Purpose & Calling After Religious Change (#400)

Summary

Podcast Summary: Purpose & Calling After Religious Change

Religion on the Mind with Dr. Dan Koch — Episode #400
Guest: Dr. Pamela Epstein King
Release Date: May 18, 2026

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Overview

This episode dives into the psychological and spiritual complexities of purpose and calling—especially in the aftermath of significant changes in one’s religious beliefs or identity. Host Dan Koch explores with Dr. Pamela Epstein King (Fuller Seminary, Thrive Center) how the concepts of purpose, calling, and meaning are defined in psychology, how they operate within intact religious systems, and what happens to them when those systems break down. Drawing from positive psychology, developmental theory, and practical strategies, the discussion is rich with insights for anyone in the process of religious change or deconstruction.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Defining Religiousness, Spirituality, Purpose & Calling

[03:36 – 11:02]

• Religiousness vs. Spirituality:

  • Religiosity is often measured by practices like attending services or prayer frequency, while spirituality may refer more broadly to beliefs, transcendence, or meaning.
  • Quote (Dr. King, 04:26):
    “Spirituality can have to do with beliefs. It can have to do with experiences of transcendence…sometimes people measure meaning itself, having meaning in life.”

• Do Religious People Have Greater Purpose?

  • Religions, when engaged authentically (orienting power), offer coherent life purpose and meaning by addressing “issues of ultimacy.”
  • Quote (Dr. King, 05:43):
    “Religion and spirituality, when people think through it, is a source of meaning and purpose. They address issues of ultimacy which tell us why our lives matter.”

• Purpose vs. Calling vs. Meaning (Psychological Definitions):

  • Purpose: An enduring life goal that matters to the self and contributes beyond the self.
  • Calling: When a line of work or profession aligns with one’s values, sense of self, skills, and gifts; broader than just religious or ministerial roles.
  • Meaning: Three facets—coherence (life makes sense), mattering (significance), and purposeful action.
  • Quote (King, 11:02):
    “Purpose is understood as an enduring life goal...something you can pursue and achieve.”

Memorable Exchange:
[13:24 – 14:14] Dr. Koch on leaving high-control religious systems:
“If you grew up in that...you might go, matters to me, Pam? Doesn’t it just matter that it matters to God?”

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2. Purpose & Calling Within Intact Religious Systems

[39:25 – 53:09]

• Religious Systems Offer Built-In Resources:

  • Doctrines, narratives, ethics, and rituals provide a coherent framework for answering “why am I here?” and “what should I do?”
  • Flexibility within traditions allows for personal growth and shifting interests within boundaries.

• Role of Community:

  • Robust, supportive religious communities help reinforce purpose, foster action, and offer relational belonging.
  • Quote (King, 48:26):
    “We do the work of becoming in the context of belonging, and that’s absolutely essential.”

• Potential Downsides:

  • Systems that are too rigid or prescriptive may limit pursuit of authentic calling, especially for women or marginalized members.
  • Quote (King, 53:09):
    “If you’re within a religious context that…has predefined roles that override, you know, human uniqueness…that is really problematic for people.”

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3. Disruption After Religious Change

[58:15 – 66:14]

• Where the Rupture Hits:

  • Loss of meta-narrative: Who am I? Where do I fit in the big story?
  • Agency: Am I now completely responsible for my life’s direction?
  • Mattering: Is my life significant in the absence of cosmic validation?
  • Quote (Dr. Koch, 29:29):
    “You zoom all the way out…none of this matters at all. That can be kind of a relief...but there’s a risk you actually cease to feel like your life really matters.”

• Loss of Practices, Rituals, and Community:

  • Religious change often means leaving behind rhythms, relationships, and rituals that provided structure and meaning.
  • Quote (King, 62:25):
    “The pot of gold in religion is the people, is the community…I mean, that’s where the research is.”

• Ethics and Coherence:

  • Leaving can bring moral confusion—no longer following a clear, pre-packaged ethical code; must reconstruct it from scratch.
  • Fragmentation and loss of coherence; “Is my life still a story that makes sense?”

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4. Reconstructing Purpose, Calling, and Meaning After Religious Change

[67:27 – 89:27]

• Thrive Model: Six Facets of Spiritual Health

  • Transcendence: Find something bigger than the self (may or may not be “religious”).
  • Habits: Build practices that promote reflection, emotional regulation, and growth.
  • Relationships: Cultivate community or a “holy/unholy huddle” for support and belonging.
  • Identity: Continually renegotiate identity; align with true values and narrative.
  • Vocation/Purpose: Pursue activities deeply meaningful to the self and others.
  • Ethics/Virtue: Develop a personal (but evolving) moral framework.
  • Quote (King, 67:27):
    “You gotta find something bigger than yourself…experiences of awe, transcendent emotions, these are good for our brain…”

• Values Clarification:

  • Vital for post-religious growth. Often requires separating what truly matters to you from inherited values.
  • Quote (King, 73:45):
    “Identity is very much made up of what we value. So when working with people on identity…what are your values?”

• The Role of Community (Again):

  • It’s a myth that meaning can be rebuilt entirely solo—relationships are needed to “hear each other into speech” (Parker Palmer).
  • Quote (King, 50:45):
    “Our lives speak when others hear us and listen deeply.”

• Developmental Lens:

  • Change is normal. Growth, renegotiation, and evolving identity occur at multiple life stages.
  • Quote (King, 78:20):
    “We are very malleable and plastic and we grow and the world’s growing around us…when religious systems don’t change, that’s hard because they don’t fit with the world so well.”

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On Purpose After Leaving Religion
  “[Purpose is] an enduring life goal that matters to you and contributes beyond the self. Just because your religious situation has changed does not mean you cannot have enduring life goals.” — Dr. Koch, 11:26

• On Calling Beyond Ministry
  “Often people of faith or not faith might feel like, gosh, I’m an artist. It’s a calling. I have to do this. This is so deeply aligned with my value of needing to create or express or lead or connect people with their feelings...” — Dr. King, 08:19

• On Losing Structure & Coherence
  “A lack of the coherence and sense of one’s life is one of the most common symptoms of religious change…I see it all the time.” — Dr. Koch, 26:48

• On Meaning & Purpose Post-Religion
  “As humans, we’re meaning makers. We know what centers of life give us meaning and joy, and so we have to go after those.” — Dr. King, 60:13

• On the Necessity of Community
  “We do the work of becoming in the context of belonging, and that’s absolutely essential.” — Dr. King, 48:26

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Welcome and Episode Structure — 01:37
• Defining Religiosity, Spirituality — 03:36
• Purpose & Calling in Psychology — 10:55
• Importance of Intrinsic Motivation — 14:14
• Meaning Defined: Coherence, Mattering, Purposeful Action — 26:12
• The Move from Happiness to Meaning Research — 32:55
• Religion as Meaning-Maker — 54:48
• Religious Change: What Gets Broken? — 58:15
• Centres of Meaning & Thrive Model — 67:27
• Values Clarification in Deconstruction — 73:08
• Developmental Growth Emphasized — 75:50
• Ethics & Crises (Trump Example) — 79:42
• Wrap-Up & Universal Principles — 87:17

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Resource Mentions

• Thrive Center for Human Development: Practical resources for thriving after religious change
• Parker Palmer’s “A Hidden Wholeness”: Community and circles of deep listening
• Episode #285: Explores the Thrive model’s six facets in more detail

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Podcast Tone & Language

• Conversational, humorous, and candid (“a little bit of cussing”)
• Accessible for both religious and secular listeners—emphasizes practical psychology and warmth over doctrine
• Encouraging and empathetic towards those in religious transition and their families

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Contact for questions or feedback: [e-mail]

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For anyone navigating religious change, this episode offers a roadmap for rethinking meaning, reestablishing purpose, and rebuilding belonging—grounded in both psychology and the lived realities of faith, doubt, and growth.

Transcript

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[Dr. Dan Koch]

Welcome back everybody to Religion on the Mind. I AM your host, Dr. Dan Koch, licensed therapist and joining me today. Her last name might be King, but it's probably more accurate to say that she is my own personal Positive Psychology Queen. It is Pamela Epstein King. Pam, thanks for being back, Dan.

[Pamela Epstein King]

It's always an honor. Grateful to share the screen with you,

[Dr. Dan Koch]

host of the with and for podcast and you also run or help run the Thrive Center. A lot of practical resources around positive psychology, virtue meaning, stuff like that. A lot of the kind of stuff that we're going to be talking about today here. And I have a real basic sort of structure for our conversation that I'm hoping to stick to. Part one, let's talk about purpose and calling. Part two, let's talk about how that tends to work for people when their religious systems are intact. And part three, let's talk about what tends to happen when those religious systems are no longer intact, when they have gone through some sort of religious change, including maybe some practical strategies or even I guess maybe we'll talk about interventions as in therapy. But you might also have some sort of individual practices or sort of things that people can run on themselves, so to speak. And it's worth noting, you know, I've been on your show a couple times on with and for and you've been on here at least twice now. I think this is the third time you've been here and if not, it should be. So that's on me.

