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Inner Healing

How to Heal When You’ve Been Hurt—Healing What’s Within with Narcissism Expert Chuck DeGroat

Episode Notes

What do you do after someone hurts you?

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How do you heal the pain that lingers inside of you?

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This is such an incredibly helpful, honest, and vulnerable conversation with my friend and fellow therapist Chuck DeGroat, author of the brand new book Healing What's Within. Chuck taught us so much about the harmful realities of narcissism in his book, When Narcissism Comes to Church, and now he's helping us heal the lingering wounds.

Here’s what we cover:

1. The moment that launched 5 years of inner chaos for Chuck

2. 3 surprising questions God asks to each of us

3. How Adam & Eve were manipulated

4. The first step when dealing with narcissism

5. How take feedback from others

6. How to ask for what you need from others

Find a full transcript and list of resources from this episode here.

Pre-order Healing What’s Within: Coming Home to Yourself--and to God--When You're Wounded, Weary, and Wandering

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Resources:

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If you liked this, you’ll love:
  • Episode 97: I Shouldn't Feel This Anxious—Insights on Trauma & Healing with Monique Koven

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‍Thanks to our sponsors:

Music by Andy Luiten/Sound editing by Kelly Kramarik

© 2024 Alison Cook. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Please do not copy or share the contents of this webpage without permission from the author. While Dr. Cook is a counselor, the content of this podcast and any of the products provided by Dr. Cook are not specific counseling advice nor are they a substitute for individual counseling. The content and products provided on this podcast are for informational purposes only.‍

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Transcript:

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Alison Cook: Hey everyone. Welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You Podcast. I was so looking forward to this conversation today with my dear friend and fellow therapist, Chuck DeGroat. Chuck has a new book coming out called Healing What’s Within: Coming Home to Yourself--and to God--When You're Wounded, Weary, and Wandering.

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It is such a beautiful book on healing. You'll hear some of the framework for the book in our conversation today, and toward the end of the episode, he gets pretty vulnerable about some of the feedback he got early on as a young therapist in training, 

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Chuck DeGroat is a licensed therapist, a spiritual director, and the author of five books, including the best selling book, When Narcissism Comes to Church. He also serves as Professor of Counseling and Christian Spirituality and the Executive Director of the Clinical Mental Health Counseling Program at Western Theological Seminary in Holland, Michigan.

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Chuck is such an incredible human and a gifted thinker at the intersection of emotional and spiritual health. His new book, Healing What's Within, is out this week everywhere books are sold and I cannot recommend it more to you. I actually was honored to write the foreword for the book. I am thrilled to bring you my conversation today with Chuck DeGroat. 

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Alison Cook: I am so thrilled to talk with you. You've become a friend. You're someone whose work I so admire. It was such an honor to read this book and write the foreword for it. It's such a beautiful book. So thank you for writing it. Thanks for being here.

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Chuck: Yeah. Thank you for writing the forward.

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Alison Cook: What I loved about this book, Chuck, and I'd love to start here, you open the book talking about a season of time 20 years ago when you were working as a pastor and you were fired from your job. You don't give us the details. You're very clear that's not the point of that illustration–the point of that illustration was that it launched five years of inner chaos.

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Chuck: Yeah, that's right. I wondered if I should write that in the previous book, the narcissism book. I didn't want to center my own story, but I was encouraged to write more of my own story and I do in this book. That's a early pivot point, to say that there are these things that happen to us, these ways in which we're harmed and wronged and abused.

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And we can talk about those kinds of things. If you spend any time on Twitter, we talk about those things all the time, but we have to shift the conversation inward. At some point, we've got to begin to do the work that you've been teaching us to do, frankly, for a number of years now. We've got to shift the conversation inward. The trauma is not what happens to us, but what happens within us.

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Alison Cook: That's really powerful right there, Chuck. So essentially, this is what I love about you. We'll dive right in. Essentially, that incident, you could frame as spiritual abuse. You could frame it as something wrong that happened to you. That's true. That's valid. We could talk about it from that place, but what you're trying to encourage us to do in this book is, no matter what's happened to us, I'm responsible for what happens inside of me as a result of that.

