What if your family's biggest problem isn't the person acting out — it's the system they're trapped in?

00:00:01 Speaker 1: The world is becoming increasingly proficient at telling stories that deny God. As such, we need Thinking Christian to become as natural as breathing. Welcome to the Thinking Christian Podcast. I'm doctor James Spencer. Through calm, thoughtful theological discussions, Thinking Christian highlights the ways God is working in the world and questions the underlying social, cultural, and political assumptions that hinder Christians from becoming more like Christ. Now on to today's episode of Thinking Christian. Hey, everyone, welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian. I'm doctor James Spencer, joined by my co host Ashishin Varma, and today we're joined by a special guest, David J. 00:00:37 Speaker 2: Van Dyke. 00:00:38 Speaker 1: David is a professor at Wheaton College, head of the Marriage and Family Therapy program, and co host with his wife Tara on the With You podcast. And they also have a book coming out with IVP, so plenty of stuff going on. The IVP books out this February. I think you said right right, so very good. Well, welcome to the podcast, David, Thanks for being here. 00:01:02 Speaker 3: Thanks James, I'm glad to be here. 00:01:05 Speaker 1: Yeah, So talk a little bit about maybe we just kind of jump in a little bit but what do you talk to us a little bit about how marriage and family therapy works at Wheaton College. So within the program you oversee what's the overwriting philosophy of marriage and family therapy and how do you all think about it? 00:01:22 Speaker 2: And then maybe we can jump off questions there. 00:01:25 Speaker 3: Yeah, I think the first thing I always try to help people understand is marriage and family therapy is very different from counseling and from clinical psychology. And everybody thinks when you think of mental health, it's just psychology in general. Marriage and family therapy is a way of thinking about health and pathology from a relational, systemic way. So the easiest way to describe that is, if someone is diagnosed with depression, it's more of the family depression that resides in the individual than it is just the individual's biology. And neurobiology matters. Medications really important in treating some mental health things, but we're looking at the relational side of it of how it helps create maintain that symptom and that the symptom serves the system rather than just individuals. So when you think about clinical psychology, they're doing testing looking at kind of what are the root causes within the individual counselors are looking at resilience of the individual. Marriage and family therapists are looking at the relationship. And this can be working with an individual thinking about the relationships that they're in, the actual relationships like marriage and family members coming in or even consulting with churches. So you think about pastor's moral failure, it ends up being a congregational issue than just that was a bad hire. 00:02:53 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:02:54 Speaker 1: Interesting, I mean I was first, I think I was first probably introduced to marriage and family therapy side of seminary by Edwin Friedman's book Failure of Nerve, where he talks a lot about marriage to family systems, and so what it sounds like you're describing is very similar to what he's describing. Would that be from a layman's perspective, pretty accurate. 00:03:14 Speaker 3: Swedman took one specific kind of family systems theory. It's called from Murray Bowen Bowanian family therapy, and so he took that and really applied it to congregations and to synagogues and actually to leadership of looking. He talks a lot about non anxious presence and it's kind of the center of the person. Nowadays we talk about neurobiology so we talk about the limbic system and the prefrontal cortex. But if you think of fight or flight, we have a reaction that if I'm not feeling comfortable with you, James, or with you Ishiesh, I'm going to get reactive, and that reactivity is going to be informed by my family of origin. So if our family never talked about things, my response to a perceived threat will probably be shutting down. If I come from a highly conflictual family, I'll come after you. But it's a default mode, and Friedman talks about that in terms of individual leadership but also within the congregation of how do we get centered and acknowledge our feelings, understand what's being evoked by the context that we're in, and then intentionally that kind of executive functioning of our brain respond to what's going on rather than just reactive. I'm sure neither one of you have ever been reactive, and so you only work from that executive functioning. Yeah. 00:04:35 Speaker 1: I don't even understand what you're talking about. So it's what are these reactions you're talking about? Maybe it's yes, it's like Freedman, Yeah, yep, exactly. So Freeman is more narrow though than what you guys would do. Like, he's really applying a fairly one specific theory and there are multiple theories of which I'm just not aware. 00:04:57 Speaker 2: That's what I'm hearing. 00:04:58 Speaker 3: Yeah, he just one specific theorist and there's I don't know, probably thirty five that are commonly accepted. So it's different ways of attacking relationships, maybe not attacking addressing relationships. 00:05:14 Speaker 2: Either way. 00:05:16 Speaker 3: Yeah, I tend to be more sports minded, so you know, therapy is a competition, you know. 00:05:23 Speaker 4: Competition, reaction, attack. That sounds sounds like sports perfectly to me. 00:05:28 Speaker 3: That's right, And it's marketing. 00:05:30 Speaker 2: Right. 00:05:30 Speaker 3: If I work from a bone and want people to be more intentional, you have to create a little anxiety. 00:05:36 Speaker 4: That's marketing, job job satisfaction right there. 00:05:40 Speaker 2: Right, that's right, that's right. 00:05:44 Speaker 1: When you when you think about doing marriage and family therapy. So we've I've had other counselors on and they really just do more one on one counseling. But part of what I find interesting what you're saying is when you think about and you mentioned it, like when a pastor has some sort of moral fail, it becomes a congregational issue, it becomes a family issue. How do you how do you train students to think through the overlapping domains there. So, in other words, you've got the family and the organization sort of butting up against each other and it creates this whole complex of problems that you know you've got multiplied across multiple things. 