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- [00:01]
Brad Straughan
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- [02:00]
Dr. Dan Koch
Welcome back. Welcome back everybody to Religion on the Mind. I AM your host, Dr. Dan Koch, licensed therapist. And rejoining me today back on the show, Brad Straughan of Fuller Seminary. Brad, thanks for being here.
- [02:14]
Brad Straughan
Great to be here always.
- [02:16]
Dr. Dan Koch
You were last on in episode 132 back in August 2021. We talked about Christian existentialism. Wow, that. So you planted a seed and the Lord watered it. Brad, listeners, regular listeners know that has been kind of my. Well, existential psychology is my current hobby horse and so I think I need to listen back to that episode just for personal reasons. But we'll talk a little existential therapy today. It's one of the four stool legs that we are going through. I was texting you about existential therapy. And I asked you if you considered yourself an existential therapist, because I increasingly do sort of lean into that. And you responded, well, I have four main influences as a practitioner or clinician, and one of them is existential. We'll get to that. And I just wrote back four items. That sounds like a podcast episode, so let's do it. So we're going to talk about your four influences as a clinician, and those four, briefly, are Wesleyan Theology. We're gonna throw a bone to the old school listeners by starting with theology, relational psychoanalysis, what is called 4E cognition, which has come up on the show a couple times with Kristen Tiedman, who also was supposed to be with us today, but Snowpocalypse, out in Pennsylvania canceled her childcare. So our thoughts and prayers are with Kristin. 4. Ecognition is sort of this really sort of full way of thinking about human cognition, all these different categories, and then terror management theory, which is the existential psychology item. And then, so we're gonna talk through each of those four, but it's gonna be a conversation for regular listeners, not just clinicians. And then I figure we'll save the last chunk for a bit more Inside Baseball. I wanna talk about how you came to identify those influences. Is this what we mean by eclectic therapy? When should we be eclectic? Like, how do you think about when to bring in different influences, when to use them? So if you're a therapist and you want to hear that, either make sure to listen all the way or skip to the last 20, 25 minutes, maybe. That's my best guess. Okay, let's start with the first one here. Wesleyan Theology. Brad, what is Wesleyan Theology? And for each of these, by the way, I'm going to ask you at some point to give us, you know, a fake example of a client situation where you're gonna lean in to this of the four influences. So, okay, this is when I'm gonna lean into my Wesleyan Theological, you know, structure or whatever. This is when I'm gonna lean into my four ecognition kind of a thing. So you could start with the clinical example, or you can start by explaining it just at one point. I'd like to get kind of concrete.
- [05:08]
Brad Straughan
I mean, I think one of the most fascinating things to me about humanity and humans is that you would think that we would sort of begin with, what does it mean to be human? But of course, that's so kind of intrinsically embedded in who we are that we sort of don't particularly name it. We don't particularly think about it. Right. We just kind of go through life. But it's interesting to me, again, when I'm with clients or I'm also a part time pastor. And so when I'm with parishioners or I'm out in the world or I'm with students because I'm a professor, how. So much of how we think about what it means to be human is not explicit. It's taken for granted. And so, you know, one of the big challenges, I think, for us as humans is, again, what does it mean to be human? Are we thinking beings? Are we feeling beings? Does one come first? What should take prominence? Does one trump another? And again, all these things, I know we're going to talk about them kind of in separated ways, but in my mind, obviously they're quite integrated.
- [06:11]
Dr. Dan Koch
Of course. Yeah, of course they're integrated. Yeah.
- [06:13]
Brad Straughan
So just really briefly, I grew up in the Wesleyan tradition. However, I think that the true kind of Wesleyan theology kind of lost its way a little bit. Like, or in the tradition I was brought up in, the Wesleyan roots kind of lost their way.
- [06:30]
Dr. Dan Koch
Okay.
- [06:31]
Brad Straughan
So all that to say, I think that the implicit anthropology I grew up with was sort of like, we're thinking beings, we think first, and so we need to make decisions. We. If you're a religious person, you give intellectual assent to propositional beliefs. Right. And even to be like a Christian or a religious person was to say, well, I believe this. What I came to understand much later in my life was that Wesleyan theology was very much a affective theology and a relational theology. So that John Wesley, the kind of originator of Wesleyan Theology, didn't sort of. Or. Yeah, he didn't really sort of set out to be different. He was trying to renew the Church of England. Right. He had this belief kind of coming out of British empiricism of his time, that human beings were motivated first and foremost by their affective dispositions.
- [07:24]
Dr. Dan Koch
When we say affect, we mean emotion. There we go.
- [07:26]
Brad Straughan
Emotion.
- [07:27]
Dr. Dan Koch
Yeah, you got it. You caught it, too.
- [07:30]
Brad Straughan
Oh, good.
- [07:31]
Dr. Dan Koch
Yeah. When the inside baseball needs to become outside baseball.
- [07:35]
Brad Straughan
Absolutely, absolutely. Thank you. Help me anytime. I do that. So emotions. Right. So that we are motivated by the things that we feel, and those things that we feel are, in fact, trained. We have different affects kind of out of the womb. Right. Affect researchers. Emotion. Researchers tell us that there are some emotions that seem to be, in fact, universal. Joy, disgust, shame, these kinds of things. We see them across cultures, but the way in which they become central or the way they're experienced relationally all that then becomes sort of socio culturally embedded for us. And these emotions, like, let's say fear, can become over time habituated into what Wesley and the British empiricists would call tempers. So we don't just, for example, we just don't have a loving feeling. We could become loving people. We don't just feel anger, we could become angry people based on again, the context that we're in, based on the experiences we have. And so we become shaped, it becomes habituated. Right.
- [08:43]
Dr. Dan Koch
I mean, this also sounds like Aristotle, right, In the Greeks of like virtue, habit formation, becoming a certain kind of person, that kind of thing.
- [08:51]
Brad Straughan
Absolutely. Yeah. This is virtue ethics for sure. So I found that to be particularly helpful and particularly interesting because actually, again, like I said, the original kind of setting that I grew up in and was socialized in was very cognitive, was rationalistic, decisionistic model. But then as I got to know Wesley more and his approach, something about that felt much more at home for me. Something felt much more real, like, why do I do the thing I don't want to do? Why am I so angry? I gave a talk one time, why am I so angry all the time? Even though I said I don't have anything to be angry about, I shouldn't be angry, it turns out I was. And I needed to try to get at that in terms of my emotion.
- [09:37]
Dr. Dan Koch
I would guess that this would come up a lot in both your pastoral situation, but also teaching somewhere like Fuller, which is very evangelical. I mean, literally, isn't it where the term, the movement of evangelicalism kind of started? Right. 100 years ago or whatever. I'm getting the timing wrong, but that is a sort of a world in which this cognitive first thinking first. We are primarily like, as Christians, we are primarily people who believe the right things about Christ and God. That is like, you know, we want our kids to say the prayer, which is essentially a. It is a. It is a willful surrender. But what's funny is that we accept really young kids being able to do that when they really can't do that yet. But we do think they can believe. And so, you know, that, that sort of emphasis. I would guess that leaning into a more affective emotion, you know, habit, this kind of thing would be kind of a natural, you know, sort of like rice and beans completing the protein together kind of a thing in that world,
- [10:47]
Brad Straughan
which has created some really interesting complexities when you think about also in some ways, what do we do with more of a charismatic approach, right? That charismatic brothers and sisters seem to Emphasize. Right. A world of feeling and that the spirit kind of speaks to us and moves through us and in some way shapes our hearts.
- [11:07]
Dr. Dan Koch
Yeah.
- [11:07]
Brad Straughan
So that. That becomes kind of an interesting almost conundrum or tension, because oftentimes charismatics will think of themselves as evangelical and vice versa. But in my tradition, we were not charismatic. At least we grew not to be charismatic. I think we had some charismatic roots there.
- [11:24]
Dr. Dan Koch
But, yeah, it makes me think of something cool that happened at our old church, Grace Seattle, that we were at for about a decade or more. And early on, our pastor, John Harrelson, trained at a PCA Conservative Presbyterian Seminary. Former military guy, pretty kind of cognitive guy. I remember early on in his sermons, he would often make a very similar argument. And the argument was like, if we just really understood how God sees us, then our whole lives would change. Now, that's undoubtedly true for some people, but I'm just noting the emphasis on understood. That's essentially a cognitive thing. And something that I saw change in him over time, to his great credit, is he got more interested in contemplative prayer. He got more interested in a more embodied faith stance, more embodied worship. And he brought, you know, he and the other staff brought on another pastor for that kind of stuff. And. And, you know, they started these spiritual formation tracks that people could do, like, year long and. And just kind of got more into that. And because he had been so clear on that initially, it was also very clear for me to notice that shift. And I think I've told him how appreciative I was of that. I don't think he listens every week or anything, so maybe I'll have to text him, but that's what it kind of made me think of. Is that roughly what you're talking about? Sort of, if you were to put it in a progression?
- [12:58]
Brad Straughan
I think very much so. And I'm struck again, too. I feel like that's Wesley's progression himself, actually, because he talks about having this experience later in life where we always joke, like, his heart was strangely warmed, where he begins to believe that God, in fact, accepts him. And he has what he calls an assurance of faith because for so long, Right. He's trying to, like, kind of almost a scrupulosity. Right. And some people say that Wesley himself probably suffered from some obsessive compulsive personality disorder where he's trying to dot all his I's and cross all his T's. And something happens in his engagement with the very relational Moravians where he feels this sense of, oh, My goodness. This is grace by faith, right? This is God's movement towards us. This is provenient grace. And so, yeah, it becomes much more of an emotional, relational kind of thing. So he starts to emphasize, we love not because it's something we've got, but because God first loves us and that becomes real for him.