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Chuck: Yeah, that's right. It doesn't absolve external institutions and churches and organizations from responsibility at some level. But the healing work is the work that happens when you turn within. You probably know stories like this. I know stories where people have received the justice that they longed for.

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Maybe a wrong was righted externally. But a year later, they're still dealing with some pain, intrusive thoughts, anxiety, panic, whatever it is. Now they need to turn their attention inward. We have to take responsibility for what happens within and heal what happens within.

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Alison Cook: I was thinking about this interview this morning and I noticed this in myself; I'm curious what you think about this. Because I teach about this, you teach about this, and the whole book, Healing What’s Within, it's right there. I am going through something externally with family dynamics, and I noticed I've been avoiding myself for a few days. 

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And what I mean by that is, I don't want to journal. I don't want to pray about it. I don't want to turn my attention inward. I've been spending tons of time analyzing, how should I act? What should I do? How should I talk about it with other people? I couldn't believe it. This morning, I was preparing for this interview and I was refreshing my memory because I read your book a while ago. 

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I was refreshing myself on the notes, and I thought, oh my gosh. I turned inward. I started to cry.

Right now the tears come up. I hadn't even considered the grief that's underneath. Yes, I have to make decisions. Yes, I have to do some things. I've been doing this work 20 years, as you have, and what is it that makes it hard to look inward? 

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It's so intuitive, it's so logical on one level; of course we need to look inside, but you talk about how It took you five years to really begin to look inward. Why do we resist that?

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Chuck: Yeah. It really helped me to begin to understand that at the heart of trauma is disconnection. You hear this from all the folks that you and I revere. Gabor Maté, Peter Levine, Stephen Porges, others like that. At the heart of trauma is profound disconnection, profound alienation.

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That's in part why I started with Genesis 3 this time. It’s the primal story of disconnection, of alienation. The question God asks is “Where are you?”. Because God meets us in the midst of our disconnection. But the wild thing, what you're talking about, is that we can go for days, weeks, months, years–for me, it was at least five years before I got into therapy.

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Then I'd say a few years later, when I ended up in a hospital in Mexico in severe pain, I won't go into the details here, it was pretty nasty, but where my body had kept the score. So it took about five years to get into therapy and then three more years for me to hit this point where I am continuing to live in this disconnection and I've got to do something about it.

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Alison Cook: Let's go into that. In the book, you go through those three questions. Where are you? Who told you? Where have you taken your hunger and thirst? It was fascinating to me to think about those questions in a non-shaming way.

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Chuck: That's it. Because I think you and I may have grown up with pastors and in churches where we learned that Genesis 3 story was a story of this great tragedy. This cosmic tragedy that we're all implicated in, and God was raging mad. So I've always thought, well, of course, we've got to hide because God's angry. 

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And we could talk about that a lot longer, but to me it's really thrilling to see what's happening in the text. God is walking in the cool of the day, when God would normally be walking with Adam and Eve when the sun has gone down. That's when they go for their afternoon walk. But God's looking around like, where are you? It's time for our walk. 

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That first word, “where”, is the first word of the book of Lamentations. It's a word of longing. It's a word of heartbreak. There is this sense of “I miss you. Where are you?” For me, that was a game changer, because I'd grown up in a tradition where God's angry and God's looking for you and God will find you. The reality is, God comes with kindness and curiosity and compassion to meet us in our place of greatest pain.

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Alison Cook: Yeah. That is a profound shift. It's not an angry “Where are you?” I wonder if when we've internalized that, that's a little bit why we're reluctant to face ourselves. Because when I'm turning my attention inward, what am I really feeling? What's really going on inside of me? 

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That's where we're meeting God in truth. If there's shame there, if there's any condemnation, I don't want to do that. I don't want to go there, but if it's a, oh, where are you? I miss you. When you say that, I just, I feel that. 

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Chuck: Yeah, it's an invitation to slow way down. I've called this the Genesis Examen for years. In the Christian tradition, there are these ways of self examination, the Ignatian Examen. But these three questions, this Examen, is a way for us to slow down. I was driving this morning, and I do these five day intensives and they can be very intense.

