The Science of Relationships: Healing, Emotion, & Connection with Drs. Sue Johnson & Jim Furrow

"What does a healthy community look like? This beautiful image of being unafraid, of everybody having what they need, of everybody having the opportunity to reach their dreams, everybody being able to take care of themselves and not having it taken away from them—all of those are part of the vision of a good life. It's not just an individual good life, it's a communal good life.  Concertación, if you were just literally translate it, means 'coming into harmony' and the way that it works in our communities is to hear somebody else with your heart. You hear them from the heart. And when you hear them from the heart, you spontaneously shift. You are automatically standing on common sacred ground and you just shift generously." (Alexia Salvatierra)

Wellbeing begins with we. “If your community is not well, then you are not well.” Thriving is collective. But our atomic individualism and narrow focus on ourselves is constantly pulling us away from the mutual belonging, reciprocity, and vibrant flourishing that can only be found by seeking the good of the wider human community—the neighbor, the stranger, the migrant, the farm worker, and the poor.

Rev. Dr. Alexia Salvatierra is a scholar, organizer, activist, and pastor, and is Academic Dean of the Centro Latino as well as the Assistant Professor of Integral Mission and Global Transformation at Fuller Theological Seminary.

She offers a healing message for those who wrestle with the pain and suffering caused by structural and systemic injustice, calling for listening, empathy, and action. Alexia’s faith is rooted in community and kinship. She affirms the wisdom of the body and cautions against over-intellectualization, offering instead a larger emotional vocabulary, emotional attunement, and the ability to hold and live with complex feelings.

The power of community is on display in our ability to celebrate and suffer together. And in Alexia’s work as an activist, she shows how fractured communities can reconcile through the power of a shared dream.

In this conversation with Alexia Salvatierra, we discuss:

• The unique wisdom that Latin- a/o culture brings to spiritual and theological conversations about thriving and spiritual health
• The complex, communal, and collective nature of thriving
• How her theology as a Lutheran pastor was formed by compassion and concern for the poor
• The challenge of Western Christians to see beyond individualistic rationality and the atomic unit of the self when thinking about wellness and thriving
• The transformative potential of a common dream to unify and reconcile
• The power of beautiful stories that are deeply connected to truth and goodness
• Seeing relationships as not just an end goal of thriving, but a means to thriving.

About Rev. Dr. Alexia Salvatierra

Rev. Dr. Alexia Salvatierra is the Academic Dean of the Centro Latino at Fuller Theological Seminary, as well as the Assistant Professor of Integral Mission and Global Transformation. Her work is a beautiful mosaic of immigration reform, faith-rooted organizing, cross-cultural ministry, and building vital holistic Christian community. Throughout her career, she’s played a central role in founding and convening communities for social justice, including the New Sanctuary Movement, the Guardian angels Project. Matteo 25 a bipartisan Christian network to protect and defend families facing deportation, the Evangelical Immigration Table, and the Ecumenical Collaboration for Asylum-Seekers. She is co-author of God's Resistance: Mobilizing Faith to Defend Immigrants and Buried Seeds: Learning from the Vibrant Resiliency of Marginalized Christian Communities.

Show Notes

• Explore Alexia’s work in God's Resistance: Mobilizing Faith to Defend Immigrants and Buried Seeds: Learning from the Vibrant Resiliency of Marginalized Christian Communities.
• “If your community is not well, then you are not well.”
• Pam King introduces Alexia Salvatierra
• Mision Integral and Liberation Theology
• Alexia Salvatierra answers, “What is thriving?”
• Bien estar—”wellbeing”
• Isaiah 65:17-25: “For I am about to create new heavens and a new earth; the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind. But be glad and rejoice for ever in what I am creating; for I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy, and its people as a delight. I will rejoice in Jerusalem, and delight in my people; no more shall the sound of weeping be heard in it, or the cry of distress. No more shall there be in it an infant that lives but a few days, or an old person who does not live out a lifetime; for one who dies at a hundred years will be considered a youth, and one who falls short of a hundred will be considered accursed. They shall build houses and inhabit them; they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit. They shall not build and another inhabit; they shall not plant and another eat; for like the days of a tree shall the days of my people be, and my chosen shall long enjoy the work of their hands. They shall not labour in vain, or bear children for calamity; for they shall be offspring blessed by the Lord—and their descendants as well. Before they call I will answer, while they are yet speaking I will hear. The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, the lion shall eat straw like the ox; but the serpent—its food shall be dust! They shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain, says the Lord.”
• The sounds of healthy community
• Equal value
• We all want to belong
• Frederick Buechner: “Vocation is where the world's deep hunger and our own deep gladness meet.”
• Trauma and faith, agency to combat hopelessness
• Spiritual gift of justice
• Dolorismo: ennobling suffering, suffering in silence
• Orthopathos: when suffering can be useful to make a change
• “The Holy Spirit is your consolation, your consuelo.”
• Surfing the Spirit: Fluidity and dynamic balance
• Serenity Prayer
• “I don’t make the collective an idol.”
• The importance of freedom, while critiquing “super-individualism”
• Discern in the context of community
• Individual discernment
• Liberation theology: “You learn by doing.”
• Meditative Prayer Practice: The Serenity Prayer (In English and Spanish)
• Civil War in Guatemala and Panama
• Dr. Oscar Arias of Costa Rica—informal peace process behind the scenes
• The Dream Exercise and Concertación (”coming into harmony”)
• The difference between concertación and negotiation
• “It’s about generosity.”
• Generosity vs dividing up the check
• Dream Exercise
• “As poor people, we have trouble believing that our dreams can come true, period.”
• Eli Finkel’s All-or-Nothing Marriage: How the Best Marriages Work
• Social capital and trust
• Jesuits in Asia
• Enculturation: Encountering the truth (and each other) at the intersections of culture
• Orthopoesis and beauty
• Knowing God through beauty, not just truth or goodness
• “De Colores”—the joy of all the colors
• Adrienne Marie Brown and Community Social Transformation
• Peter Heltzel and “revolutionary friendships”
• “We’re a very graceless society. A society at war is a graceless society.”
• Reconciliation: Navajo on opponents instead of enemies, and South Africa
• Hoyt Axton’s “Less Than The Song” (1973)—”I cannot rest easy until all your dreams are real.”
• The co-evolutionary relationship
• “Seeing the wholeness of the other” in concertación
• Loving the child in the other; calling the best forth in each other.
• Truth, Beauty, and Goodness
• Pam King’s key takeaways:
• If your community is not well, then you are not well. Thriving is collective.
• We all have a core psychological drive to belong and be received and contribute in our families and communities.
• Caring for our emotional brains and bodies is essential in seeking collective thriving.
• Thriving involves a necessary commitment to justice, and is beautifully captured by terms like shalom and concertación.
• The Christian tradition of compassion and concern for the marginalized can pull us out of our heads, out of our tunnel vision, and move us toward the transformation of society.
• Communicating a common dream or shared vision can help us move from an atomic individualistic mentality to loving community and reconciliation.

About the Thrive Center

• Learn more at thethrivecenter.org.
• Follow us on Instagram @thrivecenter
• Follow us on X @thrivecenter
• Follow us on LinkedIn @thethrivecenter

About Dr. Pam King

Dr. Pam King is Executive Director the Thrive Center and is Peter L. Benson Professor of Applied Developmental Science at Fuller School of Psychology & Marriage and Family Therapy.  Follow her @drpamking.

About With & For

• Host: Pam King
• Senior Director and Producer: Jill Westbrook
• Operations Manager: Lauren Kim
• Social Media Graphic Designer: Wren Juergensen
• Consulting Producer: Evan Rosa

Special thanks to the team at Fuller Studio and the Fuller School of Psychology & Marriage and Family Therapy.

Note: This episode contains content about trauma. Listener discretion is advised.

The path toward hope and healing is often charted through pain, suffering, loss, and grief.

Coming from two decades spent studying post-traumatic stress disorder, researcher and clinical psychologist Dr. Cynthia Eriksson Cynthia has worked with individuals and communities in the wake of major tragedy. Her psychological and spiritual perspectives emerge from first hand experience with Cambodian children exposed to the atrocities of war, Ugandan refugees, Haitian victims of earthquake catastrophe and infrastructure collapse, or at home in Pasadena tending to frontline workers who are often left burned out and traumatized from relief work.

Cynthia Eriksson discusses how to pursue resilience and recovery by reflecting on the role of faith and spirituality; habits and rhythms of life; and relationships and community.

How should we understand the difference between resilience and thriving?

Resilience focuses on the adaptive capacities that people need to bounce back from trauma, creating the capacity to bounce back, and the skills to increase one’s ability and agility to recover. Whereas thriving refers to adaptive growth through adversity, trauma, challenges, and opportunities, all the while in pursuit of one’s purpose.

Both resilience and thriving recognize the complexities of life, and both affirm and require the actualization of human agency.

In this conversation with Cynthia Eriksson, we discuss:

• How leaders and helpers and caretakers can identify trauma in themselves, and come to recognize, accept, and respond.
• The importance of paying attention to our brains, bodies, and environment.
• The 5 R’s of resilience to trauma and recovery from trauma.
• Spiritual responses to suffering and pain—which can often result in incredibly profound experiences with God—and this includes expressing anger at God within a struggle.
• And practically, we talk about how to deal with avoidance, defensiveness, and blaming others or ourselves—basically, the potentially destructive nature of coping mechanisms.
• And we close with a beautiful grounding practice that connects us all to our bodies and emotions, to engage trauma, and stay on the path to thriving.

