The Many Faces of Fundamentalism with Trauma Therapist Ryan Kuja (#402)

Summary

Religion on the Mind, Episode #402

"The Many Faces of Fundamentalism" with Trauma Therapist Ryan Kuja

Host: Dr. Dan Koch
Guest: Ryan Kuja, Trauma Specialist, Therapist, Adjunct Professor, Spiritual Director
Date: May 25, 2026

Episode Overview

This episode explores the surprising similarities between Christian fundamentalism and New Age spirituality, especially in their approaches to pain, trauma, and certainty. Dr. Dan Koch interviews trauma specialist and spiritual director Ryan Kuja, drawing from Ryan’s viral Instagram post comparing the two groups. They discuss concepts like spiritual bypassing, certainty vs. faith, healthy spirituality, and integration, weaving together insights from psychology, theology, and trauma therapy.

---

Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Definitions & Conceptual Framework

[04:38 – 11:16]

• Fundamentalist Christianity’s Main Feature:

  • Defined by an impermeable boundary around Scriptural interpretation—nothing outside the text is allowed to change the reading of the text (credit: Peter Hill's definition).
  • “The arrows can go out, but they can't go in.” (Dan Koch, 06:26)

• New Age Spirituality:

  • Held loosely; encompasses practices like meditation, crystals, manifestation, and focus on higher consciousness.
  • Not necessarily a technical or historical definition; more about contemporary expressions vaguely clustered as “spiritual but not religious.”
  • “The spirituality or metaphysics section at the Barnes and Noble…that kind of mind over matter. I mean, The Secret… manifestation culture.” (Dan, 10:03)

Notable Quote:

“I trust New Age spirituality as much as I trust Christian fundamentalism.” – Ryan Kuja (paraphrased from Instagram, acknowledged by Dan, 04:38)

---

2. Spiritual Bypassing: Avoiding Pain in Both Contexts

[13:00 – 27:43]

• Definition:

  • Using spiritual language or practices to avoid engaging with pain, grief, or trauma.
  • Functions similarly to other psychological defenses, often unconsciously (Ryan, 13:48).

• Examples in Both Worlds:

  • Christian context: “It’s all part of God’s plan.”
  • New Age context: “Just trust the universe.”

• Functional Distinction:

  • It's about how the phrase is used, not the phrase itself. If it helps someone avoid feeling pain, it’s bypassing.

Notable Quotes:

“Spiritual bypassing is…not about spirituality. It's about avoidance... avoiding pain, often unconsciously.” – Ryan Kuja (13:48)

“Bypassing is the important word here. That bypassing has a functional—points to something functional, a movement. We are going around it. We are not going through it.” – Dan Koch (18:49)

• Bypassing as an Interpersonal Defense:
  • It often serves to comfort the speaker, not the hearer: “Often leaders or other people in our lives who are using spiritual bypassing language… it’s for their discomfort.” – Dan Koch (21:58)

---

3. Toxic Positivity and the William James Distinction

[24:19 – 27:43]

• Healthy-Minded vs. Sick Soul Religion:
  • "Healthy-minded" spirituality (often New Age) focuses on the positive, sometimes at the expense of acknowledging suffering (“toxic positivity”).
  • "Sick soul" religion (often fundamentalist Christianity) emphasizes brokenness, sin, and suffering.
  • Both orientations, if taken to extremes, can inhibit healing and integration.

Notable Quote:

“Fundamentalist Christianity is definitely sick soul in its general orientation. So you're going to have less toxic positivity… But in a lot of more progressive, left leaning New Age spirituality, you can end up with toxic positivity.” – Dan Koch (26:18)

---

4. Certainty, Doubt, and Questioning

[42:19 – 48:20]

• Fundamentalism and Doubt:

  • “The fundamentalist says doubt is the enemy of faith and questioning beliefs is dangerous.” (Ryan, 42:19)
  • There’s a culture of certainty and formulaic answers—“you’re either in or out.”

• New Age Counterparts:

  • Guru-based spirituality can reproduce similar structures (charismatic authority, high control).
  • More diffuse, book-driven New Age trends may lack central authority but can lead to a lack of substance or depth—a different hazard.

“I think faith includes doubt. I think maybe certainty is—the opposite of faith…. There’s a certainty there that, in a way, is impenetrable.” – Ryan Kuja (43:03)

---

5. Healthy Spirituality: The “Holding Environment”

[48:20 – 54:56]

• Description:
  • Healthy spirituality makes room for unresolved problems, doubt, and mystery.
  • It can be religious or nonreligious—finding the sacred in everyday experience, moving toward authenticity and connection with self, others, and, if applicable, the divine.

“Healthy spirituality…is a holding environment for the unresolved, the process of becoming, the mystery of being alive in a world on fire, where glimpses of joy are possible.” – Ryan Kuja (paraphrased by Dan, 48:20)

• Non-Religious Healthy Spirituality:
  • Found in simple wakefulness, in authentic connection to oneself and others, in creativity and beauty (Ryan, 54:56).

---

6. The Tension: Isolation, Connection, and the Human Condition

[57:19 – 74:34]

• Existential Psychology:
  • Humans are both fundamentally alone (subjective, differentiated consciousness) and fundamentally social (“the brain as a social organ”—Ryan, 68:15).
  • The goal is not to eliminate this tension, but to bear and integrate it.

“There’s a fundamental aloneness to the human experience…. There’s also linkage. So we’re differentiated and linked from the very beginning.” – Ryan Kuja (61:33)

• Alienation, Codependency, and Integration:
  • Too much isolation = alienation; too much linkage = codependency/enmeshment.
  • Integrated living involves holding both our individuality and our connectedness.

---

7. Integration: The Goal of Healing

[74:34 – 78:15]

• Definition:
  • Linking differentiated parts of ourselves and our systems—making our lives, values, and experiences more coherent and authentic.
  • Applies to neural, relational, and spiritual dimensions.

Notable Quotes:

“Integration…as kind of like…helping clients see where they are living in fundamental tension within their own life.” – Dan Koch (75:09)

“I see the Trinity as integrated relationship. I see…the kingdom of God as a more integrated reality trying to make its way into this world. I think of it in the Jewish sense of shalom…that’s integration.” – Ryan Kuja (77:00)

• Upcoming Book:
  • Ryan is writing a book about integration at various levels (neural, relational, spiritual) due out in roughly two years (76:38).

---

Notable Quotes & Moments

• “[Spirituality is] about waking up…coming into more intimacy and connection with more of our humanity.” – Ryan Kuja (55:16)
• “Anything that moves us toward more intimacy with ourselves, with others, potentially with the divine…that’s what I see as kind of healthy spirituality.” – Ryan Kuja (56:12)

---

Key Timestamps

• 04:38: Start of main conversation & definitions
• 13:00 – 18:49: Deep dive on spiritual bypassing
• 24:19 – 27:43: Sick soul vs. healthy-minded religion; toxic positivity
• 42:19 – 48:20: Certainty, questioning, and comparing structures
• 48:20 – 54:56: Healthy spirituality – definitions and non-religious forms
• 57:19 – 74:34: Isolation, connection, and the existential tension
• 74:34 – 78:15: Integration – psychological, theological, and book news

---

Tone & Language

The tone is honest, reflective, and sometimes playful, with both Dan and Ryan comfortable weaving together technical concepts, clinical experience, and personal reflection. There's a willingness to hold nuance and tension—emphasizing the real complexity of spiritual and psychological life.

