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Join us as we sit Across the Counter from Psychiatrist, Author, Speaker, and Podcaster Curt Thompson.
In this ATC Episode:
• Have you ever considered the profound intersection where faith meets mental health? This is exactly the territory we navigate with our guest, Curt Thompson, whose work as a psychiatrist is deeply interwoven with his Christian faith.
• Together, we examine the unexpected journey that led him to a career in psychiatry, a field he feels was less of a choice and more of a calling. Curt illuminates the connections between interpersonal neurobiology and Christian spiritual formation, sharing transformative insights from his clinical practice, particularly within the powerful setting of confessional communities.
• Diving into the daily reality of fusing personal beliefs with professional responsibilities, we tackle the challenges and rewards that come with living a life centered around faith. I open up about how my own Christian faith informs every facet of my professional endeavors, whether that's behind the microphone, flipping houses, or providing patient care. We delve into the nuances of love's role in therapy, understanding the importance of both extending and accepting love, and why it's so crucial in the journey toward healing and growth.
This episode is an invitation to challenge, inspire, and deepen the empathy we hold in our shared human experience!
Connect with Curt:
Instagram: @curtthompsonmd
Website: https://curtthompsonmd.com/
Beliefs espoused by the guests of ATC are not necessarily the beliefs and convictions of ATC.
That said the intent of our podcast is to listen, remain curious and never fear failure in the discovery life giving truth. Many people we ardently disagree with have been our greatest teachers.
00:00 - Faith and Psychiatry
12:00 - Living With Jesus in Everyday Life
22:41 - Becoming Professional Human Beings
28:19 - Exploring Desires and Stories
36:49 - Healing and Community in Faith
Pull up a chair across the counter your one-stop shop for a variety of perspectives around Jesus and Christianity. I'm Grant Lockridge and I'm here with Kurt Thompson. He's a psychiatrist, an author, a speaker and a podcaster. And Kurt, just tell me a little bit about what made you get into the field of psychiatry, and we'll start there.
Yeah. Well, there is a longer story that I could tell that I won't belabor now, but I will say this In short over the course of my lifetime, the way I would describe it is that it seems to me that Jesus has been finding me in many, many different moments, many particular moments over the course of my lifetime and in particular ways. When people say, well, why, how is it that you became a psychiatrist, I say well, I think, as it turns out that I didn't find or discover psychiatry, I think it found me, I think it had been looking for me for some time. By the time I was getting, you know, I was about midway to a little more than midway through medical school and not really sure why I was in medical school, hadn't even been considering psychiatry, and then, when I encountered it in our clinical rotation, I really felt like I had come home, but again it felt like I had been found, as much as I found it it.
And then, after medical school and residency, training had been in practice for about 15 years, when this would now be about 20 years ago when I had my first exposure to at the time, what was a newly emerging field within the field of psychiatry called interpersonal neurobiology, this field that is comprised of a number of different scientific disciplines, all of which have a stake in identifying and understanding what is the nature of the mind and then what does a mind look like if it's actually flourishing? Those two things, what is the mind and what does a mind look like if it's flourishing? And that field was just emerging. And that field was just emerging, it's kind of author and spokesperson. A guy by the name of Dan Siegel became a we might say neuroscience is shorthand for that the intersection of that field and Christian spiritual formation. What does it mean for us to be human? What does it mean when human beings are flourishing? What does that look like? And all of that, of course, kind of comes together in the clinical spaces where I see patients three days a week. I see individuals for a lot of years saw couples, families, adolescents, and now a lot of the work that we're doing in our practice focuses on the work within what we call confessional communities, these group settings where so much transformation is taking place for people.
