Coming Out of Hiding: Shame, the Brain, and the Art of Being Known

• Subscribe to Echoes magazine (free, quarterly print): echoesmagazine.org 

• Dr. Curt Thompson’s website: curtthompsonmd.com 

• The Being Known Podcast: available on all major streaming platforms 

• The Center for Being Known: www.thecbk.org/ 

• The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe About Ourselves (IVP, 2015) 

• The Deepest Place: Suffering and the Formation of Hope (HarperOne, 2023) 

• Paul Borgman, Genesis: The Story We Haven’t Heard (IVP, 2001) 

• H. E. Butt Foundation: hebfdn.org 

00:00:01:00 – 00:00:34:19
Curt Thompson
We like to say, remember that evil is the second smartest force on the planet, and it’s far smarter than me. Evil is not about to go quietly into the night, and I say that to say our listeners might think, oh my gosh, this is this is a great question. How can I, curt, solve this problem? And therein is part of the issue itself, because the answer is that I don’t solve my shame problem.

We solve my shame problem.

00:00:34:21 – 00:01:44:14
Marcus Goodyear
I love the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and what a wonderful way to live. Connected to nature in relationship with God. Fruit growing on every tree. If you’re feeling peckish, just pick a pomegranate. And also, they were naked and they felt no shame, no embarrassment about their bodies. In fact, no shame at all.

They didn’t wonder if they were good enough. They didn’t hide anything. They were fully present with each other and with God. Adam and Eve don’t stay in the garden for long. Pretty soon they’re hiding from God, and they’re hiding parts of themselves from each other. That’s not just a theological problem. It’s a brain problem.

From the H. E. Butt Foundation, I’m Marcus Goodyear and this is The Echoes Podcast. Our guest today has spent his career asking, what does it take to come out of hiding, not just spiritually, but neurologically? Dr. Curt Thompson is a psychiatrist whose work sits at the intersection of neuroscience and Christian spiritual formation. He has several books and a podcast with millions of downloads. According to Curt, brain science helps us understand trauma and shame and also beauty and desire, creativity and that life in the garden that God intends for us.

I’m here with my co-host, Camille Hall-Ortega.

00:01:44:16 – 00:01:46:01
Camille Hall-Ortega
Hi, Marcus.

00:01:46:03 – 00:01:54:10
Marcus Goodyear
Curt recently spoke at Laity Lodge, which is the H. E. Butt Foundation’s retreat center here in the Texas Hill Country. Welcome, Curt. We are so glad to have you on the podcast today.

00:01:54:13 – 00:01:59:22
Curt Thompson
Marcus and Camille, it’s just such a pleasure. And so thank you. Thank you so much for having me.

00:02:00:00 – 00:02:06:17
Marcus Goodyear
I’ll be honest. I’m a little nervous. I’m a little intimidated to talk to you. I’m sorry. I just want to name that up front. We’re very, very excited.

00:02:06:18 – 00:02:08:12
Camille Hall-Ortega
We’re fans. We’re thankful.

00:02:08:14 – 00:02:17:03
Marcus Goodyear
We are! Yeah. Oh, very. You’re practicing psychiatrist and a theologian of sorts. And how did those two worlds come together for you?

00:02:17:04 – 00:04:51:14
Curt Thompson
Well, you know, Marcus, it’s often, we’d like to say in our work that we see our life coming at us through the windshield, and we understand our life looking through the rearview mirror. And so I can say for sure that it was not some blueprint plan in advance to do this. I think I had the privilege of growing up in a, in this evangelical Quaker space when I was a young kid that taught me to think and pray and read and taught me to listen to my elders and taught me the benefit of what it means to learn from really good teachers.

And so in many respects, it wasn’t just what I, you know, what was inculcated into me as a kid and then as a young adult, but was also, I think, the sense of what does it mean to be taught how to think about the world. And so between my early developmental years and my undergraduate years and some exposure to some other thinkers who really early in my college years began to teach me to ask the question, what does it mean for Jesus to be Lord of all of life?

How does it what does it mean? So no matter if you’re if you’re a if you’re a Jesus follower, it means I’m asking questions about meaning from a Christian perspective, no matter what it is that we’re doing. And so I think as I entered into medical school and in psychiatry, this was a question that was already, I think, again, not because I had like, oh, I want a plan to be thinking about these things as I had in medical school, these things that are already kind of formed in you in ways that you don’t even yet know that they’ve been formed in you.

