Episode 5: K.J. Ramsey – What If Our Bodies & Feelings Can Be Trusted?

Jared  

You’re listening to Faith for Normal People, the only other God-ordained podcast on the internet.

Pete  

I’m Pete Enns.

Jared  

And I’m Jared Byas.

Jared  

Welcome everyone to this episode of Faith for Normal People. Before we get started, I want to talk about our March class, which is called “Why God Died: How Atonement Theories Try to Explain Salvation” and that’s going to be taught by Jennifer Garcia Bashaw, our very own nerd in-residence. It’s happening live for one night on March 28th, from 8-9:30pm. Eastern Time, and as always, the class is pay-what-you-can until the class ends, and then you can download it after that for $25. But if you get the class before the night of the class, and you can’t make it on March 28th from 8-9:30pm, that’s okay. We’ll send you a link and you can always watch it later. So just go to TheBibleForNormalPeople.com/atonement to sign up. 

Now on today’s episode, I’m asking the question: What if our bodies and feelings can be trusted? with K.J. Ramsey. K.J. is a trauma-informed, Licensed Professional Counselor and the author of The Lord is My Courage: Stepping Through the Shadows of Fear Toward the Voice of Love and also, This Too Shall Last: Finding Grace When Suffering Lingers. And as you can tell by the title of those two books, she writes at the intersection of theology, psychology, and spiritual formation, and you will get a lot of that in this conversation, which I really appreciated. Now, don’t forget to stay tuned at the end of the interview for Quiet Time with me and Pete, where we reflect on the interview and how the conversation ties into our own personal journeys through this life of ever evolving and ever shifting faith. Alright, let’s jump in.

K.J.  

“Our emotions really are messengers and guides trying to prompt us to pay attention to ourselves as people who deserve safety and support. And our feelings are only trying to help us face how we’re experiencing the moment that we’re in and the past that came before it that shaped us to experience this moment the way that we are.”

Jared  

Welcome to the podcast K.J.. It’s wonderful to have you. I’m really looking forward to this conversation.

K.J.  

Thank you for having me. 

Jared  

Absolutely. So, I want to start with what parts of your story have led you to do the work that you do as a trauma informed counselor? Where does this come from in your story?

K.J.  

Yeah, I became a counselor partly out of practicality. When I was first out of college and into my first like, career job, I’d studied community development and was working in research and training, doing a lot of marketing for this organization, and doing a lot of writing, really—which was the beginning of the writing work for me—But the organization I was part of was really relationally unhealthy and I was absorbing so much of the stress and—I have an autoimmune disease and it really exacerbated the severity of my disease and I had to stop working. And it was while I was seeing a therapist to process this loss and to process being disabled, that I started to see that I could have a different kind of career. And I saw reflected back in my therapist who also had a chronic illness that it was possible to be sick and be disabled and do this work of really like getting to the poverty of spirit that is at the heart of every human’s life. 

So working in poverty alleviation, I always wanted to go deeper and I saw this picture of, “Oh, that’s possible,” while I was like, honoring this poverty of spirit in my own life. But it wasn’t until a lot later, once I started to study to become a therapist, that I started to get really in touch with my own story, and had to name that I am a trauma survivor myself, and that I grew up experiencing complex trauma, and how that affects me today. So, I didn’t really know how much the field that I chose has roots further into my story than I thought. I thought I was just finding a way to have a job and be disabled. And it’s really become a vocation and there was more there than I even knew, which I am so grateful for. So there’s the initial reasons why and then, there’s the “what was actually there and happening and coming to the surface” while receiving healing for the pain of my own story.

Jared  

Yeah, it’s interesting how often that happens, where we, we have the explicit reason and then we have all these things that, in reflection, were also going on, that we maybe aren’t- It’s hard to be aware of, you know, sometimes even being aware of it is an accomplishment in itself.

K.J.  

Totally. And I mean, I’m just so grateful I…the loss of that job when I was in my early 20s—it felt like I was never going to be able to have a normal career. And I wasn’t sure what work would ever look like for me. And it’s so cool to be able to look back now and see that that loss was actually just enlarging the space of what I would get to step into down the road, but I couldn’t—I would have had no way of seeing that then. I just knew I had to take care of my body first. You know? I’m just so grateful that—that’s how loss works. It’s always enlarging us. 

Jared  

Well, maybe we can just jump off of that, actually, before we go to some other pieces. Because, you know, whenever you say that “loss was enlarging the space” and I sense a spirit of gratitude for that? 

K.J.  

Jared  

How do we talk about those, you know, within grief and suffering and loss? How do we talk about it in a way that provides hope that we can maybe see that loss as enlarging the space? Right? So, there’s- You’re in that, within this experience, you have that hindsight of seeing how it worked out. But I just think, within, you know, the Christian tradition I grew up in, the idea of “see the positive, there’s always a silver lining, look at the bright side, don’t be negative,” kind of that spiritual bypassing, how do we navigate wanting to provide hope for people while also not invalidating their experiences by telling them, you know, these spiritual platitudes of, “always look on the bright side, don’t be so negative, there’s always something good,” or, you know, quoting Romans 8:28, “all things work together for good.” And all of that. How do you balance those? 