[Pamela Epstein King]

Yeah, it might be the third. Yes, I think so. One long, long Covid. Long ago when we originally.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah, it's all, it's all one podcast. So let's start here. Just very, very straightforwardly, do religious people tend to have a greater sense of purpose and or calling in their lives? And if so, how do you know that that's true or why do you think that that's true?

[Pamela Epstein King]

Great question. I think first I'm going to ask you, Dan, what do you mean by religious people? There's lots of types of religious people.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah. Okay. Force my hand. So in the realm of research, you can't really just talk about religious. Religious people. Right. Because there is no sort of straightforward category. But you could talk about religiosity or spirituality and you could measure. Religiosity is, as I understand it, generally measured by, you know, how often do you attend services throughout the week, maybe plus or instead of it, like how often are you praying? You know, sort of like practical religion. And then spirituality, I guess, tends to be measured more by, I don't know, is it also practice, but also maybe beliefs about transcendence or connection to a higher power, stuff like that?

[Pamela Epstein King]

Well, and that could be a whole nother conversation in its own. But yes, sure. So people will measure spirituality and religiousness in many different ways. Spirituality can have to do with beliefs. It can have to do with experiences of transcendence. It can have to do with sometimes people measure meaning itself having meaning in life, so that that can get nuanced. So I guess I'll. I'll go back to your main question and thank you for offering that. There is such a variety and sometimes a distinction between those who might identify as religious and those who identify as spiritual. But I think the question around meaning and purpose comes up that when people who are religious have a sense of devotion to their beliefs, where it's not just a social system of like, I show up at synagogue on Saturday or church on Sunday. But then when there is some actual convict about the beliefs and the beliefs have what I might call orienting power on someone's life when they really matter, those folks do tend to have a bit more purpose and meaning because religion becomes a source of that religion and Spirituality, when people think through it, is a source of meaning and purpose. They address issues of ultimacy which tell us why our lives matter.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah. And I mean, religion, probably more so than spirituality on average, will have maybe a bit more to say straightforwardly. Right. About what that purpose is. Like, what is our purpose? You know, like, if you're raised, reform, and you get the Westminster Catechism, the first question is, what is the chief end of man, of humankind, to love God and enjoy him forever? Bob's your uncle. There's your purpose right there. I mean, it's literally in. It's the first question of that catechism. That's a very straightforward example. But of course, the Catholic Catechism, I'm sure, has very similar questions and answers. And it's implicit if it's not explicit in basically any religious tradition.

[Pamela Epstein King]

Right, Definitely. When we think about what religions provide for people psychologically, I break it into two categories. There's beliefs and doctrines and there's communities of practice. And one of the sets of beliefs that sets religion apart from politics, sports, ideology is teleology, is religion offers people purpose. So whether that's Christianity, Islam, Judaism, people might spill some ink on how that purpose is understood. Or even the shorter Westminster Catechism, like, what does it mean to enjoy God or love God? We can dissect that a bit. But religions generally offer people purpose. So it's those that engage in religion in a way, whether it's their beliefs or the community or the practices, to suss out or discern what their purpose is in the context of that religion. Those are ones who really have a stronger sense of why I'm on this planet and how I work that out. But I can be religious and not engage in those teleological beliefs around purpose. So that's why I ask, like, what do you mean by religious?

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah, yeah. Well. And when it comes to calling, the dice are loaded ahead of time in my mind. Right. I think of people being called to ministry. That's the first thing I think of. And maybe if I'm thinking biblically, I might think about different leaders in the Bible or prophets being called by God. So there's a real strong sort of natural relationship in my mind between the concept of calling, at least within Christianity, and, like, the construction, the concept of minister ministry. But that can't be it, Right. There must be people who, through their religious faith, feel a sense of calling that is not overtly ministerial.

[Pamela Epstein King]

Right, Absolutely, yeah. In fact, there's a wonderful psychologist at Colorado State University, Brian Dick who does come from a reformed theological background initially.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

But you're saying that just as a trigger warning to me, basically.

[Pamela Epstein King]

Yeah, exactly, exactly. No, but he, in organizational psychology, has developed a beautiful science of calling. So he distinguishes calling from job within psychology to help people understand that although he is talking about a job, that you might be paid for that. When a profession has an alignment with your deepest values and your sense of purpose in life and also your gifts, then it is bigger than a job or even a career. But it is a calling in your life that you feel compelled to do this because it's so aligned with who you are now. Absolutely. Traditionally, that word has always been associated with more religious positions or people in ministry. But often people of faith or not faith might feel like, gosh, I'm an artist. It's a calling. I have to do this. This is so deeply aligned with my value of needing to create or. Or express or lead or connect people with their feelings or create beauty, that more and more, especially as people leave traditional religion, as human beings, we're meaning seekers. We can't help that. And often people spend so much time working, they're realizing they have to create a sense of calling or meaning aligned with their work and profession.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah, okay, so this is helpful. So we're kind of broadening out what these terms mean, purpose and calling and divorcing them from maybe too, too close of an association with just ministers. You know, you're a psychologist at Fuller Seminary. Your work is generally in this sort of positive psychology through the lens or in the field of sort of Christian religious folks, as well as bridging that with sort of the. The general secular or whatever positive psychology research world. So getting as abstract as possible, sort of like pulling as far away from Fuller as you can and just thinking like you're at a positive psych convention with just whoever is there. Distinguish then purpose and calling in their sort of cleanest, most universal forms.

[Pamela Epstein King]

Sure. Okay. And I might throw in meaning there too, because that's also great.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

We're going to get to meaning in a second anyway, so let's add that.

[Pamela Epstein King]

Good. All right, sure. So really, the most accepted definition of purpose in psychology, and there's a little bit of a turf war or semantic war, but generally purpose is understood as an enduring life goal. So that's the first thing. It's actually something that you can pursue and achieve.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

My bells are already ringing, by the way, for folks after religious change, 100%. Just because your religious situation has changed does not mean you cannot have enduring life goals. Good. News, just a little taste for later.

[Pamela Epstein King]

Yeah, exactly. So if you've left your religious belief system, you might still have a goal of caring for people, of creating, of leading, of bridge, building, of reconciliation. So it doesn't necessarily, in a sense, that goal is transportable across ideological lines or communities or contexts. And I really want to say that this definition of purpose is from William Damon, Bill Damon at Stanford, and he has really pioneered in this research, built a field, and others like Kendall Bronk at Claremont grad school, Bill Yang at Boston College and many others have carried this out. So it's an enduring life goal that matters to the self. So this is aligned with what you care about. And I do teach in a graduate school and one of the things that I love to tell my grad students, especially new ones, your purpose is what matters to you. It's not your parents purpose for you. David Levine, many moons ago, back in the 80s, talked about this dream, this kind of archetypal thing that helps people navigate the waters from adolescence into adulthood. And he would always say it's really important that you dream your own dream that you're not pursuing your parents dream for you. And that is part of the task of emerging adulthood is recognizing what is our dream. And it may be the same as our parents dream or our family or ethnic community's dream, but it's really important that we differentiate and identify. Like, if I'm going to have an enduring life purpose, what is it that's mine that's aligned with my gifts, skills and passions?

[Dr. Dan Koch]

I gotta just briefly pop in here before we keep going, because two things come up. First of all, what came up for me is this idea that, well, if you're raised in a particularly, you know, all encompassing form of a religious system, and I try not to like, I like that all encompassing or sort of totality. I like some of these words. High control is often thrown around, which I feel like I want to be careful. Especially as a spiritual abuse researcher. I don't want to label things controlling that are not necessarily controlling, they're just sort of totalizing. They just cover, they have directions for more of life kind of a thing. Right. So if you grew up in that or you're still sort of connected to something like that, you might go, matters to me, Pam, doesn't it just matter that it matters to God? Right.

