episode
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Spiritual Wholeness

Sacred Attachment—Escaping Spiritual Exhaustion and Trusting in Divine Love with Michael John Cusick

Episode Notes

How do you experience loving attachment when trauma leaves you feeling shattered?

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In this incredibly profound and insightful episode, therapist and author of the brand new book, Sacred Attachment, Michael Cusick joins us to explore how our darkest moments of brokenness are not just moments of pain, but pivotal opportunities for forming a deeper, more secure attachment with God. Michael shares about his own healing journey as a result of complex trauma, and we unpack how our pain can bring us even closer to encounters with God’s love. Today’s episode is for everyone who has ever felt broken. We discuss. . .

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*5 way of understanding brokenness (and why the "sin" paradigm falls short)

*Why mystical encounters are for all of us

*A jaw-dropping moment when Michael experienced God's love

*The role of imagination in healing

*How to restore exiled and wounded parts of us

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Resources:

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If you liked this, you’ll love:
  • Episode 16: What are Attachment Styles and Why Does it Matter?

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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, and Happy New Year! I'm so thrilled you've joined us for this week's episode of the Best of You Podcast. If you're a returning listener, I'm so glad you're back with us. We have an incredible lineup of guests along with some solo episodes on topics you've been asking for lined up for this new year. 

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If you're a new listener, we are so thrilled to have you with us, where every single week we come together to talk about a mental health topic using the best of current psychology research from a faith-based perspective. I'm so thrilled you're here for today's episode. This is an incredible episode that is hopeful and inspiring and empowering and so rich and meaty. 

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There's so much in this episode. We are diving into a powerful conversation, all about sacred attachment and how we forge a healthy, secure attachment with God, with others, and with the parts of ourselves. Joining me today is therapist and author, Michael Cusick. You'll hear Michael talk about his profound journey of healing from complex trauma and how he learned to restore the intimacy of a secure, loving attachment with God.

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I love this quote from the episode where Michael says, “Our brokenness is not the barrier, but a bridge to where we want to be”. You're going to hear incredible examples of how God helped build that bridge in Michael's life from brokenness into these beautiful moments of being surprised by God's love.

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There's one point in the episode where we both got chills at the way God showed up in some beautiful and surprising ways. And spoiler alert, often God shows up for us at the moments when we feel the least worthy.

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As you are heading into the new year and you've been wanting to really dive into your healing journey and healing those places that still feel broken in your own life, whether with God, whether with loved ones, whether with the parts of yourselves, there is something for you in this episode.

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Toward the end, Michael shares a real-time exercise that you can do right along with us. I do it with him in the episode. It’s about how the power of our imagination can help us heal and envision a life beyond our toughest challenges.

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If you find something in this episode that is really helpful to you, I hope you'll share it with a friend or with a family member who might need some encouragement or practical tools along their own healing journeys.

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Part of why I continue to create this content each week is because I believe we need practical tools and we need to hear each others’ stories of healing, so we learn how to name what's hard, but we also are inspired and encouraged and empowered by what's hopeful in our shared experiences. We need to hear about how these tools from psychology and from our faith keep us moving forward to restore these broken areas of our lives. 

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Michael John Cusick is a licensed professional counselor, spiritual director, speaker, and the author of two books, including his brand new book called Sacred Attachment: Escaping Spiritual Exhaustion and Trusting in Divine Love. It's out next week. It's such a good book. I hope you'll pick up a copy of it. 

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I know you will be blessed by both the practical tools and spiritual wisdom in the book. Having experienced the restoring touch of God in a deeply broken life and marriage, Michael's passion is to connect life's broken realities with the reality of the gospel. In addition to being a therapist, Michael leads Restoring the Soul, which is a trauma-informed, intensive counseling center in the beautiful mountains of Colorado.

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He also equips Christian organizations around the world and formerly served as a professor at both Denver Seminary and Colorado Christian University. Michael holds a master's degree in both pastoral counseling and in counseling psychology. I'm so thrilled to bring you this beautiful, rich healing conversation with Michael John Cusick.

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Alison Cook: Michael, I am so thrilled to have this conversation with you today. I read your new book. It's called Sacred Attachment: Escaping Spiritual Exhaustion and Trusting in Divine Love. I read an early copy of it and it really moved me, in a way that I hadn't been moved in a long time by a book, by your story, by how you frame love and his journey of attaching to God and healing. I'm thrilled to have you on the podcast today. Thanks for joining us to talk about it.

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Michael: Thank you. It's so good to talk with you and thank you for your kind words and for the wonderful endorsement that you gave for the book.

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Alison Cook:  I would love to start a little bit with your own story. Michael, the book really speaks to this gap between what we believe about God, what we want to believe about God, and the reality of our experiences.