---

Summary for Non-Listeners

This episode is a deeply layered conversation on how different belief systems, both conservative Christianity and New Age spirituality, often mirror each other in their mechanisms for handling (or avoiding) pain and uncertainty. Through concepts like spiritual bypassing and the pursuit of certainty, Dan and Ryan explore why neither fundamentalism nor vague positivity offers a truly healthy path. Instead, they point listeners toward a “holding environment” spirituality—one rooted in honesty, connection, integration, and a deep willingness to dwell in the unresolved.

If you’re deconstructing from religion, reevaluating your spiritual life, or interested in the overlap between spirituality and mental health, this episode offers rich, empathetic insight and practical wisdom.

Transcript

[Home Depot Announcer]

Your summer starts now with Memorial Day deals at the Home Depot. It's time to fire up summer cookouts with the next Grill 4 burner gas grill on special. Buy for only $199 and entertain all season with the Hampton bay West Grove seven piece outdoor dining set for only $499 this Memorial Day get low prices guaranteed at the Home Depot while supplies Last priced invalid May 14 through May 27 US only exclusion supplies. See homedepot.com Pricematch for details.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

So good, so good. So good.

[Botox Advertisement Speaker]

Everything you want for summer is at Nordstrom Rack stores now and up to 60% off. Stock up and save on the brands you love like Vince Sam, edelman frame and free people. Join the NordicLub to unlock exclusive discounts. Shop new arrivals first and more. Plus buy online and pick up at your favorite rack store for free. Great brands, great prices. That's why you rack

[Red Bull Advertisement Speaker]

ready to soundtrack your summer with Red Bull Summer All Day Play. You choose a playlist that fits your summer vibe the best. Are you a festival fanatic, a deep end dj, a road dog or a trail mixer? Just add a song to your chosen playlist and put your summer on track. Red Bull Summer All Day Play. Red Bull gives you wings. Visit RedBull.com BrightSummerAhead to learn more. See you this summer.

[Botox Advertisement Speaker]

I get so many headaches every month. It could be chronic migraine 15 or more headache days a month, each lasting

[Dr. Dan Koch]

four hours or more.

[Botox Advertisement Medical Disclaimer Speaker]

Botox Onobotulinum Toxin a prevents headaches in adults with chronic migraine. It's not for Those who have 14 or fewer headache days a month. Prescription Botox is injected by your doctor. Effects of Botox may spread hours to weeks after injection causing serious symptoms. Alert your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems or muscle weakness can be signs of a life threatening condition. Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk. Side effects may include allergic reactions, neck and injection site pain, fatigue and headache. Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, asthma symptoms and dizziness. Don't receive Botox if there's a skin infection. Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions including als, Lou Gehrig's disease, Myasthenia gravis or Lambert Eaton syndrome and medications including botulinum toxins as these may increase the risk of serious side effects.

[Ryan Kuja]

Why wait?

[Botox Advertisement Speaker]

Ask your doctor, visit botoxchronicmigraine.com or call 1-844botox to learn more.

[Ryan Kuja]

Foreign.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Welcome back everybody to Religion on the Mind. I AM your host, Dr. Dan Koch, licensed Therapist. And joining me today, Ryan Kuja. You are also a licensed therapist, and you are a trauma specialist. And just for the. For the listener who's not in this world, I describe myself as, like, a religious change or religious issues specialist. I do not identify as a trauma specialist. There's a difference. You do. We'll get into some of that, probably. You are also an adjunct professor and a spiritual director. You provide spiritual direction that might come up in some interesting ways here today. You post a lot of helpful stuff on social media, especially Instagram, so I'd recommend people follow your profile. I'll put it in the notes. And you're the author of the substack Intersections Soma and Soul, which you describe as, quote, essays and reflections on therapy, healing, trauma, the body, neuroscience, and spirituality. End quote. In other words, you are right in the bullseye of. I was gonna say a certain type of religion on the mind listener. I might just say a religion on the mind listener. Full stop. I think that this audience is gonna be very glad to have you here today. Thanks for being here, Ryan.

[Ryan Kuja]

Love it. Dan, thanks for. Thanks for having me on. I'm excited to chat and just a

[Dr. Dan Koch]

little connection, you know, to other guests. We were talking before we started recording that one of your best friends is Chuck DeGroat, who's been on the show. He's known for the narcissism in church research and writing, and he is how I found you. So a quick thank you to Chuck in case he's listening or if you. Maybe if you send him this episode, you say, hey, I joined your little club of having talked with Dan. Then what's up, Chuck? Good, Good to see you or good, good to think of you?

[Ryan Kuja]

Hat tip to Chuck making this connection happen unintentionally through the interwebs.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Okay. We're structuring our conversation today. We're talking about fundamentalist Christianity and New Age spirituality. And you put, you know, on Instagram, you can do like a carousel post. So it's not a story, it's a post. But you can swipe through to the different slides. It's like a miniature slide deck. And you posted one in January that we're going to use for our template. The first post says this quote, I trust New Age spirituality as much as I trust Christian fundamentalism. Well, of course, you had my attention and many others. It's like catnip. But let's start with some definitions because, well, I think we probably both mean the same thing by fundamentalism. That term is broadly understood. These are, like, very Conservative Protestants. There are fundamentalist forms of other types of Christianity, Catholicism, as well as other religions. There's fundamentalist Hinduism and of course Islam. Let's make sure we have the same rough definition of Christian fundamentalism. I kind of take mine from Peter Hill at Biola, the psychologist there, that it's like what makes someone a fundamentalist is that you can learn things from that are outside the scope of the Bible. You know, you could be, he says, you could be a civil engineer and a fundamentalist and you're gonna, you could still do a good job in your engineering work. But if you're fundamentalist, nothing you learn outside the text and maybe the, your group's interpretation of the text is allowed to inform how you interpret the text. The texture itself, yeah, the arrows can go out, but they can't go in. Whereas an evangelical like Francis Collins of the National Institutes of Health, well known evangelical who sort of headed up the Human Genome Project, he is comfortable saying, whatever we learn about genetics that can shape how we read Scripture, a fundamentalist would say, according to Peter Hill's definition, would say, nope, it won't change how we view scripture. It could change how we think about medicine or something like that.

[Ryan Kuja]

Absolutely, yes. In your. I love those definitions you brought. That's, I think, maybe more specific or technical than I was even going for. But you're Dan Koch, you like the technical stuff. I do too. But yes, it's a good definition of terms. Now I do think that, like with regard to the post the carousel that we're gonna unpack a bit, it can be. Some of this could be true for say, the average evangelical, maybe not all evangelicals. So there may be some overlap. And in terms of like, you know, New Agers or New Age spirituality, I'm not really defining that in any kind of technical sense in terms of, you know, sort of the development of New Age spirituality and I think largely, maybe in the, in, in the late 60s as a sort of pushback against modernity and maybe the over, over reliance on, on the left hemisphere and rationality and wanting to move away from so much of dominant cultural expressions. I more just mean I'm holding that term fairly, fairly loosely.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah, let's talk about how you're using these terms because that's probably more important. I just, I don't like to pass up an opportunity for some really clear definitions, especially if I have just enough mental acumen in the morning to recall them correctly, like I do here this bright morning in Bellingham. So fundamentalism, the way you're using it in the slide. You really just more mean, like, very conservative Christians. The kind that you might recognize from your childhood. Right. Or something like that, right?