K.J.  

Yeah, well, I’m able to express gratitude for the way grief has grown space within me to show up in my life and be whole, because people have always been present to me in my pain. And so in those early days of, for example, having to quit my dream job in my early 20s and being so sick that I couldn’t work, it was seeing another human being sit across from me, and validate how terrible that was, that—that therapist validating how big of a loss that was and how complex it is to navigate the world in a body that’s not abled. It’s friends who would come over and sit with me while I wept, and didn’t have words to say to make it better, but just sat there with me without answers. It’s being present to each other that actually makes… It turns pain into a portal, where there is this possibility of more grace meeting us along the way than we can currently see. Like pain becomes a portal when people are present with us, in it. And that is not a silver lining. That is a fierce honesty. It’s a willingness to sit in the dark, and not run away from it. That’s what actually transforms it, and it’s very different than—I grew up with the same kind of platitudes, spiritual bypassing, kind of way as, like, “That’s what we’re supposed to do.” It doesn’t work. Frankly, it doesn’t work, because that’s not how God made our bodies to work.

Jared  

Well, I just had this thought because, you know, you’ve written “the path to protection and peace first goes downward.” 

K.J.  

Jared  

And I tie it—I want to know what you mean by that—but I’m going to tie it to, and I’m gonna make an assumption here, when you’re talking about sitting with others in their grief and their loss, and in that presence with others is what allows for grief and loss to be this portal for possibility and hope, I’m wondering, is there a sense in which, that’s what you’re saying to do, we need to do that for ourselves as well? That there’s a sense in which we also have to sit with our own grief and our own sadness and make peace with it be present to it, rather than trying to escape it or avoid it and that doing that very thing that is so life giving and validating for others, if we figured out how to do that for ourselves, that could bring a lot of healing?

K.J.  

Yeah, if we were willing to practice that. Embodiment is really non-judgmentally bearing witness to what is happening in our own skin, in our stories, and there’s an emphasis there on “non-judgmentally.” Like, we so reflexively evaluate ourselves based on standards that we have swallowed from the world around us and the culture around us—including church culture—that says you’re good if this, you’re successful if you are productive, if you are efficient. And really, every human being experiences pain, every human being experiences overwhelm, and every human being at some point in their life also experiences trauma. And to dare to witness our own overwhelm, our own grief, our confusion, without judgment actually gives our bodies the chance to feel safe enough to hope, to feel safe enough to be soothed back into strength. And that’s the same process that happens when another human being is sitting there with you, and giving you permission to be sad, or to cry. It’s a process called regulation.

Jared  

Maybe we can go back, because I got ahead of myself here a little bit. You mentioned, you know, everyone’s had some trauma. Can you just define—I think that’s a word that we use quite a bit now and I think that’s helpful that it’s becoming more and more used, but I think we maybe sometimes make assumptions about what we’re talking about—So when we talk about trauma, what do we what do we mean? What makes something traumatic, and what are helpful ways to think about it?

K.J.  

Yeah, my favorite definition of trauma—it doesn’t get at all of it—but it’s from Gabor Maté, who said “Trauma is not just what happens to us, but what we hold inside in the absence of an empathetic witness.” Others have talked about that trauma is anything that has a negative effect on your capacity to self regulate and show up in your life. There’s a broad range of experiences, and the absence of good things that should have happened, that we experience as traumatic. Really trauma is when our nervous system is overwhelmed by what is around us and by, often, a lack of support in hard circumstances that are happening when we are not adequately attuned to. And that affects our capacity over the span of our lives, to keep showing up in life feeling safe enough to risk being here and being loved. So that trauma can come in so many shapes and forms and it’s really a particularized experience based on, it’s subjective, based on how you are experiencing the situation that you’re in, or this long term dynamic that you are surrounded by. So you know, one child and a family could experience that family environment as traumatic, whereas another sibling in that family might not have experienced it as traumatic. So there’s a lot of subjectivity when we talk about trauma. But really, it gets down to the fact that we all need to be witnessed when we experience pain and most of us are not adequately witnessed in that pain.

Jared  

What do you think is maybe a contributing factor, because you mentioned the subjectivity of it. And I think for some people, that’s a challenge, because it’s almost like they’re—I can just think of people in my life who were like the arbiters of trauma as like, “No, that wasn’t traumatic.” But it sort of, in some ways, it triggers them. Like, somehow it’s important that it’s this objective thing that we have criteria for, and it’s not a subjective experience. Why do you think people maybe aren’t comfortable with the subjectivity of trauma?

K.J.  

