← Religion on the Mind
Loading summary
Transcript199 lines
- [00:02]
A
The world moves fast. Your workday even faster. Pitching products, drafting reports, analyzing data. Microsoft 365 Copilot is your AI assistant for work built into Word, Excel, PowerPoint and other Microsoft 365 apps you use, helping you quickly write, analyze, create and summarize so you can cut through clutter and clear a path to your best work. Learn more@Microsoft.com M365 copilot Limu Emu and Doug Here we have the Limu Emu in its natural habitat, helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual.
- [00:44]
B
Fascinating.
- [00:44]
A
It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug.
- [00:48]
B
Uh, Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us. Cut the camera.
- [00:51]
A
They see us. Only pay for what you need@libertymutual.com Liberty Liberty Liberty Liberty Savings Very unwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company Affiliates excludes Massachusetts. All right, welcome back everybody to Religion on the Mind, where today I'm trying out a new ongoing series. This is my first attempt at it. This is the guinea pig episode. Please give me feedback in any way you can after you listen. Dear listeners, this is a series on cognitive distortions, AKA thinking errors, AKA stinkin thinkin', where we take one main cognitive distortion. I'll explain what that is in a second per episode and then put it in conversation not just with like how psychologists think about it and how I work with it in therapy with my clients, but also really meaningfully putting it into a conversation around religion, both Christianity and to a lesser extent other religious traditions where we might see this show up in the overlap of psychology and religion. And I don't really know what I'm gonna find out. I've done some prep for two of the up to 12 cognitive distortions that we might cover. I think I'll probably get that down to 8 to 10 or something. But I really, I'm just so curious about this. Listeners gave us a lot of feedback that they were interested in this when we did our survey recently. So here we are for the first one and I am joined by a multi time guest friend of the pod friend in real life, Laird Edmond, research psychologist. Laird, thanks for being back.
- [02:34]
B
Oh, thank you for inviting me. This is awesome. This particular large group of topics is one of the reasons I got excitedly interested in psychology was when I first encountered these. So.
- [02:47]
A
Oh sweet. I didn't know that. That'll be fun to fill that in a little bit. And the reason that I've got you here, Laird and then the other type of guests that people will be hearing from for the Most part, I'm starting out with like friends of the pod, people who have been on before, listener favorites, people I have some relationship with to help me kind of try and break in this new format here. Occasional. And probably what it'll be is like an occasional ongoing series. But. So let's define cognitive distortions, especially because this is the first one, also known as thinking errors. I work with these every day in my therapy practice. Laird, you're not a clinical psychologist. You don't have therapy clients, although your wife Sally does. And I know that you are in constant conversation with her about this kind of thing. What is your definition, maybe from more of a research perspective on a cognitive distortion? What is that?
- [03:39]
B
Well, it's taking normal sort of ways of evaluating both ourself in the world, other people, our theory of mind, evaluations of what are other people thinking, our own self awareness of what's going on in our head, and really losing all sense of perspective and pushing them ad absurdum to a place where they are not only not accurate, but quite harmful and then obsessing on them. That's my sense of what a cognitive distortion is.
- [04:14]
A
Yeah, I like that. I'll emphasize that these are repeatable and common, right? So these are patterns that human beings have developed cognitively that, you know, when I give a list of, let's say 12 thinking errors or cognitive distortions to a client, I have some of these handouts that I like to use. I'll say we all do basically all of them sometimes, and usually most of us can find two to four that we do more than the others. And so that's another helpful thing that people can figure out, like, where do I tend to err in this kind of a way? So these are not like things that only unhealthy people do or only people with real problems. This is like, you know, all or nothing thinking is an example of a cognitive distortion sometimes called the kind of the mother of all the distortions. Like everybody does some all or nothing black and white thinking. Sometimes everybody tries to predict the future, sometimes to maintain, to keep their own anxiety down. Right. So the one we're talking about today is what we call should and must statements. Now this is an interesting one. It's a fun one to start with because it's a little bit less straightforward than many of the other cognitive distortions, which is because we actually do have real should must statements. All of us basically, that we think are not problematic, they are not distorted, they are a genuine part of our values system. This is true for religious People, but it's also true for non religious people. And so that's really gonna be kind of at the heart of a positive way forward around this conversation is figuring out, discerning, finding a balance of a sort where it's like, okay, these are should and ought statements. I should do this, I ought to do that. Other people should do this. Other people ought to do that. These ones are genuine. They fit within my values. Oh, these ones over here, these are a little pumped up on creatine and steroids. And they're doing more work than they should do. And they're actually causing problems. And they're not helping me become more. The person I'm trying to become for a Christian. That might be like, these are not helping me become more Christlike.
- [06:28]
B
So here's one of the ways that should, must kind of ends up being distorted. I'm a terrible golfer, but fortunately I'm very inconsistent, which means that when I golf, my normal state of golfing is sort of double or maybe triple bogey golf. But every once in a while I will par a hole. Oh, yeah. And then I assume immediately that that is how I should play every hole. I ought to be able to par every hole. Cause I parred a hole once.
- [06:59]
A
Yeah. Cause look, you just did it.
- [07:00]
B
Yeah, I just did it. And hence then when it, you know, when the universe defaults back to its normal state of being, I get, you know, I'm about ready to throw my clubs in the latest pawn. Cause I'm so angry. Cause I'm not playing. Like I should be able to play.
- [07:17]
A
Yeah.
- [07:18]
B
Which of course, no one who plays just twice a year should be able to play anything better than double or triple bogey golf.
- [07:25]
A
Yeah, I like that example. So, yeah, so these kinds of ideas, these should and must statements, like we're all very familiar with them.
- [07:32]
B
Right.
- [07:33]
A
Thou shalt not kill children should be seen and not heard. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. That is a. You should do that. You ought to do that. You must do that. And some of these, you know, like as I was saying, we honestly, truly believe we should do them. We ought to do them. There are, of course, things that other people have at some point told us that we should or ought to do. Sometimes we agree, sometimes we don't agree. All these imperatives, all these shoulds, they go into our heads and we end up telling ourselves what we should or ought to do in all kinds of circumstances. And of course, there's this difference of the ones that we really want to or not where it becomes a cognitive distortion in the. Like, the strict sense of the term is that some of these are in fact wrong. They're not based in reality or evidence and. Or they're not aligned with our values. So your thought about golf, to the extent that you were to take that seriously, that because I have hit, because I have parred some holes occasionally I ought to be able to par holes regularly. That's actually false. Yes, that there's. If we looked at the statistical correlation of all occasional golfers, we would find that that's a pretty normal distribution. Probably occasionally you have a great hole and what it would take to get you to many more great holes would be a shit ton more practice golfing. Right? Like that's when it would become like. Like if, if someone on the PGA Tour says I ought to be able to par these holes, well, that is accurate because this is their full time job. They do it professionally. If I'm like, man, I have not been able to feel awake enough recently to do therapy with people, I ought to be able to do that. Well, that's true. And so I might need to go to the doctor or figure out what's going on. Right. But yeah, like you're saying, we can do it in ways that are inaccurate. And so that's when they become distorted thinking errors, stinking thinking. So that is really where it gets interesting. And I tried to distill kind of what I hope people would take away in a single sentence from this episode, which I will repeat again. Maybe at the middle, definitely at the end. Here's the takeaway. I think that we ought to. The actual thing we should or must or ought to do is aim for a life giving balance somewhere in between the extremes of perfectionism on one side and total permissiveness on the other side. I'll say that again. I think that we ought to aim for a life giving balance somewhere in between the extremes of perfectionism on one side and total permissiveness on the other. Laird, how do you feel about that kind of take home?
- [10:19]
B
Well, that it is right smack dab in the. In the place of, of good perspective and health. You know, I was just thinking of my own sort of shoulds and oughts. I have had quite a few people in my lifetime, including my wife, say that I was a good guitar player. I have always dismissed it because I am not the best guitar player. There are so many guitar players who kick my butt. And you know, people like Phil Keaggy and Joe Bonamassa and Eric Clapton, you know, Jeff Beck, that's a good guitar player. Don't call me a good guitar player. Yeah, and my wife just hits me when I say that. Because it's it, you know, I'm a good guitar player. I'm not a professional guitar player. I'm not world class, right? But I have defined good as world class. And therefore I'm not very good where that then is. And again, this is a trivial example. This isn't a pathological example. But where that ends up hurting me is when I then don't want to play guitar because I'm not good enough. In situations where I could have contributed something here, it would have made everyone else's evening more enjoyable if I'd gone ahead and been willing to play, but I'm just not good enough. And so that should, ought, I must be the best, or I'm really nothing. That's one of the shoulds and oughts that dogs my life.
- [11:58]
A
And obviously it's playing with all or nothing thinking there, right? That basically there are all would be these professional, extremely proficient players. And if it's not that, then it's not valuable at all. So just to kind of dip our toes early into the religious application here, I just think of that verse from Matthew, therefore be perfect, like your father in heaven is perfect. And we're gonna talk more about how verses like that and ideas like that can play in with things like religious scrupulosity and obsessive compulsive disorder and other things that. Right, but like, that's the Christian. And other things like that. But that's the Christian version of kind of what you're talking about with guitar. Somebody could stay on the sidelines because they're not perfect as their father in heaven is perfect, when really they could have contributed because they might have some gift, they might have some ability, something to offer that's not at that 10 out of 10 level, but nonetheless would make everybody's lives better if they did participate.
- [12:59]
B
Absolutely, yes.