[Pamela Epstein King]

So that's the first thing.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Secondly, I just have to note if listeners haven't listen to an episode from December trusting yourself after religious change, we get into sort of the problems with that, that's a huge issue for so many of my clients because you're sort of taught in a lot of religious systems to outsource trust to others to proper authority figures. They will say that that's trusting God, but what it practically usually means is trusting God's will to be interpreted through certain human authority figures or structures or interpretations of the Bible or something like that. And so the fact that it matters to the self, that's already kicking some things around for people. Sorry. Third point is that this connects to the value of religiosity. In the research literature, intrinsic motivation to be religious is where you get all the benefits. If it's just extrinsic, you're there because your mom's forcing you to be there, or you're there because, well, I converted to get married, but I don't really believe any of this shit, then you don't get most of those benefits. You might get some of the social benefits and stuff like that just because you might make friends at church. But the real benefits of religiosity are tied to intrinsic internal motivation. So even in a religious situation, if you're a believer in good standing, whatever, it still has to matter to you, or else you're not even really getting. You're not sort of cleaning up your plate, so to speak, with your religious meal.

[Pamela Epstein King]

It's not just it has to matter to you, but you, uniquely you has to matter. And I think that's what you're saying. So often in comprehensive religious systems, we get oriented outside of ourselves to what does God want?

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah, yeah.

[Pamela Epstein King]

What is, what does leadership want? What do my parents say? I've been taught to be obedient.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah.

[Pamela Epstein King]

What do you want? That's also very biblical. That God gives us the desires of our heart, that we are fearfully and wonderfully made creations, that we are given unique spiritual gifts like our human uniqueness really matters. And ultimately going back to calling language our vocation, our unique expression, like living out, becoming who we were uniquely made to be is so necessary. So Bill Damon's work on purpose, I think is so important because, yes, it's actionable. It's an enduring life goal. It's not a sense of purpose, of why my life matters. But the research shows that when you have an actionable goal that might evolve, will evolve over time, that's meaningful to yourself, that's aligned with what is unique and distinct and what matters about you. And then the third element is it contributes beyond yourself. So purpose is not self serving. Purpose is not, oh, you know, bank, I'M just going to make bank or my own success. The way Damon defines and measures service and Kendall Bronk developed this great assessment tool, if anybody's looking to measure it, is that it also contributes beyond the self. And that's where you get the real psychological benefits, when it's bigger than you. And now in the literature, there is. This is where the semantic or the turf war is. Is like, does purpose have to contribute beyond the self? Can it just be self involved? But the real psychological benefits come when it is greater than you. So I lean into that, and that's aligned theologically.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

I think there could be a concern that, oh, if it has to go beyond me, does that mean that I have to work at a nonprofit or whatever? It's like, no, no, no, no. You could, like, sell insurance, and you really enjoy the team that you work with, and you have kind of a role in the office, and maybe you have a sense of, like, here's my favorite thing that I can provide to my clients. I take my work seriously. Like that. That could be contributing beyond yourself. So we, like, I think, like, some clients, especially, who had that real thick religious upbringing, you know, you can kind of assume that this amount of purpose is unavailable to somebody who works in tech or whatever. It's like, no, no, no. You could find this in a lot of different ways.

[Pamela Epstein King]

100%. I go to a smaller Presbyterian church here in Pasadena, and it's just a very extraordinary group, even though it's smaller. So we have, like, a retired Presbyterian home in the area. So we have all these retired, like, missionaries, professors, ministers, who are, like, when you think of calling in ministry, rock stars, like, you know, have lived through Kabul, wherever. It's amazing. But you also have these other individuals, whether they're landscape architects, whether they're in the, you know, Hollywood writing movies. I got Caltech professors who are inventing new, you know, materials and elements and things like that. But they all have this deep sense of how they are contributing to God's bigger and ongoing work in this world. And it's absolutely beautiful. But because their job, their role is connected to this larger narrative, maybe not as directly as the missionary in Thailand, but every day they wake up knowing, like, this is part of a bigger purpose. I am being a steward of my gifts. I am offering my life, and I'm making a difference. And I'm also doing what I love. I'm a financial advisor. I'm selling insurance. I'm designing homes. That's really very purposeful work. And I think a group I know you're interested in like the religious shifters or changers. I find that younger generations I mean there is just a paradigm shift going on or has gone on of we're just so much more deeply connected than I was raised like in the 80s. You were really like you were taught like be a yuppie, do your own thing, make as much bank as you can. And I think people Gen Z, Gen Alpha millennials are much more have a sense of like my life is interconnected with others, how I treat the planet, how I live in community. That is important. So I think it's people more naturally increase their work to like how does it what difference is it making? Somehow. 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. Eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 Premium and a year of Xbox game Pass ultimate with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn [e-mail] studentoffer while supplies last ends June 30 turns at aka mscollegepc

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[Dr. Dan Koch]

okay, just to recap there Purpose, an enduring life goal that matters to yourself and that contributes beyond yourself. That's purpose. Okay, calling. Let's do that one.

[Pamela Epstein King]

Okay, so Brian Dick who I Because there are so many more theological understandings of calling of like that attached to God's word.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah, who cares? No thanks.

[Pamela Epstein King]

Yeah. Okay, so Brian's work already calling non confidence? No, no. He just does a really wonderful job of talking about when someone's profession or career, their line of work deeply aligns to their ethical values. You know, their ethical moral values, their sense of self, their gift and their greater why their sense. I'm using sense of purpose to differentiate that in the world. So anybody can have a calling, a teacher.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Okay, so you said ethics. What else does it align with?

[Pamela Epstein King]

Yeah, so like moral values, personal values, skills, passions, gifts, and your sense of purpose, like your why on the world. In the world.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Okay, yeah. So then a calling is where purpose, this enduring but maybe vague life goal gets a bit more practical, a bit more boots on the ground. Is that what we're saying?

[Pamela Epstein King]

And calling is generally references a line of work.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Right. Okay, so purpose, it's more specific in that sense. Purpose is more broad. Okay, yes. Great.

[Pamela Epstein King]

And so like you know, purpose could be like parent, like a full time parent might be like that is my purpose. This is my goal. And it's aligned to who I am using my gifts and it's contributing beyond even my family.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Right.

[Pamela Epstein King]

So we're calling. I guess calling could be attached to parenting, but generally like again, psychological literature, if that's what we're referencing, it's often in reference to not just a job, not just a career, but a calling, a line of work that is deeply aligned with the things that matter most to us.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah. Okay. And then you wanted to add in meaning because. And I have a. Some sort of follow ups about that. So then how are we defining meaning in the psychological literature?

[Pamela Epstein King]

Yeah, so when someone has a sense of meaning in life, there's three aspects of meaning. In the psychological literature. We're generally referring to people who have a sense that their life is coherent and makes sense. So you can think about that as a narrative, like, oh, I am this person who came from this place and am going or heading or doing X. Where that might sound really simple, like my life is coherent. But like these days, life does not feel terrible. You have to work really hard to make sense of your life and make it coherent.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

I would say a lack of the coherence and sense of one's life is one of the most common symptoms of religious change or effects of religious change. So I see it all the time.

[Pamela Epstein King]

Yep, 100%. So another place where religious change hits people in terms of meaning. So the second element is matter, mattering that my life matters and people think of this differently. It can both. You hear significance in mattering depending if you're looking at Steger's work or Park's work. But one is like cosmically, I matter as a human entity. I have dignity and I matter. So when you have a religious system with a loving creator or someone who's a God who's created you purposefully, that's easy to matter. When you get rid of those beliefs, it can be harder to experience mattering. So humans who are atheist or even agnostic have to be really intentional about setting up community or cultivating beliefs around their personal mattering insignificance in the world.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah, I would just like to pop in briefly here and maybe we'll come back to it. You know, one of the. One of the. Kind of. It's sort of like a meme, you know, a cultural meme. Not a image with funny text, but like one of those sort of ideas that kind of floats around and gets reproduced as people leave, you know, especially kind of more all encompassing religious traditions as they pursue things like atheism, agnosticism, or find them more compatible. Is this idea of like, you zoom all the way out to the size of the universe and the time span of the universe and you say something like, none of this matters at all. And what that does, I think positively for a lot of people is if you are kind of suffocated by the kind of constant need for like, moral clarity, meaningfulness, like if you've sort of been. If you've been sort of force fed that foie gras goose, like for your whole life, it can be kind of a relief to say, oh, maybe it's not, you know, maybe the stakes aren't so high. And so I recognize the value that that can have for people, many of my clients included. But I think the risk that gets run with, with memes like that, with leaning so far into, you know, and I'm doing a lot of existential psych these days on the podcast and you know, Camus and Sartre will go all the way there of like, life is truly meaningless. Like, this is so meaningless.

[Pamela Epstein King]

Right.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

And they'll say, jump in. Yeah. Where there can be a kind of nihilism. And, and I think that's sort of the, that's the danger psychologically with leaning too far in that direction is the stakes can become so low that you actually, you cease to feel like your life really matters at all. And I don't want to paint too, with too broad of a brush. That's not true of every individual. But that's like if you're worried about gutters on either side of the bowling alley, so to speak, that's, that's the gutter on one side that you can fall into and that can have some real effects on, on happiness and meaning and coping. Right, right.

