240 - Women's Takeover #2: Integrating Psychology & Spirituality w/ Dr. Craig Cashwell

You're listening to the Pure Desire Podcast.

Your safe place to find hope, healing.

And freedom from sexual addiction, betrayal, and relationship issues.

Welcome back. I'm your host, Ashley Jamison, and you are listening to episode 240 of the Pure Desire podcast, Women's Takeover. Here to join me is my lovely co host, Heather Kolb.

I am so excited to be here. It's about time that we get to take over the podcast and talk about content that's for women and all about women. And it's going to benefit the men who listen too. But still, it's kind of nice to have a fresh female voice.

Yeah, I agree. It's been. It has to have been at least a year or more since we've been able to do a podcast. We still have these cups with Trevor and Nick's face and Justin's in here, but it feels very womanly, so I'm happy.

Very nice.

And we hope guys tune in, too. All right, before we get into today's episode, here's a few things. Subscribe to the podcast. If you're not subscribed to the podcast, do it, don't wait. You can find us on all major platforms, and please give us a review. It helps more people see the podcast, and it also means a lot to us. Follow us on social media. You can do that by following us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, @ PureDesire, PDMI, and if you like to consume video content, the full episodes are available on YouTube. Just search Pure Desire Ministries. Okay, so, Heather, we got to go through the PSAP training through ITAP, and Dr. Craig Cashewell was one of our instructors, and we just loved what he had to say. So today we get to dive into the episode with him and talk about integrating psychology and spirituality.

And I think one of the best parts of having him on our podcast is that we had some lingering questions after we went through the PSAP training. And so really, it's us being able to have this time to say, hey, can you clarify that? Can you explain. Explain this more? And so I'm looking forward to that.

That. Yeah, it was really good. It was. It was fun to go through our. Our books and just highlight all the things we wanted him to talk about. Kind of felt like a private training for us and our. Our listeners. So I'm excited to get to introduce him to our listeners today. All right, well, Today we have Dr. Craig Cashell with us. Heather and I are very excited for this episode. That's probably an understatement, because today we'll be talking about the integration of psychology and spirituality. And we know that so many people have questions about this. So we are excited to pick your brain and we are thankful that you could join us today.

Yeah. Thank you for this opportunity. Grateful to be with you.

So let's just jump right in to our questions. And so can you tell us a little bit about the work you do?

Sure, yeah. I've been. I've been an educator for 28 years, which is really. That number sneaks up on me for a bit. I've been training primarily mental health counselors and family counselors and school counselors for 28 years. And that's my first passion, my first love. So blessed to be able to do that work. I also have a small part time private practice. If there were more hours in the day, I would do more practice. But I do what I can there. And then finally, I'm fortunate to be on the teaching staff with the International Institute for Trauma and Addictions Professionals itap, which is how I came into contact with you folks just a few short weeks ago. So, yeah, so I like to do a lot of different things. I get bored easily.

I can relate to that. And we did get the pleasure of sitting through a mod module with Dr. Craig Cashewell. And it was probably before the module was even over. We were like, okay, we gotta ask if he'll be on. I wonder if he'll say yes. It's kind of like feeling like you're asking a celebrity. Because we loved what you were talking about so much. But will you also briefly share about your contribution to Shadows of the Cross? Because that was a new. I wasn't even aware of that one until you mentioned it.

Sure. Yeah. So the way that came to be was really fascinating. I think that's even a God story in and of itself. So I was working on a research project with some of the ITAP folks and did some pretty heavy editing on a draft of a manuscript that sort of landed me on Pat Karn's radar as a writer. And he knew that I was really interested in this intersection between spirituality and psychology, mental health and the spiritual side of things, and invited me to be the lead author on a book called Shadows of the Cross, which was taking ITAF's workbook, facing the Shadows, and adding the spiritual component to it. Right. So for people of faith, I mean, the work in Facing the Shadows is such good material. It's really good material. And for people of faith, there was sort of this question of where is God in this work? And so what we wanted to do was to bridge that with his book Shadows of the Cross, which is a companion book to Facing the Shadows. I was in spiritual direction the whole time we were working on that book. And it was just, you know, it's one of those things I can have this experience of it, people can relate, where I arrogantly think I'm doing, producing something for someone else. And it's a real gift for me. So working on that project was such a. Such a blessing in my life. So, yeah, yeah, thanks for asking about that.