But certainly my spiritual fathers and mothers and those that were teaching me science, as it were, whether it’s high school, undergrad, medical school, were it was it was there was this question of how is what we are learning about the way humans operate, the psychology and the neuroscience of human experience and behavior and so forth. What does what does our anthropology, what does it mean to be a, you know, a creature made in the image of the Triune God?

How is that? What is the story that that is telling? I can say I’m the recipient of the work of many, many people who’ve come before me, who’ve taught me how to be in the world in this way.

00:04:51:15 – 00:05:20:19
Camille Hall-Ortega
I love it. Now we’re I would love to just get kind of a baseline definition for a couple of things, because obviously this is some heavy stuff, no pun intended. So I’m we’re using the term I had to we’re using the term neuroscience. And also I know we will of course refer to kind of the area that you are studying most recently, which is that interpersonal neurobiology.

Can you give us sort of a baseline understanding of those pretty complex topics?

00:05:20:20 – 00:07:49:04
Curt Thompson
Yeah, I mean, I think one thing to know is that, like neuroscience in general, it’s kind of made its way into the cultural conversation. You know, I mean, people now, they slap a picture of the brain on a, you know, of yogurt and you’re going to buy more yogurt because they know it’s brain. It’s good for my brain.

Like we’re hearing a lot about this these days. Interpersonal neurobiology in particular, I find to be so fascinating because it is a way for us to imagine human beings that actually, what’s so striking to me is that the science itself around this field is teaching us that science itself is not the final common pathway for how we know everything that we’d like to know and what it is.

Interpersonal neurobiology. My friend and colleague Dan Siegel coined this phrase now more than 20 years ago. It is a phrase that it represents a collection of a number of different scientific disciplines that all have a stake in asking two questions one what is the mind? What is it? Now, granted, it’s not asking the question of what’s the mind’s purpose, let alone what is the human beings purpose?

Those, those? That’s not a question for science to answer, but it is asking the question what are the what are the mechanic? What are the mechanics of the mind? What does it look like? And you come to find out that we typically if you were just ask your person on the street, well what is your mind? We have a pretty narrow view of that.

And this is a much more expansive view, because we have this working definition that the mind is an embodied and relational process. Right? So it’s the brain in my body and relationships that are interacting. It’s a system. So that is what we would say the mind is. But the second question is what is a mind that is flourishing?

What does that look like? I can give you the content, the abstractions of oh, it’s the brain and the body and the relational interactions and all the nonverbal cues and all the things that have correlation in my prefrontal cortex. But that’s different than saying, well, what does it mean for me to flourish as a human being? And this then gets to other questions that gets close to this word that we call teleology, right?

Gets close to purpose. What’s my meaning? But not exactly, but it does. We would say that a mind that is flourishing is a mind that is flexible, adaptive, coherent, energized, and stable.

00:07:49:04 – 00:07:56:04
Marcus Goodyear
When you say mind, is that a substitute? Is that shorthand for brain, or are you thinking of something that’s bigger than brain?

00:07:56:05 – 00:08:05:03
Curt Thompson
Yeah. In this world, interpersonal neurobiology IP and the interpersonal neurobiology, we would say that the mind is something that is beyond the brain.

00:08:05:04 – 00:08:06:02
Marcus Goodyear
Okay, okay.

00:08:06:03 – 00:08:47:03
Curt Thompson
Because you know, we ask people like, gosh, if you’re how do you know that you’re anxious? Well, I know that I’m anxious because my heart rate is up. My palms are sweaty. Right. So if you get rid of your cardiac system and your palms like you’re not, doesn’t like your brain is not going to do much for you.

So I have to have my entire body. But what is it? But what does it mean when I say I walk into the room and see Marcus and Camille, and I see the kindness and the softness in their smiling faces and the softness in their voices. And why is it that when I, when I encounter that my heart rate reduces, I become more relaxed, like, well, something’s happening between us.

That is my my mind is is reading something.

00:08:47:03 – 00:08:48:23
Marcus Goodyear
So yeah.

00:08:49:00 – 00:08:50:16
Camille Hall-Ortega
That interpersonal component.

