Dr. Chuck DeGroat on Healing What's WIthin: Finding Wholeness After Abuse

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Welcome to the a World of Difference podcast. I'm Lori Adams Brown, and this is a podcast for those who are different and want to make a difference. Are you walking through something in a relationship or in a situation you have at work? Or maybe something that has just been a curveball in your life that you don't really know how to walk through without some professional help? Well, if that is you, Betterhelp is here to help you.

00:00:25
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That's www.betterhelp.com difference for 10% off your first month. Today we have a very popular guest back on the show again. Chuck de Groot is back on. He's been on a previous podcast episode which was one of our most downloaded, where he talked about his book when narcissism comes to church, and Chuck is a professor who's written another book called healing what's coming Home to yourself and to God when you're wounded, weary, and wandering? Chuck is a professor of pastoral care and christian spirituality at Western Theological Seminary in Holland, Michigan, where he serves as the founding executive director of the Clinical Mental Health Counseling Program.

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He's a licensed therapist, a spiritual director and author, retreat leader, speaker, faculty member within the Solcare Institute. As a therapist, he spent specializes in navigating the issues of abuse, trauma, pastoral and leadership, health and doubt, and dark nights of the faith on the journey and he trains clergy in handling issues of abuse and trauma. He conducts pastor and church planter assessments. He facilitates church consultations and investigations of abuse in church and faith communities before transitioning to training and forming pastors. Chuck served as a pastor himself in Orlando, FLorida and in San Francisco, and he and his wife, Sarah.

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I've been married for 30 years and have two adult daughters. And he is not only writing and speaking and working as a therapist, but he's really a real thought leader in this space of what to do in a situation where there's a pastor who's dealing with narcissistic tendencies and has been psychologically, spiritually abusing and abusing maybe in many other ways, staff or congregants or people in the community, or even his own family. Chuck is walking face to face with some of these as clients. He's consulting in churches on how to change the systems that both enable and invite and welcome and celebrate these types of leaders that only hurt the church and hurt the pastor as well. And so in a spirit of helping to unpack what it's going to take to heal from what's within this book is nothing so much a second response to that first book, but it's just a deeper understanding of the therapeutic work he does.

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Whether people are dealing with narcissism or other issues unrelated to that, that could also be a Venn diagram related to it, such as attachment issues from their childhood trauma, ways they've responded to that that have been harmful to them and those around them. And he really invites a curiosity to be introspective and to look into very interior parts of ourselves. It's a beautiful book. Really enjoyed reading it. On a recent plane trip from San Francisco to Shanghai.

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It's having this advanced copy has been a real honor just to walk through it. I've highlighted so much of it. I had so much I want to ask him about it. So I'm really excited to welcome to the show Today Doctor Chuck DeGroat.

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Hi, Chuck, and welcome back to the podcast. It's so good to be here. Loride. It is so good. We're all smiles because we're just so happy to be talking about your new book, which, congratulations.

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It's such a good one. Here it is, healing what's within and coming home to yourself and to God when you're wounded, weary and wandering. And for many who know you through your previous book, narcissism comes to church, which you were on the podcast talking about last time. And this one you're kind of taking. It's not a totally different approach, but it's a different level.

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You're talking about a deep look within, which is sort of the opposite of how narcissists kind of approach life. So tell us, how can this book help those with maybe narcissistic tendencies or all of us to really walk through trauma and suffering? Yeah, it's interesting. Like even after the narcissism book, there was some, there were people who came around and said, let's do a part two version of that. Or I didn't have a sense that that was the book, you know?

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And I think part of this comes out of my own clinical practice. I do therapeutic work. Right. And I work with people who want justice for the things that have happened to them, but oftentimes find themselves without justice. Right.

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And so there's that sense of, like. And people who get some sense of justice or what they think might be some closure and still feel unresolved internally. And so the question becomes, like, so what is it? How do I heal? Right.

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And so I wanted to shift to trauma. We talk about trauma is not what happens to us, but what happens within. And so that's the focus of the. This book is like, how do we look within and begin to do some of that healing work ourselves? Yeah, it's.

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So I will say I was reading it on the plane to China recently, and it's not comfortable always and often. I had to put it down a few times because it's like, there's some pretty deep, heavy parts of that that are painful that relate to trauma. Right. And so. And that's where I think that your previous book really helped help us understand, when you avoid that, that it could go to, really, places where you're hurting other people, it could become narcissism.

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Right. Yeah, exactly. So. But I will just say. Cause I'm here in the Bay Area, and a lot of yours, you have a lot of San Francisco Bay Area stories in the book, including where I went to seminary up in the North Bay, Mount Tam.

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My husband and I used to love hiking up there. But then you also have a story about the South Bay, where I live now with some twins, and I'm a twin mom. So there's a lot of connection points in your book, driving across the golden gate and the fog, and you use a lot of metaphors to help us understand. I want to ask you this question, though, when you look back on your work years ago. Yeah.

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Until now, kind of what has changed in your approach in ministry based on your research and your first hand experience? Yeah, a lot has changed. I was trained as a therapist. I did a dual, like, master of divinity, master of arts and counseling back in the mid nineties, you know, and when I was first a pastor in ministry, I was in a more complementarian context. Now, for your listeners, that means I was in a christian sort of space where women were not allowed to do anything, and my own opinions about that were changing.

