Curt Thompson Quotes

Remember that emotion is not a debatable phenomenon. It is an authentic reflection of our subjective experience, one that is best served by attending to it.

my neuro-buddy Curt Thompson likes to say we all come into the world looking for someone looking for us.

What do I pay attention to? Paul says that what we pay attention to doubles back and governs us. Hence our attention is deeply associated with either death or life.

Healing shame requires our being vulnerable with other people in embodied actions. There is no other way, but shame will, as we will see, attempt to convince us otherwise.

what we do with shame on an individual level has potentially geometric consequences for any of the social systems we occupy, be that our family, place of employment, church or larger community. It

even though you cannot change the events of your story, you can change the way you experience your story. Have

Being known. Our Western world has long emphasized knowledge—factual information and “proof”—over the process of being known by God and others. No wonder, then, that despite all our technological advancements and the proliferation of social media, we are more intra- and interpersonally isolated than ever. Yet it is only when we are known that we are positioned to become conduits of love. And it is love that transforms our minds, makes forgiveness possible, and weaves a community of disparate people into the tapestry of God’s family. Attention.

In your life, God’s “way” is about loving him and loving your neighbor with all the parts of you. And this is hard work, especially for those parts of your “heart, soul, and mind” that have not had much practice doing that—the wounded parts, the weak parts, or the functions, such as memory or emotion, that you may not pay much attention to.

Researchers have described shame as a feeling that is deeply associated with a person’s sense of self, apart from any interactions with others; guilt, on the other hand, emerges as a result of something I have done that negatively affects someone else. Guilt is something I feel because I have done something bad. Shame is something I feel because I am bad.

What they needed from me was not, first, right theology; they needed me to be their embodied imaginer of beauty, if you will, while their brains tried to catch up.

Who would we become if we could see the moments we occupy as opportunities to create beauty, not least on our relational canvases?

We are born into this world looking for the face looking for us.

that life is not about not being messy but about being creative with the messes we have;

Our vulnerability, ultimately to potential abandonment (of which shame is the herald), is simultaneously both the source of all that is broken in our world as well as its redemption.

In particular, he said that an important part of how people change—not just their experiences, but also their brains—is through the process of telling their stories to an empathic listener.

In other words, we will be aware of (know) God, others and ourselves in the same manner as we experience God’s awareness of us. There is no hint of shame in his gaze or his voice. Our attention is drawn so irresistibly to him and how he is attending to us that we lose all awareness of the shame that has for so long kept parts of us hiding in the dark. Toward that end we need to pay attention to the things that are the summation of our lives: faith, hope and love. To live faithfully is to trust, to deeply attune to the presence of the Holy Spirit in whom we live and move and have our being. As we live faithfully, we actively imagine that he joyfully delights in being in our presence, and that all we do, we do with God, mindful that we live in dependence on him and each other.

sexual addiction. During their initial period of abstinence, abusers often find themselves flooded with emotions they do not yet have the mental or spiritual maturity to regulate, and as a result, quickly return to their old habits.

But narratives are not the only instruments within Scripture that can help us integrate our minds and lives. Poetry is another powerful literary tool. It has several distinct features:    By activating our sense of rhythm, poetry accesses our right-mode operations and systems.    Reading poetry has the effect of catching us off guard. Our imaginations are invigorated when our usual linear expectations of prose (that one word will follow obediently behind another on the way to a predictable end) don’t apply. This can stimulate buried emotional states and layers of memory.    Finally, poetry not only appeals to right-mode processing, but to left mode as well, given its use of language. This makes it a powerful integrative tool.

Left-brain mental processing disregards the right-brain emotional elements of trust that are necessary for life to thrive. When I know that I know something because I can logically prove it, I step away from trust. When I no longer trust, I am no longer open to being known, to relationship, to love.

When much of our lives has been committed to protecting ourselves from the God we believe has betrayed us, left us, or at the very least simply never shown up, it is not easy to create new brain-cell firing patterns—neural networks—that are durable enough to carry our experiential belief that we are loved.

But beyond this, and even more important, my problem is not just what I am sensing but that I do not feel adequate to respond to it. I perceive, beginning at nonconscious levels of awareness, that I do not have what it takes to tolerate what I feel. I am not just sad, angry or lonely. But ultimately these feelings rest on the bedrock that I am alone with what I feel, and no one is coming to my aid. Shame undergirds other affective states because of its relationship to being left. And to be abandoned ultimately is to be in hell. This terror of being alone drives my shame-based behavior and, ironically, takes me to the very place I most fear going—to the hell of absolute isolation.