[Pamela Epstein King]

That's a whole. Another.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

You might as well like, you know, if you're also combining that with some depression, like just get drunk, you know.

[Pamela Epstein King]

Yeah, right, right, exactly. What are you drinking there? I'm just kidding.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

I'm drinking coffee. It is 11:07am PM. I'm not. I haven't spiked. I haven't spiked the coffee during.

[Pamela Epstein King]

Yeah, no. So I think that's really important and I think having the cognitive flexibility to manage both of those alleys is really important. And because I think in that there's truth in both places and a paradox of like, wow, yeah, my life in the grand scheme of things is minutiae. I'm grateful for my own belief system that says, yeah, it is actually. But it still matters who you are. You have dignity and significance and while you're here, make it count. Kind of thing. Yeah, but so there's this. So just that technical thing in meaning, that second dimension is like, my life has significance. I have dignity. And then the other part, Crystal park pushes more on mattering. Like I matter out there. Like I experience that. I matter. People tell me I matter. My God, my community, my school, my workplace tells me I matter. So there's this like, yeah, I am, I have significance, but also I matter out there. They're very similar. And then the third part of meaning, this is where it gets so redundant. So we have coherence, significance mattering. And the third part they identify is purpose. And this is not quite the Bill Damon purpose, but it is this kind of actional. I'm doing something with my life. My life feels purposeful, but it's not necessarily this kind of orienting life goal that I talked about with Damon.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Maybe just we could say like purposeful action. You know, there's something active going on that is roughly in line with what I care about. Okay, so now the follow up on meaning. I wanted to ask, I've heard Daryl Van Tongren say this, I think I've maybe heard you say this and others that for a while there, maybe 15 years ago, like earlier days of positive psychology, and you still see these news headlines like, Denmark is the happiest nation on earth. There was a lot of happiness research. Happiness Lab is a popular psychology podcast. But my understanding is that researchers have sort of shifted away from happiness more towards looking for meaning, meaningful lives. That that is a more robust concept. Is that true? And if so, can you motivate from a research perspective, why researchers would be more interested in meaningfulness than happiness?

[Pamela Epstein King]

Yeah, so, yes, so, so grateful. A lot of the early happiness research especially that was measured was around positive emotion and positive affect, which is fantastic. It feels good, right? It's good for our brain. It helps us be more creative. Usually when we're feeling positive affect, we're feeling less anxiety and less of the more difficult emotions.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Can be helpful therapeutically to help inject some of that as a little energy or juice for what needs to get changed. Yeah, absolutely.

[Pamela Epstein King]

And yeah, I mean, Barbara Fredrickson's work on the broaden and build theory is just fantastic for showing like positive emotions. Helps your brain calm down, it helps broaden your mind and motivates you to do positive things. So that's great. But the reality is like self focus. Freebasing happiness ultimately is a dead end street. Freebasing happiness, positive emotions, great. But life actually really happens.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

So finally, I just love how you did. You're doing like a crack cocaine term and appealing to, like, very straightforward Protestant terminology in the same conversation.

[Pamela Epstein King]

I am a child of the 80s. Isn't that what's going on?

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Not.

[Pamela Epstein King]

Not in my house, but elsewhere?

[Dr. Dan Koch]

I tend to say mainlining. But I think mainlining can also maybe has more of a medical connotation as well. Freebase. I just think of somebody with a piece of foil holed up in a bathroom, like in Infinite Jest or something.

[Pamela Epstein King]

Anyway, you can delete that if you need to.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

I'm leaving it in. I just like. If someone says freebasing, my mind goes, cocaine. There's no break. There's only one kind of freebase. But I like it. So freebasing or mainlining, happiness is ultimately a dead end. Is it an ultimate. Is it. Okay, let me ask you this. Is it a dead end because of sort of the hedonic principle that, like, you just get immured, inured, I n n I n 1 n 2 n's, you get sort of used to it, you know, and it dulls over time? Or is it a dead end because of the more wraparound psychological concept of meaning being more sufficient?

[Pamela Epstein King]

Probably both.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

And okay.

[Pamela Epstein King]

That you get numbed out to it. It's like, why? Like, this is so dumb, but I'm gonna say this. I love Trader Joe's Chicken Tiki Marsala. Easiest lunch to microwave down the hall. I probably could eat it every day, but if I did, I would get sick of it.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

So, yeah, I'm that way with the orange chicken.

[Pamela Epstein King]

Yeah, but okay, but as humans, yes, we, our dopamine circuits, we can't keep something at a feverish pitch all the time. Like, our brains fluctuate, our body fluctuates. We are physiological, embodied beings. So as much as we want to practice or override some of our system, our physiological system, we don't have ultimate control over it. So A, it's just not possible to sustain that, and B, you wouldn't want to. And the full range of emotions is part of the human experience. So if we don't know grief, if we don't know suffering, it's really hard to know joy.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah, I like that. But what about contentment? Like, just. Just devil's advocate. Okay, fine. It's not happiness. Happiness is too. It's too hedonistic. It's too pleasure associated. But, like, why don't we just. Why aren't we looking for measuring how people become contented? Right?

[Pamela Epstein King]

And some people do. Yeah, some people measure. And like, especially if you're looking at, like, more Eastern worldviews. Like, harmony is really valued. And so I spent a season academically studying joy. And so joy I came to realize, like, the way I theoretically and theologically understand joy, there are a range of emotions that come with it from like, ecstatic, really off the charts positive emotion, like almost lose a sense of self, to very calm, like harmony or peace. And I don't. I think someday we'll probably have like, you know, 50 shades of gray, 50 shades of happiness or joy that will recognize that there are different affect or emotional states tied with types of happiness. Like, if you think of your day like you might be with a child and feel a certain type of positive emotion to having, like, just geeking out in a really awesome philosophical conversation. And it's a different level of affecting.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah.

[Pamela Epstein King]

So like, we understand there are these, not to get technical, but like the cognitive appraisals. And that's where you get into the meaning. So you might feel joy. Like if you know the Ignatian prayer. Since we're talking a bit about practices. When you reflect back on your day and you become aware of when you felt joy or lightness or light or love, you can be pretty surprised at the variety of quote unquote positive moments in your day. They're not all ecstatic, they're not all eating the best pizza you ever had, but they, those might be there, but they also might be a meaningful connection with someone because connecting deeply with people matters. And this gets into meaning. So when I talk about meaning, purpose, calling, vocation, all those things, for me, what orients that is a sense of what I often call telos. So as humans, we are growers. We are not stagnant creatures. We are on the move. Our brains are always like, what's next? Our bodies, again, we can't control it. We are always growing and changing. And so, so much of emotions, meaning, have to do with, like, where you're headed in the long run. So awesome pizza can be amazing in the moment, make you happy, satisfied. But, like, it may have less to do with that enduring life goal. We're doing something hard. Like my doctoral students are going through comps right now. Hard stuff, but it's good. And it's necessary to get them to the goal that they want.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Okay, that's really helpful. I feel like I've got a decent sense here of this constellation of terms of purpose, calling and meaning. I think we've done a good job. Again, you referenced a popular, poorly written series of sadomasochistic novels. So you're really. 50 Shades of Joy is like just a. It's just a. It's just a happiness dungeon. That's where that novel takes place. Okay, so I want to talk about the way that this stuff works when religion is sort of humming along well for a person. And I'll start by picking up on one thing that you just said there, which is that human beings, we understand psychologically human beings to be not static. We are dynamic beings and creatures. We are always growing, we are always changing. Developmental psychology is, I actually think, sort of much, much spurned in traditional conservative religious environments. And it actually has so much to say about the life of faith even. And also it's implicated in a lot of spiritual abuse towards children by being developmentally unsound, like my own story with End Times teachings. But so that brought up one thing for me in terms of how it works. We sometimes think of a religious system as sort of unitary. It's like I was raised in this one thing and it was kind of all encompassing. And in certain senses it is one thing. Maybe like, let's say you grew up Pentecostal. Well, ultimately it does really all come down to sort of like experiencing the Holy Spirit. Let's say you grew up Calvinist. It really does kind of all come down to accepting and understanding God's sovereignty and his determining of your salvation, and then you live out of that. At the same time, I actually think that these traditions are more properly understood as quite broad and actually containing a bunch of options. So I was just thinking, okay, if I'm like changing and growing within my Christian tradition, maybe different characters in the Bible, different stories, different verses, maybe I get more into contemplative prayer for a while. Maybe I'm doing more leadership training for a while. Maybe I'm discernment work. There are a big enough religious tradition, any major religious tradition is big enough for this, that actually there's a lot of different modes within it that you can kind of grow and move between. And so that's actually one way that a religious system, when it's still working for you, is a huge benefit to things like purpose and calling and meaning. Because actually, because of its flexibility now, you can't challenge certain things. You can't say, God's not real, Jesus didn't rise from the dead. I mean, there's certain things you can't say. But if you keep the basics, there's actually a ton of room to run. So I just thought that might be a fun place to start. But you could comment on that or other ways that purpose and calling tend to work when things are still humming along nicely for a religious person.

