episode
121
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Spiritual Wholeness

The 5 Parts of Faith—The Surprising Secret to Cultivating an Emotionally Healthy, Psychologicaly Resilient Faith

Episode Notes

We all face doubt, disappointment, and even disillusionment at times.

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In today’s episode, I’m sharing with you my framework for cultivating a vibrant inner spirituality—one that doesn’t bypass or exile the hard parts of this faith journey.

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Here’s what I cover:

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1. Why we need a more holistic understanding of faith

2. What is an inner family of parts?

3. Research on different faith orientations

4. The 5 parts of faith

5. How to honor (& lead) each of these faith parts

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Resources:

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If you liked this, you’ll love:

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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 welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You Podcast. I am so thrilled you're here today. I'm going to share with you a framework I've been working on for what I think it means to have an authentic, psychologically mature, emotionally resilient faith. A faith that honors what's hard about this journey of trusting God while also remaining deeply human.

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One of the things I've noticed over the past two years of podcasting is that there's always a strong response to episodes that touch on the harder aspects of faith, maybe those times when it feels like you're in a dark night of the soul, or when you feel like your spirit is broken, or whenever I talk about spiritual bypassing, you all really respond to that.

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It really resonates with you. Most of us are looking for ways to speak about our faith more authentically, to honor what's hard about faith, even as we want to wrestle for our faith. We want to be authentic and we want to be honest about this faith journey that we're on. So in today's episode, I want to lay out for you this framework that I've been working on for years. 

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It's a combination of the work I've done in internal family systems, IFS therapy, which is the topic of my book with Kimberly Miller, Boundaries For Your Soul, combined with decades of research from the field of the psychology of religion that looks at different orientations to faith, different ways that people orient to their religious life. 

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This is the dissertation research I mentioned in Episode 119 with Dr. Jemar Tisby that has profoundly impacted the way that I view religion and this journey of faith that matters so much to so many of us. It really gets at the heart of what I do, which is to bring together the wisdom of psychology with the deep desire so many of us have to practice our faith in Jesus in every aspect of our lives. 

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In today's episode, I want to lay out for you some of the framework that I'm developing on that topic. As always, I would love to hear from you. Any comments that you have, questions that you have, insights, ideas about what resonated with you or where you would like to learn more.

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If you have questions about today's episode or any episode in this series, please leave them on The Best of You Podcast question form. You can find the link to that doc in the show notes for this episode. I'll also link to it in this Friday's email. I send an email out every Friday morning, and you can sign up for that email at dralisoncook.com. I often provide bonus resources or announcements in that email. 

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That's where you can find a link to that question doc. We're also going to be sending out a survey related to upcoming episodes that you guys want me to have. So please be sure to subscribe to that email list again, at dralisoncook.com.Without further ado, let's dive into the five parts of faith, my framework for how to develop a psychologically mature, emotionally resilient faith. 

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In this journey of faith, where we're trying to find a really authentic spirituality, an authentic expression of our faith in God, I see two obstacles. On the one side, I see the over-spiritualizing, the spiritual bypassing, the reductive voices that want to keep faith small.

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These voices don't want to honor the legitimate complexity of working out our faith with fear and trembling; these voices shame and blame those who are trying to hang onto their faith through identifying and naming hard challenges. 

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Maybe you're struggling with doubt or uncertainty or confusion, or maybe you know you love God, but you still feel angry or hurt or sad or scared. Maybe you're dealing with anxiety or depression, even as God is for you. You're wanting to face these hard challenges, yet these voices can sometimes try to shut you down with platitudes or quick fixes. 

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They sound a little bit like this. “Just have faith. Let go and let God. Don't think about the hard things. You just have to shut down the questions, the doubt, the hurts.”

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It's almost like these voices want you to put your fingers in your ears and cover your eyes and plow through hard things without really looking at it or without really naming it. It might work for a little while, but over time you find yourself running out of gas and maybe even doubting more.

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But there's another side, another chorus of voices I see on the other side that can also be problematic. Folks on this side may play into the doubt, play into the uncertainty, and want to move you towards cynicism, toward skepticism, and maybe even toward leaving your faith all together.

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Folks on this side might be using that voice to tempt you to walk away from faith altogether. “They're all hypocrites. There's nothing good there. Burn the house down and leave while you can. There's no use fighting for your faith. Just walk away.” 