- [14:02]
Dr. Dan Koch
Where would this show up in the therapy room? Like, give me a. Give me a generic example of when. Okay, your mind's going to this Wesleyan move. When might that happen?
- [14:14]
Brad Straughan
Yeah. So, you know, we think a lot about and talk a lot in therapy about, like, an integrative therapy about God concepts. Right. Or God representations. So people will often come into therapy, religious folks, various ilks, right? And they'll say, well, I know God is love. God loves me. But in a certain way, kind of in the old language of Brennan Manning, speaking of a contemplative, they're not sure if God likes them.
- [14:42]
Dr. Dan Koch
Yeah, yeah, right.
- [14:44]
Brad Straughan
And it's much more of this emotional connection. Does God have me in mind? And if God has me in mind, what is that image like? So it's not just imaging God, but it's kind of imaging God's image of me, if that makes sense.
- [14:58]
Dr. Dan Koch
But a God image is still pretty cognitive, right? In terms of a God image is things that I think are true about God. When I imagine God sort of in my mind's eye now, that can connect. So, like, if when I think about God, I also have an attendant emotional experience of maybe feeling held or loved or accepted, then my God image has sort of gone beyond the cognitive to the affective. Is that how you would say it?
- [15:27]
Brad Straughan
That's exactly, exactly. So the kind of generic, you know, kind of example is a person who is sort of focused on, am I doing the right things? Am I making God? Am I pleasing God? Does God like what I'm up to? To a more of a move of. You know, this sounds sort of silly in some ways, but I have a couple images or a couple pictures that I like. You know, that when God thinks of you, God can't stop smiling, you know, or if God had a refrigerator, God would have your picture on it.
- [15:58]
Dr. Dan Koch
Your picture magnet would be on there.
- [16:00]
Brad Straughan
Yeah, exactly.
- [16:01]
Dr. Dan Koch
Okay, exact. Probably a pretty good transition to the next of the four influences just because of the relationality in it. So you said number two is relational psychoanalysis. And I tried to read a little bit about this. I'm almost positive. One of my supervisors in my residency, internship year, this is her modality. And she would talk a lot about, basically, humans are Fundamentally relational. That from the womb out, we are not just like, again, in Wesley's terms, we're not just thinking beings and we're not just feeling beings. We are relating beings. And all of that happens in relationship between us and others. That starts with our caregivers and attachment, or insecure attachment, but it goes on through literally every aspect of our life. Am I getting the thumbnail sketch right?
- [16:53]
Brad Straughan
Yep. Absolutely. Absolutely right. Relationships are not just something we do, they are what we are. And so even interuterine, actually. Right. We're relational. And so infants can recognize their mother's voices. They can recognize their mother's smells. And that's how we become so relational. People will often say something like, we become through relationship. We're wounded through relationship, and therefore we have to be healed through relationship. Which becomes very interesting again when you think about what does that mean with God. Well, you know, then that's where we come into questions of how, you know, the space in which our first primary caregivers are God to us. And so we then, Right. We project that into a God image, a God concept, so we could be. Right. There's research that says if we're insecurely attached to our parents, we tend to have insecure attachments to our God representation.
- [17:54]
Dr. Dan Koch
Okay, so give me an example of a generic client situation where, I mean, maybe. Maybe you would say all of your. Like, is this more of an overall stance that you sort of take therapeutically? Because. So you're just always thinking about, you know, not only whatever you can sort of learn about the client's, you know, primary relationships throughout their life, but also, I assume you are thinking about sort of the space between you and the client as its own sort of relational space where you can kind of a sandbox is maybe a metaphor. You hear about that, Right. Where you can play around a little bit, try out different relational stances. Am I getting that right?
- [18:35]
Brad Straughan
Yeah, absolutely. The relational perspective for me really emphasizes another kind of fancy word, which is intersubjectivity, which is this idea that I bring my subjectivity into the setting, and my client or the parishioner, whoever it is, brings their subjectivity. And so something unique emerges out of that. Right. Or what's interesting is not just what's in the mind of the client. What are our two minds creating? What's emerging from that? Right. Thomas Ogden, the great analyst, says that it takes two minds to think. And so I'm constantly wondering, what's going on? What's the relationality in my client? What's my own relationality that I'm bringing, what's emerging from this together, of course, then the affective piece. Right again, that I'm bringing. What are the affects that I'm noticing in me? What are the affects that I'm noticing that are merging in my client? So it's this constant, sort of really interesting emergence piece which will move us eventually here into four ecognition. But like you said, what are the things that we're playing out? My belief is that the client invites us into. The client invites the therapist into a reenactment of their earliest histories. But I also have to recognize that I'm bringing that as a therapist. So I'm constantly engaged in, again, what Ogden would call reverie. I'm constantly involved in what's happening between us, what's going on here. And so it becomes not only a kind of repetition of the past, but also an opportunity for new experience. New experience that can, in fact, rewire the brain, if we want to talk about it that way, to. So the client can have new experiences and that hopefully that can generalize out into the world.
- [20:20]
Dr. Dan Koch
Yeah. I've heard it described as, like, the mechanism of change, in part, in relational therapy is you have a client literally with you in the room, experience a type of relationship that in a lot of cases, they've never experienced before, and therefore, they're unlikely to see it as plausible or something that can happen between them and their spouse or them and their co workers or their mom or dad or siblings.
- [20:48]
Brad Straughan
Absolutely.
- [20:49]
Dr. Dan Koch
You know, so that they. And it's like, oh, this is if it's possible between me and Brad, maybe it's possible between me and this other person. Right?
- [20:56]
Brad Straughan
That's right. I think an example I really like and use frequently is, you know, let's say a client who is, for whatever reason, has experienced primarily frustration with their caregivers. Their caregivers are frustrated with them. They. They. They send messages to them like, you're too much or you're not enough, or you're. You as the child are overwhelming me as the parent. Right. That's bound to take place in therapy. And as a therapist, I'm in fact expecting to feel frustrated and overwhelmed by this patient. Right. With maybe they constantly ask for things or they're. They're texting me between sessions. Well, I don't actually take texts, but they're emailing me between sessions or something like that. Right. And there comes a moment in the work where the client recognizes and I recognize that I'm, in fact, frustrated with them.
- [21:50]
Dr. Dan Koch
Yeah.
- [21:51]
Brad Straughan
But here's the thing, right? Like we can then have a conversation depending again how you think about this relational people often make therapeutic use of self disclosure. And I might say to this patient, you are right, I am frustrated. But what you don't have an experience of is someone being frustrated with you and not giving up. Someone who's frustrated with you but stays committed in a relationship with you. Someone who's frustrated with you but doesn't leave you. Right? And that becomes a really therapeutically profound moment for a client and actually also I think for the therapeutic dyad. Study and play come together on a Windows 11 PC and for a limited time. College students get the best of both worlds. Get the unreal college deal everything you need to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs.
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- [26:07]
Dr. Dan Koch
So let's move on to 4ecognition. Give ourselves a little more time here because this is actually one idea with for ideas embedded within it. So give ourselves a little bit of time. What is 4e cognition?
- [26:19]
Brad Straughan
Brad so 4e cognition is a kind of newer approach to thinking about cognition.
- [26:27]
Dr. Dan Koch
And when we say, by the way, cognition, we're talking about thinking. This is the part of you that thinks.
- [26:31]
Brad Straughan
Well, this is thinking. But what's interesting for 4 ecognition is that in contemporary cognitive psychology is that it wants to resist the dichotomy between thinking and feeling.
- [26:42]
Dr. Dan Koch
Actually okay yeah.
- [26:44]
Brad Straughan
So when we have a thought, there is always an affect that is part of it. Or if we have an affect, there is always in some ways a cognition related to that feeling. Right?
- [26:54]
Dr. Dan Koch
Yeah.
- [26:54]
Brad Straughan
So four. Ecognition, though, emerges in cognitive philosophy. It comes out of a lot of different kind of spaces and places, but it is in some sense not opposite. I don't want to say opposite, but a differentness than to the concept of information processing models that were there, which saw the human person as a computer, essentially, and the body was just a input, output, bus. Right. Where the real action is what's going on inside the software of the model. Right.
- [27:27]
Dr. Dan Koch
I think, just to be clear, just so people don't make what would. Would be, I think, an understandable inference. Cbt, cognitive behavioral therapy, which comes out of cognitive theory in like the 60s. It. It also recognizes that problem. So the. The first thing I ever teach any client if we're doing cbt, is I show them the cognitive triangle, which has thoughts, feelings and behaviors in sort of like a recycle symbol. And they all, all three affect each other. You can intervene at any of those levels, and you can create change in the other two things as well. So I think that when we're talking about a challenge to a cognitive, like a previous theory of human cognition, maybe it's my guard dog for Aaron Beck, but I would say he saw a similar critique there. Cognition is not just a little computer processing information. It's like it. It. The reason that CBT works is that it does affect our behaviors and our feelings. Otherwise there would be no cbt.
- [28:34]
Brad Straughan
Yeah, yeah, I think that's right. I think what, like third wave or four wave, CBT is much more kind of cognitive, relational, emotional.
- [28:41]
Dr. Dan Koch
And mindfulness too, gets. Gets brought in more value stuff, more mindfulness, things like that. So even. Yeah, even furthering with things like acceptance and commitment therapy, like, even furthering that sort of deeper connection. But what are the E's? What are the four E's?