- [13:00]
A
So how do we determine a healthy versus a distorted should or must statement? I've got some ideas and I'd like your take. So, rule of thumb, this is kind of consensus among psychologists and therapists these days. A healthy should, must type statement will guide our behavior in line with our values. It will help us live good lives, grow morally or in maturity, get along with others better. And the rules that we tell ourselves, they will be reasonable, flexible and achievable. There might be some interesting stuff around flexible and reasonable when we get into the religious conversation. But what do you think about that as a kind of a thumbnail sketch of healthy should, oughts.
- [13:48]
B
Absolutely. I mean, the shoulds and oughts. I mean, there are, as you said, shoulds and oughts in our lives. There are things we should do. There are things we ought to do. They help guide our behavior, guide our actions, guide our thoughts, help us to know what it is I should be doing. People are always wondering, well, what am I supposed to be doing in situation after situation? The shoulds and oughts are useful when they are paralyzing, when they rack someone with anxiety or guilt, or when they make someone unable to actually grow. You know, I mean, the shoulds and oughts that have been useful for me are the ones when I say, you know, I should. I should be better up the neck, up the. Up the fret. I should practice this. And so then, you know, if it gets me to actually start practicing up the neck rather than the basic, you know, GCD chords down at the headstock, you know, it actually does help me to become a better guitar player. But when it paralyzes me to say, I cannot shred like Eddie Van Halen.
- [14:55]
A
Eddie Van Halen.
- [14:56]
B
I was just gonna say give it away. Give it up.
- [14:59]
A
Yeah, maybe. A parenting example I'm thinking of is one of the healthy should, ought, should, must statements for me is like, when I'm with my boys, I want to be present and supportive of them, at least some minimal level that I'm not spending large chunks of time with them, tuned out, just, like, staring at my phone, ignoring them, you know, like, not responding to genuine bids for attention from them. Things like that. Now, there's a healthy version of that where it's like, okay, I could. I don't need to look at this Atlantic article right now or this Instagram story. I'll put this down. What is Soren asking me? Okay, I'm gonna engage here. But then there could be a sort of paralyzing version of this that's like, well, I can never take a break. I can never rest to recharge my own batteries. I need to sort of at every moment, be providing a maximally supportive environment for my children. And this gets into where these things can be more harmful. So the thumbnail sketch of that is unrealistic standards. The type that make us feel anxious, guilty, ashamed, angry, depressed because of our inability to meet them. Stuff that might lead to black and white thinking, like, I gotta always be perfect around this stuff. So your guitar example is a good example there. And that they might. They're likely to damage our self Esteem and actually damage our relationships. So they're hurting our ability to even love ourselves. And then they're also, they're making us in our heads and feeling shitty about ourselves, which then will actually make us love the people in our lives less effectively. Less.
- [16:45]
B
Well, my wife Sally and I did a parenting class in our church, oh, several years ago, and we called it the Good enough Parent. And you may be aware of that sort of theory.
- [16:58]
A
I love that phrase. Yeah, yeah, Good enough parents.
- [17:01]
B
And people just flocked to this parenting class and they looked at us like, please tell us we're not screwing up our children's lives.
- [17:10]
A
Yeah.
- [17:11]
B
And you just say, oh, unless you're doing something pretty awful, you are probably not screwing up your children's lives. You're a good enough parent and you're going to mess up. And that's fine. Children are resilient in many, many ways. They are remarkably resilient. So let's relax a little bit and then let's talk about, you know, how to deal with those times when things feel out of control.
- [17:36]
A
Yeah.
- [17:37]
B
So, but the, you know, parents, it's a good example because everyone I know who's a parent has guilt about their parenting. I mean, they just feel like, man, I could have been a better parent or I could be a better parent or I just, I'm screwing up here somewhere. I just have this vague sense that I'm screwing up somewhere. And that should ought thinking. This is one of the most important things we do. We care about it as much as we care about almost anything is we really want to be a good parent. And that should ought stuff then just crushes us down. And then it can lead to times when you're, you're so distressed by your parenting that it actually makes you a worse parent.
- [18:31]
A
So I think we've done a pretty good job of talking about sort of self directed should must statements. That's kind of what we've been talking about this whole time. There's also other directed shoulds and oughts. And this is going to have its own interesting angle with religion. So when these should statements are directed at other people or the world, when we get into this distorted territory, they tend to breed a different sort of negative emotions. So it's less guilt and shame and it's more anger, frustration and resentment. So this can be done sort of in a general non religious way, like people must treat me fairly. My spouse should know what I need without me telling them. Right. That then this is gonna clash with reality. And then I could be enraged when I don't find the world to be that way. Yeah, the other thing here, this is coming from David Burns, who's a cognitive psychologist. Other directed shoulds often make people feel morally superior. There can be a kind of grim satisfaction or pride in occupying the righteous high ground, looking down on those who break our own personal should must rules. So someone could think, wow, she really should take better care of her kids. And this might make you think, well, I take better care of mine, I'm a better parent. So this kind of moral superiority thing, and this can be very pleasant in the short term, like this self satisfaction. But if it's distorted, then the anger, the contempt, the resentment, that can lead to poisoning relationships. So once those are no longer grounded in reality and then they're leading into these unhealthy cycles that just look a little different than the sort of shame, guilt, interior ones. I was wondering what you any thoughts you had about. Yeah, those other directed shoulds.
- [20:24]
B
Well, it's just fascinating because the self directed should oughts tend to lead to just sort of beating oneself down and feeling depressed, and the other directed shuddats lead to a sort of a narcissistic beating others down. At least in your own head, you're beating them down and it short circuits relationships and even just sort of battles the call for grace in our lives. You know, I'm thinking again, just trivial examples keep coming to mind. But gee, someone I know in my family who raised me had a very, very strong sense that other people should take better care of their yards. I mean, look at those dandelions. That's a moral issue. And so there was just a great deal of pressure in her expectation of other people. Her lawn always looked like a PGA golf course thanks to the work I did on it usually. And so then other people felt they knew darn well that my mom was judging their lawn because her lawn looked immaculate. But again, then it turned around and created a sho.in her life. If leaves fell on her grass, she would go out and pick them up by hand to get them off the lawn to make it look better. And so she had to constantly be working on her lawn or her house. It had to be immaculate. And then she judged other people whose houses or lawns weren't immaculate. So they did both things at once. They beat her down and kind of just made her a little more judgmental than was healthy for her.
- [22:14]
A
Yeah, so there's some of that. It affected her ability to be in good relationship with her real life neighbors.
- [22:21]
B
Yeah, right.
- [22:22]
A
Over something like very trivial now imagine that that's about abortion or about raising your kids in public schools where they are learning demonic teachings, you know, or on the other side, it could be like raising your kids in a rural community where they're going to be, they're going to grow up as bigots. Right. So, so we can, you know, once we invest like non trivial issues like children and morality and, and some of these big sources of values, like you can just imagine the, the volume being multiplied around those topics.
- [22:58]
B
And that's, I mean, we're seeing that the should ought statements have ratcheted up over the last decade in the United States in terms of political shoulds and oughts to the point where people I know who are very strongly maga pro Trump, I have a hard time even talking to them. We don't understand each other and some of those folks are family members. And we've even said it grieves our heart not to even be able to talk to each other about politics. We don't know how we got to this place. So it's an important issue.
- [23:39]
A
Let's talk about evolutionary psychology here. The reason that I want to do a little bit on evolutionary psych for each of the cognitive distortions is because it's a typical way that I normalize and explain cognitive distortions to my clients to sort of say, look, this doesn't come out of nowhere. Right. There's a reason that these tendencies are common across humanity. They have to do with the way that human brains, and therefore our minds have evolved. Right. And so I thought I would. Since this is the first time talking about evolutionary psych, let's talk a little bit about that as a field. We'll just do a few minutes on this.
- [24:22]
B
Sure.
- [24:23]
A
The sort of really simple version is that, you know, even psychologists who love evolutionary psychology and love it as a lens, I find it fascinating and helpful. It is a bit less of a hard science in a certain sense because it tends to rely on sort of speculative, untestable explanations or if they are testable, they're difficult to test. They would take a lot of money to test them, a lot of resources. You know, they are about our ancestral environments. We of course, do not have access to those environments anymore, not directly. So there's a lack of empirical grounding and it can get a bad name. And so I don't want to rely too much on it for those reasons. But I do think it can be helpful certainly for normalization and for just sort of like a story we can tell ourselves that is at least plausible. That doesn't put all the onus on us for being, like, shitty individual humans kind of a thing. So any thoughts about evolutionary psych in general?
- [25:20]
B
Yeah, no. I mean, absolutely. What I'll say when I talk to folks about evolutionary psych and they say, yeah, but you can't test any of that. I say, well, no, I'll push back a little bit on that because certainly you develop a theory of a behavior that is species, that's found across the species.
- [25:39]
A
Yeah.
- [25:40]
B
And then you say, okay, if this is indeed a result of evolutionary psych, then then if we looked at X, we should find Y. And that's how things are tested. And even for behaviors that we don't know are across the species, but we go, okay, so in our culture, older men tend to be attracted to younger women. Younger women tend to be attracted to older men. Is this species uniform? And the answer is, it absolutely is. What attracts men to women? Oh, it's a certain look of health and fertility. What attracts women to men? Oh, it's a certain look of responsibility and ability to protect me and my children and loyalty and being willing to stick with us while we raise these children and that. So, well, if this is an evolutionary sort of thing, do we find it across the species? Absolutely. So it's sort of coming up with theories and then saying, okay, do we find what we would expect if this theory is true? And they do that. And so there are a lot of really. I mean, the circumstantial evidence is powerful, but it is, you know, we can't set up the kinds of lab experiments that you would like to. But there's a great deal of good evidence that supports evolutionary psych. And one of the things that evolutionary psych tells us, that sometimes people get very nervous to say, well, you're saying we're just, you know, products of our environment and genetics. And it's like, no. Well, one of the things evolutionary psych tells us is that humans are phenomenally flexible.