00:06:24 Speaker 3: Yeah, it's not for family. Therapy is not for the faint of heart because there's so many movings and quite frankly, a lot of people, because of the individual culture here in the US, are are only thinking about the internal state, the emotional and the thoughts of the individual. I want to be careful how I say this, because I don't want to kind of clipped out. But I'm not really interested in the stories that families are telling. I'm interested in the way that they're interacting around the stories. So psychologist counselors are going to delve into the meaning. Their questions are going to be more why why are you feeling that way? Why are you doing that? Why are you thinking that? I'm more interested in how and what so when that happens for you as ye, how do you respond or how James, how does your family respond to you when you're doing that? I'm going to be tracking the relational piece that informs or shapes that and so getting students to think think relationally. And part of it's about I mean, if you've noticed already I like doing interaction. So pulling people into interaction with me as I teach to give them a new experience, then maybe what they anticipate that counseling would be. And we have it set up in a developmental frame our students. We have a clinic at Wheaton College that's just for relational purposes. We work with individuals, couples, families, but we're mainly thinking systemically. And so the first eight weeks the students start, they watch me or one of my faculty doing the therapy and they're we're on camera, and then we take a break from the family. They stay in the room. We talk with the students of here's what I'm thinking, here's what I'm doing, what would you do in the room? Go back and do it. So they observe us for about two months, and then we divide them into groups and one or two of them are working with families and we are the rest of the team and myself are behind the mirror and they're doing the work or behind the camera and then they come in and so we have them see it, we have them kind of sweat it out and do it and just have all sorts of anxiety. So a lot of that supervision is just like, don't forget to breathe, don't forget to stay in your body, be a normal human being and respond. And then we send them out into the wild in their second year, and we have placement partners all over the Chicagoland area. So that's the mechanism of how we do it. It's very experiential. It's what we say in supervision even isn't as important as how I'm interacting with them around supervision. So I'll model what I want them to do more than tell them. There's in teaching they talk about you can tell, teach and model, and we really try to do the modeling of the experience that so that they'll go in and do the same thing rather than saying, okay, focus on emotion because that tends to be more of the individual approach. 00:09:24 Speaker 4: So within that, can you help me understand a little bit more? You said you you don't like to hear, or you're not interested in what the story is. Now a lot of times we'll talk about how a story shapes a person, how they get to where they are. So I'm assuming within that it's not that you don't want to hear the story. What what exactly do you mean within that? 00:09:47 Speaker 3: Yeah, that's fair, I would say, I think, I think I do. I'm not interested in the story. I'm interested in what the story does. So it's like C. S. Lewis Chronicle of Narnia or or Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. The story is interesting, but what it does is more interesting to me. How it's moving the reader, the kind of the myth of what's being talked about speaks to kind of a deeper truth. And in families and in churches, you talk about certain things over and over again. I'm interested in what that does more than oh, that's a fascinating story. Tell me more. There is approach of systems where we look at the dominant discourse. It's called narrative family therapy. That there's major stories that we tell. We tell about ourselves, we tell about our spouses, we tell about our kids, and we look at you know, maybe that story has you stuck from new possibilities as a family. So not in the church sense, but in the therapeutic sense, we kind of deconstruct that story. We pull that story apart and look for minor, minor narratives that maybe are underneath exceptions, if you will, Like no one can do everything all the time, and so we look for exceptions. So you might say, oh, James is a bad boy, Well, that's a narrative about antich nature, Like the essence of James is bad. There might be a way of languaging that of saying, oh, James made a bad life choice there, or James made a bad choice to hit his sister. And if we just in doing that, the behavior still is the same. James still has done something. The story is there, but the function of one is about his self worth and one is about the behavior. And so we look at like that. That's how I think about story. It's what it does more than oh, I can't wait to get to the ending. Well, the ending is the function of the way it's happening, and so we can play with the way that's happening to get to a new outcome. One thing that really disturbs my students is when I first meet them, I say, you know, people come to me and say I have this problem and I want you to solve it. And my response as a clinician is, I have no idea, idea if we're going to solve that or not, but I'm going to help you respond differently and there'll be a likelihood of a different outcome. And I think that goes to thinking christianly, because if I could say you come to me and I'll do something to you to get a different outcome, that's very godlike. I'm not smart enough. Maybe there's some therapists out there that are smarter than me and can kind of promise that they can get that outcome for you. For me, I understand, I'm limited. I can't get all the pieces to James point. There's so many layers interacting we can't know them all all the time. So we approximate it and go, let's try something different to see if we get a different outcome. And it's called second order change. We're not going to change the behavior, We're going to change the rules to the system. 00:12:51 Speaker 2: How much so. 00:12:53 Speaker 1: I came out of Biblical studies, my PhD's in Old Testament. I did a lot with hermeneutics, and when we think through hermeneutics, this is a lot of the way, in the best sense of the term hermeneutics. I've been taught to think about these things, right, you think about the how you think about the actual process of interpretation. You don't think about the destination, although the destination always matters, right, But you don't think about the destination. You're thinking about how do I go about this process? And I think, as I've gotten older and just done more of it, what I've realized is that some of the things like that I've read in Friedman or other places, this sort of relational component that you're talking about has an awful lot to do with hermeneutics. The negotiation of doctrine. Hashish and I have actually talked about this offline, sort of like that it part of the problem we see in the church. And don't only put words in your mouth, Hashish, but part of the problem, at least I see in the Church is that we tend to get too narrow right and stuck in a doctrine, so that doctrine functionally becomes what the Bible should be. You know, our interpretations start to rule things, or they become too broad so that they mean nothing and there are no real guard rails and we have no particular you know, boundaries that we could set. And so then the way you're the way you're describing what you do in marriage and family therapy feels to me like what I'm trying to do when I talk to two people in churches about look, negotiate the boundaries, recognize that you may be off one way or the other, but then just admit that you're off one way or the other and try to get a little bit, you know, recalibrate. 