- [28:56]
Brad Straughan
Yes. So the first E is embodied. So we are fully embodied. We don't just think with our minds, we think with our bodies. And there are lots of really fun, fascinating research around that, which basically boils down to this idea that it's not just that our mind tells our bodies what we're feeling, but our bodies tell our minds what we're feeling. And again, this is again, a dualism that I'm trying to resist. Right. But it's really difficult not to speak in dualistic language.
- [29:26]
Dr. Dan Koch
I talk a lot about mood, congruent thinking, with clients. And I will, like, put my two. I'll make each of my hand into, like, trying to describe this visually. Like, I'll. I'll do like a 90 degree angle, so I have these two sort of like, flat planes that I can move up or down. Kind of like a volume fader on a mixing board or something. And I'll say, like, if my body. If my overall bodily affect, like, I will usually say, like, you know, how keyed up I am or sort of flooded with, you know, cortisol or adrenaline. If I'm like, way up here at an 8 out of 10, then the only thoughts that at that moment are gonna feel true, accurate, authentic, honest are gonna be thoughts from like a 7 to a 9. I can't be freaking out, you know, tripping on cortisol and just wondering, oh, what, maybe just a slightly different beige for that curtain. I just won't. I won't go there. I will be thinking my marriage is ending. I will be thinking, you know, like, everything's coming down on me because our. And, yeah. That it's like a. It's imperfect to describe that as a dichotomy, but in fact, you're doing the dichotomy to actually make the point that it's not a dichotomy, that actually our thoughts will never stray too far from our bodily sensation and vice versa.
- [30:53]
Brad Straughan
Absolutely, absolutely. So we feel, we think, we act, we perceive through this embodied thing that I am. And so that's why things like culture or gender or. Or race absolutely matter. Right. Because I feel my way through the world, as Merloup Ponte would say, the great phenomenological, somewhat existential philosopher, because of this embodied experience that I have. My body, he says, is the pivot of the world. It's the way I intend and experience and see the world. So I see the world as a white male, cisgendered, heterosexual body. So bodies really, really matter. So that's the first one. The second one is embedded. So bodies are embedded in the world of other bodies. That becomes really, really important again. So now we could talk about culture, gender, whatever it might be. I'm embedded within the world of other bodies.
- [31:51]
Dr. Dan Koch
We're also back up to the relational piece, Right? That's a direct one to the relational.
- [31:55]
Brad Straughan
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. The third E, again, these are not hierarchical. They're kind of circular, kind of working around in sort of an upward spiral, maybe is enacted cognition. And feeling is for action. So when I am experiencing something, like the neuroscientist would say, I'M like, I can't help but run offline simulations of action in my mind. So if I'm listening to a story or I'm hearing a client talk, my own prefrontal motor cortex is imagining what it's like for me to be doing that myself. Right.
- [32:38]
Dr. Dan Koch
So that brings up something that comes up a lot for me in both my cognitive work and my existential work, which is this idea that. So there's an evolutionary angle here that because humans have such big brains, they're embodied brains, but they're also bigger than other animals brains by a significant margin. And we are able to do more things cognitively than other animals can do by a large margin. So we can imagine our future death. Right. Like, that's sort of the. That's the very basis, if you want one kernel for all of existentialism. It's that, you know, we can imagine our own death in some future time. As far as we know, dogs and deer can't do that. Right. But there's also another evolutionary angle here to, like, thinking about the way that our brains developed to aid in human survival over millennia, and that is that. Yeah, we are constantly playing out mental simulations and scenarios. And if you go all the way back to, like, thinking of, like, how did Homo species. So there's more than one, but, you know, there's like, Homo sapien, Neanderthal, Denisovans, et cetera, these species had, like, a hunting advantage over earlier, not yet human species. And you could think of that in terms of. It's like running a simulation. Okay, the lion and maybe some hunting animals can do a little bit of this, but humans can be like, okay, the eight of us are gonna split up in these spots, and when that happens, you're gonna do this. And we can all get together and make the plan or think about a football huddle. Okay? It's gonna be gold 42 on two, and, like, you know where you're going. And it's like. It's this, like, coordinated planning. Again, it's embedded with other bodies, and it's embodied. And then it's. And it is for action. Like, if you think of it from a survival perspective, all of this stuff in some way or other helped us act in a way, helped our ancestors act in a way that they survived. And we got their genes.
- [34:54]
Brad Straughan
Right. Which leads perfectly. Dan. Into the last D, which is extended. Right. Even if you wrote.
- [34:59]
Dr. Dan Koch
You literally wrote a book on extended cognition with Justin Barrett, did you not?
- [35:04]
Brad Straughan
No, I wrote with Warren Brown.
- [35:05]
Dr. Dan Koch
Oh, with Warren Brown. Wrong. Co author. Wrong co author of that.
- [35:11]
Brad Straughan
So extended, like when you say you got these eight hunters or whatever, their cognition, and now we're expanding cognition to be thinking, feeling and action behavior. Right? Because all these things are connected. My cognition is enhanced, or as Andy Clark would call it, it's supersized by the fact that I'm downloading aspects of it into both human artifacts that we create as well as other humans. So I can extend my memory into other people, I can extend my action into other people, I can extend my learning into these artifacts. So even things like the cell phone or another human person, I make my cognition more robust. I supersize it because our shared memory together is better than my memory alone, if that makes sense. So that's the fourth piece of embodied
- [36:13]
Dr. Dan Koch
or four ecognition when you think of extended cognition. There again to go not so much evolutionary like 200,000 years ago, but to apply a historical lens, my mind went to. There's a great recent episode of Derek Thompson's podcast Plain English where he talks with. I forget the guy's name about the shift from oral culture to written culture. So cultures of orality to cultures of literacy, which is when printing press really gets going. And there's some interesting ways that social media, TikTok, short form videos, actually, especially the way that Donald Trump speaks where it's like this sort of return of oral culture. I don't want to talk about the politics of it, I'm just saying that's interesting. But if I go back in time to sort of pre literate societies, you know, we, we grew up with books and learning to read and write. And so we are accustomed to the idea that somebody can write down all the stuff that they know. And there are some problems. You don't exactly know what they thought. And other than math and physics and stuff. But, but like, you know, we. I can sit in a room, read a book, get a bunch of information, like fairly well describe from one person to me. But before that, literally no knowledge at all other than a little bit of private knowledge that maybe you did a couple experiments by yourself. I mean, you can't do that many experiments by yourself. Like all knowledge was. It was collective. It was you. If you needed to know what was going on, you had to be in a group with other people and their minds. So that sort of. It's almost like we have a little bit of a. We live in this weird time where some of our cognition is not extended in a way that all of it was for like the vast majority of human history is that an overstatement or what do you think about that?
- [38:15]
Brad Straughan
Well, I think, you know, what Warren Brown and I would say is that language is the first technology, maybe of extension. Yeah, yeah, right. Because as we're talking, as we're sharing stories or we're using language with one another, we are extending. That's how we know what something is.
- [38:33]
Dr. Dan Koch
Right.
- [38:33]
Brad Straughan
And then, of course, as the great philosophers Lakoff and Johnson would say, all language is metaphorical, so that means it's therefore embodied. So they would say all language is embodied. So we kind of keep going back to the same place. I think we are first and foremost embodied creatures. Language emerges out of that. Language is metaphorical. And so it becomes the first technology, really. Then written language becomes a new form of technology. Books is our technology. The printing press is technology. And then we end up with, like, AI and computers. And so Andy Clark would say, you know, we make the world smarter so we can be dumber in peace. But again, it's all about the fact that we extend, we enhance, we become more robust through language, through relationship. Right. And this is why it's so powerful to me that in clinical work, that it is extended cognition. It takes two minds to think. I think much better when I'm thinking with my patient. And if I happen to unfortunately believe that I'm the person who holds all the knowledge and that the only interesting thing is what's happening in my client's mind, that I'm missing out on so
- [39:56]
Dr. Dan Koch
much interesting stuff, that's a really interesting way to think about what's going on in therapy. That another way of describing a good therapeutic relationship between clinician and client is one in which one's cognition is extended in like, a virtuous way. Right. Like a good fit. That. Like something about being in the room with my therapist or in the. These days it's the telehealth office. But spending those 50 minutes with him, I think I would say it forces me to think about things in a different way. And that that is, I could say, oh, that's one of the things that makes it work, is that there are rules to the way that my cognition is extended in that space. That sort of bring good things out of me most of the time, or more often than not, certainly. Would you think of it that way?
- [40:58]
Brad Straughan
Yeah, I think so. It's, again, maybe saying the same thing in the same or slightly different way is that I'm extending my mind into my therapist's mind. As a therapist, I'm extending my mind into my patient's mind. And together. And I think 4 ecognition also deeply is reliant on this concept, another E of emergence. Right. What emerges from this unique relational experience? So I could. So I'm going to clear back to Wesley now at Virtue Ethics that what emerges is not always great. Right. You can extend yourself into a crime family, or you can extend yourself into something that brings about love and hope and equality and goodness. Right. Or I can extend myself into selfishness and racism and sexism and all those things. Right. So we need something, I would argue, and Wesley would argue and you know, maybe even people like existentialists like Kierkegaard. You have to extend yourself into something that has a larger or even more robust understanding of human nature that could lead to things like love or could lead to things like selfishness.
- [42:18]
Dr. Dan Koch
You mentioned AI, and Kristen did send me a question to ask you on four Ecognition, because that's her. A world that she's spent more time actually reading about than me. She brought up the topic of AI, and in a sense, of course, Google and my smartphone and these things are extensions of my mind. I rely on them. I can sort of park stuff there. I can discover new stuff there. Large language models have exploded in the last few years. I haven't talked to you since the release of ChatGPT as a public tool. How do you think about these? At least these, you know, you can talk about other things too, but specifically, I'm wondering about the large language models like ChatGPT or Claude or Google Gemini. How do you think of those in relation to 4 ecognition?