Show Notes

• Resource: "Thriving through Trauma: Five R’s for Resilience and Recovery" (via thethrivecenter.org)
• Resource: "Practice: The Five R’s of Resilience and Recovery" (via thethrivecenter.org)
• Resilience versus thriving—what’s the difference?
• What is trauma? A threat to existence.
• Extending from trauma to suffering and helping other people build resilience and recover
• Cynthia Eriksson’s personal experience of trauma (and not realizing it)
• Problem solving and seeking control as a coping mechanism and defense against acknowledging and dealing with trauma
• Dissociation
• Experiencing trauma is not the same thing as being traumatized
• Fight, flight, freeze, or fawn (”tend and befriend”)
• The symptoms of trauma and areas of disruption
• What happens in our bodies
• What happens in our minds (thinking)
• What happens in our relationships
• What happens in our sense of meaning, justice, and making sense of the world
• Resilience
• “What are some of the things that we can all do that help us to build some muscles when it comes to navigating life's suffering?
• Resilience as a skill everyone can cultivate through personal growth, rather than a static trait
• “Neurons that fire together wire together.”
• The Five R’s of Resilience
•  
  1. Regulation: bodies and emotions
•  
  1. Reflection and Right Thinking: truth and factual acceptance
•  
  1. Relationships: community, connection, friendship, and support
•  
  1. Respite and Rest: disengagement and Sabbath healing
•  
  1. Reason: meaning and transcendence
• How to deal with big, overwhelming feelings in the wake of trauma.
• Grounding and settling practices: feeling where you are. “I’m here now, and I’m safe.”
• Lament as a healthy spiritual response to trauma
• Anger at and with God
• Spiritual practice of lament
• Asking a hard question of God: “Why aren’t you here, God?”
• Lament and anger at God as a practice to stay in relationship with God
• “There’s this tension of: “If I show up for God, will God show up for me?”
• Orienting to the pain and suffering of others: “How do I show up for the people that are around me who are in pain what does it mean for me to actually open myself up to the pain of others and stay present?”
• “Do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly.” (Micah 6:8)
• Coping mechanisms: substances, shopping, Netflix, avoidance
• Unhealthy responses to trauma-based emotion: the dangers of replaying, ruminating, and regretting
• Rumination is not a constructive processing.
• What kind of grace can I show myself?
• Book: Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies
• Book: Lisa Najavits, Seeking Safety: A Treatment Manual for PTSD and Substance Abuse
• Guided meditative practice: Grounding
• Explaining the science behind Grounding Practices
• Practical ways to get help
• Book: Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Braim, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma
• Book: Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror
• Book: Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies
• National Child Traumatic Stress Network (currently under website maintenance as of March 4, 2024; contact helpdesk at help@nctsn.org or in an emergency, dial 911)
• National Center for PTSD
• Cynthia Eriksson on What is thriving?
• Joy and Freedom
• Pam King’s Key Takeaways
• A life of thriving on purpose actually includes pain and sadness. A history of trauma is not a disqualification from thriving.
• Coping strategies are tricky. They tempt us towards avoidance, defensiveness, defensiveness, substance abuse, blaming, and self judgment. Our goal is not coping. Our goal must be thriving.
• Lots of R's here, but regulation, reflection, right thinking, relationships, respite, and rest, and reason are core components to developing resilience and enacting recovery.
• It's okay to be angry at God, and it helps to tell God that's actually the case.
• We can find emotional grounding and regulation through intentionally enhancing a deep connection between our bodies and minds.
• And the path to thriving is often one where our minds need to follow our bodies and all their glorious complexity.
• For more information about resilience recovery, org. In Cynthia Erickson's framework of five hours, visit our website at thethrivecenter.org.

About Cynthia Eriksson

Cynthia Eriksson is Dean of the Fuller School of Psychology & Marriage and Family Therapy, and is a Professor of Psychology in the Clinical Psychology Department.

Her research is particularly focused on the needs of cross-cultural aid for mission workers, as well as the interaction of trauma and spirituality. This work has included trauma training, research, and consultation in Monrovia, Liberia; Kobe, Japan; Phnom Penh, Cambodia; Amsterdam, the Netherlands; Barcelona, Spain; Guatemala City, Guatemala; Gulu, Uganda; and Amman, Jordan.

Eriksson also collaborated with colleagues in the US, Europe, and Africa on a longitudinal research project on stress in humanitarian aid workers funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. She also participates in the Headington Program in International Trauma at Fuller.

She has completed research on risk and resilience, exposure to stress, and spiritual development in urban youth workers funded by the Fuller Youth Institute.

Eriksson and her students are currently exploring the intersection of cultural humility and culturally-embedded resilience practices through collaborations with ministry agencies and Fuller colleague Alexia Salvatierra.

About the Thrive Center

• Learn more at thethrivecenter.org.
• Follow us on Instagram @thrivecenter
• Follow us on X @thrivecenter
• Follow us on LinkedIn @thethrivecenter

About Dr. Pam King

Dr. Pam King is Executive Director the Thrive Center and is Peter L. Benson Professor of Applied Developmental Science at Fuller School of Psychology & Marriage and Family Therapy.  Follow her @drpamking.

About With & For

• Host: Pam King
• Senior Director and Producer: Jill Westbrook
• Operations Manager: Lauren Kim
• Social Media Graphic Designer: Wren Juergensen
• Consulting Producer: Evan Rosa

Special thanks to the team at Fuller Studio and the Fuller School of Psychology & Marriage and Family Therapy.

“Our relationships really shape how we feel, how we think, how we remember things, how we tell the story of who we are, the sense of self, where you focus your attention, what gives you a sense of purpose.

Relational integration in a family leads to the growth of neural integration inside the child's nervous system. Every time you say regulation—like regulating emotion or your mood, regulating attention, thought behavior, self-understanding, morality—it depends on integration in the brain. So the neural integration is the basis for optimal regulation, but it comes from relational integration.

We all can follow Picasso's suggestion, which I think is really beautiful: The meaning of life discovering our gift. The purpose of life is giving it away.” (Dan Siegel)

In developmental science, there are lots of debates between nature and nurture. And Dr. Dan Siegel’s groundbreaking work in interpersonal neurobiology demonstrates that we are naturally wired for nurture—and furthermore, we cannot thrive without it.

Over the past five decades, he has sought to explain through attachment theory and a study of the brain, how relationships shape our feelings, thoughts, memories, stories and personal narratives, and how all these offer an opportunity for us to integrate all of our personal subjective with the world outside us.

Our relational tendencies and inner being are malleable—always growing and changing. We are under construction our entire lives, and that’s good news for those of us who feel the weight of loneliness, relational struggle, or the challenges of mental illness.

Dan Siegel’s work helps us become deeply present to others—in friendships, romance, or parenting—by becoming deeply attuned to your inner life, including all of our emotions, plans, pain, and our ongoing and evolving stories.

His research shows that caring and attuned relationships provide a safe and secure environment in which we can experience integration and gain insight into what is most meaningful to us. He calls this concept “mindsight”—how we gain an inner sense of self is intertwined with how we relate to others.

And he offers how mindfulness and meditation are important to this process of becoming intraconnected. Life today is characterized by isolation and fragmentation, but Dan’s wisdom and practices offer helpful guidelines on how we can grow whole—and persons in deepening, reciprocating relationships.

Dr. Dan Siegel is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine and the founding co-director of the Mindful Awareness Research Center at UCLA. He has authored numerous research articles, books, and accessible materials that apply what we know about the brain to our most sacred and significant relationships. His many books include the groundbreaking introduction to interpersonal neurobiology, The Developing Mind—as well as Mindsight, Parenting from the Inside Out, The Whole Brain Child, and his most recent book, Intra-Connected.

In this conversation with Dan Siegel, we discuss:

• The connection between the mind and the brain, and why that matters for our thriving
• Coming to terms with big, challenging emotions—especially fear
• How psychological integration creates flow and harmony and helps us deal with chaos and rigidity
• The scientific connection between focused attention, open awareness, and compassionate intention
• He walks us through a mindfulness exercise he calls “the wheel of awareness”
• The neurobiology of interpersonal relationships
• And we discuss how that impacts not just our spirituality and relationships, but society as a whole.

About Dan Siegel

Dr. Siegel is a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine and the founding co-director of the Mindful Awareness Research Center at UCLA. An award-winning educator, he is a Distinguished Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and recipient of several honorary fellowships. Dr. Siegel is also the Executive Director of the Mindsight Institute, an educational organization, which offers online learning and in-person seminars that focus on how the development of mindsight in individuals, families and communities can be enhanced by examining the interface of human relationships and basic biological processes. His psychotherapy practice includes children, adolescents, adults, couples, and families. He serves as the Medical Director of the LifeSpan Learning Institute and on the Advisory Board of the Blue School in New York City, which has built its curriculum around Dr. Siegel’s Mindsight approach.

