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What if shame isn’t just a feeling, but an internalized form of violence? January Jaxon and Andrew McRae explore a reading of Genesis 3 through the eyes of the victim, interpreting humanity’s Fall into sin as an inflicted wound, not a willful disobedience. Drawing a parallel between the anthropology of René Girard and the psychological model mapped by Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy, they imagine a path beyond violence rooted in trust, integration, and the refusal to war against ourselves.
You’ll hear:
- Why we understand shame as a violence against ourselves
- How Girard’s prohibition, sacrifice, and myth echo IFS managers, firefighters, and exiles — both stabilize identity by concealing violence
- Why “perfect love casts out fear” might mean embrace, not expulsion
- What the Trinitarian nature of God may show us about a way to be human without violence
PLUS a “Letters from Unconditional Love” practice to build the habit of speaking with compassion instead of accusation.
“Great banter and raw honesty. I didn’t expect a Christian podcast to give me ideas that could help me look inward at things I have avoided.”
—Candie
Ideal for listeners interested in Girardian mimetic theory, Internal Family Systems as a spiritual practice, and emotionally healthy theology.
Chapters:
- (00:00) - Introduction
- (01:02) - Presentation: Eve and the Internal Violence of Shame
- (22:17) - Where have we experienced the violence of shame?
- (35:43) - The difference between shame and humility
- (44:23) - "Perfect love casts out all fear"
- (51:13) - Mapping IFS parts with Girard's 3 characteristics of human religion
- (01:08:02) - A brief history of the Doctrine of The Trinity
- (01:24:58) - The Trinity shows us how parts might work
- (01:37:13) - The practice of "Letters from Unconditional Love"
- (01:57:10) - End credits
Theology Kills is exclusively listener-funded. Subscribe to us on Patreon for bonus audio, downloadable worksheets, and a friendly community to carry on the conversation.
★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★
Note: This podcast is a personal exploration of theology, creativity, and human experience. January Jaxon and Andrew McRae are not medical or mental health professionals, and nothing in this podcast should be understood as medical or psychological advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Our discussions are general and are not a substitute for personalized care. If you need medical or mental health support, we encourage you to seek care from a qualified professional.
Creators and Guests
What is Theology Kills?
Toxic theologies have been weaponized to wound, but the gospel was always meant to be medicine. January Jaxon and Andrew McRae blend Internal Family Systems theory with the mimetic anthropology of René Girard to uncover a Christ-centered theology of integrity that heals shame, fosters embodiment, and creates contagious peace in the midst of a world at war. Balancing scriptural insight with personal reflections and simple everyday practices, each episode explores the ways that violence warps our creativity, our relationships, and our sense of self — and how divine love sets us free.
It turns out, if someone loves
you, they’re not concerned
about what you’re gonna achieve.
They want you to nourish yourself, yes.
Yeah.
They want your life to be tended to, yeah.
That’s what Love desires,
not some sort of achievement.
Yeah, Love is not worried about whether
you’re living up to your potential.
Love is your potential.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Oh yeah.
Nicely put.
If you’ve ever wondered why a religion
that proclaims unconditional love
can feel so full of hatred, shame,
and violence, you’re not alone.
And you’re not wrong to want
something more from Christian faith.
I’m January Jaxon
and I’m Andrew McRae,
and this is Theology Kills, a podcast
about letting our shame and violence
die so that life and love can thrive.
If you had asked me at 25 whether I had
ever been violent toward a human being,
I might well have laughed in your face.
I was, well, not kicked off my high
school soccer team exactly, but the coach
pulled my mother aside halfway through
the season and gently suggested that she
might want to find me a different hobby
because, and I quote, he said I “didn’t
have an aggressive bone in my body.”
I would freeze up and refuse to
kick the ball if I was even a
little bit worried that I might kick
another kid’s legs in the attempt.
This made me a terrible soccer player,
but, I thought, a pretty good person.
It was a quirk of personality that got
me chuckles and rueful laughs for my
lack of soccer prowess, but also a lot
of praise for how sweet I was to worry
so much about the wellbeing of others.
People saw me as kind because of this
refusal to risk injury to my friends.
The problem is that my refusal to
kick that ball wasn’t born out of a
healthy desire to be kind or loving.
It was born from a distorted desire
to cease to be something: dangerous.
Ever since I was a very small
child, some part of me has carried a
belief that my mere existence in the
world is dangerous to other people.
This part of me believes that
I can never hope to be good.
I can never hope to be beneficial
to the people around me.
That just isn’t even an option.
The absolute best I can ever
hope for is to inflict as little
damage and suffering as possible.
This caused some problems, and
not just for my soccer prospects.
It kept me shrinking myself down
and trying to be invisible because
I was afraid any impact I had on
the world would necessarily be bad.
It kept me silent in situations
where I should have spoken up
because I believed I was bad if I
made other people feel discomfort.
It meant I rarely spoke up for my
own needs because I believed I was
bad if I inconvenienced anyone.
It meant that I stayed for years
in a toxic relationship because I
believed it would be bad to cause
pain to the person who was hurting me.
In other words, I avoided hurting
other people by hurting myself.
Badly.
I don’t know what it was in my young
life that caused me to imagine myself
as dangerous, but it’s a perfect example
of how human creativity can go wrong.
My imagination wasn’t being used
to try to become something new.
It was being misused to try to
cease to be some way I already was.
I didn’t see possibilities.
I saw myself as a problem to be
fixed, and a desire to cease to be?
Well, that sounds an awful lot
like a kind of death, doesn’t it?
Eve doesn’t think much at first about
the tree in the center of the garden.
It’s there, of course.
Hard to miss.
Sometimes she rests in its
shade, listens to the birds.
She’s never felt tempted to eat the
fruit hanging bright against its green.
God said it would hurt
them, and Eve believes God.
But she doesn’t question
the tree’s presence.
It’s just part of the landscape.
She’s never felt deprived by
the injunction against it.
Why would she?
The garden’s full of trees, full of fruit.
Food is never further than her fingertips.
Everything she needs is here.
She trusts that, trusts God as implicitly
as she trusts the breath in her own lungs.
But one afternoon the serpent
finds her there under That Tree.
And the serpent, a liar from
the beginning, feigns curiosity.
“Did God really say you couldn’t eat
from any tree in the garden?” he asks.
The question is disingenuous.
You notice how it sets God up as
kind of a controlling asshole?
Eve blinks, confused.
Of course that isn’t what God said.
“No,” she says, “we
can eat from the trees.
Just not this one.
We’re not supposed to eat
this fruit or we’ll die.”
The serpent cocks its head.
“I mean, you won’t die.”
You can hear the condescending tone.
You didn’t, like, take that
death stuff seriously, did you?
Just enough to crack the
certainty she’s always lived in.
And then it delivers the blow.
“God knows that when you eat from
this one, your eyes will be opened.
You’ll be like God knowing good and evil.”
Now, the serpent hasn’t technically lied.
We know how this story goes.
Eve does eat from the fruit, and
she doesn’t instantly drop dead.
Her eyes are opened.
But there’s a deliberate and sneaky
insinuation to what the serpent’s saying.
The implication is that Eve is
supposed to be wise, but she isn’t.
The insinuation is that God has withheld
something that would be good for her.
The serpent uses, or should we say,
misuses the truth to create a lie in
Eve’s imagination: I am not enough.
Up to this point, Eve has only ever
seen herself through God’s eyes.
Perfect.
Whole.
Loved.
But now she’s seeing herself through the
serpent’s gaze and what he sees in her?
Well, it’s not flattering, and just like
that, there are two versions of Eve.
One mediated by the gaze of God, and
one mediated by the gaze of the serpent.
This new mediation through the
serpent’s gaze distorts Eve’s
perception of reality, which is to
say it distorts her perception of God.
Nothing in her outside
circumstances has changed.
She hasn’t moved.
The world hasn’t transformed, but
when she imagines it all through the
eyes of the serpent, the abundance
of the Garden seems insufficient.
God seems less like her loving creator
and more like an obstacle between
her and what she needs to be okay.
The warning to stay away from
this tree’s fruit sounds less like
protection and more like a scare
tactic meant to keep her small.
She looks up at the tree with the
serpent’s perspective, and the fruit
that God said was nasty is looking
just as beautiful and tasty as all
the rest of the fruit in the Garden.
It’s a subtle shift, but it’s enough
to rupture her trust and in the
absence of trust, conflict is born.
She reaches for that fruit.
She eats.
At first, nothing happens.
She chews, swallows, looks around.
The garden is still the garden.
Birds are still singing.
The sky hasn’t cracked open.
She doesn’t drop dead.
Huh.
Guess the serpent was right.
She glances over at Adam.
He’s watching her.
Waiting.
She hands him the fruit, and
he takes it without question.
He trusts her.
And as she watches her own hand pass
the fruit into his, it hits her.
He’s naked.
She’s naked.
Of course, they’ve always been naked,
but she’s seeing it differently now.
Now it’s not just naked like unclothed.
Now it’s naked like, exposed.
Vulnerable.
Weak.
And Eve recoils from herself in horror.
You must not eat from the tree of the
knowledge of good and evil, God said, for
when you eat from it, you will surely die.
God doesn’t lie.
They eat of the fruit and their
eyes are opened, but not to wisdom.
To shame.
For the first time they see themselves as
something bad, something revolting, even.
Impossible to love.
Unworthy of belonging.
And from this shame, a new
desire is born in them.
Not a desire to be something, but a
desire to cease to be something: lacking.
In the 1950s, René Girard was a young
French academic teaching literature
in the US when he began to notice a
pattern in the novels he was teaching.
Characters didn’t want things
spontaneously; they desired
what others desired first.
In Don Quixote, Quixote longs
to be a knight because he’s
imitating chivalric heroes.
In The Eternal Husband, a man
rekindles his love for his wife
only when another man desires her.
In the Garden of Eden, Eve is completely
indifferent to that fruit until after
the serpent points out its desirability.
From this, Girard began formulating
his theory of mimetic desire, the idea
that our wants don’t emerge exclusively
from within us but are received from
the people and the culture around us.
We don’t autonomously decide what we want.
We take our cues from
others, often unconsciously.
Literature, Girard realized, had
been revealing a hidden structure
of human psychology all along.
He made the further observation that
all desire is a desire for being.
We imitate the people around us because
we want to become like them in some way.
Something about them seems admirable to
us our clever brains start looking for
ways to mimic that admirable quality.
If all of that was a lot of word salad
to you, just think influencer marketing.
Right?
We now have an entire professional
class of people whose only job is to
be seen liking products because other
people will then buy those products
hoping to be as cool as that influencer.
That’s it.