[Ryan Kuja]

Yes, yes, yes, exactly. Exactly. Spot on.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

So that part, I think, will be fairly straightforward for listeners of this show, but the New age one, I think will be less so just because listeners of this show have differential interaction, like vastly differential interaction with various forms of modern spirituality that is not religiously connected, whereas most listeners have had some contact with conservative Christianity, conservative Protestantism. So I know that you're holding it loosely, but what do you have? Like. Do you mean like somebody who runs a crystal shop in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles? Do you mean like your aunt who wears really flowy dresses and is always at the local plant sale? Like, what. What is. Give us a little more. Give us a little meat for New Age spirituality?

[Ryan Kuja]

Yeah, I think it could be all of the above. Any of the above. And I may be committing kind of the sin of characterization and kind of reductionism. And of course, there's a little bit of an, you know, just a sort of. Like, it's just an Instagram post. And. Yeah, of course, I didn't mean it to be clickbaity at all, but just you know, maybe a little. Little bit of an edge. Just these. These two, Brad. Two broad categories that are often seen as very, very opposite. And. And I think as we converse, we'll be able to touch on how are they similar. Yeah, but maybe like, thought people who see, you know, Deepak Chopra as their kind of guru, a focus on higher consciousness, focus on spiritual experience, focus on meditation. None of which. None of which is bad, right?

[Dr. Dan Koch]

By themselves, of course. Yeah.

[Ryan Kuja]

Yes. Deepak in the Epstein files is very, very bad. That's bad.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Probably quite a bad guy at his core, as it turns out. Does not mean all his ideas about spirituality are false.

[Ryan Kuja]

They are not.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Right. So we're not doing character assassination of Deepak Chopra or anybody else on Oprah's reading list or in her personal quiver of spiritual teachers. But, like, so it's not about Deepak the Epstein files character, but, like, just. Yeah, that kind of broad. The. The spirituality or metaphysics section at the. At the Barnes and Noble, you know, that kind of mind over matter. I mean, the secret is the secret kind of what we're talking about here, too. That kind of manifestation culture.

[Ryan Kuja]

That would fit. That would fit as well. Yeah. And it is. I'm not out to demonize anybody here. Right. Like, I'm not out to demonize anybody who associates themselves with what might Broadly be considered New Age. It's just sort of things that seem apparent to me where they sort of. Both camps maybe missing the mark in quite particular ways. But coming at it from different ends of the spectrum. One from conservative, theological and political, that end of the spectrum. And one coming from maybe more. The. The opposite end would be considered conservative really in, in any way. But both, I think, engaging in avoidance, engaging in, well, having the sort of conservative fundamentalists think they. Truth is in. Truth is in their corner. Beliefs are not to be. Are not to be questioned. The constant seeking of certainty. And there's. There are some parallels on the other side. Both often discourage the questioning of the norms of the group. Certainly in the conservative side of things, there's often a figure, an authority figure elevated in, you know, has, has power. So a degree, often of high control. The same can be true on the other side in terms of the, you know, the guru, again, not work. I'm kind of painting with. With broad brushes here, but yeah, guru, enlightened leader over here.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Let's start with that avoidance piece. So your second slide says quote, in the wake of pain and trauma, the fundies say things like, it's all a part of God's plan, while the New age types say, just trust the universe. Both avoid pain and reality through spiritual bypassing. So I was thinking first, let's define spiritual bypassing. I've talked about it before, but it's not like it comes up all the time. Do you have a sort of a handy definition of that? I can give my own if you don't and you could mess with it.

[Ryan Kuja]

Yeah, I probably don't have as succinct and well articulated.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

I mean, no, this one is back of the envelope. But it's like if, if a client asks me, I'll kind of, you know, sure, sure, sure.

[Ryan Kuja]

Yeah, I think it's. Spiritual bypassing is. It's. It's not about spirituality. It's about avoidance. It's about avoiding pain. Often it can be unconscious. Like, I see it as similar to like a psychological defense, like any defensive strategy we might employ, like, like repression or projection. Right. Largely as unconscious. I think spiritual bypassing can be unconscious, but it can help keep us away from engaging with that which feels too much. Overwhelming, unbearable wounds, pain, trauma within ourselves, within relationships, in the world at large. So I see it as a strategy for avoiding painful affect, certainly. And any type of pain, certainly anything that might feel intolerable. And I think the psyche is organized around avoiding pain. We have a protective nature of our psyche or what the psychoanalytic tradition would just call defenses. And I think spiritual bypassing sort of interfaces there. It serves a similar, a similar strategy and is part of that, that intrapsychic organization in a way that's serving a very particular purpose, but often unconscious, whether it's spending lots of time meditating, going on silent retreats, participating in sangha, whatever it might be, that that's not inviting us deeper into the, into the heart of pain, suffering, woundedness. It actually can function to keep us above or on the other side, on the more fundamentalist side of things. It could be, you know, just reading the Bible more, just praying more, going to Bible study. We only need Jesus, we don't need therapy. Right. So it's keeping us up in a way. And in the space of avoidance, it's

[Dr. Dan Koch]

like a surface level living sort of a thing. You know, you. Sometimes it's helpful for me to think about spiritual bypassing by thinking first about non spiritual bypassing. So just like, you know, a 12 year old is at his dad's funeral or his, you know, and his mom says, you know, well, we're just, we just gotta look on the bright side. Or you know, we just, we keep a stiff upper lip or we just, you know, we think about the positives or whatever while this kid is at his own parents funeral. Whereas a more emotionally healthy thing to say in that time would be like, of course it's okay to be grieving and crying. It's gonna take us a while to grieve. Our lives will probably never be the same, but they will be good again. And you know, like this kind of, those are much more realistic and yeah like helpful ways of phrasing what might be going on. Right then there's no spiritual dimension to that. Right. I'm just, I'm choosing a sort of secular one. What makes it spiritual bypassing is that you layer in, well, in a Christian context, by layering, by using spiritual language, you're also kind of laying in the authority of God into it. And you're kind of, you're kind of ending the conversation functionally by saying, you know, well, God, heaven needed another angel, or everything happens according to God's plan. Now you can say everything happens according to God's plan in a spiritual bypassing way or in a non spiritual bypassing way. You can say, hey, today you could think to yourself, I'm gonna give myself 30 minutes to mourn the loss of my mom, mourn the loss of my dad. And maybe part of that is me trusting that God has A plan for it.

[Ryan Kuja]

Yes.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

But maybe that plan includes me grieving, you know. Yes, yes, yes. Right. Like.

[Ryan Kuja]

And there. Yes. What comes to mind as I hear you say that, Dan, is there's. Now there's more integration because there's space for the reality of the darkness in me. I mean, the hard emotion. Right. There's space for that which is very uncomfortable and may feel unbearable. There's space for grief, and there's also space to maybe lean into the transcendent or find yourself in a larger story, something. Something bigger. But it's not repressing the pain and the emotion and jumping here. It's. It's including. Right. Which I think that. That. That's more. That's a basic example of a more integrated kind of faith or spirituality.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

I agree. I think one takeaway, though, from kind of the. The point that one way of saying what I'm trying to say is you don't know that it's spiritual bypassing just by looking at the words, right? You can say, well, it was all part of God's plan. And that can mean, functionally, we're gonna kind of move on. We're not gonna talk about this very often, you know, in our family. Like, that's what we're gonna say when we start to feel uncomfortable because we start thinking about losing dad. And then at that moment, our mantra to ourselves is, God had a plan. It's all part of God's plan. So I'm gonna get on with my day versus someone who's like, I am gonna spend a lot, give myself a lot of time and a lot of space to process this. And it is my spiritual belief that my father passing is a part of God's plan. And so just saying it's all part. Maybe the well. It's all. Maybe the well kind of gives it away. But just like it's all part of God's plan as a phrase that does not mean itself, spiritual bypassing, you have to look at the way it's functioning, because I actually think bypassing is the important word here. That bypassing has a functional. Points to something functional, a movement. We are going around it. We are not going through it. So that's the thing to look out for, not just the words which can be interpreted and kind of used in vastly different ways. And let's just do that. Let me have you do that. So I just kind of did that from a Christian perspective. Can you apply that to what you're calling the new age spirituality? Like, give us an example of a kind of A phrase from that world that could be used for spiritual, like just trust the universe. How could that be used as spiritual bypassing? And maybe briefly, how could that be used as not spiritual bypassing?

