Suffering, Wayfaring & Hope with Warren Kinghorn and Curt Thompson

Thanks so much, Campbell, and welcome to all of you joining us for today’s online conversation on suffering, Wayfaring and Hope with Curt Thompson and Warren Kinghorn. This is actually our first online conversation of 2025, and we’re delighted to be back. And we’re delighted that so many of you are joining us. I believe we have around 1900 registrants from all over the world. Really appreciate the honor of your time and attention, and want to give a special shout out to the nearly 385 of you who are joining us for the very first time, as well as for our 200 international registrants joining us from all over the world. I believe we have at least 26 countries represented, ranging from Albania to Australia and Slovakia to Senegal. So welcome from across the time zones and across the miles. And if you haven’t already done so, let us know where you’re joining us from in the chat feature. It’s always fun for us to see just who’s tuning in and who’s been part of this conversation. If you are one of those first time guests or Store, otherwise nude. The work of the Trinity Forum. We seek to provide a hospitable place to engage the big questions of life in the context of faith, and offer programs like this online conversation to do so, and to ultimately come to better know the author of the answers. And we hope this conversation will be a small taste of that for you today. By virtually any measure, we are in an anxious and troubled age. Study after study shows that anxiety, depression and other mental health challenges have dramatically increased even since the turn of the century.

College students seeking mental health services is at record levels and growing. In 2022, the number of people in the US who died by suicide was the highest ever recorded. And in 2023, nearly 1 in 5 adults American adults reported struggling with anxiety or depression, not to mention all the other forms of mental health challenges. And of course, behind all of those statistics are stories of people working and struggling, looking for answers and hoping for healing. Our guest today, Curt Thompson and Warren Kinghorn, are both psychiatrists who have dedicated their vocational lives to caring for those who are struggling and who both, from their different vantage points, have recently written important works arguing for a different approach towards mental health care than is often practiced. Curt Thompson’s work The Deepest Place and Warren Kinghorns work wayfaring, are both grounded in the conviction that growth and healing are not solitary endeavors, nor outcomes that can be easily controlled by a medical regimen, but rather a deeply relational process. And in a world that often tells us to avoid discomfort and pain at all costs, they invite us to see suffering and struggle differently, not as signs of failure or causes for shame, but ultimately as invitations to deeper connection, love, and transformation. Oren Kinghorn is a psychiatrist and scholar who works who’s work centered on the role of religious communities in caring for people with mental health problems and on the ways in which Christians can engage practices of modern health care.

He holds a joint appointment at Duke Divinity School and the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Duke Medical School, and is the co-director of the theology, medicine, and Culture Initiative at Duke Divinity. He has written on the theological dimensions of combat trauma and moral injury, on the moral context of psychiatric diagnoses, and in his excellent new work, wayfaring, he explores Saint Thomas Aquinas’s image of what it means to be a pilgrim or a wayfarer, and how that image might actually help inform the practices of both ministry and mental health care. Curt Thompson is a psychiatrist in private practice, the founder of the center for Being Known, and the host of the Being Known podcast, which explores the connection between interpersonal neurobiology and Christian spiritual formation. Curt is also, I’m very proud to say, a senior fellow of the Trinity Forum, as well as a sought after speaker and a consultant, and the author of several excellent works, many of which we’ve had him on this online conversation to discuss, including anatomy of the soul, The Soul of Shame, The Soul of Desire, Discovering the Neuroscience of Longing, Beauty and Community, and his latest and beautiful work, The Deepest Place suffering in the formation of hope. In all of his work, he helps people process their longings, grief, identity and perspective of God and others, inviting them to more authentically engage with their own stories and their relationships. Warren and Curt welcome. It’s great to see you both.

Thank you, thank you, thank you very much. It’s great to be here.

Yeah, I’ve been looking forward to this conversation. So I started this off by ticking off a bunch of statistics about how widespread mental health challenges are. But one thing I’m struck by in both of your works is your emphasis on stories and storytelling as a richer and truer way of understanding health and healing, both for ourselves and for others. And Warren, you in particular point out that one of the primary ways we speak about both suffering and mental health is largely through labels, data and statistics, essentially fairly impersonal measures. And so I’d love to ask both of you, but perhaps starting with you, Oren, what is lost when we focus primarily on the empirical and the impersonal? And what does reframing challenges through a lens of story actually do for us?