When it’s healthy, when our desires
are picked up from someone kind and
loving who has our best interest at
heart, this mimesis, this capacity
for imitation, it’s a good thing.
It’s what enables us as humans
to learn so much, so fast.
It’s what enables us as a
species to evolve and mature.
We don’t have to start completely
from scratch every time.
We can begin partly from where
the previous generation left off.
This opens up access to a huge
amount of innovation and creativity.
But when Adam and Eve eat the fruit, a
desire is born in them that didn’t come
from this healthy mimetic mechanism.
God doesn’t want to eat that fruit.
Even the serpent doesn’t
want to eat the fruit.
The desire for the fruit didn’t spring
up because Eve imitated someone.
It sprang up from a failure to imitate.
Instead of a desire to be like someone,
even the serpent, instead Eve desires
to stop being like someone: herself.
This is the moment where mimetic
desire flips in on itself.
Before, Eve’s desire was about
becoming, mirroring God’s goodness
and growing into something new.
Now it’s about eliminating, removing
what she’s condemned as bad.
Her desire has been disoriented.
The drive that once led her toward life
now pulls her toward disappearance.
Shame takes us from becoming
to ceasing, from life to death.
This rejection of their own
experience shatters Eve and Adam.
Shame fragments their integrity of being.
It launches them into conflict with
themselves, and with God, and flips them
into the anxiety of perpetual doing,
forever trying to control and fix what
they imagine to be wrong with them.
God doesn’t have to exile Eve and
Adam from the peace of the garden.
They’ve exiled themselves the minute
they reach for those fig leaves.
The minute they hide from God.
And we are still doing
the same thing every day.
In the 1980s, Dr. Richard Schwartz
was working as a family systems
therapist when he began to notice
a pattern in the way his clients
spoke about their inner experiences.
They kept describing parts of
themselves having this or that feeling.
A woman constantly criticized as a child
might have a wounded part burdened with
a belief that she’s never good enough, an
inner critic part keeping her in check by
shaming her before other people can, and
a numbing part that turns to alcohol or
drugs when feelings of inadequacy surface.
Clients with bulimia would talk about
how one part of them forced them to
binge eat to comfort and emotional pain,
then another part berated then for it,
calling them weak or disgusting, while
a third part tried to regain control
of their inner turmoil by forcing
them to purge or starve themselves.
At first Schwartz thought this
language of parts was just his
clients’ way of speaking in metaphors.
But when he asked them to have
conversations with these parts as
if they were real inner people, he
found that parts responded as if
they were independent personalities,
each with its own fears, desires,
and strategies for survival.
Just as each client existed as one part
of an external family dynamic, so each
client had many parts within themselves
that acted as an internal family
dynamic with all the sibling rivalries
and conflicting opinions that implied.
And what he found was that his clients’
parts were in conflict with each other.
All of them were trying to do something
beneficial for the client, but
they all had different ideas about
how to go about that good thing.
Some parts became daily managers trying
to prevent the client from getting
into potentially dangerous situations.
Some parts became firefighters.
When something bad does
happen, our firefighter parts
jump in to get us out of it.
And other parts of us get exiled from
our conscious awareness because our
protectors decided their pain was a
threat and went to war against it.
If I hold Schwartz’s framework of
Internal Family Systems alongside René
Girard’s insights about mimetic desire,
the picture makes even more sense.
Humans are social animals.
We are hardwired on a biological level
to prioritize relational connection
with our social group because
for most of our evolution, we’ve
depended on a tribe for our survival.
When I think about the fact that we have
mirror neurons in our brains that allow
us to experience in our own bodies what
we observe others doing, it makes sense
to me that we develop different parts of
ourselves based on the mediation of each
of the different people we interact with.
This multiplicity isn’t a bad thing.
There’s nothing inherently
pathological about having these
various parts of ourselves.
It’s a normal consequence
of human biology, full stop.
In addition to that, as Christians,
we proclaim a Trinitarian
God — three Persons, one Deity.
If we are made in the image of our
God, then it makes sense that we have
multiple parts just like God does.
But unlike God, our parts can come
into conflict with one another,
and it’s how we respond to that
conflict that causes problems.
We have two primary options
when confronted with conflict.
We can respond with relationship, or we
can respond with rejection and rivalry.
Eve and Adam respond to their
inner conflict with rejection.
In other words, with exile.
They traumatize themselves,
wound themselves, by rejecting
their own experience.
They split off from their
vulnerability, and they try
to cover it behind fig leaves.
They don’t want to feel shame,
and so they try to hide from
God to make their shame go away.
I don’t think it had to be this way.
Imagine if, in that moment — still
holding the fruit, the serpent’s words
still echoing, confusion spinning
her mind in circles — what if Eve had
turned to God instead of the fruit?
If instead of grasping for control, she
took everything the serpent said and
she turned right back around to God and
said, “Hey! What’s the deal here, dude?!
You told me this thing, but now he’s
telling me this other thing, and it’s kind
of looking to me like you were full of it!
Here’s your chance to explain!”
What if, instead of trying
to fix her own confusion, she
had let God hold it with her?
Instead of rejecting herself and God, she
could have deepened her relationship with
God by bringing this new serpent-mediated
part of herself into God’s presence, in
addition to her original trusting self.
We’re gonna talk more about the importance
of this when we come to Mary’s half of
the Creative Journey, but for now, I just
want us to hold onto the notion that a
different more connected way is possible.
I want us to hold onto that because
it can seem supremely depressing that
Eve doesn’t take this trusting road.
She doesn’t bring her questions and
confusion to God to try to repair the
relationship when her trust gets bruised.
She jumps straight to action and
excises a part of her own soul.
She buys into the lie that worthiness is
something to strive for, that she needs
something outside herself in order to
be whole, and she doubles down at every
turn on an exhausting life of constantly
trying to control the uncontrollable.
Sound familiar to anybody else?
I assume I’m not the only person
in the room who does this.
It’s not comfortable to have to
see this in ourselves, but we need
to understand what’s at stake so
that we can understand why it’s so
important to choose a different way.
This is Richard Schwartz
from No Bad Parts, his book
on Internal Family Systems.
The challenge here is that we are
dominated, individually and collectively,
by hardline punitive parts who believe
that people and their parts are basically
bad and need to be warred against.
If you believe that within you
are dangerous, bestial, or sinful
impulses that need to be constantly
monitored, controlled, and if
necessary, battled against, then it
makes sense that you would see other
people that way, and your approach
to social problems will invariably
involve controlling tactics and war.
Time and again, we’ve seen how leaders in
one country demonize the people in another
land to justify going to war against them.
As Charles Eisenstein puts it,
“There are so many fights, crusades,
campaigns, so many calls to overcome
the enemy by force. Thus it is that
the inner devastation of the… psyche
matches exactly the outer devastation
it has wreaked upon the planet.”
The
war inside us doesn’t just stay inside us.
It moves outward.
The impulse that made Eve try to eliminate
her shame by rejecting her vulnerable
parts is the same impulse that will
drive her son Cain to eliminate his
shame by murdering his brother Abel.
The same exile we impose on ourselves,
cutting off the parts we judge as
bad, is the exile we impose on others.
What we refuse to love in ourselves,
we refuse to love in other people.
And what we see as a threat in
ourselves, we will always be
tempted to destroy in the world.
What if ending the wars out
there begins with ending the war
you’re fighting against yourself?
What if creating peace in the world begins
with creating peace among your own parts?
René Girard said that when we talk about
putting an end to violence, we almost
always mean the violence of our enemies.
Their violence.
We are too often utterly
blind to our own violence.
Don’t get me wrong.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t write
letters to your congresspeople.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t march in
protests or do whatever other social
action you feel genuinely moved to take
in the stand against war out there.
But do it in addition to learning how to
love your vulnerable parts, your shamed
parts, your exiled parts, the parts of you
that disgust you or the people around you.
Because if all we do is address
the problems out there, the things
we give birth to will still be
distorted by the violence in here.
What if all the violence outside
us started with violence inside us?
January, is there a personal
experience that comes to mind when
you’re thinking through, and this,
I mean, this is a personal question.
We’re talking about shame
as internal violence, so
Mm-hmm.
I’m almost a little reluctant
to ask you, but we are here to
have vulnerable conversations.
Yeah.
And so if you’re up for it, is
there one that comes to mind?
Yeah.
Thank you.
There is, and it is a vulnerable
conversation, so if you’ve got
baggage about middle school sex ed
class, this is your warning that
it’s time to skip ahead a bit.
Alright.
So one of the things that they did
in my middle school sex ed class was
they had a day where they brought in
this trio of teen mothers in order
to talk about how terrible life was
you know, being a teenage parent.
Basically attempt to scare us all
into abstinence forever and ever amen.
Yeah.
And it had the hilarious effect for me.
Like it, it completely backfired.
Because one of those girls was fat.
She looked like me.
Hmm.
And I will tell you right now, Andrew — I
hate having to admit this, but it’s true
— that when that class started, I did not
think that she was telling the truth about
that child being hers, because I had so
completely internalized the message that
people who looked like me were revolting
and could not be desired by anyone.
So I thought she was lying that this
was her baby, because nobody could
possibly want to have sex with her.
Or me.
Ever.
And so, yeah, 13 years old, and that’s
the first moment that I realize that I
have so internalized the social context
of my desirability, or lack thereof.
And I didn’t even realize that
I thought that about myself
Yeah.
until that moment.
And thankfully by the end of
the class, I had wised up.
I got on board pretty quick.
But so for me, that class was
the realization that, oh shit, I
might get to have sex someday?!
That’s awesome!
Definitely wasn’t what they had in mind
for that class, but, but it really was
that was my first beginning understanding
both of the dynamics of shame and the
dynamics of mimesis, that this was not
a thought that I came up with on my own,
this was an idea that I had internalized
from the way that other people interacted
with me, that I saw in the media that I
saw in magazines that I was picking up
from my social context that I existed in.
Yeah.
And so I had this understanding that,
oh, they’re probably wrong about that.
Intellectually, I got that.
But then I still existed
in that social context.
So I wasn’t really able to stop
believing it because it continued
to be the way that people talked
about people who looked like me.
And even though my lived experience
did not reflect that belief at
all, it was like my own experience
couldn’t get traction in my own head.
Wow.
Because the way that other people
acted was like my experience
wasn’t the real thing, that this
collective story about my lack of
desirability, that was the real thing.
Hmm.
And this did not break down
until literally last summer.
Maybe a month before the
conference where you and I met.
Where, and this is hilarious to me.
So I was watching Bridgterton.
I don’t know if you’ve watched that.
No, no I haven’t.
It didn’t strike me as the kind of
thing that you’d naturally pick up.