00:14:36 Speaker 2: Right, it's that constant recalibration. 00:14:38 Speaker 1: So I'm wondering how you think about that or if you have any insight into you know, the hermeneutical moves that that marriage and family systems might actually engender within other fields. 00:14:51 Speaker 3: Yeah, I think I think you kind of get right to the heart of it there. One of the biggest critiques in doing integration with marriage or family therapy and Christianity is that it's not content based. So marriage and family therapy is process oriented, and to the farthest extent of it, it's a moral, but there's no morality to it, like here's the best way to have a marriage, here's the best way to have a family. There, and so that can be kind of a challenge from the church side of things of well, there's right and wrong, and I'm like, yes, I don't disagree there's right and wrong. This tool doesn't determine right and wrong, but it provides the way of accessing right and wrong based on whatever your foundational core is. So, if it's christ we have an understanding of what's right and wrong, and then we have this tool, whether it's a hermeneutical tool or a marriage and family therapy tool, to help the process to more and more approximate what we're looking at as an outcome. As a clinician working in the regulatory body and working in the community, not in the Christian community, but just in the community in general, my job is to enter in and look at how is a system not working, how it's stuck. So I think you're talking about boundaries there. How do we get unstuck? And the challenge is it's not unstuck in that I think you should do it this way. It's unstuck to see what emerges and that makes people uncomfortable, and I think it does both in family therapy and in hermeneutics. Of there's a desire of take me by the hand, walk me, tell me exactly what I need to do to get there. Unfortunately, Yeah, like you're saying, I'm a lot older than you, and as we get older, we realize the more tightly we hold to trying to control that, the more we live for the fall. Right. I mean, that's what bond we're talking about. We've become the arbitrator of right and wrong. We live in the place where God is living, and it's seduction for us, as in I'm sure in seminary and in the church there's a there's a pull towards tell me, just tell me, and there's a poll for young clinicians to just like, hey, can you fix this? And I'm like, that's why we call our company and our podcast with you is what we can promise is will be with you in this. We don't promise any outcome. I can't go, oh you do pre marital with me. I'll give you a stamp of approval that your marriage is going to last fifty years. Well that's that's you say it out loud, it's ridiculous, But actually underneath, that's the that's the precepts that we're working on. And I think that's for me. I think we're on the on the same kind of trajectory as you're talking about metis now. 00:17:41 Speaker 1: I like the idea that emergence. The Knuffin framework is one that I've used. So I teach in the m A program at Wheaton College of the Leadership Program, and so I do the Biblical Yeah, yeah, so I do. I do a course called Biblical and Theological Foundations of Leadership, and part of what we addressed in there is the Conuffin framework, and it has this whole sort of idea that when you're in a complex or chaotic situation, what you're trying to do is manage back down to the complex. And then you know, in a chaotic situation, you're trying to manage back down to the complex and then allow the solutions to emerge from that complex environment. When you have that sort of simple like my tire was flat, so I changed it sort of one to one logic, right. You know, when it's a simple relationship, you can have solutions that are relatively straightforward, right, But in complex relationships or even complicated relationships, sometimes you have to let the system sort of solve the problem for you. Almost you have to wait for it. And I think that for aspiring leaders, that's a really helpful way of thinking about it. And then when they think about, okay, what is the biblical theological foundation for that, it's like, well, now you've got this whole set of dispositions and behavehaviors that you could actually implement in any given moment, but they may look very radically different depending on the time, and so you know, you can illustrate those through a number of different biblical characters. 00:19:11 Speaker 2: You know, like you're telling me David. 00:19:14 Speaker 1: Never war armor into battle, or that he just didn't wear armor into battle when he fought Goliath, right, like that kind of idea, and it's like, there's something unique about that one moment that wearing the armor would have been problematic, whereas in all the other times it's not problematic. And so we've got to get our heads around this idea that yes, there's a right and wrong, but that oftentimes it's also very situational and we're trying to implement and execute something that's appropriate fitting within that setting. But I love that emergence language. I just think it's I think it's super helpful for people when they start to realize that, oh, the solution is just going to pop up somehow as long as I keep responding in an appropriate fashion. 00:20:00 Speaker 3: I was working with it. I'll tell you stories about all the skies enough that you know, good clinical item. But I was working with his family that came to me and they were frustrated with their son and he was not complying to the family rules. And I'm like, well, tell me about it, and they're like, well he was. He was misbehaving. So we took access to the car. He continued to misbehave, we took access to his phone, and so then he just hung out in his room. So then we took his computer, and his behavior continued to exist the same way. So we took his door because he was just locking himself in his room, and then we took his bed, and they said we finally came for family therapy because there was nothing, nothing left to take and they were trying that single tool, if he will hammer to fix it, and it was like, we actually have to look at what his behavior is serving for the larger system. So he's he's keeping you all engaged. So I was like, thank you, Billy for bringing your family in the therapy. You've been working really, really hard. To get everybody to the point, and U and the parents look at me like I'm