Oh, goodness, that is a really good question. To be fair, while it is a subjective experience, there definitely are forms of criteria, you know, as a therapist, there’s things that I look for in how a client is presenting. There’s symptomatology that goes along with trauma and the result of trauma in our bodies. So, dissociating, like, not being able to be fully present in the moment, getting flooded with emotion, overwhelm, high-startle response, there are actual things. I think what’s difficult is—and this is what I see in so many of my clients and I think has been true in my own life, too—It’s hard to tell the truth about how much we’ve been affected by what we’ve lived. And I think that telling the truth about how much something has affected us actually feels like a threat to our belonging. Because when you say “this affected me this deeply that I’m having panic attacks or I’m dissociating,” or “I no longer feel safe to go to church,” all these things that can happen, to be that honest requires that those around you change in some way. And everybody likes homeostasis. So I think that what you’re describing is partly a real and present and common reaction because really at our heart, we’re all afraid of losing whatever form of belonging we have with each other and to really say, “It’s this bad” feels scary if there’s a vulnerability to it. And frankly, a lot of people don’t respond well to receiving the honest feedback that we’ve been harmed, or we’ve been affected in large ways that require treatment and help.

Jared  

Yeah, and I think you said something important there around homeostasis. And, you know, again, where there may be some folks who are trying to…It’s almost like they’re trying to negate the trauma like, “No, there has to be some objectivity here,” and I think it may be related—I’m curious what you think about this—to what you said about homeostasis that again, it may require something of me, and how I interact with you. 

K.J.  

Yeah. 

Jared  

If you’ve been traumatized, and that is uncomfortable to me—sometimes it’s angering to me, and for whatever reason. Do you think that’s a part of it as well?

K.J.  

Totally. And I think it’s true for the person who has been traumatized too. Like, recently, I think I’ve posted this on Instagram, “the truth will set you free, but first, it will make you cringe.” Like, the truth about what we’ve lived, like actually being honest with ourselves and others, first with ourselves, about what we’ve experienced, it really will set us free and it really will bring us into a better and truer, more freeing belonging. But first, it hurts to notice. First, it requires you to see things that you would rather keep unseen. First, it forces you to change and to have to say like, “maybe being part of this system isn’t safe enough for me.” And it’s not good for others, like maybe I have to—I mean, for me, I can’t help but think of my own story. My husband and I left a spiritually abusive church where he worked as a pastor and I ran my counseling practice on site. And the truth did set us free, but first, it made us cringe by having to face the fear of what happens when you give up your job, the financial fear of losing everything and losing health insurance. The fear of how people will respond, of being shamed and gaslit by people who you previously—like for a long time, who you might have looked up to and received as people who speak on behalf of God. That’s cringy and hard. So, I think this is both true for those who have experienced trauma, and for those who hear our stories. The truth sets us free, but first, it makes us cringe. It forces us to cringe, and it forces us to change. And that’s not easy.

Jared  

To your point too, sometimes our fears are actually realized, it’s only in hindsight that we realize that, you know, our fears were realized and yet, we still survived. 

K.J.  

Yeah.

Jared  

To your point, like, “Yes, it’s true that if I speak up about this, I may get kicked out of this group, and I may no longer belong to that group. But maybe there is a deeper sense of belonging out there,” but that’s a very scary step of faith to believe that that’s true in the face of having no evidence. Like, “No, the community that has seen me through all of this is the very ones rejecting me and I’m supposed to believe that there’s another group or there’s another community out there that will embrace this part of me? That I’m maybe ashamed of because it represents a sense of weakness,” or whatever it is that the stories we tell ourselves. You know, I think it’s—you know, what I’m hearing you say too, is it’s important that we validate, that we’re honest that, yeah, that fear may be realized but there’s another step and also that step is very difficult too.

K.J.  

Absolutely yeah, I’m just sunshine and rainbows over here for everybody listening.

K.J.  

K.J.  

Yeah, like we… You will lose, you will lose something, and you will lose people, and as somebody who has lost so much, there is nothing that I have lost and there are no people that I have lost, that I have not gained greater true belonging in the course of this losing. I guess we’re back to where we started the beginning of this conversation about the way loss actually is enlarging us. That like, the belonging that I thought I had, being part of the church that we were in, was not real belonging, my full self was not welcome. And I was not safe there to be my full self and other people were not either. So the belonging that I have now is… It does not look the same, but now I get to experience more fully a belonging with Christ, where my whole self really is loved, including the self that tells the truth that is inconvenient for people and the self who shuts down sometimes, the self who gets overwhelmed, the self who still has more trauma responses than I wish I did. Like Jesus embraces that whole self and I now, as far as I am able, get to have relationships where the quality of my relationships matches my worth. And to God, my worth is infinite. So I no longer have to live an incongruent life where I have to prove that I’m worthy of being loved by giving others my loyalty and working hard. I get to be in relationships where I am appreciated just because I exist. And I can set down, I don’t have to keep being part of relationships or systems where I have to prove anything.

Jared  

Mhmm.

K.J.  