And to be honest, it wasn’t
the sort of thing that I would
naturally have picked up either.
I think I started watching it because
it came out about the time that
my housemate started to be gone
for lengths of time at a stretch.
And so I was like, I’m gonna watch
all the things that I can’t watch
when Ryan’s around because he’d
just be a judgy asshole about this.
It wasn’t even a question of
whether I was gonna enjoy it.
I was just like, I was gonna watch it on
principle just ‘cause Ryan wasn’t there.
Oh, that’s funny.
And again, the joke was on me because
I absolutely fell in love with it.
Okay.
And people talk about it like it’s
this Regency romance, and I get that.
I get why they do that.
But I will die on the hill that
that is not a Regency romance show.
It is speculative fiction in Regency drag.
Okay.
It is this fascinating alternate universe
that they’ve created in which, high
society got racially integrated in the
16, 17 hundreds instead of when it did.
Ohhh!
And then all of the romance is happening.
But then there’s all of these
other fascinating political and
social dynamics on top of it.
And ultimately that show for me, what
I realized I loved about it was that
it was a show about the ambitions of
women and the emotional lives of men.
Hmm.
And that was such a refreshing
inversion of the stories that
we usually get in pop media.
I mean, I was fascinated.
Yeah.
It definitely is very racy, so if
that’s not your thing, give it a pass.
But The joke was on me.
I got totally sucked in and turned into
a fan almost instantly and thoroughly
enjoyed the first two seasons.
And then last May, the
third season came out.
Okay.
And the third season — so each season,
one of the Bridgeton siblings is the
romantic lead and it’s the story of
their romance and eventually marriage.
And in the first two seasons, by a wide
margin, the character that I related to
most of all was this character called
Penelope, who is this short, fat,
ridiculously intelligent, very snarky,
very creative, but constantly overlooked
character who, like, nobody, nobody
sees her because of what she looks like.
Her appearance has no value in this
social system that she exists in.
And so the first two seasons, she’s
constantly basically being let down
by the guy that she’s got a crush
on, who thinks of her as a friend,
but is utterly failing to notice
that she’s head over heels for him.
And I didn’t know going into
it that the third season was
she was the romantic lead.
Ohh.
The two of them have
their love story finally.
And so there’s a particular scene
which everybody who’s seen it
will know what I’m talking about.
I’m just gonna call it the carriage scene.
Everybody knows, if you don’t
know, don’t worry about it.
But we got to the carriage scene
at the end of the first part, and
I cannot explain to this day what
happened watching that scene.
This was the most popular show streaming
on television at that time; in the span of
five minutes, they made it cool for boys
to have feelings and fat girls to be sexy.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I honestly, I don’t know how to
explain what happened in my brain.
That — I was 40 years old, Andrew, and
that was the first time in my entire
life that I had ever seen someone
who looked even a little bit like
me treated as desirable in a piece
of media that wasn’t a comedy where
you were obviously supposed to laugh
at it because clearly that’s never
gonna happen, that’s just ridiculous.
Yeah.
I had never seen that in my life.
And with one scene, it was like all of
that, 30 years of baggage all the way back
to seventh grade sex ed class was revealed
for the bullshit that it had always been.
And it just crumbled into my mental ocean
Wow.
like a cliff face collapsing.
Oh.
Just — I could feel the thought structures
coming apart at the seams, and it took
a solid six months for me to really
feel like my life was stable again.
Oh man.
Because so many of those beliefs
were so embedded for so many years,
but it really was that mimetic
dynamic of, this is a TV show.
This is somebody else’s
gaze, that’s not mine.
Yeah.
And they made the choice to
present this person as desirable.
And somehow that managed to utterly
unpick the shame narrative in my head
that I couldn’t possibly be desirable,
that no amount of my own experience
had ever managed to, to make a dent on.
And so, yeah, it was a truly fascinating
moment and I was so delighted and so
grateful that this TV show was brave
enough to do that, and I absolutely
adored that the second half of that
season, the whole thing turns out to
be a story about her stepping into the
place of shame and not being run by it.
That is utterly the plot of that season.
And I was like, yes.
Oh, that’s great!
So yeah, just I enjoyed the hell
out of that, and I don’t know where
that’s gonna go in my life, but just
finally being free of the burden of
that story has been mind-blowing.
In one year.
I’m like so much more relaxed as a human
being because I’m not trying to keep
that part of myself compartmentalized
or exiled anymore, you know?
Yeah, yeah.
And so, yeah, it was just this fascinating
experience of really, really deep
shame that got embedded very early on.
But that experience of having
that shame undone by something
as utterly ordinary as a TV show
Yeah.
that I happened to stumble over and
would never normally have watched.
It just felt to me like such a beautiful
example of grace can find us anywhere.
Absolutely.
Grace can find us anywhere and when shame
is met with that kind of empathy and that
kind of witness, it just can’t survive.
No, I’ll be thinking about this.
I can’t, I don’t want to comment
too quickly ‘cause that, just,
well, thank you for sharing that.
There’s definitely something going on
with the two moments that you’re talking
about, watching the finale of Bridgerton,
and that day in sex ed in seventh grade,
that it’s you in the presence of another.
Mm-hmm.
That is, that’s opening your mind.
And a lot of Girardians like to talk
about, oh, mirror neurons, right?
Like, we’ve got these,
Yeah.
apparently humans have more of
‘em than anybody else it seems.
And they zero in very quickly on
the fact that you can see someone
doing something and it has a reaction
in you, there’s collapsing, right?
So
—
You experience it as if you
were the one doing that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Somebody else gets an apple to eat and
your mouth starts to water or something.
That kind of stuff, that.
Mm-hmm.
But what you’re describing, I’m not a
neuroscientist, but it seems like there
are probably a few mirror neurons at work
here, but it’s, the meaningfulness is not
a collapsing, it’s the fact that there
is another and you know there’s another
Yeah,
right?
It’s…
Yeah.
you haven’t lost some sense of self.
It’s the fact that, no, there is somebody
outside me and this… that is having this
experience that is making it meaningful
like that, that it’s consistent.
I also, I kinda love how like teachers can
have so many ideas of how to plan a class,
but like you just, you bring students
in, you know, some are a little older.
And they’re gonna learn from each other!
Mm-hmm.
Try and stop that, right?
Your lesson plans may be great, I’m
sure like you tick all the boxes on how
to write a good lesson plan that day.
But it seems like with the second
episode, it wasn’t so much that there’s
a character here that you can identify
with, but there’s, a creator, somewhere.
And probably a team of
creators, but right?
There are people making this story.
And you’re a creator and it’s
opening your eyes to what’s out
there to be created in a way.
I mean, yeah.
Excuse me, for trying to speak to
your experience and probably that
can be a very constricting, like…
I am inviting you to do so.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I, and I, I can trust you can tell
me to step back when I do this
too much, if I do this too much.
But yeah, that was new for me, this
idea that these mirror neurons are not
something that necessarily collapse
us into the other, but that there’s a
connection that’s healthy, that rests
on the differentiation, and yet those
mirror neurons are still allowing us
to learn, like allowing us to become.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Opening us out and growing
us instead of collapsing us.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I’m sure somebody would have something
to say about it if I called it positive
mimesis and used that term wrongly.
Ah, yeah.
Because it wasn’t exactly that I was
imitating anyone’s desire necessarily,
but maybe I was, because it kind of was
a permission slip to, as Rebecca Adams
talks about, desire my own subjectivity.
Desire my own experience.
Yeah.
And to allow my experience to be
real and not just defined by what
other people saw or didn’t see in me.
Which has been a trap I’ve fallen into
with some pretty negative consequences.
Yeah.
It’s been pretty wild to discover
that that just can’t get its hooks in
me anymore, the way that it used to.
Yeah.
Well, thank you, Bridgerton.
Yeah, I haven’t even watched
a trailer of that show.
I feel like now I’m like,
ah, I wanna watch this.
Well, thank you.
Mmm.
I can’t remember if this has been
something we’ve been through or not, but
I really liked reading your chart on the
difference between humility and shame.
It felt brand new to me
as I was reading that.
No, no.
It was brand new to me.
I was like, what?
Oh!
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
That was really cool.
What was the impetus for writing that out?
One of the things that I have a
habit of using ChatGPT for is that
I will stick a piece of writing
in and ask it to argue with me and
ask it to poke holes in my logic.
Mm-hmm.
To make sure that I’m thinking
through all the avenues and so I
think it was something that it said
where it was making some pretty
fundamentalist theological arguments
about shame is actually good for us.
You know, that kind of thing.
We’re supposed to be humble,
we’re supposed to be lowly, we’re
supposed to recognize our own
worthlessness and all of this stuff.
And I’m like, that is not humility.
Yeah.
I felt very clear that
that was not humility.
So then I was like, okay, if we’re
gonna talk about shame, we need to
talk about why it is not humility
and what humility looks like instead.
You cannot say, well, there’s
good violence and then there’s
violence that’s harmful.
Like, no, no, no.
Violence is harmful, period.
I really think that shame is harmful.
Period.
The humility that we’re after in
the Christian life is something
very, very different than shame.
And so I broke down this little
chart because I had never really
thought about the distinctions
before, between those two words.
I knew that they were something
different for me, but I didn’t
necessarily know, well, what is
it that I think the difference is?
So I went through and made this chart,
and I’m gonna read it to you and I
want to hear your thoughts on it.
So these are two lists, kind of
side by side, and we will have
a PDF of this available in the
show notes, for this episode.
So come find us on Patreon
after you’re done listening, and
that’ll be ready for download.
You’ll be able to see these
lists side by side, but for now
I’m just gonna read ‘em to you.
And the first list is the shame list.
And shame is rooted in lies.
Born from disgust.
Shame isolates.
It is self-obsessed.
It obscures agency.
It’s rigid and certain.
It is painful because of
the violence of self-exile.
In the body, it creates a
contraction or a tension.
It feeds stagnation and death.
It refuses creative flow,
and it hides from God.
And the contrasting list for humility.
Humility is rooted in reality.
It is born from curiosity.
Humility connects.
Humility is self-transcending.
It increases agency.
It’s flexible and teachable.
It’s painful, when it’s
painful, because of the grief of
self-recognition rather than the
violence of self-exile in the body.
It feels like an
expansion or spaciousness.
It feeds aliveness.
It receives creative flow, and it opens
to God instead of hiding from God.
It’s another thing that comes up
regularly in Martha Beck classes.
She’s very fond of the term as well.
There’s a line about humility in the
Taoist Classic text, the Tao Te Ching,
which can be translated as something
to the effect of, “All rivers flow to
the sea because it is lower than they
are. Humility gives it its power.”