00:08:50:17 – 00:09:30:10
Marcus Goodyear
Yeah, yeah, yeah. One of the reasons I like the podcast form so much is because it preserves some portion of the body. I mean, there’s a digital representation of vocal cords and then it’s received in somebody’s earbuds or through their speakers. So there’s this kind of it’s digitally facilitated, but there is some sense of physical body between us.

Right. You were talking about flourishing. And you’ve also talked a lot about being known. Do you connect the idea of flourishing to the need to being known, to the need to be known?

00:09:30:11 – 00:11:11:05
Curt Thompson
Absolutely. And I would say, you know, on one hand, we can again look at the mechanics like we could look at the train engine and say, oh, here’s how it works. When people are deeply known by one another. And there there’s scientific language for how we would go about that. What does it mean for me to feel felt, for example?

This is where we get into all kinds of attachment research and so forth. But again, that’s different than saying, what is the story behind this? How is it that we are creatures for whom that is such a crucial thing? Like, how did that come to be? So for instance, why why is it when we read then the text of Genesis chapter two, why does God go out of his way to say it’s not good for the man to be alone?

That’s not a good thing. It’s not complete. Why does he have to make the comment? Why doesn’t he just make like two humans to begin with? Why? And why doesn’t he just say, oh, we’re just going to continue this process? There’s commentary. There’s something to be said that is not just a commentary about this current state of the human, but it’s also a comment that is a harbinger of what’s coming.

But the person who loves God is known by God. And he, you know, he says this again in Galatians, this notion that if I love God, we might say, you know, he doesn’t say the person who loves God knows God. The person who loves God is known by God. And when he’s talking about that, he’s not just talking about, oh, is a person by whom God knows all the facts.

It’s one thing for, you know, your third grader comes home from school and you’ve already gotten a call from the teacher and say, you know, Marcus had a tough day today.

00:11:11:07 – 00:11:12:00
Marcus Goodyear
Yep, yep.

00:11:12:00 – 00:11:53:15
Curt Thompson
And I’m the dad. And I now know the mark. And I know things. I know things about Marcus before Marcus knows that I know things about Marcus. I know the facts. And the teacher can download me all the facts. But that is a very different kind of thing than for Marcus to be known by his dad and say, for me to say arc is, tell me about your day.

For for us to have the felt experience of being known like this is not. And this is where it’s important. Like, I’m going to be known deeply, not just because I transfer facts to you about my day, but because in that moment of telling you the story, I’m not just giving you information, I’m giving you myself.

00:11:53:17 – 00:12:05:20
Camille Hall-Ortega
Wow. There’s so much there, Kurt. And it’s all just really good. I’m wondering what happened. Can you tell us some of the things that happened when in the brain, when we feel known?

00:12:06:01 – 00:15:08:10
Curt Thompson
Well, this gets to some of the mechanics that we like to talk about. If you imagine we would say that one of the metaphors that I use when it comes to what does a mind look like, how does mine operate? That’s flourishing. We would say, oh, if you imagine an orchestra, right? An orchestra has typically four sections, and it has a conductor, and we know that each of those sections need to perform well.

They need to be differentiated, but they also then need to be able to listen to the other sections of the orchestra. So I’m playing my part, but I’m listening to another part. And we were talking to each other back and forth. And so that takes a lot of work, that takes a lot of practice for us to do this over and over again.

And we as an orchestra don’t tend to self-organize this very well. We need a conductor. And so we need somebody to help this process along. And in the brain, the place where all of this comes together, the conductor, if you will, is the anatomical location of this is the middle prefrontal cortex right here in our forehead. It’s the location where all this comes together.

But in order for that to happen, for the things that I sense and image and feel and think and do with my body, that’s a five word shorthand for what the mind does. We sense, we image, we feel, we think, and we do with our bodies. In order for that to happen, I have to go to conductor school, my middle prefrontal cortex, in order for it to develop so that I can bring all of these sections of my orchestra, my mind’s orchestra, on board to be integrated, as we’ve called, differentiated and linked.

I need to have a human relationship that can enable my mind to do this. I will not do this by reading books. I will not do this by just watching YouTube. I will not do this as a self, as a self-made creature. When we come into the world, newborns come into the world. 100 billion neurons give or take a few hundred thousand.