It's really fun to have somebody on that shares that passion for integrating psychology and spirituality because it's. It always seems like people want one or the other. Where's God in it? So where did your passion and interest come from in having this kind of be your area?

Yeah, so I thought for a hot minute about going into ministry. When I was in college, I had the opportunity to date an absolutely amazing human being who also happened to be my pastor's daughter. And although the relationship didn't quite survive, I got to peek behind the curtain of what pulpit ministry looked like. That's the hardest job in the world. So went in a different direction. But my faith life has always, I say always, as long as I can remember, has been part of my story. And so as I got interested and intrigued in mental health work, there was always this sort of idea behind the scenes for me of how does this all relate? How does the psychological work? How does the spiritual work relate? I was fortunate to have a colleague who came alongside me, a faculty member at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro named Scott Young. We started collaborating on efforts to really kind of figure this out. And honestly, we were asking the questions that we were curious about. And so over time, that's really evolved into an appreciation for really actually what you just said. How important the both and is that it's not one or the other. Either one is incomplete without the other. And so that's just been, you know, really a passion of mine for a quarter of a century and probably over the last. Well, yeah, pretty close to a quarter of a century. It's been my primary focus as an academic, both in teaching, helping people think through these things, and also in writing.

So. Good. We're very thankful for the work.

Yeah. So as we mentioned, you were one of the presenters when we went through the PSAP training, the pastoral Sex Addiction professionals training. And during that training, you used this phrase or you said this statement that nothing that is psychologically damaging is theologically sound. So can you elaborate on that?

Yeah. And it's a, it's not a statement without some controversy. I can appreciate that. But I just, you know, when I read, you know, so of course I studied growing up in a Christian family and in the church, I've been studying the Bible for most of my life. But as I became more sort of connected to the mental health side of things and really began studying the red letters and a red letter Bible, really the words of Jesus, what I always circle around is just how amazing his teachings are psychologically. Not only spiritually, but psychologically. And the example that comes up the most often for me is the predominance of grace over shame. So I think anything that religious communities do that promotes shame among its members is missing the mark because Jesus never did that, ever, ever did that. And so I think as we try to sift through what is right and we all wrestle with this, right, all of us as people of faith, struggle with these and have, you know, have difficult conversations and sometimes relationships end over disappoint agreements and churches split over disagreements. But for me, it just becomes kind of a marker, kind of a foundational marker for me to try to sit with what I experience as true, how I understand the gospel, how I understand the teaching of Jesus and what it means to me. And so I make that statement really as really kind of an evocative statement for people in the audience to kind of go, okay, so sit with this, right? Take this and do what you do with it. Because we all have to. At the end of the day, it's between us and God. But I do put that out there to stir the pot a little bit for people if there are parts of their belief system that feel still externalized. And what I mean by that is just what I've been taught versus what I experience and encounter through the Bible and through my relationship with Christ as true. So yeah, that's part of why I said that was to stir the pot a bit. But I think it's, it's an interesting way to think about that. And again, it's the, it's the both and right. We can't separate these things apart from one another. Absolutely.

I love it.

Yeah, we like keeping good company with pot stirs around. I think that's interesting though, because I, I definitely have always had more of a logical brain. I need to understand how things work. But when it came to my husband's addiction coming out, it was very hard for me to understand that it wasn't just a moral, it wasn't just simply a moral choice. He was making. I didn't understand the psychology behind it, about behind addiction. And so when I started learning about that, with it from an addict perspective, it opened up my eyes and it gave me a lot of hope that God can work in those ways. And I started to see that integration. And then I came down the road and I experienced some physiological effects from my own betrayal trauma, which was like, now this other new door I need to open and explore. And in the height of my trauma, my autoimmune disease just erupted. My hair was falling out, I was dripping sweat, My heart rate was out of control. I was so flared. And my rheumatologist, who I'd been seeing for about 10 years, said, well, are you under stress? And I'm like, no, no, this is just how I roll. This is how my life. Oh, you know, I always function at this high pace. And I really did not understand it. And I feel like it's only been the last couple years that I've understood that trauma can create havoc in our bodies. So can you tell us how trauma is stored in the body and maybe give us an example of what that could look like as far as in clients that you work with?