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That probably sounds very repressive, regressive to listeners. Right. And it is 25 years ago, I was a 27 year old going into ministry trying to figure some of these things out. But almost immediately, I was the one sitting with women who were telling me abuse stories. I would never.

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Lori, I would never have guessed that that's what would have happened. You know, I sort of expected as a young pastor that I'd be working with men, and, you know, that was just kind of the way it went. But I became a safe person for women who. Who were Satan and the wives of leaders within the church who were telling me stories of what they were experiencing. And that led to, as it does in these contexts, disorientation, disruption.

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And I was eventually fired from that particular church. But I think my approach back then, too, I was really angry. I'll just put it that way. I was really angry. And my approach, now I'm talking, I guess, therapeutically, my approach was pretty confrontational.

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I think that over the last 15 years or so, as I better understood trauma and as I better understood fragmentation, the parts of us that are adaptive and compensatory and play particular roles, I've begun to understand. Began or begun or whatever it is that narcissism, for instance, just to get back to some of the old writing that I did, is not core to a person, but is compensatory. It's a way of coping out of trauma. And most of the narcissists that I've worked with are deeply wounded human beings. I mean, when I do the work, I mean, they were traumatized themselves.

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They were abused, they were bullied, and not that they woke up one day and said, I'm going to become the bully, but somewhere, somehow, they learn to become the bully, and now they're acting out as a bully. And so trauma has. My understanding of trauma has helped me become a more compassionate therapist because I end up working with pastors, sometimes large church, even mega church pastors, who come into this office and sit on this couch over here. And the way in, I've learned, is not through the front door with a battering Ramirez, but through some compassion and empathy that leads them to know that I'm for them. I want the best, but there has to be a both end, right?

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On the one hand, they've got to deal with their own trauma, and on the other hand, they've got to deal with the harm that they've caused. And the only way that I found. I'm hoping. I'm hitting your question, but I think the only way that I've found for them to deal with the harm that they've caused if it's not coerced, because that's what led them to the narcissistic bullying in the first place. So if they find me as one who's empathetic and an ally, I can't tell you how many men I've worked with who are like, they've gotten to a place where it's like, I'm so ashamed, and I want to reckon for what I've done.

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I want to be held accountable. And then, of course, there's a whole process and path as you go down that road. I've been doing this work for 25 years now, and for as much progress as we've made, you and I were talking a little bit beforehand. I am still utterly frustrated by how many narcissistic abusers get away with their abuse and how prevalent this is in christian spaces, in churches, in political spaces, even as we have an election coming up. I mean, I.

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I find myself every day wrestling with, like, not a little despair that this is continuing to go on in so many different spaces. Yeah. I share your frustration and concern, and I'm so grateful people like you are working in this area. It's really hard. I can't imagine how hard.

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And all of us, you know, one of the things we've talked about this in the previous podcast that we recorded together, and people listening to this know that I walked through a workplace bullying situation in a church by a pastor here in Silicon Valley years ago. And so one of the things that would often be thrown around by this bully and his henchmen who kind of mobbed me together and done that to others was they would sort of minimize everything by saying, we're all wounded. We're all just rubbing up against our wounds with each other and very much dismiss without doing the work. Is that something you hear? Quite a bit.

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It's something I'm hearing more and more, you know, that I did not. I found out that. I thought I coined a term, Lori, but I found out that others were using the language of vulnerability. F a u x. Vulnerability.

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No way. I thought that was you. Oh, wow. I thought it was me, too. And it turns out that others.

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I mean, it's just in some ways, it makes sense. Right. Vulnerability. Vulnerability. But whatever the origin might be, this idea that, again, back 25 years ago, pastors were not as apt to talk about their own inner life.

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They weren't as apt to talk about their struggles or their therapy or their wounds or their Enneagram type or any of these kinds of things. But I go into these spaces now. And I do some. I don't do as many investigations or inquiries as I used to do. I just don't have time to do that kind of stuff.

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But I go in and I get the pastor who says, well, I know my Enneagram type. And, you know, I go to therapy, and I can't tell you how many pastors. And there are some larger profile pastors that people would know that I've worked with who are into therapy, and they're into the enneagram, and they're into emotionally healthy spirituality, Pete Scaziero's work, and all the things. All the things. And.

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And it's not leading to a deeper self revelation or it's not. At least it's not leading to them understanding their impact on others. Right. And so it's fine. And they use it to gaslight others, frankly, they use it as a.

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As a like, immunity. Like, I get a pass because, I mean, I had a pastor fly up to Michigan and take a selfie with me, sat down with me and wanted to. I didn't know that there were things going on in his church, but it turned out he wanted to come up and take a picture with the book and go back with his immunity card to say, well, I talked to the guy who does the narcissism work, and I know my stuff, and I get off free. So it's stunning to me. I mean, I'm sure you see this, too, how people are doing this, right?

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Oh, yeah. One of the ways that played out with the church I was at, where I walked through a lot of bullying and many things, was they would bring in these consultants who no consultant can know everything. And when you're really good at hiding stuff, literally, we would be told to clean out the closets when, like, the board, external board came into town from Oliver, wherever they were from. And I never got to meet with them personally. Even I was like an associate pastor.

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And so it was clear that we were putting on a show, that it was smoke and mirrors. And so when a consultant comes in to, like, right after I was fired on women and how to treat women, will they just say, we're so good with women. Women love us. Look at these token women. They love us.