And, um, so I think, I think, my, I, I tell people, uh, I don't deserve my life. Um, and the work, uh, you know it's, it's not, it is, uh, I am. I'm the recipient of many gifts that come from many people and many opportunities that I certainly didn't create, and so one of those gifts is the work that I get to do, and I come home every day and say to my wife, phyllis, I can't believe I saw what I just saw, in moments where people who live with great grief and great trauma and anguish um discover, uh, what it means to move into spaces, uh, of health and healing. And it takes a ton of hard work because life, uh at its best is, can be pretty excruciating to try to live. And, my goodness, that's a much longer answer to your question, perhaps, than you wanted, but that's exactly what I wanted.
I, we, we, we try to get you know good, honest answers, so I I liked that we started there. Um, I really do enjoy more long-winded answers cause I'm actually, believe it or not, I do have a podcast, but I don't really like the talk. I'd rather just hear from you. So that a fact. But I am curious how you know the field of psychiatry if you bring faith into it. Do people not look at you a little funny? Or you know what I mean.
Yeah, you know, it's interesting, grant, even in the way that that, even the way that you pose the question is revealing about something, that and that and that, something into a thing called the field of psychiatry, which presumes that there are these two separate domains of life, one called psychiatry, one called faith, and what's I think noteworthy is that that way of thinking about even I think noteworthy is that that way of thinking about even what faith is would be unrecognizable to a first century Hebrew.
Uh, the first century Hebrew would ask the question as, as would a uh person, a follower of Jesus, in, you know, 1100 AD Gaul, in what is now France, or in Germany or Northern Italy, because their assumption is that everything is spiritual, everything is faith, that that is the world and that Jesus is the living king of the world, and that Jesus is the living king of the world. And so the question becomes how do any of us do anything that we do as Jesus followers? What does it mean for me to practice? So it's not as if faith is intersecting with something, it's. How am I imagining what it means to practice this particular thing in in the world in which I believe that Jesus is actually Lord of everything and and that's. We might think that that's a small thing, but it's actually critical to the work, to the work that I do, because, because we make the assumption that we can silo our categories into these different things, um, that then can make us very anxious, because I? Because what it does it? It tells us that we're assuming, actually, that we're we, that we believe that we live in a world that has been dictated by the enlightenment, been dictated by modernity, and that is a very, very different plausibility structure than the plausibility structure which we make the assumption that we are creatures that have been made to live into and create, become outposts and create and curate beauty and goodness in the world. This is what we're made to do, as opposed to I'm just, you know, one of another set of animals that are trying to survive until we're dead. Those are two very, very different visions for and set of assumptions that we make, and it's important to recognize, I think. I think for me it's important to recognize.
So, when, when the question comes up well, do you treat people? You know, do you treat Christians? Yeah, there are people of faith who come to us. There are people who are not of faith who come to us who are actually closer to Jesus than some of the people of faith who come to us and you say well, do you treat people who are not interested in spiritual things? Which we say well, let's just be clear, everybody is interested in spiritual things. We might have different words and categories by which we have these conversations, but I don't know anybody who would wake up in the morning and say I want the world to be an uglier place by the time I'm done with it today. No, we long for beauty and goodness and my job is we tell people.
In our practice, our work is to help people tell their stories more truly, and by truly we don't just mean more factually correctly, we mean telling your story more, wholly, more, as it is relative to the way the world is really made to operate. And we're often very, very much unaware of the assumptions that we're making about how we're living in the world, and not just in terms of, you know, broad worldview overviews. But you know, the example I give often is a patient of mine who I've been working with for a long time Now. This person came to me in their mid forties and you know standard questions that we're asking in a psyche initial psychiatric interview and I asked the question so, um, tell me about what it was like growing up in your home. And he said I grew up in a. I grew up in a loving Christian home. I'm like, okay, which means, uh, that's code for uh, well, life was really hard and it sucked a lot of the time, but you're just not allowed to talk about that. And there's this sense in which I don't really know what that means, until I then ask the next question who is in charge of disciplining your house? No-transcript. Now then we would pause and say, okay, help me with this. Not 90 seconds ago, you said that you grew up in a loving Christian home and now you're telling me, giving me some additional information. Help me to understand what you meant by what you, by your answer to my first question.