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That also leads us to nowhere good. We're trying to fight for a more authentic faith without bypassing our feelings, without shoving our questions and our uncertainties and our disappointments aside, while also not being lured away to leave it altogether.

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I see so many of us trying to navigate that middle path, dare I call it the narrow way that Jesus spoke of, where we're trying to filter out those voices on one side that shame us for asking hard questions. They want us to put our head in the sand and not name what's hard that we see in the culture around us and the churches around us, even in our own souls.

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It doesn't help us. We're also trying to filter out those voices on the other side that lure us to cynicism, to negativity, and to eventually leaving faith altogether. We're trying to find that middle path of what it means to follow Jesus. While Jesus tells us we'll recognize his voice, sometimes his voice can get lost in the din of voices all around us.

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I want to offer you another way today, what I believe is a psychologically complex, emotionally resilient, authentic faith. One that honors the fact that we all have different parts of us when it comes to the path of following Jesus. I don't think that path looks like one right set of behaviors, one right set of feelings, one right way to think.

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I think it means cultivating your own symphony of faith inside your own soul. That symphony contains many parts, each one no less important than the other. As you cultivate a relationship with each one of those parts, you discover the joy of harmony. As I talk about in the faith chapter of I Shouldn’t Feel This Way, harmony doesn't mean we don't have different parts.

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I want to take you through five common faith parts of that symphony, and how cultivating a relationship with each one of those parts can lead you to a more vibrant, more beautiful, more wholehearted, more emotionally resilient faith over the long haul. 

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First of all, I want to give you a very quick overview of what I mean by internal family. If you want to learn more, you want to go deeper into this model. You can check out my book, Boundaries For Your Soul. I wrote it with Kimberly Miller. Or you can go check out Episode 39. I did a a five part series on Boundaries For Your Soul: how to navigate your overwhelming thoughts and feelings, which gives you an overview of internal family systems.

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For today's purpose, all I really want you to know is that this internal family systems model posits that we all have an internal family of parts that is our job to parent. We are not only one thing; there are different parts of us, and we are multifaceted. That there are different parts of who you are is not a new idea–this has been around for centuries. 

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We see evidence of it in the Bible, especially with King David and the way he talks in the Psalms. He prays for an undivided heart in Psalm 86:11, and he talks about how he has calmed and quieted his heart like a weaned child within him. There's a sense in which David is attuning to different facets of his soul and learning to calm the different parts of himself. 

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We see the apostle Paul talking about different parts of himself when he names the inner tension between the things he wants to do and the things he's actually doing. Bessel van der Kolk talks about how every major school of psychology has acknowledged the mosaic nature of the human soul. You're created with different parts of your soul; you are multifaceted. 

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You might notice that a part of you wants to stay home tonight, whereas another part of you wants to go out and meet up with your friends. These two parts of you are in conflict and part of your job, as you grow in psychological maturity and emotional health, is learning to honor the competing parts and not sideline either one, but make decisions based on the good of the whole.

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This is what we do in families. Families are composed of different parts, different individuals, and each individual sometimes has competing ideas about what to eat for dinner, about what to do for the weekend. The goal in a family is to try to negotiate between different parts of the family for the good of the whole.

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Sometimes, different family members have to compromise or sacrifice for the good of the whole. It's the same inside your own soul. Different parts of you have conflicting agendas at different times, and your job is to work through some of those inner tensions without shaming yourself, without exiling parts of yourself, but making decisions for the good of all of you.

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This is what it means at its most simplest level to be comprised of different parts. It's your job to lead that inner family wisely in partnership with God's Spirit. When it comes to faith, what I want you to think about today is a cluster of parts inside your soul that relates specifically to spirituality and to God and to how you practice your faith.

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I want to say up top, these different ways of orienting to faith, what I'm calling five parts of faith, can be applied to different types of religious belief, right? And so for the purpose of what I am trying to do here  I want to focus on orthodox Christian belief  and what I mean by Orthodox Christian belief — I go back to the creed, a belief in the triune God as revealed through the Bible: God, the father; God, the son made known through the person of Jesus Christ; and the Holy Spirit who lives inside of us, as Jesus spoke of in John 14. 

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Orthodox Christian faith also posits that Jesus not only walked on the earth as the visible representation of who God is, but that he was crucified on the cross and rose again. That's such an important part of our Christian faith, that resurrection of Jesus. Through the power of Jesus conquering sin and conquering death, we also have new life as we seek to follow him. 