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And so I feel like people, like you get used by these people who are hiding something. Yeah. And, I mean, I'm curious about your experience, because I'm seeing this happen more and more in egalitarian spaces, which is to say, and again for your listeners, spaces where women are allowed to be pastors and wherever. Where it's like, but look, we've got women pastors. We're egalitarian.

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We allow for this, but it's, you know, it hides the misogyny. Like, I mean, there's a deeper misogyny going on within the system, and yet they're able to sort of say, but we've got women pastors, and we allow them to preach. And did you experience something like that or. 100%. I wasn't even allowed to preach.

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Okay. You know, then later, you know, Andy accused me of wanting to steal his pulpit, and, like, I didn't honestly even want to preach because he so tone policed me and others that I would have never made it through a whole sermon, saying everything exactly like he wanted. We had to be his mouthpiece. Even in our welcome and next steps. It was a lot of pressure to kind of take our emotions and our personality out and put his in, because I think that's all that a narcissistic personality or somebody struggling with that knows how to do is make clones of themselves so we couldn't be ourselves.

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But, yeah, it was definitely a show. And, you know, he's fought the whole Southern Baptist convention on behalf of women pastor as well, you know, very badly psychologically abusing me and others. And at the same time, you know, I think about, like, you know, where your book is talking about. And I I knew there was trauma there, but he wouldn't really talk about it. So I had a lot of compassion that kept me there for a while, just having.

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Giving him a lot of pity. I think I pitied him a lot. I have a lot of. And so that made me excuse all of his things. And I think in systems even that are egalitarian or people who may be deconstructing from evangelicalism and are fresh out of it, some of those people I've encountered in that space still carry a lot of the old with them as they're stepping into the new.

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And I think that's where there's a lot of areas where the refusal to listen to understand women, there was never even an opportunity to have a conversation about what my experience was like being the second woman pastor in this church. And the first woman pastor didn't have the opportunity either. There was a whole posture. And I see this also with white supremacy a lot. So there's a lot of connections between the white, you know, the white patriarchy, basically, where you need to express extreme gratitude on a regular basis because they, with the power, allowed you to have these crumbs.

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And so you're getting mansplained a lot. You're getting. Man, dropped it a lot. You're getting gaslit and not. Your gifts aren't being seen for who you are.

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You're tokenized. And so I think a lot of women listening to this that have been in egalitarian spaces that I have spoken with, have had those experiences where men are like, you should be grateful I let you do this. It's like, no, God put me here. You didn't do anything. And that's where we see the narcissism coming in.

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Like, I gave this to you. Be grateful. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 100%. I mean, and I.

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Yeah, it feels like I'm hearing more and more of those stories, and it's getting harder to tease out also, you know, in my work, my therapeutic work, in part because I have so many pastors who would claim that they're doing this kind of work. And I've had consultants come in, and I did a 360 review, and I just. I don't get why I'm being persecuted. I'm sure you've heard things like that, the Darvo. But there's also.

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And this worries me about my profession, the therapeutic world. There are a lot of pastors who have found therapists who, in their narcissistic way, they can find a therapist who is their mirror as well. They can find a therapist who's like, I think you're great. You're so self aware. It's not hard to find a therapist like that.

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I don't really trust or buy when someone says to me, I'm seeing a therapist, I know my Enneagram type. I've done this consultation at my church, and that's. I mean, again, I know you're seeing this in spades. That's making the work tougher nowadays to really tease out what's going on. Yeah.

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I certainly don't understand how we can overcome that easily. But I am so grateful for you and the hard work that you're doing. Doing, because I think it's going to take a lot of brains around this, and I'm really glad that you're trying to push to the next level and get past these obstacles. I know that one thing I've learned in my experience, and we mentioned before, when we were talking earlier, I was in this Kineo cohort based in Puerto Rico by Dan White Junior and Tanya White, which included some of your articles. Thank you.

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Yeah. But I learned a lot with my cohort leader, Sid Hoxgal, about nervous systems, and it helped me understand why I was having trouble walking into evangelical spaces. So you talk about that a bit in your book, nervous systems and how they respond to environments with this window of tolerance to hyperarousal, to hypoarousal. You call that home? Sympathetic storm and dorsal fog.

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Explain how that works. Yeah, this feels really important. And it gets to what we were just talking about, too. Because I'm saying more and more that I am working with a lot of pastors who would claim to be self aware, but they're not self regulated, and there's a big difference. That's to say that they're claiming that they're self aware because they know they're Myers Briggs and the enneagram.

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They're going to their therapist and stuff like that. But they're not self regulated, which is to say that they're not living from a grounded place. They're not living from a centered, grounded, sort of true self kind of place. They're living in what I call sympathetic storm or sympathetic hyperarousal. Now we're talking about our nervous system.

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Our sympathetic nervous system. And that's where oftentimes you'll hear people talk about the responses of fight or flight. Add two other f's, Fawn, and find. But a lot of these pastors are living in sympathetic fight. And it's tricky because that looks like, I mean, just imagine the church planner or the mega church pastor with a lot of energy and the person who's able to say, but we, there's so much fruit emerging from the work that we're doing.

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Like, I'm engaged in all these things. I've just written this book. We've got a new curriculum, we've got this discipleship program. And I'm even talking fast, trying to mirror what I see in these.