He is author of many books, including, The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are, Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation, The Whole-Brain Child: 12 Revolutionary Strategies to Nurture Your Child's Developing Mind, Survive Everyday Parenting Struggles, and Help Your Family Thrive, Parenting from the Inside Out: How A Deeper Self-Understanding Can Help You Raise Children Who Thrive, and his most recent, IntraConnected: MWe (Me + We) as the Integration of Self, Identity, and Belonging.

Show Notes

• Explore Dr. Dan Siegel’s Website Resources
• Dan Siegel’s latest book: Intraconnected: MWe (Me + We) as the Integration of Self, Identity, and Belonging
• Practicing the Wheel of Awareness (guided meditative exercises): https://drdansiegel.com/wheel-of-awareness/
• Emotional realities reverberating throughout our lives
• Picasso on meaning and purpose: “The meaning of life discovering our gift. The purpose of life is giving it away.”
• Host Pam King introduces Dr. Dan Siegel
• Living life on auto-pilot
• “For those of us feeling isolated, lonely, or cut off. You are not a finished product. … We are under construction our entire lives.”
• “What in the world is going on?”
• Growing up with an undercurrent of fear; Dan Siegel shares about his adolescence and his family dynamics
• Understanding internal, relational ecosystems
• Communicating and connecting with people in crisis; Dan Siegel on working for a suicide prevention service
• Vivek Murthy and the epidemic of loneliness
• John Lennon’s assassination and the mental illness of his murderer
• “What would a healthy mind be?”
• The 1990s: The Decade of the Brain
• What is the relationship between the mind and the brain?
• “Our relationships really shape how we feel, how we think, how we remember things, how we tell the story of who we are, the sense of self. So, you know, whatever you call those things. Feelings thinking, narrative meaning making, where you focus your attention, um, what gives you a sense of purpose.”
• Attachment research and linking relationships to the mind and the brain
• The difficulty of defining the mind for scientific study
• How could they all be correct?
• Energy transmission and connecting neurology to sociality
• Emergent Properties and “optimal self-organization that creates harmonious flow”
• Relational integration and integration in the brain
• Differentiation and linkage
• What does “integration” mean?
• Environmental factors and the shaping of attachment styles
• Parenting from the inside out
• “Feeling felt”
• Presence, attunement, regulation
• Curiosity, openness, acceptance
• What is thriving?
• Living as a verb and avoiding “nounification”
• Rashid: “Having abandoned the flimsy fantasy of certainty, I decided to wander.”
• “Wander with them through the journey of life.”
• Understand your own childhood experiences and then liberate them
• Patterns of developmental pathways
• Life is scary and full of uncertainty.
• “We've identified three subcortical networks that involve agency, which is a drive for empowerment; bonding, a drive for connection; and certainty, a drive for safety.”
• Agency - feeling seen
• Bonding - feeling soothed
• Certainty - feeling safe
• “Who we are is really energy flow.”
• Finding harmonious flow between the shores of chaos and rigidity
• VUCA life: Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous.
• Minimize exposure to information
• Picasso: “The meaning of life is discovering our gift. The purpose of life is giving it away.”
• The Wheel of Awareness
• attention to be focused, awareness to be open, intention to be kind
• The hub of the wheel: the source of knowing
• The rim of the wheel: that which is known
• Creating a loving state inside you
• “Empty but full.”
• “Connected to everyone and everything”
• Feeling an open sense of love
• Christian contemplative tradition and centering prayer
• Silence and stillness—leading to heightened awareness
• The illusion of certainty
• Me + We = MWe
• Well-being and thriving
• Adaptive developmental regulation
• Leaning into love: “the manifestation of love is kindness and compassion”
• Spiritual health and being “intraconnected”
• Intraconnected: MWe (Me + We) as the Integration of Self, Identity, and Belonging
• “Feeling into the truth of our intraconnected identity”
• Host Pam King’s Key Takeaways:
• We are embodied creatures with glorious brains that we're still only beginning to understand.
• Caring attuned relationships can create opportunities for us to be and become who we are, realizing our deep connection to others.
• There's a constant balancing act between chaos and rigidity, and the path of spiritual health is marked by a steady recovery of harmonious flow. A process called integration.
• When life is scary and uncertain, we need safe relationships to ground us, help us attune and regulate and navigate the most challenging circumstances.
• And finally We need a new paradigm for reciprocal relationships in society, seeing the ways we're intra connected Knit together with and for each other.

About the Thrive Center

• Learn more at thethrivecenter.org.
• Follow us on Instagram @thrivecenter
• Follow us on X @thrivecenter
• Follow us on LinkedIn @thethrivecenter

About Dr. Pam King

Dr. Pam King is Executive Director the Thrive Center and is Peter L. Benson Professor of Applied Developmental Science at Fuller School of Psychology & Marriage and Family Therapy.  Follow her @drpamking.

About With & For

• Host: Pam King
• Senior Director and Producer: Jill Westbrook
• Operations Manager: Lauren Kim
• Social Media Graphic Designer: Wren Juergensen
• Consulting Producer: Evan Rosa

Special thanks to the team at Fuller Studio and the Fuller School of Psychology & Marriage and Family Therapy.

“It really has to do with this ability to, to dream and to live unencumbered.” — Dr. Dwight Radcliff

Seeing justice, equity, and social transformation through the lens of hip-hop culture and Christian faith, Rev. Dr. Dwight Radcliff offers a vision of freedom and unencumbered life for the future of the Black community to which we can all bear witness.

Raising challenging questions about the meaning of thriving in a culture dominated by fear, he speaks in a prophetic voice, interweaving the powerful, compounding effects of the language of the Gospel and the language of hip-hop.

As a cultural theologian, community leader, and pastor, one of Dwight’s many gifts is presence—presence to emotion, to the realty of injustice, and to the complexities of thriving in the context of race and gender.

He speaks about the power of purpose and calling in his life, pointing out the unique insight hip-hop, rap, and R&B music can offer the human experience. He calls us to be attuned to the whole reality of pain, suffering, trauma, and struggle when discussing psychological and spiritual health and thriving. And he bears witness to fear, anger, and grief—re-sensitizing us to our pain and vulnerability—speaking truth for the sake of beauty and justice.

In this conversation, we discuss:

• Thriving as the ability to dream and live unencumbered, and the ways the Black church embodies that thriving
• The grievous reality of Black double-consciousness that results from systemic racism
• And his personal experience as a Black man today
• Mental health in the Black community
• The power of sanctified purpose
• How hip-hop culture and music help us understand thriving at embodied, emotional, and familial levels, beyond the horizon of rational understanding
• And how the prophetic vision of hip hop operates in the same tradition of justice spelled out by the Gospel that Jesus taught and lived.

Show Notes

• Check out Rev. Dr. Dwight Radcliff’s Hip Hop Playlist (Note: Explicit Content)
• What is it to live unencumbered?
• “Hip-hop culture keeps me in check. It reminds me that the church of Jesus Christ is also supposed to be a prophetic and subversive voice.”
• Hip-hop and the Black experience
• Introduction: Rev. Dr. Dwight A. Radcliff
• Dwight Radcliff: What is thriving?
• “I think it really has to do with this ability to dream and to live unencumbered.”
• Fear and the experience of Black men
• “The American dream is not available to all equally.”
• “What is unencumbered life for Dwight?”
• W.E.B. Du Bois and Double Consciousness
• W.E.B. Du Bois’s book, The Souls of Black Folk (Project Gutenberg)
• Double consciousness is “fatal to self-confidence,” producing “a peculiar wrenching of the soul, a peculiar sense of doubt and bewilderment.”
• “I don’t get to just be me.”
• Dr. John M. Perkins
• “Where does our pain come from? Why are you hurting? And I give you your pain and I say that you are hurting; and you give me my pain and we say that we are hurting.”
• Honest, vulnerable conversations
• Trauma and inherited trauma
• “Why do we have to be Black?”
• “One of the things that I'm lamenting right now in our society is our inability to have honest conversations—our inability to say, ‘Hey, this happened, this was horrible.’ There are ramifications and ripple effects of that. How do we address it, talk about it, and begin to take corrective action so that all of our children can begin to dream and live unencumbered.”
• Where are honest conversations happening?
• “I might not change the world, but I'll damn sure inspire the mind that does.” (paraphrase of Tupac Shakur)
• Socioepigenetics: the impact of genetic inheritance for emotional trauma, depression, anxiety, and the effects of social injustice
• Mental health in the Black church and broader Black community, and the mistrust of mental health providers
• Barbara Holmes on Black contemplative practices and spirituality
• Hip-hop culture and expression of pain and suffering
• Dwight Radcliff’s journey through hip-hop
• Pentacostal Holiness church and seeing hip-hop as the devil.
• “You’re more concerned with the curse words than the cursed worlds.”
• “I began to do a dangerous thing: I began to read the Bible.”
• James Cone, The Spirituals & the Blues
• West African spirituality and “holding all things together”
• Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five, “The Message”
• “Don’t push me, cuz I’m close to the edge / I’m trying not to lose my head”
• “It’s like a jungle sometimes / It makes me wonder how I keep from going under”
• 2Pac, “I Wonder If Heaven Got a Ghetto”
• C. Dolores Tucker, a Black congresswoman and critic of 2Pac
• Hip-Hop as a way of life, unencumbered and wholly oneself
• J. Kameron Carter on poesis and creativity
• “Poesis… making a haven in a ghetto.”
• “I am hip-hop.”
• Lament and Good News

About Dwight Radcliff

Theologian and pastor Rev. Dr. Dwight A. Radcliff Jr. is Academic Dean and director of the William E. Pannell Center for Black Church Studies and is Assistant Professor of Mission, Theology, and Culture at Fuller Theological Seminary. Prior to coming to Fuller, Dr. Radcliff taught at Vanguard University, Azusa Pacific University, and the Southern California School of Ministry.