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I was driving this morning, and I heard that question, where are you? I would have liked to have been anywhere but where I was, and I was thinking about later today and a nice meal that we're going to have with some friends. I was thinking back to some other things, and I was like, where are you?

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I'm not here right now. I need to be right here right now. I need to be grounded in my body to do this work for the next three hours. So it was an invitation back to my body, back to my breath, back to presence.

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Alison Cook: That's it. Sometimes I don't want to feel grief. I don't want to go into this hard broken place. But when we surrender to that in response to the loving question from God, we are so much more able to move through it with integrity, with that Holy Spirit led self presence.

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Chuck: Yeah, that's it. It's all about attention. It's all about noticing. It's all about presence. I don't know about you, but I can live hours of my day and hours of my week disconnected. My family knows and sees it. Some of my colleagues and friends see it as well. it's always an invitation back to presence.

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Alison Cook: I want to pause there for a second. Because even when you say that, I'm imagining the listener saying, wait, isn't that normal? To be driving in my car, thinking about dinner, thinking about this, thinking about that, how is that disconnected?

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I can go for days, like you're saying, and I haven't actually checked in. You're in your car and there's some part of you that's been trained to hear that voice from God. How do we start that work? Or how did you begin to learn that practice? I think it's a practice is what I'm trying to say. There's a little bit of a discipline to it. I hate to use that word. 

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Chuck: Yeah. I think it's the practice of attention. It does take time. If we've lived inattentively or in an externalized way, where we're constantly thinking about these things that we need to do, or perhaps because of the trauma of life in a hypervigilant state, we're going to live functionally disconnected from ourselves, and we might not even know it.

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That's the thing. That's the reality of the work that we do. A lot of the folks that we work with and probably our stories as well, what we discover is that I didn't know that I was disconnected. I thought this was life. I stayed busy. That busyness has kept me from some of that pain that I really don't want to look at, and so this is a brand new invitation to folks. 

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That's why I love it through the lens of “where are you” in Scripture? I'm sure you get accused of this sometimes: “You're a therapist, you're a psychologist, that's what you are supposed to do”. I want to say, no, actually, that's where God begins when we've experienced alienation, where we've experienced disconnection. God invites us back to ourselves, back to God, back to one another.

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Alison Cook: Yeah. It's really the essence. You can't bifurcate what's going on spiritually with what's going on emotionally and mentally. To geek out here for a second, one of my favorite books of all time was Kierkegaard's The Sickness Unto Death. Wonderful title. He talks about how we're going to be nailed to ourselves, essentially. 

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I always remember reading that going, whoa, then I better get really at home with myself. There's something powerful about that, that at the end of the day, whatever we mean by the afterlife, but also right now, the eternal now, we're going to have to make peace with ourselves.

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That's the person we're going to be with. And the more I can do that in the light of God's compassionate invitation, “where are you?”, we're aligning with the truth. In thinking about trauma, even if the truth is, I can't go there, there's too much, that's a starting place. That's a starting place. 

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Chuck: That's a starting place. I've heard you talk about it on the podcast–we've both been informed by internal family systems. This is a contemporary way of doing counseling, if listeners are not familiar with it, where we talk about these parts of ourselves. Years ago, I may have told you this before, but years ago, I was introduced to the work of a woman named Elizabeth O'Connor. 

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She was a pastor in Washington, D. C. alongside Gordon Cosby and she would lead spiritual retreats. So back in the late 60s, there's a book called Our Many Selves that came out of a retreat that she would lead where she'd simply greet people.

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She had no idea about this sort of contemporary therapeutic modality. All she was doing was leading a spiritual retreat and she was asking people to identify the many selves that are caught up in the many things out there that lead them into fragmentation and to come back to the ground of their being.

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This is old news, good news; this is not contemporary psychology. This is the ancient Christian tradition as well.

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Alison Cook: That's exactly right. When you go back to the older ideas, what they're talking about is alienation from the self, and we actually have to be reunited. This isn't a modern psychology thing. 

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The second question also really blew my mind. “Who told you?”, which again, can have the connotation in my mind of shaming. “Who are you listening to? Why aren't you listening?” as opposed to how you recast it as from this place of curiosity. I think about it as, where did you get that message? Who told you? Where did you pick that up?