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And they'll say, you know, I've got my therapist, I got this thing, but God is doing these great things. And after I do these five day, three hour a day intensives, right, and, you know, at the end of the first day, I'll say I'm exhausted. I don't know about you, but it feels like you're on this hamster wheel and you're going 1000 miles an hour. And what we're talking about there is dysregulation. We're talking about a sympathetic storm.

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And one of the reasons I know about this is because after my own experience of being fired and some of the trauma that was in my own body, I was doing some therapeutic work. But I didn't know how dysregulated I was, I wasn't yet sort of engaged in the larger trauma conversation. So I was so disconnected from my own body, and I ended up landing in a hospital in Mexico when we were on vacation. We'd flown down from San Francisco to Cabo, and that's when I learned, I mean, a doctor essentially said, you have the body of a 60 year old at this point, your system is septic. And I began to understand the body keeps the score.

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And Chuck, you are living in, out of my trauma. I was living in sympathetic storm. And when I moved to the Bay Area, it was like, I'm going to prove that I'm good enough, smart enough, you know, I'm able to do all the things that I'm asked. Like, I was going to make that the good experience to sort of reverse what I had experienced before. So I know it in my own body.

00:21:51
Lori, what it looks like to live in this sympathetic storm. Yeah, it seems miserable. And that dysregulated pastor on a staff can really cause so much damage. And so I know that, you know, you walk through John Boldly's attachment theory and the halls for attachment styles. Yeah.

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And so wondering how, you know, if we're considering this, you know, theoretical pastor who has MPD, for example, and how they're learning to not inflict their wounds on their staff, but to really cultivate a psychological safety and attune to people instead. Like, how could that be different? Yeah, I mean, it begins with where we just were, with understanding nervous system state. So it begins with an acknowledgement that I'm living dysregulated. And as my experience, and, I mean, I'm literally sitting in the office where I do this work is, you know, by day two or three, when we're doing some of this intensive work, if a pastor leans in and they don't always lean in, as, you know, they might be out of here by day two, you know, but if they, if they start to lean in and understand the dysregulation and get curious about it, there's always a story behind that.

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You know, the question becomes, because it's like, I don't want to live like this. I didn't know I was on this hamster wheel. I didn't know that in my storm, other people were catching the winds and being hit by the debris. I didn't really know that then if they're able to continue with that curiosity, they can begin to look at their attachment story, which is to say, you know, where did this start? We were, of course, as you know, because you've done a lot of this work.

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We're born in and for connection, but when we don't experience connection, when we don't experience safety, when we're not seen and soothed and secure, we will become more anxiously attached or avoidantly attached or attached in a disorganized way. And most of the pastors that I see in this space of dysregulation, where they're insecurely attached, which is to say there's a story of living in these stormy waters for a long, long time. And that's where I, you know, that's where hope grows in me. Because if they start to get curious about that, there are a few things, will they acknowledge their dysregulation? Will they start to get curious about the larger story?

00:24:00
I think where, as you know very, very well, where this is all proven is, will they get serious about the impact on others? Like, it's fine if behind closed doors they're having a conversation with me. It's another thing, you know, I'm thinking of your situation, wherever, where someone acknowledges this is the harm that we've done, and they take measures to step away, because I think both you and I know a lot of this can't be worked out if you continue in your role. You really do have to at some point, step away and begin to do the work. So a lot of what I'm doing is I'm trying to get these pastors to willingly step away before they're forced to step away.

00:24:38
A lot of them aren't forced to step away. But will you, will you invest in the work or is this just for lip service? And I can't tell you how many pastors have said, well, I went to Chuck to groat for an intensive. So, well, now they're saying, I know that I used to struggle with self awareness and self regulate. So there's always that piece, too.

00:25:00
Yeah, it's so tough because this whole thing that develops from this lack of attachment or whatever, insecure attachment causes so many of them to want to use people as tools and to not, you know, to not look at themselves and to cast shame on them others, but not process the shame themselves. And so when we look at a situation where how could pastors who, you know, who maybe didn't have secure attachments and therefore are struggling with this kind of connection, and you mentioned in the book, like the differentiation from others and also knowing how to move in and out of relationships with healthy boundaries, these are areas of struggle. How could they do a better job of regulation with their staff and showing up as a non anxious presence. This is something I would hear often from the pastor who abused me and others. He would say the right things, like be a non anxious presence, but he wasn't that.

00:25:52
So how could they change? And what would change if they didn't rule with power by fear and causing anxiety? And we're curious about themselves and others. Yeah, well, I mean, I do think that there are like everyday, ordinary, a lot of really good pastors out there. I mean, I know you, I know pastors like this, right, who are not narcissistic abusers and they're, but they are kind of anxious and dysregulated in their own way.

00:26:17
And maybe it doesn't look like narcissistic bullying, but maybe it looks like a little bit of workaholism or drinking too much in the evening, whatever it translates to. Right. The journey to becoming a more non anxious presence is one that it takes particular kinds of practices and relationships in your life of honesty, where you can experience the kind of co regulation and attuning in honest relationships. I think that we all need, you know, those honest, safe, transparent kinds of places. Like there are practices that you can engage in.