Wow.
Yeah,
Whoa, man!
And so yeah, understanding humility, not
as this bizarre self-abasement, which…
I am not sure where that came from in the
Christian tradition, but it’s certainly
how it gets talked about in pop culture
Hmm.
Like this is what Christians think,
even though that’s there’s plenty
of Christians who don’t think that.
But there are demonstrable
Christian communities who do.
So, yeah, this picture of
Christian humility as this constant
self-denigration, that’s not healthy.
That’s not loving.
Why would God invite us
into that if God loves us?
In no way does that
facilitate life and aliveness.
No.
But there is a way of looking at humility
that is in line with the natural world,
that is profoundly receptive, just in
the sense of lowness, not as a form
of breaking ourselves down, but simply
allowing ourselves to rest and receive.
Yeah.
And it connected for me with
all the talk about Jesus as
the fountain of living water.
Mmm.
And if we wanna receive the
water, but we’re all trying to
climb to the top of the hill,
like, wait.
Yeah.
No wonder we’re thirsty.
The
point is it’s flowing.
Yeah.
It’s running,
Yeah.
It’s alive.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so there was this picture in my head
of God always trying to answer prayers
and send us blessings, but if it’s water
flowing, are we allowing ourselves the
lowness of receiving those blessings?
Hmm.
Or are we trying to achieve everything
and have no room for receiving and so
in that sense, the opposite of humility.
But the other term that connects to it
for me is that notion of beginner’s mind.
Humility for me connects profoundly
with being teachable or being curious.
You have to be able to admit that you
don’t have all the answers if you’re
gonna get curious about anything.
You have to have humility for that.
And so there’s this way that it
just opens up all of this aliveness,
but it is absolutely not shame.
Shame is not the way to arrive
at that humility at all.
Yeah.
I liked how you contrasted
disgust and curiosity.
I had thought through how certainty
can get in the way of curiosity.
But I think disgust incorporates
the idea of certainty and adds
a bit more to what’s going on.
It did feel like a bit of
a chicken and egg question.
Did the humility come first or
did the curiosity come first?
I don’t know.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And ditto the shame and disgust.
Exactly.
Yeah.
I liked how you considered both shame
and humility as painful, potentially.
Mm, mm-hmm.
And you, as you were choosing to contrast
them, it wasn’t the fact that one
would be painful and the other wasn’t.
But no, the reasons for the pain
either being because of the violence of
self-exile or a grief of self-recognition.
Yeah.
I like grief being portrayed
as a positive thing.
That’s nice.
I mean, nice.
Yeah.
Humility certainly isn’t always
painful, but when it is, you know,
we have that word humiliation for
a reason, it’s not comfortable.
Yeah.
But it is a grief that heals
and integrates rather than a
lie that distorts our reality.
Is there anything in there that challenges
something that you grew up with?
Oh yeah, I would say that
definitely humility was
considered a performative act.
Mm.
It’s an act of obedience.
Humble yourselves in the sight of
the Lord and he’ll lift you up.
So it’s like you do the thing,
and then you get recompense.
Rather than, it could just be a
declarative statement, like If this is
what happens, if you’re humble in the
sight of the Lord, you will be lifted up.
Yeah.
It could be read that way just as easily,
but yeah, it was always “be humble, choose
humility.” It was a thing to be achieved.
Mm. Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
What character trait do you just choose
to be every time it happens, you know?
Mm-hmm.
A character trait, like yes, you
can develop character traits,
and I guess the virtuous ones
can be associated with practices.
I think there’s a real connection
there, but this idea of, either you
have this character trait, or you don’t,
depending on what you chose to do in
the last, you know, 60 seconds that
can’t be right it can’t be something
you choose every time again and again.
Yeah.
But that was how it was discussed.
More often than not.
I don’t know.
I say that although I would
imagine that as a child, if I’d
heard somebody say, guess what?
Humility, it’ll come upon you.
And it’s a sign that the presence
of God has been active in your life.
Mm.
And it’s not gonna be something
you choose, but when it comes
upon you, it’ll be a blessing and
you’ll recognize it as divine.
Like somebody could have come with that
message, completely incongruent with
the be-humble-do-humble, and I’m pretty
sure I would’ve heard that and been
like, yeah, yeah, that sounds right.
So I had ears to hear that message.
I’m sure.
So somebody must have
been telling me about it.
It wouldn’t have sounded foreign.
I would’ve recognized it as true.
Yeah.
Well, let’s talk about
your Molly LaCroix quote.
Yeah, let’s do that.
So I probably can’t introduce
her as well as I should.
But yeah, I ran into the
author, Molly LaCroix.
She was being interviewed
by Tammy Sollenberger.
The reason why I listened to it is ‘cause
it reminded me of the first line of our
intro thing of why does the church that
is so excited about unconditional love,
why doesn’t it actually look like that?
So LaCroix is a therapist, and I
got the impression that she seems
to work primarily with religious
clients, evangelicals, people that
want their therapist to be Christian.
She’s somebody that serves
those types of folks.
And so she’s written a book to introduce
the concepts of internal family systems,
to people that might not be familiar
with that, but would’ve a familiarity
with scripture and the way she uses
scripture in the book, you can tell like
she’s been raised in a church or if not
raised, has spent plenty of time in it.
And, she has this paragraph.
She says, “These are the resources we
bring to bear when we lead our internal
family in harmony with the Holy Spirit.
Our spiritual practice shifts from working
hard to develop something we think we
lack to building relationships with the
members of the inner family that block the
expression of something we already have.”
Mm-hmm.
As soon as I was reading that, I
was like, yeah, theology kills.
That’s what we’re saying.
I don’t know, like I gotta,
That sounds awfully familiar, doesn’t it?
I’ve gotta, I mean, yeah, I sat down
to read a whole chapter, and I just
stopped there and I was like, ah, yeah,
I’m gonna have to text this to January.
Yeah, as soon as I read it
I was like, yeah, exactly.
That is, that is everything
that I’m constantly trying to
preach in everything that I do.
I wouldn’t have put it as specifically
as she did in the sense that it’s
restoring the relationships that
makes those resources available.
I hadn’t thought about it
explicitly in that sense.
But that is absolutely what I believe,
and that is very much what I hope I’m
talking about on this podcast for sure.
A funny thing that used to happen
for me when I first started working
with a therapist after my life blew
up, it was just a regular therapist.
It wasn’t an IFS therapist.
And we would have these moments where
she would say something, and I could
feel my brain sliding off of the concept
even as we were talking about it.
I could not get a grip on it.
And so I learned to pay
attention to something when I
could feel a gap in my head.
There was place in my head where I
knew that a concept was supposed to
go, but it was like it was raining
and there was this space where the
rain wasn’t falling, kind of a thing.
Mm, mm-hmm.
So I could tell that something was
there, but I couldn’t see it yet.
And may be a bit too woo-woo for the
rest of our audience, but there’s a
book called The Energy Codes, and one
of the things that she talked about
that was such a light bulb moment for
me was that we often talk about energy
in terms of having these blocks in our
system that we then have to remove, and
that actually what’s happening is that
we don’t have those neural pathways yet.
So it’s a gap, and we have to
build the relationship before
the energy can make that flow.
And that’s exactly what Molly LaCroix
is talking about right there, is that we
have to learn to make those connections.
We have to make them in our
physical neural pathways.
We have to make them between each other
as humans so that the larger system of
the human organism can function better.
But all of it has to do with that
energy flow through the system.
And that we don’t need to talk about
it as blocks that have to be removed,
which is what we’re doing when we exile,
that rather what we have to do is build
the relationships and bring people
closer and integrate things instead.
And yeah, that’s exactly what I hope
I’m getting at with this notion of
Theology Kills, that bad theology
kills those relationships, but
good theology kills what’s getting
in the way of the relationships.
Yeah.
She quotes that passage from 1 John or
one of the Johannine epistles where,
“Perfect love casts out all fear.”
Mm-hmm.
And she says, I really hope you don’t see
some terrified animal being chased off,
or the image of someone being run off.
When love is casting out fear, you
should see the picture of a child
being embraced by an adult they trust.
Yeah.
Right?
That, that is fear being cast out.
Mm-hmm.
That’s a passage that’s been in my
head since I was a kid and I never
attached that image to it before.
Mm.
And I greatly appreciate that.
And it is the forming of
a relationship, right?
Mm-hmm.
That clearly, yeah, fear is driven
away, but fear is not a person or
an entity like, like it’s, yeah.
I don’t know.
Yeah.
Language gets us in trouble.
I guess there’s all sorts of metaphor
and whichever image you grab onto
first to understand a concept probably
sticks with you for a long time.
Yeah.
What does it change for you to have
that new picture of that verse?
Well, just that the image she
gave is so entirely non-combative.
Mm. Mm-hmm.
And I’ve never been particularly
drawn to the whole like “spiritual
warfare” sort of metaphor. That’s
never really done it for me.
I haven’t gotten real excited about that.
And so, I think what it changes is
the imagery of having components
of combat in the Christian life.
Hmm.
I don’t have to roll my
eyes at it when it’s there.
I don’t, I don’t have
to entertain it at all.
It doesn’t need to be there.
Mm-hmm.
There’s gonna be another image to
understand those passages and those words.
Yeah.
And yeah, I think we find
that through the Holy Spirit.
I’m in agreement with her that
that harmony is something that
comes through the Holy Spirit.
Yeah.
I think the person that I would
most readily refer to as a spiritual
warrior in the New Testament is
Mary, with her receptivity and her
just, “I will not be moved” refusal
to return violence for violence.
That is my definition
of spiritual warfare.
Hmm.
Right?
Not that I’m gonna go out there and
force anybody into line, but that I’m
gonna go out there and be so relentlessly
loving that violence just can’t do shit.
It just can’t get traction on me.
Yeah.
It can kill me.
Yeah.
It can do that.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
If there’s one thing Jesus never
does, it’s engage in self-defense.
Yeah.
Even in those instances where you
think he’d have to, like, there’s a
mob trying to push him off a cliff
or something, and he, he just like
Yeah.
Walks through it.
He just walks through ‘em.
Yep.
And this is a perfect place actually
to get you to explain your connections
that you made between the three types
of parts in IFS and the three pillars
of the archaic sacred in Girard.
Do you wanna unpack that for us?
Yeah, I texted a buddy of mine
that I hadn’t seen in a while.
Senior year of college, we
lived in this guy’s backyard.
His name was Bob Davenport.
And we set up a yurt in his backyard.
Well, we bought this yurt, and
then we needed to find a place
to put it, and Bob Davenport was,
he used to be the football coach.