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Tell me a little bit about how you've wrestled with that in your own life and with clients.

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Chuck: Yeah, there again, it feels like another question that comes out of heartache. Who's telling you this counterfeit story? I created you for Eden, for goodness, for all these things. Who told you that you weren't enough? Who told you that I couldn't be trusted? It's an invitation to curiosity.

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The other thing that I wasn't told about Genesis chapter three is that Adam and Eve were victimized. They were deceived. There was so much emphasis placed on Adam and Eve's responsibility–and I don't want to minimize responsibility. You go down those rabbit holes and you've got people who want to catch you in some heresy.

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Okay. We're responsible. I get it, but we were deceived. I think what God is asking is, what are the voices that you're listening to? What stories are you telling yourself that don't reflect the goodness of my story? My whisper of worth and belonging and purpose over you?

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Alison Cook: That's really powerful to think about it in those terms. She was manipulated in that story, totally manipulated. How often are we unwittingly manipulated, controlled, whatever it is? Like you're saying, there's responsibility, especially once we become aware, but I love that. I found that so powerful, that recasting of “Who told you? What lie did you believe?”.

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Chuck: Yeah, so we can look at our stories with some curiosity again. I did this work today. I was sitting with a man where we gently walked back through his story and learned that early on in his life, the message that he got, it wasn't a message that he heard, it's a message that he intuited because his parents weren't around, was that you've got to go it on your own.

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I was like, that's the story. That's the primal story. That's the story that all of us at some level end up believing. “I'm on my own. I'm not enough. God isn't enough. God's goodness can't be trusted. My own instincts, my own intuitions can't be trusted”. The invitation is to gently walk back into your story and into the stories you tell yourself.

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Even right now, you can go back into your past, but the reality is, you're probably telling yourself some version of that story right now.

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Alison Cook: Yeah. To become curious, as you say.  So that invitation, even driving in the car, taking a walk, “Where am I, where are my thoughts? What am I thinking? Who told you? Let's check where the messages are coming from ". Then this last one, “Have you eaten from the tree?”, that gets at, “Where have you taken your desires?”. Talk to us a little bit about that.

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Chuck: This was the one that stumped me years ago when I was doing some of this work on retreats that I was leading. I served out in the Bay area in San Francisco, and so I would take Silicon Valley executives for 48 hour silent retreats, no phones. Can you imagine what that would be like?

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I'd invite them into these questions and that third one, have you eaten from the tree? I was like, God, you asked two really beautiful open ended questions. And now this. And so as I listen carefully, what I started to hear is, “Where have you taken your hunger? Where have you taken your thirst? Where have you taken your desires?” 

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In other words, I long to fill you up. I long to satisfy you. But where do you go to cope? Let's get curious about where you go to cope, because I think that what we know about what happens within us, what we know about trauma, is that we seek to medicate it in one way or another.

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If we begin to pay attention to the things that we go to, the things that we chase after, the ways in which we chase worth or belonging or purpose in a variety of different ways, we'll begin to understand a bit more about how we're coping and self-medicating in light of that wound within.

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Alison Cook: Yeah. I thought that was brilliant. It makes sense. Where have you gone to feed this? Again, in a non shaming way, in a naming way, let's talk about it. Let's be honest about it. 

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Chuck: It's really that simple in a sense. As therapists, people come to us with so much shame in the midst of addiction. I want to stop doing this. I don't approach it with yeah, we've got to get you to stop doing this right away. It's instead an invitation to get curious about what that's about. How are you medicating the wound? 

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It's a strategy that's protecting you from the story underneath, and so let's get curious about the story underneath. I bet the strategy will go away as you get more curious about the story underneath.

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Alison Cook: Of attentiveness, of that awareness, of consciously, again, in the terms of IFS, differentiating when I go for that apple, when I go for that food, when I go for that booze, whatever it is, oh, there's a wound and it's powerful. That is what makes the work. The integration of the spiritual and the mental and the emotional work all works together because we create that space for healing for the way that God designed us to heal. It's like we give the oxygen that our systems need to shift.