00:26:48
I think what's tougher in the situations that you've seen, and I've seen, is that there often needs to be some sort of accountability for the harm that was done. Right. And so, and I'm not saying that there shouldn't be accountability for a pastor who drinks too much or who's a workaholic. We need to look at the impact on their family and their church. And of course, you know, but I think that when there's harm over the course of time, and those of us who work in systems, you know, begin to, when we begin to, as I often say, go beneath the waterline and we're no longer just talking about the one off event like that pastor did that one bad thing that time.

00:27:24
But we begin to see patterns. We begin to see the systems and structures that undergird those patterns and the particular mental models that are. And we realize this isn't just a person, this is systemic. Our work is really cut out for us because it's no longer about, why don't you buy that book and do those practices and become a non anxious presence? It's like the whole entire system needs to be dismantled.

00:27:51
Right? Because I, again, you've seen these things. I've seen these things. You get one pastor out of a system, but the system is still the system. And so there's just, this is where sometimes I do this.

00:28:04
My clients know I do this a lot. I put my hand on my chest for my own sense of regulation because the work is just so vast. Like, there's just so much work to do. And it really takes integrity. Have worked with some churches where they're like, okay, we want to do it whatever it takes, whether it's, you know, the, getting the pastor out of here, but we want to do the deeper systemic work.

00:28:28
We want to go below the surface and we want to look at our history, we want to look at our patterns. We want to look at our polity and our structures. We want to better understand our, the mental models that we've been working with. Like, we're egalitarian up here, but our mental model is misogyny, you know, and we want to root it all out. As you know, that's the really heavy lifting.

00:28:50
And to do that work, we need many more people who get these kinds of things and are doing this work out there, actively doing the work. Yes. Yes. Amen to that. It's going to take so many of us and it's going to be important going into the future because there's a lot of rubble right now and there's a rebuilding that needs to take place at some level.

00:29:15
And we don't want to re, it's like, you know, I have tsunami relief in my background, so I have visuals of rubble. But when we rebuilt, we didn't rebuild the houses the same way. We retrofitted them for an inevitable, another earthquake that would come because this is a zone where this happens. It will happen again. So it would not make sense to rebuild houses in the old way.

00:29:34
We have to rebuild in the new way. And it took a lot of us, took a huge team of a lot of people and a lot of hours, and it was. But now, you know, we've left something behind that's better and positioned for the inevitable storm. I think one of the things that you talk about, and as other experts on this in books that I've read, there is just something that goes on within somebody who's dealing with narcissism, where when shame enters, it's unable or they don't have the skills to process it. And therefore, those they target seem to be the ones they add that put the shame onto.

00:30:07
How does that show up and what should we be aware of with that? Yeah. Yeah. I have a friend named Kat Wilkins. She's a colleague in the work, and she's a voice that deserves more exposure.

00:30:19
She just did some writing, and in fact, I hosted some of it on my own website and blog just to get her beautiful and brilliant work out there. Because she's trying to tease out some of these dynamics of shame, right? Because I think when we're dealing with bullies like this, when we're dealing with narcissistic abusers, a lot of the grandiosity and the bullying comes out of a story of shame that they've compartmentalized, they've repressed. Right? It's like they've pushed that off into the shadows.

00:30:49
Not necessarily consciously. Right? But that's just a part of the story. And you know, what cat argues very, very wisely and persuasively is they end up displacing that shame, putting that shame on others, projecting that shame on others, which creates further harm and toxicity. Right.

00:31:07
They're always looking for scapegoats. They're always looking for someone to put their shame on. And so there are people who are dealing with immense shame who, as a way of coping, shame others. And if you've ever been the victim of that kind of harm, you know what that feels like through their manipulation, their gaslighting. I mean, I look at where I was in 2003.

00:31:32
I was a shell of a person. Like, I would walk into a grocery store and have a panic attack that I'd see one of the leaders of the church that I served. And I was very convinced, and I had evidence of it, too, that there was sort of a campaign to make sure that Chuck was not going to be able to get a job anywhere else ever again. And you've experienced some of that, too. And the word begins to get out in various ways.

00:31:55
I get calls from people, and so I was shamed, right? Like, I. And cast off. And that's essentially what this does. The person who has cast off his own shame within is now casting others off in shame.

00:32:12
And so, you know, do a search for Kat Wilkins, my brilliant colleague and friend, an up and coming therapist and someone who does great work in this area to read a little bit more about that dynamic. Yeah, I follow her. She's excellent. Maybe we'll come onto the show and unpack that. Thanks.

00:32:28
And definitely everybody follow her. She's writing some really great stuff. I think there's another part of your book that I found. You kind of reframe something for me, and I love that there are so many parts of your book like that you quote that famous verse, proverbs 423, that tells us to guard our hearts. It's the wellspring of life where everything flows from it, depending on the translation.

00:32:47
And so. And then you kind of talk about these psychological cartographers of the self and how do they give us new insight into that verse? Could it mean more than what the sermons have told us? Yeah, you know, I. So I grew up in a tradition that.

00:33:02
Where I was told that the core of me was bad and live with that for a long time and talk about shame and guilt and all the other things, you know? And was introduced to the contemplative tradition years ago. One of the reasons I love the contemplative tradition is that there are many, many women within the tradition. Yes.

00:33:22
Sort of flew beneath the radar. Right. They oftentimes weren't like, sanctioned leaders within the church, but they were powerful voices. I often say my favorite 16th century reformer was Saint Teresa of Avalon. She's one of them.