- [27:24]
A
Incredibly flexible. Yeah.
- [27:25]
B
And so that's. It's like, there's some freedom in that. We have evolved to be remarkable problem solvers, which is why we are in every environment on the planet. So there's freedom in it.
- [27:36]
A
Just a brief note on, you know, that sort of gender stuff, just so people. I understand that you're not making a gender essentialist argument here saying all men just want youth and fertility and all women just want. Right. No, but, like, at a bell curve distribution level, at a statistically average level, we find these. If you find these patterns across Cultures across time, then, yeah, you're starting to basically add evidence to a theory. So that's very well said. So applying this to should, must statements. So here's like, here's kind of a thumbnail for how evolutionary psychologists have thought about this particular distortion. So the idea is that human brains evolved to internalize should and must rules, Right? So internalize them. We sort of take them in and we adopt them and we then cast them back out. Like we look at the world through them. We look at ourselves through them as a lens, as a prism. Because if we do that, the idea goes, that will help group survival through cooperation, trust, and social cohesion. A lot of these explanations are going to come down to group survival. And this is particularly hard for some of us in the modern west to get our heads around, because even though we are all social creatures and we do live in groups of a sort, we don't live in the up to 250 individual tribes that genetically modern humans have lived in for the majority of the last 200, 250,000 years.
- [29:10]
B
Yeah, I mean, the whole notion to try to explain to someone for less than, say, 2% of our species history. Well, I mean, for 98% of our species history, we've been on a permanent camping trip with our small group and we've been living off the land. And your small group better get along and work well and there better not be freeloaders because otherwise, I mean, you're all gonna die if you don't work well together.
- [29:39]
A
Yeah, that's essential. And the people who did figure out how to work well are the ones who survived. And then we get their genes, right? So we get the neurological structure that is then encoded as sort of blueprints in the DNA. Again, these are imperfect metaphors, but something.
- [29:57]
B
Like that, three year olds who were not afraid of the dark ended up becoming lunch, right?
- [30:03]
A
Yeah, exactly. So that's why three year olds are afraid of the dark.
- [30:06]
B
Afraid of the dark? Yeah. Stick by the fire.
- [30:08]
A
So the idea is like there's a. The idea here is that there's an interplay between sort of our higher cognitive functions, which include things like moral imperatives. I gotta stay with the tribe. I have to be loyal. I shouldn't steal from other members of the tribe. These are prefrontal cortex, like higher order, highest order thinking that this interplays with like deeper lizard brain, so to speak. You know, fight, flight, freeze, survival type brain mechanisms that then exaggerate risks of getting these things wrong, these strict internal rules wrong. And basically a false positive is much safer than a false negative is the way that we kind of say it when it comes to survival. Right. So I, you know, survival would rather have a human being who gets anxious a few times a week from over being over implicated in all these rules about staying with the group than someone who's got a more laissez faire attitude, who doesn't experience anxiety because it only takes one time for that person to sort of have a false negative. Oh no, there's no danger here. And be wrong about that. Boom, you're dead. We don't get your genesis. And the person who lives with a constant low hum of anxious dread of being separated from the group, well, that person probably stays with the group and survives and we get their genes instead of the iconoclast, right?
- [31:32]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so the lone hero who goes off to see what's over the next hill for the adventure. Yeah, there really aren't that many of them among us, but again, as you said, it's all a bell curve. So there's always a few of them and actually it ends up being also helpful to the group, even if a lot of them get eaten trying new things.
- [31:59]
A
Like we've actually found better solutions now because this person is bored and they're trying something new. But generally speaking, right, so we have a evolved tendency to err on the side of at least whenever we're distressed, whenever that lower part of our brain. Maybe that's one way of saying why anxiety, depression. That these things sort of especially anxiety makes it more likely for us to sort of lean into these distortions is it's about threat detection. And in that case we are going to heighten, we're going to double down our efforts to follow these should must statements into the realm of the irrational and unhelpful. And you know, I'm already thinking about religious perfectionism. Right. And things like that. That's a natural move to make if you have that visceral anxiety of being left behind. Pun intended.
- [32:55]
B
Well, and small children on a playground, you know, your grade school kids on a playground, if someone experiences ostracization, that is, you know, the group decides we don't want you with us anymore. That child who is experiencing being ostracized doubles down on the group's rules. Yeah, just doubles down on doing everything right. The way the group wants to get.
- [33:22]
A
Back with the group to maintain. Yeah. To maintain membership and therefore in an evolutionary sense, safety. Right. But in too large of doses now then you get that self righteousness, especially when it's directed to other people. Okay, so we, we have the basic idea here of sort of where it fits with evolutionary psychology and maybe let's just do a little bit of like, we'll come back to this. But I don't want to save all the practical advice for the end of like a two hour episode. So just, just briefly, let's just talk about like how do I work on this stuff with clients? And then we will dig into more and more nerdy territory. So there's basically kind of like three, three rough approaches here when we recognize that we've got some of these harmful should, must statements. Obviously this is more effective in general if you have a therapist, but usually cognitive distortion type stuff. People can do a fair bit of self help work around this stuff because it's mostly conceptual and it also is just pretty applicable across individuals. So it is not quite the sort of individualized care that like I would always recommend for ocd, for instance, where you really got to be paying attention. Having that therapist there is so key. This stuff is in the realm of you could do a lot of. You can do a lot of work on your own.
- [34:44]
B
Read some books by Brene Brown. It's pretty much everything she writes is about this. Okay.
- [34:49]
A
Actually, I'm not super familiar with her stuff. I've never read a Brene Brown book. But if you read David Byrne's Feeling Good Handbook or anything like that, this stuff will be in there. So the first one is that we reframe or we shift our language when we realize that we're operating on a distorted should must statement. So instead of I should or I must, we can try and change it to I'd like to, I'll try to, I want to. And what I like about that is it implies values congruence or not. If it is something I really want to do, then it is probably in line with my values. And that's great, but I'm sort of giving myself a little bit of that compassion and like, I'm like giving myself a leg up as opposed to knocking myself down for being imperfect. Right.
- [35:35]
B
Yeah. You know, bringing up another book. This is a book I haven't read, but my daughter said it was quite useful for her. And I don't know if I can say this on the podcast, but I suspect I can. It's, you know, what is it? The Subtle art of not giving a fuck.
- [35:49]
A
Oh, that's the name of it?
- [35:50]
B
Yeah, yeah, that's the name of the book. And it's all about letting go of those sort of should ought statements that fuel our perfectionism and just releasing that.
- [36:03]
A
Yeah. So that first thing is about reframing the language of the statement. The second one is about reframing the rules themselves or the standards. So if you recognize that I've got an unrealistic standard here. Okay, well, I'm recognizing that for me, if I'm not Jeff Beck, then I shouldn't be a guitar player. That's a ridiculous standard. Let's replace this with something that's more compassionate, more flexible, more realistic. And it might be something like, I am perfectly adequate at playing guitar in all the scenarios in which I might want to play guitar. Like, no offense, Laird, but in Decorah, Iowa, you are not going to be expected to play at the level of Joe Satriani or Eddie Van Halen. You're not letting anybody down, buddy. Right.
- [36:49]
B
You know, and actually, if I started doing that in church on a worship Sunday, it would be bad.
- [36:55]
A
It would be bad.
- [36:56]
B
No, this is not the purpose of what we're here for.
- [36:59]
A
Yeah. And then the third element here is a communal element, and this is going to obviously tie into the religious conversation, but looking for supportive communities, including churches, that emphasize grace, that emphasize realistic expectations, as opposed to heavy emphasis on moral purity, legalism, perfectionism, stuff like that. So that's a little takeaway. Reframing the thoughts, reframing the standards, and then seeking out people who will support a more realistic and gracious approach to these things. So we'll probably come back to some of that again at the application, but anything on that before we jump back into the nerdy shit?
- [37:40]
B
And here's why. If this is an honest to goodness serious issue in your life, you should probably have a therapist, because all of this stuff is so much easier said than done. And you know, I am not particularly. I'm not totally unselfaware, and yet it's taken decades and decades for me to release some of these things. This is hard to do.
- [38:07]
A
Well, let's take a little break and when we come back, the first two things I want to talk about is individualist versus collectivist cultures and how that shades some of the should must stuff.
- [38:18]
B
Yes.
- [38:19]
A
And then I want to get into where this lines up with my research on spiritual abuse. So we'll be right back to do those. With Black Friday savings at the Home Depot, you can get up to $1,400 off, plus get free delivery on select appliances like LG, America's most reliable line of appliances. Check out the newest LG refrigerator with new mini craft ice straight from the dispenser shop Black Friday savings on select LG appliances. Plus get free delivery now at the Home Depot. Free delivery on appliance purchases of$396 or more. Offer valid11.5 through12.3 US only. See store online for details.
- [39:03]
B
Close your eyes, exhale, feel your body.
- [39:06]
A
Relax and let go of whatever you're carrying today. Well, I'm letting go of the worry that I wouldn't get my new contacts in time for this class. I got them delivered free from 1-800-contacts. Oh my gosh, they're so fast. And breathe. Oh, sorry. I almost couldn't breathe when I saw the discount they gave me on my first order. Oh, sorry. Namaste. Visit 1-800-contacts.com today to save on your first order.