And before that, in the 1950s, apparently,
he was like one of the biggest names
in all of football, and he won the
Pro Bowl MVP as a college player.
Whoa.
Back in those days, college
players played the pros.
Okay.
And, and so everybody was expecting
him to be this great thing, and
then he met, the Campus Crusade
for Christ guy or something.
Anyway, he had some conversion where he
felt like he couldn’t work on Sundays.
Mm.
If you’re an NFL player,
that’s kind of a problem.
Yep.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
So he goes to Canada and plays in
Canada for a few years and then hurts
his knee or something and then he was
a football coach at Taylor University.
Anyway, somebody was like,
yeah, you guys should ask him.
And we asked him if we can put
a yurt in his backyard and we’re
like, oh, we’ll do all this stuff.
Like, we’ll clean y-your yard.
If you want anything
work done, we’ll do it.
And he just looked at
us and he’s like, no.
And we’re like, oh, another no.
He’s like, “Yeah, you won’t
do any of that. You’ll have a
girlfriend the first weekend.
I don’t want you to tell me
you’re gonna do anything.
Just, just keep it quiet.
I don’t want any parties, alright?
It is just gonna be you
three living there?”
And we’re like, “Yes, sir. Yeah.
Yes sir.” And he’s, “That’s it.
Okay.” This friend who studied psychology
went on to get a doctorate, he was
like, “Have you, have you ever read
Pirsig?” ‘Cause he’d just read Zen
and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
Mm-hmm.
And, and he was like, “It’s my
scripture. Quality is caring.”
And our minds were just blown by
like, who is this man that’s in his
seventies that knows the book that we
think nobody’s supposed to know about?
And he’s like, it’s my scripture.
It was, it was just this
mind-blowing experience and
he’s giving us a place to stay.
So affectionately, we came to refer
to him as Bobby-o, just because it
was so absurd to call this gruff man.
Like we, I’ve never met a Bobby-o in my
life, but it was like, Hey, Bobby-o, like
you would never say that to his face.
This man was very intimidating.
Anyway, so I recently sent a text
to both of these guys actually with
a Bob Falconer video, the one that
you sent where, and I was like,
boys, I just, I just found my next
Bobby-o, I just found my next Bobby-o.
This man, you don’t understand.
Oh, that makes me so happy.
And so in response to that, he
was like, yeah, I had somebody
trying to explain IFS to me.
But I didn’t get it until,
until I watched Inside Out.
Mm!
He’s like, yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Then I watched Inside Out and instantly,
instantly it made sense to me.
Yay.
And there’s definite inroads to
IFS with the Inside Out movie of
like, there’s a collection of parts,
and they all want what’s best,
but they don’t necessarily agree.
It veers away from IFS with
regards to attaching these parts to
emotions, and it would lead people
to suspect, anybody would know what
their parts are gonna be before
they’ve done any sort of parts work.
Mm-hmm.
It’s like, so I’m gonna have a joy part
and I’m gonna have an anger part where
it’s really, it’s not like there’s
these prefigured sort-of types ahead
of time that you just need to find.
No.
You don’t know who you’re meeting
till you’ve met them in IFS.
But that said, even though you don’t
know who you’re meeting till you’ve
met them, these parts, according to
Schwartz, they fall into three categories.
Really two categories.
There’s protectors and there’s
exiles, but there’s two types of
protectors depending on the situation.
You have managers that are more in line
with what needs to happen today and what
needs to happen every day, and you have
firefighters that come in when something
needs to happen right now and that
something needs to be drastic because
this could be the end of the world.
And this no holds barred,
we’re gonna solve this problem
now with whatever it takes.
As opposed to, the protector that’s
more like, this is how things should go.
And then the exiles are those
whose emotions their thoughts,
their understanding is far too
dangerous to be felt or heard.
The pain is too intense, and they
have to carry it and they have to
carry it somewhere else, and they
need to be kept at a distance.
So yeah, he calls ‘em exiles.
When I was introduced to that framework
in reading the book, No Bad Parts, it
occurred to me and this is because I’m
hopelessly carrying around my Girardian
hammer, just trying to find anything
remotely resembling a nail so I can
whack it and say, “Yep. Told you! I knew
how that worked before you even told—”
That’s, that’s, yeah.
Sorry.
That’s how I go through
the world these days.
And so when I heard three parts,
Managers, Firefighters and
Exiles, immediately I went to what
Girard posits as three universal
characteristics of human religion.
Period.
And you’re like, what?
Hold on, you’re gonna
define religion, really?
And you’re gonna say, you’re
gonna say it’s universal
and that all human religion.
Yeah, that’s what Girard says.
The three components that he says you
will find all human religion, and the
reason why he thinks it’s universal
is he does not understand religion
as something that people start doing.
People don’t take up religion.
The whole modernist idea of like, oh,
it’s an opiate to the masses, if we just
put down this addiction, we could ascend—
Mmm.
Mm-hmm.
No!
Humans arise from religion.
We were created through
these religious practices.
Mm-hmm.
These three things are what made us human.
The hominids that weren’t human yet became
human because of these three practices.
Taboo, which would be prohibitions,
ritual, which would be blood sacrifice,
and mythology, which is a story about
your origin that’s true enough to be
convincing, but essentially a lie,
in that it covers up the true story.
Myth necessarily conceals what
actually happened in order to
provide a more comfortable story.
And Girard’s point is that the origin
of humanity is very uncomfortable.
Tony Bartlett put it that the
birth of mind is collective.
it’s not a wonderful, awe-inspiring,
exciting event in the Girardian system.
It goes back to essentially a lynch mob,
where a group is in disarray because
mimetic desires are not constructive.
It’s a runaway escalation to everybody
being against everybody, and it’s
getting worse and worse, and everybody
is at everybody’s throats, and then
somebody makes a gesture, an accusatory
gesture, towards someone, more or less
saying, “It’s you, you’re the problem.”
And instead of people mimicking
the desire for some thing that
somebody else is grasping at,
they mimic the accusatory gesture.
This episode, it’s a cathartic
event, and everybody is involved in
the group and one person is killed.
And that corpse becomes significant.
It marks a before and after.
There was a chaotic series of
events and now once this one is
dead, there’s a mysterious calm.
There’s an inside and an outside.
There’s everybody who survived,
and then there’s this dead one.
And so over time, this recurrence of
this sort of event for Girard leads
to the creation of deities, these
fearful, awful presences that come
into our midst and bring all this chaos
when they come, but when they leave,
it’s been a blessing the whole time.
And that, embracing this story and turning
it into a story about a God who’s blessed
us, that story actually precedes humanity.
And so that’s the event,
the genesis of humanity.
But what’s left over from that
traumatic event that is speciation,
the coming to be of humanity, what’s
left over is three things, right?
We’ve got a blood sacrifice
ritual, which is a reenactment
of the original lynch mob.
And there are prohibitions against
certain activities, which go
back to the all-against-all stage
where there’s certain things
that people are arguing over.
And so if we have certain rules to
keep that at bay, then we can keep our
community in line, find some solidarity.
And then of course there’s a myth
that’s told about what happened.
And so Girard would say that all three
of those things, the remnants of them
can be found in every human religion.
And that advances were made as far
as moving away from human sacrifice
and using animal sacrifice instead.
That’s clear advancement.
But he would argue that originally
it goes back to humans killing one
of their own and lying to themselves
in a way that makes them think that
it was some sort of divine encounter.
And so the role of prohibition in
human culture, these taboos that
you must not do in order to keep
things in line, that lines up
perfectly with the Managers in IFS.
Mm-hmm.
And the rituals that are intense,
and perhaps horrifying, this
turn-to-extreme-measures that’s
embodied in ritual and bloodletting
seems to map on pretty clearly to
the role of the Firefighter in IFS.
Yeah.
And then that leaves the Exile.
And this was the revelatory thing for
me that as far as studying Girard, it’d
never occurred to me, but that the pain
of bearing a false story — a lie that’s
concocted to make things livable — that
pain becomes a burden that’s placed
upon the Exile, and they’re sent out.
Mm-hmm.
The real truth of it
has to be exiled, right?
Yeah.
You can’t know that everybody
got together and killed one of
their own for no good reason.
It was just us deciding that if
we all kill this one guy, it’s
not gonna be a big problem.
There’s nobody that likes him that
much, he’s not that important.
That’s what happened.
It wasn’t a God that came was
terrifyingly awesome and then blessed us.
No, it was us picking
on the weakest among us.
That’s what happened.
Mm-hmm.
That truth cannot be known otherwise
why would you ritualize that?
Why would you repeat that?
Why would you tell a story
about — that truth cannot be known.
It must be removed from the
stories that we tell each other.
And so in order not to tell that story,
we tell a story that’s very close to
it but doesn’t tell the awful bits.
And that’s the mythology.
And the awful bits that aren’t
told are nevertheless there.
And as soon as people get close to
speaking those sorts of things, it’s
gonna start freaking everybody out.
Managers and Firefighters alike.
And so behind every origin myth,
there’s a dead body and there’s
a truth that must not be told.
And that lines up pretty closely
with the Exile, in the IFS system.
Yeah.
Maybe I even got a little confused
because I think it is true that there
is a truth that would be unsettling,
but the idea that the exiles would
be privy to that and be holding the
quote-unquote gospel story in our
analogy, that’s not what we’re saying.
Right?
There’s going to be parts of it that
are false and have to be false in order
to make the structure of this interior
family stand up for a little while longer.
And so if that’s the case, why would
a mental family chase off or keep at
arm’s length the one who is bearing
witness to the false story that
they need to hold onto so tightly?
Yeah.
what came to mind for me when you
were talking about the parts carrying
truth that can’t be acknowledged, I
do think that that’s true to an extent
in that, when Girard talks about the
epistemological privilege of the victim,
where the victim knows something that
everybody else can’t acknowledge.
That’s in there, and that is the
truth that the Exiles are carrying.
Mm-hmm.
But the burden of the part,
specifically the burden of an exile.
Burdens are another thing
that IFS talks about is that
parts are burdened with these
Mm-hmm.
roles that aren’t their natural optimal
function within your system, if you will.
Yeah.
And my experience of burdens, specifically
in my own IFS work and the work that I’ve
done with clients is that those burdens
almost always are attached to a story.
There’s some belief that that part has
internalized about themselves from the
rest of the system that just isn’t true.
And that’s why it’s that burden,
and that’s why it’s forcing them
into a role that’s not theirs, or
it’s forcing them out of the system.
Yeah.
And so if the rest of the system needs
this part to be carrying this burden
in order for the rest of the system to
function, I mean, if we’re gonna take that
and talk about it in terms of what that
looks like in the external world, right?