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Chuck: Yeah, that's it. I love the oxygen metaphor, like maybe that's what these questions offer. An opportunity to simply breathe and attend, and the act of doing that the healing is already beginning. We can do a lot of work. We can do a lot of talking. We can do a lot of looking at your life, your story, your trauma, but it begins as we breathe. As we notice. I love the idea of introducing some oxygen to the system.

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Alison Cook: Yeah. It's a little bit of a paradox. Even my experience this morning of, oh, I actually need to tend to the grief inside of me. It is actually now going to unlock and bring more oxygen in, which is going to allow me to brave a better solution or a better way through. Like your experience in the car, it's so life changing and earth shattering. It sounds so simple and yet it really is the path to healing and wholeness.

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Chuck: Yesterday–you're going to appreciate this, I hope–I was feeling some of the pressure of hard, challenging client situations. I was actually sitting with my intensive client. It's been about two and a half hours and I felt in my body that sense of pressure.

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We've got one day left and I put my hand on my chest and I breathe and sometimes I'll do that. That's become a practice of even now when I do that, I can feel it in my body like, oh, okay. there's a blessing that God can offer in that space. It’s relaxing and calming.

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That's really beautiful. We've got to find our way to those resources and practices, of course, that work for us. But for me, in a moment where I was feeling some pressure, a hand on the chest, the deep breath, and I was back in my body. It didn't fix everything. It didn't make me a brilliant therapist for the next half hour. It allowed me to be more present.

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Alison Cook: It brought you back to yourself, which brings you back to God, which opens up more. You're operating then with the grain of the universe. It's so good. It's such a good, powerful, powerful work, Healing What’s Within. 

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I am curious, Chuck, you've written a number of books. A lot of people know you by your work with narcissism. You wrote the book When Narcissism Comes to Church. Why was this the next book for you?

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Chuck: Yeah, I feel like this brings it all together and that's a really incredible feeling in some ways. Back in the late nineties is when I began seeing women who were emotionally abused by their partners in a church where I was serving. That began the work for me.

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I began trying to figure out this emotional abuse thing and find books. I remember finding one that was translated from Dutch. It was one of the only resources back in the day on emotional abuse, and I ended up going to court for some of the women that I was working with, but a lot of reading, a lot of learning, some supervision, some new modalities like IFS and other things.

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For a number of years, I felt like I was piecing things together. The narcissism work felt like an important and timely work to name what I and others have been seeing in the church for many years. This isn't new. This isn't a new phenomenon. Christians have been abusing power for centuries. 

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There are stories in scripture that show that. This to me was the culmination of over 25 years of pastoring and practicing as a counselor. It's really fun to be able to anchor it in a biblical story and to re-narrate that story and show people in concrete ways how they can go within and do this inner work in a way that is transformative. 

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Every once in a while, I think your last book did a really beautiful job, it's simply naming the process, and every once in a while you land on something as a writer, as a teacher, that helps you articulate it simply and invites people in. For me, that's what these three questions do. I can use this in counseling or as a pastor leading retreats. 

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It really brings together a lot of the divergent threads of a 25 year vocation of counseling and pastoring and retreat leading and more.

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Alison Cook: It makes sense. You're naming. On one hand, we have to name what's going on systemically; we have to name what's going on outside of us. Also, we have to name what's going on inside of us. They're both important. In fact, Healing What’s Within is actually then the brave path that one has to take.

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Chuck: Everyone that I've worked with will know this and I'm sure you'll do the same thing–when people come to me and say, I've got this narcissistic pastor in this traumatizing system. My first counsel is to do your own work. They're like, what do I do? What do I say to the pastor? I think I should confront him. Maybe I should write a letter. I feel the anxiety in the email, in their voice. 

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Okay, let's slow down and let's make sure that you get care so that whatever you do is coming from our true selves, from our core, and not from a reactive or anxious place. That's the work. 

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In a sense, people are asking, is this a follow up to When Narcissism Comes to Church? The answer is, in a very real way, yes. This is the work that you need to do so that you can be healthy and whole as you engage the complexities of our church and our world.

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Alison Cook: Because the one thing that you can take responsibility for, it's a cliche, but it's true. You're never going to be able to change the other person. The only way through is to get really deep within yourself and find your own way through whatever the case may be. You have to do that work from within.