- [43:11]
Brad Straughan
Yeah, I mean, all of this I want to say I'm holding this. I'm trying to hold this with humility and I'm trying to hold it with. We just don't know, right. Like for sure what everything's going to occur. But Warren and I like to sometimes use a kind of philosophical thought experiment. Right. So, for example, if you took a human brain and you put it in an elephant body, you would have a very different mind.
- [43:37]
Dr. Dan Koch
Yeah. Same brain, but different mind.
- [43:40]
Brad Straughan
Right, right. Because you have a different body. The elephant body.
- [43:45]
Dr. Dan Koch
Yeah.
- [43:47]
Brad Straughan
So again, our bodies absolutely are essential to the kinds of minds that are being created. So when people say, like, well, you know, will we have robots who. Who are human? We would say, well, at this point, a robot is not going to be human because it doesn't have a human body.
- [44:11]
Dr. Dan Koch
Yeah, there's no meat. Now maybe, now maybe someday there's a way to sort of incorporate it with some sort of muscle tissue or something. And then, and then, who knows? But right now, I mean, I actually think, like, I do think that's kind of clarifying because LLMs can spit out language that we are so accustomed to only hearing from other humans, basically, or beings. But like, it is just a really sophisticated way of figuring out which word to put next. That is what they're doing now. Maybe there will be other forms of genuine intel. Like, is that kind of where you're at, that there might be some other genuine form of intelligence that we don't know about yet? But for now, it's best to think of this as incredibly sophisticated. What's the next word? I should say robots. Is that still how you think of it?
- [45:07]
Brad Straughan
Yeah, I mean, I think essentially if I'm tracking with you, there are things, for example, Right. That large language models can do so much better than the human brain can do. Yeah, right. But there's things that the human brain does because it's embedded within this human body that I don't think that AI can do. I think it can maybe approximate or it can say certain things or it can. Yeah. What's the next word? You know, it's very interesting to me the way in which people are using chat GPT as their therapists. But what happens, I think eventually, as we're learning, is Chat GPT is learning the person they're interacting with, so they begin to tell the person what the person wants to hear.
- [45:55]
Dr. Dan Koch
Well, that's very similar to the way social media algorithms work. And that's one of the most worrying aspects of it for me personally.
- [46:02]
Brad Straughan
Yeah, that's right. So, as I, you know, I always tell my, my, my clinical psychology doctoral students, I say, you know, psychotherapy, eventually, as a therapist, you eventually have to deliver some bad news to a, to a client. Yeah, yeah, right. And the bad news is that in some way, even though, you know, your trauma or your experience or whatever was not your fault, you are now engaging in patterns of repetition that are keeping things going the way they've always gone.
- [46:31]
Dr. Dan Koch
I mean, existential therapy is even stronger on that. An existential psychologist like Emmy van der Zen would say, like, you are probably delivering a lot of bad news. Like, your job is in part, like, you have to be warm and you have to build rapport. But actually, what a lot of clients need is a splash of cold water of reality. Because that whole therapeutic approach is about aligning yourself with the difficulties of reality and not whitewashing them and not sort of lying to yourself to get out of them. Yeah, yeah.
- [47:04]
Brad Straughan
So Jay Greenberg, who is part of the relational analytic world. He and Stephen Mitchell wrote one of the quintessential first books together on relational concepts and psychoanalysis. Jay Greenberg would say, if you can't be a good object, therapy can never begin. Right. So that's again this sort of empathic, relational, secure attachment, all that. But if you can't become a bad object, therapy will never end. Which is now where reliance.
- [47:34]
Dr. Dan Koch
Yeah, yeah.
- [47:35]
Brad Straughan
The therapist has to recreate these not consciously, you don't have to create them, but there will be recreations of traumatic experiences in the therapeutic dyad, which now gives us the opportunity to work through it in new and different ways.
- [47:52]
Dr. Dan Koch
Yeah, well, that's a good transition to our fourth and final leg of the stool, which is terror management theory, which is a part, it's within existential psychology, but it's sort of its own specific thing. Now I do want to start here because if people have heard about the replication crisis in psychology and sociology and some other of these sciences, Terror management theory is one of the things that's come up a little bit and it's not all of it. There's a particular kind of lab tested mechanism that says if you increase someone's awareness of their own death, then they will in that moment react with like a doubling down on their worldview. They will become more tribal, yada, yada yada. That like mortality awareness is like this in the strongest sense, the driving factor of really all the things that, that create human culture. That's not. I don't take you to be meaning that you are not saying this in like a purely theoretical way, but I'd love to hear from you, like, how do you describe using terror management theory in the room with clients? Which I imagine we're going to have some distance between the sort of lab version I just said and what you are doing?
- [49:16]
Brad Straughan
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think terror management theory tries or will often describe itself as sort of the empirical evidentiary work of existentialism.
- [49:30]
Dr. Dan Koch
Right.
- [49:30]
Brad Straughan
Which is quite a claim emerging though out of Ernest Becker's work around the denial of death. And so death or mortality salience or mortality prompts become a central focus to that. I think there's something to be said about that. But I also like the idea that existentialism includes other issues such as meaning and purpose. Right. Limits. Limits is a huge one.
- [49:58]
Dr. Dan Koch
And by the way, I think that's the way out of the replication crisis problem. Just zoom out a little bit. It's not all about knowing you're gonna die. It's about whatever four to seven items you're gonna put in that bucket of existential realities that are very hard for human beings to accept.
- [50:18]
Brad Straughan
Right, exactly, exactly. So I think, you know, I'm interested, for example, in the cultural worldview defense. I think there's something really interesting about that, particularly in the culture we live right now and in polarization, in the way in which politicians. Seems like to me, all politicians in some way are trying to tell their constituents, you should be afraid. These are the things to be afraid of. And I'm the person who can protect you against those things totally. Right? So people can believe some crazy shit, you know, be at some level, because I think essentially they're deeply afraid. I've had some interesting experiences with. For. For a number of years, I worked with a gentleman who I lovingly referred to in my mind as my alt right client. And he had decided that because I was an academic, that I was part of the left wing liberalist elite, which was not entirely wrong, of course, and that I was a bleeding heart liberal. And so that would sort of emerge in therapy at times with him sharing some conspiracy theories that he had and kind of tension that would emerge between us. And I came to understand some of that and even was able to talk with him about it, as, you know, did he believe that I could respect him and did he believe that I could think that he was a smart person, even though we disagreed deeply about some things. And that emerged in his own family, right. With his own children who were younger, of course, and then were kind of influenced in different ways. So that can become some really powerful. Some powerful stuff. And I'm hearing and reading more like, even again, relational analysts who are writing about how do we work across these differences and how do we respect each other, but recognize that we're making different meaning we're having different purpose about these things, but we're desirous to connect and relate, even though in some existential ways maybe there's a kind of aloneness that we have to come and grapple with. Even, you know, even Winnicott talked about a part of the self that could never be communicated maybe to another, which is so fascinating to think about. So again, for me, I think where the existentialist stuff comes up, Dan, is around. It is around, meaning it's around purpose, and it's around a lot of times around limits. Like, I find that, you know, humans, we kind of don't like limits. Right. I have a dear friend who I meet with regularly for peer supervision, and we were talking about one of my clients One day struggling with limits. And my colleague said, oh, your client doesn't have this sense of limits. Yeah, yeah, right. It's always like limits, you know. Yeah.
- [53:14]
Dr. Dan Koch
Van der Zen's like her, like, you know, to put this therapy into a few different questions you can ask yourself as you go. It's like, where is my client trying to bend the rules? Where is my client trying to have his cake and eat it too? Basically do things that go beyond the limits. Either those limits of reality or personal limits, you know, or situational limits that may change in the future, but right now they are this way, you know, that kind of a thing. And. And how much distress, frustration, pain, hopelessness, depression, anxiety comes from us trying to do things that are impossible, ultimately.
- [53:56]
Brad Straughan
That's right. That's right. And that's where there's an overlap for me with the four ecognition. Because if we are embodied right, bodies have limits.
- [54:05]
Dr. Dan Koch
Right.
- [54:07]
Brad Straughan
You can't go 24 7, you know, you can't have your cake and eat it too. To make a choice of monogamy toward a particular person. Right. Is to some way say no to other persons.
- [54:26]
Dr. Dan Koch
Yeah. I mean, just to, you know, not to do too hot of a take here. I think that. But like the sort of polyamory craze, there's been some interesting reporting that it has been sort of focused on, like, higher earning, kind of more privileged sectors of society. And I actually think that that makes sense to me because I think one way to think about polyamory is just through, like, a sheer amount of work and attention angle that, like, you know, the. For the average person, the amount of effort it takes to be in a sufficiently communicative and kind relationship with just one other person, if you add in another third or fourth person or any sort of additional arrangement, there's just more variables, it's more time. And I recently saw Ben Sinclair, who's a former. He's a creator of the HBO show High Maintenance, which I love. And he's got a substack now called low maintenance, which is funny. He made a little thing about like 85% of polyamory I don't believe in anymore. And someone asked him to clarify about the 15%, and he said, I think about 15% of people I've met are actually able and willing to do the incredible amount of work it takes to do that. And I don't deny that there are people for whom polyamory is a more natural fit for them. I'm sure those people do exist where I think some people End up erring. And this is from an existential perspective, is they go into that without a full accounting of the realities of it, of what it takes, of the limitations therein. And sort of like you could say choosing polyamory is sort of like not choosing one or two more hobbies that you might have had time and energy for. Like, if you really are into it, then okay. And you could maybe try that out and do the sufficient amount of communication and repair work and all of that stuff. But not going into it, expecting that just. Well, the sheer enjoyment I experience from an additional person in my life that's going to sort of paper over everything else. No, there's no free lunch. You got to pay for it. If you want to become a serious rock climber, you have to put in hundreds of hours of work. That's what it takes. And it's kind of like rock climbing in that way. And maybe you love that and that's cool, right?