We need you to not acknowledge
that child labor is a problem.
We need you to not acknowledge that
racism and slavery are a problem.
We need you to not acknowledge
that sexism is a problem.
There’s a story that we’re
telling ourselves that makes
the world stable, in a way.
It makes it quote unquote “function”
Mm-hmm.
for the people with social privilege.
But it’s not working for the people
who don’t have social privilege.
It’s not working for the Exiles.
And yet those stories can still get
internalized by those exiled communities.
And then a whole lot of healing
work has to happen to unburden them
from that colonized mindset that
they’ve been handed generationally.
Yeah.
I just wanna say it’s really cool because
when I was using the word carry, I was
using that synonymously with burden.
But I really appreciate how you’re saying
that these exile parts can carry more
than burdens, they are carrying truth.
M-hmm.
It’s just
Mm-hmm.
that complexity I think is necessary
to the personal nature of parts.
By personal I just mean
possessing personhood.
There’s a complexity there and so
they can’t be reduced to a story.
Yeah.
Especially they can’t be reduced
to a story that will never change,
but that might very well be part
of the process of exiling, right?
Turning that part into a
story that can’t be changed.
And because they can’t be changed,
you need to be over there.
You can’t talk to us about what’s
going on and interact with us.
We don’t,
Yeah.
we don’t interact with stories that way.
We just play ‘em on repeat
and hear ‘em when we need to.
You’re not allowed to be a person.
You need to carry that story.
Mm-hmm.
I think more than one Girardian
commentator and maybe Girard
himself, I can’t remember, talk
about the fragility of these systems.
Mm-hmm.
That’s why you need to go through
such effort to maintain it.
And there’s all these religious
taboos and things that mustn’t be
transgressed because our myths, our
origin stories, as awful as they can
be and destructive as they can be
— and they are awful and destructive!
— they’re also fragile.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
And if you just stop and take
a look or interact a bit, they
can collapse really quickly.
Yeah.
And um.
I’m blanking on the guy’s name.
He wrote Violence Unveiled and, [it] was
one of the first Girardian books I read,
and he talked about how that was part
of the revelatory nature of scripture.
That there are certain Bible stories
that are mythic in the sense of
they’re covering up, the violence
in a way to try to make it sacred.
But they do such a terrible
job of covering it up!
There’s so lousy!
It’s just like, oh, I can
see the seams just bursting.
And that’s a form of revelation, right?
That… it’s just, so yeah.
And did that get at what
you were hoping to get at?
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, I think so.
So January, we’ve talked a little bit
about the audience and who we have
in mind who’s gonna be listening.
I want to just go ahead and say
frankly that I don’t want the
audience to learn theology from me.
Mm.
I don’t.
Mm-hmm.
I don’t.
Mm-hmm.
I hope that my audience can get
excited about theology because of me.
I do wanna build excitement, but
I think there probably are gonna
be better podcasts out there when
it comes to teaching theology.
And I wanna be upfront about that
because yeah, I’m about to go on a rant
and talk about the Trinity, because
The Trinity’s sort of a big deal.
So I’m gonna run through this, but
the point here is not for me to teach
anybody what the Trinity is, and
maybe I say a few things that get you
excited about learning more about it.
But I think we can learn something
interesting about IFS by following
through a very brief survey of the
history of the doctrine of the Trinity.
And that’s where I’m going with this.
I’m not trying to give a full
understanding of the Trinity so much as
maybe shed light on something about IFS.
When we start to think about parts in IFS
versus the use of the word parts — I’m
making scare quotes with my fingers right
now — in an understanding of the Trinity,
generally it’s not considered a heresy to
say that God comes in three parts, because
nobody’s ever actually believed that.
So in order for it to be a heresy,
there have to be some folks that
were like really adamant and up there
and saying, yeah, this happened.
And then some other people come along
and be like, wait, no, that’s wrong.
You’re a heretic.
So nobody’s ever really said
God comes in three parts, right?
Take the three parts, put ‘em
together, and you got God.
But sometimes there can be sort of a folk
explanation of the trinity that you might
run into in some sort of Sunday school
or something that needs to be filled out.
But the Trinity… I think it’s worth
saying that it doesn’t really have that
much to do with the number three either.
Hmm.
The Trinity comes from observation of
what’s going on in a faith community.
It doesn’t start with this idea
that three is a magic number.
And three might be a magic number.
And maybe you got the song
in your head right now.
I don’t know if it’s schoolhouse
Rock or De La Soul or what you
got in your head right now.
And, and maybe, it’s true, and
maybe we can apply that to the maker
of Heaven and Earth, but that’s
not where the Trinity came from.
People didn’t start with three and
be like, well, three’s so special,
how does that make sense of God?
Rather it had more to do with
Christians worshiping a man
named Jesus as if he were God.
And people are, you
realize you’re worshiping—?
The way you talk about this guy,
it’s like you’re talking about God!
And the Christian response was,
well no, actually, it’s not
like we’re talking about God.
We’re talking about God.
There’s no like.
It is.
Yeah.
It’s just a full on, yep, that’s right.
That’s what we’re doing.
And this is really confusing.
You’re saying, he’s a man a
human, and he was killed in very
inglorious fashion and that’s God?
Yep.
That’s exactly what we’re saying.
So, real quick, now this is not an
explanation of the Trinity, but I think
it’s a run of the mill way to set up
the essentials of what needs to be said.
In order to do this right, I’m gonna say a
sentence and I want you to count ‘em off.
Okay?
I’ll give you one statement
and you’ll give the number.
Okay.
The Father is God.
One.
The Son is God.
Two.
Holy Spirit is God.
Three.
The Father is not the Son.
Four.
The Son is not Holy Spirit.
Five.
Holy Spirit is not the Father.
Six.
God is one.
Seven.
All right, that comes
from Saint Augustine.
Mm.
And I never said the word three.
I did not say the word three.
And I didn’t say the word Trinity,
but I said everything that was
essential to this doctrine.
I didn’t need the word three.
And so I think here already we’ve got
our first parallel with parts-language
isn’t about a particular number.
Mm-hmm.
Right.
it’s not like there’s this certain set
of archetypes or whatever, that once
you get to know them, then you can
find them in yourself and all that.
Mm-hmm.
No, no.
When you meet the parts You have to meet
them first in the same way that you know,
the early church doctors or writer of
doctrines they were observing and meeting
the activity in this faith community
and finding language to describe it.
There wasn’t a predetermined
mold to fit in.
Like, well, there’s gonna need to be
three ‘cause three is a magic number.
Mm.
It’s the same thing with parts.
It’s not like, well, everybody’s
got this, that, and the other part.
I think we talked a little
bit about Inside Out.
I actually heard Tammy Sollenberger
again had somebody on her podcast
and they did a whole 30 minutes
just on the Inside Out movie.
I don’t think the sequel had come out yet.
But they did the whole thing, and the guy
she interviewed, he was really into it.
And he was like, yeah, people have
talked about like how every person
in the movie has the same five
parts and that doesn’t really track.
And he was like, I think it’s because
the whole movie is from Riley’s
perspective and she has five parts.
So when she’s understanding her mother and
her father and her friends and the boy.
Oh, okay.
That’s why they have five parts.
And then, so I was like, that’s a
really deep reading of Inside Out.
I wish he had come to our
Mimesis at the Movies.
Uh, like that’s the guy I want.
But I don’t, I don’t know if that’s
what Disney had in mind or not.
But anyway, the mystery of the
Trinity, because there is a mystery.
I did just lay out these seven
statements that get at everything that’s
essential, I think, that needs to be
said, but it’s not an explanation.
It is a little bit confounding, right?
You just gave names to three different
Persons and said they’re divine, said
they’re God, and you said God is one,
like that, that’s not an explanation.
So there is a mystery here, but it’s
not triunity, it’s not three-in-oneness.
The mystery, it’s that there’s
an eternal generation, I
think is the way to say this.
The Son is one who is always begotten,
the Father, one who’s always begetting.
There were folks in the first century,
I think that would understand the
Logos as sort of this intermediary
between God and the rest of creation.
Mm.
Christians are coming grips
with who they’re worshiping and
in this new revelation of who
humans worship, when they worship
the Maker of Heaven and Earth.
And the idea that the Logos is this
thing that’s kind of in between — one
of these people was named Arius, and
he actually bothered to think through
like, okay, well, either you’re
a creator or you’ve been created.
Mm.
It’s one or the other.
You’re a creature or you’re a creator.
Mm.
That’s it.
There is no in between.
So this Logos that you’re saying is
in—now, most people didn’t even get
this far, and they’re just happy
being a Christian and using the
Greek thoughts and making sense.
Oh, so Jesus is the Word, the Logos.
Arius, actually like thought the
thing through and said, yeah, we’re
gonna have to say something, one
or the other about this Logos.
And what the church decided was he
chose the wrong option, I guess.
And said that the Logos
was created, right.
That the first principle would be the
Creator, and the second principle that’s
intermediary would have to be created.
And they’re like, no, he can’t be made.
And so that’s when you get
the phrase, begotten not made.
Mm-hmm.
It’s a way to basically point out that
Arius, who was the first one to do the
methodical thinking, that he was wrong.
Not for being methodic in
his thinking, but for coming
down on the wrong side of it.
I think pagans had something helpful there
that the eternal first principle, a second
principle that is eternally generated.
And so, I think the people putting Arius
in his place, they were also able to
bring in some Greek philosophy maybe,
to help them as they were doing that.
But it didn’t go all the way.
Because if you got first principle
and second principle, that sort
of sounds like a hierarchy, right?
That’s a problem.
Mm-hmm.
And I think that’s when Athanasius steps
in and he’s insisting on coequality.
Mm.
Eternally begotten means
an eternal begetter.
Eternally begotten, that’s familiar.
But the idea that if that’s what we
say about the Son, the implication
is of the Father eternally begetting.
And when I got to this part, I was
thinking, you know, this sounds like
what January says about creating,
that we are always creating.
Mm mm-hmm.
Because God is always creating.
Mm-hmm.
And so the Son’s dependent
on the Father, yes.
But then so is the Father
dependent on the Son.
Because you, not a Father
if you don’t have a son.
So there’s a coequality
here, between Father and Son.
That’s, I think, where Athanasius
steps in to go beyond the Greek first
principle and second principle and get
to this idea of eternal generation,
a timeless process, which is I think
in some sense, real sense, a mystery.
Mm-hmm.
It’s not easy.
I don’t know.
Would you attach the word mystery to what
you describe as you’ve said already in
this podcast a couple times already, I
think, that humans are always creating?
That’s a fascinating question.