00:33:35
A cartographer of the soul who wrote the interior castle. St. Teresa, who didn't occupy some sort of, like, position as bishop or something like that, but was recognized as an authority because of her wisdom, her depth. And I think that what I've learned about that is that at the core, there's dignity, there's worth, and that informs my work. It even informs my work with narcissists, because as I'm doing the work, I see them as more than some total of their behavior or this part of them that they're living out of.

00:34:07
There's another contemplative, a woman named Eddie Hillissim, who died of. She died in Auschwitz in her late twenties, but she was a contemplative in her late twenties. And she's so fascinating. But she saw, even in the guards and her captors, the image of God in them, which is astounding to me. Like, I can't imagine that.

00:34:27
Right. And so that informs my work in pretty deep and profound ways. Yeah, it's so beautiful, you know, and in so many ways, it was kind of framed for me in a lot of the evangelical space I was in as an adult. I would say that it was. That it was like a purity culture verse.

00:34:47
It was a verse used for men to not lust after women and therefore. You know, oh, the guard your hearts verse. Yes. And there's so much more. Yeah, there's so much more there.

00:35:00
And it's like, wow, you really missed a huge thing by just, I don't know, cheapening it in that way, that it's so much deep. I mean, it's basically the core of your book. Like, you've written a whole book. Right, yeah. Of the goodness of the heart.

00:35:15
Right. But there's so much suspicion. Right. I think in those spaces. That's why I love the lady Julian of Noritz and the Hildegarde of Bingens and the Teresa of Avila's.

00:35:25
And because I think particularly the women, the women cartographers of the souls, I've called them, they ennoble the body. And I think men, and particularly in these evangelical spaces, are taught from a very early age to be afraid of their own bodies, women's bodies. And so they live in fear and shame. So, yeah, obviously, that's a big part of what I'm writing about, too. How do we rediscover the goodness of our own hearts and desires as well?

00:35:55
Yeah, no, I mean, you. There is this part where, I mean, you actually end up having. There's the frieze, fawn fly. You actually have six of them at different parts. When you're unpacking the attachment theory system, new things I learned underlined a lot of that part of the book.

00:36:08
But as you're walking through kind of some of that, it's a reminder that whatever generation we're living in. I know. Like, as you're mentioning, like, Hildegard being and all these women, they were living at a time where Doctor Beth Allison Barr writes about in her making a biblical womanhood book, women's bodies in the middle ages were considered deformed, like they were inherently bad. And then in our generation, it's more like women's bodies are just sexy, and that's it. You know, like, there's nothing else.

00:36:32
And so you have all kinds of issues on either one of those. To think that we are made in God's image out of love, and we are loved. I think going back and learning from some of the early church fathers and mothers, but also processing it now with the way our narratives are in our own church context is really important. How do you see those kind of coming together? Yeah, I mean, I have a friend named Sam Jolman who just wrote a book called the Sex Talk you never got, and he's done a really good job with this.

00:37:03
Sam and I graduated from the same clinical counseling program where we were required at a very early age I went through when I was 27 years old to deal with our hearts. And can I tell a quick story about this practical. I'm in a counseling session. I'm doing a counseling session with a woman who's probably 23, 24. I'm 27.

00:37:23
We're in the clinic. That mirror window kind of deal going on, right, where my female supervisor, Lori, and several other women from our program are watching. And when I'm done with the counseling session, I walk out and Lori meets me, and she says, it's time for your debrief. And so I walk into the room, and they ask me, well, how do you. How do you think the session went?

00:37:46
And I said, I think it went great. I think I built trust. I think. I think it was just awesome. And they're all sitting around, they look at one another, and they say, if you call flirting with a woman for an hour a good session.

00:38:00
And they proceeded to do a lot of deconstruction work in my own life, in my own heart. Right. There's a lot more to that story that I can tell, but what the sum of it is. The woman wasn't blamed. I was asked to do work on my own heart.

00:38:17
Right. And so what's going on inside of you? How is that connected to your own stuff, Chuck? Well, it turns out that within me during that time, as I was flirting, well, that was anxious energy connected to my own story, connected in part to my relationship with my mom, among other things, some of the abuse that I experienced. But I was a little boy.

00:38:38
Anxiously trying to make conversation with a woman and unaware of what was going on within me in that moment required me to grow up, is what I'm saying. Awesome.

00:38:52
To see. This is. I think the beautiful thing about this is this is what led me to be able to do the work that I began doing several years later with women and why I think women began to experience me as safe because I'd started to do this work within me that allowed them to feel like when I'm with Chuck, I don't feel like there's some sort of weird dynamic here, you know? But I feel like he really sees me. And that's felt like an important part of the work over the years.

00:39:20
But oftentimes it takes men doing that deeper work, and I just think so few of us do it. It's so much easier to sort of blame the woman who is immodest and isn't dressed appropriately or whatever the case may be. Right. Yeah. Or is breathing, basically is breathing.

00:39:37
It just showed up. It's just there. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. No, man, that's such a beautiful story.

00:39:42
And it's so encouraging because I don't know. I mean, I don't know a story like that, like what you just told. And my experience is either men know how to treat women or they don't, but the ones who don't tend to not do the work. And it's a barrier for them and their, you know, ministry. It's a barrier for how they're going to help women because that's half the church, at least.