[Ryan Kuja]

Absolutely, yeah. I mean, it's very similar to what you just said, but the symbol, you know, the symbol system is different. It's not God, it's the universe and the same thing. What is the intent? What is the motivation? Is the motivation consciously or unconsciously to avoid. Is the strategy one of I'm going to avoid this, what feels like a cesspool? Right. Am I avoiding the wound, the pain and just trusting the universe? And often these things come as advice from other people. Just trust the universe, just trust God. It's part of God's plan in that also functions, I think, in a way, unconsciously it can keep the person giving the kind of advice. It can keep them comfortable. Right. It serves like a way for them to almost, in a way levy a happy ending on someone else's story. It keeps them away from discomfort as well.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah, well, that's a good point. That the bypassing. Often leaders or other people in our lives who, who are using spiritual bypassing language and they are meaning it in a bypass kind of a way. It's for them, it's not for us. It is for their discomfort. Now their discomfort could either be their own discomfort at like the loss or the pain or the trauma, or it could be their discomfort with our discomfort, their discomfort with our grief. You know, like imagine you imagine the mom of the 12 year old who's like into the sixth month of the kid, like, you know, moving more and more into like a hot topic goth phase, you know, like, you know, struggling with the loss of his dad and you know, getting really into. Pick your like emotional angsty artist of the day, you know, getting really into that. And like the mom can't handle how long that's taking. From her perspective. This should be done, this should be wrapped up. And then she might feel an urge to like use language to sort of encourage her kid to kind of get over it. And it may end up being in an unhealthy kind of a bypassing type of a way.

[Ryan Kuja]

Absolutely, absolutely. And I think that often bypassing it serves to keep us away from vulnerability. Right. And the vulnerability comes from the Latin vulnerare, which means able to be wounded. That's so descriptive. When we are vulnerable, we are able to be wounded. If we can stay away from vulnerability, we can maybe prevent wounds from happening or at least, at very least prevent the wounds that are festering within us from, from being touched.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah.

[Ryan Kuja]

And even, even Dan, like toxic positivity can be part of this. More of the secular, like you were saying earlier, the, the kind of the, the secular bypassing or. Yeah, and, and there's, I think there's endless permutations of what bypassing can look like, whether it's secular or force.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Spiritual toxic positivity makes me want to do a very slight detour onto one of my favorite conceptual distinctions that I will bring up a lot, which is William James's distinction between sick soul religion and healthy minded religion. Right. Sick soul religion is religion. Or we'd say now spirituality would be included in these concepts he's writing 130 years ago or whatever. But six soul religion is Luther. You're starting with the evil and sinfulness. You're starting with the pain of the world. Liberation theology is sixth soul religion. Anything that kind of starts with the really shitty stuff and then makes sure that it has concepts, language, practices to contain that. That's sort of the primary job, that's the first job of the religious system is for people who are aware of what's broken to have language for it. Healthy minded religion errs on the opposite side. It's like, and this would be Deepak Chopra. But I don't mean to paint with too broad, I don't mean to sort of sully healthy minded religion. I think of Rob Bell usually in this category. I think of a lot of more left leaning type of spirituality. And healthy minded religion says, well, yeah, there is pain and suffering and maybe evil. Sometimes they would say there's no evil. But really we have the capacity in ourselves to kind of enhance, enliven, to sort of raise ourselves up, raise our consciousness. We need to basically get that engine humming as well as it can. And so the focus is primarily on sort of like keeping our minds healthy and not in a clinical, like the way a therapist would say, but like, you know, we want to sort of bring that marshal all that positivity manifesting is a perfect example of healthy minded spirituality. Like get that, get that thing going so that it can bring good things to you. And fundamentalist Christianity is definitely sick soul in its general orientation. So you're going to have less toxic positivity in fundamentalism. You'll have kind of toxic negativity or whatever it is. You know, you're painting God as this despicable, morally despicable being who kind of by default hates everybody. Right. Okay. So that's not going to be a lot of toxic positivity. That's not going to be your fucking problem there. But in a lot of more progressive, left leaning new age spirituality, you can end up with toxic positivity that overemphasizes the healthy mindedness, which of course is true. That is a part of what a lot of therapy is, is marshaling those resources that we have within ourselves and our communities to sort of buffer ourselves and move forward. But it can become toxic positivity when it is used to bypass the pain, the trauma that needs to be dealt with. The darker side of things that, that needs its own light and attention.

[Ryan Kuja]

Right, right, right, right. And it's so it's like it's bypassing the night and only focusing on the day versus day and night for form a whole.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

And so much more succinctly said. Nice words, nice words there.

[Ryan Kuja]

Yeah. Like Ken, how Ken Wilber talks about the process of evolution is transcend, including the evolution of consciousness and moving through developmental stages. Right. It's. It's transcend and include not transcendent repress. And I think a lot of what we see with spiritual bypassing it's transcend and repress. There isn't, there isn't an including of what of earlier stages or. There's not an including of all aspects of our, of our humanity. There's wanting to certainly with the healthy mind approach that you mentioned, if we can transcend this, we can get here. So there's this kind of upward, this kind of ascent, a spirituality of ascent. Right. Spiritual experiences, peak experiences, bliss manifesting all of these different things. Everything is just consciousness. Right. So it's, there's, there's a repression of the. More in a way basic, in a way the, yeah. The. Even the body, the body itself not including the body.

[Blinds.com Advertisement Speaker]

Did you know if your windows are bare, indoor temperatures can go up 20 degrees. Turn the temperature down with blinds.com and get up to 50% off custom window treatments like solar roller shades and more during the Memorial Day Mega sale. Whether you want to DIY it or have a pro handle everything, we've got you free samples, real design experts and zero pressure. Just help when you need it. Shop up to 50% off site wide and huge savings on door busters. Right now during the Memorial Day mega [e-mail] rules and restrictions apply.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

You know, I think about these kind of more eastern perspectives of, you know, some metaphors that, that come to mind are like when we die, our consciousness is like a drop of water that drops back into the ocean of consciousness. I'm Sympathetic to certain ideas like that, even just more from an existential psychology perspective, you know, one that does not assume an afterlife, which is. I really hope for a beautiful and just afterlife. I desperately, desperately hope for it. But I find myself kind of feeling like I need to live as if I can be okay without one, if that makes sense. And so in trying to be okay without one, one of the concepts that I find quite powerful and quite convincing most of the time is like, you know, this is all gonna end, and I won't be bothered by any of it. Like, the idea that all shall be well, I think in the biblical context is supposed to be like, you know, the Isaiah idea of the lion and the lamb. Like, not. Not just okay. Not like all's gonna be okay, but like, it's gonna be fucking great. It's gonna be glorious and resplendent. But I can lean into. It'll just be okay because nobody will. None of. No one who's alive now will be alive, and they won't have any issues, and it will just be sort of peaceful. So some of those ideas I find to be. To have some psychological power for me, not to mention clients of mine who are not religious or spiritual. Right. Who don't have kind of those things to pull on and who. Who may have, you know, for instance, anxiety around death and things like that, like we all do. Is there a danger in any of that, from your view of bypassing or anything else we've been talking about? Or is that all sort of above board of the topics we've been addressing thus far? I kind of just want to kick that or anything else to you kind of wide open.