And about 20% of those neurons or ready to go and to do what they need to do in order for that newborn to get to infancy, to get to toddlerhood and so forth. The other 80%, in order for them to come online, require the interaction with another human being. And there is a sense in which, you know, we live in a culture that teaches us to be able to do life on our own, but the story that we believe we live in is one that says it’s not good for the man or the woman to live by themselves and the brain.

Science would tell us this, that when I’m in isolation, not only do I, as an individual, become more anxious, but I become more anxious because the different parts of my mind that typically are intended to function in concert orchestra, they also become more isolated. I become more isolated from you and become more isolated from within myself. Different parts of me are cut off, and the way that I then cope and manage with that is to do all kinds of other things that that the Bible would, you know, the Bible would call idolatry, the Bible would call sin, we would call it addiction.

00:15:08:11 – 00:15:32:18
Camille Hall-Ortega
You’re speaking to some of it there. You talked about isolation. You said that babies are born with 20% of of what they’re needing there, but that 80% were learning over time and that we continue to do that. What happened if that if that 80% is not we’re not getting that 80%. What are some of the other things other than isolation, both in the brain and what we see for ourselves?

00:15:32:20 – 00:19:42:23
Curt Thompson
Yeah. So we typically talk about humans as being people who emerge into the world. We grow from being newborns into whatever we become as being people who are either unformed or ill formed. There are those of us who experience the, you know, the rupture that exists when people don’t pay any attention to me. Right. And we all have listeners here who’ve grown up in homes where certain elements of my orchestra, if you will, that just weren’t you know, I grew up in a family where, you know, you weren’t allowed really to get angry at your parents.

If you did, there was going to be a price to pay. So the whole notion of being angry, I learned, felt dangerous. It. Now, I didn’t have parents who were abusive at all. I had, you know, I grew up in a loving Christian home, but whatever that means, right? But I didn’t have abusive parents, but I had parents who were, you know, who were anxious and who needed to make sure that they were doing things the right way.

And so, like, you just didn’t cross my dad. You didn’t talk about being here. So what does that mean? That means an entire arena of human affect. That is true for every single person on the planet, that you actually have to be able to experience and name and regulate all the things I had no access to. It doesn’t mean that I wasn’t feeling things.

It means I’m working really hard to keep that section of the orchestra out of the concert hall. And this is problematic. So it’s unformed, it’s unformed, but we have others who grow up in families where there is everything from, you know, horrible stories of trauma and abuse, where shame is just thick and heavy laden. You know, how many people have I taken care of patients of mine who, you know, they will say, no.

I grew up in a loving Christian home, like, which of course means like that’s code for like, well, things were not nearly as good as we wanted it, but we just couldn’t talk about these, these kinds of things. I remember a patient of mine who said, I grew up in a loving Christian home, and then I asked the next question, which was who was in charge of discipline in your house?

Because, you know, these are the questions that you asked maybe in a psychiatric evaluation, but maybe not at a cocktail party, although you could try that. It’ll be people either want to talk more with you or less with you if you ask them that question. And when you ask, well, who is in charge of discipline in your house?

He said, well, it would be my mom, because anytime my dad got involved who was a deacon in the church, violence would break out in the kitchen. Oh, so how is it? How is it that a person says, and this is a person in their 40s, well-educated, successful? How is it that they tell a story? I grew up in a loving Christian home, and yet the data is otherwise so.

Even the way we tell stories, we tend to tell them as a way to cope with either our unformed or our ill formed experiences of life in which we’re developing all kinds of coping strategies to somehow contain all of my anxiety that comes because I’ve had shame applied to me. There’s been certain ruptures that have never been repaired, big and small ones.

And again, this is where the gospel is such an important thing because Jesus is coming and saying, all you who are ill formed, all of you who are unformed, y’all come, y’all come. And of course, this is tricky because the moment he beckons me, I both long for this. Like, oh my gosh, who calls me? Who calls me?

And I might also be wary of it, right? The woman who’s got the bleeding problem that we read about in Mark chapter five, who knows that she has a problem, and she comes and she’s clear about how what the problem is and how we’re going to solve it. And it’s like commando healing. We’re going to in get the job done.

Get out. Nobody gets hurt. Nobody gets seen. It’s all until he says, stop who touches me. And then it’s like things get difficult for her because there are other parts of her story that she’s not even considering that are really bigger issues in need of healing.