And I think so—that’s just me personally, I think, I do believe that when we set down, when we lose the things that we’re so afraid of losing, we really are being invited into, like being held in a very deep way by divine love, in a way that like we can’t really experience when we’re so busy trying to prove that we’re good enough to keep around.

Jared  

K.J.  

Jared  

You said loss is enlarging. I thought of you know, this idea, “If we give up our life, we’ll find it.”

K.J.  

Jared  

And I think that in some ways, the older I get, and the more I’ve experienced these very scary letting-go’s, the more I trust that but at first, that’s a muscle that is not well worn. And it’s asking a lot…

K.J.  

Yeah…

Jared  

…to believe that if I give up on this version of my life, that I’ll find a different version that is better. And as long as what’s guiding me is love, and authenticity, and honesty, and this pursuit of love—both for myself and for others and this common good—if I hold that fast, then the letting go does lead to finding a different life. And I think, even in the way that Jesus says that it’s absurd, because it doesn’t make sense. “If we give up our life, we’ll find it.” What does that mean? In those moments, I can remember the absurdity of it because it’s like, “Wait, if I let go of this, I’m going to have something else?” It just didn’t compute. The fear was sort of overwhelming. And it was only in hindsight that I recognized that that’s the case.

K.J.  

Yeah. I think that probably most of faith is learning to let go. Like, it is learning to let things fall out of our hands, and to keep our hands open. To let something be… To be given, to receive actual goodness and to experience that like, even if I’m not holding on tight, even to God, there are everlasting arms underneath me, holding me. Like that nothing can take me out of that embrace. Sometimes it’s like we…I think we do have to learn how, and to dare to, let go of all these things and people and opportunities that have made up the sum of most of our lives, to really experience that we’re held no matter what. And that’s the, I think, the heart and the best part of being alive is experiencing that.

Jared  

Yeah, it reminds me I had this experience when I was kind of going through faith transitions. And the things I held certain about my faith were starting to kind of fall apart even though I didn’t want them to—they sort of had a mind of their own—I just remember in the Counte of Monte Cristo—and this is so cheesy, but this is like my mantra for months—There’s this scene at the end where the Father, of course—in the Catholic Church sense—is talking to—and I even forget the main character’s name—but going through this wrestling crisis of faith, and the Father keeps talking about God and finally he says, “I don’t believe in God.” And the father is like, “That doesn’t matter. God believes in you.” 

K.J.  

Yeah. 

Jared  

And that was such a, like, powerful statement for me. But for me, it conveyed exactly what you just said, is that I had held on to my faith, like, my faith was about me holding on to God and then I realized that maybe faith is the exact opposite. It’s being able to fully grasp that no matter what I do, or believe or don’t believe, or any of that, that God has a hold of me. And it was the most liberating experience. But I don’t know if I’d get there without these points, these pain points in my life, as teachers and as guides to get me there. Because it’s a powerful drug, this idea of certainty or me having control and holding on to my faith, I had to have something that kind of ripped my hands off of it.

K.J.  

Right. And I think that’s why I said earlier pain can be a portal. I don’t…I can’t say that I fully understand this. [Laughing] That would be ridiculous and audacious. But I think because God chose to become human, that because Jesus became a person with skin and bones, who had to eat and sleep and poop [laughs] who walked on actual land, and still lives and reigns in a body—our personhood, like there’s pain because of this God who—somehow this crazy story like that love came through the place of pain of God incarnate on a cross. Like, somehow that is where love came to be. I think that our places of pain are forever, like places—they’re like, thin places. That Celtic idea of a “thin place” where it’s almost easier to sense the divine. There is something about when we are aware of, and must cope with, our pain, that makes it possible to sense the presence of God because of Jesus becoming human. And I think it’s our fear of loss and a way that perfection is reflected back to us as a standard of like, we’re supposed to be more secure than we are and more successful than we are. Therefore, we want to, like, deny the pain and walk around it, instead of go right through it. That convinces us not to do that divine release of just like, yeah, the pain in my life has prompted me to let go of so much in ways that was terrifying. Yeah, so, there’s a unique experience of the divine in our places of pain, there’s the possibility of that, and I don’t understand it, but I think it’s beautiful. It’s been my experience.

Jared  

I want to go back to, you know, some of the things that you’re talking about. You used the phrase just a minute ago of denying the pain and feeling like it’s an indication of weakness, or somehow we’re failing, but you’ve also written somewhere that you say, that “you’re not failing, you’re feeling.” And I think those are connected, because, you know, going back to non-judgment is—I don’t know if it’s Western or if it’s Christian, I can only speak from my context. But I saw it a lot when I was a kid—there was a lot of shoulds, we were should-ing on ourselves around our emotions

K.J.  