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Chuck: Again, that's going to sound cliche or it's going to sound therapeutic to some. I want to say, even this morning, sitting with a pastor, he said that very thing. I said, do you know St. Augustine from church history? Oh yeah. I know St. Augustine. Have you read the confessions, where he says God, you were within, but I was on the outside looking for the answers out there?

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Augustine says, return to yourself, go within. We get scattered, we get pulled and the movement for the sake of wholeness is always a movement within that allows us then to move out and to be healers. That's the work that you and I do because in part we've done the work within.

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Alison Cook: Yeah. It can feel like a paradox, but it's absolutely the way through. I wanted to ask you, this is a little bit of a tangent, but I'm curious because I don't know this about you personally. How did you end up counseling women? How did you end up counseling emotional abuse survivors? Did you stumble into it? Did you set out? How did that evolve for you?

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Chuck: I was a seminary student in the mid 1990s and I was about to start a PhD program in New Testament studies with a well known and regarded New Testament scholar. I had gotten the blessing of this particular scholar, but I was a nervous wreck. I was so anxious about it.

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I sat down with a counseling professor at my seminary, and this is going to sound really funny because I'm a counseling professor at a seminary now. He said to me really honestly and kindly, but it was hard, he said, if you don't do your work, you're going to be dangerous to the church. You're probably already dangerous to your wife.

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That sounds hard. It was probably harsh, but I was invited into this incredibly relationally-oriented counseling program where I was invited to listen to the experiences of my fellow students, and to ask them about their experiences of me. The program at the time was by and large women.

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I put that question out there, and what I started hearing is, you're arrogant, you're off putting, we don't feel safe with you. We wish you wouldn't have started in the counseling program. This was devastating. At the same time, it was a truth serum. I needed to hear this and it set me on my own journey. We could talk about this a lot longer Alison, but they were naming misogyny. They were connecting it to my mother. This is what we therapists do.

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Alison Cook: You were all training and there was this invitation. You'd asked and they were willing to fill in. 

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Chuck: Yeah, and I had supervisors. When you go through programs like this, you've got your fellow students and you've got supervisors and you're jumping in the deep end. It was a revelation of the ways in which I was hiding, a revelation of the ways in which I needed to heal.

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What happened is it really opened my eyes to how women were experiencing not only me, but the seminary setting I was in, the complexity of male female relationships, and the late misogyny. Again, this is back in the late 90s. We weren't tweeting about this. We weren't holding up signs of “down with the patriarchy”.

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Alison Cook: It was before it was trendy.

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Chuck: It was before it was trendy. It gave me an opportunity as an on the ground pastor to do the work, to really listen to the stories of women. That's where it began.

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Alison Cook: Okay. So as your friend, I find it hard to believe with the way I've experienced you these last few years. Do you think that there was truth in it? Do you think that you were a bit of a lightning rod for a lot of what was going on around you? Do you think a little bit of both? 

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Chuck: What they were seeing in me? Yeah, I think I was a part of a group of men at the seminary who were clicky. We were tribal, we had all the answers to the questions, and the experience was, they're in and we're out. There was a sense of arrogance that they were rightly perceiving.

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Now what they didn't know was that I was the most insecure guy in the pack, and I was clinging to a sense of security. I wasn't the pack leader. But I was certainly participating in something that to them felt very arrogant. I remember sitting in one conversation where I fought them for about 20 minutes and then I was in tears for about the next 40 minutes as I started recognizing some of the connections. 

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I heard the whisper of, “Who told you?”, and I started making connections to my own story and my own insecurities and the ways in which I was grasping for my own sense of worth and purpose and status and other things like that, and so it was a pretty radically transformative two years, but the fruit of it was now I could hear and see in ways that I couldn't hear and see before some of the stories of women in this largely complementarian context that I was in, where they were experiencing harm in their marriages. Yeah, that was it.

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Alison Cook: Are you okay with sharing that Chuck?

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Chuck: Yeah. I am okay sharing it. I don't share it very often and I notice discomfort in my body as I share. I actually think it's probably good that people experience my discomfort with this.

