Pam King joins licensed therapist Dan Koch on his podcast, You Have Permission, for a discussion of the six facets of spiritual health.

Announcement! With & For Season 2 is dropping on January 5, 2025! And until then, every Monday from September to December, we’re sharing some shorter clips, practical features, and other talks or interviews featuring Dr. Pam King, to offer insight into what it means to thrive and pursue spiritual health.

Show Notes

• With & For Season 2 is dropping on January 5, 2024!
• Subscribe to Dan Koch’s podcast, You Have Permission and his Patreon at patreon.com/dankoch
• Pam’s research interests: positive developmental psychology and theology
• How do psychologists perceive religion, spirituality, and theology?
• How does spirituality and religion factor in human development?
• William Damon (Stanford University) on moral development in the wake of the Columbine shooting
• “My work has really focused on how do we offer people insight into the psychological benefits available in spirituality and religion at their best.”
• Youth group
• “What's the question I could ask that would get her thinking about the potentially harmful theology?”
• Purity culture at youth group
• The Thrive Center’s rubric of Six Facets of Spiritual Health
• What are the six facets of spiritual health?
• Transcendence and spirituality. Habits and rhythms. Relationships and community. Identity and narrative. Vocation and purpose. Ethics and virtues.
• “This model comes from is comes from existing research that highlights potential resources available through religious participation or being a spiritual person that can promote our well being.”
• How religion and spirituality buffer against mental illness
• Psychological benefits of spirituality
• “Mechanisms of change”
• Benefits mediated through relationships with other people
• “Young people need relationships.”
• What is the nature of healthy spiritual community?
• “But increasingly, with the fragmentation of our society and our very transient and digital affiliations, we don't have the richness and the thick connections that we once did.”
• Polarization and culture wars and Robert Putnam’s “Bowling Alone”
• Transcendence: ”something beyond the self”
• Spirituality: “experiencing and responding to transcendence”
• Habits and rhythms.
• Creativity and music
• “The reality is, as humans, we often find freedom with some structure.”
• Atomic Habits
• Contemplative neuroscience
• Fight, flight, freeze
• Built in rhythms of work and rest
• Sabbath
• Ancient rhythms and practical wisdom that give us permission to rest
• Listen to Pam and Dan discuss facets of “Relationships and community” and “Identity and narrative” in the Patron-only second half of the conversation, available via patreon.com/dankoch
• Vocation and purpose.
• Teleology and Telos (end, goal, purpose)
• Reciprocating relationships
• Pursuing purpose as an “enduring goal that is actionable”
• Mary Helen Immordino Yang (USC) and the default network
• Meaning making
• “The moment that I was able to admit that I was a theological liberal was when I felt through contemplative practice directly accepted by God.”
• “If God exists, then I’m God’s kid.”
• “And if there is God, and if these spiritual experiences actually correlate to something, then the clearest thing I know is I'm good. I'm loved. I'm accepted.”
• Ultimate transcendence and connection to divine love
• “Ultimately spiritual health involves an identity in which we are the beloved.”
• Contemplative practices
• How to make changing diapers a spiritual practice: “Oh, we got a pooper!”
• Directionality to narrative
• Ethics and virtues.
• Ethics as “real-world application to moral thinking.”
• Virtues as “building up certain regular capacities in ourselves such that we will naturally make good ethical choices.”
• Intercessory prayer and loving-kindness meditation
• How youth approach morality in the context of community and family

About the Thrive Center

• Learn more at thethrivecenter.org.
• Follow us on Instagram @thrivecenter
• Follow us on X @thrivecenter
• Follow us on LinkedIn @thethrivecenter

About Dr. Pam King

Dr. Pam King is Executive Director the Thrive Center and is Peter L. Benson Professor of Applied Developmental Science at Fuller School of Psychology & Marriage and Family Therapy.  Follow her @drpamking.

About With & For

• Host: Pam King
• Senior Director and Producer: Jill Westbrook
• Operations Manager: Lauren Kim
• Social Media Graphic Designer: Wren Juergensen
• Consulting Producer: Evan Rosa

Special thanks to the team at Fuller Studio and the Fuller School of Psychology & Marriage and Family Therapy.