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You pull us right in at the beginning of the book by showing us some of these contrasting experiences in your own life. You share a story about being surprised by love. It's a really amazing story with your aunt, who's a Carmelite nun, and it’s juxtaposed with going back home into significant emotional and sexual and physical abuse.

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Tell me a little bit about those competing stories and how they shaped your understanding of yourself and God.

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Michael: Absolutely. I would love to. I've shared elsewhere and even in my book, Surfing for God, about being sexually abused as a child. Most of that I remember beginning around the age of eight, but around 2003, I started to have body memories, not images, but body memories and was diagnosed with complex post traumatic stress disorder.

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That unfolded over a number of years and was, to this day, the hardest thing that I've gone through in my life–much more difficult than overcoming depression and various addictions in my life. My story started to be corroborated by various family members in my immediate family and beyond based on a lot of knowledge that was always known about an uncle. 

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He sexually abused me and a number of other family members, and I was trafficked to other men that he made me available to. Back then it wasn't called trafficking, but it filled in so many pieces in my story. My abuse wouldn't be dealt with, much less remembered in full, until I was released around probably 16 years old.

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I was four years old when that abuse started and I had an aunt that was a cloistered Carmelite nun. Carmelites were cloistered, so they made a choice to live behind a wall and they could not have contact with the public, except through a metal grate, which was like a prison cell. So when I was four years old, it was always a scary thing to go visit the nuns. 

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I was the youngest of five Irish Catholic kids. On this particular day, my brother lifted me up into this cabinet, which was in the corner, in the space between visitors and the 17 or 20 nuns that were there. It's like prison bars, but it's a crosshatch. My brother lifted me into this cabinet and it spun around on a lazy susan so that food and gifts could be passed over back and forth to the nuns. 

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I spun around thinking, I'm going to die. I didn't like being dizzy or spun around. I was terrified. I remember this very acutely. Finally, the door opened and I thought my brother was there, but my aunt, this cloistered Carmelite nun, was on the other side and she gave me this big embrace. She took me on the other side of this grid where I was not supposed to be.

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I remember being terrified even more then, of the Pope or the Bishop or some priest coming, and I'm in big trouble. It really became a metaphor for later, when I came to a very personal kind of faith. Although I was baptized and confirmed as a Catholic, for many years, for two decades, I saw God as someone who was catching me on the wrong side of things, where I was not supposed to be, not measuring up, not following the rules, and that I was going to be in trouble.

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But what actually happened on the other side of that grid is that my aunt embraced me and kissed me and held me and rubbed her fingers through my hair. She couldn't even go to her own father's funeral about 10 years before this moment. Then other nuns came in and began to embrace me.

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What ultimately happened was, they put me down on the floor and we created a circle and we started singing Ring Around The Rosie and dancing in a circle. That moment became this metaphor of spinning in life, where we're disoriented and we lose our bearings and yet there's this place where we're actually held and embraced by love.

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I've come to see that in many cases with the people that we work with in our therapeutic and pastoral work. Maybe many of the listeners of this podcast are experiencing some kind of disconnect like that as well. They want to believe that love is there to embrace them, that love has them if you will, and yet there's an external reality where they're spinning, they're disoriented.

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There's this disconnect between what they want to experience with God and what they were told the Christian life would actually be like, but what they actually experience is something very different from that. They don't have any idea how to connect those two or to close that gap.

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Alison Cook: That was such a powerful story. It reminds me of the title of the classic CS Lewis book where he talks about being surprised by joy, and it's almost like being surprised by love in that moment. There was pure love for you from these women.

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That metaphor is so powerful, and you talk about being surprised by love, where God comes into the unlikeliest of places in the book. You also talk about the long-term damage in your life as a result of the abuse that doesn't go away magically, even though you have these moments of love and grace. 

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Tell me a little bit about that. Once you began to realize the devastation that had occurred to you, what was that like? How did you try to heal? How did you try to address that? What worked? What didn't work?

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Michael: Yeah, I had some very pronounced survival strategies that kicked in at a very young age. As the youngest of five, I was the family comedian or the mascot. I got a lot of my emotional needs met by making people laugh. I made this commitment very early on that I would be a people pleaser, that I would get people to like me, that I would try to mediate conflict and anxiety.

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There was a lot of that in our home, and I mediated with humor. One of my earliest memories that I write about in the book as well, is when I was probably five years old. I would steal food out of our pantry and we were a blue collar, lower middle class family, and food wasn't always plentiful because the older people would eat it.

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I stole a bag of Nestle chocolate chips and I went under my bed and I tucked them up underneath the mattress. Some of my earliest memories are going under that mattress and eating these sweets, rationing them out to myself to kill that emotional pain. That lasted through my whole life.