But this is what we do, grant, with a lot of things in life.
We are walking around with a certain narrative that we are telling ourselves Everybody is, we all are, all 8 billion of us.
We're walking around with a certain narrative without recognizing that so much of the narrative that we are telling we tell in order to protect me from myself, and that included in that narrative is not just what I tell about me, I tell about you, I tell about the world, I tell about politics, I even tell about a thing called Christianity, and I do most of this as a way to keep me from having to encounter the parts of me that I am afraid of, am ashamed of, that terrify me, that I certainly don't want you to know about, because I know that when you know what I really think, what I really feel, not just about you or about politics or the church or this or that, but what I think about myself uh, you'll leave.
And you know, when we look at the gospel, the gospel was all about, as Jesus said, I'm not like the people who are well, that they are not the people who are calling for me. It's the people who are sick that the doctor comes for, and I have a lot of patients that come to me who want to be not sick but are not necessarily interested in being well. Um, we would very much like to. And then this is true not just in psychiatry, this is true about, about in our world, just in general. I would love for whatever my symptoms are in my world to go away, but please don't ask me to change my life in order to make that happen yeah, that's.
That's super interesting, that I I definitely think you're right in the sense of like everything comes from you know your center with Jesus, because like it really doesn't that's such a good way to put it of living with Jesus and everything is kind of a byproduct of that. Like you can't separate Jesus or you know I feel like Christianity is such a bad word just like having you know, like following Jesus, and you can't separate that from like being a psychiatrist or you know being anything A podcaster yeah, being a podcaster or being a. You know I flip houses too, so oh, do you really Okay?
Yeah, I love doing that. So being a, you know I flip houses too. So, oh, do you really? Okay? Yeah, I love doing that. So being a house flipper, whatever it's, it's really hard, like it's not hard. It is impossible to separate those things, because that that is who you are. So, yeah, the my question was just like, more of a silly one of just like, because there there's a lot of, you know, secular psychiatrists and even if they're not secular, a lot of like the code, because my wife's like studying to be a therapist right now A lot of it is basically like don't talk about your faith, don't bring that and that's. You know, that's just strictly by the book, and I'm sure you're doing something kind of a little bit different from that which sounds cool. So I'm curious.
Yeah, yeah. Well, again, I think it's a matter of again. If you make the assumption that your faith is this thing that is siloed, that is separate from you, you don't talk about your faith. I've gotten in the habit recently of telling people, you know, we talk about the gospel as a, as a thing that is separate from us. Right, there's you and me, and then there's the gospel. And yet when you read the gospels themselves, when you read, I mean, he says you are the light of the world.
If we take this seriously, when Paul writes, you are the body of Jesus, like this isn't just a metaphor, this is material world reality. We are like, as it turns out, we are the gospel. We are not its origin, but having begun to die to sin and being raised in Jesus, that's who I am in the world. Now, I'm imperfect at this, I'm woefully imperfect at being Jesus in the world, but I can't get away from the fact that that's who I am. So it's not like oh, my faith is this thing over here. So the real question is in what way am I simply going to be faithful to Jesus in all the things, all the ways that I'm talking Like I am my faith, just by being hospitable to a patient. I don't have to talk about Jesus, to be talking about my faith, as if it is this thing that is separate from me.
The Holy Spirit is at work not only when I do a thing called talk, about a thing called my faith.
It is when I prescribe an antidepressant. It is because we're going to do everything we can to walk with a patient into a place of wholeness, or integration is the word that we like to use in our particular scientific, you know, uh, field, um, and so uh again, uh, it's, it's, uh. It's helpful, I think, for me to uh practice imagining, like you know, when, when Jesus um, you know, jesus didn't talk about a thing called Christianity, jesus talked about how do we live, how do we live Right, and his disciples, like they were still having to be convinced of what the God, even after he was resurrected in Luke's gospel, there were some who still did not believe at the ascension. They did not believe at the ascension, for goodness sakes, like, wow, like that, like that's the thing, man, like if there were people on the ground, boots on the ground, who, at the ascension, are still like, I'm not really sure, I'm not, I'm not really sure, like you think. Okay, then this must not be an easy thing to do.