00:40:02
Yeah. And then I think both in just regular workplace and in the church, a lot of the targets of bullying are women, and for a variety of reasons, but because of the way our social hierarchy works and expectations of workplace, whether it's ministry or not. And so that's why that work is so important. Women are dealing with enough as it is, you know, and to have that extra layer of having to be hyper vigilant about what they wear or how they look or how they breathe or how they speak or whatever, it's up to men to do that work so that women can feel safe in churches and in workplaces. So thank you for this book, healing what's within.

00:40:36
I really hope you get a lot of pre orders. Everybody go pre order this. Now. We're going to put a link in the show notes. I'm going to have you answer another question for our difference maker community on Patreon as an exclusive.

00:40:46
But I just want to give you one last chance to say anything that you want our listeners to hear on the regular podcast. I'm just grateful to be with you. I feel like we were talking beforehand that I wish I lived in the Bay Area still and hang out with you and Jason. I feel like we're kindred spirits. And I was reflecting yesterday and some of the work that I do and the work that you do and those of us do in these various spaces, and I think we compliment one another in this work that we're doing.

00:41:15
We need people, I do some of the therapeutic work inquiries here and there, but we need people in a variety of different spaces nowadays speaking to these things and bringing light to darkness. Right. And so thank you for the voice that you have in the podcast and all that you do. Lori, Chuck, I appreciate you so much, everybody. If you haven't listened to the previous episode with him, go listen to that now.

00:41:39
We'll also link that one because that book is incredible. And both of these books are so helpful to many of us who are trying to make a difference in this space. Thank you so much for your time. And how can people find you? Make sure you let them know.

00:41:49
Yeah. Chuckdegroat.net is the website social media, you know, X and the other. I'm not on TikTok. I'm 54 now. I'm just, I can't do TikTok, but I'm on most of the social media spaces.

00:42:01
I hate TikTok. Oddly enough, it was banned when I was in China. I thought that was the one social media that would be there. But they only have the chinese version available, which was like, of course, yeah. Anyway, everybody go find Chuck on his website and follow his writing and his work.

00:42:15
It's beautiful. Thank you so much for being on today, Chuck. Thanks. Well, I hope that you came away from this conversation, one wanting to pre order this book, healing what's within, coming home to yourself and to God when you're wounded, weary and wandering by none other than Doctor Chuck de Groot, but also that it spurred up some curiosity in yourself. Because when we go around the world and things happen, trauma is not something we can control.

00:42:42
We all respond to it differently. And we also can't control the childhood we were put into. But we can control whether we heal. We can control whether we are willing to get curious. And he not only writes this book very vulnerably, showing us some of the shameful parts of his own choices and experiences and thoughts and the way he has processed some things in life, but he's also showing us the hope of what it's been like for him to work through some of that and why this matters to him.

00:43:13
I think that in the conversation today, what I came away with is that I think he has hope because he's seen change in himself and his own attachment and how he's responded to that with tools of, you know, what he taught, he said his daughter's call meditation. So if you check out our Patreon episode where I ask him to go a little bit deeper into a story that's really insightful and so vulnerable, I hope that you check that out@patreon.com. aworldofdifference but he goes into, you know, experience where something happened when one of his oldest daughter, Emma, was a baby. And also some things he processes as how he parented her and how to change and how his change that working on himself, healing himself, helped him become a better parent, a better therapist, better in ministry, and better probably in all his relationships, I would expect. And it's allowed him to go through that journey and know how to help others as well.

00:44:09
And I'm going to read a part of his book where even though this is an advanced copy, things can somewhat change in the final copy, but his words here in this version says, but sometimes within the minutes of my alarm sounding, I can feel the stirring of restlessness within the foreboding sense that there is too much to do and that I'm not up to it all at all, the lies, that God doesn't care and that I'm not enough. I don't know if you can relate to that, if you believe in God, or even if you just believe in some version of a divine power, or even if you don't believe in any of that. But I think many of us can relate to not feeling up to it all and to not knowing how you're going to make it through. And that's certainly something I've experienced where the world demands a lot of us and how we respond to that can be related to our attachment experiences growing up. It could be related to some of the traumas we've walked through, which if you have heard us talk about trauma here before, two people can experience a very similar traumatic event, and both respond very differently to it based on attachment from childhood, based on their personalities, their lived experiences.

00:45:23
If you have two women standing in an office and they're both experiencing misogyny, it's possible the woman of color has also experienced a racialized misogyny. In addition to that, the level of trauma would be more intense based on what she might have experienced. And so are both people experiencing an earthquake or a tsunami or a car accident will be in the same situation, but have slightly different experiences based on their seat in the car, where they were in the house. And so we can't really compare. We can't compare nervous systems, we can't compare experiences.

00:45:55
But what is across the board for all humanity is that when we get curious about what's going on inside us and we get really introspective about our own nervous systems, our own lived experiences, our own traumas that we may not even remember because our body does things to protect us and survive, but they don't necessarily serve us in the long term and how we are coming across in our relationships. If we're not curious about how people experience us in a room or as a leader or as a pastor, and we minimize that and blow it off and say, we're all wounded, we're all wounding each other, or we cast shame on those that are being targeted by bullies, either by the bully himself or by those in a staff or congregation that want to continue to live by the narrative that this man is a good man and don't want to be curious about that victim's experience, that target's experience, that lack of curiosity really does not serve us. And you've heard me say many times here on the podcast that getting curious about why I've reacted about certain things, getting curious about why others react that way, getting curious about why systems are the way they are. So much of that curiosity leads to knowledge that helps us and at the foundation, we want to encourage curiosity lived in an evangelical world for a while, where many of the white southern evangelicals had a pretty similar culture and were taught some similar parenting styles with some nuance and variations there. But it was really quite common to have other white evangelicals that were colleagues of mine that when their baby toddlers were learning to explore the world, that they would slap their hands and sort of tell them to not be curious.