- [57:02]
Brad Straughan
Yeah. Well then I know that we often talk about polyamory, I think, meaning like sexual, multiple sexual relationships maybe, but family is polyamory.
- [57:11]
Dr. Dan Koch
Yeah. Thinking about, yeah, keeping all those, like the. Having children, right? Yeah. If you, if you go into having kids, thinking, I mean, I. These days, I don't know how you could. With the amount of Instagram memes that you're fed. Once Instagram knows that someone's pregnant, you start to get all the stuff. But the way that children work into all of these questions about limits and requirements and sort of hard reality, I find the existential frame being so kind of hard bitten. It's kind of like a cynical detective like, you kids, you don't know what you're in for. Like, and it's like, yeah, he's right. You know, like it is that much work and so go into it clear eyed, you know.
- [57:58]
Brad Straughan
That's right. That's right. Well, and you know, and I think, you know, marriage or having a committed relationship, monogamous relationship is hard. And then add some kids to it, right? And suddenly it's like, oh, I don't have my partner's attention all the time. Oh yeah. And they don't have my attention all the time. And there's a reason why, you know, that research suggests that, you know, marital satisfaction dips after the first kid and then raises when the kids leave the house.
- [58:26]
Dr. Dan Koch
Yeah, exactly. I mean we two year old and six year old man, we're in it, we're in it right now. Oh my gosh. Okay, let's, let's put our clinician hats on here. So if you are not a therapist, you will still, I think, be able to follow most of what we say. But fair warning, you might get bored. And if you are a therapist, you're fucking welcome. Let's really do it. No, I'm kidding.
- [58:50]
Brad Straughan
Let's get into it.
- [58:51]
Dr. Dan Koch
Okay, I wanna start zoomed in and then I wanna get to zoomed out. So I use this phrase with clients. And it is accurate. It is sort of the main way I think of myself as a client. I say I think of myself primarily and as a co detective helping you solve the problems or problem of your life that like my sort of primary role is helping, you know, co authoring with you a sort of schematic or a blueprint of what's going on. So I tend to be very problem solvy. I think that's something that I'm good at. When I found the existential language of mapping your client's way of being in the world, which is van der Zen doing Heidegger, that worked really well. I was able to sort of put that straight on to my thing, maybe adding a few nuances there. But I wanted to bring this up in relation to both the relational psychoanalysis and the 4e stuff. So when it comes to relational stuff, what I find is that I'm sort of like, I will bring in practically, I will bring in the relational element when it becomes apparent that I need to. Or if something tips me off, if something happens where I'm like, oh, your affect has changed around something. So then I get curious about that. And then I basically sort of set aside the detective work to figure out what happened there. And are there clues there? Obviously repair any rupture, make sure we have rapport going, but also then look for clues that ultimately will come back to helping us solve the mystery. That's sort of how I think of it. And I wanted to just sort of throw that to you, like from your perspective. Is that potentially an over reliance on a cognitive approach, insufficiently embodied or insufficiently relational posture? Or do you think that's just another way of doing things? What would maybe you be looking out for if like I was your supervisee or something like that?
- [61:06]
Brad Straughan
Maybe what I want to begin with as a clinician supervisor is that I think that the therapeutic relationship is going to supersize the client's mind. So we are entering into an embodied relationship that is going to enhance their way of seeing and experiencing the world.
- [61:30]
Dr. Dan Koch
Okay, cool.
- [61:31]
Brad Straughan
Because again, it takes two minds to think together.
- [61:33]
Dr. Dan Koch
Now does that make it more sensitive or More powerful or like, give me some adjectives. Because with the detective work, I think, oh, it does make it more powerful. Like, I do find that when I can come in and use my kind of clinical skill, like I'm pulling stuff out of them and then I'm bringing my own ideas and we are multi. Like, there's something emerges. Our abilities sort of multiply each other in that. In a way that ends up being an effective way to solve a lot of these puzzles. But I'm guessing it's not just that it impacts their sort of cognitive capacity, that there's other ways in which it becomes supersized.
- [62:13]
Brad Straughan
Well, again, if you think about. I have these four. Four influences. Right. I think that the, the, the four EPs is giving me kind of an. A kind of image of what we're doing relationally. Obviously, the relational psychoanalytic piece is giving us a process, like maybe like a process model to think about how we're going to do that together. We're going to do it in relational ways. We're going to do it clinically. There's going to be this repetition. There's going to be. The client's going to invite me to re. Experience with them if I allow this to happen. So I think. I don't think I want to think so much about myself as a detective as I want to think about myself as a participant in the recreation of their earliest experiences so that we can eventually have a new experience. So if their experience is trauma, we're going to have trauma again together, but trauma that leads to new levels of healing and change between the two of us.
- [63:25]
Dr. Dan Koch
Is this like, okay, but let's say that you were assigned me as a supervisee and like, you know, we just are gonna have different modalities. We're gonna have different broad approaches. Is this like a thing where you're like, you would really make sure I had enough of this, or is this the kind of thing where you're like, if you're gonna come from a relational lens, then this is how you're gonna need to think of it, and you're coming from a primarily cognitive lens or something. And so that's okay to think of it that way. Like, you know what I'm like, I'm trying to get a sense of that and feel free. Let it fly, man. Criticize me.
- [64:01]
Brad Straughan
When I'm supervising someone. I am trying to help them find their own voice.
- [64:07]
Dr. Dan Koch
Yeah.
- [64:08]
Brad Straughan
But I do want to challenge them in terms of how they think about what it means to be human. So if I have A supervisee that's saying, well, this client isn't thinking right about this. I want to say, well, that's a very. You're bringing a very. You're bringing your values and your ethics in this moment. And what is the client.
- [64:30]
Dr. Dan Koch
To be clear, I would never say that.
- [64:32]
Brad Straughan
No, no. Yeah. I don't think you're using the detective metaphor in that way.
- [64:37]
Dr. Dan Koch
No, no, no, no, no. I don't mean it that way.
- [64:39]
Brad Straughan
Yeah, yeah. But I think the anthropological question. Right. Which for me is deeply theological and ethical, also raises the question of what, in fact, is worth living for.
- [64:54]
Dr. Dan Koch
Hell, yeah.
- [64:55]
Brad Straughan
Right. So there's something in there, I guess, just because recently I've kind of come across his recent work, his most recent work, Mirzlaf Wolf's work on a life worth living. And I'm thinking also of a client that I have currently who's just a fascinating, lovely person who has achieved so much. Like, he's got the thing that the world. The world that the culture has told him he should get. Sure he's got it right. He's a successful business person. You know, he gets invited to these kind of weird. I shouldn't call him weird, but, like, you know, these. These kind of, like, he gets invited to these, you know, secret meetings out in the woods, you know, kind of thing where they all sit around and say. And drink scotch and smoke the best cigars or whatever. And he's asking the question, my client, is, is it worth that? Is it worth getting it? Like, what is that all about?
- [66:00]
Dr. Dan Koch
I'd like to clarify, when I say, you know, we're doing detective work, solving puzzles and stuff, these. I don't just mean, like, how do we get you to feel Fewer depressive or anxious symptoms. I mean, a lot of times, like, you know. And the existential psychology piece has really been suffusing my work recently, but I think in a way that I've noticed is quite a good fit with kind of where I was headed anyway, which is like, well, maybe the problem that we have to solve here is what are you living for? That might be the problem. I don't mean to imply that it's all surface level. I just mean that I think that I tend to operate as the relational sort of. If I'm looking for countertransference or transference stuff that is more of a. Like, if the radar pings loudly enough kind of a thing. And I'm more moment to moment focused on, like, I do a ton of making connections between things that the client has said. And I'LL go, oh, what do you. That reminds me of this thing you said. What do you think is the relationship? There's, you know, and I sort of bring out patterns and I think I have a gift for synthesis, which is also why I podcast. And so I'll be like, oh, you know, that's. What if we put these together? What does that make? Or, you know, whatever. And I guess I'm just so. I do believe that the sort of dynamics you're describing in relational psychoanalysis, I know that that's happening in some ways I would think it's kind of like, well, it's just a part of the deal. You sort of get it in the deal. It's a bundle of sticks. And one the sticks is we're going to have these relational experiences. And unless it's getting in the way, I'm not going to make it. My primary focus, though I understand the theory behind, like, well, maybe what a lot of people primarily need is this relational thing that shows them another way to be, but more common for me. We will talk about what was your model for this? Or if someone's like, why, why do I? And why am I doing this? And I go, well, did you ever see your parents do it better? You know, and the answer is often no. I was like, oh, well, who do you know that you know, who do you know that is a 50 or older year old woman that is living the kind of life you are wanting? Do you know anybody like that? Have you seen it? Are there people in your life? So, but I, but I will tend to kind of like even you can hear it in my framing, like, that's a piece of the puzzle. Like, why don't I see this? Oh, you've never seen it, you know, like that kind of a thing?