[Pamela Epstein King]

Yeah, so I think that's a great question. I also. And you can strike it out if you don't want it in your interview, Dan, but if you're in a religious system that's working along and humming for you, you've got beliefs in a God. And I'm going to suggest that God can handle any of your questions. Whether God exists, whether Jesus rose from the dead, that you can bring that all to God, and that we can't navigate this world authentically if we can't raise those authentic questions that we have. And part of that orthogenetic principle, that's what we developmental psychologists like to talk about. This tendency towards growing is like we have to show up as who we are. And if we're going to try and grow in our purpose and calling, especially if we're attaching that in religious system, but we feel like we have to hide this, this part of our religious life of, like, God. I don't know. I don't know how this works out. Like, we naturally question things as humans. That's curiosity and that's growth. So I don't think people of faith should be scared or ashamed if they don't feel faith all the time. Even if feeling faith is one thing, knowing it's another. Maybe you don't know it 100% all the time, but I believe that when we show up, and I've studied spiritual exemplars and they all question. They all question. It's part of the journey. And I think that, you know, it's actually in our human particularities, which have to do also with our weaknesses and vulnerabilities. That is where we find who we really are. And our purpose is so tied to who we are uniquely.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Well, I totally agree with you. And there are healthy religious communities that exemplify that. Conscious that so many of my clients and friends and whatever, and at different times in my life, you know, you raise a certain question and you come up against the brick wall of a person in that community who tells you, oh, that one's outside the bounds. So that is more what I am referencing. Obviously, would that it were not the case, you know, but that is so often what people end up experiencing. And so actually, and that can be maybe a place. It is often a place where religious change starts to occur for people is that they are told that something is out of bounds that doesn't seem like it should be out of bounds to them in one way or another. It can be doubts, it can be sexuality. It can be any number of things, concepts, hell, et cetera. And then they might go, oh, well, to connect it to your nice little orthogenesis, the orthogenetic tendency to keep growing as human beings. That's a place where a lot of people really first get that tension between what's changing in them and if their system tells them, you don't grow, you don't change. We locked it down and now we got it. We have the pearl of great price, and it's our job to defend it.

[Pamela Epstein King]

Right.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

That's actually. Oh, and it's cool to hear you say that's just humans, like, you are going to grow and change. There's nothing you could do about it. I mean, you could stifle it and tell yourself you're not, but that will produce other consequences for you, right?

[Pamela Epstein King]

100%. I'm reading a really profound book right now called Glimmerings. It's just out. It is a published correspondence between Miroslav Volfan, the theologian at Yale, and Christian Wiman, the poet at Yale. And in this correspondence, they share doubts, questions, self doubt, God doubt. It is so profound and so beautiful and so hopeful.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

And thank God that they're both still writing, because they could have just walked down the hall and just had those conversations in person at Yale, and then we would have been none the wiser.

[Pamela Epstein King]

Absolutely. But the reality is that's where the conversation started in their mind.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

I'm sure. I'm sure they did. I know, I know, I know.

[Pamela Epstein King]

For health reasons, it had to go by email. But another beautiful thing that I'm taking from this book is what is revealed and the vulnerability that occurs in the context of this very safe, trusting relationship. And so what I want to say to your listeners are that when you doubt, when you're not sure what your purpose is, like who God is, how God is loving in this crazy world, why do I feel shamed and judged? When you're. You need people that you can wrestle with with these deep questions. Ideally, it is your religious community, but the reality is it may not, but that you need people in your life that can create, like, a container of safety for you. And we are, you know, just as we're developing orthogenetic people, we're relational, and we do the work of becoming in the context of belonging, and that that's absolutely essential. So if we think we can just find meaning and purpose on our own, like, oh, I'm gonna go buy a cool new journal or find an app that I'm just gonna sit here and discern my purpose or even just reflect between God and I. That's a myth. Like, it is a relational process, and I believe we're created that way.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

At the risk of repeating myself too often on this point, I'll just briefly say, for the sake of being practical, Mark Karras, who is a psychologist in San Diego, I've had him on the show a few times. He used this term the unholy huddle. When people. So when the doubts are about the religious system, right? When the questions implicate sort of foundational things about the religious group that your friends are. Are still in, that's when they really can't be those people because they have too much skin in the game. They're not able to sort of be objective. And he recommends finding, you know, one to four people who are. Who have no skin in the game. So either they've already changed and now they're mature. Not like they just changed and now they're an evangelist for the new thing, but they're mature and they've already changed, or they're just not religious. You know them from some other thing, and they just don't. It doesn't matter to them. Like, if I had a friend who was, you know, if I met a guy who was questioning his Sikh upbringing, I would be perfectly fine to talk to because I don't care. I'm not worried about offending the God of Sikhism. I don't even know what the name of God is in Sikhism. Is it just God? I don't know enough about it. That's the point. It doesn't matter to me. So I'm just there for that person as a board to bounce things off of. Companionship, friendship, things like that. And it comes up with a ton of my clients we actively work through. Okay, who are the people who might be able to comprise that unholy huddle? And my little line to Mark was, sounds kind of like a holy huddle to me, buddy. Maybe you have misnamed it, but I use this terminology out of respect.

[Pamela Epstein King]

I like it. I recently recorded a podcast interview with Parker Palmer, discerning youg True North, Living an Undivided Life, and hand in hand with that conversation of Letting youg Life Speak. His very, I would say, holy book is also his work around circles of deep listening to one another. And he has this rather strict, like, methodology and process of listening. And he talks about hearing each other

[Dr. Dan Koch]

into speech, hearing each other into speech.

[Pamela Epstein King]

Yes. It's like our lives speak when others hear us and listen deeply. And like you're saying you have no skin in the game with your Sikh friend, you're just wanting to ask deep questions. As a therapist, you're so well trained in this. It's not about necessarily, you know, it's not advice giving, but that's. That's in his book, A Hidden Wholeness has a beautiful. He writes out this process of forming these circles where people really listen each other into being. And I know, you know, when my friends deeply listen and ask great questions, I hear myself say things like, oh, I didn't know that, or I started crying when I said that. I didn't realize that matters so much to me.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Back to how purpose, calling and meaning work when things are going strongly. I mean, I'm just looking at. I wrote some notes down about your definitions. Purpose, an enduring life goal that matters to the self, that contributes beyond yourself. Well, obviously the contributing beyond yourself, that part is sort of generally baked in. Now, not necessarily in one's work like one's day job, but in terms of if I'm a practicing Christian member in good standing of my church, so to speak, then all things being equal, I do have a real sense that I'm participating in something that matters to me and that is bigger than me and that generally something will. If you asked me about my life goals, there would be something about loving God, loving my neighbor. There'd be some leaving creation better than I found. I would find some language along with that. So purpose would tend to be pretty baked in to a lot of religious systems. Calling is a bit harder. Right. That's where I actually think. I wonder if you would agree with this calling, you know, sort of when we're aligning maybe our job, if possible, with our ethics, with our morals, our personal values and our skills. Actually, religion can sometimes get in the way of that by sort of devaluing other forms of work and lifting up, you know, ministry, missionary work, pastors, things like that, maybe lifting up homeschooling, motherhood over. Woman has a career, mom has a career. So maybe calling gets a little bit more complex there. Agree, Disagree.

[Pamela Epstein King]

Yeah. You know, I think if you're within a religious context that is going to elevate forms of ministry or has predefined roles that override, you know, human uniqueness. Yeah, that's true. So. And I know many women who, I mean, it's interesting. It comes up on the podcast often of like, I grew up in the church, I'm a Korean American and I was told I cannot go into ministry.

[Commercial Announcer]

Can't.

[Pamela Epstein King]

And so that, that is really problematic for, for people.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Well, ministry is one thing, but even being like just sort of disincentivized to pursue college and a career, especially as a woman. But, but yeah, you know, in more sort, more apocalyptic leaning religious groups like your Jehovah's Witnesses and stuff like that, there's, there's even a sort of systemic downplaying of going to college, saving money for retirement because Christ is coming back any minute. Which is a lot more plausible if Your religion is 150 years old than if it's 2000 or if you count Israel 4000 years old or whatever. So, you know, so that can really be a complicating issue. When we get to meaning, though my life is coherent and makes sense, my life is significant and I am doing something with my life. I mean, if religion isn't just the key that matches the lock of a human need for meaning, then I don't know what is.