crazy, But Billy smiles and he in some level he gets it right. His behavior isn't his own. His behavior is part of a larger system. And I'm like, what what if we responded differently? What if we change the rules of the game back to competition? Right, We're working according to a certain set of rules. Those rules developed over time and were necessary for that historical period of time in our family, in the Church, in the for the Hebrew people. Uh. And then context change. How does the how does the moral core stay the same? But the expression might need to change? And we call that systemic change. We kind of change change the rules of the game. We don't change the morals, but we change the rules. And I think it taps into the salvation story. If you look at the arc of scripture and you guys have gone to some you know this, but I'll give a quick quick telling of it. Of this is kind of how I talk about marriage and family therapy integrated with Christianity. We are created for intimacy in the garden. Whether your theological anthropology is relational, structural, functional, multi dimensional, We're created for intimacy, and God values intimacy. He pursues us. It's good for us not to be alone, to be in human relationships and in relationships with Him. We violate that and we get kicked out of the garden. He pursues us in the tabernacle, he pursues us in the temple. He pursues us. When we can't respond, He gives us the law of like. And the more we try to actually do the law, the more we were doing it. We're trying to reconcile the relationship which we can and we continue to be our own be our own gods rather than leaning into him. Then he comes in the incarnation, and in the Incarnation, Paul talks about the new covenant. It's a systemic change. The rules of the game have changed, and now there's a potential in responding to Jesus that we can have a different trajectory. It doesn't mean that necessary, depending on your theology. Everybody chooses that limited it. Tom, I'm not going to get into all of that, but there's a possibility because of the incarnation, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, there's a new possibility for right relationship with God and then we see the end of the story in Revelation twenty one and twenty two, seeing God face to face and that deep intimacy again. So for me, the arc of Scripture is a relational rupture and repair story, and we can see the systemic change of at just the right time, there was a systemic intervention. What used to work wasn't working. Christ came in and changed the rules of the game that allowed for something new for me and for kind of those that I train and oversee. That's what I want them to see. We get to be christ Like, not necessarily in proclaiming the Gospel, but modeling that systemic change in the therapy room with families, with churches, with congregations. That that's the difference, which is very different than the individual psychology kind of way that they're doing integration. Sorry, I get excited, I get going. I'm sure you have lots of questions, but that's kind of what you stimulated in my head. James. 00:24:27 Speaker 4: Yeah, that's great. Can I jump off of that and yeah, maybe pinpoint some dynamics there that I find especially interesting. So kind of pulling together a lot of the strands you've been talking about. I find this very interesting, we've come to a place. 00:24:45 Speaker 2: I think. 00:24:47 Speaker 4: Clinical work has especially been important in helping us understand this. That we are unreliable narrators. We have a tendency to be very open to suggestion, especially when we are already you know, we can push back really well, we're good at that. But when we're comfortable with the situation, when we trust someone, or when somebody is able to speak in a way that is more amenable to our wants or desires or our ways of framing things, we can be very open to the suggestion at the same time, and so we end up having these forms of narration coming together in ways that may or may not actually be helpful to understanding how we get to the present. And now we throw in this dynamic of there are multiple narrations. So I think about the family environment of what you were just describing, where a parent might think, what are you talking about? You're crazy? Why would you describe things this way? Whereas the sun he smiles to me. That signals they both, you know, assuming one narration from the parents, which is probably not already the case, and one from the child. They're entering in this environment thinking very differently about how they got there. Yeah, and yet on your side, you know what you experience in that moment, right, you get the smile on one side, the frustration on the other side. How do you leverage both of those reactions at the same time in order for it to be a productive environment for both sides. 00:26:21 Speaker 3: Yeah, great question, and this will be you know you know me is she? So my answer would be it depends is the which I starting bank, But it depends because I'm going to think about how that system is actually working, and my response is going to be unique to how they're holding those narrations and those what those narrations are doing. So sometimes I might side with the parent just to depending on how things are working, or side with the child or you all are wrong. So there's a theorist called Salvador Manuchin. He did structural family therapy. He said every family he ever saw over sixty years of clinical work was wrong. Why they came into therapy because he said, if they were right, they would have fixed it, and so their stories, the way they were organized was off, and his job was to enter in and give them a different experience, which often meant he looked a little crazy because he was responding if you think about our interactions. We're always giving each other emotional bids to respond in a certain way. The way we frame our questions, the way we position where we have eye contact, how we position our body. Do we meet in shared location, do I meet with you in the church? Do I make you come to my office? All of those things, in a very subtle and unaware way shape our behavior. And as a family therapist, I'm going to listen to all those narrations. I'm going to feel I've done enough work and done this long enough. I can feel the polls in my body, so I can feel how a parent is trying to make me side with them, or trying to turn me against the child, or the child's trying to be really negative about the parent and get me to feel negative about them. I sense all those dynamics because I've had lots of reps, right, I've had a lot of iterations to see that, And so I'm going to figure out how do I position myself given all the relational play that's going on in the room. For a young clinician, for a pastor that's trying to do marriage or family work, they can have some basic skills, but pretty quickly if the system isn't flexible, they're going to be over their skis and feel stuck. And then when we get stuck, we