Jared  

You shouldn’t feel this way, you know. Like, whatever. It can go as extreme as boys shouldn’t cry, or it can be as Christians shouldn’t feel sad. There was a lot of judgment put on our feelings and so through that, you know, growing up, I’ve become a big proponent of this idea of a “FAN” or Feelings Are Messengers. They’re telling us something really important and when we judge them, we too quickly dismiss them rather than listening to them, as telling us something really valuable. What’s been your experience with this idea of “you’re not failing, you’re feeling?” Have you seen that there also are a lot of people who judge their feelings as failure? And how do we navigate that? How do we overcome that? 

K.J.  

Yeah, I mean, I grew up evangelical, and so many of my clients did, too. So, yes, I think it’s even beyond evangelicals, I think it’s like broader into American culture. We really prefer to have the image of success. I think the American Dream, the idea that there’s always forward momentum and progress to be made is dangerous [chuckles] and convinces us to be dishonest with ourselves and dismissive about anything that does not appear to be moving forward. But within what I’ve seen in myself and with clients, I think so many of us have been taught to mistrust our feelings. We’ve been told things like your emotions are lying to you, feelings aren’t facts, or the heart is deceitful above all things. And really, what that serves to do is shame the very place where God is trying to get your attention and your body is trying to get your attention. 

So I love that you call it “feelings as messengers”, I’ve talked about, like emotions as emissaries, that our emotions really are messengers and guides trying to prompt us to pay attention to ourselves as people who deserve safety and support. And really, our feelings are only trying to help us face how we’re experiencing the moment that we’re in and the past that came before it, that shaped us to experience this moment the way that we are. So you know, earlier you were talking about—I’m not exactly sure how you put it—but this like bottom-up approach. That hope really begins not through thinking and telling yourself that “God is good, and therefore I am okay,” it’s not placing Romans 8:28 over your pain like a bandaid and everything’s fine, but that like, responding to our physicality first. A body-up approach. And that’s the beauty of what we’re talking about here is that the God who so loved us that Christ became one of us with a body is always seeking us through the experiences that we’re having throughout our days. And it is when we actually non-judgmentally notice our sensations and our emotions, which are really just how we’re making sense of our sensations. The story that we’re telling about our sensations is what emotion is. 

So, we can notice our feelings, and respond to what they’re telling us, which is often that we don’t feel adequately safe and we don’t feel adequately supported. When we respond to that, there’s the beauty of how God made our bodies so that we actually—our bodies respond to being seen and given solidarity and presence, with more safety. So, you actually can better show up in your life and feel that, “Maybe, it’s true that God is with me and God is kind and good” when you are honest with yourself that you feel hopeless or overwhelmed, or despairing and offer yourself some support. I mean, even just before this podcast—I’m in the middle of, I just had a book release yesterday and book releases are really intense for authors. Just so much talking about yourself and your book, and I’m an introvert—and so right before this interview with you, I was so tired and got super overwhelmed feeling and I know enough about how my body works to be like, nothing’s actually technically wrong, right now. I just…my body is saying “we’re tired, you’re tired.”

K.J.  

And so I, instead of like—I don’t know, maybe my younger self would have been like, “I need to pray right now.” [Laughs] But instead of that, it was like, “I’m gonna do some tapping right now. I’m gonna give my body a chance to breathe and like use self touch to help my body feel supported and to be able to release through my skin, through these acupressure points, the energy of stress that’s been accumulating over the last two days of really intense work,” and I feel good now! Like we can have this conversation and I can be present because I listened to my body and actually gave her some support that she was asking for.

Jared  

K.J.  

Jared  

…that needs to flourish. And recognizing that—again, it gets complicated. I don’t want to get into this kind of biblical theology here—While that, sure, we can get that from the biblical text, it’s interesting to me that you can just as easily find those passages where creation is good.

K.J.  

Yes.

Jared  

That theology is just as much present. But it’s interesting that we privilege one over the other and maybe suggesting that we rethink that and learn to privilege the idea of incarnation that Jesus has become human, to privilege a theology of creation that is good and that out of that maybe comes more fruitful understandings that can bring healing and restoration rather than shame and punishment, which is more of the tradition that I would have grown up with.

K.J.  

Totally, I mean, the same. Me too. And I really do believe that the incarnation is God’s profound yes to our physicality.

Jared  

That’s excellent.

K.J.  

Really [Laughs] and we’re missing so much. We miss so much life, and joy, and peace, when we treat our bodies like something to subject and control. The fact is this, it just works. By actually making that shift that you were just describing, from subjugation to solidarity and soothing, we actually will, and do, experience more well-being—capacity to show up with kindness and compassion. I mean, the truth is the way that our nervous systems work, we are very limited in our access to what’s called “the social engagement system” when we are in a state of stress. And you’re in a state of stress way more than you probably are aware of. Like when your nervous system notices, and this is a process called neuroception, when your nervous system—which is always always scanning like a self surveillance system—when your nervous system notices that there are more cues of danger around you and within you than there are cues of safety, you think into states of stress. And when you’re in a state of stress, your body can’t actually access the parts of your brain that allow you to have perspective and extend empathy and kindness and compassion to others. And so if we want to be people of love, we have to become serious about paying attention to our stress so that we can actually shift our bodies into the state where love is possible. So it’s actually this bottom-up approach of believing what your body is telling you about how unsafe you feel in any given moment that makes it possible to get back to the state where you can extend love.