[Pamela Epstein King]

No, 100%. And when I think of like the four categories of beliefs that religion offers, that's helpful for people like you have these doctrines that kind of state the truth, like this is what it means to be made in the image of God.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

This is what we are, what's going on. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Pamela Epstein King]

But we also have narratives. Like there's a gospel narrative, you know, there's the Pentecostal narrative or there's maybe a zillion. But human brains love stories. And so when we get a story about the bigger world, who knows where end times, you know, that might vary depending on beliefs. But when we can find our role in that story, that's great meaning making fodder for us. That's like I say, one way to understand your purpose. Like if you know the larger story of your life and you know your role in that story, that, that's a great way to begin to identify purpose. But yeah, religion is super in another category of beliefs. So we got doctrines, we got narratives, teleological beliefs like about purpose and ultimate meaning and ethics.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah.

[Pamela Epstein King]

And then the third is ethics, the fourth is ethics, which these days, honestly there's not, you know, in general secular world, like ethics are all over the place.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

You know, where else they are all over the place is the fucking religious. Right. That's a different way in which they're all over the place. They just are. They just have simply contradicted themselves. But yes, yeah, yeah.

[Pamela Epstein King]

And to that point, like nobody gets off easy right now. We all have to be proactive about our belief systems, about our morals, our values. I mean, one of the ways, like, people get really upset, oh, everyone's leaving the church, the church is in decline. And I'm like, well, you know what? I know humans are meaning makers. They can't resist that. And they're going to figure out how to make meaning inside or outside of a church. So instead of, like, society breaking down, my hope is, like, it's going to break open. But I've come to realize that even if you're in religion, you. You are still having to be proactive about how you are reconciling the beliefs that you're being fed or given because they're changing. And I do work with chaplains and sometimes university chaplains. And one phenomena that I'm getting feedback from currently is how active religious life is more active lately because of world events. The Palestinian crisis. I was at Stanford University, and their chaplain office was saying, like, are Muslim groups? Are Jewish groups? Because all of a sudden kids are like, what does it mean to be Jewish? Like, there's things going on globally in the world that I'm now associated with. What does it mean? What is my Jewish identity? What is my Muslim identity? Even if I haven't been devout, it's just raising these issues, Christian nationalism. All of a sudden people are like, well, wait, I grew up a Christian. Am I one of those? Am I not?

[Dr. Dan Koch]

So what does that mean?

[Pamela Epstein King]

Yeah, now they got to think about it. So we all are kind of in a moment where we're having to navigate or renegotiate our religious or spiritual identity, Whether you're one of these who are intentionally shifting and leaving, or if you're left behind and still within your tradition, like, how is that sitting for you? What's working?

[Dr. Dan Koch]

And by the way, I think for most people who do end up intentionally leaving or seeking a new community, it never starts on purpose. Right. Like, you tend to be thrown into it for one reason or another. And that becomes important too, in terms of dealing with shame, with religious change clients. Right. That sometimes there can be that sense. And. And once you've, you know, if you leave evangelicalism, for instance, and you're still connected to a bunch of the type of evangelicals who like to post on Facebook, which is becoming a recognizable genus, then you're going to be reminded pretty consistently to the extent that those people still show up in your feed, that, like, they don't think it happened to you. They think that you left because of sinfulness and things like that. And so that can be really kind of disorienting. But. But yeah. Then of course, as we sort of discern next steps, we are active again and we're choosing hopefully. Right. That's ideally. So. Okay, so then thinking, let's apply this. So I think we're kind of already talking about it. Let's see what remains to be said. What have we not mentioned already in terms of what tends to get broken or bent around purpose calling, meaning when we do go through some sort of religious upheaval. Right. So narratives get. We sort of talked about narratives, those stories. Which of those are true? That becomes a question. Is that story true? Is that one true? Is this one true? Certainly the big meta narrative about where people fit into God's plan for the universe, that is almost always gonna be disrupted, at least to some degree. Where else do you see the sort of sites of disruption there?

[Pamela Epstein King]

Yeah, so there's all those beliefs, God's sovereignty, providence. Like how much agency do. All of a sudden your agency is up for grabs?

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah.

[Pamela Epstein King]

How much can I make things happen or not or should or not? The sense of mattering or significance, like, it's easier to go to those nihilistic or like, totally. Oh, gosh, if there is no end game, like what. What does it matter? Is hedonism a good thing? Is being in community and friendships the best thing that I got? So that's where I'm gonna put my energy. So that's where, like I would say, as humans, we're meaning makers. We know what centers of life give us meaning and joy. And so we have to go after those. And I'd love to talk a little bit more about those centers of meaning in a moment.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Okay, I'll make a note.

[Pamela Epstein King]

The other places that go awry is. So we've been talking a lot about the beliefs of religion. The pot of gold in religion is the people, is the community. I mean, like, that's where the research is, is like, wow, it's people who embody all these beliefs, who support you in these beliefs. We don't know who we are outside of relationship with another. It's a little bit like, does the tree make a noise if it falls in the forest, if no one hears it? Like, who are we if I don't have someone to bounce that off or hear my life speak again. Back to that. So the community is really important. And people who leave religion can miss that. Especially if you choose, if you are engaged and you have been shamed, hurt, abused, violated, marginalized, rejected, and consciously stop attending That's a huge loss because you have rhythms in your life that are upset and you have relationships in your life that are terminated that you need to reconstruct elsewhere. Another thing religion offers people are practices like prayer. I think right now, currently, I think sacred texts, the Bible. Scripture is completely underrated. Having a text that anchors your life, whether it's the alchemist or the Bible, is so helpful. And when you leave your religion. Yeah, but you throw out your guidebook. Right. So having a guidebook is really helpful.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah, those are great. I got a couple more and then we can keep going.

[Pamela Epstein King]

Yeah.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Enduring life goal. Was that a bad life goal? Sometimes that's a question. Was I on the wrong side? Was I one of the baddies? Right. Ethics and moral values. This comes up a ton. Like you are given, generally speaking, and the more sort of totalizing your religious community, the more this is true. Like if you're raised Episcopal, this might not be quite as, you know, quite as much or whatever, but like you have, you are given a sort of prepackaged, generally speaking, a pre packaged ethics. This is the way to act in the world because these are the moral values that matter to God. And then you have to sort of go, oh, well if that's okay, if that's changing, then where will I ground that? And so having to make new moral sense of the world and yourself as a moral agent fits nicely with the existential psychology stuff that I often do with clients and on the show. But that's a real work area. One more that I thought of talking about under meaning, the first item was that life is coherent and makes sense. First of all, I want to bring in what you said about other people. So in that group collective context, sitting there in church, yep, life is coherent. It makes sense. If I'm out of there now, some of those people will still be available to me, some not. Kind of depends on what the change is, the nature of the change, as well as frankly the intellectual and emotional maturity of those individuals and their capacity to have some cognitive flexibility, as you mentioned earlier, emotional flexibility as well. But then also if you're coming like let's say towards agnosticism or atheism, then you're not just going to be wondering if your life is coherent and makes sense. You might actually be wondering if your life can be coherent and can make sense. Because again, maybe none of it does. And so there's that kind of meta doubt along with the practical, communal, lived in rupture there. How are we? Do we? Have we. Is there more?

[Pamela Epstein King]

Well, you know. Yeah, I think that's, I think that's all good. I think another beautiful thing religion offers people, that's psychology gets. But it's not so much of the forefront of culture is like, is ritual too. Like life transitions, like, I mean, like bar bat mitzvahs are. You know, there's a lot of religious rituals, confirmation around puberty. Like, these are really helpful.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Confession and forgiveness. I've been thinking about a lot too, like that that's like such a important psychological process to go through when we have fucked up, to be able to admit it and have a way of feeling like that has been resolved and that tension can be released. Yeah, huge.