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I currently attend a 12-step group for freedom from compulsive overeating. That has been really revolutionary. So today, for anybody who's listening, freedom and healing and integration are possible, but we always have to continue to do our work. There's no end point where we go, okay, I'm good. I'm whole. 

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I do believe that we can get to a place where we're whole, but we need to cultivate that in the same way that we have to cultivate a garden.

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Alison Cook: I love that. In the book, you keep us on that journey with you. You have these moments of breakthrough. You have these moments of discovery and of healing, and also, it's an ongoing process of continuing to do the work. It's beautiful in that sense. It's so realistic and also so hopeful. 

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You've described brokenness, and this is a really powerful way to describe it, as a gateway to divine attachment. Tell us a little bit more about what you mean by that. You don't mean that glibly. 

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Michael: No. I believe that with all my heart. I described the gap as this Delta, and in science, a Delta is the triangle or the Greek symbol for the distance between where you are and where you want to be. It represents that gap, but a Delta is also like the Delta of the Mississippi, where two things come together to create something new. 

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The brackish water and the salt water in that Delta becomes something new. I believe in the “gospel reality”, when we bring our brokenness plus our hope and what we're actually made to be together, and something altogether new is formed. There's this third reality that is developed. We therapists talk about non-duality and dialectical behavior therapy; there's this other way, this third way, that's really based in paradox. 

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Our brokenness is not the barrier, but a bridge to where we want to be. What we often focus on as believers is, why do we struggle with X, Y, or Z? The average pastor, unfortunately, or the average person in the pews might say that it’s because we're sinners, but it's actually because we mishandle our pain and we mishandle the disconnection that is there spiritually, emotionally and relationally from others.

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In that disconnection, we're going to move towards something that gives us that sense of being seen, soothed, safe, and secure, those four foundational elements, and behind it all is attachment.

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Alison Cook: Pain becomes an opportunity. It's something deeper than simply healing the pain and making it go away. When we actually take the pain out and we face the brokenness and we continue to take that into relationship with God, something transcendent happens there. Something new is formed.

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Michael: Absolutely. I'm not sure when this will be broadcast, but Advent starts in a week. Advent is all about becoming and waiting. It's the journey of Mary's Magnificat, of saying yes to God in this very unlikely situation, and it culminates in the birth of Christ.

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We take that for granted. The birth of Christ and the Incarnation, as well as the conception in Mary by the Holy Spirit, is really one of the very first proofs in the New Testament that God loves to inhabit anything and everything that is seemingly unfavorable. A situation that is a crisis, a situation that is tragic, like the homelessness of the God of the universe, the fact that he was conceived in an unwed teenage peasant womb, all of those things are unfavorable.

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They become precursors that in our life, all of those moments, God inhabits those things. That's the very first secure attachment, is that God is with us, God is in us. In Christ, we are in union with him. Like the Irish Celtic proverb that says, we can't put the ocean in a thimble, but we can put the thimble in the ocean. We are in the ocean of God's love.

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We can't acquire that, we can't attain that, we don't have to strive for it–it's something we rest in, through spiritual practices and spiritual training, beginning with silence, solitude, stillness, and awareness of our body. Through so many of the things that you speak about and write about, Alison, we can actually begin to embody and to experience that kind of attachment in the midst of and through the brokenness and the pain and the suffering in our life.

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Alison Cook: I love that. You give some very vivid examples of this in the book, and I've seen it in my own life. My husband and I had, for years, led Bible studies in a homeless shelter in Boston, where every single week we were with folks who were coming out of prison who, because of addiction, mental illness, all sorts of things where they'd inflicted harm on others, also were survivors of incredible trauma. 

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I've never felt such holy ground where God showed up. It wasn't because all the lives were suddenly cleaned up. Many of these folks were there, like I said, out of prison, in the unfavorability of those circumstances, where the Holy Spirit is invited in. There's a closeness of God when you feel like your life is at its lowest moment. 

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I've had moments of this in my own life, where God has shown up the most powerfully. I've turned toward him. Sure. But in the midst of some of my worst moments is when he's shown up the most powerfully.

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Michael: Yeah, and he shows up and sometimes he doesn't say anything. It's merely his presence, which brings, occasionally, a sense of comfort, but not always an embodied sense of comfort, but the sense that it's going to be okay.

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You're absolutely right. Especially if we read the Beatitudes, it's almost as if the worse a situation is and the less expected it is for God to be there, the more consistently he is there. Of course, he's everywhere, including when we visit the sick, when we take care of the homeless, when we see people in prison, what we've done unto the least of these, that's where God is. It's in the least of our situations, suffering, and circumstances, where God is as well.