I think that until you asked me that it
would not have occurred to me to use that
word of human creativity, since there
are hardwired biological processes that
cause us to be creating all the time.
Mm-hmm.
And that seems, I mean, it is mysterious
in the sense that we don’t understand
how all of that works and we don’t
have to for it to work, which is great.
But that’s not the same thing as mystery
in the sense of when we’re talking
about the divine, and something that
is utterly and completely beyond any
possibility of ever comprehending it,
because it is so fundamentally other.
At the same time, as soon as you ask
that question, I’m like, well, but it is.
How creativity functions
is a bit of a mystery.
It does depend to some degree or other
on inspiration and revelation and things
that we don’t control and things that
we don’t understand and never will.
We don’t understand where
inspiration comes from.
We don’t understand, necessarily,
why we make the choices that we do in
responding to that inspiration, and what
we create as a result of that inspiration.
So yeah, I do feel like there’s a
significant degree of divine mystery
involved in human creativity, and
very specifically that that degree
of divine mystery isn’t of us.
It is of God.
Yeah.
It is part of being image bearers of
God and the divine in material space.
Does that answer your
question sufficiently?
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
No, I just scheduled a few breaks here
so people wouldn’t have to hear me ramble
on and on without any interruption.
Being introduced to your thoughts,
that was one of the first ones
where I was like, wait a second.
Always creating?
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Yup.
Even before you get
to, like, is that true?
Can that even be?
Like how, like what would
that even look like?
But
mm-hmm.
I do appreciate that formulation
of understanding human life.
Yeah.
And of course, well, I mean, we’ve
said before that our creative
processes can be perverted, I guess.
I don’t know the exact, which word, yeah.
They can
Disoriented.
run amok.
They can be askew,
disordered, disoriented.
Yeah.
They go in ways that are
problematic and more than
Mm-hmm.
merely creative.
Yeah, I guess, we’re gonna get into…
Why can I think of Seth?
And I can’t, I can’t
think of… Cain and Abel!
Like what in the world?
Like that’s the reverse of
Sunday school answer here.
Yeah.
No, but you’ve already made
the point that there’s no place
where only violence is born.
There’s always,
Yeah.
there’s things that can glob on and it can
lead to disorientation like you’re saying.
Mm-hmm.
But there’s always a
creative aspect there.
Yeah.
That’s who God is.
God is eternally begetting
the eternal begotten Son.
And in so much as we are in the image,
in the reflection of such a being,
then yes, we’ll always be creating.
Now, there are three of them, right?
Father, Son, Holy Spirit.
They’re co-equal.
So why not just say three gods?
And the history of why didn’t the Church
just say, okay, we got three gods.
And the short answer, I think, is ‘cause
the first Christians were far too Jewish.
They’re just way too
Jewish to let that happen.
Like there’s no way.
No way.
I mean that’s probably an accurate answer.
So, okay.
Not three gods.
Then three… what?
Exactly what are we talking about here?
And so, some of these Church
members, they spoke Greek, they
came up with the word hypostasis.
Bless you.
And they said there are three hypostases,
I’m sorry, say that again?
Three hypo— think of hypo like hypodermic,
h – y – p – o, and stasis as in being.
Okay.
The under-being, the under-state.
Or…
Okay.
That’s fly by the seat
of my pants etymology.
I don’t know if that’s actually true or
not, but hypostasis is, it’s basically
the most abstract, empty word you could
come up with in Greek, I think, pretty
much, that means an individual being.
Like, a cat is a hypostasis.
A table is a hypostasis.
A human being is a hypostasis.
My hand?
Mm-mm.
No, that’s not a hypostasis, because
it’s not what it is by itself.
Okay.
Okay.
Now the Latin speaking
church folks said Person.
Three Persons.
Mm-hmm.
And as best as I can tell, a person
is basically a hypostasis with a mind.
And here we’re getting to, I’m saying
more than I know already, so I, yeah.
I gave a disclaimer at the
beginning of this, and I hope
January hasn’t edited it out.
You folks are not here to
learn theology from Andrew.
That’s not why you’re here.
You’re here to get exc—
hopefully this is excit—
.
Yeah, you’re not to learn
theology from either of us.
Okay.
Yeah.
That’s not why you’re here.
So hopefully this is intriguing.
You’re like, well wait a second.
Maybe somebody could talk about
this stuff and make sense, and
now I’m gonna go find that person.
And more power to you if you
want to hopefully hit pause
and not delete on this podcast.
But yeah, if you need to do that,
it’s perfectly understandable.
We encourage you, in fact.
We encourage you to find
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
um, actual certified theologians
to explain the Trinity to you,
but it is crucial to say that
hypostases, persons, are not parts.
Okay?
Augustine didn’t say the Father is
a part of God, because the Father
is a complete individual being.
I’m using part because
of IFS, if I was just
Mm-hmm.
speaking
Mm-hmm.
in a Christian context, I would be
saying person, hypostasis, I would
not be using the word part ‘cause
it could just lead to confusion.
But what I’m saying is if you take
the IFS understanding of part, you’re
not gonna have this confusion, right?
And this is what we’re actually after.
And I think we are perhaps qualified to
teach just a little bit of the concept
of what the word part means in IFS.
And I’m trying to do it, not because
I’ve ever met a part in my life.
I haven’t.
I’ve been trying, but I haven’t.
But I, I trust that January’s here and
that she can correct me if I go wrong.
So if we’re made in the image of God
and there are multiple persons, multiple
hypostases, multiple parts in God’s,
it makes sense that we would too.
But unlike God, our parts can come
into conflict with one another.
Mm-hmm.
I’m blanking on which figure from church
history made a big deal about this.
Unlike God, our parts can come
into conflict with one another.
And It’s how we respond to that conflict,
that’s what causes problems for us.
Now, I’m gonna do a little
thought example here.
Okay.
Let’s imagine.
We’re driving a car.
I don’t know why it’s so easy
to always talk about driving.
This is probably a… I’m sure there’s
parts of the world in America even
where, like New York, Chicago,
you guys, you guys own cars?
Like, you drive places?
What’s your, what’s your deal?
Yeah, I’m one of those Americans who
owns a car and drives it everywhere.
So I’m driving my car, right?
And the roads are there in front of me.
They’re for me, right?
— Well, I, I not really, but that’s how I
feel — when somebody gets in front of me.
Cuts me off.
Right.
Just flies past.
I’ve had it happen.
like we’re on the on-ramp, right?
I’m already there.
Mm-hmm.
They’re well behind me I’m looking
in the rearview— and they’re
passing me on the shoulder.
Yep.
‘Cause there’s too many
people in the fast lane.
And I’m like, that’s dangerous!
Like people could— right?
There’s a part of me that’s just ready
to like, I’m gonna tailgate this person.
I’m gonna be right behind them the whole
time, and they’re gonna see me and I’m
gonna do this thing where I’m in their
mirror and then I’m in their other mirror.
I’m gonna do everything so that
they know that I saw what they
did and that it was dangerous.
It doesn’t matter that what
I’m doing is dangerous.
Whether you do that and execute that
terrible plan of vengeance, there’s a part
of me that like that makes good sense.
Now,
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
what would be a good name
for that part, let’s say?
we’re in the hypothetical
world here, right?
So a hypothetical driver.
What do you think?
What could we name that part?
Your inner Road Rager?
Okay.
Inner Road Rager.
Yeah.
I came up with Righteous
Avenger because I was imagining
Mm-hmm.
this, this part could do more than just
stuff on the thoroughfares, uh, like that.
Mm-hmm.
But yeah, that Inner Rager.
I think that’s enough.
The Inner Rager, it
doesn’t have to be road.
So this person driving down the road,
they’re not alone in the car, right?
They get cut off, they get swerved,
they get passed on the shoulder, right?
In very dangerous fashion, but
they’re not alone in the car.
There’s, uh, let’s say there’s an
8-year-old in the backseat; somebody
that’s old enough to understand
what’s going on, not old enough to
drive, but old enough to understand
like, oh, yeah, so-and-so’s angry.
They’re upset, right?
Mm-hmm.
And if I got an Inner Rager
going, I’ve also got somebody
that says, okay, wait a second.
I can’t let somebody else see what
I’m actually feeling right now.
I have these feelings; I have this rage.
It’s real.
It’s me, but I can’t let people see that.
Not this person!
Maybe it’s not a child.
Maybe it’s somebody you’re
trying to impress, right?
And they’re sitting shotgun.
I don’t know, right?
Mm-hmm.
But there’s somebody that’s
definitely pumping the brakes here.
Metaphorically, not literally,
even though we’re on the road.
Somebody that’s like, okay, this
is too much, like, chill out.
Right?
What would be a name
for that kind of part?
The Cool Your Jets part.
Cool Your Jets!
All right, Cool Your Jets.
I came up with the Super-Duper Ego 100.
As in
Fantastic.
100 for 100.
Just try me.
I’m spotless.
I never make a mistake.
That was the one that I came
up — but Cool Your Jets is good.
Okay.
So the Rager gets triggered.
Cool Your Jets is right there behind it.
And then, somebody steps in, right?
And it’s like, you know, how beautiful
is the world… that it begins with
nonsense and this tom foolery on the
roadway, but I’m brought into alignment
because of the presence of someone else.
Somebody’s in the back seat of the car.
I’m blessed.
Somebody’s riding shotgun
that I care about.
I’m blessed.
And it makes me safer than I
would’ve been without them.
Mm-hmm.
Right.
This, this ain’t a Rager and this ain’t
a, this ain’t a Cool Your Jets part.
What would you call this part, January?
Hmm.
I just went with Mystic.
Oh, yeah.
That works.
Yeah.
The word that was popping
into my mind was Gratitude.
The Gratitude part.
Gratitude.
Gratitude.
Okay.
Okay.
Now, I am gonna say a sentence and
I want you to count ‘em off for me.
Okay?
Uh-oh.
Okay.
The Rager is human.
One.
The Cool Your Jets is human.
Two.
Gratitude is human.
Three.
The Rager ain’t the Cool Your Jets.
Four.
Cool Your Jets ain’t Gratitude.
Five.
Gratitude ain’t the Rager.
Six.
There is one human driving the car.
Mm seven.
All right.
I think you see where I’m going.
Now, there are people listening to this
podcast who know theology way better than
I do, and I guarantee you there’s somebody
right now that’s like, “Ah-HA! MODALISM!”
Okay, so not that I understand
it completely, but I think the
idea of Modalism is that there’s
different modes of God’s being.
And basically what it does is it
takes the three-ness and it turns it
into a subjective thing for humans.
Mm-hmm.
Like we experience God in one way
in the Old Testament—it’s Father.
We experience God in another way when
he’s walking around—and it’s Jesus.