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Alison Cook: I don't know about you, but I know for me as a therapist, I can much more easily elucidate concepts sometimes than talk through some of my own stuff. I remember listening to you and thinking, that's part of the training. It's a good part of the training of becoming a therapist; you expose and open yourself up to the feedback of others. 

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I remember moments like that in my own seminary training, in a different context of people putting their finger on things. I'm curious because honestly, a couple people put fingers on things in my life that I was like, nope, and I knew how to smile and nod, but inside I was like nope, I won't be going there. And then a few years later going, oh my gosh, they were exactly right. 

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Chuck: It could be one of the lines from the narcissism book that is most quoted–it's the question, “how do you experience me?” That came out of that early training. In my work, because I've started a couple of counseling centers at different churches and started a couple of training programs, in every place of leadership, that's been a core question that I've asked people who I've led. 

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How do you experience me? That's, I think, a really important question for us to always have at hand, particularly for leaders. But if we're friends, spouses whatever, how do you experience me?

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Alison Cook: I think we often lead out of what we've had to learn. I know for me in various junctures, when I was writing a lot about boundaries, my kids and my husband are like, this is not one of your strong areas. I'm like, exactly. I have to think about it so hard. It is so hard for me.

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At my core, I'm such a pleaser. It would be my joy to make every person feel totally happy. So I'm constantly having to push against it. I only say that to say, often, what becomes so powerful to us is what we're learning about. Oh, this is how people experience me. How do I grow and change? I think it's really powerful about you that it has become your strength.

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Chuck: Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't end. I had a student march up to my second floor office a couple of years ago when I was up there and say, that question that you ask us to ask in class, can I answer that for you? Can I tell you how I experienced you? I was sitting there like oh, of course. Sure. 

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He said, "You talk a lot about presence, but you walk really fast through the atrium in the seminary from one thing to another. It always feels like you have a lot going on and you don't have enough time for us”. It was like, oh thank you. Let me sit with that and process that, metabolize that and understand what's going on.

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He was exactly right. I was in a season where I was traveling a lot. When I was down in the atrium, I was avoiding people because I didn't want to get caught in a conversation because I had too much to do. He gave me the gift of that reflection and I needed it.

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Alison Cook: Yeah, that's a hard one listening to you, because I'm even imagining the listener and I'm thinking of myself in those seasons, and that ability to be present and open to the feedback of others. It comes all the way back to not shaming. Yeah. I haven't been present in these moments with my kids, or I wasn't present here. I wasn't a great friend in these situations. 

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That's true. Part of me is like, I gotta go fix that now. It comes right back to, where are you? Oh God, that is where I am. I might not even do anything about it, but I can honor that. There's truth in that.

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Chuck: Yeah. I can listen in a way that acknowledges the impact on the other and I think that's a really important piece that came out of the narcissism work. Can we acknowledge our impact? What's tricky for me as a counseling professor and someone who talks about these things, is that I have students or clients or family members, by the way, who can perhaps gaslight themselves into thinking, it's probably not dad or it's probably not my professor or my counselor because he talks a lot about presence.

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He's good at that. It must be me. The reality is, and yeah, in a non-shaming way, I could say, Chuck, that is a propensity of yours. You got really good at hiding and disconnecting. It's another invitation, but it's a kind invitation.

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Alison Cook: That's a really good point about the gaslighting. Because it's not that we have to be perfect. It's not that we have to fix it. It's that we can honor that other person's experience. What you're sensing there is accurate. We're honoring the reality of their experience of me without shaming ourselves–that takes a lot of internal fortitude. It's the fruit of the work of healing that you've been doing for 20 years.

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Chuck: This is why it's not selfish. I always tell people it's not selfish, because this allows you to love your neighbor. This allows you to listen well and honor your neighbor, honor the pain, the harm that you might've caused or created. None of us are immune to that. And then we get to live.

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I'll often say to my clients, now you get to live the rest of your life in this. There's no arrival point. You continue to do the work with curiosity and you listen for those questions and you assume that you're going to be disconnected again.

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But you come back and you begin again. That's a phrase, by the way, from the Christian tradition that you see in all the great contemplatives and mystics. Begin again. It's simple and it's non-shaming. If you fail, begin again. If you get stuck, begin again. If you're disconnected, begin again. It's okay.