- [39:31]
B
1-800-Contacts.
- [39:38]
A
Let's talk about individualist cultures versus collectivist cultures. So for those who don't know that lingo, the modern West, United States, the sort of Commonwealth countries, Western Europe, these are considered to be heavily individualistic cultures. And this comes out of things like the Enlightenment, amongst other sources. We tend to think in the west of human beings as individual agents with their own dignity, autonomy. We care a lot about autonomy, non coercion and really giving people freedom to be themselves. This kind of language and collectivist cultures really don't value that as much. They value the group, the collective. This is usually the family, a multi generational family, but it can include ancestors, especially in the more religious realms, and even some of the kind of less religious but kind of Confucian way of doing things in China and the East. And you know, this is Latin America, this is Asian countries, most African countries, most Middle Eastern countries. This is actually a larger portion of the world than the west. And they tend to think more in terms of the good of the whole, the good of the group. And where it connects here to should, must statements is collectivist cultures on the whole. Individuals have more obligations on them to other members of the group. And I just wanted to kind of set aside a few minutes to chat about this. It's interesting for therapists for a lot of reasons. I'm sure it's interesting for you too. You know, you've done a lot of research on ritual and sort of group religious activity. So I just wanted to kind of pick your brain on this difference.
- [41:28]
B
I'm really glad you're bringing this up because there's a sense that sometimes when we talk about should, must statements and cognitive distortions, we do so with very little cultural sensitivity to recognize that what we see as pathological it may actually be not pathological.
- [41:46]
A
Yeah, it could be healthy in a different culture.
- [41:50]
B
You know, I'm thinking of, I remember talking to someone who was teaching sort of Native American children and how in a more collectivist culture, the idea of one student doing really well on the test and other students not was shameful to the one student who did well on the test. And we would, you know, say, oh, good for you. You did so much better than everyone else. You're doing great. The idea of doing better than everyone else, well, that's kind of shameful. Why was I not helping my peers? That's selfish. And so what? You know, Christopher, my son and daughter in law have spent time in Africa and has said it's one of the things in Africa, if someone gets a bit of money, at least where they were living, they immediately went out and bought things with it, particularly building supplies. Because if you built something onto your house, your family couldn't show up and say, we would like some of that because you would be required to give them. Give it to them. And so it's sometimes our Western sensibilities see activity like that and say, oh, and this is why those cultures just are getting nowhere. They need to be more individualist like the west, so we can have more economic success. Folks in the other cultures look at us and say, look at all those lonely people destroying the environment for their own personal gain, caring nothing for future generations or their own families. So there we are.
- [43:30]
A
Even in the United States, especially in non white cultures, you can have some of those collectivist elements that are a part of. It's almost like a hybridized, individual, collective culture. I was really impacted by something that a guest said years ago when I was doing my first podcast, Depolarize. And I can't remember this was a. He's a white Chicago professor who wrote Divided by Faith. Who are the authors of that book?
- [44:04]
B
I have the book on my shelf right behind me.
- [44:06]
A
Yeah, Michael O. Emerson. And he shared a statement from one of his black colleagues. So colleague at the university. And she's like, how do you save money? And he's like, what do you mean? Like, you know, you earn more than you spend and then you put in mutual funds or whatever. And she's like, no, no, no. If I have Money, there are 10 people in my life who I'm close to who need it. And he's like, oh yeah, I don't give it to anybody else. Like that's the answer. Mathematically, that's the difference. But now we're into values Because I think for that co worker of Michael's, it was important to her to lift up the other people in her life if she should have an economic windfall and they don't have one. Especially people that she knows well and she knows that they're not just lazy. You know, it's not, it isn't like what's coming to them. It's like there's genuine inequality in the world and if she has more, she wants to share it with the people that she loves. She's also expected to share it with the people she loves. And that's some of that collectivist vibe in there.
- [45:18]
B
Yeah, and that's, you know, it's just one of those things of trusting your community. And you know, in an individualist community we're afraid of ending up broke and destitute, so we have to sort of hoard money and things to protect ourselves for the coming hard times. Whereas in a collectivist community there's a sense that, look, we all rise together, we all fall together. You will never be alone, broken, destitute, unless everyone is alone destitute.
- [45:48]
A
Yeah.
- [45:49]
B
So there are trade offs and there are different definitions of health and I'm not entirely sure where I land.
- [45:59]
A
Yeah, this is one that I don't have an answer for this. I think in any individual case, it depends on a lot of factors. This ends up being very interesting therapy work for clients, especially clients who are kind of straddling the two cultures. Sometimes these are children of immigrants or immigrants themselves who do identify as American, but also identify as Chinese or Mexican or whatever, or indigenous and are trying to square those circles sometimes or find a balance there between. And ultimately I think you have to look at your individual values, some of which may be collectivistic and you have to sort of. But that's like complex discernment work and it can be really tough. But. But one thing I had for you. So one way that a psychologist might think about working with should must distorted beliefs in a more collectivistic culture would be to help the client balance their personal well being with their cultural values, making it so that they can better handle social expectations without necessarily denying those expectations or refusing to fulfill them. But do it in a way that's like minimizing shame and anxiety while still really participating more or less in this collectivistic culture. And that's different than the way that I typically do it with an individualist culture client, where I will just say, hey, let's figure out what's causing you shame and anxiety. Let's let's chop that off. Let's go values here. There's more freedom in an individualist setting because you're unlikely to really feel bad about that. Like pursue your own health and you'll be healthier. That tends to be how we think of it. I'm wondering if this approach might be an interesting way of thinking about more traditional or conservative Christians because there is some of that collectivist thing. So I wanted to have you riff on that a little bit.
- [48:04]
B
Yeah, absolutely. Because that's one of the things where particularly when you dig into more sort of traditional Christian literature or even the church fathers or some of those things. And boy, there's not much individualist going on in that. And so there's a sense where claiming to be a part of the kingdom of God and the family of God automatically decreases the individual and increases the commitment to the family, the group, and then the higher purpose that we all share. And it's sort of the words of John when he talks about Jesus and he says he must increase and I must decrease. And that's supposed to be sort of the cry of our heart, you know, Christ must increase, I must decrease. Let's move more towards serving each other, loving each other, giving ourselves to each other, which is a collectivist sort of sense. But then the wackiness of particular churches, which are incredibly individualistic, sort of just have bought into that American individualist narrative. It's me and Jesus, it's my Jesus, but at the same time still keep all of these incredible shoulds and oughts about behavior. And so now we're trying to get give it all away alone. And so there's a sense that the individualist church sets people up for a kind of guilt ridden pathology of needing to obey these shoulds and oughts and not having the supports to help moderate and do that.
- [49:45]
A
Well, I like that. It's making me kind of go back to this one sentence takeaway from earlier. Right. Aim for a life giving balance somewhere in between the extremes of perfectionism and permissiveness. I have been thinking of that through a solely individualistic lens. But maybe one way of finding balance between perfectionism on one hand and permissiveness on the other, we could recode those as perfectionism is like pure collectivism. If collectivism becomes so toxic that you are under the constant yoke of pressure to perform for you and for others in every instance, every moment of every day, permissiveness is a kind of a individualism on steroids, where not only are you not responsible to the other members of your group, but you're not responsible to God. You're not responsible to really anything. So just do what thou wilt and let that be the whole of the law, to quote the Church of Satan. So maybe there is a kind of an interesting. Like such a balance might be well suited to also include a balance between individualistic and collectivistic values and approaches that finding that, like, yeah, the group does matter. I like what you're saying. It's almost like leaning into early Christian thought that predates the modern individualist west might be a way to bring some of that balance in for those of us like myself, who are definitely much more formed by that Western individualism and autonomy first kind of morality and ethics.
- [51:26]
B
You know, And I'm thinking of stuff that we read in the modern world or postmodern world, whatever world we're in right now. Yeah, it's all confusing.
- [51:35]
A
I don't know.
- [51:36]
B
Yeah.
- [51:36]
A
Contemporary world.
- [51:37]
B
Contemporary world. Reading someone like. And I don't know if your listeners have ever read Catherine of Siena or Teresa of Avila, some of the. These sort of mystic saints, pre Reformation saints, where you read this stuff from an individualist point of view, and it's all about me and Jesus and having this ecstatic experience of God, but that's not the world they're writing in. And so that mystic experience is in some ways just embedded in the communion of the church for these writers. And so to try to understand how we have this sort of individual fulfillment within the context of the group and actually arising out of the group, that then becomes a way of moderating the should ought statements. Perhaps. I mean, perhaps I'm just sort of brainstorming on what that might mean in the context of these cognitive distortions.
- [52:43]
A
Talk about spiritual abuse. So again, this is a form of emotional and psychological abuse that is generally has like a spiritual or religious element to it. Usually this is. There's some coercion or control. Not always. This is the focus of my own published research and a lot of my therapeutic work with clients. So should and must statements. When I sat down to think about how does this relate to spiritual abuse? The kind of dominant metaphor, which is one I use a lot for spiritual abuse is writing a check that you can't cash. Right. So this happens a lot in spiritual abuse. Basically, pastors or groups sort of making claims, speaking for God in a way that they can't really back up because other Christians disagree with them. Like, that's the simplest way of saying it. So someone says, the Bible is clear, God thinks blank. And then like going, okay, Five miles down the road is a different seminary than the one you went to, and they have a different view, and they also are reading the same Bible. So that's like a check you write but you can't cash. Right. So some of these items, like should or must type statements, are sort of embedded in actual items on the screener, the spiritual abuse screener, as well as some of the items that I used to develop the screener that didn't make it onto the final one. So here's like, I slightly rephrased some of these, and then any of these that jump out to you, Laird, we can talk about. I've got eight of them, so I'll do four. We'll give you a chance, and then I'll do the other four. Give you a chance. So, first four, you should always seek your leader's approval before making life decisions or you're outside of God's will. A true Christian should never feel depressed or anxious. If you do, your faith is weak. You should stop associating with anyone outside our church community, because they will pull you away from your faith. And if someone leaves our congregation, you must stop talking to them or you risk losing your own salvation or at least membership in this particular group, which is connected to all these good things in your life. All right, those are the first four open prompt to you.