Jared  

I think that’s a great—you know, we have to wrap up here in just a minute. So maybe kind of for concluding thoughts: for people who feel, just what you just said, unsafe, this heightened sense of, I don’t know, you know, exactly what you were just describing. 

K.J.  

Mhmm.

Jared  

What is a good first step to get to that place? What does it look like to take more of an embodiment approach, a bottom-up approach to this? Are there any, again, kind of concluding thoughts for how might people take a first step in this direction?

K.J.  

I love that question. And it’s as simple as right now: pause, and take a second to remember your breath. So, actually, those listening, like—Stop. Inhale. Exhale. Let your exhale linger a little bit longer than your inhale. Maybe do it one more time. 

Our breath is one of the quickest bridges back to letting our whole selves belong. And when we do something like lengthen our exhale, we’re giving our body, our nervous system signals, you’re sending out signals throughout your whole body that say, “I’m safe. I’m okay. We’re gonna be okay.” So embodiment doesn’t have to mean you go read a bunch of books. It doesn’t have to be big and complex. It can be as small as remembering to breathe. It can be as small as taking a second right now just to notice: Where in your body do you feel pain? Where do you feel tension? Have you eaten today? Are you thirsty? Like responding to your body’s innate needs for nourishment, and water and movement. This has more to do with your faith, and your whole sense of well being than you realize.

Jared  

So I’m hearing you say that my approach, which is to get mad at my body that it has to eat in the middle of the day because I have so much to do, is maybe not the best approach. 

K.J.  

Yeah, I think we have really internalized a lot of shame about being human. 

Jared  

K.J.  

And therefore we like turn on ourselves, like, as though our bodies have done something wrong by slowing us down to need to eat, or drink, or sleep, or rest. When really like, your body’s the wise one here, it’s saying like, “Hey, you’re gonna feel better if you eat.” You know, it’s so funny. Like, it’s so simple that you have to laugh about it. But yeah, I think, you know, you brought up the way that you were raised and the story that you were told about feelings. 

Jared  

K.J.  

And we’ve been told that same shaming story about our bodies. And I think every time that we feel frustrated with our needs, and with the pain that’s happening in our bodies, or the simple thing of needing to eat lunch, for example, we’re given a chance to shed that old story of shame, and to offer a story of solidarity instead. To like, I mean, straight up, give our body—feed our body back the story of incarnation—that you matter. I mean, I talk about my body in terms of, as a she, with like, person-language, because this is one of my most important relationships in my life is my relationship with my body, and the story that I tell about her. And I think that every sensation that we have really is a prompt to tell ourselves that better story that God really is with us. And then tell others the good news, too. 

Jared  

I think it’s a wonderful place to end. So thank you so much, K.J. for coming on. And again, for taking some time at a, you know, very busy season, with the book and everything. I know what it’s like to be exhausted and thinking, “Oh, how am I going to talk for another 40 minutes and have complete thoughts and sentences?!” So thank you for taking the time to do that. I really appreciate it.

K.J.  

Thank you for bearing with me and just for this delightful conversation, it really was a joy.

Jared  

And now for Quiet Time…

Pete  

…with Pete and Jared. 

Pete  

Well, yeah, I loved listening to this episode, Jared. And, you know, one thing that has struck me over the past few years is people are using the word trauma a lot more. You know, “I’m sorry, you don’t have the right to use that word trauma to describe this thing.” But people are saying “No, this does describe me.” And K.J. actually defined trauma at one point, I think several different ways she defined it, but it’s something, it’s like an experience that you hold in your body. Like, I’ve heard that experience too, because the “body keeps the score,” right? 

Jared  

Yep.

Pete  

That’s the idea there. And I just, I find that to be, for me, a concept that helps me put things in place and work through things like, “Well, this is why I perceive this this way. It’s—not that they have a simplistic cause for everything, but you know, “I was affected by this other thing a long time ago, and it really has stuck with me. And that’s why my stomach’s tight every time this happens.” You know, so, I talk to too many people just—not that I know what I’m talking about—but who have experienced a lot of trauma. College students. A lot of trauma that they’ve experienced at home, and they just, they want to start talking about it knowledgeably.

Jared  

Right. Yeah. And you know, when you said it’s embodied, like what we hold in our body. I just really loved the quote that she said that, “It’s not just what happens, but what we hold after what happens…

Pete  

Right. 