Sure, yeah. You know, kind of the foundational book right now in the mental health field is very appropriately entitled the Body keeps the score by Bessel van der Kolk. And it really is. We've come to such an appreciation of the somatic experience of trauma, somatic meaning in the body, how it gets trapped in the body. So, you know, trauma is basically our reaction to any overwhelming event, any event that we cannot process in the moment. So discovery of an addiction and a partner, for example, is a very good example of that. Right. And so it just so overwhelms our meaning making system that we can't metabolize, we can't process it in the moment. And so it gets sort of stored and trapped in the body. And so what happens then? There are a lot of things that happen then. And first of all, let me say how grateful I am that we now have a trauma informed lens to not only look at the process of addiction, but also the partner's experience. Right. We haven't always had that lens, and I don't think we've done the best work that we could possibly do without that framework, understanding it in that context. For example, if. If someone is partnered with someone who is using their phone to access pornography, simply seeing their partner pick up the phone can actually be a trigger. Just picking up the phone is not an egregious act. It's not a harmful act in that moment, but what it's actually doing is activating the original trauma of the disclosure or the discovery. We go through this process, which is called attribution error, because we're so flooded emotionally with that trauma story. We believe that it is what is happening in this moment is the act that is making us feel all this discomfort. But in fact, it was what happened eight years ago or four years ago that still hasn't been processed. We might scream at somebody for picking up their phone, when in fact picking up your phone is not in and of itself a horrible act, but actually it is the cue that triggers the old trauma response. So everything that you felt in that moment feels completely alive in that moment. You either feel too much, call it hyperarousal, or you feel so much that you have to shut everything down and go into what we call hypoarousal or numbing and just not feel at all because the pain is so overwhelming. It creates this complexity. Different people have different symptoms after traumatic experiences. Ashley, what you're describing is not uncommon at all. Those kinds of people get migraines, they get nauseous, either can't sleep at all, or they want to sleep all the time. Appetite gets impacted. We see anxiety, we see depression, we see lots of different kinds of reactions to it, but all of which are really best understood through the lens of trauma as a very normal response to what has happened in the past. And that's one of the beauties of this, is we pivot the question from what's wrong with you to what happened to you in a trauma narrative, which is so much more of a compassionate space to hold both for the addict and the partner. Right. So.

So in talking about the way that we respond to trauma during the PSAP training, you also introduced this model called the Window of Tolerance. And so can you explain that for our listeners?

Yeah, so I think it's a really useful tool, and I use it a lot with clients, with students. I just think it's. I think about it a lot in my own life. Where am I in my own window? So I think it's a great sort of framework to sit with all of this. So Dan Siegel developed this IDE called the Window of Tolerance. And the idea is there is, for each of us, there is a dynamic window in which we can handle what comes at us. And so it's dynamic from the standpoint that if we're practicing our self care and we're, you know, we're eating well, we're sleeping well, we're exercising, we're doing our spiritual practices, we're in healthy communities. Our window, all of that strengthens our window, right? It builds this tolerance window in which things can happen that are stressful, but we can handle them because they're in our window. If you are one of the 1% of the universe that really has no trauma history because most of us do, you feel things, but everything stays in this window of tolerance. You might get a little stressed out, you might feel a little bit down one day, so you might be a little up, you might be a little down. But it really has this roller coaster, gentle roller coaster feel to it. But the problem is when we experience trauma, when that trauma gets reactivated in any way, right? So again, you see a partner pick up a phone, activates the old trauma, that old fear comes up. We often will go out of our window of tolerance. When we're in our window, we can think and feel, right? So we're able to feel, but we're also able to think clearly. When we go up and out of our window of tolerance into this hyper aroused state, part of what we know is we're no longer in, we're out of our mind quite literally because the frontal cortex, that executive functioning is largely shut down because we're now in fight flight, freeze. We're in survival mode because it feels like there's a very imminent threat for us, right? And so we're in this kind of hyper aroused, very anxious, very agitated kind of state. And we're very, and we tend to be very reactive to things, right? So we get very defensive, we can get very angry very easily. We get irritated super easy and we're not able to really process information in a logic helpful way. Or we can go down and out of our window of tolerance, hypoarousal, which is just kind of shut down and taken to an extreme. This is dissociation, right? It's completely checked out. So sometimes I'll be working with clients and you can just see them sort of get this. I call it the Million Mile Stare. They're there, but they're not there, right? And they've just kind of gone into this shutdown kind of space, which means whatever pain they were starting to feel was too much. And they just literally kind of shut that down. I call it like a big kill switch. You know, it's just like it just shuts everything down so that we don't feel at all. And so I think this has a lot of implications for trauma work because first of all, we know that good healing work, whether it's from a therapist or a clergy member or a layperson, a lay helper, happens inside the window of tolerance. We actually always say in the therapy world, the best therapy happens just inside the top edge of the window of tolerance. So we want people to be feeling so that they can metabolize the. But we don't want them to go out of the window. And so for each of us, our work then is to. Is to build our resilience, to strengthen our window of tolerance so that we can handle more, but also to build a skill set that when we go up and out of the window or down and out of the window, we know how to get back in the window more quickly so that we're not just hanging out outside the window because it's exhausting. I mean, it's just so dreadfully exhausting when you get triggered, when you get activated and you just sort of stay in that spin outside the window. That's absolutely exhausting and just so painful. And so we want to support people in building resources so that they can resource themselves. Their partner understands trauma so they can use their partner as a resource when needed, to help them come back into the window more quickly and bring that frontal cortex back online so that everything is happening in the present moment and with the adult brains fully functioning, because they're not when we're out of the window. So that's a quick description. I would encourage people to Google the term. There's a ton. The infographic, the visual that comes with it really helps. I think I would encourage people to look that up online and read more about it.