start blaming. I'm going to blame the parent, I'm going to blame the child, I'm going to blame the system, I'm going to blame the pastor well, when blame happens, it's because we haven't figured out what are all those narratives, what are the polls, and how we can respond differently? Does that make sense as it does? 00:28:59 Speaker 2: Yeah? 00:29:00 Speaker 3: Yeah, and so it's hard for me to give like one answer of how to do that. It's a process and you can kind of track like it's hard once you start seeing things systemically, it messes with your whole world because I can see kind of from from an individual experience up to kind of geopolitical of what's going on now. There's lots of lots of bids and lots of different rules in ways things are organizing, whether it's right or wrong behavior. To get out of it, we have to realize what the game's being played, and it's not necessarily the outcome that we have to attend to. But I think in Western society we tend to be very outcome based kind of proverbs wisdom based, if we do this, then we'll have long life. If we obey our parents, things will go well with us, and if we don't, bad things will happen. Well, there's two other wisdom books. There's the kind of perspective wisdom books in terms of Ecclesiastes of saying, well, yeah, but really you're just vapor, you're heavil or getting to job where there was something bigger, talk about perspective, there's something bigger going on. His suffering wasn't a function of any direct thing he his family. It was a spiritual kind of situation that was going on of does humanity love God for who God is or only what he does? And God's response in the end of Job isn't to deal with his suffering, isn't to explain. He gives perspective like let's talk about inanimate objects. How much control do you have over that? Oh, let's talk about animate objects in people and animals and ostriches, and it's like, what is going on here? Well, God's kind of giving a systemic perspective of there's pieces here working that you have no understanding of, and you're part of this do you trust me? Do you love me? Do you believe I have the best for you even in suffering for me? This system's perspective fits within that wisdom literature and how I try to then help students, help pastors kind of enter into suffering and the narratives around that in different ways. 00:31:10 Speaker 4: Yeah, that's great, And obviously a major difference between the job dynamic and ours is that at least we can look at the framing of how God is asking the questions and say, well, God it, God can answer those questions. He's just posing him in our case, in the therapist's case, in your case. Right, it's you don't even have that benefit. So now you're sitting in the midst of sometimes subconscious or unconscious varying narrations. 00:31:38 Speaker 3: Right. 00:31:39 Speaker 4: I think part of that reality being unreliable narratives is we don't even know that we're being unreliable. So many things have suggested themselves to us and interwoven with our experience of an event that even after the fact, those can change. But then you've got the dynamics you're drawing in as well, that sometimes there's power plays, right, Yeah, And what I appreciate, and this is going to betray a bit. We're talking sports, so I may as well bring in sports. It betrays my my tutelage from the great Chicago Bulls coach Phil Jackson, who brought this up before, but he says he was very adamant in telling his team and convincing his team that yes, obviously we're trying to win a championship, but we don't get from the beginning of the season to the end of the season with merely that goal. It's about being attentive to every step, and it's a thousand foot journey or a thousand step Journey'd constantly be reminding them, and I think you really convinced them of it, and that's what made those teams so consistently good. And I, you know, maybe wrong source of wisdom, but to me, that's been an important lesson that I've tried to carry into everything. Right, you know, whether you're teaching a class. I've had the privilege of teaching several of the classes, some of the students in your cohorts with the marriage and family therapy, and I've tried to engage them in a way where I say, think less about where we're going and think more about how the actually matters, that the journey matters. So we're building here, and it seems to me like that's very much the mindset you're trying to bring into therapy, right that where we end up obviously does matter. You want that, you want that child and those parents to have a sense of togetherness, a sense of shared dynamic within their marital or sorry, their family dynamic. But also the steps they got to be attentive to pay attention to where they are, pay attention to how they're posturing themselves, maybe in ways that they do know, or maybe in ways they don't know. Is that fair to say? 00:33:36 Speaker 3: Yeah? And it made me think of to to certain I mean, I love Phil Jackson even though I'm a Pistons fan, so I love beat the Bulls. But that's a whole other conversation. But Phil has more Eastern philosophy, right, So you were saying, absolutely, Wisdom's He's much more from a collectivist philosophy if you look at that, if you look at marriage and family therapy. So I travel the world speaking to missionaries, churches, and different societal groups globally and get so much better recognition and understanding than I do here in the States, and it's the ruggeded individualism versus more of a collectivist. I think both cultures are really really important and we can learn a lot from them. But for instance, in Illinois, there are ten thousand licensed counselors, there are five thousand licensed psychologists, and there's nine hundred and sixty eight licensed marriage and family therapists. So one in fifteen our relational focus, and it's a market force. It's the idea we think very differently as Americans, as Western philosophy, that it's about me, It's about my personal relationship with Jesus, It's about my therapist and someone to be there for me. But I bet you a suite that talks about emotions being cultural creations. And most of the study is done from a Western mindset that emotions are mental internal and it's and essential, where the rest of the world, more community based relational base are. It's external kind of mine my emotions versus ours. So it's outer, relational and situational. Well, which frame we come from is going to be how we find our solutions. And for a couple example, I tell a married couple what would it be like if they're a Christian couple coming to me, what would it be like to love your spouse as an act of worship rather than what you feel they deserve or what you're trying to get from them. Because we have a lot of transaction in our relationships. I'll do the dishes and hopefully get lucky that night. Right, it's a it's a transaction. I'm hoping to do something for you so I get something. What if I just do the dishes because I want to honor God, and I