Because when our attention is firmly ensconced in the past or the future, we remain outside the present moment, the only dimension of the temporal domain of integration in which we are able to find joy and create beauty, even in the presence of our suffering. The psalmist offers a commitment to focus on something different than what we commonly do.

Research in marriage and family therapy suggests that approximately 80 percent of the emotional conflict between couples is rooted in events that predate the couple knowing each other. That’s why one of the questions I commonly ask in marriage counseling is how much of each spouse’s reaction to the other is his or her “80 percent.” In other words, how much of the conflict is not so much a direct outgrowth of a current event as something that flows from parts of their minds that are remembering?

It may be revealing to know that telling your story begins with someone else. Long before you arrive on the scene, before and then after you were conceived, people started talking about you: they talked about your gender, what you will be named, who they hope you will resemble in appearance and character (and likewise, who they hope you will not resemble). And even before this, perhaps your parents had months or even years of longing for you. Or perhaps no one longed for you, and you were eventually passed on to someone else for your care. We are all born out of preludes of beauty and tragedy, each of us with our own ratio of both. You began your life out of and into this narrative that others were already telling.

It is common for people who are depressed to have a very different understanding of their past, as well as their future, compared to when they are well. Via neuroplasticity and Hebb’s axiom, practice tends to make permanent. Thus, if we tell ourselves, using imagery and sensations as much as words, that our life isn’t going anywhere, we literally wire our brain to continue in that pattern of storytelling. It becomes an embodied reality, and no amount of theological facts that state otherwise, apart from equally embodied action, will necessarily change the story’s outcome. Robert began to see how the “facts” of his life were not immutable realities but were as much a function of the story he told himself on a moment-to-moment basis.

It is equally true that in order for me to be liberated from the shame I carry, I need someone to be able to say to me, “You’re right. You were wrong to have done this.” I need to hear that my behavior was really as bad as I think, if not worse, while simultaneously sensing that the person I am confessing to is not leaving. Shame has the effect of coaxing us into pretending that sin is not as bad as it seems; for if it really is that bad, and I have to face it, it would be too much and I fear I would be overwhelmed. When someone seeks forgiveness for the wrong they have committed, we who have been wounded must be able to acknowledge the reality of the pain inflicted if forgiveness is to be real, and if the offender’s shame is to be effectively healed.

Narrative. As our minds develop, eventually we try to make sense of our lives. We take the input from our awareness of our conscious, vertical, horizontal and memory domains, and begin to tell our stories, with most of that content being nonverbal and nonconscious in nature. This narrative is highly influenced by our most intimate attachment relationships. Thus, who I am (i.e., what I tell myself about myself in visual images, sensations and feelings as well as words) is always going to be understood in terms of my current relationships—and by current I am referring to all relationships, past or present, that currently are influencing my mind’s activity. Thus, even people who are deceased can continue to have sway over my life, depending on how I continue to process my ongoing experiences with my memory of them. This is why I can continue to have feelings of shame when I have memories of events involving a parent who is no longer living.

Not surprisingly, therefore, our patterns of attachment deeply influence the way we experience our relationship with God. For he has to deal with the same brain that we do; he engages the same proclivities we have for avoiding or being anxious about the intimacy of relationships. It is not as if we get to put our brains, which are wired in a particular way through our attachment patterns, on the shelf and somehow draw on a separate one when it comes to dealing with God. He comes to the same set of neural networks that our friends, parents, spouse, children or enemies do. In

To this God, whom we meet in Jesus, we must direct our attention if we are to know the healing of our shame. We must literally look to Jesus in embodied ways in order to know how being loved in community brings shame to its knees and lifts us up and into acts of goodness and beauty.

goodness and beauty can prevail in the face of overwhelming shame.

Secure attachment is fostered in environments in which there is a premium placed on empathy, attunement, mindfulness and the proper setting of limits

As we age, our brains become more connected within themselves and mature in healthy ways as we also become more connected in healthy ways to other people.

part of shame’s power lies in its ability to isolate, both within and between minds. The very thing that has the power to heal this emotional nausea is the reunion of those parts of us that have been separated.

if anything good or beautiful is happening, God is in the room and on the loose.