Yeah, that was such a great model to learn about and just to understand our behavior when we are, like you say, outside of the window. Because I've even caught myself since that training that when I'm. When I feel like I'm overreacting to something, it's like, well, I'm outside of my window. And that's what I just tell myself, which then it helps me to think, okay, what can I do now to get myself back into my window?

Right.

Yeah.

I think in my past I probably had one of those, like, itty bitty bathroom windows. That's just because I. I feel like, as you described, it's exhausting to live outside. And then the moments when I feel myself going back out of the window again, especially in relation to betrayal, trauma, it's like, so uncomfortable. And you wonder how you just lived there for so many years. I think it could also be valuable information for the spouse, because, you know, I remember when John and I would get in conflict and he's the kind that withdraws, you know, the, the island. And I'm the wave that wants to keep crashing and talking. And it would always get worse. And it took me years to understand that I will have a better conversation. Things will be more fruitful if I wait for him to calm down. And so now having this visual, I thought this would have really helped me because he was also out of his window while I was out of my window. And if we both can get back to that, you know, center place, then we're going to have more productive conversation. So it's just a really, really good model.

I couldn't agree with you more. I mean, so you're describing in couples theory language, you're talking of the wave and the island analogy we would call a pursue withdrawal relationship. And every relationship has these little dances. Right. But when you're in your window, when both people are in their window, they're usually navigable, they can be negotiated. But the part of the challenge is when one or both, because sometimes when one goes out of the window, they'll take the other one with them. Although in pursuit withdrawal, the pursuer typically goes to hyperarousal, the withdrawer goes to hypoarousal. And so now you've got this real disconnect in the way of being with this. And so. And it intensifies the response. Right. So a pursuer out of the window becomes a chaser and a withdrawer out of the window becomes completely avoidant and running away from the situation. Right. And so the distance that the intensity of that dance ramps way up when people are not in their window. So it's a great way to think about the dance between couples. Absolutely.

It just gives like handlebar grips to have these kinds of tools put language to what your experiencing. It's just. It's just so, so good. Okay, so you kind of touched on it a little bit about what it looks like to be hypo or hyper aroused out of the window. But what are some ways, just some very practical ways, if somebody finds themselves stuck either up or down, that they can start moving back into their window.