- [68:43]
Brad Straughan
Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't. I love all that. And I think maybe, maybe where I'm grappling or thinking about or getting and maybe even stuck on is I think I have Erich Fromm in my head who talks about two types of therapy, right? One that is what he called social adjustment and one that he called cure of the soul. And I think I want to be in the camp of cure of the soul, which is all the things you're describing, Dan, but it also includes a larger conversation about, like, are we part of a sin? Sorry, let me not sin, but are we part of a sick society? Right? And so, you know, I can imagine, like, again, like, you can have this, like, you can have a client come in who has all the trappings of the world. Right. Trappings. I mean, they've bought the cultural zeitgeist of this is health, but they're not healthy and they know it. And it's because their understanding of what it means to be a healthy human is broken. It's not about money and toys. It's about relationality and it's about embracing these existential realities of meaning and purpose. You know, so we use all the. We use the cognitive stuff, we use the relational psychoanalysis stuff, but at some level we're asking, I think, deeper questions and it's a kind of privileged place. Let's acknowledge that. Right. I also want to acknowledge it's a cost.
- [70:16]
Dr. Dan Koch
Time and money. It costs time and money. Emotional bandwidth, cognitive bandwidth, things like that.
- [70:22]
Brad Straughan
Right?
- [70:22]
Dr. Dan Koch
Yeah.
- [70:22]
Brad Straughan
And some of our clients are like, man, I'm dealing with the fact I was talking to a woman the other day, as an African American woman in a position of authority, I'm being disrespected by some people, you know, and she's, I think she's saying to me, or she's wondering, like, how is implicit racism a part of this? Right? So there's all that going on at the same time. It's like the work we do is so complex and so interesting and so rewarding and so difficult all at the same time.
- [70:53]
Dr. Dan Koch
I think something that's bothered me since the beginning of grad school when I really started reading and thinking about this stuff because I had to, is I keep wanting to find more common ground between the so called evidence based camp and the so called, that is so called evidence based camp. There's a real tribalism there and like a two sides thing. And it strikes me that I initially was trained sort of cognitively, and that's where I. That's one of the first thing I learned to do well, cbt. But. And like, when people talk about cbt, it always sounds like a caricature. Like it is five quick tips from a manual for improving your thought life, right? But a normal, just a normal, like even a 10, 12 week for me. Like by week seven, if I'm doing proper CBT, which I don't. I'm not like going through that as much as when I was first trained in it, but even when I was. By week seven, we are uncovering core beliefs, right? Like these are like, or as I like to call them, core anxieties. Am I lovable? Am I acceptable? Am I gonna be okay? And by week five, we're talking about intermediate beliefs, which are these norms and expectations. Expectations that we've gotten from our families, from our society, that we can then pull them out and question them. You know, oh, I shouldn't take up too much space, or, oh, my needs are never important, or my needs are the only thing that's important. You know, like these kinds of things. Like. And I just think, what the fuck CBT are you guys talking about? Like, you can upend an entire family fucking worldview with eight weeks of cbt if you're doing it the normal way now, maybe that's not the way it gets done. And I don't know. I don't know. I've never worked at a big, you know, hospital clinic with 50 clinicians doing CBT. You know, I don't know how it maybe works out in the real world, but I did work with multiple real world clinicians at offices in the Seattle metropolitan area, and they were doing it the way I'm doing it. So some of it is like, maybe that's just the tribalism. But it also does feel like if you follow any of these legit, whatever I'm gonna call legit modalities, of which there are at least 50, I don't know, maybe more, they get to really deep, consequential stuff. Okay, so that's my first little screed. I'd like to just get your response to any of that.
- [73:43]
Brad Straughan
Yeah. You know. Yeah. Speaking of straw men, arguments can be this kind of argument between, like, oh, some therapies are only focusing on symptom reduction and others are doing something more powerful and meaningful. I know, I know that. That's. That's another dualism that I kind of want or dichotomy that I want to avoid.
- [74:03]
Dr. Dan Koch
I think it's safe to say insurance companies are focused on symptom reduction. Like, yes, that's true. That's not the same thing as saying that anything that insurance company is willing to pay for is just going at symptom reduction.
- [74:17]
Brad Straughan
Yeah, no, that's right. That's right. But I think sometimes, too, even our clients will say, you know, I've got this thing and I want this thing to stop.
- [74:26]
Dr. Dan Koch
Yeah, yeah.
- [74:27]
Brad Straughan
But I'm thinking of a particular person I was working with who tended towards the kind of symptom reduction piece. Right. He would tend towards, you know, I got this bad marriage and this troubled wife, and I got. And I know I'm contributing, but, like, I gotta stop this. But I'll never forget, like, him coming in one day and saying, you know, I'm realizing I go to work and then I Come home and at the end of the day, you know, I have a scotch and I watch some television with my wife and I go to bed and I get up the next day and I do it all over again. And then he looked at me and he said, is that all there is?
- [75:13]
Dr. Dan Koch
Now we're cooking with gas, right? Yeah. In that moment, I would give the biggest goofiest dad smile and I would have to apologize. And I have done this with clients and be like, I'm not smiling because of your pain. I look like I just found a treasure map. Because I think that we might have just found a treasure map and we have to follow it now kind of thing.
- [75:41]
Brad Straughan
That's right. And so to me, the way I would describe that and getting kind of in going back into again, these four things that deeply influence me is there's this theological, spiritual, religious piece to this, There is this embodied aspect to it, there's this relational piece to it, and then there's this deeply existential piece to it, which to me, in one sense, another way I might want to say that is I want to examine with this client who asked that question. Yeah. What is the socio, cultural, political, religious context that causes you to ask that question. You feel like something's missing, you've got all this stuff, but you don't feel satisfied. And even if I could make you, and we are right, we're working on helping him recognize what does he contribute to his troubling marriage, how can he deal with that differently? How can he respond differently? What comes up to, what's his history? We're doing all this work, right? And it's cognitive and it's relational and it's psychoanalytic and it's all of that at the end of the day, like what his, his goal or his telos or his meaning and his purpose in life. He's, he's finding to be shallow. And that's, that's fascinating to me. Now we get to ask some other bigger questions.
- [77:12]
Dr. Dan Koch
I mean, that's just, that's when the therapy just takes off, right?
- [77:16]
Brad Straughan
What's worth living, what's the life worth living here?
- [77:19]
Dr. Dan Koch
Well, and so this is, so it's been interesting. So I kind of started, you know, historically with this. I'm kind of pushing back against the oh so called evidence based. And you know, part of me just thinks like, look, if you do have a theory, fucking test it and figure out how to. If it's true, there will be evidence for it. Now, it might not be exactly the kind of evidence you want or you have to maybe make some inferences or something. But like, some of it is laziness. I think that it's hard or funding. It takes a lot of money to do these studies. I don't mean to belittle any of that, but the more interesting question for me is that I love doing that cure of the soul kind of work. Ultimately, that's the stuff that resonates with the part of me that feels a type of a ministry calling of doing therapy. It is. I did consider if maybe I was supposed to be a pastor. And most of my pastor friends unanimously disconfirmed that specific idea. They said, yeah, but not as a local pastor, Dan. That's not for you. And they're right. But like, there is the way that my supervisor, Dr. Baird, who I worked with for a couple years, what he says is like, look, sometimes what you gotta do is reduce the depression or the anxiety in a few weeks. Because until you do, you don't have any. There's no space to do anything else, anything deeper.
- [78:55]
Brad Straughan
That's right.
- [78:56]
Dr. Dan Koch
That's right. And that to me is where. That's the middle ground between the two, where I do want some symptom reduction and I want it kind of quickly.
- [79:04]
Brad Straughan
Absolutely.
- [79:05]
Dr. Dan Koch
Because we can't really get any of the deeper stuff done until that happens. Because we are, you know, we are 4e human beings. Like, you know, we, we have like. And if we are flooded and if we're in fight or flight mode all the time, or if we are like so depressed that, you know, we're. We're not enjoying anything, we're not gonna get that, that energy we need to move forward. And so like, to, to me, that is how, like, is that basically how you would square, you know, those things of like, okay, we will start on like a quick kind of evidence backed way to do that so that we can dig deeper or what. How would you say it?
- [79:45]
Brad Straughan
Yeah, I mean, absolutely. I mean, if I'm thinking of like, if I have a, you know, again, I'm thinking of the privilege issues in here and the positionality and the power and all that. And I'm thinking if I have a, you know, a single mother, person of color, you know, with several kids, and she's overwhelmed, I want to meet her, where she's at. I want to like, help her think through, you know, what's going on here. But I'm still doing that in a kind of way where I'm holding her humanity and her particular social location prominently. Right. First, like, I'm concerned about the evidence based therapies that come in or, you know, and I, and I consider actually psychoanalysis to be an evidence based therapy. Yeah. That comes in and says, well, let me tell you how to do this.
- [80:34]
Dr. Dan Koch
Yeah.
- [80:34]
Brad Straughan
You know, and I don't think probably none of your listeners would, would say that they would do that.
- [80:41]
Dr. Dan Koch
Right.
- [80:42]
Brad Straughan
But I think there's a way in which we can be co opted by the context and the culture that we're a part of that we can fall into that. Right. And we can miss the particularity of this woman and her race and her socioeconomic status and those kinds of things. I have to work within that, even existentially, to help her come alongside as a fellow journeyer. I like the term of accompaniment that I'm going to accompany her through this, figuring out like, what is this going to look like for her and how are we going to do this and what's it going to end up at the end? And I still think that even in that kind of very practical, pragmatic, solution, focused approach, you can't lose sight of what it means to be human or what it means to be an embodied human. I think all of the stuff we've talked about, even though it's like sometimes feels like it's at the 30,000 foot view, it has actual real meaning even in how are we going to solve this fact that you've got these three kids and you don't have a lot of support.
- [81:46]
Dr. Dan Koch
Okay.