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This is the basic tenet of what I'm calling orthodox Christian faith. This is the core of what it means for us to be Christian. There's a lot of things about which reasonable people can reasonably disagree. We might even find ourselves in very different types of churches, very different denominations, very different Christian camps, but in general, that's what so many of us are coming around.

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Imagine that for a minute with me at the center of the seat of your soul, that core belief. But around that table are these different faith parts–different parts of you that orient to that faith in Jesus in different ways. That's what I want to focus on today. Not so much the core content of that belief, but those five parts of us that circle around that faith in different ways.

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So again, if it's helpful to you to imagine that table of your soul, you've got that faith, you carry those beliefs and you hold them dear in your heart. But there's still different parts of you that relate to your faith in different ways. I developed these five parts out of decades of research in the psychology of religion, where psychologists studied different people and their different orientations to faith. 

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These five religious orientations are styles of faith and approaches to faith. What I am suggesting to you today is that we in fact contain all five of them, probably more, but for the sake of argument, we're going to reduce it to five–all five of these orientations inside our own souls. This is what I'm calling the five parts of faith. 

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As we learn to acknowledge these different parts and build relationships with these different parts and introduce each of these parts to God and to each other in, the more healthy and vibrant and mature and resilient our faith will be, the more we'll be able to relate in healthy ways with one another.

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So here are the five faith parts. I'm going to give you the actual names that are used in the psychology of religion for the sake of academic rigor. That part of me wants to name them correctly. But I'm also gonna share with you my renaming of these parts in ways that I think is a little bit more honoring.

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The first parts are called extrinsic parts, and these extrinsic parts of us really want to be socially acceptable. I like to think of them as the good upstanding Christian parts. These are the parts that are a little bit more concerned with how other people see us. They want to do the right thing, to fit in, more than they want to do the right thing to honor God.

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Again, remember. From a parts perspective, from an IFS perspective, there's no shame in any of these. We're getting curious about the different parts, these extrinsic parts, these good upstanding Christian parts, the ones that want to be socially acceptable. We tend to see our faith as a means to achieve our goals or to obtain good standing or to look like a good person more than to really want it to honor God. 

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We see these parts scripturally when Jesus talks about the Pharisees. You're praying loudly in public, you're putting on a show publicly, but your soul is far from me. These are the parts of us that want to perform faith because that makes us feel like a good person. We feel like that makes us socially acceptable.

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We feel like a good Christian, and they're not as connected to what it means to follow Jesus as we sometimes wish. Remember, I'm positing that we all have this part inside of us to some degree. 

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Back in Episode 76, I interviewed Granger Smith about his story of being what he called a cultural Christian. He wanted to appear like a good Christian man. He was a country music singer, and then he realized, oh my gosh, I'm doing all that and I don't actually have transformational knowledge of Jesus.

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He was speaking to these extrinsic parts, the “I want to be a good upstanding person” part of us. Again, there's no shame. We want to honor and own and name these parts inside. I don't want those other people to think poorly of me. I want to look like a good Christian I can check a box. It makes me a good upstanding citizen. That's the voice of these parts, and at their best, these parts help us show up for church. 

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They help us show up for Bible studies. They help us show up for prayer meetings. They might even encourage us to do the right thing by our neighbor. Because I'm a good Christian, I should be kind to that person. So at their best, they can help us do the right thing in society, and that's not all bad, but at their worst, these parts are shallow, flat, and hollow, and at their very worst, they're self-righteous. 

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They lead us to do these things to make us feel superior to other people. They might judge other people who don't do these things, and they might be tallying up all the good Christian check marks and never pausing to spend time with God. These extrinsic parts of us, we all have to keep an eye on.

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In the research, the balance to these extrinsic parts are what psychologists called intrinsic parts. These are the parts of us that genuinely want to connect to our faith deeply and sincerely. That relationship with Jesus really is the end, in and of itself. Those intrinsic parts of us are working every single day to try to integrate our beliefs into our lives.

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We want to be moving toward these intrinsic parts of us, these parts of us that sincerely love God, that sincerely want to follow Jesus. These parts of us that are deeply connected to conscience, where we feel that prick of, oh, I did that overt religious action so that other people will think highly of me. 

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The truth is, I hated every minute of it. I was resenting those people that I was trying to serve. I only did it to try to get a check mark with that church community, or with that other person. This is the very deeply faithful part of us that longs to do right. This part of us doesn't always have all the answers, but it's deeply connected not only to the belief in Jesus, but a sincerity and a genuineness and an honesty. 