- [55:02]
B
Oh, those cause me such stress because, I mean, I just cringe when you're saying these things, Dan. Yeah, because I have heard them. I have, dear people in my life who lived in homes and churches that were making those statements, and. And they're still paying the price. And so there's just a sense that the people using the statements are using them for control. But the people internalizing the statements then, are developing should oughts in their life that they can never live up to and hence are always a failure. Always a failure.
- [55:47]
A
Well, the check you can't cash. It just struck me that that's really what we're talking about with the should oughts that are not grounded in reality. Yeah, right. So they're the ones that are grounded in reality. That's like a check you can cash, to use the metaphor. And then the one you can't cash is the one that's like, ultimately, it's not rational. There's not evidence for it. So going back to some of those for, like, to claim that your Christian pastor should be able to tell you who to date, what school to go to, where to work, what industry to pursue things in, that is something that is assumed or sometimes Explicitly stated in spiritually abusive environments, that's a check that can't be cashed. Like, your pastor does not have the requisite experience and expertise to give you that direction, Even if you thought that you wanted to follow his or her advice around that, they don't have the expertise for it. And that is going beyond their role as a spiritual leader into matters that are better for a college counselor. When you're in high school or a conversation with your friends and family or your boss or whatever, there's other people that can cash that check. And if they make their statements, you know, backed by evidence and reality, that kind of a thing.
- [57:13]
B
Well, and even, you know, I remember having good conversations in groups in a number of different churches that Sally and I have attended where we've talked about how it's a good idea to bring your church body, at least a small group of mentors in the church body, along in the decision making process of where should my career go?
- [57:37]
A
Big decisions.
- [57:37]
B
We're thinking about moving and taking these different jobs. We'd love your input.
- [57:41]
A
Absolutely.
- [57:42]
B
The idea that the church body is the source of the decision and you just do what they say. Now we're in, to use a term that actually has no good definition. Now we're talking about a cult, but no one knows what a cult is. A cult is a religion that you don't belong to and you think is weird. Exactly. But I mean, we're talking about, as you said, the checks you cannot cash, but they tend to be wrapped up in power, of course, in having power and exerting power over the people taking it. But our concern here is not in the abusers, but in the abused. And so how do you come out of that situation without losing so much that is valuable?
- [58:31]
A
Well, yeah, that's really why one of the main reasons that working with spiritual abuse matters and that it's worthwhile work is that it does tend to cut off one of the most powerful avenues people have for healing and growth. Right. And so it's like, as a friend told me once, it's like having your leg broken at the hospital.
- [58:55]
B
Yes.
- [58:56]
A
You know, like by the doctor who you went in for an appendectomy. You know, like, it's like you're not the very people. Yeah. The very people who are supposed to be helping. Yeah. Harming you and then also making you less likely to go back to the hospital to get your leg fixed. You know, so it's this cyclical problem. I got four more for you. And if any, feel free to, like, latch onto one of these or respond to any of the four, you should just pray harder instead of seeking counseling or therapy. Members who struggle with sin must be openly rebuked from the pulpit to set an example for others. Women must dress modestly at all times, otherwise they are causing men to sin. And finally, if you experienced abuse, you should forgive immediately and not speak about it, or you're sinning by harboring bitterness or sowing discord or gossip or something like that. So these are ways that this language is being absolutized in these abusive environments. Any one of those kind of jump out at you?
- [59:59]
B
Well, I mean, the first one is the one that grabs me the most. The other three, pray harder instead of therapy. I just get angry about those other three and I just want to yell at people. But that first one, that's the one that it's sort of like, oh, I've had so many students with that. And I myself just this sense of, oh, come on, I shouldn't be weak, I should rely on God. I should like the bumper sticker, let go and just let God. It just, you know, here, I'm ashamed to say, but I actually did have this bumper sticker, God said it. I believe that that settles it.
- [60:40]
A
Oh yeah, you've admitted that publicly before.
- [60:42]
B
With me, I believe so. It's just that sense of the all sufficiency of Christ which I have heard preachers talk about in railing against the evils of psychology that then just harms people. And now that I'm more reformed in my theology, I want to talk about common grace. And, you know, all that is good is useful.
- [61:08]
A
I had like kind of a specific example. So those were sort of eight, eight little ideas. But I wanted to dig into one that has come up a number of times. It's come up with clients, it's come up with friends, it's come up at a previous churches that I've attended. So let's say you have a church that has a rule for anybody in public. And the rule is you must not cohabitate with a boyfriend or girlfriend in order to like play in the worship band. Do kids ministry. Pick your volunteer position. They have a policy now that is a common norm within most traditional forms of Christianity, I would say. But how strong of an argument can you really make to say you're speaking for God or this is the only thing the Bible says about sex and relationships. I think this is an example of a check that can't really be cashed, written that way. But I picked it because there's Some wiggle room here. I think so. So it might be cohabitation, but I want to give some other examples. So could be that you're gay. Could be that you drink alcohol or smoke weed. It could be that you post on Facebook about theological questions you have. I mean, these are all real examples I've heard, right? So whatever. The thing might be that there might be some actual stated rule or just a very strong norm, but it's a should, must type of a statement. And so you imagine someone who is getting involved at a church. Maybe they've been there six months and they're starting to volunteer. And then when they apply to volunteer, they run into this buzzsaw. Now, it might be a relatively minor thing in their life that they don't mind changing anyway. Maybe someone who's like, I don't really like smoking weed. I just have some friends who do it. I'm happy to give that up. Great, that's fine. Then I would say, good, that's within your values. No problem. You can make that choice. But unless it's something like that, then this type of stuff where they go, wait a minute. What I thought, like, I've been growing here, I've been making friends. Now you're saying that because I have this behavior or belief that I do not find problematic and that other churches wouldn't find problematic that are reading the same Bible that you are reading now, I can't. Now I have to basically stop this progression. This is not as serious, generally speaking, as being sexually abused by clergy or things like that. But this can really affect someone's ability to practice their faith, like they were building momentum in a church community, and then they run into this thing. So I have a kind of a way out, I think, for situations. I do think this is a tough situation. It's not obvious what to do in every case, but I wanted to get your take on just sort of that. That rough scenario.
- [64:01]
B
I think it's one of those things where, again, I'm going to tilt towards. Here's where we run into perhaps a bit of a conflict between individualism and collectivism in the church. The individual might say, look, I don't have any problem with this behavior. It's important to me. I'm going to keep doing this behavior. And the church says, well, I mean, okay, but you can't be on the worship team. Then the individual says, but I want to be on the worship team, therefore I should be allowed to be on the worship team because I want to. And so here it's that how do you negotiate? No, the church has these policies. And it's kind of like way back when Wheaton College didn't allow any dancing on campus. They never said this was a theological issue. They said, well, this is just a community distinctive. It's just, it's one of the distinctives we hold. We're not saying that people who dance are somehow condemned. We just don't hear. And it's like, I respect that you're not saying that it's a sin to dance. Cause they knew darn well they couldn't cash that check.
- [65:09]
A
Yeah, good.
- [65:10]
B
Yeah. But eventually then they changed the rule and they changed it.
- [65:13]
A
Yeah.
- [65:14]
B
My son was actually a student at Wheaton the year they had their first dance. And it was pretty wild. Cause he was one of the few guys who could dance. So, you know, because of course we dance in our living room all the time.
- [65:25]
A
Doesn't surprise me.
- [65:26]
B
So a church that is going to say, look, this is just one of our policies, and we're not going to change the policy for you because we think it's a good policy, then let the church do it. And you have to make a decision of how important doing this thing in this church is for you.
- [65:44]
A
I really like that language of community distinctive. This is something that our group has agreed to together. And I do think that all groups need boundaries. Without boundaries, you don't really have a group. And that goes all the way back to those tribes of up to 250 individuals that our ancestors lived in. Right. Like there is some boundary and other people are in another tribe. And in order to feel close to people in a shared group, it can't just be, well, we're just all human citizens of the world. That's not enough for most human beings to feel connected to other human beings. There needs to be some boundaries around our collective self definition. And so I have no problem with that. Of course, secular and progressive communities do this as well. I think that the church that we attend, an Episcopal church that we attend, if someone comes in in a God hates fags T shirt, they will be asked to leave. Like that is, you know, like you have free speech in the United States of America, you can wear that shirt walking around town, but you can't wear it in our church. Right. And there would be other versions of that that like, from a progressive perspective, we would be like, you know what? That doesn't have a place at our church. So it's not the fact of having distinguishments, distinctives, that's not the problem. So my solution For a situation like this is really just about clarity early on. So I think if a church, and this is really where this tends to happen, you have these often they are sort of evangelical, non denom kind of Baptist or Calvinist leaning, you know, community churches, Bible churches, churches with words like renovate and you know, these kinds of single action verb churches as I've heard them parodied. They love to use very open and universal language about how everybody is welcome here.
- [67:41]
B
Yeah.