He has published in The Journal of Hip Hop Studies, and is a recipient of the Parish Pulpit Fellowship graduation prize and the Hooper/Keefe Preaching Award. He completed post-master’s studies at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas and the University of Oxford.

He currently serves as senior pastor of The Message Center in Gardena, California, where he leads with his wife, DeShun Jones-Radcliff, who serves as the church’s director of administration. He and his wife have two daughters.

About the Thrive Center

• Learn more at thethrivecenter.org.
• Follow us on Instagram @thrivecenter
• Follow us on X @thrivecenter
• Follow us on LinkedIn @thethrivecenter

About Dr. Pam King

Dr. Pam King is Executive Director the Thrive Center and is Peter L. Benson Professor of Applied Developmental Science at Fuller School of Psychology & Marriage and Family Therapy.  Follow her @drpamking.

About With & For

• Host: Pam King
• Senior Director and Producer: Jill Westbrook
• Operations Manager: Lauren Kim
• Social Media Graphic Designer: Wren Juergensen
• Consulting Producer: Evan Rosa

Special thanks to the team at Fuller Studio and the Fuller School of Psychology & Marriage and Family Therapy.

“Love of God, love of neighbors. Seek the kingdom, the good of the world. And in that good of the whole, your own good. And be attuned to what is around you in joy and also in sorrow.” (Miroslav Volf)

We’re in a crisis of meaning. It’s like our existential compasses are off kilter. Uprooted from faith, social, and civic communities—the very institutions that once supplied narratives, a sense of identity, and belonging.

But meaning and purpose are central to our spiritual health and therefore thriving. And theology comes into play because psychologists are more concerned with how meaning is made descriptively—looking at the cognitive and affective processes of our brains and behavior. Whereas theologians are concerned with prescriptive meaning, commenting normatively about how we should live.

This episode features renowned theologian Miroslav Volf (Henry B. Wright Professor of Systematic Theology at Yale Divinity School / Founder and Director of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture) and author of the bestselling book, Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most.

We need stories of love and hope to define our lives. And much of Miroslav's life's work has been devoted to understanding what constitutes a life worth living.

In our conversation, he shares about a God who is with us, who is loving, and who created us for love, calling us to an active role in the flourishing of this world.

In this conversation, we discuss:

• How to discern what really matters and how to be intentional about a life worth living
• The need to challenge the hyper individualistic assumptions of our day, focusing on thriving life as a life of connections and convictions
• Spiritual health as dependent on our relationships with one another, with God, and creation
• Spiritual practices that quiet, create space, and slow us down—allowing us to attune a broad and secure space for human becoming and unfolding
• Miroslav speaks openly and vulnerably about his own experiences of faith, suffering, hope, and flourishing

Show Notes

• Learn more about the Yale Center for Faith and Culture
• Check out Miroslav’s best-selling book, Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most (co-authored with Matt Croasmun and Ryan McAnnally-Linz)
• Reorienting theology around the concept of human flourishing
• Honor everyone, love God, love neighbor, seek the kingdom, stay attuned in joy and in sorrow
• Crisis of meaning and the need for deeper reflection on what matters most
• “We need stories of love and hope to define our lives.”
• Interdisciplinary research in psychology and theology
• Miroslav reflects on his early life in 1970s Croatia (then Yugoslavia)
• Anthony Kronman’s Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life
• Miroslav’s early faith: “Jesus is alive.”
• “His experience was that people who believe are idiots, that they can't know anything, that they are these parasites that want to undermine whatever the society's trying to do. And so that was my first initiation, so to speak, in the public living of my faith. … but, it was also beautiful.”
• A way of life that is worth suffering for—holding a treasure.
• “Another occasion where we were actually beaten and chased out of a village that was completely communist-dominated. And we kind of disrupted it by … We spoke about Jesus … and they chased us out of the city to beat us up … and then we had this kind of sense of joy.”
• Practices vs Reflection
• Moral practices and felt experience
• “There's always a kind of excess beyond what we can actually say, what we can describe, what we can explain. We stutter often when we try to—especially describe experiences like joy or like suffering. They're beyond the words. That's the beauty of them—giving oneself to them.”
• Miroslav Volf on thriving
• Thriving is framed around three elements of human experience: agency, circumstances, and emotions—knit together through the lens of the kingdom of God and Christian imagination
• Agency: Love God and Love neighbor.
• Circumstances: “Thy kingdom come” vs “give us this day our daily bread”
• Emotions: Attune to the world. “Rejoice with those who rejoice and mourn with those who mourn.”
• “Love of God, love of neighbors. Seek the kingdom, the good of the world. And in that good of the whole, your own good. And be attuned to what is around you in joy and also in sorrow.”
• Primordial goodness: Goodness is always prior to evil.
• Spacious public faith and Christ as the key to flourishing life
• Christ as a moral teacher and exemplar
• The “aliveness” and presence of Christ
• “I often don't experience God.”
• Martin Luther on faith: Christ as a gem, encased in our faith
• Church fathers on the presence of Christ as “heated iron in fire”—the heat doesn’t come from the iron but from the fired—similarly, God heats us from within.
• Exclusion & Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation
• Porous boundaries and our nature as relational beings
• Jürgen Moltmann’s autobiography A Broad Place
• “Religion really cramps our style… But in Miroslav's theology, personal wholeness in Christ is spacious and freeing.”
• Exodus 3: God promising to lead Israel out of bondage and constraint and into freedom and a broad space
• Love
• Relational image of God and relationality
• God as ultimate lover—”God loves us while we are still so far away”
• Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most
• Christian faith and pluralism
• Articulating a coherent answer to what it means to live a life that’s worthy of our humanity
• The Recipe: “You can’t put all the ingredients together as you wish. They have to fit together.”
• “We make truth claims.”
• “I think we go wrong when we don't honor people's own search for truth. The whole book is about having truth-seeking conversations about something that has a claim upon your life. And argue with others, but argue in such a way that honors everyone. And so for me, this is a kind of central Christian conviction that comes straight from the Bible, from 1 Peter. Short commandment: Honor everyone. That's what I need to do. Whatever they do, whatever they think, especially honor those who've spent so much time trying to think through some of these issues as many of the figures have that have, that are not necessarily Christian.”
• “Honor everyone.”
• Nurturing the ascetic practices of self-reflection and discipline
• Spiritual exercise by Pam King: Creating Space
• Teresa of Avila and the Interior Castle
• Relationality, reciprocity, and mutual flourishing
• Robin Wall Kimmerer in *Braiding Sweetgrass: “*All flourishing is mutual.”
• “Human thriving isn't thriving when it's the expense of other people's thriving.”
• “And it's a kind of strange paradox. At our disposal, but it's all reference to me and to my experiences. … We have a really narrow scope of concerns.”
• Mary’s Magnificat: “God coming and taking the mighty down from their thrones and transforming the entire world.”
• “What I want is the expansion of the horizon of concerns. Our horizon of concern is the horizon of God's mission in the world. God’s mission is our mission.”

About Miroslav Volf

Miroslav Volf is the Henry B. Wright Professor of Theology at Yale Divinity School and is the Founder and Director of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture.

He was educated in his native Croatia, the United States, and Germany, earning doctoral and post-doctoral degrees (with highest honors) from the University of Tübingen, Germany. He has written or edited more than 20 books, over 100 scholarly articles, and his work has been featured in the Washington Post, Christianity Today, Christian Century, Sojourners, and several other outlets, including NPR, On Being with Krista Tippett, and Public Television’s Religion and Ethics Newsweekly.

His books include Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most,  Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation, Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace, Allah: A Christian Response, After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity, A Public Faith: How Followers of Christ Should Serve the Common Good, The End of Memory: Remembering Rightly in a Violent World, Flourishing: Why We Need Religion in a Globalized World, For the Life of the World: Theology that Makes a Difference (with Matthew Croasmun), and The Home of God: A Brief Story of Everything (with Ryan McAnnally-Linz).

About the Thrive Center

• Learn more at thethrivecenter.org.
• Follow us on Instagram @thrivecenter
• Follow us on X @thrivecenter
• Follow us on LinkedIn @thethrivecenter

About Dr. Pam King

Dr. Pam King is Executive Director the Thrive Center and is Peter L. Benson Professor of Applied Developmental Science at Fuller School of Psychology & Marriage and Family Therapy.  Follow her @drpamking.

About With & For

• Host: Pam King
• Senior Director and Producer: Jill Westbrook
• Operations Manager: Lauren Kim
• Social Media Graphic Designer: Wren Juergensen
• Consulting Producer: Evan Rosa

Special thanks to the team at Fuller Studio and the Fuller School of Psychology & Marriage and Family Therapy.