Yeah. Thank you, Cherie, and thanks for hosting this conversation. It’s always great to be in conversation with with Curt. And I also want to acknowledge to the topic of today that, uh, for those of you who are joining from the Washington, DC area and beyond who are affected by the the airline crash this week and and also everything else that’s going on in our country and world. It seems like a timely time to talk about these matters. Um, we do tend to talk in the language of statistics when we talk about mental health care, and it’s meaningful to say that 1 in 5 of us will be depressed over the course of our lives, or 1 in 13 of us is depressed right now, or almost 1 in 2 of us will meet the criteria for a mental disorder at some point in our lives. And those those mean something. But I’m a psychiatrist. I practice in the VA system, and a statistic has never walked into my office. Like the people that I see are are people, you know, and they’re they’re not just people. They’re people who can’t ever be reduced to statistics. They’re people with stories and cultures and families and, and and they matter as human beings and not as statistics. And I think so often in the world of mental health care, about which there’s so much to celebrate, we tend to think of mental health care as a way of like naming people’s experiences that are so complex as symptoms.

And we say, oh, I recognize what you’re going through as a symptom, like poor sleep or poor appetite or loss of energy. And then as a psychiatrist, I’m trained to aggregate those symptoms into diagnoses of mental disorders. And then to kind of pull in my toolbox of evidence based treatments to find treatments for those mental disorders and in hopes that those symptoms will be reduced. And there’s a lot of really good things about that way of thinking about mental health care as a process of careful work to reduce symptoms. But what are we missing? And I think some of what we’re missing are the stories that people bring in and the stories not just of individuals, but of communities and cultures. And, and I think broader questions that we’ll talk about in this conversation about, like, how should we even think about psychological suffering and mental health challenges? Maybe they’re not just internal problems that where something’s broken and needs to be fixed, but maybe we need to think about it in a broader and more holistic context.

Curt, anything to add?

Yeah, just to say, first of all, again, I’m also grateful to be here and supremely grateful to be in conversation with Warren. And Warren, and I’ll say to our listeners, as I’ve said to us in our pregame warm up yesterday, that Warren’s book is a book that I’ve been waiting for for a long time. And, you know, one of the first things that jumped off the page at me as I was beginning to read that was this notion that not only are we, uh, you know, we are more than just statistics, but we are also storytellers. We come in with full blown narratives that include all the things that Warren has just named. It’s also equally true that, um, the notion that we think about ourselves as statistics is also a story in and of itself. Um, it’s not just we didn’t just suddenly, like, magically show up at this point. We in the West for over 500 years have been gradually, uh, there’s been a particular story that has been gradually gaining momentum and now kind of controls the general sense of who we believe ourselves to be as human beings. And so I think it’s not it’s and Warren points this out, and I think it’s important for us to recognize that when we even talk about how we think about statistics, it’s that’s all embedded also in a particular story that a particular culture has told about who we are. That is very different than the biblical narrative that we usually are working to encounter.

Yeah. You know, that is that’s such an interesting point. And just to dig into that a little bit more, um, I’m struck not only by the story, but also by a particular metaphor of, um, kind of man as machine. And, you know, there’s a quote by Wendell Berry who where he says the future is going to be largely divided between those who wish to live as creatures and those who wish to live as as machines. And, um, you know, the empirical kind of lends itself to, you know, a machine metaphor or a machine story. And it does seem like so much of the language around mental health is, you know, fixing what’s broken or rewiring the mind. Um, and yet, um, Curt, you have suggested that essentially our embodiment is so key to who we are. We actually we don’t know what’s true ultimately until we sense what’s true bodily. And, Warren, you’ve offered a very different metaphor from a machine that of a wayfarer, essentially a pilgrim making progress. Um, and so one of the things I’d love to ask of both of you and Kurt, maybe we can start with you, is what do we understand about ourselves, God and reality when we understand ourselves as pilgrims or wayfarers rather than malfunctioning machines?

Um, I would say, uh Cherie. That especially in the last 20 years in the the particular field that I, um, work in that of interpersonal neurobiology Biology is a field in which the data itself. When we look at it carefully, reminds us that the whole notion of who we become as humans depends heavily upon our attachment processes. Now we can talk at length about what’s happening in the brain through secure or insecure attachment processes, but nonetheless, for us to become human. The science itself points to an attachment process, and a major feature of what it means for us to become securely attached is related to how we actually tell the story about who we believe ourselves to be. And so from the beginning, when without recognizing this, the science itself, particular science, and recognizing that, as Polanyi once said, there’s no such thing as science. There are only scientists. Science itself doesn’t tell us anything on its own terms. There are only human beings that are telling us things about the data that we are we are interpreting. And all of that is a story as well that’s loaded with meaning. And so the notion of wayfarer, the notion of our being on a journey, is actually consistent with the way we actually live our lives as storytellers and are moving through our life.

Whether you’re a person of faith or not, people will consent to the notion that, yes, I am in a life that I want to have meaning and I want to move from where I am in this time in my life to the next time in my life. There is this sense of I’m moving as a pilgrim, as a wayfarer, even if I’m not using that language. But if you were to pause someone and say, well, do you think this word, this word wayfarer fits with what you’re doing? Most people who are paying attention would say, oh my goodness, I think that actually is really helpful way for me to describe who I am. And we would say that the science itself, within interpersonal neurobiology, at least not just reductionistic science of like what do neurons do. But the science that includes the relational aspect of what the mind is. Points in the very direction of this term that Warren has so elegantly brought forward as a way for us to really kind of fire our imaginations once again, to invite us to come into the story that the biblical narrative is introducing for us. Yeah.