00:19:43:02 – 00:20:28:12
Marcus Goodyear
That’s such a great story. I’m glad you brought that up, because she’s seeking healing and carrying shame as she seeks it. I mean, she’s she’s afraid to approach him directly and just, I think, comes up behind him and touches his cloak. That’s right. Which makes me think, first of all, that I love your book, The Soul of Shame, tremendously.

It touches me on a deeply personal level, but also we’re talking about hiding. We’re talking about hiding parts of ourselves from ourselves and silencing portions of the orchestra. And I would love to hear you share a little bit about some practical ways that we can create habits, spiritual formation, habits, perhaps to help us cope with shame and move beyond shame.

00:20:28:18 – 00:23:26:20
Curt Thompson
Again, you know, we like to say, remember that evil is the second smartest force on the planet, and it’s far smarter than me. And even those things that we want to begin to do, to live as God has made us to live evil is not about to go quietly into the night. And I say that to say our listeners might think, oh my gosh, this is this is a great question.

Like, how can I I’m listening to this. My individual self is listening to this and how can I, Kurt, solve this problem? And therein is part of the issue itself, because the answer is that I don’t solve my chain problem. We solve my shame problem. That’s the way it has to be done. And so I think the first step that we would that it’s a practical step and but it is not an easy it’s not complicated but it’s not easy to do.

And that is I would to our listeners I would say okay, first of all, how aware are we of the degree to which shame plays a role in our life? And most of us are are I mean, some of us may be very aware of this, but most of us are unaware of the ubiquity and of the subtlety in which shame operates.

And so part of how we respond to that is, first of all, to recognize that this will be a lifelong journey of allowing ourselves to be healed. We begin to experience shame as early as 15 to 18 months of age, which means we’ve been practicing it first of all, for a very long time. And it began long before we have language where by which I can understand why it is that I’m feeling what I’m feeling.

I’m just trying to get through my day coping with this in a number a different way. So I create all kinds of practices unknowingly that not only help me cope with it, but at the very same time reinforce it. If I feel ashamed when I walk into a room about a certain thing, I’m going to work really hard to make sure that I don’t say that certain thing.

And the very act of not saying that certain thing reinforces the very shame that I have, making sure that I don’t let anybody know about the certain thing until someone else comes for me and says, Kurt, tell me about that certain thing. I’m like, oh my gosh, really? Like, this is Jesus saying, who touched me? Yeah, not not moving, not leaving.

And so can you name a person or two people to whom you would be willing to name for them and begin the practice of making a list? Here are the things that I’m ashamed of. And of course we might have. Oh yeah. Okay, I have my list of like, you know, for things that I’m ashamed of. And then you start to see, oh, each of those four things has like 100 subsets.

00:23:26:22 – 00:23:27:23
Camille Hall-Ortega
Yeah.

00:23:28:00 – 00:24:46:22
Curt Thompson
It’s just everywhere. And so this is the other thing that’s important. The healing of shame is not when when God comes to heal or shame by myself, allowing myself to be known by others and by my also being an agent by which you can be known. I am not doing this just to heal my shame, just for me to feel better.

I’m doing this because in that, in the course of that, I had energy that is released for me to create beauty and goodness, that I didn’t have access to that energy before because I’m burning it all, just trying to contain the shame. I’ve got these three guys that I meet with every Tuesday morning for the last 25 years, and without these guys, I’m a dead man, because this is where we come to name all the things, all of our longings, all of our griefs, all of our hopes, all of our joys.

These we want to be fully known and we are imperfect at this. But this is a very long winded answer. Markets to your question about practical steps, who would be the who would be the person who would be the 1 or 2 people to whom you would be willing to take the step of revealing your story, to asking them to do the same, assuming that if it’s true that where two or more of you are gathered, the spirit is in the room and is going to go to work?

00:24:47:00 – 00:25:28:10
Camille Hall-Ortega
Kurt, you’re talking about something. Vulnerability at a very deep level. That’s a pretty scary thing. And and you’re mentioning this community component of, of the necessary community component to vulnerability. How is it that we take those first steps even when we’re really afraid? Is there something that we do at a young age that I’m speaking now with my mom hat on, I’ve got three kids, young kids.

Is there something we do at a young age that encourages this vulnerability, especially within community?