“Our society doesn't want to hear about how interdependent we are—doesn't want to hear that if we want to thrive, we have to put people first and we have to create community. And people need connection with others like they need oxygen. If you create a world where that connection isn't very available or it all happens on a screen, you are going to have huge problems. You are going to have huge problems with depression, anxiety, suicide, emptiness—people are going to make terrible choices.” (Sue Johnson)

We need each other. We are relational beings, and our thriving—or languishing—often hinges on relationships. In this episode, psychologists Sue Johnson and Jim Furrow not only explain why relationships are so important, they offer practical advice on how to pursue healing, emotional regulation, and lasting thriving in all kinds of relationships.

Sue Johnson is the creator of Emotionally Focused Therapy, the gold standard in tested, proven interventions of couples and author of many books including Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love. Jim Furrow is a marriage and family therapist and an internationally renowned trainer of Emotionally Focused Therapy.

This conversation goes from profound to practical, covering the biological and psychological science to explain why belonging gives way to becoming. We discuss the rampant emptiness and loneliness, fear, and depression people today experience and the connection between relationships and a sense of meaning in life. Sue and Jim also provide a framework for how to understand your attachment style and the way it impacts your relational health. And they discuss the practical ways we can grow and change so that we can engage in and sustain fulfilling and life giving relationships.

In this conversation with Sue Johnson & Jim Furrow, we discuss:

• What it means to be fully alive, in all the existential fullness that being human means
• How to bring together the spectrum of emotional realities with our lived experience
• The crisis of loneliness we face today, and what we can do about it
• The role of empathy and caring in the healing process
• An introduction to attachment science, the role of attachment figures in thriving relationships
• And the therapeutic and relational practices that lead to security, a sense of worth, empowerment, and competence in life.

About Sue Johnson & Jim Furrow

Sue Johnson is the creator of Emotionally Focused Therapy and author of many books including Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love. Jim Furrow is a marriage and family therapist and an internationally renowned trainer of Emotionally Focused Therapy.

Show Notes

• Learn more about Emotionally Focused Therapy (including ways to find a therapist)
• Sue Johnson’s book, Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love
• We’re made for relationships.
• “We need to understand how crucial relationships are for us. They are oxygen. We need to help people value them and learn how to have them.”
• “If we're not willing to risk and we're not willing to reach, we're not going to necessarily be found.”
• “You can't be a self or by yourself. I think that says it all. That's the most basic human interaction. Do you share my reality? Is my reality valid? Do you see what I see? Can you make sense of it? Can you help me make sense of it? Is what I'm feeling making sense? Can you share it? Am I alone? I mean, this is the most basic human contact of all.”
• The purpose of our being and our means to becoming.
• Episode Summary
• Pam King welcomes Sue Johnson and Jim Furrow.
• What is thriving meant to you?
• “Full existential living… fully alive.”
• Carl Rogers
• “Trust yourself to go through life in an active way.”
• “Fulsome being… not only who I am, but who I’m with.”
• Purpose, meaning, and connection
• Therapy is not only about reducing thriving to the treatment of symptoms.
• Coherence vs Binary Thinking: “How does all of this cohere in a new way of making sense?”
• Mother and Child: Explaining reality and needing other people to do so
• Unexpected, unknown, and fear
• Attachment figures
• Fullness vs. Emptiness
• The relational isn’t just a means to an end. It’s our purpose.
• Sue’s relationship with her father: “He was an amazing attachment figure.”
• “I’m an ardent feminist.”
• Understanding attachment through loss and grief
• Sue Johnson on working with trauma survivors
• John Bowlby: “You do unto yourself as you’ve been done to.”
• “Just to have some sort of sense of who you are, coherent sense of self, you need the recognition from another person. Yes, you matter. Yes, you're important. Yes, you have meaning. Yes, I see you. … to not feel seen, to not feel like you matter to anybody is, it's excruciating for human beings.”
• “One safe relationship with a loving other. seems to protect us and create resilience.”
• Jim’s loss of his father: “I know he's going through a difficult time, but I believe in him and I know he will make it.”
• The power of attachment
• Fully oneself, fully connected with another
• Attachment to God: foundation, protector, shield, transcendent
• Spirituality and experience of attachment through the beauty and transcendence of nature
• “My life is part of this beauty.”
• Animate, invigorate, create.
• “Your worth comes from your connection to others.”
• “But no, we're not enough. But I think our society doesn't want to hear that. It doesn't want to hear about how interdependent we are. Doesn't want to hear that if we want to thrive, we have to put people first and we have to create community.”
• Interdependence and affective dependence
• How to forge relational bonds.
• Attention
• “Love and bonding is about attention and if you don't give attention to the other person in your relationship, which means if you don't take the time, make it important enough and focus down and spend time, then whatever connection you have naturally erodes.”
• ARE—Accessible, Responsive, and Engaged
• “It’s more than date night… it’s about engaging with the other person.”
• “Loneliness and depression are going to be the main problems for the next century.”
• Relationship-driven church communities
• “One of the things that is a heartbeat in our work in emotionally focused therapy is calling individuals into opportunities to share vulnerably with one another.”
• John Cacioppo (loneliness researcher): we have changed deep relationships from an essential to an incidental.
• Vulnerability and loneliness
• Depressed or heartbroken?
• The impact of smartphone technology on relationships
• Empathy and caring in the healing process
• “When the vulnerability becomes specific and makes sense and is accepted, then people have words for it, they can tolerate it, and they start to be able to share it. And when they do that, they pull their partner towards them. They evoke empathy and caring. That’s the only solution to human emotional pain that there really exists—s the empathy and caring of another. That is true in religion too. It's the empathy and caring of a God figure. That's about bonding. It's about sharing vulnerability.”
• “No one goes through vulnerability alone.”
• Belonging leads to becoming
• Pam King’s key takeaways:
• Being fully alive means finding coherence and connection with others. finding meaning in human and spiritual relationships.
• Relational bonding is built in to our genetic code. We're built for connection and made for relationships and we have to work at it.
• Relationships are powerful. They are capable of bringing sorrow and joy. To the extent that they're able to break us down, they're even more able to build us back up and bring us to healing.
• Longing for relationships is natural and normal. While loneliness can be so frightening, it does not need to be stigmatized. But it does need to be worked through.
• Often healing comes through the very wounds we're hurting with. We heal when we open up in vulnerability, when we seek transcendence and connection with others, and ultimately with a loving and caring God

About the Thrive Center

• Learn more at thethrivecenter.org.
• Follow us on Instagram @thrivecenter
• Follow us on X @thrivecenter
• Follow us on LinkedIn @thethrivecenter

About Dr. Pam King

Dr. Pam King is Executive Director the Thrive Center and is Peter L. Benson Professor of Applied Developmental Science at Fuller School of Psychology & Marriage and Family Therapy.  Follow her @drpamking.

About With & For

• Host: Pam King
• Senior Director and Producer: Jill Westbrook
• Operations Manager: Lauren Kim
• Social Media Graphic Designer: Wren Juergensen
• Consulting Producer: Evan Rosa

Special thanks to the team at Fuller Studio and the Fuller School of Psychology & Marriage and Family Therapy.

“We all have a story because we all have a future and a past. … And story is really about making the influences in our life explicit to ourselves. Oftentimes, when we're not living intentionally, it's like we don't know what our story is. And we're not living in a way that is aligned at all with our purpose—so that you know what your story is, and so that you can be explicit in your intentional current behavior, feelings, and decisions.” (Dr. Belle Liang)

Do you know your purpose? How do you understand your own life story?

The science of purpose promises many positive outcomes: mental health, psychological wellbeing, physical health, even longevity, not to mention academic engagement, career fulfillment, and even nurturing relationships. Who doesn’t want purpose?

But as much as it captivates us, can be an elusive, ephemeral object dangling in front of us. We want it. We can sense it. We should have it. But we can’t quite attain it.

A deep sense of purpose and vocation are central to our spiritual health. Purpose is understood as an actionable and enduring goal that is meaningful to oneself and contributes to the world beyond oneself, is crucial to our spirituality bc it serves to integrate our beliefs, values, understanding of ultimacy, and love into action.

In this episode Dr. Belle Liang (Boston College, author of the bestselling book How to Navigate Life: The New Science of Finding Your Way in School, Career, and Beyond), offers research-backed practical guidance on how to identify and pursue your purpose, identifying essential elements of purpose: (1) character strengths, (2) skills and expertise, (3) deeply held values, and (4) a sense of contribution to the world.

During the interview she guides listeners through a real-time practical exercise for aligning with our purpose and explore how it can help us navigate the journey of life.

In this conversation with Belle Liang, we discuss:

• How family history shapes us as individuals
• The importance of differentiation and emerging from early family dependency into a healthy sense of oneself as an individual
• The role of faith, spirituality, and community in our understanding of purpose
• A psychological definition of purpose as using strengths and skills and values to make a positive impact on the world
• And the practical elements of finding and living your purpose as an individual, with Belle guiding us through a practice of reflecting on our past and finding our purpose

About Belle Liang
Dr. Belle Liang is a professor of Counseling, Developmental, & Educational Psychology at the Lynch School of Education and Human Development at Boston College. As the founder and Principal Investigator of Purpose Lab, she is committed to advancing understanding of positive youth development, including mentoring and relational health, through her research. Her expertise in purpose interventions, including those that are technologically mediated, is reflected in her current work leading the development of True North, a curriculum and web-based application aimed at helping individuals and organizations cultivate purpose with data analytics.