Yeah and it's not because, well, they were stupid yeah, exactly, yeah it.
It's hard not to, you know, look back and be like those guys are idiots. You know, like how could you see something like that and not believe? And then you know that really does have something to say about just the basic human condition of how quickly we forget and how you know we don't want to believe. Things like if it's right in front of our eyes and we just can't believe it is is super interesting, just in in general of the human condition.
Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, we say, uh, if you, we, you know, um, that fundamentally, what we're doing in our work with patients is, um, we are working to love them. That's what we're doing and what patients are actually doing, whether they know it or not, and only after they've been at it for a while do they even take the risk of being open to this being what's happening in the room. Whether we're prescribing medication or we're doing psychotherapy, you're doing EMDR, whatever the things are that we're doing, what the patients are doing is that they are working to allow themselves to be loved. You know, there's a when I'm training clinicians and we tell them look, you can't give patients what you don't have, because nobody can. I can't give anybody, I can't give my wife, I can't give my kids what, what I don't have. And the reason you look around you say we're not, we're not very good at loving others. Like, look, just look at our world, like we're not very practiced at that, and we think, well, that's just because we're, because we need to work harder at that. No, it's because the parts of me that are not very effective at loving others are the parts, are the very parts of me that have not yet been able to be receptive to being loved. So we're not very good at loving others, but we are even less skilled, even more frightened, to allow ourselves to be loved. And you know people well, I don't really, I don't know. Like, look a lot, listen to a lot of pop music, like, listen to all it's, like it's all about love, like we're. We're like, of course, like we want to be, like, yeah, we do, until love shows up. I like the idea of love until it shows up, because then it asks me to be vulnerable, and it asks me to be vulnerable not on my terms, but on its terms. And then it asks me to live like the Sermon on the Mount. And then it asks me to, you know, produce the fruit of the spirit. And I quickly become aware that, like I'm not able to do that, right, because there are parts of me that have not yet been loved. Again, I really would like for you to um, it's, it's. I would like for you to cure my symptoms, but don't ask me to change my life in order to allow my whole disease to be cured.
You know, it's like the woman in Mark five who comes with a bleeding problem. It's a well-known story and what's really striking to me is that the way the story unfolds reminds us, the readers. It reminds us that her bleeding was actually just the tip of the iceberg, like the bleeding stopped and she had a plan right. And it's going to be like I'm going to go to the doctor, I'm depressed, I'm anxious, I have this, I have that, I have these and I'm going to go to the doctor and I have a plan and I'm going to decide what the doctor is going to do. I'm going to touch the hem of his garment. We've got a plan, it's all going to work and it does, you know, for a nanosecond, until he says, stop, who touched me?
And then she's like crap, like the whole commando healing enterprise just goes out the window, like we're going to just do this whole clandestine SEAL Team 6 thing. Get in, get the job done. And because at some level, jesus you know, and he keeps looking for her and he demands her participation, he demands her public appearance, her, and he demands her participation, he demands her public appearance. He's not just going to walk, go out and find her on his own. And you come to find and then he calls her daughter and you sound like gosh.
The bleeding is a problem, but she has no husband, no children, no family. No, she doesn't have Jack and all. That's a far bigger problem than her bleeding and that's those. Those would be things like you know. She tells him the whole thing but she's not even aware of what she doesn't know yet, that he's about to do. And this, this happens to patients all the time. This happens to us all the time that we come with we, what, we, what we understand the nature of our problem is only to discover that it's just the tip of the iceberg and underneath the waterline is so much that we don't know that we don't know.