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Alison Cook: That's beautiful. That's a beautiful summary. That's how then we continue to live. It's a virtuous cycle of more and more goodness. It's not that we don't continue to have to begin again, but it gets a little easier. There's more compassion. 

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I have a couple more questions. Are you then also able to find pockets in your life where you can more honestly speak about what's hurting you or what you need from someone else? Do you feel like that's also a fruit of doing the work internally, of being able to then voice, oh man, that hurt? Does it flow both ways?

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Chuck: That's been an area of growth, and I think I'm getting better at saying I'm hurting or this is what I need, because I think for a long time a part of my own self-medication cycle was to be quite externalized and to help others in the midst of their needs. It's a classic sort of helper syndrome.

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So in another moment this week, in a similar way to what I described earlier, in the midst of a pressure packed, challenging situation with a pastor that I've been doing some work with, I put my hand on my chest again. My clients all discover this after a while.

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They're like, what are you doing? Are you saying the Pledge of Allegiance? What's happening right now? But, I whispered to myself, Chuck, you do hard things. It's okay. I think that in the work that we do, there needs to be an acknowledgement at times that this is hard.

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I know one of the messages that I had growing up was that I had to always look and dress the part. I couldn't have needs. I couldn't be weak, fragile, or needy. There's that sense of, yeah, this is hard. This hurts. Or you're tired. Or you need a break. Things like that are growing practices. I think even today, having done this for such a long time, I'm still a work in progress when it comes to that. Yeah.

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Alison Cook: Yeah. That's also vulnerable. I've noticed that in myself and sometimes I don't verbalize it, but shifting into myself and what I need in the moment can be a subtle cue to someone I love or someone around me. That subtle, like you're saying, deep breath, putting your hand on your heart, as a way of being known and of showing up in your own needs.

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Chuck: Yeah.

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Alison Cook: I want to end by asking you a couple of questions I like to ask my guests. What would you say to that younger 20, 25 year old you now, if you could sit with him for a few moments?

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Chuck: Wow. That's such a good question. I’d look him in the eye and co-regulate, as we say, and say breathe. Breathe. Because I think I lived my early years holding my breath a lot, pushing through and yeah, I say breathe. It's okay. That might be it because I think younger me would be in tears at that point.

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Alison Cook: It's beautiful because that's what you're doing now when you give yourself that. Yeah, that's beautiful. Chuck, what's bringing out the best of you right now?

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Chuck: Oh yeah, that's another good question. It's a sweet time in our family right now, Alison. There have been some ups and downs over the years, but my oldest is living with us for the first time in a number of years. She's 23 and she's getting married, and two weeks from Saturday, she'll be married. Sarah and I, my wife, Sarah, we've got two daughters, 23 and 21.

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We're getting to really invest in our oldest in a way that we haven't in a while. She reminded us the last time that she was the only one that lived with us. It was from zero to 16 months. We are loving time with her and time with her fiance.

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I live in Michigan in the summer and it's gorgeous. We sit on the back deck and have these unhurried conversations. That's been really beautiful.

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Alison Cook: I love that. Where can people find you and find the book? We'll link to it in the show notes, but this is going to come out probably the week it releases. I don't know if you have any kind of bonus order items or anything like that.

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Chuck: I'm on Myspace and the book, if you're listening to this days before the book comes out, there's a little bonus if you pre-order. You can get a two plus hour workshop on spiritual abuse, religious trauma and systems thinking, and how we transform ourselves and systems.

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It's a two plus hour lesson that I'll send you a code for. You can go to my website for the pre-order link. The website is ChuckDeGroat.net, and then I'm on Twitter and Instagram and Facebook, but not TikTok. I can't do it. I have not been able to do it.

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Alison Cook: The book is Healing What's Within: Coming Home to Yourself When You're Wounded, Weary, and Wandering.

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Chuck: Forward by Alison.

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Alison Cook: Yeah, that's right. It's a fantastic, beautiful resource that everybody needs. I'm thrilled. Thank you for sharing with us your expertise, but also your personhood.

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Chuck: Yeah. Thanks friend. Good to be with you.

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