I would just add, we live in a culture, and I feel this a lot in our, in our modern, both political discourse and also just how where we are as a, as a culture is that we live in a culture where we’re valued by our culture for production and consumption. And so to the extent that we’re producers and consumers, we find social worth and value. And there’s so much now emphasis on on being worried, frankly, that machines can outproduce us and that we’ll be replaced as producers. And therefore we need to continue to, like, make ourselves as maximally productive as possible. And so we find ourselves like both thinking of our bodies as machines that need to be driven and recharged and refueled and made maximally efficient and productive. And we think of care sometimes as like health care as a process of fixing machines so that they can be productive. And I think this is a trap for modern mental health care where like, like what if we were to live in a culture where we feel like we’re being valued as producers and consumers and we feel like we’re being under productive and we are feeling anxious and depressed about that. And then we go to therapy to try to make us more productive so that we can get right back into the system that creates the problem to begin with.

It’s a kind of we have to be worried that we’re we’re kind of feeding the beast, so to speak. You know, that it can be a kind of catch 22. So I think it takes a radical rethinking of who we are as as creatures. We’re not machines. Human beings are not machines, but we’re creatures of God whom God loves. And and I think it’s it’s much more helpful to think of us again, not as machines, but as creatures who who, as Curt writes about so eloquently, are embodied, and they get exhausted and sometimes sick and tired and need nurture and care and relationship. And we’re not just machines. We’re not just creatures, but we’re creatures who are who are pilgrims. And we’re on a journey. So we’re we’re from God as our creator. We’re on the way to God as our hope and our goal and our joy. And and we’re we’re on a journey from God to God. And so we we can come alongside each other, including those of us who are psychiatrists or pastors or therapists or any other kind of of someone in a helping role come alongside each other as those who ourselves are on a journey alongside others, who are on a journey and ask like what’s needed right now for the journey.

And that that to me is so much more helpful of an image because it’s not about like identifying what’s broken that needs to be fixed or tweaked through technology, but it’s But it’s about what’s needed right now for the journey that this person is on or that I’m on. And and as a psychiatrist, for me, that might be what’s needed is a medication or what’s needed might be a hospitalization. And those are those those have really important roles. But what’s needed might be a supportive community, as Curt writes about so beautifully. What might what’s needed might be to get out of an abusive relationship. What’s needed might be, um, access to stable housing or healthy food. I mean, these are all things that we need as human beings. And and so that broader question of what’s needed right now for the journey helps us to get out of, like, this trap in our culture of thinking ourselves as, as machines that always have to be producing and consuming. Yeah.

Well, I want to talk about the role of community in just a second. But before that, um, Warren, I also wanted to ask you about not just the image of wayfaring, but you draw that from Thomas Aquinas and essentially choosing a 13th century Dominican monk as kind of like your controlling image for a modern book on psychiatry is is unusual. And so I have to ask, like, what is it that you think that Aquinas has to tell us now about understanding, um, our own minds growth and healing?

Yeah. We didn’t study Thomas Aquinas in medical school or my psychiatry residency, for sure. So and people would wonder why? Why is a philosopher and theologian who lived and wrote 750 years ago, uh, relevant for us now? And Thomas Aquinas again, was a philosopher and theologian. He lived and wrote in the 13th century. He lived from about 1225 to 1274. Um, he writes in the middle of the medieval world in a very particular way. But the thing that I find helpful about Aquinas as a, as a Christian and as a psychiatrist and as a theological ethicist, is that he’s someone who not only was like deeply formed in Christian faith, he was a Dominican priest and friar. He, uh, he said mass every day. He lived a life of prayer and devotion. Uh, and that comes through in his in his prayers and his hymns. Um, but he also lived at a time in Western Europe where there was beginning to be a rediscovery of the writings of Aristotle. You know, a Greek philosopher, not a Christian, but what Aristotle was, uh, in this case was, was relevant for was was encouragement to carefully and closely attend to the particulars of ourselves and of the world around us, to to notice the world of plants and animals, to notice the, the, the working of the human body, to care about the material creation. And and Aquinas began to just show this, this, this interest in like attending closely to the world around and to the world of creatures and to the human body. So he wrote, uh, part of his large work called the Summa Theologiae, is a description of emotion which is which is the most comprehensive account of emotion ever written in, um, you know, European thought to that point. And, and so it’s that it’s that close attention to the material nature of the world drawn up into this vision of the human as God’s good creature who’s drawn into the life of God, whose goal and good is union with God. That’s a vision that we need nowadays. And I think Aquinas is really just helpful to beckon us to that.