[Ryan Kuja]

So is that problematic in terms of how it might interface with bypassing? Like, even your kind of where you are with regard to. I'm not really potentially on board with the eschatological vision of the new heaven and the new earth, but I am on board with maybe there's something of okayness, an ultimate sort of okayness.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah. I guess I realize that it's not guilty of spiritual bypassing because it's not making any promises. It's actually, you know, I think maybe. Maybe one way to say it is what I find attractive about this, or another example is Irvin Yalom's famous thing that he will do with his clients, which is to ask them, well, what was it like before you were born? As a way of getting them to be like, oh, well, it was fine. You know, like, so that's a way of reducing anxiety, but it's not offering anything. You know, we're not like making up for the evils of the world. It's not, it's not really just, it doesn't, you know, I think of it like opioid receptors and opiate molecules. Like, you know, C.S. lewis talks about this deep desire that humans have for like capital J justice. And you know, he thinks, and I think he's, he's right psychologically to say that the concept of heaven and, and like a just afterlife, like, oh, that is the opioid molecule that the receptor is wanting, that fits, that's the key, that fits the lock of something that we really want as people. Right. So it's not a cheap fix. This kind of like, well, maybe it'll just be okay. It'll just be done and that'll be okay. And no one's suffering. And that's what we mean by. So it's not, I guess that I'm realizing that's not a problem in the bypassing sense. But maybe I'll just ask you this. You're a spiritual director, the way that you write and think about this stuff. My sense is that you do hope for and probably have confidence in something considerably more robust than that. Eschatologically speaking. In terms of what comes next, what do you see as the difference between the sort of perspective I just did and a more full throated, the kingdom of heaven kind of thing?

[Ryan Kuja]

Sure, sure, sure. So honestly, I find I see them both as hopeful. Maybe one. I find hope in both. Neither are nihilistic and they're both. There's both, there's a vision in both, just a different sort of vision. There's a, there's a hope. I think in both there's just a different sort of, sort of hope. And even like you said, maybe a reality in which there wouldn't be suffering. Well, that sounds, that sounds phenomenally hopeful to me. So, you know, I don't spend a whole lot of time personally thinking these things through. And even in my spiritual direction practice, I often don't. Clients aren't often bringing these, these sorts of questions. It's often more especially with clients who are maybe deconstructing and reconstructing or the, the old, the old conditioning has, has faded. They've left church. They've, you know, often experienced church hurt or church trauma. And it's like they're able to leave the, the village in a way that was harmful and binding them and they're able to go out into the dark woods and begin to walk and maybe they have A flashlight. But they're in the space of. They're in the space of uncertainty and freedom. So it's more. It's more of maybe the immediacy of trying to reorient as the. As the old system, the smaller container has. Has broken apart and they're maybe not yet situated. They're in the kind of liminality and disorientation of the in between. Because there isn't necessarily a larger container that's just showed up with new community, with people who allow space for mystery and, you know, more of a. A, A mature faith that's developmentally further along, say. But yeah, that space of what happens in those spaces, the loneliness, the disorientation, the where's my tribe? Where my people. Kind of the loyal soldier parts of us that come up that say, hey, just go back. It's safe there. At least you have the answers there. Right. So more. Lots of. There's lots of conversations around that I tend to find than the ultimate. Than these questions of. Yeah. Esphatology, ultimate reality in terms of what comes next.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Let's just hang. This is a bit of a cul de sac for what we set out to talk about, but I'm interested here. Let's linger a bit longer. The type of client you're describing in your spiritual direction practice is very similar to sort of my average therapy client. And I also do coaching with some of these folks. So there's a bit of. That's a little bit in between. And just as a refresher, because I probably haven't said it in a while, for me, my coaching practice in Washington State, the kind of distinction is you're not directly treating mental health symptoms, and clinicians will themselves raise up three different flags about all those definitions and all that stuff. It's, it's. It could be a unclear line in a lot of ways, but practically I just say if I think something really requires therapy, I'll just refer you to a therapist. Like, I'm not gonna do that. That's really how it ends up working. But similar type of client. Right. Like you're describing sort of this in between. There's been some religious change. There is some disorientation around that. What's the difference between, like, doing spiritual, since you do both, what's the difference between doing spiritual direction with a client like that and doing therapy with a client like that?

[Ryan Kuja]

There's so much overlap, like, you know. And I said with spiritual direction clients. And as I'm thinking right now, many are our therapy clients as well. So there's, there's. In terms of that, at least the way. The way I approach it. And I think my spiritual direction tends to have maybe more of a therapeutic scent or flavor because I'm a therapist, and they're very hard to separate out. And just like, as psycho spiritual beings, where is. Where is psychology becoming spirituality? And, you know, there isn't a distinct line, right? There's. There's this. There's this interpenetration of this large. This large gray area. And I think, you know, like, good theology is good psychology. Right. And so there's for. For Christian therapy clients who have experienced spiritual trauma, the conversations, the kind of journeying, the unpacking, the processing there, there's often. They often look quite similar. Like there isn't necessarily a hard and fast line. I think with spiritual direction clients, we may not get in, like, we're not going to be doing trauma therapy. Right. That they could. They may or may not need related to their spiritual walk, related to spiritual trauma or otherwise. But, yeah, there's not a hard and fast line. I noticed sometimes certain spiritual direction clients, a session may feel more therapeutic. Any given session may feel very more therapeutic in nature. And sometimes a client who sees me for therapy, it's like a lot of the questions I'm asking are almost classic spiritual direction questions. So, of course, depending on the session, depending on the raw material, what the person is presenting with that, you know, that session.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah. Okay, let's go back to the. The content of your Instagram posts. So that first one, just to reorient us the. Or the second slide. But the first kind of idea was this spiritual bypassing. Being present in both settings with different language. This next one to me feels like two separate issues. Maybe you can tie them together for me. Or maybe they are overlapping would be a better way of saying it. So what you write is the fundamentalist says doubt is the enemy of faith and questioning beliefs is dangerous. Right. The New Ager tends toward a sloppy sentimentality devoid of substance and a refusal to enter into grief, anger paradox, and emotional complexity. So in some sense here, that second part, the New Age one, that does sound a bit more like spiritual bypassing, Right? It's like if your spirituality keeps you from grief, anger paradox, and emotional complexity, then it is engaging in spiritual bypassing. Right. But the fundamentalist sentence is about questioning, right? Questioning beliefs as dangerous. You could maybe get someone. You could try to get someone to stop questioning by using some spiritual bypassing language. But those. Those seem to be kind of distinct issues to me. What what do you say to that?