I want to get back to that frame of mind of the first century Christian or the ancient Hebrew kind of thing. And I've interviewed this guy, john H Walton, who's an Old Testament scholar, that his huge thing is getting to the mind of the ancient Near Eastern Hebrew person family, all sorts of that. I'm curious, how do you do that? What's your method of being? Like? You know, because we do walk around with our preconceived notions and our plausibility structures and everything, and the best way to read the Bible is to throw, you know, basically all of that in the garbage, at least to me, and try your best to read it as it was meant.
um, yeah time yeah through there well I yeah, well, grant, I'll tell you it's a great question and I I would say this, this so you mentioned john walton, who has also been a really important voice for me. John Walton has been an important voice At this point. You're probably familiar with the guys Tim Mackey and John Collins at the Bible Project. These guys that are doing really, really fabulous work, and there are others. We only become professional at whatever we're doing flipping houses. You become professional at flipping a house not by just doing it one time and then you're done no, right. So if you're doing some of the GC work, right, some of the general contracting work, if you're doing some of that work, if you're all the things you have to do, you become really good at that by doing it a lot.
We become professional human beings by paying a lot of attention to what it means to be a human being, and most of us are not really interested in doing that. We're on autopilot, trying to get through our day, and that's what we do. And again, it's not because we're stupid or we're cowards or we're just weak or lazy. It's none of that pejorative stuff. We have been trained because this is what evil's mission is. Evil's mission is to devour us and it doesn't want us thinking about any of this stuff. Yeah, god is not thinking we are stupid, lazy cowards. God is yearning for his sons and daughters to grow up and to become kings and queens. He wants us to become professional human beings. But if we're going to do that just like if I'm going to become a surgeon or I'm going to become a concert violinist or I'm going to become a person who flips houses and who becomes really good at it it means I have to commit time, effort, energy and so forth. So when you ask the question, how do we do this?
Well, we do this by doing the work that is required to actually immerse ourselves in an awareness of at least two things. Number one, to become aware that I live in a particular world that has trained me to assume a certain set of things. So that means we're going to read people like Leslie Newbigin and we're going to read everything that he's put on the market to help us become more familiar with the fact that actually I am a fish that is swimming in water Like I have to be, like I have to, because the world does not want me to do this. The world evil does not want me to become aware of the way the nature of the world really is. So I'm going to have to work at doing that, and then I'm going to immerse myself in reading and listening and becoming familiar with the work of somebody like John Walton or the work of the folks at the Bible Project, who have all kinds of resources for us to actually to become aware of what we are not aware of, so that we can slowly, meditatively, begin to imagine, in all kinds of small moments, um, what does it mean for us to be a person of the biblical narrative in the 21st century?
Right, I'm not asking to take away my indoor plumbing, yeah, mind you. Um, I'm not asking to. You know, there are things about living in our time and space that are really lovely and beautiful, like like mind blowing, in really unbelievably beautiful ways. So we're not suggesting that, just because that everything about this plausibility structure is corrupt, that everything about it is corrupt, corrupt, that everything about it is corrupt, but what we are saying is that there are certain things about the nature of what it means to be human that we have been kind of, like, you know, anesthetically taught to believe. And somebody like John Walton comes along and you, you know you read his book on Genesis, his trade book on Genesis, and it kind of blows your mind about the first two chapters of Genesis, the first chapter of Genesis, and like, oh my gosh, like these are not things that I was taught in Sunday school growing up.