That’s beautiful. And I’ll just throw it out there. Curt I know you’ve written a huge amount on attention at some point. I would love to have you both back and just to do an online conversation about attention. And there’s so much that we could talk about there. Um, but I also want to ask about, um, the role of community, um, which you, you both have mentioned earlier and how the fact that both of you see healing and growth is necessarily communal rather than just individual, much less purely medical or pharmaceutical. Curt you have even argued, I made a note of this, that it’s only through the process of being known that you come to either learn yourself or learn how to know others. There is no other way. And so I wanted to ask, um, what do you mean by that? And why do you believe that healing is necessarily communal?

Well, I think one thing I would say is that it’s easy. I mean, even even our conversation here is one that, uh, can the nature of identifying that we are a people who are anxious and depressed and all the conflicts that we carry. It’s easy for us, without recognizing it, to imagine that we’re starting our conversation, not that we’re doing this, but that we we really are beginning our conversation as if Genesis three is really the primary hard deck on which we stand, like the Bible begins in Genesis three. We’re not. We’re not doing that. We don’t, we don’t. We don’t think that. But my my point being is that we think so much about, um, our brokenness. We’re so aware of that, that it’s, uh, we then talk about like why healing is so necessarily requires community. And we would I would say, well, it’s not just healing that requires community. I mean, life itself requires community. We begin with that, and flourishing requires my being known. We talk about how a newborn comes into the world, and it’s got 100, roughly 100 billion neurons, but only about 15 to 20% of those neurons are prepared to do for that newborn what that newborn needs it to do the other 80 to 85%, in order for them to begin to fire and continue to mature and grow, are going to require the interaction with other human beings.

I need to be seen. I need to be safe, soothed, safe, secure. I need to have these kinds of things in order for me to develop into a flourishing human being. This this whole notion of how I most effectively regulate my emotional states. Warren was just mentioning Aquinas’s take on emotion. We would say that emotion regulation is most effectively done through what we call co-regulation. I don’t just do it by myself, but I do it most effectively because someone else is coming into the room, especially in my early developmental years, to help me do that so I can do that more effectively later on. And so the family, the structure in which our early attachment processes develop, then becomes the extension through which when there are ruptures in our life experiences and they can come in the form of falling down and skinning my knee or getting yelled at by my boss, or reading something said about me online all the ways or simply even, you know, living two miles from where the where the plane goes down to the Potomac. Yeah. And, like, what do you do? And this is where we would say, um, the very nature of living and flourishing requires community. It requires another brain in order for me to heal. Trinitarian theological theology is a grounding in which this occurs.

It’s not good for the man to be alone. It’s a comment that predates all these things that are happening. And so what we see then is that and we see these in our confessional communities that we like to say the brain can do a lot of really hard things, including the repair of rupture. It can do a really a lot of really hard things for a long time, as long as it does not have to do it by itself. And we find that when people are in connection, not just with one therapist or with one pastor or with one friend, but then when we are in a space of collected, Acted, embodied beings by whom I’m being deeply known, and by that they don’t just know the vital statistics of my story, the facts of my life, but they’re also able to receive my tragedy. They’re able to receive my grief. They’re able to receive my rage. They’re able to receive my questions on and on and on in such a way that they provide boundary for me, but they also provide a way for me to be seen, soothed, safe, secure, so that I can then move from that place of grief and be reminded that in that space, even while my grief remains, it’s not the only thing that’s taking place in that space. I think that, you know, Warren mentioned, for instance, um, there are other things.

Does someone need housing? Does someone need employment? There are all kinds of ways in which we require community in order for us to be able to flourish that are not just, oh, I need community to have someone listen to the internal Machinations of my existential angst inside my head. I also may need a paycheck. I also may need a way to pay for my rent that I’m running out of. I think about what my wife helped with a number of churches when Covid first hit, and they raised a number of dollars helping people pay for their apartments because they weren’t going to be able to do it by themselves and would be out of housing. Those are ways in which people are being known deeply. And I would say then that this all, you know, we can find, you know, throughout the arc of the biblical narrative, we find examples of God saying, I’m with you and this with this is what we stand on to begin with, and then we have to return to it over and over again when we find ourselves in the middle of ruptured relationships or circumstances. So that my brain ultimately would say that my anxiety, which is ultimately about my sense of being alone with myself, Does not have to be so.

We’ll have that Curt. And I think I would just affirm that we tend to start we tend to assume that Genesis three is the beginning of our lives, but that’s not the case. And that before Genesis three, we find two really important things about what it means to be human. The first is that God knows us and loves us unconditionally, and that we we so often think, especially when we’re anxious or depressed or going through a lot of challenges. We think that we’re kind of alone in the world and have to kind of find our own meaning. And, uh, one, we can’t do that alone. We need other people. As your as your work is a model for me and helping to point out that and and the second is that we’re never alone because God always knows us and loves us at the deepest truth of who we are is that God knows us. And so we come into this world with an irrevocable, essential belovedness that is just ours by the fact that that that the God has made it so. And and I think also just to affirm what you said at Genesis two, before we get to Genesis three, teaches us that we’re dust like we’re bodies and we’re we’re creatures of dust.