00:25:28:12 – 00:27:21:15
Curt Thompson
Well, I think this is, you know, one of the some of the beautiful news about interpersonal neurobiology. One of the things that we learned, you know, how many times have we heard someone say, well, my dad, my dad’s too old. He’s he’s too old to change. And the good news about what the brain science is telling us is that it’s never too old to change.

I mean, you figure, look, why does God God calls Abraham when the dude is 75. He calls Moses when he’s 80. Like, he’s just like, I don’t know, maybe he’s waiting for for guys that are just like, they got nothing to do. They’re kind of close to retirement. And now we’re going to help. These are people that were going to Sarah.

Right. He’s asking people. He’s asking people who are vulnerable. Like you think like, oh, he chose Abraham. Is it possible that he chose Abraham specifically because he’s married to Sarah, someone who’s barren, someone in this way that it is never too late and so it doesn’t matter? Like, how many times have we said, parents, do they hear me?

We talk about rupture and repair and so forth, and they’re like, oh my gosh. They suddenly become aware of what they’ve done to screw up their kids. And you’re like, look, you don’t. The only way you don’t screw up your kid is just don’t have them. That’s the only way you don’t kid. Speaking as a parent of two adult children.

And they would confirm that, right? Yeah. That’s the only way that could have not screwed up his kids. And this notion, though, that if I am going to be curious with my children, let me get go. I’m going to be asking them to talk with me about what they feel now, not because whatever they feel is going to be the rule of law.

I want them to learn how to regulate what they feel, and I want them to allow me to be an outside brain that can help them learn how to do this. But I want them to become familiar with all of their mind and have the experience of being known by me in order for them to have had the practice of, oh, this is what it means to be fully human.

And we say like, gosh, how do we do that? Yes. Marcus, do you have a question?

00:27:21:17 – 00:27:23:12
Camille Hall-Ortega
That’s what we’re going to ask. How do we do that?

00:27:23:13 – 00:27:46:19
Marcus Goodyear
That’s right. So how do you find those people? I mean, I hear you saying that healing requires community. Being known requires community both both to be known and to be that community to others. And yet, I also know there are communities out there that are not going to be healthy for us. So how do we how do we find the right kinds of community?

00:27:46:20 – 00:28:48:11
Curt Thompson
So the first thing I want to affirm is that God, more than we might know, God knows how hard this is. Paul Borgmann wrote a book called Genesis The Story We Haven’t Heard, in which he asks this question. And the first time I considered it, it just kind of like knocked me back off my feet, he said. Who knows how many people?

God asked to go with him to Canaan before in Abraham, he finally found someone who said, yes, we don’t know because we don’t have any stories there. But we do know that when Jesus comes on the scene, he asks all kinds of people who say, no, I got to go bury my dad. No, I got to do this now.

I got to do that. People who started to follow me and they don’t, you know, the whole book of John you get from chapter five to chapter ten, and it’s just a great departure of people. And then he says to his disciples, Will you to also leave me? So the first thing to know is that God knows that this is hard to do, and we would love to have someone for Marcus and Camille to ask her this question and say, just call one 800, get a friend.

Yeah, right.

00:28:48:12 – 00:28:49:03
Camille Hall-Ortega
Yes.

00:28:49:06 – 00:29:47:19
Curt Thompson
You find a friend. And the reality is that this takes courage. And it may take asking several people our work at the center for Being Known. We have resources there. And we are we are creating space in this little nonprofit for people to become part of a confessional community. You can do that online where, like we do that we have intensives and we have training programs in our practice here in Northern Virginia.

So there are ways that you can through through those organizations, you can find them. But I will also tell you, you can go to, you know, we have this little podcast called the Being Known Podcast. One of the seasons was on. What does it mean to be in a confessional community? But the courage that you’re talking about is really the thing that is the most difficult to muster.

And so I would say if you if if you’re listening to this and you’re like, gosh, I want to be in a community like that, we said, where can I find one? The question is no. How am I going to create one? The question is not how am I going to find one?

00:29:47:21 – 00:30:12:17
Marcus Goodyear
The thing I love is this idea that we’re set free from our shame. We’re brought out of hiding specifically to flourish, specifically to be creative. Which reminds me of a talk we heard at Laity Lodge. I didn’t hear it in person, but we’ve heard it in our archives. It’s Charlie Peacock who is part of an artistic community, probably an artistic confessional community, he might even say, and he’s talking about creativity.