And then you get rocked Right and then you read it and it's so liberating. But like so, for instance, tomorrow we're recording this on a Thursday. Tomorrow, it turns out that I'm I'm we're recording this on a Thursday. Tomorrow it turns out that I'm going to be I had the privilege of speaking to a group of about a hundred faculty members at Ohio state, ohio state university Awesome, and uh, we're going to have a conversation about the work that I do, but these are not people who are believers, and so one of the first things that I it will be important for me to do when I, when, when we're there, is for me to name, uh, who I am and who I am is is not what they would otherwise. You know, they have ideas, they, they know that they're going to come listen to a psychiatrist who's had some, who's had some experience in the academy and who's going to talk about some faith stuff or whatever. Some experience in the academy and who's going to talk about some faith stuff or whatever. Who knows what that means. Until I actually say this is who I am and this is the world that I believe that we occupy, so that you know exactly who you're getting, so that when I use certain words and language and so forth. You're going to know that, like I'm not trying I'm not here to convert people, I'm not but I'm you're hearing someone who's talking, talking who believes that he lives in a particular world, and that may not be the world that you think you live in, but at least we're both going to know what we both know about, what we both believe when we get started and we come to many things. I mean, my guess is, if somebody else wanted to come up and talk about things, they're not going to necessarily think to say, well, I want to first say that I'm a modernist, that I believe in the Enlightenment and I don't believe that there's any God, and like all these things, they're not going to say that, they're just going to start to talk, as if everybody in the room is just assuming that everybody believes the same thing. That's true about the world.
But one of the things that this work of John Walton does and the Bible Project and others, is that it's helping, like it sparks our imagination. Right, it's novel, it catches us off guard and this is what the gospel is all about. I mean, jesus was catching people off guard not to shock them, not to disrupt them for the purpose of disruption. But this is how God operates. God comes in and like invites. So it's like it's.
You know, when I asked my patient, as I mentioned, when I asked my patient, oh, tell me about your family growing up, he has a standard answer I grew up in a loving Christian home. It's automatic. He like cause, he thinks he knows the world that he lives in because he's been telling this story for 45 years. And then you but? But when you ask the next question, nobody asks him, like nobody's. Nobody's going to cocktail parties saying like hey, who was in charge of discipline in your house when you were growing up? That would be, that would be weird. Nobody's asking that question. But the moment that you get asked that question, you're like huh.
And this is what it means for us to be people who curiously come into the world, just like Jesus. What do you want? His first words in John's gospel what do you want? John 138? He's curious and, like you imagine, right, it's like what is the rabbi doing? Asking me questions? We're supposed to ask him questions so that he can give us all the answers, but he's a and not only like the particular question he asked. What do you want? I ask a patient what do you want? And, like I, I want to not be depressed like now that's what you don't want, what do you want? These are questions that we aren't being asked. We're, just like in our addictions, trying to answer it without being very thoughtful about it. And this is where the gospel in its fullness comes, and we discovered that our King is genuinely serious, far more serious about us than we are about ourselves.
That's good and that just makes me think of like. I feel like the word that you're describing is mindfulness, can we? Yeah, that's a word, yep.
Yep, that word, that word works. A doggle hunt.
That's a word, but you know, just like paying attention to what you're paying attention to, kind of thing, that's right and that is huge if you actually take that into practice.
Um, I was listening to a podcast jordan peterson, you know also crazy intelligent guy, I think, but um, just really fun to listen to too. Um, and he was talking about, you know, the mindfulness and all that stuff and actually like keep it, keeping like your brain turned on, if that makes sense, because a lot of stuff we do is, you know, super, just repetitive and you're not thinking about it and, like you said, you know you're not awake through life. You're just kind of like doing stuff to survive. Like you hit like the survival button and you go to work, you come home and you sit and you want like the survival button and you go to work, you come home and you sit and you want some Netflix, and then you go to bed and you try your best along the way to not start any arguments or not do anything crazy, and then you do the, you know, do the next thing.
So what do you do Like? What's your goal for the day? My goal is to not set my house on fire.
That's my goal your goal for the day. My goal is to not set my house on fire. That's my goal. So and not it that idea of like picturing what you want or knowing what you would actually want, and like thinking about you know, if I did have my ideal life or if I did have everything I wanted, would that actually mean anything? And something that I've found to be super helpful in my walk with Jesus is something I pray a lot is like God, just change my desires, because a lot of times I don't want the right things that would actually like. What do you want? Even my desires are corrupt, so it's like Right.