[Ryan Kuja]

Yeah, yeah. And they, they may be, they may be distinct. They probably are distinct issues. I think perhaps the place where they weave together and this links maybe to the earlier slides and I don't know if we've named it yet, but there's often a sense of spiritual bypassing is wanting to bring us into, wanting to bring us into certainty. Like the certainty of God. God's got this. Yeah, just trust God, just trust the universe. There's a kind of. So we are sure, we are certain. This is just, this is just the way it is. I think, you know, in the more fundamentalist side of things, they, that group tends to see doubt as the enemy of faith. I don't think doubt is the enemy of faith at all. I think faith includes doubt. I think maybe certainty is, certainty is the opposite of faith, maybe not the enemy, but certainty seems to be the opposite of faith. So there's often this kind of ideological certitude coming from the more fundamentalists side of people and there are formulaic answers. There are, you know, kind of what we touched on earlier, you're either in or out. We have the corner on the truth and nothing can be, nothing can be questioned. So the tenants, the core tenets of the faith mustn't be questioned or else you're entering into a danger zone. So, you know, eternal conscious torment. We do not, we do not question that Biblical literalism. We, we do not. Right. We do not question these things. So there's a kind of, there's a certainty there that is, in a way it's impenetrable. There isn't, there isn't room to question. And I think when, if, if questions were allowed, such as, well, what about, you know, what if we hold. How does the complexity of somebody who can't just get over the loss of a loved one. This may not fit the paradigm we have of praying harder, reading your Bible more, but we can't question that because it's going to rattle things, it's going to shake things up and we don't want things shaken up.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

So I think, of course I agree with everything you're saying about conservative religion there, fundamentalist Christianity. I think when it comes to the other side, it's a little less clear to me that the spirituality, the sort of new age spirituality side and what's coming up for me is a distinction between a kind of guru based and a non guru based meaning. Is there a figure alive or dead? Right. It could be that the teacher has passed, but there's A community that maintains its spiritual life based on his or her teachings. Right. So is there. Because that's essentially a text. And if it's a living person, then it's somewhere in between a text. And like, what LDS church has. Which is a living prophet who can. Who purportedly speaks directly for God. There's a sort of. There's a central authority figure or authoritative text, but the Deepak Chopra metaphysics section of the bookstore version. I actually think that one of the things. One of the features that it has that distinguishes it from conservative religion is like, well, maybe you just gotta wait a few months for the next book to come out by a different writer with a slightly different set of ideas, and you could go, you know what I mean? I'm more of a Neckhart Tolle guy now. Or I'm more of a. Whoever the latest manifestation teacher is. I'm more of that kind of a person now. And there's a transience where, you know, it's like, when I think of the gurus, they buy land. Like, you know, there's like a compound, you know, wild, wild country in Oregon or just any, you know. Right. Like, so these communes that people live on, or some wealthy person donates a large home, they're a member of the community and 40 of the people live there or something. It starts to look more like an institutional form of religion, and then it gets that version that's like fundamentalism. But to me, sort of like one of the selling points on the other side is the opposite. No, it's like nobody has that, and that can have its own cost. You could go too far in that direction where you're essentially out to sea. Or it's almost like whatever band is popular, whatever idea is popular, you'll be sort of flowing with it. That's its own kind of a danger. Does that distinction track for you?

[Ryan Kuja]

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So two different. Very different permutations or forms or expressions. And I think they're, you know, to like, there are different levels of. Of health. There may be folks who sort of identify as new Age, who are deeply curious, who are deeply curious, who do engage more of their inner world, are attuned to the suffering of the world. Right. That don't really fit this well because they're just, for lack of a better phrase, like they. There's more of a sense of integration in health where they are. Even though they are browsing the metaphysics section and they are reading, you know, whoever is the. The latest. The latest and greatest.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

What I mean, it makes me Want to ask like, and, and I know I'm just kind of asking a question about some of the further slides. Again, people can go through and read all the slides and take them in at their own pace, but you end up kind of talking about healthy spirituality. You say it's a holding environment for the unresolved, the process of becoming the mystery of being alive in a world on fire where glimpses of joy are possible. I love that juxtaposition of world on fire, but also joy. Well, I think, I actually disagree that the world's on fire. I think as a. Well, let's maybe let's do a bit on this and then we'll do healthy spirituality really briefly. My cognitive therapist comes out around this stuff and I think some of this is probably catastrophizing. Like we know that humans catastrophize and if gun to my head, if I had to put money down, does living via social media make us more or less likely to catastrophize about the state of the world? I think I would bet my house on more social media. Algorithms make us as individual human beings more likely to catastrophize. And then, I'm not piling onto you here, Ryan, to be clear, but then we post social media things about the world being on fire and we go, yeah, the world's on fire. Well, I mean, I would say the United States global standing is on fire. The norms of civil discourse in America are fucking on fire right now. But like, you know, I have two boys under 10 and I think their prospects in terms of their physical health and education and like the, like they are, in a lot of ways the world looks great. It looks better for them than it looked for me. Maybe not the US economy for the bottom 90% of people. There are issues there, of course, but, but like it's not. I wouldn't call, I wouldn't. When I think about my son in kindergarten and him, you know, running around and what he's learning, I just think, well, that part of the world's not on fire. He's having a great time. He's learning and growing and you know, so maybe just briefly you could defend on fire and disagree with me or nuance it however you want.

[Ryan Kuja]

Yeah, no, I agree in many ways. I mean in terms of my, you know, my little sphere, my little world. And we have six year old triplets who are in kindergarten and they're doing amazing. So, you know, there are these pockets of flourishing and yet they're the political division, the kind of geopolitical fragmentation. And it seems like things are so high, things are so heightened with the administration. We have the whole, you know, what ICE is doing, the seemingly the erosion of democracy, these types of things where we didn't, we weren't having many of these, well, different conversations we're having now in the zeitgeist than 15, than 15 years ago. So yeah, that's, that's a little, not, not everything is on fire. There are pockets that are on fire. And some of us are more insulated from that, from that than others. I think I'm quite insulated from that given my social location and geographical location. All of these, all of these things.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

I've recently been thinking that I am in part insulated. Yes. I mean I think the sort of various privileged aspects of my life do insulate me, but I also think I'm insulated by being a cognitive therapist. And I have thought recently of like, I should maybe put this into a book at some point because I had panic disorder for 20 years and I stopped having panic disorder basically through cognitive therapy. I didn't know that that's what it was like. I, some of it I had did a very little. I read one CBT book that a therapist recommended, but I didn't like do a lot of cognitive therapy over the years. And when I ended up getting into therapy it wasn't cognitive therapy. But as I learn more and practice it more, I recognize that these are basically the tools that effectively cured me of panic disorder. I haven't had a panic attack and I don't even know the last one I had. And it's not a looming threat for me anymore, which means it's not an active disorder. And I do think that I am, I am buffered against especially the kind of bite sized media version of like global anxiety or anxiety about the world through like recognizing cognitive distortions so quickly and like they just don't have as much oxygen in my own mind. But okay, that's neither here nor there. So the last kind of topic I want to talk about is healthy spirituality. So again, it's holding space for the unresolved. Right. You're contrasting it with a sort of surfacy, New age spiritualism as well as a spirituality as well as this deep, deep ingrained fundamentalist religion that it leaves room for the unresolved, for this process of becoming who we are going to be. The mystery of being alive. Right, so healthy spirituality. Where do you see that in a non. So obviously there are Christian spiritualities or Christian approaches to spirituality that can be healthy. Do you think that any non religious, you know, like, are there cohesive spiritualities that you have seen in clients or reading or elsewhere that are non religious? Because, you know, a lot of my listeners and friends and clients, they can't do religion. It's not, you know, for all intents and purposes, it may just be too late for them. The way their brains have been formed and the way their lives have gone, whether or not God exists, like, they're not going to be able to really do it that way. So I'm curious if you. If you have seen healthy spirituality outside of any religious traditions?