00:30:12:17 – 00:30:20:10
Marcus Goodyear
And we would love to play this for you. It’s from 2006 at Laity Lodge, Charlie Peacock, and get your your take on it.

00:30:20:12 – 00:32:07:04
Charlier Peacock Audio
This capacity of the human being is very much about what it means to express our human integrity. We are creative people made in the image of God, made to be creative. We are relational people, made in the image of God, made for relationship with God and others. And it’s there that sin has done its damage. God’s word, his earth and his sky.

What he has spoken into being is no longer full of care and full of provision. Is it? God’s will in his way are no longer the controlling story? So what is the controlling story? It’s things like self-interest, self-importance, fear, and distrust. Man is definitely moving in the opposite direction of God and integrity because man says I will dominate my creation.

So he moves from dominion, which is a good thing, to domination. He moves from stewardship, which is a good thing, to ownership. He moves from covenant relationship to self-rule. I want to be a person of integrity, but this is really what’s at the root of human integrity. To understand that you are made to be a person who stewards creation, and you’re made to be a person who stewards relation as well.

You say you’re furthering God’s dreams for the world. You become an active participant in it. And it’s the same way with relationship. Your relationship starts with God. You learn your identity through that. That pours through you out to others.

00:32:07:06 – 00:32:08:04
Camille Hall-Ortega
What do you think?

00:32:08:05 – 00:35:03:12
Curt Thompson
Well, I think the first thing I would say is what I feel, I feel.

I know Charlie and I, I feel comforted by hearing his voice. I feel the fullness of the picture that is coming into my mind when he talks about what he’s talking about.

Beauty and goodness.

And what is true in the world. Like we know those things. We know those things by what we sense and image and feel long before we know them by what we think in brain time. And so when I hear Charlie describing these things, it again, it reminds me of the very nature of how the Hebrew Bible was written.

You read the first page and oh my gosh, like, you’ve got some brilliant writers who are doing this, right? Because they’re not they’re like great screenwriters. They’re not explaining every jot until they’re showing you a God who before anything else is an artist. And then he turns around and says, let’s make humans to be like we are. Well, but he expects us to come to the page ready to do our work.

He’s not just spoon feeding us because he wants us to do the work of becoming, being full participants in our becoming. And, you know, one of the things that we would say about, you know, evil finds beauty to be anathema. It can’t tolerate that. And so when it comes to the to the use of shame, the way we like to say shame in and of itself is not a bad thing.

It’s just it’s part of the created order. It’s a signal about something going in a way that is disintegrating. To signal. Our problem is not that we have at our problem is how we respond to it. There are people who behave in certain ways for which shame should be the absolutely the response that they have, but the point of how evil wields it.

It’s not just to make us feel bad, but when we experience it, we do things with violence to cope with the world. Whether it’s violence toward myself, violence toward my sisters or brothers, it’s in some it’s it is violating shame is a violating neuro affective experience. But the thing that it really does is that it keeps us from creating.

It keeps us from imagining beauty. I now have to cope with it. And that is the energy I have to burn, to contain and cope. That is energy cope with that is energy I do not have available to create co-create with those with whom I have different beauty and goodness in the world. It is evil’s way of keeping beauty from being made from us, being who we were supposed to be.

00:35:03:14 – 00:35:04:17
Marcus Goodyear
Yes.

00:35:04:19 – 00:35:44:01
Camille Hall-Ortega
Wow. And that’s what I love, this framing. It’s of course, this clip is reminiscent of what you’ve been talking about, which is this framing of how did God intend things to be, how what did what purpose did he create us for? And so to think about, to create and to be in relationship with others. And, and this notion that we should look at the world in that way, to remind ourselves what we’re missing, what what could bring us closer with God, what could be closer, what could bring us in closer, better, more loving relationships?

It’s just good.

00:35:44:06 – 00:35:56:19
Marcus Goodyear
And and, Camille, what the world is missing because we’re part of this orchestra, right? We are the orchestra, like we were saying earlier, but we’re part of an orchestra. And if we don’t play our part, it will not be heard, right?

00:35:56:20 – 00:38:16:03
Curt Thompson
I think the other thing that that’s crucial for us to remember is that it’s easy for us to think about what God wants, what God’s vision is for the world, what God’s vision is for us to be doing. I think it is equally important for us to recognize that God is not just wanting us to do something. God is trying to turn us into certain kinds of people God is wanting us to become.