With over 100 publications, Dr. Liang is recognized as a knowledgeable speaker and collaborator in the field of positive youth development. She is grateful for the opportunities she has had to contribute to the field and to translate research into practical application, as demonstrated by her recent co-authorship of the bestselling How to Navigate Life: The New Science of Finding Your Way in School, Career, & Beyond, published by St. Martin’s Press.

Show Notes

• Check out How to Navigate Life: The New Science of Finding Your Way in School, Career, and Beyond by Belle Liang and Timothy Klein
• “What is your life dream?” Learn more about Belle Liang’s Purpose Labs
• “Purpose is knowing more of yourself and living in ways that are aligned and consistent with those values, strengths, beliefs, and, desires.”
• Pam King introduces Belle Liang and this episode
• Belle Liang’s family of origin
• Growing up the daughter of Asian immigrant parents with very impoverished backgrounds
• Understanding sacrifice
• Learning how to listen to herself and identify her vocation and purpose
• How Belle became a psychologist
• “It was pretty tricky for me early on to make some decisions that had to do with my own interests, my own intrinsic motivations versus doing what seemed to be the most strategic pathway to success.”
• Parker Palmer and “letting your life speak”
• Listening to the inner voice that reveals purpose
• How to define purpose in order to study it through psychological research
• Purpose as “living a life that is personally meaningful and intended to contribute to the world beyond oneself.”
• Positive outcomes of finding and living your purpose
• Improved mental health and well being
• Physical health and longevity
• Better academic engagement
• Increased career fulfillment
• What are the elements of purpose?
• Character strengths
• Skills that you're motivated to learn and master
• Values that you're willing to stand for and sacrifice for
• Needs of the world that you want to contribute to
• “Purpose is not like finding your one true love.”
• Romans 12—offering our lives as “living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God”
• Practical or Passion: they’re not mutually exclusive
• “Purpose is not like you have to sacrifice a paycheck, in order to do the thing that you love and the thing that is aligned with your purpose.”
• Living life to the fullest
• Pam’s purpose: “To enable people to thrive and become who God created them to be.”
• Belle’s purpose: “To be a blessing … translating research and spiritual language into plain language. … translating across the lines.”
• Practical resources and tools for finding your purpose
• Purpose defined: “Using your strengths and skills to make a positive impact in the world that's aligned with your core values.”
• “There's a lot that we don't know about ourselves because we've never been given the space to reflect and given the scaffolding to ask those kinds of questions of ourselves.”
• Recommended practice: Journal for 3 to 5 minutes
• “How do you want to be remembered?”
• Look for key words and think of them as strengths you want to be remembered for.
• “What's one thing you can do in one minute that's going to move you one step closer to your purpose?”
• Example: Cultivating courage
• Creating a “moment that matters”
• “We want to connect our envisioned future, whatever that, that aspiration is for growth and that strength or that skill with where it came from, which is reflecting on our past and what informed it with the action in the present, and to have people come alongside us as to journey with us, um, as we develop those skills and strengths.”
• Purpose Practice: “In an ideal world, what does success look like for you.”
• Pick out a few words that stand out, share them with trusted people.
• Envision the future based on these strengths and successes.
• Consider the past.
• What are certain experiences that you've had that are formative?
• What are certain relationships that were meaningful in your life that gave you that sense of the kind of success that you aspire to?
• What impact did this have on you?
• Did you learn a harsh truth about yourself or the world?
• Did it cause you to believe or to accept or trust something or someone?
• Did it cause you to commit to an action that altered the course of your life?
• Craft a story based on these reflections: (1) Set the stage, (2) Something happens, (3) Impact on you, (4) Success revealed.
• Purpose should be more like a verb than a noun—it’s a deeply relational endeavor.
• “We’re purposing people.”
• Living toward an envisioned future, informed by our past.
• “You want to be able to tell your story. And it’s so helpful to have done the work of identifying what truly matters to you and putting it together in a story.”
• Weaving our stories into other stories
• Reclaiming our own life events and experiences and making meaning of those
• At the end of ourselves
• Relying on faith in God, prayer, and seeking God in seeking a life of purpose
• The Sermon on the Mount: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of God. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.”
• Is purpose just for the privileged? No
• Sometimes purpose is associated with choice, but the research shows that those who have encountered adversity and trials and trauma are more deeply connected to their purpose.
• What is thriving to Belle Liang?
• “Living in your joy.”
• It's making the impact that you care about making in a way that's really aligned with your deepest core beliefs and values.
• “Purpose is not just about an individual mindset. It's about shifting culture.”
• Pam’s key takeaways
• We are relational beings with deep dependencies on our families of origin, and we need to differentiate and individuate in order to thrive and find out who we are and enter into even more healthy relationships.
• To find our purpose, we can let our lives speak. And there is transformative power in personal storytelling when we do so mindfully and intentionally.
• Faith can be fertile ground for finding purpose, especially when practiced in communities of thriving and healthy spirituality.
• Spiritual health includes our own awareness of our evolving sense of purpose. and an application of that to our daily lives, w ork, vocation, and all the relationships we find there.
• Purpose is something you grow toward, and from it emerges all sorts of pro social benefits and positive personal outcomes for physical and mental health.
• Lastly, purpose is for everyone, not just a privileged few.

About the Thrive Center

• Learn more at thethrivecenter.org.
• Follow us on Instagram @thrivecenter
• Follow us on X @thrivecenter
• Follow us on LinkedIn @thethrivecenter

About Dr. Pam King

Dr. Pam King is Executive Director the Thrive Center and is Peter L. Benson Professor of Applied Developmental Science at Fuller School of Psychology & Marriage and Family Therapy.  Follow her @drpamking.

About With & For

• Host: Pam King
• Senior Director and Producer: Jill Westbrook
• Operations Manager: Lauren Kim
• Social Media Graphic Designer: Wren Juergensen
• Consulting Producer: Evan Rosa

Special thanks to the team at Fuller Studio and the Fuller School of Psychology & Marriage and Family Therapy.

“Humans are born to be kind. They're born to love. It is part of our nature. … we're actually nurturing a capacity that is part of the nature of who we are as human beings to begin with.” — Dr. Richie Davidson

Dr. Richie Davidson’s research has revolutionized the way we understand the brain and how plastic and malleable or changeable the brain is. Just like we train our physical bodies and go to the gym, he and his team at the Center for Healthy Minds have shown that we need to train our brains and work them out as well. 

As a result, he is changing the way we understand well being—to think of it as a skill—something we do and practice as active agents of our own well being.

His research can give us a whole new appreciation of Christian contemplative practices or disciplines. Although we can't control all that happens around us or to us, we do have some control on how we respond, merging helpful insight with concrete practices that make a difference for our minds, so that we can become more regulated, peaceful, receptive, open, and even more trusting. Not just so that our personal well being increases, but so that we become more engaged in thriving humans that contribute to a flourishing world.

In this bountiful conversation with Richie Davidson, we discuss:

• Two kinds of learning—declarative and procedural—that need to be integrated in order to cultivate mental and spiritual health
• The four pillars of a healthy mind: awareness, connection, insight, and purpose
• How to cultivate a mindset for healthy relational connection
• How to understand the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and how this impacts our well-being and spiritual health
• The over-emphasis (even approaching hype) on mindfulness that seems to be present in our culture
• What a healthy approach to meditation might be in our spiritual lives
• The science and spirituality of love and compassion

About Richie Davidson

Dr. Richie Davidson is a pioneer in contemplative neuroscience, and does cutting edge research on the neuro-correlates of emotion and meditation. He's also the founder of the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin Madison, where he's the William James Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry.