[Pamela Epstein King]

Why forgive if. I mean, and how do people forgive if they don't have that experience growing up? And what's wonderful is religions that are like worked out, spiritual communities that are worked out, there are words that articulate forgiveness. So when you have a ritual of confession or forgiveness or prayer of forgiveness or confession, you just grow up understanding, like, oh, I'm forgiven and I need to forgive others. So if you're not a part. I mean, we don't learn about forgiveness in school. I mean, if you kind of got to figure it out on the playground or you're not going to have any friends. Yeah, but it's not explicit. And so religion makes a lot of fundamental aspects of being human explicit. When I interviewed you, you talked about like the nuclear human core of being human. And religious religions really do talk about, explain. I would say not all get it right, but at least they're in that space to.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

They have answers. They have, they have answers that they can give you. Yeah. And good questions. Right. To keep the conversation going. Okay, so I want to sort of turn to this final act of what are things that can happen on the other end? Like how, how can, how can this stuff be reconstructed in some way? And I just, I guess I just want to note that one way I might interpret a lot of what you've said is you're kind of making, and I don't know if you're intending to do this, Pam, but you're kind of making the case for eventually, when it makes sense, maybe finding another religious community that, that can align with where you're at. Because if I just start thinking of like piecemealing those things together, you know, and that's not going to be possible for everybody, not some people are just not ever going to fit in any sort of organized religious setting. And I, I've worked with clients like that. I'm not judging People like that there. That is true for some individuals, but you are kind of. You're making a pretty compelling case for, like, if you can find a community of something. Because just look at the, you know, all of the. All of the tools in here for that.

[Pamela Epstein King]

Absolutely. So a lot of the work that we do at Thrive center has to do with, like, healthy forms of spirituality. And at Thrive, I care about both equipping religious leaders. We're at a Christian seminary, so most of the people we work with are Christian, but not all. I think there's a lot that extends into the broader human experience. But how do you design, curate, have, build, rebuild healthy religious congregations or ministries or organizations or schools, or if you're a spiritual leader or if you're a spiritual seeker, how do you forge a healthy sense and experience of spirituality? And there's six things that the psychological literature explicitly addresses. And the first is transcendence. Like, you gotta find something bigger than yourself. Like, I've done a lot of research on people who have different belief systems around spirituality. I interviewed a guy, Math was where he found meaning in order. That's not how I'm wired. It's not about judgment. But, like, that was how he. He found beauty in numbers and equations and. And curiosity and unsolvable equations. So people have different ways of working out what's bigger. But we do know, like, that experiences of awe, and we talk about transcendent emotions, which include gratitude, joy, elevation. These are good for our brain. As we talked about, people need to experience them. So religious traditions and the more reformed are not long on awe. Traditionally very plain churches, where. The Cathedral at Chartres in France is my favorite sacred space. And it was painted initially and it was just an ecstatic experience when people did their pilgrimage and probably were famished and walked in and stained glass and color everywhere. That arousal for a brain is awesome. People have experiences of transcendence, of feeling God's presence, feeling God's presence with and through others. That. That's really important. But with that transcendence, it's not about self annihilation, which we were talking about earlier on Transcendence. When I interview spiritual exemplars, when they experience something bigger than themselves, God affirms who they are and their existence and uniqueness. And that's really important. It's not about annihilating the self. People do have those experiences, but it affirms your dignity and worth. But in the second area is these habits and rhythms, like having good spiritual practices that give you good habits of mind that Help you regulate your emotions, that help you reflect and clarify your beliefs, then actually I have an acronym that spells thrive. And so we have transcendence for T, of course. H for habits. R is for relationships and community. If you're like feeling like I can't get up and go on Sunday mornings or I lost the habit of COVID or I've been kicked out or it's so boring, you need to go find a community. You need to find your holy unholy crew. Really great to have some group that actually has diverse persons too. Not that all think exactly like you, not just your peeps to support you in your spiritual journey. I is identity. And for these religious shifters and changers, renegotiating your identity of all those things around meaning we were talking about is just really important to attend to. Like, how is the narrative of your life changing? And take some time. Find friends, find the unholy, the holy. A therapist, another spiritual leader to help you understand where your identity is going. And V in thrive is for vocation and purpose. How do you understand now this purpose? What are you pursuing in your life? And the E is for ethics and virtue. Like, how are you working out what's right and wrong? When we understand, like what morally matters and our moral values, we have so much more cognitive energy. But when you're having to renegotiate of what's right and wrong, that just zaps us of energy and people often get lazy. So if you can come up with a pretty solid but always evolving sense of ethics because the world changes and we need to renegotiate, like, oh, I didn't three years ago. I wasn't asking about AI. I pretty much ask the ethics of AI every other day in my job right now. Maybe every day. So we need an evolving sense of what our ethics are.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

I've got to mention that we did an entire episode on the six facets of spiritual health. These six. It is episode number 285. So it's like over 100 episodes ago. We will put a link to that in the show notes if people want to just kind of dig deeper into your and the thrive Center's modality there. But I thought we could pick a couple things and get kind of real in the weeds, practical or on the ground? Practical about them. So one of the things that I do a ton of work with my clients on, I mean, almost every single religious change client this happens at some point is we talk about values. And usually we actually have to do a little bit of values identification because some of what a person thought were their values is sort of inevitably tied up in religious identity. And so if that's shifted in some significant way, you know, there's a. There can be a kind of a breaking there where, like, where do you see identifying one's values as like, where in which of those facets is that kind of most implicated?

[Pamela Epstein King]

So when I get technical, which I do, I've written up the stuff. Oh, you're talking about Kiryu and Tanya with it. Yeah. So meaning weaves through all of the facets, transcendence offers, inspires it. Practices and habits help us create it community reinforces it, clarifies it identity, it integrates into our identity. Values and meaning are deeply intertied from my perspective. So what is most meaningful informs our values. And we can have values that are around ethics and morals. We can have values about more general life priorities.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah. How to spend our time, Things like that. Yeah.

[Pamela Epstein King]

How to spend our time. How we. You know, I value being empathetic. Like, you know, parts of our personalities can feel like values, but I think I would target it in identity and narrative, that facet. Because identity is very much made up of what we value. So when working with people on identity, one way you can say is like, yeah, what are your values? And there's a bazillion value inventory out there, from the scientific to the more popular. You know, Brene Brown has a whole sheet of values and can circle. You can do strength finder and, you know, those are a way of getting at values.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah, yeah.

[Pamela Epstein King]

But I think for people in religious exile or, you know, in the wilderness, that's really important because the other thing we haven't mentioned that often when people change religion, family is deeply tied to

[Dr. Dan Koch]

that because often relationship effects are almost always a part of the work that I'm doing. Yeah.

[Pamela Epstein King]

And the values that people tend to be at the forefront of their minds are things they picked up in their family. So when you.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Not to mention that closeness with family is a very commonly held value in itself and can be sort of violated through the process of religious change.

[Pamela Epstein King]

Absolutely. So this all becomes deep, hard work. And I'm so glad you're helping clients with this because it's not easy. And I want to say that in an affirming way for people in their life who are finding themselves renegotiating their religious beliefs, community, habits, et cetera, that it's really important work. And it's honestly something that I think as a developmental psychologist, people kind of need to do this kind of inventory at so many major life stages. Whether it's your 20s and you're, you know, Oregon College and you're leaving home for the first time, or in your 20s or in your 30s, you're starting a family and thinking about, oh, what is my marriage going to center on? Or what am I passing to my kids? Or then you're in midlife and all, shit hits the fan. And again, you're renegotiating.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Now you're triggering me for real.

[Pamela Epstein King]

Yeah, but I. So I just want to name it. It is valid, important. It's the work of thriving. I mean, this is where thriving is found, is in making meaning and doing that with others and living your life purposefully.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah, that's such a. That's kind of maybe, you know, I'm pretty familiar with your work. The work that you do and the work that I do with clients day in, day out is. There's quite a bit of overlap. Obviously. You have obviously way more experience, way more research background, and then just not being a clinician, you're able to focus more on the positive psychology, the sort of thriving aspects of things. Right. That's what we're pointed toward. But in therapy, in my coaching stuff, it's closer because when I'm coaching, I'm not directly treating mental health symptoms. That's sort of the definition in Washington state, anyway, that's the line. But in therapy, you know, that's like in the. That's in the distance, that's on the horizon. But we are dealing with the shit. And, you know, that's the job. But I. So for me, maybe that's the background to say that the idea that's kind of bubbled up, most surprisingly for me today in talking with you, is that orthogenetic tendency. I actually didn't know that term. I'm a little embarrassed. But that idea that humans, I do talk a lot about developmental psych and bringing in a developmental lens makes so much more sense of so many things. And that's actually just a takeaway for me today is like, we grow. We grow and change. And that's like kind of step one with a lot. I realize implicit in a lot of the work that I do with people is like normalizing the fact that they have changed. And that a lot of religious systems, maybe not in their best form, if you went straight to the theologians and the church fathers and mothers and whatever. Okay, maybe not. But in their actual practice, the way they get lived out in the world is very anti growth. There's like a. No, there's Just this platonic sort of holy good thing, and we've sort of got it locked down and we tell you what to do. And once you're basically 18, you do the same thing for the rest of your life. You're an adult and you love God the same way and whatever. And just to normalize that, that's just a bad view of humans. That's just a shitty understanding of people.