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Alison Cook: You talk about these five W's and I thought that was such a helpful and powerful framework. You talk about this in the book, because of your own woundedness, because of what was done to you, you did end up finding yourself in situations that hurt your wife, that hurt others.

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This is this really hard thing for folks who are coming out of complex trauma, where we find ourselves doing things that harm others. You give us this framework of these five Ws and it's so important for us to understand all the nuances of that framework. Could you share that with us?

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Michael: Absolutely. Hurting people hurt people. Pain that's not transformed is transmitted, as a number of spiritual writers have said. I took these five W's as a way of helping people to understand what's going on below the surface. I'm assuming that people who are coming from a Christian framework have been told, the problem is your sin, and you need to repent. 

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The problem is, that doesn't work, and that didn't work for me as a very disciplined, high-level willpower Christian early on in my faith. For the first 15 years, I was memorizing Scripture, studying the Bible, leading others to Christ, starting a Young Life Club in Cleveland, Ohio that is still running 40 years later, far beyond my expectations, and really doing a lot of the external things that I thought would somehow give me the grace. 

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That God would be appreciative or impressed, and that would somehow turn the lock in the door that would open into this life that was called the abundant life and freedom. That never worked.

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I started to ask the question, what else could be going on here? I did therapy and I got some graduate degrees, and along the lines, I was approached by a professor. I've taken my own experience, my own understanding of the scriptures, and my own understanding of some of the best of psychological and spiritual writing.

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The first of the W's, and I want to forewarn your listeners, this first W might be offensive, but it's the word wretched. We all know the word “wretched” from the song, Amazing Grace. It's interesting how many secular versions there are of this song, because it's such a classic song in melody, but also the lyrics. 

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Presumably, people that aren't even religious are moved by this song. Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me. If you look up the word wretch in the dictionary, it says something like despicable or vile. Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a despicable, vile person like me. 

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Here's the good news. That's not actually what that word means. There's a small context where that’s what that means, but at the time that song was written, the word wretched meant impoverished. It meant homeless. One of the most poignant images is in Dickens’ writing in the 1800s, A Tale of Two Cities. 

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We all know A Christmas Carol, but in A Tale of Two Cities, he wrote of wretches as homeless children that were out on the corner begging. What if we thought about our personhood, because there was this sense of disconnection from God way back in the Garden of Eden, that we've lost our way, that we're homeless, and that we're impoverished?

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I'll speak for myself, that all the resources I've used to try to make my life work, to try to manage my trauma and my pain, none of them work, and yet I keep thinking that if I spend my money, or spiritually, emotionally, relationally speaking, if I utilize my survival strategies, that somehow I can earn love.

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The scriptures actually tell us that we are impoverished. It was St. Thérèse of Lisieux, that Doctor of the Church who passed away at age 24, who left behind this wonderful spirituality of childlike simplicity. She called it “the little way”. She once said that our poverty (and she was referring to spiritual poverty) alone is our capacity for God.

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If I've got game, and if my credit card has $20,000 of spiritual spending power on it, and if my wallet is full of $100 bills, and if my piggy bank is full, then I really have no need for God. That's why in Isaiah 55, the prophet says, “Come all you who are thirsty, come and drink. You who have no money, come and buy wine, milk, and bread.”

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We actually have to acknowledge that we're impoverished in order to experience the kingdom and to experience the love that is there. So I prefer, instead of talking about wickedness, which is another W, to talk about wretchedness, or our poverty.

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The next W is our weakness, and that's simply our vulnerabilities and the human limitations we have. Jesus was weak; he emptied himself of divinity, and part of that meant that he had to sleep, he had to eat, he had to go to the bathroom. In the Garden of Gethsemane, he turned to his friends and said, hey, stay here and pray for me. Not once, but three times. 

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We tend to come into the world and reveal to others our strengths and our abilities and our gifts, but we take our vulnerabilities and our limitations and we hide them behind our back, or we relegate them to some faraway place. In IFS work, we call these exiles, the parts of us that get lost, the parts of us that get relegated. 

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People then love us, not based on who we really are, but based on who we think they want us to be, and we become performers, either getting larger than we actually are, or becoming smaller, either expanding our sense of self and performing, or dialing down who we are.

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So there's wretchedness, there's weakness, then there's woundedness, and that includes trauma and wounds of presence, things that shouldn't have happened that did happen. But especially related to attachment, and oftentimes more difficult to address, are those things that didn't happen. 

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Long after I dealt with a lot of my complex trauma, I was left going, now I need to learn how to attach to people and how not to be anxious and avoidant in my pattern of attachment. So there's wretchedness, weakness, woundedness, and then there's warfare. By that, I don't mean devil possession or anything like that, but that we have an accuser who wants to tell us that love doesn't have us. 