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These parts of us, we want to keep very close. They're closest to our true self. It's the part of us that is saying, oh, I think I did that because I felt guilty and not really because I was trying to honor God. 

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The truth is, if I was really trying to honor God, I might've set a healthy boundary there. These parts are the parts of us that say, you know what? I don't really want to go to church today. I'm checked out. I'm annoyed with what's going on at my church, but I'm going to go. But I'm also going to use that time to talk to God about what I'm really feeling right now while I'm sitting in church. 

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These are the truth-telling parts of us. They're the honest parts of us. They're the genuine parts of us. These are the parts of us we want to keep really close to us. 

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Closely related to the external parts are the fundamentalist or legalistic parts of us. Now, fundamentalism has been researched for decades in the psychology of religion. It's often thought of as a pejorative term. What I wanna posit is that we all have an inner fundamentalist. All that means is that these are parts of us that are strongly attached to binary thinking, right versus wrong, black versus white. 

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You're in or you're out. You're with God or you're against God. These parts of us want to reject nuance and complexity. They don't like uncertainty. They want to be certain. Here's the thing– at their best, these fundamentalist parts of us are leery of change. They're very loyal. They're very faithful. They want to do what's right. 

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At their worst, these parts of us get dogmatic. These parts of us think they have the corner on truth. They start to think that they're the arbitrators of truth instead of deferring in humility to Jesus. Sometimes, they can get myopic and don't see the whole truth. They can be cruel. They can prioritize dogma over love. 

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They can prioritize being right over relationship. It's really easy to point fingers at these parts out in the culture around us. But the truth is, the more you grow in understanding your own emotional landscape, the more you begin to realize, oh, I have those parts. I have those parts too. Again, these parts can be helpful. 

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I remember early on as a college student when I had a pretty radical experience of Jesus and on my college campus, there was a lot of excitement and there were a few of us that were really on fire and we were leading people to Jesus.

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We had a little mini-revival on our campus during this time. My group of Christians was featured by one of the big publications at the time put out by R. C. Sproul about how there was a revival in the Ivy leagues. We were bringing people to Jesus. It was powerful. I loved that time and had a little inner fundamentalist that man, sometimes in private, with people I loved, with people I really cared about, I was taking that Bible out and I was beating some people over the head with that Bible. 

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If you're listening to this podcast and you knew me at that time, you know what I was talking about. There was not a lot of love in some of those behind the doors conversations. There was a, “I have the truth. You need the truth and I'm gonna beat you into it”. Now, listen, that part of me really cared a lot, but that part of me didn't understand that sometimes the best thing to do is sit on your wisdom.

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The best thing you can do is show someone how your life has changed versus preach to them about how their life needs to change. That part of me didn't always understand that at that time in my life when it really comes down to it, I can tell you from personal experience, that little inner fundamentalist in me is usually scared of getting it wrong. 

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It wants to be certain. So when I can connect to that part of me honestly, and ask that part of me to give me a little space, it leads me to more courage. There are some things I don't know, and that's okay. We can hold some things loosely, and that brings more opportunity for faith in Jesus.

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I might be wrong. You know what? If I am, that's okay. I can honor your humanity on this issue. Whatever the topic is, I can give them respect. I can honor them, and honor this part of me that really wants to be right. I can put some healthy distance between myself and that part of me that deeply longs to be right, that deeply longs to know the truth for eternity, for now and all time, that deeply longs to have a corner on that truth. 

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I can relax my nervous system, and as I honor that part of me that is finite, because that part of me is not God and does not see the truth at all times for all people in all places, that allows me to give the benefit of the doubt to people, even people with whom I disagree. 

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And so that inner fundamentalist is important for each one of us to pay attention to. We can notice when we're feeling a little dogmatic, we're feeling a little bit like “we're right, you're wrong”, coming from a superior place. It doesn't mean we have to abandon those beliefs. It does mean we defer our need to be right in the moment for a higher calling, which is to fix our eyes on Jesus. 

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Jesus may be calling us to lay down our swords, to lay down our right to be right, and love and respect and honor other people.

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Next, the third part that researchers have indicated is almost the opposite. This part researchers call “quest orientation”. I think of it as our spiritual but not religious parts. They are spiritually-seeking parts. These are the parts of us that are open, that are curious, that sometimes experience God and spiritual highs out in nature, far from the walls of a church. 