And so any research around the biology, how how our bodies are affected in the context of psychological struggle, Christians, when that’s well done, Christians can can celebrate that and can can affirm that we’re bodies and that we’re not just bodies, we’re we’re we’re bodies who always, from the very moment of our conception, are in relationship with others. And we we learn who we are in relationship, hopefully in secure attachment relationships, but in relationship with, with with our with our parents, with others around us, with God, with the with the created world around us, with others. And that never stops. And so we’re always like creatures of relationship. We come to be who we are in relationship. So then when we think about, well, why do we, why do we struggle? It’s not just because necessarily there’s something wrong with our bodies, although that might be part of it, but it might be something that’s happening in our world of relationships or in our communities or in our culture. And we’re responding to that because we’re we’re relational beings. That’s who we are. That’s who God has created us to be. Yeah.

You know, just picking up on that, um, you know, community forms, US community can also deform us or or harm us. And, um, you know, so much of well, it seems like there’s so many links between things going awry and community in our own, you know, sort of deep struggle. I mean, when we are hurt or let down, we tend to isolate, we tend to feel shame and, um, Curt, as you have described, that isolation and that shame, uh, is itself disintegrating, um, you know, to our, to our neural circuits, to our, um, to who we are and would love to love to sort of ask you both, um, you know, Curt, maybe we can start with you. Like, how do we think about healing and community, when community may have been the cause of, um, the harm? And just to ladle another question on top of that, we’re all going to be in that place. Um, and we all have been in that place. Like, there are always, um, we are fallen, frail creatures. We are going to let each other down. Uh, sometimes it is unintentional or just thoughtless. Sometimes, um, you know, there’s there’s malice involved. There’s there’s real harm. Uh, and so how, you know, you both have described suffering as not only being inevitable, but potentially growth generating. And so we’d love to hear your thoughts on how we think about that, how suffering can actually be transformative, and how we can wisely and helpfully kind of engage with community that may have let us down or harmed us.

Well, I think a couple of things to note in your question. Cherie that I think you’re right that I’m reminded of. I think one is that, um, most of our, uh, we’ll call our ruptures of any nature of things the harms that have happened to us in whether that in small ways or large ways, these ruptures take place. They typically tend to take place relationally. I may be a three year old who falls down and skins my knee, and we might say, oh, the rupture is my skin’s knee. What I really need, though, is a parent who can see the knee and respond properly to that. They don’t call 911, but nor they do. Nor do they say, oh, that’s nothing. You don’t have to pay any attention to it. So the rupture is not just that I, that I hold within me that is painful is not just the thing that happens to me as an event to my body. It also is intricately woven in with intimacy. So most of our remembered events of rupture, small or large, are related to intimacy. And you then find that things happen in families. Things happen in churches, things happen in schools. Things happen in all kinds of social contexts in which the wounding that I experience takes place, as you say, in the very place that I need connection the most. So the place of connection becomes the very source of my rupture. And so, uh, from a memory standpoint, I remember that that happens.

And so, like, why would I want to stick my hand in the meat grinder again? Um, all of us who are deconstructing our faith experience and church experience and so forth, all the ways in which we are harmed in a context of intimacy that my mind will very much remember and say, look, I’m not going to do that again. To which we would say, well, of course not like that. You’re not stupid. So you’re not going to you’re not going to do that. The challenge is that it’s kind of like saying, well, I you know, I drank that water and the water was like it had, you know, bad germs in it. So I’m just not going to drink water anymore because, like, I know, I know where I know where the bad germs come from. And we would say like, well, no, what we really need, it’s not going to deny that we still need the water to drink, but we need water that is actually going to work for us. And this is where we would say, we can’t get away from the fact that our brain, like we need vitamin C, like we need water, like we need connection. And so where our unrepaired ruptures exist, this is where we would say it’s really crucially important for us to take the risk of seeking out connection with people. And we know we would say this is not easy to do.

And we would also say that Jesus knows exactly what this is like. Um, you know, you have the seven words of Jesus in John’s gospel, the great I am. And we Christians take this on as words of great comfort and joy. And they are also the same words that got him killed. And here you have our King, who’s being vulnerable and revealing himself, telling his story. And we kill him for it. He knows what it’s like to ask people to follow him, who then leave him. God knows that this is not easy to do. And here again, to Warren’s point about our being loved, we only, uh, we only can my my capacity to viscerally sense that God loves me. I sense it in my chest. If, uh, is when I’m in the room with Warren and I see his eye contact, I hear his voice. I see, I hear the I, his body language, all the things that tells me, oh, this is what? Jesus. This is how Jesus operates when I’m in the room with Warren King. That I can get my head around. That touches me at a level that my intellect can’t yet get to. My my intellect is necessary to make sense of what’s happening in the room, but it will not like my brain cannot get away from the fact that I am going to need to have community.