do the dishes as an active worship, It's a very different It's a very different relationship, and it frees us up to respond differently. It's also thinking about parents. I think in the seventies, eighties, and nineties when we all grew up, the Christian parenting books were very much prescriptive, if you do this, your kids will turn out okay. I mean doctor Dobson started some of that with dare to discipline and if you just do it right, not only the individual, the church, society, everything will be okay. Well, that's a very mechanistic view. And I tell parents, I'm like, so we both believe that God is our perfect father? Right, God's our father. God the Father is a perfect father. How are his kids doing. So if we really think about our behavior and we have a perfect parent, then that blaming the parent has to stop. There's not a direct back to your point, James, a one to one connection. It's much more complicated. And so I want to free parents up of like do your best. I know, I know parents that have done the best, and painful things have happened. I know parents that have done horrible things. Almost at horrible parents, language matters, parents that have done horrible things and their kids can out find there's not a direct relationship. There's a probability if we if we live rightly as best we can. To scripture and relational science, there's a likelihood of positive outcomes, but there's no guarantee. And so then why do we why do we strive? Why do we live well? Our hope is that we have a God who loves us, and we're responding from that love place rather than some kind of extrinsic I'm trying to force something to happen, make something happen. And it goes back to phil like take the next step. You don't necessarily know where this jorney's going. You have a perspective of where you'd like it to go take the next step, because that's we only can control our response, and then we'll see what the next step is after that. That's a hard space to live because it means it's letting go and having having some dependency on that. 00:38:18 Speaker 1: It's it's been interesting over the years. So I worked with smaller churches out in New England for some time my current position, and one of the things we talked about was discipleship. And as we're talking about discipleship, you know, everybody wants to understand what that is, right, and uh, and and what's the goal here? 00:38:40 Speaker 3: Right? 00:38:41 Speaker 1: Like what are we what are we shooting for? And so you got some of the similar answers. And then we started talking a little bit about the persecuted church and and I said, what if we rethought the goal of discipleship as being able to maintain our convictions even if at some point down the road in the United States we don't have the religious freedom that we have today. Is there a way for us to prepare ourselves to be so resilient and so faithful that if persecution were to come, we remain uncompromised. And I think, as I look across sort of what you do in marriage and family systems. It strikes me that that's sort of part of what has to be I guess I'm wondering, is that part of what comes into the equation. So I mean, I'll give you the story. My daughter has done gymnastics for a lot of years and when she was younger, there was a meet where she fell off the beam and she cried and was really frustrated. 00:39:33 Speaker 2: Wasn't hurt, she was just really frustrating. 00:39:35 Speaker 1: Her coach went up and very sternly said, get back up on the beam and finish your routine, right. And I'm kind of sitting along the side just not right, because I'm like, kind of I don't really want my daughter to cry, and I don't really know that getting back up on the beam is the best thing, you know, Like I've got all these things circling around in my mind. And so she got up, she did it, you know, everything was good. And then it was a few years later she fell off the beam again and she laughed. She hop back up on the beam, finished your routine and was done. And I was like, that may be the most vivid and happiest moment within her whole gymnastics career of actually watching her fall off the beam and laugh and be happy about it and get on because I'm sitting there like it built a resiliency in her that is going to carry into other aspects of her life. And I think that's just absolutely crucial. And so I guess what I'm wondering is when you do marriage and family therapy, just to kind of connect the dots on that, do you think through you know, I mean, our context is changing. There's a lot of different pressures on us. There's a lot of you know more there's a lot more instability economically, politically, whatever. But there has to be a sense, right in which we respond to each other in such a way that we can build resilience as opposed to chisel away at it. 00:40:56 Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, And would I would say in that story, you and her coach both loved her. It was just in different ways, right You were you were connected to the emotional part and wanting to soothe soothe the pain. Uh. The coach was interested in helping her work through the pain. It wasn't discounting it. It wasn't being cruel or being It could look that way from the outside because it's like emotions are tender and you know that that coach was a jerk, but it was really loving in a different way, loving to say the hard thing. But my guess is your her coach and she had a good relationship that enoughational equity was built up that he that the coach could say something that might come across in other contexts is really harsh, but was safe enough that she got up on the bean and did it and learned a lesson from that. That he was community or the coach, I don't know he or she, Yeah, she was. She was communicating your you have strength, this isn't going to break you. This is Yes, it's painful, but continue on. And you you were there like I just want to hold you. I don't want to be in pain anymore. Both are really important, but in different context it's going to have different outcomes. Systems wise, we talk a lot about homeostasis or kind of balances the way that you just like in your family probably say well, that's just the way you can that's a homeostasis. There needs to be enough pain in the system to try something different because we're going to go back to what's familiar comfortable. I think kind of with cultural, political religious things going on in the US. For the last twenty thirty years, it's been pretty comfortable being the dominant, dominant belief system and having having privilege of But as pain gets entered into the system of it's going to challenge us to respond differently. The question is are we Are we doing that now or are kind of Are we coaches in church? Are we coaches in our family? Do we have enough relational equity? Is there enough sense of safety and community and connection that then we can say the hard things and grow or if not, I mean that's that's what is key. It starts with relational safety and connection. Do