- [67:42]
A
And what they don't tend to do is very clearly state in the bulletin on their website where such rules might be present. So because they are trying to be seeker friendly, and I understand there are multiple reasons for that, but then people who are getting involved can be blindsided. And if you had just been clear about it, said, look, this is who we are. If you aren't on board with that, God loves you, we love you, this probably isn't the place for you. That's a loving way to say that. Right.
- [68:14]
B
That's interesting that the church I attend now, one of the sort of statements we say regularly, like in the leadership group and in the church all over, is clarity is kindness. Look, clarity is kindness. Don't dance around something because you're afraid of hurting someone's feelings, because if you do, you are going to hurt someone more deeply.
- [68:38]
A
Yeah. And some of that can be, you know, aversion to conflict. I suspect for a lot of those churches it's like they would see that as like limiting their potential reach. And I understand that. If that's a gospel reach, okay, I get it. But it's also like a financial buts in the pews reach, which is gross. More gross. I think also there's a way of doing this with verbiage. So again, back to the checks you can't cash thing. There are gonna be some Christian distinctives or doctrinal points that are so universally agreed upon that you don't need to do this. You don't need to say our church believes that Jesus is the second person of the Trinity, you don't have to say that. Basically every church believes that. But I think when people say God does not approve of queer sexuality or there are two genders or things like this, like, well, you know, the problem is that people disagree on that and many of them are very loving, committed Christians. There are entire seminaries, as I said earlier, that teach various views with multi hundred year traditions around this stuff with very brilliant people disagreeing in good faith. So rather than language like God doesn't approve of queer sexuality, you can say our church holds to a traditional sexual ethic. And the following are expected of all staff and volunteers. Yeah, okay, great. Fine. People can opt in or opt out of that.
- [70:04]
B
Right, right. It should be easily available for anyone who's looking.
- [70:09]
A
Exactly. So it should be very clear. It should be like one click on the website or two at most. And it probably should be printed in the bulletin. If you've got a bulletin and you're having a lot of new people coming. So. Yeah, so that's kind of. That concludes my spiritual abuse angle. Let's talk about Christianity more broadly. Unless you had one more thought.
- [70:30]
B
Well, I just. I mean, the spiritual abuse stuff, I just. I know people whose parents often. Mostly their parents often because they're pastor's kids or missionary kids. The parents. It was so important to the parents that the family looked perfect.
- [70:48]
A
Yeah. Talk about a should, must statement.
- [70:52]
B
Good grief. And so, so many should musts. The kids particularly, say an oldest child in that family. So much placed on that child to make sure that the younger siblings and all the kids were the perfect, perfect little von Trapp Christian family.
- [71:10]
A
Yeah. And that's a Sound of Music reference for anybody born after 1990.
- [71:16]
B
Hey.
- [71:18]
A
Or 80 for that. I got it. I'm just on the cusp, probably.
- [71:23]
B
I got to play the captain once in a show. So.
- [71:27]
A
If I can't be Lin Manuel Miranda, I'm not going to act at all. Damn it. That could have been. You could have had it go.
- [71:36]
B
I could have said no. But even then I knew I could sing better than Christopher Plummer, so I was good.
- [71:43]
A
Okay.
- [71:43]
B
All right. But that sense of just pain and the need for people then to find a place where they can experience some healing. And now as someone who thinks, look, if you feel like the church has been the source of your pain, I would encourage you to try to find some people in a fellowship group, a church that can be the source of your healing.
- [72:11]
A
Yeah.
- [72:12]
B
Because what you need to do is rewrite those scripts.
- [72:15]
A
Well, back to that practical advice.
- [72:17]
B
Right.
- [72:17]
A
So, yeah, we talked about rewriting the thoughts, rewriting the rules themselves, the principles, and then finding a supportive community. Those, of course, can feed into each other, and the community can help give you language for the reframed ideas, stuff like that.
- [72:37]
B
Absolutely. And then you realize, wait, there are Christians who actually don't talk about each other behind their back when they're going home and saying, can you believe she wore that? And he said that. And that sermon was terrible. They're actually people who just redo all of that stuff.
- [72:56]
A
Yeah. Sometimes easier said than done, but I like the point. A couple more quick things to hit within Christianity before we talk about OCD and religious scrupulosity. Purity culture. Right. Strict inflexible standards as opposed to aiming for values congruence. There's a. I got a whole episode coming about kind of a middle path approach to a sexual ethic. So we don't need to linger here, but just noting great example of some should must statements. We talked about them a little bit earlier with modesty, but metaphors about being spoiled permanently if you have sex before marriage. That is a heavy implication of a sort of a perfectionist should must ethic. Prosperity gospel. Right. Which is defined basically by this underlying formula of having enough faith will equal prosperity or physical health or things like that. The health and wealth gospel. These obviously and often imply really rigid should and musts. Because if in fact you're not being blessed, then you are likely to blame yourself for having insufficient faith. And therefore you must have sufficient faith in order to get ahead, to get life's. To get God's blessing on your life. Right. So these can be a little slippery. They're implications, but they're very heavy implications of sort of rigid shoulds and musts.
- [74:23]
B
Oh, and it's comforting. And you feel like you're part of the group now, I'm speaking as an insider here because this is how when I was in junior high, high school, I was deeply embedded in a prosperity gospel kind of church fellowship. And these were my people. And the thing was they embraced me. They were my family. There was much sort of just healing and love to me from these folks, while at the same time just fed into my guilt about not being good enough because, you know, I had acne and I wasn't, you know, I actually wasn't exactly sexually pure. As a matter of fact, I was weird a little bit. Not. And so, you know, there was just.
- [75:16]
A
You sound like the way my mom talks about this period of her life.
- [75:20]
B
Well, am I the age of your mom? I might be that close.
- [75:23]
A
Yeah.
- [75:26]
B
And so it was just this mixed bag of these people did so much for me and harmed me at the same time.
- [75:34]
A
Absolutely. So I want to hit OCD and religious scrupulosity because this is also an interesting way to get into other faith traditions and where some of this stuff shows up. Obviously I'm not an expert in those traditions. We're not going to spend as much time on them. But I like the idea of sort of situating this in worldwide religious and wisdom traditions because to connect Back to our conversation about evolutionary psychology. What evolutionary psych looks for is universal human psychological tendencies that are species based. And if we think we've got sort of species based stuff, then if we think it would apply in Christianity, then it's probably going to show up in other faith traditions as well, because it is a function of human psychology at an individual and group level. So really quick. Obsessive compulsive disorder. Most people know what this is. You know, this is intrusive thoughts and like ritual compulsions. Various behaviors that you have to go through in order to manage these high levels of anxiety that you will have if you are not doing that. It's a really complex condition, basically requiring therapeutic intervention. There's not really a lot of ways to treat serious OCD without like regular, sometimes twice a week, sometimes two hours a week, once a week. The gold standard of care for OCD involves a lot of therapy, more per week than most other struggles. Religious scrupulosity is the way that this shows up in religious contexts. Our editor, Josh Gilbert has talked at length about his struggles with OCD and religious scrupulosity, but just to connect it to the should must stuff here. So there are a lot of different ways that religious scrupulosity shows up, different kind of domains. So I'm gonna just read through a bunch of them here, kind of quickly give an overview and then we can talk about whichever ones kind of catch your interest. Layered. So I've got eight. Number one, moral perfectionism. I must never have an immoral or sinful thought. Number two, prayer ritualism. I must pray perfectly every time or my prayers don't count. Again, just noting how the should must oughts play into what I would consider to be like a logically prior existence of OCD and religious scrupulosity. But it's providing language for that. Number three, ritual purity obsessions. I should achieve perfect ritual purity, otherwise God will reject my worship. You can already hear overtones of other religions in here if you're paying attention. Doubt and reassurance seeking, which is huge. Reassurance seeking is huge in ocd. I must be absolutely certain about my salvation or I'm damned. Excessive confession. I gotta confess every single wrongdoing immediately or my sin remains unforgiven. Blasphemous thoughts. Fear about that. And this is especially true for ocd, where you have intrusive thoughts that are often totally irrational and unconnected to your genuine desires. They're almost like circuit firing mistakenly. And that's how some specialists think of ocd. It's like a tripped circuit. So you have these thoughts that you don't believe at all. You might have an intrusive thought of God, praise Satan. And that might be someone who has no interest in Satan. But that will come in almost akin to Tourette's. So then you could go, well, I can't. I must never think these thoughts, these blasphemous thoughts, or they count against my soul, so to speak. Two more rigid religious rules, compliance. I gotta follow every moral guideline and religion perfectly or I risk punishment. And then there's finally the unforgivable sin. Fear of committing the unforgivable sin, which is very poorly defined in the Bible. But. But once you have that concept, you can go, I. If I gotta. Never on purpose or even accidentally approach committing this unforgivable sin, or I'll be damned. So these lead to things like excessive mental rituals, repeating of prayers, compulsive hand washing or other types of. Of purification. Constant confession, you know, repeated, detailed confessions to God or others to relieve anxiety. Obsessive avoidance of certain things. You know, hyper vigilance to make sure I'm never having the wrong kinds of thoughts. So that's sort of the big picture here of how scrupulosity gets fed through these cognitive distortions of should, must, and ought. What's jumping out to you about any of that, Laird?
- [80:14]
B
Honestly, so much. One of the things that popped into my head was just the memory of. From the time I was, say, 12 or 13 up until the time I was 16, I went up for every altar call. I was. Every one. Just. I mean. Cause I wasn't sure. Am I actually. Have I given my life to Christ? Am I saved? I'm just gonna go up for this altar call, too. And I probably went up at least 20 different altar calls to give my life to Christ.