And so where we have those of our of our brothers and sisters who have been wounded in community but now are saying, oh, we need community. Those of us who are in positions who that have authority to do this, that have capacity to have agency to do this, we want to create states. We want to create communities where we can say, this is really hard to do, this is really hard to do, and there is no other way. And we are not leaving the room until we do this really well with you. Not unlike what Jesus says, like, yeah, there is no other way. Like, I’m going to love you to the end and there is no other way but then to come unto me. And that’s what we would hope that what I think in many respects, Warren, when you’re talking about, you know, the embodied state and all the things that you’re doing with Aquinas in this book, which I just adore. Um. I think one of the things that jumps off the pages for me that you’re talking about is this sense in which Aquinas puts his finger on and his words to this sense that as creatures, we are creatures who need other creatures because we are in creaturely, you know, relationship with our God who has made us to be such and who has come to dwell with them, you know, among us in that way.

Yeah, I would resonate with everything you just said. Curt, I mean, community, I mean, including the community of the church, uh, can be a tremendous source of healing and connection and wholeness. It can also be a tremendous place of wound and trauma and hurt and and as you point out, often the deepest wounds are cut at the points of the things that we need the most as human beings. And and I think that cuts both ways. So we have to be honest about that and have to be honest about how community can, can wound. Uh, and also I just resonate with what Kurt just said. We have to continue to press into relationship, even just from a public health perspective. The Surgeon General in 2023 put out a report on loneliness and isolation, referring to what he called an epidemic of loneliness and isolation. One of the research findings that was reported here was from a group of researchers at Brigham Young University, led by Julianne Holt-lunstad, that reported that, uh, that, uh, significant, um, extreme social isolation is just as predictive of adverse, both mental and larger health outcomes and early death as drinking six or more alcoholic beverages a day, or smoking 15 or more cigarettes a day. Now, as a physician, like if I hear my patients come in and say, I’m drinking a six pack a day, or I’m smoking two packs of cigarettes, I’m going to I’m going to encourage them to think about, like, change. But do I care the same way when people come in and they say, I haven’t, actually, I don’t ever see anybody during the week. Um, and, and I think we have to recognize that that’s critically important. And our Christian faith, everything about our faith tells us that that not only our relationship with God, but relationship with others in the the body of the church is critically important, even when that’s been a place of wound for us.

Beautiful. Well, there are so many more questions I would love to ask both of you, but I also see that time is getting away from us. And there are lots of questions that viewers have already posted in the Q&A feature. And one thing I will just mention to all of you watching. Uh, those of you who can stick around you are in for a treat. We have decided to do a post online conversation discussion group for those who want to go more deeply into and to reflect on and to discuss some of the ideas that have been discussed in in today’s online conversation. And both Curt and Warren, uh, have graciously agreed to stick around for a half hour so we will not be able to get through most of the questions that are posed in the Q&A. But if you have additional 45 minutes, we invite you to join us for our post online conversation, discussion and a link to join that should be in the chat feature either now or in the among the previous chats. But we’re going to turn to questions from our our viewers. And I’ll start off with two related questions, one from Jeff Smith and one from Sarah Tintle. And Jeff asks, uh, he says, I would love to hear a brief reflection on the intersection of shame and mental health within this conversation, and also the interplay of loneliness, isolation within this cycle, both as a cause and a result of shame and mental health challenges. And relatedly, Sarah Tintle says, I would love to hear about the role of community with the healing process for those suffering from shame around addiction. Curt maybe we can start with you on that. Curt Thompson:

Well, I think one thing, you know, Warren, you and I haven’t actually I don’t know that we’ve had this, that our conversation has been this specific, um, one, one thing you know, it’s fashionable for us to, um, uh, talk about human beings as, uh, those who have mental health issues and those of us who don’t. And I think it would be fair to say, look, we’re we all have mental health issues in some respects. We’re all broken in this way. I think it becomes, uh, sometimes it’s a convenient way for us to have conversation about things, but it’s also a convenient way for me to protect myself from myself. I’m not like those people who have that. And I and I say that, uh, to say, um, when we think about shame, uh, at least from from where I sit, uh, you know, clinically and, um, even even just in my own life, uh, one of the reasons why we talk about how it is that shame shows up so early in the biblical narrative and why it is and and Warren. Right. We write about you write about this in, uh, Wayfarer, this notion that there’s good data that would indicate that the notion of what we would call shame starts to show up early in childhood development. Very, very early. And it gets attached to all kinds of things.