Yeah. So the first thing is what Heather said just a moment or two ago, which is you recognize it. Right. And so part of the beauty of this model and why I think it has so much value in psychoeduc is it almost gives you a handle to grab onto just as you're going out of the window before that frontal cortex goes Offline to say, okay, or just before you feel yourself kind of going flat and numb, Rather than saying, I'm not feeling anything, you can know that you're actually feeling a lot and your body is shutting that down because it's too much. Right. The tricky thing, the fascinating thing about this is there's no one size fits all. And so there are some things that we typically want to explore with people when they're learning about and experiencing their own window of tolerance. For example, for a lot of people, when they go into hyperarousal, consciously slowing down their breathing and breathing diaphragmatically, making sure that their belly is actually expanding with the inhale and taking longer, slower, deeper breaths, we actually know that for most people, that engages what's called the parasympathetic nervous system, which is the nervous part of the nervous system that brings us down. The tricky part is, of course, we go up in a heartbeat and then we come down much more slowly. But we can expedite that for a lot of us, can use deep conscious breathing as a way to bring that down. That might be along with prayer. That might be along with whatever combination works for you to engage that parasympathetic nervous system. Prayer might help you not feel alone in that moment. So, again, just exploring and experimenting with what works for you. There are other people that if they go into hyperarousal, they start consciously breathing, they'll go farther up out of the window. So it actually has an adverse effect for them. Again, you have to be curious about that. We use weighted blankets a lot. Those have become mainstay now. But they really got their start in trauma work where therapists would have weighted blankets. I know people who share a personal story. When my inclination is to go into hyperarousal out of my own trauma narrative. I have a weighted blanket in my office, have a weighted blanket at home. I crawl under that, I breathe a little bit, Everything kind of settles back down. Right. It really does impact at a nervous system level, brings that back down. But I've worked with people for whom hyperarousal is their. Typically their exit. And weighted blankets feel suffocating to them, and it makes them more anxious. Right. So, again, if you Google this, there are a lot of good resources online. I don't want to try to be more exhaustive than that. But the point being, you have to experiment for you, because there's not a one size fits all. You have to sort of experiment. A good way to do that is when, if you find yourself in the window, but up in the upper range, if you tend to go out into hyperarousal, that's a great space where you're still thinking pretty clearly, where you can start experimenting with some of these different approaches to reregulation and just being curious about that and what works for you. We do encourage positive practice, which means if you have a strategy that works really well, practice it every day. If diaphragmatic breathing helps you when you're out of the window, practice it when you're in the window so that you've built some muscle memory around. Oh, this is what I do. When I start getting in that kind of hyper aroused kind of spin. I'm ruminating, I'm thinking way too fast, I'm reacting, overreacting to things in my environment because I feel a threat. Right. Like I feel a very legitimate threat in my environment out of that trauma narrative. So just building those tools to help you come back in the window. Because as you said, Ashley, it's miserable outside the window. It really is. Yeah.

I found myself breathing deeply when they talk about, I just feel good. Breathe deeply. We did. Even with our child, he can get hyper really quick and just like have this energy running. And, and his therapist said to do some heavy work. And, and, and just typical heavy work for a little boy is not good enough for him. He needs extra. And so we bought him 10 pound ankle weights for each ankle and he has a backpack and we stick £25 worth of heavy blanket in there. There. And we say walk up and down the stairs 10 times. I mean, that sounds really dangerous. Maybe you shouldn't do that. I am not advocating you have your child walk up and down the stairs. But he, like, it calms him down that just, he just needs the. Or he'll say, will you just lay on me, mom? And that's when I realized he needed a heavy blanket because I tuck him in and I'd sometimes squish him and give him a big hug. He's like. That feels relaxing. And, and so even with our kids, we, we've taken some of the stuff. I know in the, the PSAP module that you taught, there was some examples of things you could use, and we've applied some of those to our kids as well. Just when they're feeling really anxious and hyper.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, there's two things on what you just said, Ashley. One is the. Sometimes it needs to be physical activity. We need to move around. Right. We cannot think ourselves out of that space. We have to act and do something differently. That's really, really important. But the other thing you said was weighted blankets are wonderful, but I'll take a hug any day of the week over a weighted blanket like a good strong squishy hu. Because what we do know is that nervous systems between people and I think spiritually, I always think about where two or more are gathered. Right. That there's this idea that. So when I'm sitting with a client who I can see starting to ramp up as they're telling me their story, part of what I will do is I'll make sure I'm not going with them. I will use my breathing. Breathing works really good as a regulator for me. So I will really consciously slow down my breathing, maybe even slow down my speech just a little bit. There's this idea in the mental health world we talk about process where there are the words that I say, but how I say them, the pace, the volume, the tone of speech, all of those things can either dysregulate someone or help them re regulate. And so we think about that co regulation piece and you know, honestly, for any kid, what better co regulator is there than a big hug from their mom? Right. So, but again it's, you have to find what works for each person and do what works. Do more of what what works.

Yeah, do more of what works.

I like just do more of what works.

That's good.

So another thing that came out of our PSAP training is that you used a phrase that we hadn't heard before and, and we even talked a little bit more about it. But, but how would you describe this term of benign neglect?