Jared  

“…in the absence of an empathetic witness.” And I really appreciated that understanding because that empathetic witness—because her definition of trauma was when our nervous systems are overwhelmed and undersupported in difficult situations. So there’s a sense of undersupported that—I don’t know if she meant to do this—but in my mind, I tie it to an absence of an empathetic witness, which for me means a great way to support someone when they’re going through these situations is to be an empathetic witness. That’s how to support that’s how to lessen the trauma is to be an empathetic witness, which is… It flies in the face I think of my personality of a fixer, someone who wants to get in there and solve the problem or how do we do this, and how that can, actually, create a feeling of more overwhelm.

Pete  

Right. 

Jared  

Because, like, now I got more to think about.

Pete  

Jared  

Rather than just being an empathetic witness.

Pete  

Because it’s not aimed at the emotional life, it’s just more aimed at fixing it. And oftentimes for your own benefit, not for their benefit.

Jared  

Right. And so, I don’t know, I think for me, something I kind of take away is how might I be more of this non-judgmental witness? 

Pete  

Mhmm.

Jared  

For others, but then also turning it back on myself. 

Pete  

Oh, right. Absolutely. 

Jared  

And I think that’s a tricky situation or process to go through, which is, I’m very comfortable moving more and more into being a non-judgmental witness for others. But it’s much harder for me to do that for myself.

Pete  

I wonder if the one can help with the other, you know? The more we could be compassionate towards others, the more we can be compassionate towards ourselves, at least the more we see the disjunction between, “You know, I’m really supportive of other people. But I’m horrible to myself.” You know, I think that’s the trauma, though, isn’t it? Like, we’re just unworthy, there’s shame, and we just keep that—all those voices inside of us. Blegh. What a mess.

Jared  

Where did you think the judging comes from? Because I think my personality is, I’m just naturally non-judgmental. So I don’t have, I don’t relate to people who are really judgmental toward themselves or toward others. I’m not sure where that comes from, like, is there a need to like categorize or make sense of something that causes people to label things as good or bad?

Pete  

Well, I’ll bite, I’ll try that one. Of course, I don’t know the answer to that question. But I think when we hear those voices, and pick up the signals from a very young age, from the people who care for us the most—which can be not just parents, but it can be some older siblings, it can be teachers, it can be kids on the team or in the playground and stuff like that—and we just internalize this stuff and we don’t know what’s happening to us. And it’s not that, you know, our parents are bad people—I mean, some parents are bad. Let’s get that straight, but not all of them are. And you know the old, the old joke “if you’ve had parents you need therapy,” right, so, or “if you’ve had parents, you’ve got trauma,” right?—And I think that’s probably true. And through that, we learned these coping skills, and one of them might just be being really harsh with ourselves, you know, I still am. You know, I still I’ve…I’ve learned not to curse myself out when I spill something on the counter. Because I did that as a kid. And I know, my dad went ballistic when we spilled something, “How could you spill something? Like how could you be so stupid?” And so when I spill something, I mean, I revisit all my high school vocabulary talking to myself, I’m like, “I would never say that to somebody else.” Right? Well I just think that becomes baked into our psyche, somehow. 

Jared  

Yeah, I think I remember—I don’t even know if this is still relevant, or the appropriate way to think of it—But you know, the old like, like ego, the Id, and the superego and those parts of ourselves. I remember someone saying, like, our super ego, that thing, our conscience, is often the voice of those guardians and parents in our lives, that we’ve internalized. And so, just your example, like, “Oh, yeah, that’s where we get that voice,” that tells us not only if what we’re doing is good or bad, but also how to make amends. Like there’s almost a sense of you cursing yourself out is a way to kind of make amends through it’s own thing.

Pete  

It’s almost an atonement. Yeah, exactly. Right. Yeah. Because if you flagellate yourself enough, then you’ll be fine. And then we create god in our own image—which we all do— and then that comes from above, and there are religious systems—not just Christianity—that thrive on that notion, right. So, it’s almost like how can you possibly escape trauma? You know, as a human being—and maybe, I don’t know, maybe living in the modern world the past few hundred years has exacerbated that. I don’t know.

Jared  

Well, you said something that I think leads me into the next thing I wanted to just mention during this Quiet Time, and that is a new thought I had—which I haven’t ever thought this clearly before—But talking with K.J., I thought of this irony—that evolution has a more life-giving story about our feelings and our bodies than the fundamentalist evangelicalism that I grew up with. And the irony, of course, is that the narrative for me growing up was that evolution devalues everything, nothing’s meaningful if it’s just evolved over time. But the way K.J. talked made me think, evolution has created our feelings and emotions and bodies to be this well tuned machine that helps us thrive. It’s a messenger. It is a messenger worth trusting because it’s so well tuned. 

You know, that idea of “trust your gut,” trust what you’re feeling in your body, because it’s tuned to do that. It’s tuned to give us a message that’s saying something isn’t right, something’s off or something’s good, but it is this receptor that allows us to kind of acknowledge, at an emotional level, what’s happening to us and what’s happening around us. And it’s just an ironic thought to me that evolution basically said, like, scientists will say trust your body because evolution has made it such that it’s a messenger for important things. And yet the Christian narrative has often been in my tradition, “don’t trust your emotions, because they’re desperately wicked or deceitful above all things.” It’s like which one of those is more life-giving? And frankly, which one’s more true? And I think it’s the evolution. So we just have some catching up to do in our, well, the fancy term is our anthropology.