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These parts of us might seek the highs of an encounter with God. They might seek miracles or spiritual experiences or mountaintop experiences. At their best, these parts of us can really lead us to curiosity, to openness and to rich emotional experiences. They're more tolerant. They're interested in what other people think and other people's spiritual experiences. 

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They can teach us that God isn't contained in any one setting. That God reveals himself all the time, in all places. These parts of us, in contrast to the fundamentalist parts of us, are more curious. They're wanting to feel God's love, wanting to experience God's miracles.

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At their worst, these spiritually curious parts of us can lead us to pursue the spiritual experience above and beyond the Creator. Let me be clear, that doesn't mean following the spiritual experience right out of a Christian faith. This is where I also see spiritual bypassing come in. Folks who have strong Christian viewpoints, but they want to bypass the reality that sometimes following Jesus means doing hard things. Sometimes it means persevering through incredibly challenging circumstances where there isn't that mountaintop high, or that really good, instant quick fix feeling.

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It's slogging it out every day in a hard relationship, but you don't feel like you can leave. Or slogging it out through going to church, where you're struggling to find a church community that you really like. Or slogging it out through a recovery program where you really do have to take it one step at a time. 

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There's no miraculous healing, and spiritualizing parts can lead us into really beautiful experiences of hope, of joy, those emotional highs, but that quest can also lead us to bypass the day to day work of showing up and persevering.

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Lastly, this is a part that I think a lot of us might not want to face, but I think it's important. These are the agnostic parts of us. The parts of us that have doubts, the parts of us that aren't sure. Here's the thing about agnostic parts–when they're honored and named and given a seat at the table, they become our humility.

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These are the parts of us that might feel confused or even skeptical, that might have questions we can't quite answer, and they acknowledge the limits of what our finite humanity can know. At their worst, these parts of us become cynical and skeptical and throw out the good things when it's messy, confusing, and hard.

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But at their best, these parts of us keep us humble. They keep us connected to God with a spirit of, sometimes God, I don't know. Perhaps one of the best representations of how these different parts work in the Bible comes in Mark 9:24, where a man has brought a son to Jesus for healing.

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He's desperate for a son to get healing, and when Jesus asks him if he believes, the father replies, “I believe. Help my disbelief”. I think about that juxtaposition of those two parts right there, the intrinsic part, the believing part of the man, I do believe. And then “help my disbelief”, help this agnostic doubting part of me that isn't sure and doesn't really believe. 

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In the freedom of being able to speak on behalf of both parts in that moment with Jesus, these doubting parts don't have to get the best of us. We all have them. When we're honest with these parts, we can bring all of them to Jesus. This is what it means to embrace this internal faith family. You show compassion toward the doubting parts of you. It's okay. I'm not going to let you lead this family, but you don't have to go away. You can be here. 

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I can bring you to Jesus and you can show compassion toward that good Christian part of you that wants other people to know what a good Christian you are. It's okay. I get it. I get that you want others to accept you, that you want others to see your value. You don't get to lead this family, but it's okay that you're here.

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You can show compassion toward that fundamentalist part of you, that inner legalist that beats you up for having doubts and for being hypocritical, the part of you that wants to beat other people over the head who don't agree with everything you think is paramount. You can show compassion for that part of you and ask it to take a step back. It gets to be a part of your family, but it does not get to lead you. That part of you does not get to play God. 

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You can show compassion toward that spiritually curious part of you, that part of you desperate for that mountaintop experience, that healing touch, that part of you that longs for the magic. That maybe you had at one time, but man, does it seem distant to you right now? You can honor that part of you. It's a beautiful part of who you are. 

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It's a part of you that helps you imagine what things could look like, even as sometimes you have to help that part of you acclimate to the reality that sometimes life is hard, sometimes things don't feel great and sometimes we still have to do the hard things.

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Lastly, you can nurture that inner believer. Here's the paradox–the way to nurture that inner believer is to honor each of those other parts. You don't nurture that inner believer by shutting down or exiling or shaming those other parts of you. You nurture that inner believer by honoring those different parts that show up. 

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When you honor each of the different parts of that faith symphony, without trying to sideline or exile any one part, you actually begin to cultivate a vibrant inner spirituality. No matter what's going on outside of you, you're learning to cultivate that inner vitality, that inner release, as you sit at the feet of the God who loves every single one of these parts of you.

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