Yeah, yeah. So it's a term that really became more ubiquitous in our field after a particularly landmark study called the ACEs study, which is the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study. It was a large SC that really for the first time, you know, for a long time, even when I was training, I did my training back in the late 80s and early 90s and we largely thought about trauma as being somebody's in a horrific car accident and they're afraid to get back in the car. So that kind of one off acute trauma or military. Right. The kinds of experiences that people in the military have, and those are certainly good examples of trauma, they're very legitimate. But what we've come to appreciate is that this, the complexity of what we call developmental trauma or early childhood trauma really is quite highly impactful to this new forming brain. Benign neglect really has come to be appreciated as a really important factor to look at. It essentially means it's not aggressive neglect, it's not feeding your child, not taking care of the basic creature comforts. But there are a lot of children who grow up in homes where they have a roof over their head, they have three meals a day, they often look to the outside world, they look to the church like kind of the ideal family. But the parents are very unavailable, psychologically unavailable. That can be because of addictions, that can be because of mental health issues. It can be because of the parents own trauma. A good way that people numb out is with their phones. And so parents who live on their phones and they're never available to their kids, that's all benign neglect. But children do this fascinating thing and we've all done, done it where, but when we're young children, you know, Piaget told us this, you know, decades ago, that we're in this pre operational thought and we're the center of the universe. So if parents aren't paying attention to us, it's not because they're an alcoholic or they've got a mental health issue or they've got their own trauma story. It's because something is wrong with me. I'm unworthy of love, I'm unwanted. I don't belong here. You wish I'd never been born. These are all schemas that start around that kind of benign neglect. And we actually know that early childhood benign neglect that happens over repeatedly. Right? We're not talking about a one off kind of experience here. We're talking about this is the pattern actually has really substantial impact on the person's developing brain, their schemas, their window of tolerance. They're easily distressed outside of the window. And so it really is. And what will happen with clients is clients or humans, I think, but I tend to have these conversations with clients is that they will say, but I wasn't raped, I wasn't physically beaten, I wasn't. And all of those are ways to kind of minimize this benign neglect. But it's very, very impactful and needs to be talked about and looked at. And we need to be given permission to struggle because again, it's not what's wrong with me, it's what happened to me. And if what happened to you was benign, negative neglect because your parents or guardians couldn't, couldn't show up for you in the ways that children need them to, then the reality is that we need to reprocess that because we're probably still, still blaming ourselves for what happened to us during childhood. It's a very insidious struggle that I think we have as part of the human condition. So, yeah, that is so good.

I remember the first time a woman saying, I was at probably some woman's conference and. And we were in a small group environment and everybody was talking about how they'd been raised. And she said when it came to her time, she said, you know, I hear you guys talk about being raised, but I wasn't ever really raised. I just grew up, you know. And so when you talk about benign neglect, that's what I think of is, is her situation. What was happening with her when she was just growing up. She just got bigger and had to navigate life on her own because she didn't have. Have somebody to help her with that process.

Yeah, yeah. So I think a great. A question that I will often ask people is, when you were a little boy or a little girl and you tripped and fell and skinned your knee, who did you go to? And you. I'm often amazed at the number of. Some people immediately say, went to my mom, went to, my dad, went to my grandma, went to my uncle, went to, you know, there was somebody that they identified as that person that was their attachment figure. But I'm struck by this person. Heather likely would have nobody. I went to the bathroom and got some peroxide and put on or whatever. You know, it's like I always took care of things myself. Well, on the plus side, that's independence. But on the downside, it's, I can't rely on other people. I can't ask for support, I can't ask for help. And let's face it, this life is hard. We need each other, right? So we need to be able to ask for that support. And we learn not to.

Basically, I can find the women that come through my groups, whether on the betrayed side or on the women that struggle, struggle on that side. When we get to these family of origin, you know, when we learn how to do relationships, a lot of times they can feel hesitant to want to say anything negative. And after learning about benign neglect from you, I. I was like, I feel convicted because I work from home. I'm just a busy person and I run at a high speed. And I. I'm always like, I could be doing something else, like, okay, we're gonna watch a movie, but I could also be planning our trip or paying bills or. Or something. And so I've had, you know, this struggle the last few months of, okay, I'm going to put my phone away after dinner. I'm going to put my phone away after dinner. And so I guess to say that for Encouragement to other people, that it doesn't mean that you had bad parents, if you experienced neglect or benign neglect, but it. But it's something to recognize, and it's okay to recognize it, even though, you know, you feel bad kind of talking about your family of origin. And for me, I felt like group really helped with that, because when I would hear other people, I was in that category of like, oh, you know, I don't have anything too bad in my past, which is totally crazy for me to even say that. But going to group and hearing other people describe it and say, yeah, I love my mom, but she was also always working. And I felt like, you know, I was kind of invisible, and then I could relate to that person easier than identifying it in myself first. And. And now I, you know, I'm able to recognize it and. And even recognize that I'm repeating some of those behaviors with my kids the same way my mom did with me, you know, with work habits and things.