[Ryan Kuja]

Yeah. You know, I think of what Anthony De Melo, who was a priest, said. Spirituality is about waking up. So anytime we're in the. In the process of waking up, and I think that includes. And this kind of ties back into the spiritual, bypassing waking up to

[Dr. Dan Koch]

our

[Ryan Kuja]

own pain, our own woundedness, and coming into more intimacy and connection with more of our humanity. Or even it's related, but slightly different, like finding the sacred in the everyday, that doesn't need to be connected to a certain religious tradition. Right. The encounter with the sacred. Right. Is there a sense of maybe even a larger sort of like I use the word holding a virus, barring from Winnicott. Right. Like, is there any. I think of healthy spirituality as something that can help undo aloneness. Aloneness, especially in pain, is intolerable for the human being. And is there a sense of what can move me toward more, More connection? And not necessarily. We often talk about, you know, like therapeutically in therapy. We need connection, healthy relationships, that sort of thing, but also connection to, however we might imagine the divine or the sacred. What helps undo aloneness? Humans do not do well. We are not designed for aloneness. And I think we do have a. A spiritual impulse. I think there's a kind of spiritual impulse in us that is quite robust and quite. It doesn't necessarily mean, you know, going to mass or attending church. It could be your. Your. The creative thing in you that you can't keep inside that becomes part of a healthy spirituality. And anything that's moving us toward more intimacy with ourselves, with others, potentially with the divine, moving us closer to our own pain and the pain of the world. That's what I see as kind of healthy spirituality. And that doesn't need to unfold within the walls of a religious system.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

So here's maybe our last kind of general topic, and we were hoping we might get to some existential psychology here. And I think we have. So one thing that I'm hearing in your answer right around aloneness and moving toward connection. Right. So first of all, basically all therapists in every modality, major modality, major treatment style, would agree that, you know, human connection is better than a lack of human connection. That, practically speaking, we want our clients mixing it up with people that can support them in various ways. Obviously, you don't want those to be unhealthy relationships, but yeah, yeah, it's good human connection. It's a major, major aspect of health. But there's a little tension between a view that says that a robust spirituality is aligning with the way the world is, whether that's God or something like God existing, and the more atheistic existential perspective that, like, we are born alone, we die alone. We do a whole. We. We do a whole lot of heavy lifting subconsciously to ignore that fact. And that, like, acceptance of some level of isolation from others is acceptance of reality and is therefore actually kind of necessary. You know, you could push this as harder or less hard in terms of calling it necessary, but. But it would certainly be accurate and honest. And so there's, you know, I don't, I don't know that these are irreconcilable. You know, you. You can have a. You can have a Christian existentialism that says, yes, the psychological experience of a human life includes some necessary isolation from others. Each person is their own person, and they are not. They cannot merge with other people. Mother, father, you know, partner, best friend, can't do it, kids. But that doesn't mean that we are not also fundamentally connected to God in our own way kind of a thing. So we aren't actually alone because God is with us. Right. You can. There's a way to kind of have both, but I just thought I would throw that tension out there and kind of for you to play with and respond to and feel free to ask me to clarify any of that, if it would be helpful.

[Ryan Kuja]

Yeah. What exactly is the. Is the question in there?

[Dr. Dan Koch]

That's becoming a theme today, Ryan, and it's on me. What do you do? So let's just say I am positing a tension between two perspectives that I find valuable. Existential psychology, which says isolation, there's a fundamental truth there about human isolation, and to call it what it is has real benefits for letting us kind of take reality seriously and then figure out what we want to do about it. Okay. And on the other hand, there's spirituality, including Christian spirituality, which I practice and hope is sort of true. I hope that that isolation is only While we're alive on Earth and that when we die it's gone and we are no longer isolated and that there's something meaningful about that. And so on that view, it would be sensible to engage in spiritual practice regularly that highlights connectivity with God, with others, that sort of, you know, devalues or de. Centers that fundamental isolation. So there's a tension in how you approach those. Like, do you call it what it is? Do you remind yourself of its opposite? You know, so, so what do you do with that? Do you see the tension? What do you do with the tension? That's the question.

[Ryan Kuja]

Yeah, absolutely. See the tension. I think the tension is something that we have to hold, we have to bear that the tension is necessary because there's a sense of. As differentiated beings, there's a fundamental aloneness to the human experience. Right. Nobody else has my subjective, phenomenological kind of. Right. Experience of me. No one else is. Dan. Right. There's also linkage. So we're differentiated and linked from the very beginning of when we come out of the womb. So there's the tension of distinction and connection. And I think we have to hopefully try to do that dance as imperfectly as we can. I think there's a difference between this kind of isolation and alienation. Like, I think certain folks are due to whatever circumstances, whatever adversity, whatever it, whatever it may be, intra psychically and kind of more of the ecology of relationships, they find themselves in an alienated state where there isn't enough linkage. There's too much differentiation, there's too much aloneness. And given like what we know as, you know, we're not designed like we need. I think connection is a biological, psychological and spiritual imperative. But yet that doesn't override the reality of. And there's old and there's aloneness, but does, like, can we move away? Yeah. I think there's a difference between alien, like fundamental, but kind of just a life of alienation and a life where there's some bearing, the bearing alone. Aloneness and what that. The difficulty of that.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

I tend to lean pretty heavily with therapy clients. Well, I mean, or coaching clients, if it makes sense into explaining why we experience certain difficulties today through an evolutionary lens as a way of kind of diverting a bunch of like, inaccurate guilt. Right, like. And giving an explanatory framework that kind of. Yeah, like puts, puts the onus on the physical processes that got us here as opposed to the moral character of the client or something like that. Right. Like, oh, I'm anxious because I'M a bad person. Well, maybe you're anxious because we developed giant brains. So, like, that kind of a thing. And so. Okay, so if we're talking about. First of all, let me just as a glancing note, say, I really like you bringing in alienation and contrasting that with isolation. So I love that. That, like, it could both be true that we have some fundamental isolation from each other in that we are individual people and we are not the other person. We cannot merge with them. But that doesn't mean that we need to be fully disconnected from them, which would be something more like alienation. So I love that. That's great. But if I ask myself, okay, so how do we get. How did we get there to this place where we are kind of fighting and oscillating, you know, between isolation, alienation, codependency. Right. Is another thing to. Enmeshment and codependency are a concern where we try and resolve isolation and alienation through, like, too much identification with another person who is actually their own person and not us, right. Through various forms. So I think, where does this come from evolutionarily? Well, it's something like the fact that we are isolated individuals that stems from the fact that organism cutoffs are what they are. You could sort of imagine, like. Yeah, I mean, we can imagine it with other species that, like, let's say that ants got. Ants or bees got to be as intelligent, roughly speaking, as we are. Which, you know, I know there are problems with that. They're not big enough and stuff like that. But let's just say that a species that was much more like ants or bees got to be the kind of dominant human species. Well, then we would be less isolated. Like, those organisms are not as isolated as we are. They are not isolated as autonomous and independent. They are not as unique. They are actually more fundamentally more part of a whole than humans are. But humans are more part of a whole than other primates. Right. Like, other primates don't live in as big of groups and things like this. So there's this kind of. This kind of raw material of evolution has led us to this place of being. So we are fundamentally alone in a sense. Like, my wife's brain chemistry might affect me, but only secondarily. It does not directly affect my brain chemistry. I have my own brain with its own chemistry. And if I eat McDonald's only for three meals a day for a month, I'm gonna be in worse shape than she is if she's not eating McDonald's. But we evolved to basically Kind of work best in groups of up to 200. So we really do need other people. Like, that is a fundamental part of what makes us human. How do you think of all that stuff, like, theologically or spiritually? Is that God's choice? Does God specifically want. Be creatures that are in between that isolated and combined or communal type of a thing? Does God have creatures on other planets that are different than that? And if so, how much can we put that on God? Is my asking about God sort of beside the point? How would you react to any of that stuff?