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I believe that the ultimate goal of evil is to whisper in our ear and to shout in our face that we cannot trust love and that love doesn't have us. This is ultimately revealed in the person of Jesus on the cross. 

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Finally, the fifth W is wiring. So if I had those first four Ws listed, I would draw a circle around those other Ws and say that we are embodied people, that we have this neurobiology, and that our nervous systems are shaped and formed by living in the world and having all those experiences of the other five Ws. 

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In that inability to self-soothe or regulate or reacting in the world and in relationships, we mishandle our pain in an attempt to try to find that secure attachment, where we can rest and know deep in our body and in our being, not in our left brain and our intellect, that that the Lord is our shepherd and that we shall not want.

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Alison Cook: What I love about that is it's so holistic. As I go through this process of sozo, this healing, this becoming more of my true self, I've got an eye on the wretchedness. When you said that about exiles, when I started doing parts work early on, those parts of me that I had shut out showed up in my system as little orphans that I was completely neglecting.

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It was life-changing for me to realize, oh my goodness, I need to actually invite these parts of me in. I'm addressing my weaknesses, like you said, I'm addressing the reality of warfare. It is a reality. All of these things matter, and we're looking at things holistically. It's not one size fits all. 

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I love that you include that. So I thought that was really a powerful way to think about the complexity of healing, the complexity of restoring our relationship with our self God and others.

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Michael: Yeah, thank you for pointing that out, because if things are not holistic and don’t represent all the different parts of our humanity, we end up believing that our faith makes us actually less human, and to be more spiritual is to become less human. But to become more spiritual is actually to become more fully human.

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Alison Cook: In working with folks about those five W's, I am always thinking about what's going on here in this marriage that's hard or in this friendship that's hard. Is there some woundedness? Is there some wiring? Is there some warfare? It's really important to have a sense of the primary thing at the root of this. When we have that framework, we can be more astute and more discerning when we're trying to be in this space of healing and walking with the people we love. 

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Michael, you bring in both this really refined psychological lens with this deeply spiritually-informed contemplative lens of there's something bigger going on. We have to do the work - and also, there's something bigger going on. There are two things you talk about in the latter chapters of the book that I loved, because we don't talk about them enough. 

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The first is this word mysticism. I loved this. Tell us what you mean by that and why that's important in this journey of healing. This isn't something relegated to saints and hyper-religious people or hyper-spiritual people from the past; there's a mystical component to all of us that can really be a part of this journey.

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Michael: Thank you for asking. In all the podcasts I've done about the book so far, no one has talked about this and I actually feel like it's one of the more important chapters, even though it's later in the book. Because it's really the goal of everything.

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Attachment, even though we can now see on spect scans and MRIs and things like that what happens in the brain, and therefore we can have a scientific aspect to it, it's really fundamentally an imagination, mystical-driven process. So first, let me define mysticism. 

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A mystic is somebody who seeks inner experience with God. So they're seeking experience, which is a kind of knowledge biblically, but it's not left brain. It's not intellectual. It's not cognitive. It's not knowing about God. It's having an encounter with God. I would argue that's the whole point of why human beings were created–not to have more Bible studies and to learn more about God, but to live in that ocean of God's love. 

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I want to quote Karl Rahner, who was a German Catholic theologian, a philosopher. He wrote in the 1960s, “The devout Christian of the future will either be a mystic, one who has experienced something, or he will cease to be anything at all”. 

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I'm afraid that what's happening in the church today, is that many people who were Christians, who now can't use Christian language, or call themselves by certain identifiers like evangelical or even a Jesus follower, are ceasing to be anything at all, and yet their hearts are still longing for the transcendent. Their hearts are still longing to be attached to love. 

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Part of what I tried to do in writing about mysticism and in the whole book is to give people a new lens by which they can see their spirituality and their relationship to God in Christ. Also, to give a new language to speak about what's going on inside that blends the contemplative and the psychological and then ultimately to give people a path to experience God.

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Mysticism and that conversation really is linked to the conversation around imagination. We can go there if you want to in a minute. When we start talking about mysticism, it makes the religious professionals and denominational leaders very on edge, because it feels woo-woo.

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It feels like we're throwing out Scripture. But the more deeply I have delved into Scripture and seen Scripture with my imagination, and tried to place myself in the stories rather than try to learn facts about God, it not only brings more transformation and healing and spiritual and emotional rest inside of me, but it also draws me into more of a mystery.

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So it feels like there's more experience of God, but there's less ability for me to explain Him, and there's less necessity for me to have to defend God, which I spent a lot of the first decades of my life in faith doing–apologetics and trying to convince people of something that they simply didn't believe.

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Alison Cook: I love that. I often now have that experience in nature, hiking in the mountains. We have this horrible fire up here in the Rockies. That was devastating to so many of us. There was a large background to it, but I was walking in the mountains and I had a moment and it was what you described.