And one of its features is our tendency to turn away from relationship and turn away from parts of ourselves. And so it attaches itself to all kinds of things. If we were to call, if we were to say that addiction and there are those authors that would say, you know, we’re all addicts, the question is just really what? Like, what’s my what’s my behavior of choice? What’s my drug of choice? What’s my activity of choice in which I’m committing myself? You know, the Bible would call that idolatry. We call it addiction. And my addiction, my behavior is a way for me to cope with the parts of me that I can’t tolerate. It’s not just the world I can’t tolerate. My abstract thing I call my life. I can’t. I can’t tolerate with the things that I sense and image and feel within me. And so these behaviors are ways in which I turn away from the shame as a way to cope with the shame, but then it also doubles down and strengthens the shame. And then someone might come along and say, well, Curt, you don’t, you don’t need to be. I don’t want you to be ashamed of that. Which, of course is unhelpful for me, because what I really need is for someone to say no, say more about that. But I don’t want to say more because it’s shaming and so on.

But, but, but it is necessary for me to be able to reveal that in order for that shame to be regenerated, in order for me to reimagine what it’s like, for me to feel felt, when if I say to Warren, this is what’s going on for me, and I’m feeling a great deal of shame, even as I tell you this, the very act of being present and open to his response in the midst of my shame is the very thing that is transformational for me. But that takes a willingness and enough courage on my part to be able to bring that into the room. Not unlike what happens when Jesus is questioning Peter on the beach in beach in John 21. Do you love me? And like Peter’s like, okay, like, all right. Like I get it. Like, can you imagine if you’re the one who’s like, for the third time, like, did you not hear me the first two times? There’s a sense in which Jesus is really going after a part of Peter that Jesus knows that Peter still is. There’s some part of Peter where shame is still lying under the rock, and Jesus is going to uncover that because he’s not willing to let Peter live with himself in the way that he was. And so that’s just a short reflection on that.

And just to echo what Curt just said, one Curt what you said about mental health problems just is it’s a good opportunity to say that. Yes. Like we’re having a conversation now about mental health, but this is not just an intellectual topic, and it’s not just something that affects somebody else out there. I mean, but there are over 700 people on this call right now, and there are a lot of people right now here who are really struggling, because that’s the case in every, every room of almost any size. Sighs. And I just want to encourage anyone who’s watching if you’re struggling and and then then by all means, uh, get help. You deserve help. There’s hope for you. And know that you’re loved by God. Know that you matter. Um. And and and hold on and keep going and find help. And, of course, if you’re having any thoughts of of suicide or self-harm, there’s a national here in the US, there’s a national, uh, crisis line that you can find by calling 988. So there’s always somebody who wants to be able to help you. And then with respect to shame, I like to quote a, you know, a psychiatrist who I really appreciate named Curt Thompson. Like, it wasn’t until I read Kurt’s book, The Soul of Shame, that I really thought I really was kind of had my eyes open to the dynamics of shame, which is kind of amazing because it’s kind of like a fish learning to learning that the fish is swimming in water. And, uh, and I think once you begin to see shame, you begin to recognize how pervasive it is, and sometimes even more powerful because of its of its invisibility.

Um, but when I talk about shame with my students at Duke, and I think every university, frankly, is permeated with shame, like universities tend to kind of run on the fuel of shame and lubricant of shame, is that and I’ve learned from Curt here, who’s also drawn to other people, that shame is correlated with this two part belief that I am not blank enough where blank is whatever it is that is necessary for for belonging to a community in which I want or need to belong. And that when others find that I’m not blank enough, I’m going to be ostracized and alone. And that and that’s associated with shame for us. And so we we would as humans, we would rather do almost anything than come face to face with that shame. We’d rather numb it away. We’d rather displace it onto someone else. We’d rather just, like, at least accept the fact that we’re not blank enough and just then just totally withdraw other people. Um, my personal favorite way of coping with shame is just to keep going and keep working harder, you know, you know, to try to sort of outrun it, but that doesn’t actually work. Um, and so I just really appreciate what, you know, Kurt’s wisdom, like, the only way to, uh, to engage our shame is to, is to allow us to be seen in it by God and by others, and and to take the risk of being loved.

Um, you know, can I just add one one thing just real quick about this? I mean, I because I really want to emphasize and this comes through loud and clear in Wayfarer. Uh, and we’ve talked about this, I think, here before. Um, and that is that, uh, again, we can tee this up as, oh, we have a population that has a problem. And what we’re really talking about is how can we solve the problem? Because that’s really what the mission of being human is about. Even if we’re even if we’re embodied creatures. But we are creatures who have problems that we have to be solved, that have to be solved. And we I think Warren and I would both say that we aren’t we aren’t here to just solve psychiatric problems. What we really want to do is invite people to reimagine that the story that they’re in, how it is that they’re anxious. We if you’re less anxious, you are then enabled to create beauty and goodness in the world that was planned for you to create, partnering with God before the foundation of the world. And that’s another part of the story that our being machines is never included, that we have a purpose from the very beginning. And so we don’t even if we reframed it, our, our point as, as, as, as physicians is not to just reduce symptoms.