Show Notes

• Check out the Healthy Minds App (free!)
• Learn more about the Center for Healthy Minds
• Science intersecting with spiritual experience
• “I've always considered spiritual experience to be part of the human repertoire. I think that humans are born to touch into those qualities that we come to label spiritual because it is within our capacity to have experiences that in many ways we can say go beyond ourselves, connect us to something larger.”
• Richie’s experience with the Dalai Lama
• The neuroscience of kindness and compassion
• The development of the Center for Healthy Minds: “to cultivate wellbeing and relieve suffering through a scientific understanding of the mind.”
• Learning to approach thriving and well being as a skill
• Two kinds of learning: declarative and procedural
• Brain plasticity and well being
• Well being requires practice!
• Declarative learning, e.g., learning the value of kindness or honesty. This won’t make you kinder or more honest, though.
• Procedural learning— a skills-based roadmap, complementary to declarative learning.
• Mental hygiene
• The four pillars of wellbeing: awareness, connection, insight, and purpose
• Insight: changing the narrative and changing the relationship to the narrative
• Self-esteem
• Finding your true north in life
• Nurturing our capacity for compassion and kindness
• “Humans are born to be kind. They're born to love. It is part of our nature. … we're actually nurturing a capacity that is part of the nature of who we are as human beings to begin with.”
• The power of appreciation
• Cultivating a sentiment that others would be relieved of their suffering
• Lovingkindness meditation that moves from a person who’s easy to love to others, including those who might be very hard to love
• “An elixer for the soul” … to “regain our humanity”
• MEDITATIVE PRACTICE for connection: Richie Davidson leads listeners through a meditative exercise to send love and wish for that person’s healing and relief of suffering.
• Comparing to Christian intercessory prayer
• Exploring the pillars of awareness and insight
• The default network or default mode
• Research on depression and cognitive behavioral therapy
• “What does that mean: ‘I am sad.’”
• “The narrative we carry around acts as a filter.”
• Developing a healthy relationship with the narrative we have about ourselves
• “A lot of people I think don't even recognize that they have a narrative. … And that the narrative is actually powerfully guiding their behavior and experience in the world.”
• Mary Helen Immordino Yang on meaning making and the default network.
• The default network is almost always about ourselves.
• The connectivity in our brains can change.
• MEDITATIVE PRACTICE for awareness and insight: Richie Davidson leads through an exercise to imagine a different approach to a challenging personal situation. “Can you imagine a different set of beliefs or expectations?
• “Let’s see if we can envision how things might be different.”
• Understanding purpose
• Cultivating rituals that connect us to purpose
• What are the pitfalls that lurk near the practice of mindfulness or meditative practices for cultivating the skill of well being.
• Blaming the victim.
• “The best form of meditation is the form of meditation that you actually do.”
• A gap in the scientific study of love and compassion.
• Vivek Murthy: “an epic struggle between the forces of love and the forces of fear.”
• What is thriving to you?
• “From my perspective, I would say thriving is nurturing all of the innate capacities that we've been given. And here, the four pillars of wellbeing in our framework are critical, awareness, connection, insight, and purpose. And I think when we are expressing these qualities to their maximum, we are thriving by definition. And I would say perhaps the most important manifestation of that is our capacity to both receive and to express love.”
• Pam’s takeaways
• “We have a robust and glorious agency to cultivate our personal well being.”
• “Transformation comes from the integration of declarative and procedural learning.”
• “We have the power to shift our relational experiences to more loving places that align with our deepest values.”
• “Discerning and articulating your purpose will keep you grounded and directed in your journey towards spiritual health.”
• “Perfect love casts out fear.” (1 John 4:18)

About the Thrive Center

• Learn more at thethrivecenter.org.
• Follow us on Instagram @thrivecenter
• Follow us on X @thrivecenter
• Follow us on LinkedIn @thethrivecenter

About Dr. Pam King

Dr. Pam King is Executive Director the Thrive Center and is Peter L. Benson Professor of Applied Developmental Science at Fuller School of Psychology & Marriage and Family Therapy.  Follow her @drpamking.

About With & For

• Host: Pam King
• Senior Director and Producer: Jill Westbrook
• Operations Manager: Lauren Kim
• Social Media Graphic Designer: Wren Juergensen
• Consulting Producer: Evan Rosa

Special thanks to the team at Fuller Studio and the Fuller School of Psychology & Marriage and Family Therapy.

“We have so many demands before us, we feel that we cannot stop. There is too much to do, and we're not stopping. … Know that if you follow the rhythm of this world, you'll likely be overworking and stressed out, if not traumatized,  so I actually get more done following the rhythm of my body and paying attention to it. Rhythms of deep work and deep rest. This is how I want to lead. For me to survive and then actually thrive in this kind of environment, I need to have a different rhythm.” — Alexis Abernethy, Fuller School of Psychology

Coming from decades of research, clinical work, and practice in the field, Dr. Alexis Abernethy cuts through theory and ideals, addressing the complex realities of life: loss, trauma, systemic racism, the grinding and wearing away from the stresses of everyday life, and the pressure to lead in the face of unsolvable suffering and need.

Alexis keeps spiritual health real and accessible, addressing research-backed principles on sleep, concentration, irritation, relationships, and burnout.

Absolutely essential to spiritual health and thriving in our chaotic and frenetic days, Alexis describes rhythms that we can internalize before we get to those soft symptoms or signs of stress.

This is a rich and robust conversation about self care at the deepest and most impactful levels in our physical, mental, and spiritual lives—tending to the complexity of our humanity and addressing the deep, pervasive practices that engage us and intertwine us with others and with the sacred, so that we can find and stay aligned with our purpose.

In this conversation, we discuss:

• Her research and therapeutic work with traumatized pastors after Hurricane Katrina, emphasizing the necessity of self-care for the caregivers.
• How to identify the symptoms of burnout and how to respond.
• The Christian practice of Sabbath rest, worship, and singing, which Alexis personally experiences as a source of healing and restoration.

Show Notes

• “Rhythms of deep work and deep rest. This is how I want to lead.”
• Alexis Abernethy’s research and expertise
• How leaders can heal and thrive, taking care of themselves and leading their communitities, even amidst traumatic circumstances and the threat of burnout
• Caring for pastors and local leaders in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, Louisiana
• “It's just this complete devastation. That picture is seared in my mind, and then you go in other communities, and you don't see that same kind of devastation.”
• “Frankly, a deep anger just really was rising in me. righteous indignation at that injustice.”
• “This is an interaction of an uncontrollable hurricane and man's decision making.”
• Dealing with and holding all the anger that rises up as we develop a care and recovery process for healing after trauma
• How to help the helpers? How to care for leaders who care for others?
• Surviving to Thriving, Resilience, and Cultivating Relationships
• Pastors’ Empowerment Program
• “What happens in the body?”
• Trauma’s effects: physically, psychologically, emotionally, interpersonally—”how it affects how you engage in the world and how some people over-engage”
• Emotion regulation
• Theology of Sabbath
• The symptoms and root causes of burnout
• The Body Keeps the Score
• Restorative and restful sleep
• Irritability
• Attention and awareness: “Whose really in control here?”
• “First, know that if you follow the rhythm of this world, you'll likely be overworking and stressed out, if not traumatized, okay? But definitely overworking and stressed out, because that's the rhythm of our world.”
• Take a personal inventory for the purposes of making small adjustments that prioritize the balance of work and rest.
• How efficiency follows rest
• How to reorder the rhythms of life
• Alexis’s response to the murder of George Floyd in 2020—feeling traumatized
• “I actually needed the world to be much smaller around me. I had to retreat. I had to withdraw because I didn't have what it took to be my more typical empathic self.”
• Phil Allen’s film, Open Wounds
• Intellectualizing (as opposed to emotional presence) as a response to trauma
• The pressure to have it all together and know what to do
• Permission as leaders and caregivers—in order to be present, we need to be absent.
• Microdoses of rhythm and rest
• Theological insights and Sabbath principles
• How to implement Sabbath principles
• “Deep work. Deep rest.”
• “How’s that unboundaried life working for you?”
• Exercise: What is your relationship to time?
• What is your theology of time?
• “God is in charge of time.”
• The image of God
• Comparing time and tithing: God’s provision and principles of discipline and trust
• How to deal with burnout in professional life and leadership
• Compare and contrast where you’ve been with where you’re going
• Emotional exhaustion
• Attending to various domains: the physical, the emotional, the spiritual, the intellectual, the relational…
• “There are mindfulness that we can use words that are totally comfortable with anyone's tradition or background.”
• The difficulty of sharing about burnout, and the shame or fear that prevents connection with others about what you’re experiencing
• Languishing and depression sometimes requires an override in order to seek professional help and talk about difficult emotions that come from burnout.
• Prayer, scripture, and a brief emotional expression to God: “Jesus!” “Lord, have mercy!”
• The healing practice of singing together
• “Music was my first language.”
• “Sometimes I feel like a motherless child … a long way from home”
• “The power of music transcends religious experiences.”
• Psychological research on corporate worship experiences.
• “You’re seeking a common note … It's communal not only that we're singing together, but we're singing toward a purpose … glorifying God.”
• “Bind us together, Lord, bind us together in love.”
• What does thriving mean to you?
• Thriving means walking toward discovering and experiencing the calling that God has for my life. It doesn't mean I'm always in it. It's walking toward it. The discovery is really rich. You know, you think of calling as a destination. It's not. It evolves. It evolves.”
• “I don’t thrive by myself. There’s no way I can thrive by myself. I do it in community.”

Pam’s Key Takeaways

• Catastrophes don't hit us all the same. We all weather life storms in different ways. It's when we find healing and restoration in community that we can integrate personal, relational, and political thriving.
• Limitations can be our friends. Irritation, lack of concentration, fatigue are all signposts to the need for self care.
• Burnout is complex, often involves a shift in our context, making our environment or job not a good fit for who we are.
• To quote Bessel van der Kolk, our bodies keep the score. Burnout and psychological stress are often manifested with psychosomatic symptoms.
• We need to be aware of our relationship to time and how our trust and faith come into play when it comes to rest.
• I need more microdoses of rest and perhaps macrodoses of sleep.
• We thrive when our vocation lines up with our work. but we need to address our culture's workaholism by talking more about strategies for rest that contribute to spiritual health.