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It wasn't like I was annoyed with God. I was trying to avoid God, but there was this moment outside, the leaves were crunching, where I felt that connection with love. It was palpable. I wrote about it. I sent it out into a blog. I usually write much more practical things. That blog got more responses, to your point. 

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There's something about, this isn't this woo-woo thing. We're trying to cultivate that experience of God with us. We don't always live there, but we want to feel that. We want to feel that experience of God with us, Emmanuel.

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I love that you're naming all of this work that we do; our deep breathing, to learn how to soothe our nervous system, to work out hard things in our relationships, to heal from our past trauma–there are these moments, these glimmers, to use Deb Dana's word, of something divine, something beyond, and we can maybe put ourselves more and more in that path.

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I'm curious, personally, how those moments have shown up for you and given you encouragement and kept you going on your own path.

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Michael: I've had many moments like that, but I've had to develop awareness and attentiveness. Sometimes there's still a voice in my head. I would argue that the scriptures and disciplines and liturgy for people that are part of that background and community, that those are all really good and essential things, but we all hit seasons of our life, particularly when trauma and anxiety and dissociation and depression or other mental health disorders are there.

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We can't walk in some of those same paths that we once did. We have to look for ways to experience beauty in the midst of our suffering. I have the strange habit of memorizing first lines of books, and Kay Redfield Jamison wrote a book called An Unquiet Mind. It's about bipolar disorder.

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I've read all of her stuff, and the first line in her book, which is her memoir of bipolar, says, “People go mad in idiosyncratic ways”. Brilliant idea. There's no two people that develop a disorder, even if it's the same disorder, the same way. I've become fond of saying, “people heal in idiosyncratic ways”.

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So when I was a brand new Christian and discipled by my Young Life leader, he sat down, he said, here's what you do. You have a quiet time and you pray this way and you read this way. That was really great for me, but within a couple of years, especially in the midst of my struggles, I needed something else, and there was no one who pointed that out to me.

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One of the most profound examples of this is about 12 years ago, when I went to a family reunion. As you might imagine from some of the stories in my book, my family has been fraught with conflict for decades and there's been estrangement. This was the first time that we'd gotten together as a nuclear family.

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We did this evening sunset cruise on Lake Michigan. We stayed in Saugatuck. There were about 250 people on this boat, and we went offshore far enough to not be able to see land, and the engines went out. I'm still coming out of my trauma at this time. I'm like, great, I'm going to die in the middle of Lake Michigan. This is probably a terrorist.

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It was really quite irrational. Then the captain came over the loudspeaker and he said, ladies and gentlemen, turn to the other side of the boat, and the clouds parted and there was a beautiful sunset. It didn't always happen there because of the clouds. It was this flaming, orange ball that was one of the most intense, glorious sunsets, and it was high up in the sky.

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As it lowered, people came closer together and huddled, these strangers in mass, and as it got right to the horizon, it became absolutely quiet. No one told us to be that way. It was an absolute hush. Then it went lower and lower. I have chills as I tell the story. As it disappeared behind the horizon, there were about two seconds of absolute silence. It's gone. Then spontaneously, the 250 people burst into applause and cheering.

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Alison Cook: That's amazing.

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Michael: It was as if they were saying, God, well done. I don't know if all the people were religious or if they were all atheists, but it doesn't really matter because it was so overwhelming and so sensory and compelling.  About 250 of us were standing together, where it may not have been the same response if it was one person on a cliff or a beach, but it was absolutely glorious.

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It was like there was a standing ovation for God. In the same way that if you see a symphony or a U2 show or something like that, you have to stand up and lift up your arms. That moment in the midst of this very tense, anxiety-producing, somewhat triggering several days with my family became like this kiss and hug from God saying, Michael, I've got you. I've got you. I show up, even here, miles away from the shoreline in one of the Great Lakes.

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Alison Cook: That is so powerful. It’s hard, and that experience doesn't necessarily zap you right out of it, but it's God breaking through. There's that moment where something bigger is happening that gives you enough to keep going. It's beautiful. Before we wind down, Michael, I want to bring in this idea of the imagination. 

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When I got to that chapter in the book, I started weeping. When I stumbled upon Internal Family Systems, IFS, at the end of my doctoral work, I was on this quest for understanding of the soul. I didn't find it in my mind. I didn't find it in all the academic knowledge. I didn't find it in all the psychology theories. 

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Here was this model, IFS, that allowed me to connect with parts of myself using what CS Lewis calls, the baptized imagination. There's this holy ability to imagine something that takes me out of my head, that takes me out of my limited finite abilities. It was life-changing to me to this day. 