- [81:46]
Brad Straughan
So
- [81:49]
Dr. Dan Koch
if I give you any pushback at all today, this is going to be the only time. And it's not really on you. I have for a while found some of this kind of identity, first language unsatisfying. And the criticism there would be, of course you do. You're a privileged straight white male. Okay. That might be what it is, but the existential framing has given me some, I think, language for what I think has been going on. And I think, and I'm wondering if you think this is a little too cute, but I think it gives me a way to address it, which is to say it should be grounded in reality now. And part of that, like existentialists are good about not thinking that we have like a perch of clear viewed reality.
- [82:40]
Brad Straughan
Right.
- [82:40]
Dr. Dan Koch
That's baked into all of existentialism from the beginning, is that is precisely the thing Kierkegaard pointed out that we don't have and that Hegel thought he had, that he could see the wide scope of the spirit moving through history. And Kierkegaard calls bullshit, says you are the captain of A ship in the middle of a fucking storm. You don't see the whole field, no one does. But I like using reality rather than labels, rather than starting with, oh, you're an African American mom or whatever and more go, hey, part of what we're gonna do, and this is my internal. I'm not like role playing, but internally I'm just thinking, let's figure out what the reality is for this client. And maybe in eight out of 10, you know, women in a similar position who walk into my office, I could make some good kind of initial assessment assumptions that would be right. But maybe in two out of ten I'm wrong. And so I'd rather just go, let's start talking about it and let's identify the real world limitations that are acting upon your individual life. Now, that doesn't work in political language. It doesn't work for a politician to speak like that. It doesn't work even for a book. Right? Like, I mean, you could talk about it, you know, theoretically, but it's sort of like that language, the sort of category, first language fails in precisely the way that the individual therapeutic relationship doesn't. We don't actually need that. Now. It might be good to be sort of informed by it loosely. But isn't that like the benefit of a one on one therapeutic relationship is I don't have to rely on that. I can actually just let you tell your story and I can absorb it and come alongside you with actually fewer preconceived ideas. And that also has the benefit in existential psychology of because of that realization that I don't have a perch. Which is exactly what you were saying about the way that evidence based stuff can go awry is if I come in as the expert, it actually leaves me open to continuing to learn about the world through my client's experience. And I'm also open to having my horizons pushed and my world get bigger as I interact with them. And I'm hoping that I'm not being Pollyannaish about this, but I think that that really does give me something with real fucking teeth that doesn't fall into the trap of groups based, identity based stuff, which I, you know, maybe I'm just bored with it, but. And maybe that's on me for being bored. And if it were my lived experience, I would not be bored. That's probably true. But I also think I can frame it in this clinical way that I think it has an advantage. I'm wondering, feel free to call bullshit on me there.
- [85:42]
Brad Straughan
Yeah, No, I think I Mostly agree with you. Probably it's an issue of language games in some ways. Right. So identity politics, that shut down conversation I have a problem with. Right, yeah. And I was just talking this weekend we had an integration symposium at Fuller, which was around power, position and privilege. And so having conversation with lots of people from different cultural contexts, races, and a person of color raised this issue that, you know, there are times she even feels like when someone leads with, well, I'm Korean female, blah blah, blah, that then sometimes she said it feels like it ends the conversation. Sometimes it just locates the person in a way that's helpful to me. So we're kind of like exploring why it's probably something about the way the person says it and the relational trust and all of that. I think what I would say is again, one of those E's is embedded. Embedded means I am a body in a particular context. Contextual situatedness is something that actually 4e people are very, very interested in. So we know that matters, right? We know it matters. We know that we're two white guys talking about this. What I tell my students probably I think similar to what you're describing, Dan, you tell me if I'm wrong, but I tell them, you need to do your homework. Like you need to understand some things that I would describe as multiculturalism, for example. Right. You need to understand, for example, that people from different cultures experience time differently. Yeah, talk about time differently. Right. But then to your second point, which is more of a what an ideographic approach. Like there's an individual sitting in front of you and this person of color at 4pm is going to be very different from that person of color at 5:00pm Right. So yes, we have to experience them as particular kinds of systems. So to me it's kind of a both end sort of approach. I think I still worry though, and maybe it's partly because I've been in psychoanalysis so long that I worry that I read these case studies in books where they never situate the race or the culture or the gender of the person. It's amazing to me how many case studies I read where they say, well, a 23 year old woman came to see me for depression. I'm like, but there's so many other things, right. That actually matter in that. And that may be more again of like the particular theory that I. Now that's changing. I will say, yeah, because I just
- [88:18]
Dr. Dan Koch
went through, you know, I went through a doctor doctoral program and yeah, and in school we had a very down the middle program, like Just trying to get and maintain APA accreditation status, which I love them for and grateful to them for. And then you know, four different training settings. In all of them we are talking, you know, our demographic description includes more than age and gender or sex. So I do think that, that at least at the training level has, has, I would say it has changed.
- [88:49]
Brad Straughan
And that's, that's our, that's my fuller experience too. Yeah, I think it's when I see it out in, in, in the private practice world or you know, in certain theories, maybe in classical psychoanalysis particularly, it troubles, it troubles me I guess.
- [89:04]
Dr. Dan Koch
I think it, I think that for. Here's my sense and I could be wrong for someone who leans left like myself. It can actually be a way of, it can make us too self conscious and then we are actually failing part of our job to help our client map themselves within their actual reality. And we can. Like for instance, two things can be true at the same time. One, maybe I've got a client whose racial and socioeconomic status are presenting real stressors in their life that a lot of people don't see and that they, they, they mostly pass invisible to many of the people in their life. And it, it feels, it's very frustrating for them as well as presenting these, you know, more concrete obstacles. And it is good for me to recognize that. But I think if I'm doing existential therapy and we are naming reality, then we are going to name that. Right? Like I would name like Kristen and I have been talking about her Ms. Diagnosis. Like you have to name it like that is a reality of her life now. Sorry Brad. That's for people who have been listening to the show for a while recently. But it can also be true that that same client is living in a way like banging his head against a wall because he's trying to make choices that ignore those realities. And actually the way to get out of them is to acknowledge them, name where they are. Hard limits. But as a left leaning person with maybe a poor black client, I am, it's like I would feel uncomfortable maybe even venturing a conversation about are we maybe acting in ways that are actually giving those limits more power by sort of ignoring them, you know, So I just, I'm looking for something that I'm looking for something that can sort of do it all. And maybe that's a fool's errand. But Brofen Brenner's ecological systems model, which everybody will get in grad school of like hey, I'm impacted. I'm myself. But I'm impacted. I'm embedded in these concentric circles. That's just true. Maybe I'm doing a little sleight of hand by just calling that. I just think that's reality. Yes, there are mesosystems and macro systems and microsystems. That is true. I'm grateful for that. And to the extent that that's applicable for my client, let's map it out, because those are the realities of existence that my client is embedded within. I just think we could, I think we could do without the performative, the sort of performative stuff that maybe in some cases is actually getting in the way of just treating our clients the way we ought to treat them.
- [92:02]
Brad Straughan
Well, yeah, I mean, that's always a challenge, right? Like, when is it performative? But like you named something really important when the therapist in power doesn't name the realities, oftentimes the client who doesn't have the power won't name them.
- [92:20]
Dr. Dan Koch
Yeah.
- [92:21]
Brad Straughan
Malan Fors has a good book about this called the Grammar of Psychotherapy, where she examines power and privilege and how it actually shows shifts and changes. Sometimes the patient has more power than the therapist. Right. These are all really interesting things. But where it takes me back to is like liberation psychology, which talks about raising critical consciousness within our patients and that even some of our patients of color are not aware of the internalized racism that they've taken in. And then how does that then get played out between the two of us in a kind of transference countertransference.
- [92:50]
Dr. Dan Koch
I think that's true. And then there are also clients for whom. No, they're perfectly aware and it's not what they want to talk about.
- [92:58]
Brad Straughan
No, sure.
- [92:58]
Dr. Dan Koch
So it's both. You know what I mean? Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, we have to be.
- [93:02]
Brad Straughan
Our job is to agreeing on this.
- [93:03]
Dr. Dan Koch
Yeah. I'm thinking of like an infielder ready stance in baseball. Like we, we need to sort of be in that ready position to field a grounder or a pop up or a line drive in whichever direction it's going to come. Like, we, we have to do the homework, as you said, and like have that, that basic sense and awareness and be able to sort of catch what comes our way. And including that means like. Yeah, like obviously we also have this job of setting the tone of the therapeutic, you know, the tone of the setting and out of which the relationship and rapport build. And so, yes, we need to give those signals that we are attentive and that we are not coming in with a bunch of biases of our own. Yeah. Okay, so I guess we don't at
- [93:50]
Brad Straughan
least owning our biases.
- [93:50]
Dr. Dan Koch
Yeah. Or at least owning them. Yeah. Okay. I have one last question for you. That is. Okay, more of a tangent, left field. No, this is great.
- [93:58]
Brad Straughan
Okay.
- [94:00]
Dr. Dan Koch
Okay. And this is totally personal, and I probably shouldn't even do this on the podcast, but I'm an authentic podcaster. How do you. How do you like. You are a guy that I would describe. And a lot of my guests are this way. A lot of the wonderful psychologists and philosophers and theologians that I've met and become friends with through the years of doing this podcast. You know, you're not alone in this, but I think of you as a good example of you have had a fulfilling career. You have been able to write and publish some books. You have some cache with academics. You also have a clinical life. You have a pastoral life. You have, you know, enjoyed being a professor. One thing I notice in myself as I think about not my clinical work, but my public work, like with the podcast and writing, speaking, these kinds of things, I do have this kind of part of me that wants to be maximally known, maximally famous. I notice in my desire to interview celebrities, there's a real star fucker part of me. I think that's the technical term. I want their prestige to rub off on me because they agreed to talk with me, and I want people to perceive me as being friendly with famous people. I am feeling physically disgusted with myself as I describe this to you, just for the record, I actually got a little bile coming up my throat.
