The Place We Find Ourselves

Naming intentionality matters because if you are unsure about whether or not the other person meant to hurt you, it will be very difficult for you to heal from your wounds. This is because you can't heal until your brain has constructed an accurate and coherent autobiographical narrative of your life: the narrative has to be true and it has to make sense. Drawing from David Schnarch's book Brain Talk, I explain two important concepts: mind-mapping and traumatic mind-mapping. Mind-mapping refers to your ability to map out the thoughts and feelings of another person. Traumatic mind-mapping is a collapse of your brain's normal mind mapping abilities that occurs when you are mind-mapping someone and what you see is terrible.

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I am joined today by Aundi Kolber, the author of Try Softer: A Fresh Approach to Move Us out of Anxiety, Stress, and Survival Mode — and into a Life of Connection and Joy. We discuss the importance of paying attention to what is happening inside your body, as well as having a posture of compassion and curiosity toward your internal experience. We often respond to our life experiences by "trying harder." Aundi invites us into the very counter-cultural practice of trying softer.

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Bonus episode! Cathy Loerzel and I dive into why it's crucial to take your wounds seriously, and how your wounds lead to the "orphan experience," "stranger experience," and/or "widow experience." We also talk about what redemption looks like for each of these three types of wounding. Jesus takes our experiences of trauma and redeems them. That is, God creates glory, meaning and calling out of the very things that were designed to hurt us. If you want to better understand what redemption can look like for you, Cathy and I will be co-leading a live Redeeming Heartache event on May 21, 2022, in Fort Collins, CO. You can sign up here.

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Jerry Sittser is the author of A Grace Disguised: How the Soul Grows Through Loss. He is no stranger to trauma. Jerry and I cover the following topics in this episode: our tendency to try to muscle our way through pain; how adversity in our present life invites us to return to our past story; and how to keep going when facing sadness, anger, exhaustion, and longing.

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Anxiety can be so debilitating. But what exactly is it? Why do we feel anxious? And how can we address it? Anxiety is what you feel when you are avoiding important unfelt emotions. And your anxiety is almost always related to some particular part of your story.

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I am joined today by Jay Stringer to talk about the relationship between our current sexual difficulties and our attachment histories. At some point in our lives, each of us will encounter difficulties in our sexual life. It might be the compulsive use of unwanted sexual behavior or a struggle to locate any sexual desire at all. Sexual struggles are rooted in our stories—and, very often, our stories of attachment to our primary caretakers and adverse childhood experiences. If you want to explore this material in more depth, please sign up for the Sexual Attachment Conference on Saturday, April 30. You can sign up here.

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This is part 2 of my interview with Wendell Moss about racial trauma. Today we continue to discuss the importance of naming what has been true of the past so that we might be free from it. We also begin to talk about what the path toward healing looks like, including the role of lament in the healing process.

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I am joined today by Wendell Moss. Wendell is a therapist, an instructor at the Seattle School of Theology and Psychology, and part of The Allender Center teaching staff. We discuss a blog post Wendell wrote for The Allender Center called, "Racial Trauma: The Marks We Bear." Topics covered include the importance of naming what has been true of our collective past and what is required for healing to begin to occur.

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Complicity often haunts people with a history of trauma more than anything else. The essence of complicity is the sense that I volitionally participated in my own abuse. In today's episode, I outline four ways in which we may feel complicit in our abuse, and then talk about how to address the feeling of complicity by blessing arousal.

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Rebecca Wheeler Walston joins me today to talk about how she came to engage her story in more depth. She also shares a story of significant harm at the hands of fellow Christians. It is a story of harm from those in a position of spiritual authority. Rebecca and I talk about how hard it is to make sense of experiences of spiritual abuse. We also ponder the role that envy may have played in her story.

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