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Speaking of CS Lewis, his baptized imagination, Tolkien's baptized imagination, I will still sometimes go back and read the last battle, the last story in the Narnia series. He imagined this world that is rife with great theology, but it's the story in it that actually gives me hope, that helps me reconnect to God.

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There's something about the world of the imagination that is holy and is so important for us in this work of healing trauma. We have to find a way to both incorporate it and imagine something bigger. Talk to me a little bit about that. 

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I found that chapter so personally moving because I can forget that. I can get back into my head. I can get back into good, spiritual formation habits and all that's important, but there's something transcendent that happens when we access that baptized imagination. Tell me a little bit about that and why that was important for you to include.

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Michael: In 1996, I had the privilege of sitting down with Eugene and Jan Peterson for three hours in their home in Vancouver when he was at Regent College. So I was with Eugene and I asked him a silly question.

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I was a contributing editor for the Mars Hill Review, no relation to the Mars Hill Church, which looked at the intersection of the visual arts, music, literature, poetry, theater, et cetera, with Christian faith. Back then, very few people were doing that. It was a cutting edge thing. Now, that's much, much more common.

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Eugene, who had been speaking on the arts and the imagination for a long time, called what Lewis called the baptized imagination, the sanctified imagination. I said, why are the arts important? He looked at me like, that's a dumb question, but he's too kind, he didn't say that.

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He said, Michael, we're dealing with the invisible. Everything about our faith is dealing with the invisible, and something clicked in me. I went, so I need to actually fan the flames that it's good that it's invisible, and I'm gonna have to use my imagination. I had read enough of Eugene's books, and The Message was about halfway out.

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Part of the gift he gave us with The Message is the poetry there that allowed us to think beyond the normal words, because he believed that for disaffected outsiders and for bored insiders in the Church, that we needed new language to fire up the story so that we could actually understand the story.

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Back to C. S. Lewis, I love what you said about his fiction, because throughout the world people know Narnia. All of the movies that are there are about the story of God. It is the story of creation and redemption, of birth and death and resurrection and ascension.

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It's there. The names have been changed to draw in the innocent, if you will, and to make the guilty know that they're welcome at the table. But I want to read a quote from Lewis because he wrote this in the 1950s, I believe, long before we had the neuroscience that we now have today. 

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He said in regard to imagination, the two hemispheres of my mind were in sharp contrast. On the one side, a many-islanded sea of poetry and myths. On the other, a glib and shallow rationalism. Nearly all that I loved, I believed to be imaginary. Nearly all I believed to be real, I thought grim and meaningless.

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What Lewis did with his work, and to a large degree even in his nonfiction work, is that he brought together the real and the imaginary. He helped us to see that we can actually see reality more with our imagination than with our rational mind.

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I could ask you, what's five times five? 25. What's seven plus seven? 14. You could give me the answers, but if I said, why is five times five 25? We would have to use our imagination about that and we would not be able to use our left brain. I'll often ask people to tell me what their favorite food is.

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Alison, what's your favorite food?

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Alison Cook: I'm gonna say pizza.

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Michael: Okay, what kind of pizza?

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Alison Cook: Pepperoni.

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Michael: All right, and do you like cheese on it?

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Alison Cook: Yes.

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Michael: Okay, so I'm gonna ask you right now to close your eyes, and I would like your listeners, unless they're driving a car or operating heavy machinery, to close their eyes, and to imagine a pizza. Imagine your favorite pizza from your favorite pizza shop or from the store, and imagine what that pizza looks like on top with the pepperoni, and how the juice has come out over the cheese, and imagine the crust. 

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Imagine what it would be like to pick it up in your hand and to take a bite of the gooey cheese and the tomato sauce and the pepperoni and to taste the juice. Then imagine what it would be like to swallow it, and imagine that fullness in your stomach and the satisfaction between your taste buds and chemicals being released in your stomach saying, okay, satiety or fullness is starting to happen.

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Then take a breath. What are you feeling right now as you imagine that pepperoni pizza?

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Alison Cook: Hungry.

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Michael: There you go. 

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Alison Cook: I have warm feelings. It put me back in a fun family gathering at my favorite pizza place. There's a lot to it.

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Michael: If you were to go eat after this podcast, you'd probably be less likely to eat cornflakes and more likely to eat something akin to pepperoni pizza. Wouldn't it be strange if I said to you, Alison, that wasn't real. That's strange to ask if it's real. In GK Chesterton's biography of St. Francis, Chesterton wrote in the introduction that children tend to engage in make believe and adults look down upon that. 

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But children see far more of reality through make believe than the adults who live in rationalism. We have this capacity to imagine because God has made us in his image, and God is the first one full of imagination. The Trinity dreamt us up. In Jeremiah 1, it says, before I formed you, I knew you. 