we have enough? And I think COVID hit us hard because we all became a little more isolated, and so then the homeostatic balance became we just do our things on our own. We worship at home. Nothing wrong with worshiping at home. Uh. And yet that there's for me. The church is about embodied connection and their science is about embodied connection. That we're not meant to be an isolation. Isolation is a is a poison to the human existence. And yet that's what we were put through in lots of different ways, and that has become the default. I see it with students, I see it with couples. Everybody likes telehealth better than being in person, and it's there's more accessibility. I know all the positives, but the embodied part is what I worry about because I think that's the space that builds safety for us to then be able to build resilience. And so how are we thinking about our bodies? How are we thinking about a body settling bodies? As God or Tae talks about like coregulation. I can't just regulate my emotional system on my own. I need there's a power of doing it in community. Confession in church practice isn't just in my head to God, but it's about because He already knows all that I have to confess. My turning towards him is an act of intimacy. How are we doing that with each other? Not in terms of like shame or guilt or sick pleasure, hearing struggles, but being intimately connected. Yeah, so resilience is going to come from that foundation and then help navigate suffering struggles. Without that foundation, I think that's where we need to build. I mean, we can't have hard conversations of whichever end of the political spectrum you fall on, or whichever end of faith spectrum you fall on, and all the topics, all the kind of self identified topics that are out there. We can't have interesting conversations and struggle because if you don't agree with me, you are denying my personhood versus we are safe with each other and we can hold different ideas and we can still love each other. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's that's where I would have the systemic change is we need to be in community, We need to be developing safe connection that then we can do the hard work. But if we're trying to do the hard work beforehand, it's going to lead to fracturing. And I think that's what we're seeing in micro and macro perspectives. 00:46:08 Speaker 2: Do you go go ahead, ashiz? 00:46:11 Speaker 4: I wanted to pick up on some of these threads again where perhaps I'm miss hearing, and please correct me if i am. It sounds a little bit like some of these cultural dynamics that are sort of accelerants that at least from my observation, it seems like the gap between generations is much more exaggerated due to these cultural accelerants than perhaps they used to be. Is it would you say that's fair? 00:46:40 Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean things are moving fat. Look at technology. My great grandfather, I knew, came over to the US and immigrated here and had a horse drunk cart, and I knew him that was the main technology. We've gone to that to where we have personal computers in our pockets as phones and they actually, you know, we're doing spiritual or anthropic is doing spiritual formation of technology, of trying to give a moral core, uh to technology. That's a huge in one hundred years, that's a huge development. And it's strange. We can't we can't even get to a homeostasis before the next change comes. And so this this amount of dysregulation and speed of that between isolation and technology. Yeah, it's putting a unique I would say it's putting a unique strain. I like the accelerant idea on society in a new way. We have to adapt faster and it's harder. 00:47:37 Speaker 4: Yeah, I wonder what that does for resilience. Now, I'm speaking completely off the top of my head at this point, I have no research to back it up. I want to be careful about making too hard of claims, but I look at I look at my kids, for instance, and I sometimes I get the sense that all of these different factors, as complex as they are, has has weakened the ability to work in them a kind of resilience. And I don't know if that's that's one of those I'm getting older and therefore I think, you know, it is much easier to be resilient. It was much easier to do this or that when I was younger. I want to avoid that, And what I really want to be concerned about is how do I develop them towards resilience without the sort of without a sort of emotional hardening. But I wonder if there are fresh challenges, at the very least, whether or not there is a less of a tendency to resilience or not. Are there fresh challenges and ways that you have had to develop to say generationally, there are new ways to look at the process of helping people become resilient. 00:48:47 Speaker 1: If I can piggyback on that before you answer. So, one of the one I was going to ask was somewhat related. I think what I see happening a lot with technology is we're trying to solve every problem. So there's the transhumanist movement, which I think there's soft transhumanism happening a lot of places. I think people are transhuman and they don't even know it, sort of. And the idea is that we're we're taking these technologies and we're saying this is the solution to this problem. But inevitably the revenge effects come back around and it creates different problems within the system that we hadn't thought of when we executed it. And so you get into all of these different aspects of like con road and I think it was in the seventies, you know, the tyranny of small decisions, Right, We're all making these little micro decisions without really thinking through the system dynamics. And so when we don't do that, then ultimately some of these things we plug in, they're going to have some there. 00:49:47 Speaker 2: I liken it to like a baby's mobile. 00:49:49 Speaker 1: You touch one side, another side is always going to move in generally in unpredictable ways. 00:49:54 Speaker 2: Then you could really understand. 00:49:57 Speaker 1: And so kind of to piggyback that into ashi this question, I think is, yeah, is my perspective on that accelerant aspect. 