At the same time, though I think that you know, grant, I'll say this One of the things that we discover in the work that I do is that it becomes. It's easy for us, easier than we're aware of, to be aware of certain desires that we would say oh, that desire is corrupt, and so our prayer is God, will you please change my desire, will you take that desire away, and so forth, without fully exploring what that desire is really about. And so you say well, my desire is X, y or Z, it's, it's the job, it's the car, it's the, it's the, it's the sexual partner, it's the. You know, whatever, whatever the thing is, these, these things, and we, often we, just you know I'll say like, oh, I know, it's not good for me to desire that for its own sake, so somehow I got to find a way to like shut that off. Good for me to desire that for its own sake, so somehow I got to find a way to like shut that off. And, um, what we find, is that actually what we want? To make sure that we do? And, of course, uh, desire can most definitely lead to devouring, uh, devouring ourselves, devouring others, if we are not getting to, if we are not answering the question what is the desire behind the desire that you believe is corrupt? What is that desire? Ultimately, what that's about?
And typically we will find that our sin is typically misdirected. Sin is typically misdirected desire. That is a way for us to cope with our grief, because I don't fully name my desire, I never get to naming my grief. And if I don't name my grief and allow God to meet me in that space, then I can redirect that corrupt desire and it's just going to show up in another corrupted form later.
You know, when we read in Isaiah that the son of man was a man of sorrows, he was a man of sorrows. He suffered as much as he did anything. I mean, think about it, like the dude had to put up with just being here, right? I mean no, no, I'm not down for that job. I'm thinking this is a bad idea. And so he knows grief, he knows grief, and what's a challenge for us often is that I am not. I am not willing to look at my own grief, that Jesus is already waiting in and waiting for me to join him to look at, and my not being willing to do that is what leads to all the other stuff that I do where my desire ends up showing up in ways that's pretty unhelpful that I do where my desire ends up showing up.
in ways it's pretty unhelpful. Yeah, that's super interesting to take it a layer back and try to get you know to the origins of your desires and what that's what I hear you saying anyway is like peeling back the layers, getting back to the origin.
It sounds like a psychiatrist, you know, would say something like that Go to the origin. Yeah, one would think, and then I would say, yeah, but I wasn't the first one who asked that question. Right, those are Jesus' first words in John's gospel.
Oh yeah, and I love that kind of stuff. So you are an author. I'm curious, some of the ideas in some of your books like what would you say and I know you've written a couple of them, but just something that's kind of stuck out to you, um, you know in the past little bit that you're either chewing on for another book or something that's you know, an idea kind of that you've been chewing through right now.
Yeah, I mean I, I, I would say grant that I'm, I'm most, I'm most aware. I mean this in some respects I do have. There's a project that is, you know, in my mind, has kind of come up on the horizon, that I am reflecting on and meditating on. I don't know how long it'll take me to kind of mobilize the engine that you know needs to write these things, and I'll say that perhaps for another time to talk about Um, but I would say that, you know, the thing that I am most struck with is, uh, that our stories really matter. They matter, uh, far more than we are aware that they do, more than we are aware that they do, um, that we are.
Our traumas, uh, not only um shatter my story, but they also tend to shatter my capacity to understand the nature of what has happened to me and what is required for me to make a course correction and required for me to heal. It's hard, and so I really need the presence of other people who can, as we like to say, who are going to be able to imagine things for me while my imagination is trying to catch up and envisioning what healing looks like, envisioning what the practice of forgiveness looks like what it means for me to work out all of my grief and all of my rage in order for me to no longer be committing all that energy to containing all that, but rather to make that available for God to create duty and goodness in the world. And you know, one of the most important elements of all this is that our healing uh is going to take the rest of our life, and we don't like that in our, you know, instant gratification society. It's hard for us to hear and to know that my, my commitment to following Jesus makes healing possible. As long as I'm willing to allow for the fact that that's going to be a lifelong process, to allow for the fact that that's going to be a lifelong process.