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I'm not sure of the Hebrew word there, but one could paraphrase that as, before I actually imagined you, I knew something of you, and then I set you apart. That set-apartness was not put off on a shelf, but set apart for a time and a moment for his imagination to be fulfilled. I don't know that God ever imagined my life to take the detours that it did. 

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Some would argue that God knew all of those things. I would actually dispute that without denying his sovereignty. But I would argue that part of his imagination is to meet us at every single point of our brokenness, and by entering into, incarnating, and inhabiting that brokenness, his imagination expands and then creates these opportunities for transformation that is a collaborative process between us consenting and saying yes to God, and God's always generative, creative process to bring forth life.

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That when God touches up and bumps up against brokenness, when we consent and say yes. There's no other alternative but for something that is life, and life-giving, and good, and true, and beautiful, to be generated out of that. So imagination is absolutely essential, and we all sing the song based on Ephesians 1:18, Open the eyes of my heart, Lord, open the eyes of my heart, I want to see you.

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I regularly pray, God, open the eyes of my heart that I would know the hope to which I'm called, which is to say, open the eyes of my heart so that I can become what you have imagined for me and what I can become, what the imagination and the hope and the vision and the longing that you put in my own heart.

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Alison Cook: We want that ability to imagine, when you're coming out of something like you've described, Michael, the atrocities. We want that capacity to imagine something beautiful, something good, something like that sunset that you saw.

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Sometimes Aslan from the Narnia Tales gives me that, when I feel like I can't find God, but I can almost imagine Aslan, and I've learned there's something in that. There's something there. Because there's an essence there that is good. It is what keeps us going and gives us hope.

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I love that you bring us toward that at the end of the book. I actually think it is a missing piece in this journey that is so powerful and so important.

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Michael: Great summary of the importance of imagination, Alison, and I tried to unpack that in the book. I would add that even our human longing for the Scriptures are filled with this invitation to long for. Jesus said, blessed are the hungry and thirsty for righteousness.

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He invited people to him in John 7, all you who are thirsty, come and streams of living water will flow. In Isaiah 55, you who are thirsty. Longing is a desire for something that is not yet. Every time we long for something, there's this imagination for something more, as it's related to our particular situation.

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For more in my marriage. For more experience of God. For more self control. For me to say no to things that I don't want to be eating. For me to have self-control to go and exercise when I want to, instead of sleeping in. For more experience of life. For more time in the Rocky Mountains.

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We cannot long for without imagination. Hopefully this gives people language for that.

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Alison Cook: That's so good. It's not fantasy. It's a conscious and intentional posture of the heart. I love that opening of the heart to what might be possible. It's so good. Michael, this book, I cannot say more strongly to those listening to this. It's so readable.

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You share a lot of your story but you bring in some incredibly rich resources from, as we've heard today, from our spiritual practices, from good psychology. It's such a good resource. Tell me a little bit about how people can find Sacred Attachment and what your hope is for folks who pick up a copy.

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Michael: My hope is that people can experience a trauma-informed invitation to a whole new spiritual life. My hope is that people can reimagine a new kind of spiritual life with God, that's really based in rest and peace, and overflow, and that our service and our contribution and the way that we show up in the world that is life-giving.

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That it comes out of a solid foundation inside of us, and that ultimately that every reader will understand that I can be securely attached to God, and that's a work that I do in relationship with others and in relationship with God, and most of all, that attachment has nothing to do with me.

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Once again, I love this phrase borrowed from Martin Laird in his book, Into the Silent Land. He's a contemplative author and he says that most of us are like people fishing for minnows while standing on the back of a whale. This union or attachment with God that we're seeking and desiring is something that we never have to acquire or lose or attain or work up. 

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It's something that we fall back into. I would hope that people have healing of their brokenness, and my hope would be that people have healing of their experience and their image of God, especially toxic and unhealthy beliefs about God. My hope would be that it would bring joy and lightness of being to people.

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Alison Cook: You did that. It certainly did that for me. I'm so grateful that you wrote it and that you took the time to walk us through some of your own story today. How can people find you and find your resources?

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Michael: Yeah, my website is restoringthesoul.com. Restoring the Soul is a ministry in Denver, Colorado, where we do two-week intensive counseling with folks who are looking to get unstuck from trauma and significant relational issues. We work with couples and individuals, and you can find my personal website as well, michaeljohncusick.com. 

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The book is available on Amazon starting on January 7th, 2025, but it can be pre-ordered before then everywhere fine books are sold.

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Alison Cook: I love it. I love it. I can't recommend it more to folks and so grateful for you and all the work that you've done to bring healing to others out of your own pain.

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Michael: Thank you so much, Alison. Great being with you.

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