00:50:09 Speaker 3: So there's there's a lot here. I'll try to do it in two minutes and just an aside of there's a there's a scholar in Romania Rodica Mocan who's doing a lot with transhumanism and studying there. I forget who the artist was, but had had a cyber arm attached to him and then was on and gave access to the internet, so anybody could go on to the Internet and move this arm and engage with him, and it was anyway, it's fascinating to the collectivist idea and disembodied transhumanist kind of thoughts and what does that mean? How how much cyber input can I have before I lose my image bearing kind of amago day, Like, where does that? I think theological anthropology questions are super important right now as we continue to have technological assists, and so there's that. I think a regarding resilience, the starting spot is optimal frustration. So I think from what we were talking about, the systems perspective of resilience is how do we help our kids identify and us as well identify what optimal frustration is and how to navigate it. I think we're I mean, there's lots of things going on in my life right now, and I get lots of messages from friends about how to alleviate pain, how whether it's physical, dealing with death of a parent, all of these type of things. It's how do you make the pain go away? And that's not resilience, right, that's numbing. And the benefit of numbing it won't feel the pain. The downside of numbing is we don't feel, and so the absence of pain also means the absence of joy, the absence of love. And I feel like through technology, through messaging, through medication. I was a board member at a Bible camp and over ten year period, seeing how many kids went from not having any medication to everybody, we had to hire extra nurses. I believe it. I believe there's necessary. I'm thankful for medicine and medication. I just worry that we lean too hard to We want to treat the symptom, get rid of the pain, and we're missing the heart issue. Like if I have a pain shooting down my arm, I can treat the pain in the arm, but it's really the heart issue. And I think a lot of times around resilience with our kids in school system and families, we're trying to manage pain rather than fostering flourishing we're trying to manage the symptom rather than looking at how what are good ways of responding to suffering? How is suffering connected to love more than sin or equally connected to love and sin. So there's negative consequences for negative behavior, but there's also I know the potential of suffering is great. As a father and a grandfather, the love I have for those kids has the potential for deep suffering, and what I want to love them less, so I don't feel the potential for suffering. I think that's the navigation we've made as a society over the past couple of decades, is we were so good and creative, we're going to take pain away, But in doing so, we've taken away the resilient potential and the need for development with optimal frustration. And there's a beauty in coming together in painful things, like certain things won't have solutions, but I have a couple of friends that will enter with me in it and sit by the fire in the ash with me, And there's such a beauty in that. I can't even tell you. I get emotional thinking about it. So thinking about parenting, that's where I started, like, how are we navigating optimal frustration. How are we looking at the edge where it's good for our daughters to fall off the bar right the balance beam rather than man want to I want her to succeed. I want her to get a college scholarship that she needs to. I could put pressure on her to be on the beam, and then when she falls off, then I've added to the suffering versus life'sful little disappointments. The growth part is how we respond to them. It's how we respond, not why they happen. And that's the system's idea compared to individual psychology approach. 00:54:54 Speaker 4: Yeah, what I'm partly hearing in that correct me if I'm wrong, is that sometimes we MISIDENTI by resilience, that we we perhaps think that we're generating the ability to be resilient, or we think of ourselves as resilient, when really what we've done is we've walled ourselves off from those things that we need to be resilient towards. Is that a fair Yeah, not a challenge that you've given us. 00:55:20 Speaker 3: I would also say, don't pray for patience, don't pay pray for resilience, because what you're praying for is difficult times because those things. If you look at Paul saying, you know, perseverance leads to right, there's the pathway there of resilience and spiritual formation comes from how we navigate these things faithfully over time. And it's not about the lack of them. It's about how we go about addressing them. And as parents, we don't want our kids to suffer, but sometimes love is how do we come alongside them and not take it away, but give them the confidence that this isn't going to break you. The suffering that's going on for you right now. She's the suffering that's going on for you right now, James. It's not going to break you. God is with you. It's gonna suck, and it's going to be painful and it's going to be awful. Sorry about the language, but it's it's when when you see Paul uses a lot of gritty language, right scuba crashet of like there there is painful things. It's not going to break you. You have a community, you have a loving God, you have me as a therapist to come alongside you, to be with you. That's where resilience comes out of. It's not solving the problem. It's not alleviating the problem or preventing the problem. It's going through it together that we see the formation of perseverance and long suffering and the fruits of the spirit coming out of that, not only resilience, but I would say the fruits of the spirit spiritual formation. 00:56:58 Speaker 1: Well, David, this has been helpful and good, and unfortunately we're about out of time, and so really appreciate your perspective on this. 00:57:05 Speaker 2: I think I resonate so much with it. 00:57:07 Speaker 1: I think that system's oriented perspective is just sort of become part of the way I think about things, you know, whether it's org capacity and consulting, or you know, thinking through some of this stuff from a leadership perspective, and then obviously the marriage and family therapy. It just makes a lot of sense. And so we've had conversations about systemic sin, which is almost the dark side, you could call that the the uh, you know, de optimized suffering in the other direction sort of right, And so just really helpful and really insightful, and appreciate you being here. 00:57:42 Speaker 3: Man. Yeah, thanks, it's been fun talking with you guys. And I'm going to have to read up on hermanuticts now. 00:57:50 Speaker 2: Well, night Resources Oh, go ahead. 00:57:53 Speaker 4: You've learned from your students. You mentioned second order earlier. I've learned that what her minutation mean by second order and what MFT mean by second order are not the same thing. So go and be aware of that. 00:58:07 Speaker 3: Okay, that's a good pointing. 00:58:09 Speaker 1: Yeah, all right, Well, everybody check out. The books come out in February, so we won't have links to it or anything, but hopefully David'll be back on the show to talk about it and then also check out the podcast with you if you're interested in more things around marriage and family therapy. But otherwise, come on back for the next episode of Thinking Christian. We'll catch you all next time. 00:58:30 Speaker 2: Take care. 00:58:31 Speaker 1: I just want to take a second to thank the team at Life Audio for their partnership with us on the Thinking Christian podcast. If you go to lifeaudio dot com, you'll find dozens of other faith centered podcasts in their network. They've got shows about prayer, Bible study, parenting, and more.