About Alexis Abernethy

Alexis Abernathy is a clinical psychologist and professor of psychology in the Fuller School of Psychology, where for over 25 years she has served as Chaplain to the Faculty, Chief of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and her current role as Chief Academic Officer at Fuller Theological Seminary.  She graduated from Howard University with a BS in psychology. She received her MA and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. Her primary research interest is the intersection between spirituality and health and her Spirituality and Health Lab includes three research teams: Experience of Spirituality and Health-Related Outcomes; Spirituality, Cancer, and Health Disparities; and Spirituality, Culture, and Eating Disturbance. She is author of many journal articles in psychology of religion, as well as Worship That Changes Lives: Multidisciplinary and Congregational Perspectives on Spiritual Transformation (2008).  For more information, visit her faculty profile.

About the Thrive Center

• Learn more at thethrivecenter.org.
• Follow us on Instagram @thrivecenter
• Follow us on X @thrivecenter
• Follow us on LinkedIn @thethrivecenter

About Dr. Pam King

Dr. Pam King is Executive Director the Thrive Center and is Peter L. Benson Professor of Applied Developmental Science at Fuller School of Psychology & Marriage and Family Therapy.  Follow her @drpamking.

About With & For

• Host: Pam King
• Senior Director and Producer: Jill Westbrook
• Operations Manager: Lauren Kim
• Social Media Graphic Designer: Wren Juergensen
• Consulting Producer: Evan Rosa

Special thanks to the team at Fuller Studio and the Fuller School of Psychology & Marriage and Family Therapy.

"Loved, held, guided, and never alone. We are wired to be able to perceive that. And when we do, everything in our world is reordered. And in fact, of all the dimensions of lived spiritual life, that which most strengthens the awakened brain is love of neighbor—to one another. We are able to draw closer to God.” — Lisa Miller (Columbia University, author of The Awakened Brain)

What does science have to say about spirituality?

Dr. Lisa Miller, clinical psychologist and researcher, has made the case through years of research collaborations that spirituality is a birthright to the human species. In her best selling book, The Awakened Brain, she notes the glorious complexity of the human spiritual brain, revealing an innate capacity for transcendence. But she's not content to stop at these psychological capacities. She wants to help people with practical, tangible, evidence backed interventions that lead to their thriving and spiritual health. Lisa not only gives words, but explains scientifically why spirituality is so transformative. She challenges us to reimagine religion, faith, and spirituality as an experience of love from beyond us.

Her research suggests that spirituality has less to do with the dos and don'ts of religion, and rather offers a richer experience of how to encounter the love of God. Even if you don't believe in God, spirituality provides access to powerful transcendent emotions such as awe and joy that help our resilience and are necessary for thriving. These emotions broaden and build our capacities and help us develop narratives around love and goodness.

In this conversation with Lisa Miller, we discuss:

• The neuroscience of spirituality
• Guided meditative practices to fortify spiritual health and a sense of love, purpose, and possibility
• How paying attention to our inner mental and spiritual life builds awareness and resilience
• Research findings from the science of spirituality that we're wired for transcendence
• How transcendent love fortifies our brain in ways that buffer against depression and anxiety
• How human connection and spiritual guides are vital for a healthy life and even a thriving democracy
• And we explore all of these experientially, working through the ideas with practical exercises to increase our awareness

About Lisa Miller

Dr. Lisa Miller is bestselling author of The Spiritual Child and The Awakened Brain, and researcher and professor in clinical psychology at the Teachers College of Columbia University.  Learn more on her website.

About Dr. Pam King

Dr. Pam King is Executive Director the Thrive Center and is Peter L. Benson Professor of Applied Developmental Science at Fuller School of Psychology & Marriage and Family Therapy. Follow her @drpamking.

Show Notes

• "Loved, held, guided, and never alone. We are wired to be able to perceive that. And when we do, everything in our world is reordered. And in fact, of all the dimensions of live spiritual life, that which most strengthens the awakened brain is love of neighbor to one another. We are able to draw closer to God.”
• What does science have to say about spirituality?
• About Lisa Miller and The Awakened Brain
• An experience of love from beyond us
• With & For’s approach to practical resources and exercises
• The power of asking a council of advocates in your mind: “Do you love me?”
• Meditative practice: The Hosting Table
• “We can ask what's on our heart. The capacity to be in a deep transcendent relationship is our birthright.”
• “God is working in us and through us.”
• Dr. Gary Weaver on trauma and spiritual or moral injury
• Urgency and hope, curiosity and openness
• Neuro-docking station: “There’s one spiritual brain and we all have it.”
• The research that led to The Awakened Brain
• “Every single one of us is born with natural spirituality. There's an innate Human capacity and every single, just as we have two eyes, two ears and a nose, we are born with a neuro-docking station, the capacity through which to experience a transcendent, living relationship.”
• Longitudinal research on twins
• “This capacity to perceive and feel and know a transcendent relationship is one-third innate. We are all born with the wiring hardwired, but two-thirds environmentally formed.”
• Ken Kendler: What is the awakened brain?
• Neurological correlates while people told sacred stories of transcendent relationship. “The same neural correlates ran in every single person.”
• “Loved, held, guided, and never alone.”
• Supporting religious people across faith traditions
• Lisa Miller’s personal struggle with infertility and the desire to have a child
• Meditative practice: The Trail Angel Exercise
• “Less cogitative, and more exciting”
• “Are we actually discoverers of our journey where we don't get what we want, we get something so much better?”
• “Where in your road of life is God? Where is your higher power? What is the deep nature of life?”
• The difficult balance between achievement and awakening—action and contemplation
• Head, heart, and hand
• “We are knowers in many forms.”
• “We can use all forms of knowing together, and when we do, we can literally track on an MRI. That we have built highways, if you will, myelinated tracks between regions of the brain, multiple organic forms of knowing, different inborn epistemologies, and we have a far more rich engagement with life because we are engaging through all of our channels of knowing.”
• Knowledge, spirituality, and our connection to the world
• Neuroplasticity and adaptation to the lived environment
• Resilience, depression, and hope
• As of September 2022—48 percent of Gen Z “reported moderate levels of a disease of despair. The rate of death by suicide rivals the rate of death by auto accident. All three of my Gen Z kids have talked someone back from suicide.”
• “There is radical desanctification of life in the youth culture that is transmitted through the phone. So the phone is not the problem. It's not the phone. It, because the phone could have been a source for great spiritual connection. And in some cases is. But very often the phone is a place where a culture is transmitted that is effectively a public square minus a spiritual core. It is radically transactional, what can you do for me? It is radically material, what do you look like, what do you have, what are you going to vacation? It is It's basically a big golden calf delivered over the phone.”
• Spirituality and the spiritual muscle of the awakened brain is neuroprotective against depression
• “Beyond-the-self love”
• “It is relational spirituality beyond the self love and whether I am feeling that deep loved, I'm loved, felt guided by God or I show up as to be loving, holding and guiding of my family or my neighbor in need. I'm using the same neuro docking station and in fact, of all the dimensions of live spiritual life, that which most strengthens. The awakened brain is love of neighbor to one another. We are able to draw closer to God, which strengthened the awakened brain.”
• Having a strong spirituality: 250 percent more likely to have gotten there through profound struggle and depression within the past 10 years.
• Long-term clinical study vs fMRI studies and giving of alpha-energy
• “Is love real? Is God real?”
• “We have the equipment, but we have to use it. We have to develop it.”
• The hard work of meaning-making
• How to help children move towards transcendent love
• Authentic inner spiritual awareness
• Religion vs spirituality
• Religion and faith tradition is 100% environmentally transmitted
• Spirituality is 1/3 innate, 2/3 environmentally transmitted
• Lisa’s early childhood experience of her Jewish faith and the love her mother
• Spirituality and democracy
• How spiritual pluralism and spiritual diversity can impact public life
• “We hold these truths to be sacred…”
• Finding common ground through shared spiritual dignity
• “Democracy is a verb.”
• “Our soul's code, our natural telos in relationship to fellow human beings and fellow living beings … in relationship to others, we go together. And we go together whether or not we're Republicans or Democrats. And we go together whether or not we agree or disagree. We are souls on earth going together on a journey.”
• Invoking generosity on all sides
• What is thriving to Lisa Miller?
• “Living in alignment with God’s will.”
• Pam King’s takeaways from her conversation with Lisa Miller:
• Our brains are amazing.
• Our spiritual capacity is like a muscle we can exercise with daily practices of attention, meditation, imagination and prayer.
• And we hold the spiritual capacity for transcendence. In common with each other, it's knit into our relational essence as human beings.
• We can find a renewed sense of agency and power and resilience when we open up to what's inside: our feelings, our senses, our perceptions, and our core experience of God.
• Healthy spirituality allows us to know and experience that we are loved, held, guided, and never alone.

About the Thrive Center

• Learn more at thethrivecenter.org.
• Follow us on Instagram @thrivecenter
• Follow us on X @thrivecenter
• Follow us on LinkedIn @thethrivecenter

About Dr. Pam King

Dr. Pam King is Executive Director the Thrive Center and is Peter L. Benson Professor of Applied Developmental Science at Fuller School of Psychology & Marriage and Family Therapy.  Follow her @drpamking.

About With & For

• Host: Pam King
• Senior Director and Producer: Jill Westbrook
• Operations Manager: Lauren Kim
• Social Media Graphic Designer: Wren Juergensen
• Consulting Producer: Evan Rosa

Special thanks to the team at Fuller Studio and the Fuller School of Psychology & Marriage and Family Therapy.