Pete  

And our theology because…

Jared  

And our theology.

Pete  

Those two things come together and as you know—not to get off track but—theology really is an interdisciplinary topic. It’s involves from various sciences…

Jared  

Pulling from different things.

Pete  

The hard sciences, and the so-called soft sciences, philosophy, a lot of, you know, biblical history as a context of scripture, things like that. And I think that those things can help maybe bring us a different perspective, and maybe some healing even with some of these things. 

Jared  

Right. 

Pete  

Yeah. Evolution. Yeah. I mean, I think you’re right. But the thing is that—okay, that contradicts the biblical story, so to speak, right?—But the biblical story is not very old. It’s only at the most 3,000 years old, which is old, but it’s not really old. You know, when we talk about human-like creatures have been around for 300,000 years or so. Right? So there are—I’m by no means expert in this. I’m just sort of riffing here from things I’ve read recently—But you know, the agricultural revolution around 10,000 years ago changed how humans live in the world. So it’s more like living on the land, rather than living with it.

Jared  

Right.

Pete  

You have to, you know, cultivate your crops, and you protect your land and competition that maybe was different than the kinds of competition they’d had before. And the wickedness of the heart is not so much a description of the human condition that has always been there. It’s more a description of human dysfunctionality that by the time the biblical writers were around, this has already been around for thousands of years. So how do you, how else, how different would it be? And again, that’s where, just taking a step back and looking at, from what we can tell, the long story of humanity, you know, and what makes us us. You know, and you might get, like you said, a more hopeful way of looking at the human condition. One that will even, I think, also take trauma seriously. You know, there’s nothing wrong with you, like, “What’s wrong with you, you have trauma, you’re just calling it trauma because you’re trying to put a nice face on something or whatever,” it’s just, you’re trying to—well, trauma, it is what it is, people experience it. And maybe there are ways of getting a handle on that that isn’t filled with just bad religious ideology sometimes. You know? And I don’t expect the Bible to address all that. And when people tell me that the Bible does address all that, I say, “Well, I don’t think that it does.”

Jared  

Right, yeah.

Pete  

It doesn’t make sense.

Pete  

It takes out our responsibility and our work, which is to create structures that can do that well. And that can be a faithfulness to the tradition, not undermining it.

Pete  

Right. And it’s working with what we know—

Jared  

Right.

Pete  

—today, rather than working with past iterations that might not have been aware. Well, that were not aware of things that we’re aware of. And this isn’t like chronological snobbery. It’s just living in the reality that we, you know, people have studied things pretty carefully—And so I like, you know, Thomas Keating, who was not Buddhist by any stretch of the imagination, but he was a Catholic and he reinvigorated the contemplative influence within Catholicism beginning in the 70s because people were… He had a place in Massachusetts where they invited guests and did their contemplative thing, but people would come knocking on the door, saying, “Where’s the Buddhist place?” And he says, “Down the road,” and he’s like, “Well, why don’t they just come here?” It’s because we’ve lost that sense of contemplative right ways of thinking, yeah.

Jared  

Which again, you say “lost,” because I think it’s important to recognize that this is a pretty strong strand within the Christian tradition. It just got lost.

Pete  

Now remind me, how are we tying this to trauma? 

Jared  

I have no idea.

Pete  

Neither do I, but it’s a really good point that I just made. Oh! It’s about evolution and all that kind of stuff, it’s tied to that. So anyway, I do think that was a good thought that you had.

Pete  

Mhmm.

Pete  

Which is… When’s the last time you had a good thought?

Jared  

Yeah…

Pete  

It’s been a while. 

Jared  

It’s been a while….

Pete  

I’ve known you for a while, it’s like… Good for you! Jared.

Jared  

I deserve a gold star. Thank you. 

Pete  

Oh my…

Jared  

Excellent. Alright. 

Pete

See ya, folks.

Jared  

Well, thanks to everyone who supports the show. If you want to support what we do, there are three ways you can do it. One, if you just want to give a little money, go to TheBibleForNormalPeople.com/give. 

Pete  

And, if you want to support us and want a community, classes, and other great resources, go to TheBibleForNormalPeople.com/join.

Jared  

And lastly, it always goes a long way if you just wanted to rate the podcast, leave a review, and tell others about our show.

Outro  

Thanks for listening to Faith for Normal People! Don’t forget, you can also catch the latest episode of our other show, The Bible for Normal People, wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was brought to you by the Bible for Normal People podcast team: Brittany Prescott, Savannah Locke, Stephanie Speight, Natalie Weyand, Steven Henning, Tessa Stultz, Haley Warren, Nick Striegel, and Jessica Shao.