- [95:24]
Brad Straughan
Okay, hang on.
- [95:25]
Dr. Dan Koch
But how have you. Is that something you've struggled with? How have you weathered that? Anything sort of in that field? Because there's a part of me that recognizes, of course, immediately how facile and putrid and bullshit that is. But there's also a part of me that's like, well, I'm a human being. Like, I can, you know, I get it. And I'm a performer. I was a musician, you know, for 20 years. And I like having things be public. And I'm trying to, like, I'm trying to. Now that I'm finally done with school and have my shingle out and like, you know, whatever. Trying to, like, get a healthier sense of, you know, what I ought to do and how I should approach public work as opposed to just, you know, private, clinical, good work with clients, which is that part has not. Is not really affected by this conversation. That's going very well. I would say I'm happy with how I am internalizing that Stuff I should say.
- [96:23]
Brad Straughan
Yeah.
- [96:24]
Dr. Dan Koch
But yeah, like what is that? What does that bring up, like any, like, literally advice for me or someone like me? I'm just so curious. Or what's worked for you? What have you noticed?
- [96:35]
Brad Straughan
Yeah, no, it's a great question. It's a vulnerable question. So I could say, yeah, I have for sure grappled with that. You know, you want your books to sell a lot, you want people to send you notes.
- [96:47]
Dr. Dan Koch
You want to get invited to clandestine scotch and cigar parties in whatever you
- [96:53]
Brad Straughan
want to be invited on.
- [96:54]
Dr. Dan Koch
By the way, where are these woods? These must be on golf courses or something, because there's no fucking woods where you live.
- [97:01]
Brad Straughan
No, no, no, they go to other states.
- [97:03]
Dr. Dan Koch
Oh, okay. They fly. They fly private planes to go fly the private jets.
- [97:07]
Brad Straughan
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay.
- [97:08]
Dr. Dan Koch
They're going to Jacksonville.
- [97:09]
Brad Straughan
They have to have that thing over their head.
- [97:11]
Dr. Dan Koch
Just Jackson Hole. Let's just be honest. Okay, got it.
- [97:12]
Brad Straughan
Probably.
- [97:13]
Dr. Dan Koch
Probably.
- [97:13]
Brad Straughan
Yeah. So, yeah. You know, I always, like, I tell my students, tell myself that, you know, without some ambition, you never get anything done. There's My analyst once said, without narcissism, nobody would get anything done.
- [97:24]
Dr. Dan Koch
Yeah. Without a little bit.
- [97:26]
Brad Straughan
Yeah, yeah. And I think even like years ago, reading Neville Semington's work on narcissism, he thought narcissism was at sort of at the core of the human condition, which theologically in some ways makes some sense to me. And what's then the journey of moving from kind of self preoccupation to other preoccupation.
- [97:47]
Dr. Dan Koch
Also it also ties in with the sort of evolutionary cognitive stuff we were talking about earlier. Right. Of that big brain that we sort of live in our minds in a way that other animals don't. And so there's could be a kind of a lowercase N narcissism kind of baked into that.
- [98:02]
Brad Straughan
Right, that's right. It's interesting. Peter Chabad says, he says the term self conscious is not a good term. Whenever you say someone becomes self conscious of something, usually it means like it's a bad feeling.
- [98:13]
Dr. Dan Koch
Yeah. They're getting embarrassed.
- [98:14]
Brad Straughan
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. Yeah. I think it's partly what you said.
- [98:18]
Dr. Dan Koch
Right.
- [98:18]
Brad Straughan
It's like, well, I'm human and this is what it's like to do that. And I notice when the envy comes up, you know, sometimes it's jealousy and sometimes it's envy and kind of talking yourself down, learning to become resilient, you know, all of that. I also think, though, theologically and psychologically I've really appreciated again, Richard Beck's work, which again, Back to existentialism, he's coming back on. Yep. Great. Fantastic.
- [98:43]
Dr. Dan Koch
Yeah, I just got his new book.
- [98:45]
Brad Straughan
Okay. Yeah, but you know, in his book on slavery to death. That's the one. So it's. I mean, yeah, to me it's just like it's money and this idea that all of life is gifted. And if that's true, there's more than enough to go around. I literally don't have anything to lose. And as he says, and he's borrowing from someone else, I can live this ecstatic identity. I can live this identity, this martyred life really, in some ways. So I do think for me, and I'm not saying I got this conquered by any stretch of the imagination, Dan, but I do think it comes back to me again theologically. I think my theology helps me with this, that you know, what kind of life is worth living. It's nice if you get celebrity in some ways, if you use it well. But to get it, I don't think that's the purpose. You know, if you get it, use it. And we see examples of that. Right. People who do in fact get celebrity and use it in really powerful and meaningful ways. And then those who use it very
- [99:50]
Dr. Dan Koch
poorly, Father Greg Boyle, you know, uses his celebrity really well. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not as many examples of that category as the not using it well category, are there?
- [100:01]
Brad Straughan
Right.
- [100:02]
Dr. Dan Koch
Do you think that they're like. My sense and my hope is that a deeper dive into existentialism and potentially where I sort of imagine I'm heading is some version of Christian existentialism just sort of wholeheartedly endorsed. I'm not there yet, but that in that the sort of ruthless honesty about oneself and the limitations. A huge theme of embracing an existential viewpoint is seeing yourself as properly sized, which is Daryl Van Togren's definition of humility, which I love being right sized. But as it turns out, in a 14 billion year old universe with 8 billion people on the planet, that's pretty fucking small. It's still you also. It is also. You have this. You have the Pearl of great price. You have the imago dei. You are an agent in the world with freedom and responsibility, but you're just one. And you're. The limits of your control are less than you'd like. Maybe not everybody's this way. I think that's one thing that's interesting about trying to frame things in terms of reality is it also helps you stop saying that everybody is like something because people are different and you can just find it for each person. For me, I have grandiosity. I am not the person who thinks, oh, I'm a worm, I don't have anything to offer. I think I have way more to offer than I have to offer. So that's the way I'm always gonna err. Right. So I think I am hopeful that digging deeper into this will reduce my self deception and, and that kind of a thing, I mean, is that like. Does that pencil out for you? The way I'm describing it?
- [101:45]
Brad Straughan
I think so. And the one other thing I don't know that you named explicitly is aging.
- [101:50]
Dr. Dan Koch
Yeah, yeah.
- [101:51]
Brad Straughan
I mean, getting older. You know, 14 years ago I played basketball twice a week. I don't do that anymore.
- [102:00]
Dr. Dan Koch
Yeah, yeah. I used to spin around and flail my guitar as hard as I could night after night and I. And burnt, you know, 700 calories every night. And I was under 200 pounds for years and years.
- [102:13]
Brad Straughan
That's right. That's right.
- [102:14]
Dr. Dan Koch
I'm a six.
- [102:15]
Brad Straughan
Three things you can't control.
- [102:17]
Dr. Dan Koch
So that was a real thing for me. Yeah. Age. Yeah, Age is obviously. That's a big one. Yeah. Also, you know, having kids and kids, their well being sort of insists itself upon you in a. In a way that's very psychologically powerful and I'm very grateful for. Okay, so I'm doing all the right things. Thanks, Brad.
- [102:38]
Brad Straughan
Appreciate it. You're doing all the right things.
- [102:39]
Dr. Dan Koch
Yeah. Thanks for the pep talk, buddy.
- [102:42]
Brad Straughan
Anytime, Dan. Anytime.
- [102:44]
Dr. Dan Koch
Okay, where if people want to connect with you on like Amazon author page or do you have a website? Where should we send people?
- [102:52]
Brad Straughan
They can go to my website at Fuller, actually, if you just. Or you just put in.
- [102:56]
Dr. Dan Koch
Brady, put that in the notes.
- [102:57]
Brad Straughan
Yeah, yeah. And my latest book came out in August, this last August, the Integrative Mindset. And so that's really for clinicians who are wanting to grapple with. How do I think about the ways in which spirituality, religion may show up? What do I do with that kind of. When it shows up and it's not. We tried to write it so that it's not like any one sort of theoretical, psychological. Theoretical perspective, nor particular religious perspective. Although of course I co authored it with Earl Bland. And so of course our stuff comes through, but. But that's what we tried to do.
- [103:36]
Dr. Dan Koch
Well, that's awesome. Okay, great. That might need to be its own conversation about working with religion, spirituality in the room. Even just the way you were kind of talking about it, I was like, oh, we actually have really, I think, quite a distinct clientele in terms of the type of questions they're asking about faith and that kind of stuff. I was hearing you as more of a kind of like you'll have some sort of type of clients who would might want a Christian therapist or Christian counseling, and they're like, very vocally wanting to integrate this into their therapeutic work. And that is much more rare for me. I more deal with people who are dealing with the fallout of religious shift, religious change, deconversion, stuff like that. But same concepts and maybe some of the same. So that might need to be another conversation. Feel free to email me if you want to hear Brad and I talk about that. Our listeners leave a comment. Whatever, dude. So fun. We went long because it was so good. Thank you so much, Brad.
- [104:35]
Brad Straughan
Thanks so much, Dan. Good to see you.
- [104:36]
Dr. Dan Koch
Yeah, you too, man.
- [104:38]
Brad Straughan
Okay.