We really want to invite people to imagine that your symptoms are trying to tell you. We, as we say to folks, sometimes, you know, when you’re when you’re depressed, when you’re anxious, I think your brain is doing exactly what it should be doing when you’re asking it to live under the conditions that you’re asking it to live under. And so it’s trying to get a message to us. It’s signaling things to us, just like an inflammatory response is just like my fever is like, yeah, I don’t like a fever, but fever, but my fever is my brain doing. It’s my body doing exactly what it should be doing when something’s happening to it. But we don’t want to just get rid of a fever. We want you to not have a fever in order to put you back on the road to creating the beauty and goodness and playing ball and doing the things, all the things that you want to do. And that also, I think, is included so beautifully in Aquinas’s thought. Right? He’s not just also thinking like humans are problems. How can we solve it? But also what does it mean for us to flourish? What’s our purpose? What’s our meaning? All those kinds of things.

Yeah. That’s beautiful. So two related questions that flow somewhat from what you’ve just said. One is from Rachel Sowinski, who asked, what is a pathway for Christians to reframe our American societal valuation of human individuals by monetary productivity and recognize each as an individual individual, equally loved by God and valued in being? And then, somewhat what? Relatedly, an anonymous attendee asks as a way of getting out of that distorting metaphor of humans as machines requiring maximal production, often for others profit. What do you both see as the role of prayer, both individually and communally? No other practice fights against the model of human machines, as does prayer, for it orients us to a loving, living God who is listening and responding. So how do each of you make room for prayer in your respective professional practices? We started with Curt last time. Warren, we’ll start with you this time.

Yeah, great. Great questions. And man, I feel like any response to this question is directed primarily to myself because I’m still kind of figuring these things out and feeling the weight of it. I think to the question of how we can avoid, uh, like constantly falling into the trap of seeing our value in production. Um, part of it, I think, has to do with what does it mean, uh, to be able to love the place and, and and the community where we are right now without always seeking, in some ways, to move on toward something bigger and greater, or to move on to greater wealth or something else. But what does it mean for me right now to see those around me and to see the the land around me and to see my, my family, but also those in my church, those in my community, those that I don’t know here in Durham, North Carolina, as as like, like these are people whom I’m called to be with and to love and to and to learn to love. The flourishing of a community is a way to get out of the kind of the trap of kind of marketing ourselves as individuals to be productive. Um, I think with respect to prayer.

Yes, absolutely. And not just prayer, but I mean practices of Sabbath, which I often don’t observe, you know. Well, it is a kind of revolutionary practice that like, denies. Actually, it’s a direct affront to the culture of value through productivity, because it’s telling us to set aside a day, a week, or perhaps other more to, uh, to not be productive and to trust that that God is the one who is Lord of our lives and of our world. And and that cuts, I think, directly against that kind of cultural emphasis. And so I say that more to myself than to anyone else. Um, I talk in the book about the way that so often in, in our world, but also in our world of healthcare, we’re, we’re kind of drawn toward gaining control. We want to always be kind of things are out of control in our world and in ourselves. We want to keep things under control and and and control is a good thing. I work a lot with trauma survivors at the VA. Uh, it’s those of you that are trauma survivors. Know that having basic control over your life and the circumstances around is really important. Uh, and also, if we, if we live lives that are oriented toward maximum control all the time, we’re going to end up giving a lot of authority to whomever or whatever has put us in that place of control.

And, uh, and that could be a that could be a technology. It could be an institution, it could be a leader. And and that’s pretty much the textbook biblical definition of idolatry. If we turn for if we turn to make an uncontrollable world controllable by turning to something that’s not God, that’s to make it into an idol. So the question I would have and this this gets directly to the question about prayer, is like how in our practices of worship and of Sabbath and of just appreciating the goodness of God’s world, can we find ourselves not drawn toward control, but being drawn toward becoming deeper lovers of of God, of ourselves, of our bodies, of the natural world around us, of and especially of other people whom God has given us to love. And so so if we’re if we’re finding ourselves in our lives, like kind of opening up like an opening flower. Like growing in love. Then I think that’s one mark that we’re not allowing ourselves to be just like, mechanized, you know, for efficient productivity.

Yeah. I don’t I don’t think there’s in terms of those, uh, reflections. Warren, I think you’ve said everything. I mean, you could you could you could speak, I think even in more detail about a lot of those things. But generally speaking, I don’t think there’s anything more to say about that. And the one thing that I would add would be I want to acknowledge that, uh, I think part of the story that we are also told that we believe the story that we believe that we’re living in, that we’re not aware that we’re being told, is that when we reach these points and the questions are asked and Warren offers his response, um, it’s easy for me to want Warren’s response to be something that I can do, and it’s not really going to cost me anything. The whole notion of Sabbath is a great idea.