And so I’m not just creating. My mission is not just to create beauty. My mission is to become an artifact of beauty in the world. And this is this is that in of itself is very it’s right. The whole notion, you know, you know, the whole, you know, for for women and men, they have their own our own particular ways of being uncomfortable with this because of how the whole notion is misused and so forth and so on.

And yet what will we be able to tolerate? The King looking at us in the new heaven and new earth, and turning to our friends, looking at us, pointing at us and saying, he she is the most beautiful thing I’m looking at at this moment. Like that makes me nervous because, you know, because the way shame plays a role for us.

But this is the thing, if I feel, if I have a sense that my beauty coming into the world, why out of my front door every day, are we able to imagine, without arrogance, without shame, that my beauty is going to make the difference in the lives of the people with whom I interact today, not my beauty compared to somebody else’s, but the very light that I am walking in means I am an agent of that, that light that I am becoming a greater I con of attraction to other people that will also perhaps be unlike, you know, unwittingly, like, you know, off putting to others who are having trouble with this, for whom beauty

is just way too much, intimacy is way too much, and evil doesn’t want any of that happening. And so we’ll often use shame as a way to keep it from happening. And this is how we understand that the healing of shame doesn’t just make us feel better, it leads to my becoming different. And so therefore being able to do different in the world.

00:38:16:05 – 00:38:39:17
Camille Hall-Ortega
Kurt, this is all so, so, so good. I, I’m just grateful for your time because we have gotten such good answers and food for thought, things to think about. We spoke a little bit about your book, The Soul of Shame, and I believe your newest book is the deepest place. Where can people connect with you and find your other resources and books?

00:38:39:19 – 00:38:59:16
Curt Thompson
Oh, that’s very kind. Thanks for asking. So they can I think the first thing I would say is we have a podcast. I say we, my co-host Pepper Sweeney and I on our producer Amy Kela, have a podcast called the Being Known Podcast that’s you can find it on all your streaming platforms. Is that the way you say it?

Streaming platform. I like just parroting things. People tell me to say.

00:38:59:17 – 00:39:01:10
Marcus Goodyear
It’s a great podcast.

00:39:01:12 – 00:39:31:01
Curt Thompson
Yeah. Yes. And there are lots of things that we talk, including the books. We talk about the books there, among other things. Our most recent offering has been on Rupture and Repair. You can find my website, Curt Thompson, MD. For those who are curious about these confessional communities, the center for Being Known, it’s the CCBC are some ways to find out about that.

And you can see me on Facebook and Instagram as well.

00:39:31:01 – 00:39:34:13
Marcus Goodyear
So thank you so much for being with us here today.

00:39:34:15 – 00:39:38:07
Curt Thompson
You. It’s been a delight. Thank you. Always a pleasure. Thanks so much.

00:39:38:09 – 00:39:58:07
Marcus Goodyear
The Echoes Podcast is written and produced by Camille Hall-Ortega, Rob Stennett and me, Marcus Goodyear. It’s edited by Rob Stennett and Kim Stone. Our executive producers are Patton Dodd and David Rogers. Our original music is by Johnny Rogers. Special thank you today to our guest, Dr. Curt Thompson. Curt, do you subscribe to Echoes magazine?

00:39:58:08 – 00:40:02:23
Curt Thompson
I do, and I receive every issue and look forward to it when I get it.

00:40:03:00 – 00:40:04:20
Marcus Goodyear
Thank you so much. We’re so glad you do.

00:40:04:21 – 00:40:20:08
Curt Thompson
And I just want to say, it is just a deep reminder of the many times I’ve had the privilege of being at Laity Lodge and all the good work that the H. E. Butt Foundation is doing. So I’m just really grateful to have been with you. Thanks so much.

00:40:20:11 – 00:40:45:18
Marcus Goodyear
Thank you. Thank you for coming out. Thank you for reading. Whether you listener, are able to come out to the lodge and not you can subscribe to Echoes magazine. It’s free. It’s at Echoes magazine. You’ll receive a beautiful print magazine each quarter for no cost. You can find a link in our show notes. The Echoes Podcast and Echoes magazine are both productions brought to you by the H. E. Butt Foundation. You can learn about our vision and mission at hebfdn.org.