- [80:43]
A
Well, false positive is safer than a false negative.
- [80:46]
B
Absolutely.
- [80:47]
A
All the way back to survival stuff. Yeah.
- [80:49]
B
And there was one guy having a revival in town, and he was there, like, every night for five nights. And I went up every single time. And I could tell he was just kind of, what are you doing up here again?
- [81:01]
A
What do you think that was about, Laird? How would you phrase it psychologically? Your younger self? Were you taught, like, once you're saved, it counts? Like. Like, was that an official part of what you were told and believed, Or. Or was it implied that you did need. Like, was it sort of officially implied that you ought to do this, or. You know what? You know what I mean?
- [81:24]
B
No, it was, I think, my own Theology was just such a mishmash because of course, I grew up in a country, Lutheran Church, and the Lutherans think altar calls are in themselves, you know, wrong and bad because it's not something you do that saves you. You've been b. God's done it, relax. But then of course, I get among the Pentecostals and I was deeply involved with campus, with campus life, youth for Christ and just going to all these things all the time. And of course those were the years when the ministerial association would get busloads of people to take us to the Billy Graham crusade if it was anywhere close. And just all this stuff happening. And so there's just this sense that sort of an evangelical version of Martin Luther saying, you have to be drowned in the waters of your baptism every day. So there I am, I'm going up to recommit myself to Christ every chance I get. Just maybe this time it'll take hold and I'll stop being such a sinner.
- [82:31]
A
Yeah, I'm hearing some should, must in there.
- [82:33]
B
It's like, oh, so many.
- [82:35]
A
It's like I'm doing so like, tell me if this is right. I'm doing so many things on the regular that I must not do. And so I ought to continue to try and get, you know, get this key to actually unlock the lock once and for all so that I can be confident that I am in God's family and safe from this plague of anxiety. I mean, is that, am I getting it right?
- [83:04]
B
Yeah. And start walking the walk. You know, I'm talking the talk, but I just, I know in my heart I'm not walking the walk. I have bad thoughts and I do bad things all the time. You know, you just, when a 14 year old says that, you just. It breaks your heart.
- [83:22]
A
Yeah, yeah. I never struggled with religious scrupulosity, thank God. It's really hard for people who do. It's treatable, which is great, but it's hard. So I didn't really have that, but I did have that intense moral seriousness. And the thing that's similar in my experience to OCD is it was for me ultimately about managing my momentary anxiety. That is what it was about. It was more like panic attack type anxiety than OCD type anxiety, but it was anxiety. And if I could figure out the right sin that I needed to confess or whatever, then maybe the Spirit would come into that crevice where it needed to be and finally fix this thing. And yeah, so that part feels similar.
- [84:14]
B
In our experiences and it's, you know, it's been called by some of the people who do work in cognitive science of religion and ritual a misfiring of an overactive hazard precaution system.
- [84:27]
A
Fill that out.
- [84:28]
B
Okay, so our hazard precaution system, that is an evolved system to keep us away from things that are gonna hurt us, like disgust. Disgust is part of our hazard precaution system. It's bad for you to eat dung, so we are disgusted by dung. It's bad for us to eat rotten fruit, so we're disgusted by dung.
- [84:50]
A
To touch rotting flesh.
- [84:52]
B
Yeah. To. To dead body. Rotting flesh.
- [84:55]
A
Dead body. Yeah.
- [84:56]
B
And so we are disgusted. That's sort of a hazard precaution system. Part of an evolved system to keep us sort of safe.
- [85:03]
A
And it's why body horror films are so effective.
- [85:05]
B
Yes, absolutely. And so then you miss that, that system misfires, and all of a sudden you're seeing or feeling hazards that you have to take precautions for. And the precautions then become obsessive. And there are some people who think, well, that's how rituals evolved. But the research on that indicates. No, actually it's the other way around. Rituals were here and sort of a misfiring of the ritual system, which actually helps us moderate our anxiety and then it ratchets out a bit out of control. And so, yeah, that's what I'm hearing and thinking about.
- [85:51]
A
Well, yeah, I'd want to think about it more because I haven't heard this language used in this context. But that sort of misfiring of the. What did you call it?
- [86:03]
B
The hazard hazard precaution system.
- [86:05]
A
Hazard precaution system. That feels like an evolutionary account for what's going on with ocd.
- [86:12]
B
Absolutely.
- [86:13]
A
So I'm sure some people have probably made that. And I'm just hearing these terms for the first time. So OCD is really. It's the easiest way to talk about other religions here, I think, because especially with this cognitive distortion as we've been talking about, it's pretty delicate. Right. Like the balance, the line between values oriented and non values oriented shoulds and oughts is. Is one that we've given all these different caveats and examples of where it can sort of slightly air into one or the other. And not knowing other religious traditions, that would be hard to comment on from my perspective. But the OCD scrupulosity stuff is kind of extreme. And so I think where we can see the patterns is pretty clear. So I'm gonna run through a couple examples and then we can kind of dig in where you want. So some clinicians who work with religious scrupulosity clients in orthodox Jewish populations. So keeping kosher and keeping Sabbath in some communities, depending on your form of Judaism, you have over 600 individual laws around those, those sort of codes. And so there can be a lot of, you know, all the scrupulosity stuff and ocd stuff that we just mentioned. Imagine there's 600 some official laws to follow. And if you have that overactive hazard thing. Wow. You know, in Islam they have their wudu, which is the washing rituals before the five times daily prayer. So folks who struggle, especially with contamination, ocd. Right. There's a real easy link there around ritual purity in the Muslim faith. Sometimes with Hindu clients, therapists have described, you can find this striving for perfection with the offerings that they, that they make to gods and goddesses or family members. I don't understand Hinduism that well, so don't me. But by the way, listeners, if you do have more complete thoughts about these other faith traditions, always email me, I'd love to hear it. But. So they can like be obsessed with getting perfect right angles for their offerings. Or if you've ever seen this might be mispronounced rangoli, these designs with like colored salt or whatever that they'll make. Monks will sometimes make this or they will be a part of Diwali or other festivals. You make this big elaborate design as a part of the ritual. And people can get obsessed with there being no aesthetic flaws in their rangoli design that is related to their piety. Right. And then there's a really interesting angle here that is not present in Christianity because Christianity is a multilingual religion, but in Hebrew. So in some Jewish communities and for some Islamic individuals, because of Hebrew and Arabic, sometimes the religious scrupulosity can be about perfect pronunciation of Hebrew or Arabic as a part of the ritual. That one is kind of wild to me, but makes perfect sense. But that's really different because Christianity, you know, Jesus spoke Aramaic, the Gospels are in Greek, the New Testament's in Greek, the Old Testament's in Hebrew. It's like Gentiles came in very early on. So we don't really have that, you know, Book of Mormon, Quran, like perfect. These are exactly the words that God intended. We don't have that view. So we don't get into even the pronunciation can be an issue.
- [89:57]
B
Yeah, yeah. And that, I mean, that indicates to me why when I have been with some Jewish friends and we've, you know, sung a Jewish song, I mean, I was a classical languages major as one of my majors, and as an undergrad. So, you know, I took Hebrew, I would sing Hebrew songs, say the Shema things. And I was criticized for my pronunciation, which kind of offended me a bit because hey, I worked hard on this. But clearly I was not ritually pure in my pronunciation. But yes, I mean, I remember reading a book by Orhan Pramuk, who's one of the most famous writers in Turkey. And in the book one of the characters is constantly obsessing about whether or not he might accidentally have become an atheist. He believes in God and loves God and wants to serve God and he's afraid that maybe he has become an atheist. And reading that, it sounds absurd, but I'm just thinking about people worried they might have committed the unforgivable sin. I mean it's essentially, it's that same kind of, did I by mistake do something that I could, I've lost it all now, I can never come back. And just because I'm so stupid or sinful.
- [91:19]
A
And something that directly addresses that with OCD, that also works to a lesser degree with general anxious thoughts is recognizing it as a thought. So I am having the thought, maybe I am a secret atheist. And the thought maybe I'm a secret atheist despite not having any experience of lack of belief is really a thought not grounded in reality. And I'm just having the thought, right? And so like Josh has talked about this with his scrupulosity of like naming those thoughts as that's a scrupulosity thought, that's an OCD thought. And that is one of the things that people will do in that treatment to kind of get some separation. But the pattern across these religious, you know, especially with the scrupulosy stuff, there really does seem to be a kind of a human pattern here that it manifests in these different traditions. We didn't talk about Buddhism and sort of non violence, non harm, but that can extend to insects like, that can extend to like literally anything living. And you can imagine somebody with OCD where that might show up. But it's basically, there's some value or practice purity, devotion rituals, non harming, observing the law that gets exaggerated into this absolute uncompromising demand of the self, the ultimate should, must sort of statement. And that leads to distress in individualist or collectivist cultures. And it often leads to a weakening of faith. Because if you can't feel the, like you're getting the, you know, the consolation back. You're getting the feeling of connection to God and others, like you're really not having a full experience of your Faith without that reciprocal comfort and aid coming back to you. And so it ends up undercutting the very life of faith, which of course pointing that out doesn't solve it, but it's part of the perniciousness.
- [93:13]
B
And that's, I mean, talk psychotherapy geekhood here. If you watch videos of Albert Ellis doing therapy, one of the founders of cognitive behavioral therapy, he always, I mean, he was kind of a jerk, but he would always really carefully just sort of ask people questions about, okay, so what's the worst that could happen? Then what would happen? Then if this.
- [93:40]
A
And then what?