[Ryan Kuja]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So before you bring in the kind of the theological question and the God question that my wheels are turning a lot. Let's. Can we. Can we start.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Slow it down. Slow it down.

[Ryan Kuja]

Yeah, yeah. So I think of, for example, like, the brain as a social organ, right? So the brain does not and cannot develop properly outside of an attachment relationship. Right? So literally, the brain is a. Is a social organ, right? Especially the circuitry. Especially, like, if we look at Alan Shore's research, the right hemisphere, which is related to affect, regulation, these sorts of things. So if we grow up outside of a nurturing social environment with some degree of secure attachment and good enough parenting, we are going to be more likely to experience some degree of psychopathology severe or. Or not severe. I also think about how. So I also think about how the mind is relational, right? The mind. Like if we look at Dan Siegel's work, like the mind as an embodied and relational process that regulates the flow of energy and information within us and between us. That is, the mind transcends the skull boundary and transcends. Transcends the skin boundaries. So it's actually happening between us. Like, Dan's. My. Your mind is impacting my mind. My mind is impacting your mind.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Extended cognition. Brad Straw and I just talked about that on a recent episode.

[Ryan Kuja]

Yeah, right, right, right. All of that. And so I think where also these other, you know, animals we're talking about, I don't know about, like, we have it. We have an ego. We have a. We have a false self. We have our sense of being, our conscious sense of being separate and not in communion and different and isolated. I think there's. Or alienated. Like, I think there's something there that impacts us. I think we're constantly. There's a constant unconscious desire to what, like, Ken Wilber calls the separate self sense. Like the separate self sense. And the being, the feeling of being a kind of atomistic creature is inherently painful for us. I don't know that Other species, even with highly developed brains, like orcas, right. Like they're having a. Probably a wildly different experience than us, even though their limbic system has in a way, more development or more layering, more. It's more complex than our limbic system even. But they're more. There isn't an individual sense of self. There's sense of self is coming communally in. If you're an orca having the experience of an orca, right. Without. Without.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

You are quite literally a friend of the pod. If you're an orca.

[Ryan Kuja]

I love it.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Don't get to make very many podcast orca pod jokes. Then we go, we got to get

[Ryan Kuja]

friend of the pod. There we go. Good placement.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Member of the pod, I guess, technically.

[Ryan Kuja]

So, yeah. And I don't. I have your. Your question makes my wheels turn. I don't know exactly where to go with all this. But we are embodied. We're always embodied and always embedded. And we never escape our embodiedness as individuals nor our embeddedness in larger systems from family system, communities, school, state, nation, world. Right. We are systems within systems within systems. And I guess if I think of kind of the theological or more the spiritual piece, like, is there an. Is there a telos toward flourishing, A purpose? Like a purpose? Yeah. Is there, Is there, Is the whole thing. Yes. Is the whole thing heading somewhere? Is there an arc that's trustworthy in some sense? And I think about maybe like, say, just within our own Christian inheritance where we come from. The. The mystics, the sages, the theologians, the wise ones who have pointed to, in. In very different ways and sometimes not in agreement, but that point toward flourishing for all of creation, at least human flourishing, perhaps flourishing for all of creation. And what, what leads us there? For me then, it like, interfaces with theology and shows us sort of is the ark I'm following is. Is the direction I'm going, leading me and leading others toward, like what even, like a biblical theology might say as God's. Am I participate? I'm not saying I necessarily ask this question of myself every day. There have been times in the past where I might ask it more readily, like, how can. How can I participate in the. In breaking of, say, God's kingdom if we, if we use that language Again, I don't necessarily ask myself that. There was certainly a time where I did, but I even see, like, say, therapy work, for example, with a client who's not. Who's not a Christian. The healing, transformation, flourishing, that person having more. More integration at the level of their psyche, the level of Their relationships, the level of their, their personal world. That's, that's spiritual. That's even if we're not using the language of God, the language of theology, the language of spirituality. And I don't know if I'm probably getting off on my own tangent here based on what you asked.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

That's good. Yeah. I mean, we have to wrap up for time. I like, maybe let's end on that idea of integration because it's a term that also gets thrown out maybe in some of these kind of new age circles as well. It's a therapy term that has burst beyond the bounds of the therapeutic world. In some ways. It feels to be, to me, to be kind of like regulation and dysregulation, where it's like we have particular meanings of those terms. And maybe when people are using the term integration or dysregulation, they mean the same thing and maybe they don't, and it's hard to know.

[Ryan Kuja]

Right, right.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

But I think of integration as kind of like, you know, one thing I'm often pointing out, helping clients see is where they are living in fundamental tension within their own life. Well, over here you are doing, you are following this value and over here you're following this opposite value. And you can't really make sense of the two because they kind of don't go together. And so how can we figure out which one we're going to pick and which is the one that is more in line with who you really want to be, who you feel called to be, I might say, depending on the client. Right. Like where you're supposed to be going, which I think works pretty well with the way you're using, you know, integration. So that that integration can be true of a religious client or a non religious client. Integration is, I think of it more like how many. No one's ever going to be a perfectly aligned specimen. But like how many of those stray kind of detours can we trim off? You know, how many of those like spray stray dead branches can we trim off of the limb and keep it. It's kind of all healthy. It's all moving towards one way. It is like to help people get rid of non integrated parts is a kind of like pruning process that then reserves the energy that the plant or tree has to put it into the good parts, to put it into the parts that are still growing and producing fruit. You know, that kind of a thing. How does that description of integration hit you?

[Ryan Kuja]

Yeah, yeah. So I'm actually, actually today I'm just about to sign a book contract with Brazos. And it's a book on. On integration at all these different levels. So especially in the context of. Of healing, of. Of healing and certainly trauma. So like, looking at neural integration, looking at autonomic integration, relational integration, integration of traumatic memory, like integrating a healthy. A healthy spirituality and looking at some like, integration in terms of maybe like a more technical definition, like from Dan Siegel, the linkage of differentiated parts of a system. But it's. I also think of integration as fundamental, as baked into the fabric of reality itself. I see the Trinity as integrated relationship. I see like the K, you know, this. This language of the kingdom of God as a. As a more integrated reality trying to make its way to. Into this. Into this world. I think of it in the Jewish sense of shalom. To me, that's. That's it. That's integration from a Jewish. A beautiful, you know, ancient Hebrew concept. So we. I see integration, you know, defined slightly differently at all these different levels, but a reality at all these different levels. We could even talk about it like, you know, the, like, integration act at the. At the quantum level. There's always something around this distinction and connection. So, yeah, that's. Could say a lot more about that.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Probably its own. That might be its own episode when that book comes out.

[Ryan Kuja]

Let's. Let's do it. Yeah. Okay. It'll be two years until it comes out, but.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Well, yeah, I've been doing this podcast. I've been podcasting for 10 and this one for six and a half, so I think I can. That's fine.

[Ryan Kuja]

Love it. Awesome.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Thank you, Ryan, so much.

[Ryan Kuja]

Thanks so much. Yeah, that was a great conversation. Thanks for having me and yeah, really appreciate it.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Ryan had to jump off to see a client. He really gave us. He gave us those golden last few minutes there. Hopefully not harming his session or his ability to concentrate. Again, thanks to Ryan, Ryan Kuja. And we will have a link to his Instagram in the show notes if you guys want to connect with his work. Thank you so much for listening.