00:47:46
Because in some situations there was danger, like 220 voltage in the plug on the wall. But at the same time, that curiosity over time of having their hands slapped, really led to lack of opportunities to learn knowledge. And there are other ways to parent, there are other ways to guide in our faith communities that embrace curiosity, that encourage it, that encourage questioning, that encourages asking clarifying questions instead of seeing those as threatening, and that it's okay to say, I don't know, and continue to be curious, even with people who are asking us as questions, as leaders. All of that curiosity is a foundation for knowledge and for health and for healing. And so I encourage you to be brave enough to pick up this book.

00:48:34
It's going to start off with him talking about his own journey a bit, and he's going to draw you in, and he's going to pull you through some therapeutic principles that are going to be really helpful for you. There's a particular diagram. We discussed it here on the episode where he walks through. If you're not familiar with some of the different aspects of our nervous systems and how we can react in what he calls the home, or the window of intolerance, the window of tolerance, excuse me. Or the sympathetic storm, the hyperarousal.

00:49:03
That's where we get into fight, flight, fawn, and find, and then the dorsal fog, hypoarousal, which is a freeze and fold response. And so he's also going to walk through these different, six different words that start with the letter f as to way ways people can respond based on their various attachment styles that they've learned from childhood. And it's fight, flight, fawn, find, freeze, and fold. And that shows up differently depending on your insecure attachment style or I, your different attachment styles. And there's so much richness in this book, it's going to get uncomfortable for you at times.

00:49:44
Okay. Not to read it all at once. But that work is not only brave, it's getting you to where you want to be. You want to be the kind of person who shows up in a room and makes people feel calm, that you're regulated and that your regulated nervous system allows others to be regulated. Because not only are you going to accomplish more as a family and relationships, as a team, to work more efficiently as a church, to get more ministry done when people can have their brains available to be more innovative, but you're going to allow people to not have, like, all these crazy reactions in their own bodies from having these situations where they're showing up fawning or freezing or having traumatic responses, because you aren't regulated as a leader.

00:50:28
So showing up as a non anxious presence isn't a cliche for narcissistic, abusive pastors to throw around and act like they're doing when they're not. It's something to actually work so hard to do and to do the own work on yourself, whether it's deep breathing, visualization, Emdr spotting, deep, deep therapy, to work on the injuries and your own past so that you show up as somebody who's not causing more trauma and injury to those around you. And instead of blaming others and saying it's their fault again and again and again, maybe it's time to take a look at yourself, and not in a narcissistic way, in a mirror where everybody says you're great and that's all that you can handle. But to actually truly be brave enough to say this horrible thing that happened and has happened in my childhood or in my previous experience is something I don't want to own me going forward. I don't want to be the kind of person who hurts others again and again and blames them for what I've done to them.

00:51:27
And this is not easy. And whether people struggle with narcissistic tendencies or not, this is not easy for anyone. So we're all in the same boat with this. Whatever your struggles are, whatever you've been through, whatever traumas you've experienced or whatever your childhood was like, this is a book that you can find tools and handles to work through, to walk through healing, going forward. There's even at the end of every chapter, there's some questions and extra resources he gives.

00:51:55
He recommends other reading, which I love because I'm a big book nerd and reader, as we all know. We have a lot of authors here on the podcast, and I get sent a lot of books by different people, advanced copies that I get to read and I absolutely love that and I love promoting good books out there. He lists resources like Dan Allanders book to be told, know your story, shape your life. Frederick Buchner telling secrets. All kinds of different authors that you may or may not be familiar with.

00:52:20
He lists their other resources at the end of each chapter. He really is not just writing to give you knowledge. He's writing to invite you into healing experience. That this book can be a significant impact on you and to others. So pre order it.

00:52:35
Pre order it for a friend and send it to them. Gift it to people that you know that really could use this tool. And it's the kind of thing that when you see a resource that's valuable, you want as many people as possible to have access to it. Chuck is somebody who has done deep work and invites you into doing that for yourself. You deserve to heal.

00:52:56
You deserve to be free. You deserve to not live in the past. You deserve to know that you're here and you're now and it's safe. And you don't have to react to people around you like that and hurt them too. And you deserve to know if you've been targeted by somebody like this that you didn't deserve that.

00:53:11
And that you too can heal. And you too can be free. And you too can walk through knowing that today is where you are and you're here and you're safe. And that it's okay to just take a deep breath and be introspective and be mindful and know that you matter and that your story matters and that there is hope moving forward. And this book is full of hope.

00:53:32
And so I hope that you pick it up. Healing what's within by doctor Chuck de Groot. Thank you so much for listening. Please check out the patreon.com awororldofdifference exclusive episode that'll be coming out soon. If you join today, you won't miss it.

00:53:46
You'll get it in your email when it comes out. And so just join us there and that difference maker community and keep making a difference wherever you are.