But I would say this I grant that when we are willing to allow ourselves to be seen, soothed, safe, made secure by being in the presence of others and revealing the reality of our lives in a vulnerable way, that kind of community work in which everybody is doing that same kind of work creates a durable transformation to which others look at and glorify our Father in heaven. And it is a practice and a process that takes time, but it is the kind of work that, as I've seen and we're in the work that I do, we're not just doing this in the clinical setting I've got a small nonprofit that is establishing these confessional communities where a lot of this work is taking place, lay-led confessional communities in this little group called the Center for being Known, and we're training people, not just clinicians, but we're training pastors and others who want to take this kind of work into their churches. And so I've never been more hopeful about the presence and work of Jesus in the world. I've never been more hopeful Even in the middle of being at a particular moment in our own history where everybody's, of being at a particular moment in our own history where everybody's there's a lot of, you know, people are worried, afraid in all kinds of ways about all kinds of things.
And especially, I would say, to our listeners who have sustained perhaps no small amount of wounding, even from within the church, I want to say that, first of all, that that's not new, that is as old as human beings, because it is our religious practice from the time humans have walked the earth. It's our religious practice that is both the source of great joy and the source of the most destructive abuse it always takes place in the houses of faith, so it's not new, and so we've been here before, and the gospel continues to speak life and peace into that space. And, as you've rightly said, christianity and being a Christian and following Jesus are not all three the same thing, and I would just say that I'm really grateful to have the opportunity to do the work that I do and, not least of which, to have a conversation with you about this today.
That's so cool. Describe to me more about that.
Well, let me just say this. Let me just say this I have about two minutes before I have to jump on to my next call.
We got to do another podcast then because I got more stuff. Are you interested in going round two with Jerry?
Oh, you bet you bet. You bet that would be lovely.
Well, for my final minute. So what makes these communities? What about these communities that you've been creating in that? I forget what you called it, but that new thing that you're doing that's about, like, oh, the Center for being Known, that's the nonprofit yeah. So what about those communities? Makes you so hopeful?
Oh, I can say undoubtedly it's what I witness that happens in the rooms when what people are telling us are, and confidence is uh maintained, and in which people are able to tell the whole truth about their stories and um, uh and that, and, and those stories are, those stories find a hospitable place to dwell and it's in that space that those stories are then hospitable place to dwell and it's in that space that those stories are then given the opportunity to begin to heal and also for people to be invited to take the kind of risks of following Jesus in ways that they heretofore haven't, because so much of their trauma has remained hidden and they're just burning a ton of energy trying to manage all that and that energy is not available for them to follow the king in the way that they actually really want to when it comes right down to it.
But it's been, their energy has been way too invested in protecting themselves from themselves. But coming into that body really creates space for Jesus and the work of the spirit to happen in ways that otherwise they would not find easy to access. It's kind of a long-winded way to talk about it, but beautiful.
Well, I'll end it there, unless you have anything that you want to plug at the end. I like giving you know my guests a space if they get a new book or a new thing, or you know that kind of yeah, well, you know, I'll say my, my, uh.
The fourth of the four books I've written came out in august. It's called the Deepest Place, suffering and the Formation of Hope, and I've heard that people have found it to be really helpful and I hope that could be. It's an intersection of neuroscience and Romans, chapter 5, the first five verses. It's like what happens to suffering, suffering what happens to us when we peer into it from from that perspective. Um, I would love for our listeners to check out our, our podcast, and certainly you can find out more about me in, you know, my website, kurtthompsonmdcom, and, uh, you can find me on instagram and on what used to be Twitter and Facebook.
Cool and the podcast is called being Known.
The being Known Podcast.
Thanks for listening to the Across the Counter Podcast. If you enjoyed the show, please rate us five stars, wherever you got this podcast. Thanks, y'all.