We also see that the serpent has no trouble talking about God rather than inviting the woman to have a conversation with God. This is one of shame’s most important means of creating the isolation that supports its affective gravitas. At this point the woman can begin to consider God in her own mind, by herself. She is given the opportunity to decide independently who God is and what he thinks and feels in response to her. She begins the process of analyzing God—of judging him from a distance, rather than interacting with him.

Furthermore, a necessary element of the emotion we call guilt includes empathy, if even in primitive form. In order for me to feel guilt, I must in some way simultaneously feel the pain I have caused for another. In this sense guilt tends to draw my attention to another and is often accompanied by a desire to resolve the problem by being closer to him or her [admitting a wrongdoing, seeking and being offered forgiveness]. Shame, on the other hand, separates me from others, as my awareness of what I feel is virtually consumed with my own internal sensations. Furthermore,

This way of comprehending the healthy development of the mind reminds us of the Genesis narrative which declares that we mysteriously hewn creatures are both dust and breath (Genesis 2:7); we are inseparably embodied and relational. Furthermore, this feature of integration is reflected in the psalmist’s plea that God would give him an undivided heart (Psalm 86:11), and God’s deep desire to do so while transforming hardened, disintegrated hearts into flexible, connected ones (Ezekiel 11:19). The notion that my mind comprises different parts that function well only when brought together in harmony and only with assistance from someone outside of myself is but one metaphor the writers of Scripture offer, a poetic expression of our embodied neural circuitry operating in an integrated fashion. In the same manner that God intends that our minds grow in maturity and connection, just as we do with each other, it is one of shame’s primary features to disrupt and dis-integrate that very process, functionally leading to either rigid or chaotic states of mind and behavior, lived out intra- and interpersonally.

Not surprisingly, therefore, our patterns of attachment deeply influence the way we experience our relationship with God. For he has to deal with the same brain that we do; he engages the same proclivities we have for avoiding or being anxious about the intimacy of relationships. It is not as if we get to put our brains, which are wired in a particular way through our attachment patterns, on the shelf and somehow draw on a separate one when it comes to dealing with God. He comes to the same set of neural networks that our friends, parents, spouse, children or enemies do.

Those neurons that fire together wire together. In essence, the more we practice activating particular neural networks, the more easily they are to activate, and the more permanent they become in the brain. In his epistle to the church in Rome, St. Paul suggests that renewal is possible: I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship. Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will. (Romans 12:1-2) It is fair to say that although Paul was not a neuroscientist, he refers here to what we now see through the lens of neuroplasticity. Renewal of the mind, therefore, is not just an abstraction. It means real change in real bodies.

It is also important at the outset of this book to note that I do not consider this infestation to be neutral or benign. This is not merely a felt emotion that eventually morphs into words such as “I’m bad.” As I will suggest, this phenomenon is the primary tool that evil leverages, out of which emerges everything that we would call sin. As such, it is actively, intentionally, at work both within and between individuals. Its goal is to disintegrate any and every system it targets, be that one’s personal story, a family, marriage, friendship, church, school, community, business or political system. Its power lies in its subtlety and its silence, and it will not be satisfied until all hell breaks loose. Literally.

The premise of this book, then, is that shame is not just a consequence of something our first parents did in the Garden of Eden. It is the emotional weapon that evil uses to (1) corrupt our relationships with God and each other, and (2) disintegrate any and all gifts of vocational vision and creativity

Hearing the sharpness in her voice, which interrupts the child’s movement, he or she next hears it soften as Mom says, “Let’s go this way!” quickly moving physically to redirect the child elsewhere. Joy is not at risk of being undermined, even in the instance of limit-setting, when a parent’s mind is attuned to maintaining connection with the child.

And whenever genuine acts of goodness evoke responses of distress, you can count on shame being at work, accusing those very neighbors, albeit unconsciously, of their complicity.

When the time came for Carla to consider coming clean about her affair—and about her lifelong striving to be seen, to be heard, to be enough—I mentioned that I imagined Jesus, far from looking at her with impatience, might more likely tell her that he knows, despite its necessity, just how painfully hard it is to expose herself, given shame’s power.

In an environment where we are unafraid, mistakes are not our enemies but our friends.

With little to no awareness, we seamlessly respond to shame with judgment, which emerges as words. But more significantly, these words carry the emotional arrows slung as much at ourselves as they are at others.

Her shame required a community to realize the fullness of its healing.