- [93:41]
B
If this terrible thing and then what? And then what? And so just kindly helping to identify this is a thought you're having. And when we pull the thought out into the light of day, it's actually irrational, isn't it? And so just to identify that now more needs to happen. Elvis always kind of assumed if you identify the thoughts as irrational, you've done the therapy. But you know, there's a lot more work that has to happen. But that's a first step, identifying the problem.
- [94:12]
A
Well, so let's talk about solutions. This is kind of, this will be sort of our final area. I'll repeat the kind of those three items from earlier, but then let's talk about them in context of religion because from what I can tell, all major religious traditions have sort of built in mechanisms for dealing with this perfectionism and all or nothingness. I think my kind of, my guess is that religions that don't provide for every basic human psychological need just don't last. That the ones that have lasted, they have a means for getting at whatever somebody might need. Roughly speaking, they're not like obviously missing whole domains of psychological wellness or else they wouldn't be so effective for thousands of years. Right? So, but back to that initial kind of three, three item thing, right? So we can reframe the language of our own thoughts away from a should to I'd like to or I must to I'll try to a reframing of the rules themselves to be realistic, to have some compassion, to have some flexibility, especially where that's indicated in the particular case. And then of course seeking these supportive communities that will, that will sort of surround us with positive support and kind of helping us move in that direction and that avoid this sort of heavy emphasis on perfectionism and moral purity. So every tradition seems to have one of these things baked in. Maybe we'll end on Christianity and then we can kind of talk about that. But Jewish law, right, specifically builds in flexibility and priority for human life and health over strict rule following. There are provisions there of, like, if someone's actually harmed, like, this is not as important as that. Islam emphasizes divine mercy and what some Muslim writers call ease. It's a kind of peacefulness when you are, you know, living in accordance with God, but not just because you did it right. But it's like in relationship with God should bring some ease, which implies that these obligations should be somewhat flexible and manageable. And specifically, a lot of these Muslim teachings will call out what we would consider, like, obsessive ritual adherence. I'm saving Buddhism and the Middle path for the all or nothing and other episodes because it's so directly related. So we'll come back to Buddhism, but basically there's all these major voices that emphasize God's grace, human fallibility, the primacy of love important of inner transformation over outer compliance. I think within Christianity, one specific example is Pope Francis, for instance, said the Eucharist is not a reward for the perfect, but medicine for the weak. And really, in Christianity, kind of one of the big ways that we can sort of push against this is, is the tradition of grace over legalism. I mean, you've got a Lutheran background. Grace over the law. That's a huge tenet of Lutheran theology. But even just in the stories, Jesus healing people on the Sabbath, Paul eventually winning the argument against some of the other early Christians that all converts need to be circumcised, keep kosher, keep the Sabbath. Like Paul's like, no, that's not what we're about now. This is a new thing here. And so we do have that workable stuff within the tradition, all these traditions to sort of within faith. Traditions fight back. So I ended on Christianity, but I'm open to your thoughts on any of that.
- [97:48]
B
Oh, well, I mean, I think.
- [97:52]
A
You'Re.
- [97:52]
B
Covering and touching on the very thing. It's that religious people have not been immune to the foibles of being human.
- [98:00]
A
Yeah.
- [98:01]
B
I mean, it's just. Yeah. And so the faith. The faith should address these things. Yeah. Now, I mean, it's. Critics of religion often will like to say, well, religions are just pie in the sky comfort for people who can't face the reality of existential dread.
- [98:19]
A
Just a sky daddy, A wish fulfillment. Sky daddy. Yeah.
- [98:24]
B
Which is fine if you have a grossly inaccurate anthropology of religion and don't actually know what religions are about it.
- [98:33]
A
Bill Maher. Yeah.
- [98:34]
B
Yeah. Yep. Sam. Yeah, there we are. But there is that sense within Christianity that someone who is wracked in guilt, you Know, the answer is, can I talk to you about the Gospel? And these should must statements, it's like they flow out of and increase one's sense of inadequacy and shame and guilt. Well, and even the shouldma statements that are other directed increase one sense that other people are inadequate and other people should be ashamed. And grace addresses both of those things. It's like you need to sort of have grace on yourself and grace for others. And it's one of those things where, I mean, students would regularly on a college campus say, I don't want to go to church anymore. It's just full of all of those hypocrites. And my response, you know, my snarky response, I always was, oh, you know, come to church. There's room for one more hypocrite come along. And they look at me and say, we are all fundamentally hypocrites. Everyone, you know, that's growing into maturity is partly the process of relasing just what a hypocrite you are and being okay with that, giving yourself the grace to recognize, yep, I say things and I do another, and I don't like that. And I would like to get better, but I'm not going to get better by denying it or beating myself over the head.
- [100:15]
A
Yeah.
- [100:16]
B
So there should be that in the church. And I latch onto the grace of a healthy church community. But they aren't all healthy.
- [100:25]
A
Yeah, of course. Yeah. I want to actually even just conclude with broadening it out to just spirituality. So I think it's pretty clear we've spent a lot of time sort of talking about that there are, within overt Christianity, there's certainly there are these strains of thought and practice that can help around this stuff. But I even think if you just have a more vague, like less. Less specific spirituality, by which I mean some sense of connection to a higher power or the universe, which is conceived of as in some way caring, internally connected, you know, some level of intentionality to the fact that the universe is there at all? Like, this is, you know, I've talked about how, for me, this is essentially the question between theism and non. Theism is like, is there ultimately meaning and value in the mind of God, so to speak, in addition to the meaning and value created by creatures, including humans and any other creatures that might exist anywhere else in the universe in time and space, who are capable of making meaning the way that we are capable of doing it with our minds. And if you think that it's likely that there is that source of meaning, whether or Not a particular religious tradition has a great grasp on it or whether none of them do. I think that just that idea, like to the extent that you can believe that you woke up in an ordered and beautiful fraught, but beautiful and ordered universe with some kind of love and intentionality at its center, well then that's a weird place to wake up if your job is to be perfect. This is the world where I'm supposed to be perfect. I actually think in a lot of ways, especially around the scrupulosity. I think basically downgrading from particular religion to just spirituality is probably doing you favors. And I would even wonder, I wouldn't be surprised if there were research that showed that people who score highly on sort of perfectionism and OCD type scales who leave religion might find a lack of structure there to at least in the short term be kind of a way of reducing that pressure. Right? That wouldn't surprise me. I haven't seen this research, but I wouldn't be surprised. But like just any, any spiritual idea of like meaning, value, connection, like, okay, like, so if that's the world we have, then it's just implied. I find for almost everybody with that kind of spirituality, there's growth, there's like a striving. I mean the very basic fact of the increasing complexity of biological life and evolution, the complexity of, you know, one big thing of matter being separated out into galaxies where stars can form and then support planets with life. Like just that whole, just the rough. Draw that out on a piece of paper, the directionality of that, it's unfinished. And so we're unfinished. And so none of our particular values and rules for ourselves, none of them. Can we for sure stay. Are perfectly done in English. You know, like, you know, like there's just so many ways, like of course it's evolving. Of course we're, we're, we're making progress as we go along. Even if it's two steps forward, one step back, or 10 steps forward, nine steps back, or whatever it is. Like I even think in their. You can find some grounds for removing some of that pressure. What do you think about that? Like sort of taking it out of overt religion.
- [104:33]
B
I have a dear family member who has found that just walking in nature is incredibly important and healing due to just a whole host of traumas, most of them religion based. And she's still, I mean it's worship, devotions, praying, singing, very important parts of her life, but just getting out and being someplace where there is no pressure to perform form or to show or Be a particular way, but you just get to see the messiness of it all, the beauty of it all, and the fact that there are no trees out there that are making demands on your life.
- [105:40]
A
Yeah, I like that. Yeah. And actually, I think even, like, last thought is, I think maybe for the more spirituality focused, I think some of the evolutionary stuff might be especially helpful. And one thing about being in nature, you know, we moved to a place where there are a lot more animals because it's a much smaller city still, the Pacific Northwest, same type of animals, but we see a lot more of them because there's just fewer cars. It's less developed, and, like, seeing other species of animal and going, oh, you know, like, we're different. I'm a human. That's a bird. That bird is probably not beating itself up over this, over these unrealistic expectations that it has of itself, probably, as far as we can tell, you know, even that kind of thing is like, putting it in that context can sort of take some pressure off. And anyway, I hope that this has been helpful for people. I have really enjoyed it. It is long. I tried to cover a lot. Laird, thank you for hanging in there with me. And just to return one more time to the one sentence encapsulation, Finding a balanced and values congruent middle between just like, rigid demands and perfectionism on one side and just complete autonomy, individualist permissiveness on the other side. Finding that balanced ground of like, well, this is what I really care about. This is direction that I'm moving. I'm gonna do so imperfectly. I'm gonna be checking in. I'll continue to grow. Something like that.
- [107:09]
B
Yep. Yeah. Preach it, brother.
- [107:12]
A
Any final words?
- [107:14]
B
So here's the thing I would say to folks who are struggling with these issues is that the community is a source of your healing, even though the community was a source of your pain. And so find people and a place where it's life giving and they're there. The optimism is they are there. And there are even evangelicals who are working on these issues in some interesting ways and good ways. So. Wow. The world is shaking to its foundations.
- [107:49]
A
A little late in my view, but better late than never. And. Yeah. Okay. Well, Laird, thanks so much. Much, man. This was.
- [107:59]
B
Oh, thank you for having me.
- [108:01]
A
It's just long episode. I loved it.
- [108:05]
B
It's always a delight. Thank you, Dan.
- [108:07]
A
All right, man. I'll have you, Sam.