In Sanity: A piece of mind

I say in the podcast that this is episode 299 - it's not; it's episode 300.

When someone we love goes quiet, hides, or pulls away, most of us do one of two things. We try to fix it, or we confront it. In this episode, the second of maybe four continuing Chapter 6 of Curt Thompson's The Soul of Shame, I look at a third option he finds in the oldest hide-and-seek story we have: a question instead of a verdict. I'll talk about why the search for someone who is hiding so often backfires, what research on rupture and repair says about getting it right, why exposure is genuinely risky and how to be wise about it, and a simple practice for checking in on someone who has gone quiet, including yourself.

This podcast is a conversation at the dinner table with my kids, spouses, and friends. It's unpolished and, depending on how the Riverside Podcast Platform mutes background noise, could be very noisy.

I hope you enjoy it. If you have questions or ideas to continue this podcast, feel free to leave them in the comments on Spotify, or email them to:

[email protected]

We tend to treat feeling vulnerable as a sign that something has gone wrong. In this episode, the first of a few more from Chapter 6 of Curt Thompson's The Soul of Shame, let's look at the opposite idea: that vulnerability isn't a flaw in the design, it's part of the design. I'll walk through what research on human evolution, the brain, and creative teams says about why we were never built to go it alone, why creating anything at all requires exposure, and how Thompson reads the oldest creation story as saying the same thing. You'll leave with a simple weeklong practice for sorting your moments of exposure into "something's wrong with me" and "I'm just human."

Join me this week for a gentle meditation to support all the parents, grandparents, and caregivers out there. Give yourself 25 minutes and a little love - because taking care of others is hard, and you are crushing it.

Reach out if you want to know more about the January parenting group.

Join me this week as we continue the discussion about shame. In this episode, I'll talk about why shame doesn't get better by staying hidden — it gets worse. I'm covering Chapter 6 of Curt Thompson's The Soul of Shame, where he says the fix for shame is vulnerability. I'll explain what that actually means, and why hiding a hard feeling doesn't make it go away. We will also talk about why being really good at things can secretly be a way of hiding, why your body reacts to being truly seen almost like it's in danger, and why letting yourself be known is both scary and one of the best things you can do for yourself. There is something for everyone in this little ditty. Thanks for joining me.

We are about halfway through the parenting group, Raising Connected Kids, and I thought I'd provide an update. It's going well. I will offer it again in January. As a reminder, you don't have to be local because there is a Zoom option.

I've still got other topics to cover, and I haven't forgotten them, so stay tuned.

This is part 2 of the discussion on shame in our faith communities. In this episode, I discuss the healing part: community, confession, forgiveness, prayer, and meditation practices all work to heal shame that may have come to you through your faith tradition. Faith traditions can hurt and heal. This podcast is a good resource for understanding this idea.

This is part 1 of 2, and this week I talk about how faith can be one of the places shame hides deepest — and one of the places it heals most completely. In this episode, I'm looking honestly at how religious teaching can sometimes turn "I made a mistake" into "I am fundamentally broken," and how the same traditions that can wound us also carry some of the oldest tools we have for healing shame: grace, confession, forgiveness, prayer, and contemplative practice. Whether you hold a strong faith, a complicated one, or none at all, this episode connects those old practices to the same research we've been talking about.

Let's meditate. This is not a meditation about NPD. It is a practice about the ordinary, everyday ways that all of us protect our vulnerable places with something hard. So, let's get curious about the armor.

Welcome back to In Sanity: A Piece of Mind. Last episode, I talked about the gap between who someone is and who they need to believe they are, and how narcissism is really a wall built around that gap, not an excess of self-love. In this episode, we will start there.

Today I'm going deeper into what the actual clinical picture of NPD looks like, what the research says about shame specifically inside that diagnosis, where it actually comes from developmentally, and how you protect yourself from narcissistic behavior without needing to dehumanize the person behind it. My hope is you leave this episode able to hold empathy and a boundary at the same time.

**This podcast does not address physical abuse in any way. If you are in a relationship where there is abuse, please seek professional help**