Vulnerability is not a question of if but rather to what degree. This does not imply that we have no choices of being more openly so, but it is an illusion to believe that we are not vulnerable. It is something we can hide but not that we can eliminate. The question, then, is not if we are or will be vulnerable but rather how and when we enter into it consciously and intentionally for the sake of creating a world of goodness and beauty.

I not only feel bad, I have the sense that I am bad, independent of any role played by someone outside of me. However, it is important to note (especially later as we explore the world of storytelling) that no one ever feels the sharp sting of shame apart from an initial encounter with someone else that, despite perhaps even having no conscious intention to do so, activates the shame response.

In 1 Corinthians 12:4-11 Paul describes how the body of Christ develops as a gathering of people with different strengths and capacities. There are different kinds of gifts, but the same Spirit distributes them. There are different kinds of service, but the same Lord. There are different kinds of working, but in all of them and in everyone it is the same God at work.

This is why we wear clothes, live in houses and have speed limits. So much of what we do in life is designed, among other things, to protect us from the fact that we are vulnerable at all times. To be human is to be vulnerable.

it seems to emerge fully and only from deep within the dungeon of my own mind.

As Siegel has said, of all the variables that encourage the development of secure attachment in a child, the single most powerful one is the degree to which the child’s parent has made coherent sense of his or her own story.

The story of Scripture tells us that Jesus has not just come to make peace—rather, he himself is that very peace.

I’ve come to call what I experienced the process of being known. This is a much deeper and richer experience than simply knowing the bare facts of my story. It reflects what neuroscience and related disciplines are teaching us about what it means to live an integrated life—both as an individual and as part of a community.

When we find ourselves on the low road, metaphorically the PFC has come unhinged. Neurologically it has become less efficiently connected to the other parts of the brain that are sending messages to it. On the low road we do not regulate our bodies well; we do not attune to others’ emotional states; our emotions are unbalanced and our responses are rigid. We leave no space for empathy and therefore limit our insight; fear becomes our gyroscope, overwhelming our capacity to attend to our bodies and making it impossible for us to intuit internal and external situations with wisdom. Ultimately this leads to poor moral choices. This entire process gives new meaning to the expression “He flipped his lid.

Those we shepherd, for example, will flourish in a culture that exposes shame, allowing room for healing and creativity.

First, shame is not something that infests only individuals. It is endemic in systems, and any system run by it will seek to maintain its equilibrium. Shame will not share its authority.

We push back against the inertia of systemic shame through the weight of a body of people who are collectively engaging in trusting confession, reminding each other of the “great cloud of witnesses.” Thus, the need for us to be regularly gathering in places where we are “finding” each other, just as Jesus found the blind man after he had been put out of the synagogue (John 9:35). He found him and gave him the reward for his trust—seeing Jesus face to face.

Third, we assume that whenever shame is dealt with properly, all interested parties will be happy about it. Our story from John 9 reminds us that this is not always the case. Naming and despising shame, while liberating, will also necessarily reveal all who are actively responsible for propagating it. It would not be hard to imagine, for instance, that when Jesus heals the man, creating space for God’s works to be revealed in him (v. 3), he necessarily confronts a community that has understood this man’s life in terms of something that was wrong with him. There was no evidence of people rushing up to Jesus, urgently asking him to come and heal their blind friend. Healing did not bring comfort and joy to the neighbors. Rather, it brought distress. And whenever genuine acts of goodness evoke responses of distress, you can count on shame being at work, accusing those very neighbors, albeit unconsciously, of their complicity.

From the family room to the business lunch to the PTA meeting, there is opportunity for shame to be exposed and healed. And in any of these places, that healing may be met with resistance. For this reason we must routinely engage in confessional communities where we can tell our life stories, reminding ourselves of the joy found in the practice of shame-free emotional nakedness.

It seems to me that one way to express their perspective is to say that if we can reduce our experience (in this case, of God) to that which we can measure (our genes and our neurons), we can eliminate the necessity of the God we thought existed.

In his book Anatomy of the Soul, psychologist Curt Thompson referenced work done by Daniel Siegel about compassionate listening: An important part of how people change—not just their experiences, but also their brains—is through the process of telling their stories to an empathetic listener. When a person tells her story and is truly heard and understood, both she and the listener undergo actual changes in their brain circuitry. They feel a greater sense of emotional and relational connection, decreased anxiety, and greater awareness of and compassion for others’ suffering.