[Pamela Epstein King]

Yeah, we are very malleable and plastic and we grow and the world's growing around us. So, yeah, when religious systems don't change, that's hard because they don't fit with the world so well. And there's a difference between. I'm not saying be relevant and kowtow to every whim or popular trend, and you don't literally have to throw the baby out with the bathwater. You can still love Jesus. But I mean, I think, I would guess one of the fundamental reasons for decline of religion is the stuff we're talking about today, meaning and purpose. A lot of congregations don't address those issues. I mean, it's there, but like, I mean, I think that's where, like, when people get involved in small groups and connect with people or do discernment practices, they start uncovering like, oh, this is my purpose, and this is how it fits into the story. But very often it might be emphasized on moral, like, what you're supposed to do or what you can't do, who you shouldn't talk to or who you should talk to, or who you should vote for or not vote for. But, like, if churches took more seriously, activating the people for God's purposes, whether that's as a therapist or a janitor or a business executive, I think people would be coming back to church in droves.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah, it's. It's. I'm trying to. I'm trying to make one last connection here with, like, the sort of Trumpy stuff, because I think that that does have a sort of its own interesting psychological angle. There's a particular type of rupture around ethics especially. But I'm also thinking. So I think ethics is the obvious application there of, like, wait, I was given a very clear ethic, and then now this guy is the nominee and that. And not. Not just now, not just 2016, but now, like, well into 2026. And it's like, we'll just support whoever he wants to bomb. We will support however he wants to treat immigrants, even US Citizens who get in the way of the way he wants to treat immigrants. Like, that's sort of the. That's maybe the low hanging fruit on ethics. So I wanna skip over that because I just think it's a bit more straightforward. But the one I'm coming to is purpose. An enduring life goal that matters to me and that contributes beyond myself. I think that, like, when I think of friends of mine who are comfortable roughly in evangelicalism, they are animated by that. Like they have a sense that they and their church and fellow believers are sort of ambassadors for God's love on the earth. And that is something they believe in, but obviously that moves beyond them to others. And, and the ones that I know who've been able to hold onto that have rejected Trump. And I think that where it becomes hard is if the people who raised you with your particular purpose, that particular life goal, which is usually something about spreading the gospel, or maybe if you're a bit more mainline inclined, kingdom of heaven kind of language. But usually it's gospel, it's souls, it's conversions, it's evangelism. Now you're, now you're like, you're like, wait a minute, was the, was the initial goal any good? I, I thought, you know, I thought that it was and it mattered to me. And now I'm seeing these people, it still seems to matter. Something matters to them. But have they actually swapped out the purpose? Or was that the purpose all along? And which of those is scarier? Maybe that's a way to kind of put a fine point on that question. What does that bring up for you?

[Pamela Epstein King]

I don't know if this is the answer you're looking for, but what comes up for me is it goes back to Jesus. Like, who was Christ? How did Jesus inhabit this earth and what did he invite us into? And we started out talking about coherence earlier. There's a pretty coherent gospel narrative. I know there's lots of ways to interpret it.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah.

[Pamela Epstein King]

But when we talk about Jesus as the logos or the blueprint or the pattern we're to pattern our lives off of, I mean, obviously there's a lot of hermeneutical, exegetical work to do and what that means today, but I think that's what it goes back to for me.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

And there are a few problematic passages, mostly in John, you know, did Jesus really call that woman that bad? Name one or two instances where it's like, does that really cohere with the rest of it? But those are only problematic because basically every other passage about Jesus is roughly coherent. You know, he really had a pretty coherent moral and ethical view and he treated People pretty consistently. And he called out kind of the same things pretty consistently. So I do think that that's. Yeah, that's helpful. So maybe if someone's asking that question, they could say, okay, let me practical, practical that out. So you could say, first of all, all right, the initial enduring life goal that I found within that church, that I thought was coherent with the rest of it, how lined up with the basic mission of Jesus was that, or, you know, his teaching in life. And then if the question is, has it changed? You can again use that as the backdrop. That hasn't changed. So did it used to cohere better or did it not? And that'll be very individual, right? Person to person. And so for some people it might be, oh, shit, I never got a very Jesus centric ethic or purpose to begin with. It was more like anti Catholic or something weird. And other people will go, actually, this is more me. No, I did. I got a pretty consistent with Jesus thing. And some of the adults that raised me in that world stuck with it and some departed pretty substantially from it. And actually the respect I have for the ones who stuck with it, that consistency over now 35, 40 years since I was paying attention, whatever, 30, I think even more highly of them. And then the others, I am just kind of like sad and trying to just accept it, I guess.

[Pamela Epstein King]

Yeah, yeah, it's hard like, since I'll focus on you. I mean, not just you, Dan, but like you, the listeners.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Thank you. Focus on me.

[Pamela Epstein King]

It's like less about like, you know, people are gonna choose to do what they do and we don't really have much control over that. But, you know, I mentioned the word telos a few times. Just the foundation of my work as a developmental psychologist. I won't call myself a theologian of someone who loves theology is like, is imago day, like understanding who we are created to be. And my first answer is the perfect image of God is in Christ. And our first invitation as Christians or I think as humans is to become like Christ. And we're going to do that differently. Like, so we conform to the image of God in Christ. The loving, healing, sometimes angry ways. You know, I mean, like Jesus was not simple, but we are supposed to become like Christ. But that conforming to Christ is not becoming uniform. Like we're not all uniform.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Right.

[Pamela Epstein King]

Dan's gonna be like Jesus differently than I'm gonna be like Jesus. Even if we both have a podcast and PhDs in psychology, we still do that really remarkably differently. And we do that with and for Others. And so I always think of, like, if I'm speaking theologically about purpose, it's that process of becoming who God created us to be, like Christ and in relationship with others. Not just my unholy huddle, not just my peeps, but for the poor, for the broader world. Like, so it's almost, how do we become like that? And I think in different seasons of life, that might get lived out a little differently. I've had. I've been at Fuller. I just celebrated 25 years.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Congrats.

[Pamela Epstein King]

My job has looked really different over those 25 years as a faculty person. Like, I'm now executive director of the Thrive Thrive Center. I have a podcast. I'm doing less research, but I'll go back to research. I'm doing a lot of writing still, you know, so there's. Sometimes I'm teaching more than others, sometimes I'm more administrative. So, yeah, there is a purpose. And I don't even always get it, but when I look back, it's like, wow, yeah, there was a coherent trajectory there.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah.

[Pamela Epstein King]

But I. But I often think, like, it's that direction that our lives are headed.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah.

[Pamela Epstein King]

Are they becoming more like Christ?

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Well, I love that answer from. From you and your work. I feel like maybe I'm wanting to maybe later, maybe in another episode, find an answer that appeals less to a particular tradition for folks who are just, like, whether or not forever or for the time being, needing something outside of it. But I think still back to that episode 285. That would still have a lot of practical stuff that's not just for Christians, because you're really speaking psychologically there about how we thrive as individuals. Right. So. Okay, well, we'll. We'll leave it there for today. Pam? Oh, yeah.

[Pamela Epstein King]

Can I say one quick.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah, you do it.

[Pamela Epstein King]

I'll just say that, you know, like, outside of a Christian worldview, for me, that sense of telos doesn't change that much. It's like becoming who you uniquely are in relationship with one another. And you need the spiritual and moral ideals, like. Like the. To keep that balance and the spiritual motivation to keep that journey of differentiation in relationship.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

I mean, existential psychology would not use spirituality language. But even there. And you can do that from a fully secular perspective. Even there, they are gonna say, like, you do have to, like. It is most effective when a client can identify their meaning and their purpose. Like, what are they here for? Like you were saying, and you're with and for. And so that can be explicated religiously or not religiously but the sort of idea of, like, it does have to be, you know, in the way that 12 step uses a higher power and emphasizes service back to the group and to others. Like, that kind of like, you know, okay, it's true for me, but it's also. I'm also contributing to the world. Right. That was a part of purpose and then using my skills, part of calling. So that is. That's in there, whether or not we use sort of religious or spiritual language for it.

[Pamela Epstein King]

Absolutely.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Okay.

[Pamela Epstein King]

100%.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Well, Pam, I'm sure I'll have you back. And maybe we, you know, you. You have a whole other thing we could do on suffering and resilience after religious change, so I might need to book you in a little bit for that one.

[Pamela Epstein King]

Yeah, that's a. That is. Yeah. We didn't get into, like, what happens when your beliefs change and you're making sense. Another.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

That'd be fun.

[Pamela Epstein King]

Another episode. Another comment info.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

All right, great. Thanks so much for your time.