So, you know, one of the. One of the hallmarks of families is, are covert rules. So they're rules that aren't explicitly stated. But, you know, this is the rule. You grew up in this family. You know, this is the rule. And a classic one is don't talk. We don't talk about this. And so if you have an alcoholic parent and you get up the next morning and nobody's talking about thing that that parent did the night before, there's this. It becomes a rule that you don't talk about this. And it's hard to break those covert rules as an adult. You're an adult, you're 10, 15, 20 years removed from living with your family of origin. But those rules still are in play. And so. And sometimes from a faith perspective, people will say, well, there's scripture that tells us to honor our mother and father. So I don't want to say bad things about them. As a mental health professional, I'll tell you, I don't think you can honor your parents in any way better than changing the legacy of what's being passed on from generation to generation. I think that is how you can honor that process. But those are tough, those rules. And that spiritual message of don't talk about these things can be really, really difficult. And so what I try to do with folks, we get into that either or thing. Either my parents were wounded and did the best they could, or they hurt me. And the reality is, both of those things can be true. You don't have to hate your mother and father as horrible, terrible people because some of your needs weren't met during childhood. They were wounded themselves and they did the best that they could. You can hold that in a space of compassion for them and look honestly at how you were affected by the dynamics in your family. So I really always try to help people find that space, and it's hard sometimes, but to find that space where they can hold both of those things as true at the same time and work on their own healing work. They don't have to change their mom or their dad if they're still with living, but. But their work is on themselves.

I love that language and that, you know, my parents love me and they hurt me. You know, I love that. And part that you guys use in the training to just kind of shift that perspective that both those things can be true. Okay, well, this is the, the best question. What are your final words of encouragement? So give us your best answer for our listeners today.

You know, I think what I'll share is just what comes to me. And this is the one question I didn't prepare an answer for. So I just sort of was like, let's see what comes up. So we'll see. We'll see if it's good. But what comes to me is, you know, this idea. I think about the passage in Jeremiah for I know the plans I have for you, right? So when I think about what is our true self, who are we created to be in Christ? I think about the work of the work that Pure Desire does, the work that therapists do, the work that clergy do, is really all about helping people reclaim that, that true self, that highest self. I don't think we're actually fixing things. I think we're going home as well. I always think about good therapy, good spiritual direction, good support from friends is about helping people go home to who they already are, which means a lot of. Meister Eckhart said spirituality is more about subtraction than addition. So it's about getting r of the things that keep us or that block us from that highest self. And, and I think that journey. So I. So I think about all therapy is spiritual because it's helping people go home. And when we get closer to home, we get closer to God. It's inevitable. It happens that way. And there's a lot of writings about that. I won't go into all that detail, but I just think this, this healing work that Pure Desire does, that therapists are doing, really, that's really what it is, is help is coming alongside people, walking them home, home and helping them find that, that space of communion not only with themselves, all of themselves. Right. Not just the parts that look pretty, but the parts that are difficult and that we struggle with and that we struggle to have compassion for in ourselves. And that brings us closer to God. So that's, you know, that's my prayer for me, for the two of you, for anybody who might be listening to this.

That's really beautiful. I love that subtraction, taking off those built up. That's really, really good. Well, thank you so much for joining us. I feel like it was such a privilege to have you on. Privilege to our listeners. So we really appreciate you just carving out some time for us today and. And sharing about what you do.

Yeah, it's my pleasure. Thank you for the invitation.

Yeah, thank you.

And remember, wherever you're at on your journey, pure desire is here to help create a roadmap for healing. If you or someone you know is impacting by sexual brokenness or betrayal trauma, go to PureDesire.org and let's start the healing journey today. Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast. Each week we put out new content to help you on the road to healing and freedom. And lastly, never stop being healthy.