And then we experience God in a third way.
But really it’s just one, it’s one God.
But our experience is it
turns the three-ness into a
subjective thing of the observer.
And there’s different
modes for the one God.
And that is not the Christian doctrine.
Mm-hmm.
And some people just heard my
story and they thought, oh, okay.
So at one point you were raging,
and then at one point you cooled
your jets, and then you got
to a place that was gratitude.
That’s an awesome progression.
That’s a great thing that you did.
And what I’m saying is, no.
If you affirm IFS — now, you can’t
do this with every experience,
but the underlying point of IFS
is that the Rager is always there.
Mm-hmm.
The Rager is a part of you.
Always.
The Cool Your Jets is always
there, is always a part of you.
Gratitude is always there, so
don’t be an IFS modalist, right?
Don’t fall to that heresy of— that
the whole point of IFS is that
we, we aren’t just jumping— and
again, I’m not a psychologist.
I don’t know how to use the
words schizophrenic other
than in a colloquial sense.
There may be, I’m sure, an IFS way
to address these actual psychological
issues, but what I’m saying is the
folk understanding of schizophrenia,
that’s like first you’re one, then
you’re another, you’re all these
different— that’s not what IFS is about.
Mm-hmm.
It’s, it’s not this jumping.
There’s an ongoing, consistent inner
relationship between your parts.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
And there is, I believe, a connection
to be made to the Christian
understanding of God this sense.
Um.
And again, I’m doing all of this not
to give anybody a clear view of the
Trinity, but hopefully to shed light
on what we’re talking about when
we’re talking about parts in IFS.
Mm-hmm.
What do you think, how did it
come across to you, January?
No, I love that.
I think that’s brilliant and beautiful.
Thank you for all of that.
I like the idea that there could be a
state the human system, both inside us
and between us interpersonally, that
really does fully imitate God’s system,
where there are three distinct Persons
who are also one, and there’s no conflict.
There’s no lack of integrity.
Everything is perfectly fully integrated.
I mean, that, to me, is a description
of an optimally healthy system.
Yeah.
Where everything is fully integrated.
Everything is fully working together
to be the full expression of
what that system is meant to be.
And at the same time, there’s
these unique individual pieces that
are participating in this system.
Yeah.
And these pieces aren’t things
in the mind of the therapist to
understand the human psychology.
There’s an actual
Yeah.
there there.
It’s a reality that’s unpacked.
It’s not like they simply arise
when you stop and take the time
to look and analyze your thoughts.
Oh, let me, let me analyze myself when I
was on the road and that car cut me off.
I can divide it up into
these three things.
No, it’s not a way to do— I mean,
again, yeah, psychoanalysis means
more than I want it to here, but like…
Yeah.
It’s not a projection of an
analysis onto an experience.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
we’re not retroactively making meaning
and applying it to the experience.
We are encountering something
inside ourselves and asking
what was the experience?
Yeah.
Tell me all about it.
When I got to the part about,
Western Church, talking about three
Persons and the need to talk about
mind, the argument is that God of
necessity is of one mind and one will.
Mm. Mm-hmm.
Yes.
Uh, whereas humans can be,
but aren’t necessarily so.
But of God, it’s necessary.
because that’s who God is.
Yes.
And so there’s never that disorientation.
All of God’s creation’s good,
is the simple way to say that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I don’t want to give
the wrong impression.
When I’m talking about us existing
as a healthy system that’s optimally
integrated, that doesn’t mean that I
think that God is necessarily a healthy
system in the way that we think about it.
What I mean is that when God’s nature is
manifest in and through us in the material
world, that’s what it looks like for us.
Mm-hmm.
Not that we can look at ourselves
and take that picture and apply it
to God, but that we can take what we
understand about God and apply it to us
Yeah.
to understand ourselves better.
Yeah.
What’s the most important
thing you want people to take
away from what you just said?
If we’re made in the image of God,
then could it also be possible
that our oneness is just as complex
and mysterious as God’s oneness?
Hmm.
Yeah.
That feels very true to me.
There might be philosophical problems all
through everything I just said, but for
some reason, for me, feels better to sum
this up with a comment on the complexity
of oneness rather than multiplicity.
Hmm.
Maybe it’s just ‘cause my ancestors
in my faith were just, as I said
before, far too Jewish to put up
with any sort of multiple deities.
And maybe that’s all
that’s coming out here.
Thank you.
That was delightful.
Cool.
And yeah, do agree that it’s really
important to be clear, I don’t wanna risk
presenting us as teachers of any of this.
We are very enthusiastic lay
people, but we are not experts.
Yeah.
And we want to communicate and give
people our enthusiasm for this stuff,
but we want you to go do your own
research, go do your own reading.
Go listen to actual experts.
Please don’t take our
word for any of this.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
No.
And I, I can’t remember if I said
this already, so yeah, but, um,
no, I, I really appreciate James
Allison’s treatment of, of the Trinity.
There’s a Trinity Sunday
and so he delivers a homily,
he does not do what I did.
If anybody’s interested in hearing a
15 minute exposition on the Trinity
that does not bother to go through
all the heresies and say, oh, we gotta
say this ‘cause we can’t say that.
Mm-hmm.
Right?
We can’t say that the Logos,
the Word, was made, so it’s
not made, so it was begotten.
This doctrine that is always a response
to something that must be wrong.
Mm-hmm.
He doesn’t do any of that.
He just outlines, in one positive
statement after the next, a
way to understand the Trinity.
It’s a beautiful thing.
So yeah, I think we should put
a link to that in show notes.
Well, that was absolutely delightful.
Thank you so much for sharing that.
That was awesome.
I’m gonna be thinking
about that for a while.
This feels like a good place to
start wrapping up this episode,
and so let’s talk really quick
about this episode’s practice.
Oh yeah!
So Letters from Love, what is this?
What is this about?
Where does it come from
and how do you do it?
This is a practice that I picked up
from Elizabeth Gilbert who most people
know from her book, Eat Pray Love.
She also wrote Big Magic: Creative
Living Beyond Fear, which is my
personal favorite of her books so far.
And then her latest book just came out,
her memoir All the Way to the River,
which is a really, really fascinating
but very emotional piece of work.
I highly recommend it, but definitely
practice self-care if you have to
put it down for, points in between.
So this is a practice that she’s
been doing for years and years.
And it’s a very simple idea where you
just sit down with a blank piece of
paper or a journal or whatever, and
you write at the top of the page, Dear
Love, what would you have me know today?
Or something similar.
If that question doesn’t
land for you, adjust it.
What would you have me do today?
What would you have me hear today?
Whatever the language is
that really speaks to you.
And then just free write whatever comes
into your head and write to yourself from
the perspective of Unconditional Love.
What is the most loving, most
compassionate, most honest
voice that you can imagine?
And just write to
yourself from that person.
And she makes a point of being clear that
like, don’t imagine a specific person
that you’re writing to yourself from.
Don’t imagine, you know, God or
Jesus or a specific religious figure.
Because a lot of the time those can
come with very limiting beliefs, right?
Like we have real structured
ideas about who those people are.
And it’s gonna be hard to imagine
Love saying something that that
person wouldn’t say, in your opinion.
And so if you just make it, I’m writing
to myself from Unconditional Love, there’s
many fewer of those preconceived notions
to kinda get in the way of what it’s gonna
say to you, and it can surprise you a lot
more, which is part of the point of this.
But I wanted to attach it to the Shame
as Internal Violence episode because for
me, this is one of the most significant
and meaningful ways that we can start
to heal some of that shame wound.
I think that if the serpent mediates
a false self-perception to Eve and
Jesus offers the true one, how do
we practice re-mediating ourselves
through God instead of through the
distorted lenses that we inherited?
And this is really one of the best and
simplest ways that I know to do it.
It is super accessible to anybody.
You don’t really need any tools to do
it except for something to write with.
And quite frankly, once you’ve got this
as a practice for a while, you don’t
even necessarily need to write it.
You will find yourself talking to
yourself from the voice of love.
Mm-hmm.
Over time.
Okay.
As, this gets into you.
It really is a form of mediation
that will become part of you.
I love it because there are too many
of us in the world who didn’t have
unconditional love from a person or from
a community that we should have had.
And so it can be really difficult
if we’re trying to find that in
the world outside of us, sometimes
it just doesn’t exist out there.
That can lead to a lot of
hopelessness and despair.
And it turns out that the answer is
much simpler and much more accessible.
That it is right here, and we
can just talk to ourselves that
way and it can still have the
same healing effect over time.
I did do some letters It
took me a couple days.
I was like, oh, yes, I’m gonna do this.
And then I was like, I didn’t do it today.
I didn’t do it today.
I’ve got three bulls in with eight other
cows that need to be split off, and
the neighbor’s expecting to bring his
animals over at the beginning of November.
And I just It’s not working.
So, I mean, cut to the end of the story.
It didn’t happen.
I haven’t been able to do it.
I knew yesterday was kind of a do or
die, do or die—nobody’s dying here!
Anyway, I talked to my neighbor
on the phone this morning.
He’s not worried about it.
He’s not in a pinch.
But it’s an issue.
Like they need grass to eat.
So anyway, it does need to happen.
And so I guess I knew there was a
part of me that felt very anxious
about what I was gonna try and do.
It’s a little scary too, ‘cause
they’re big animals and I’m by myself.
Mm-hmm.
Farming’s about the most
unsafe job in America, I think.
I think it ranks number one for accidents.
So I didn’t have a part to talk to.
I just knew I felt anxious.
Hmm.
Love said,
“It’s okay to feel awful. Your
anxiety is real, but you aren’t,
of course, anxiety itself.
You’re not.
If you’re the only one,
it’s not actually about you.
It’s about everyone who’s
left you to fend for yourself.
I’m here now, for now
anyway, but now is still now.
And I feel it too.
You can tell me all about it if you want,
but before you do, know I already feel
everything you’re about to tell me about.
And that’s something we can
focus on too, if you want.
We can focus on the us-feeling and let
the you-telling come later if you want.
And I felt like I heard a response
that said, “Today’s gonna be a chore.
Don’t make me pretend it’ll be fun.”
Mmmm.
I said, okay.
Hmm.
Thank you for sharing it.
What else do you wanna share about it?
It’s an openness and a strength to be
able to say encouraging words to yourself.
That doesn’t have to be a
sign of insecurity issues.
I mean, there can be insecurity
issues, but that’s, not the
only thing that that points to.
It points to a compassionate Self
that’s aware of parts that are hurting.
That’s also what it points to.
So I don’t know who I was
talking to and I’m not sure
who was talking at that point.
So there’s a bit of a, there’s a bit of
a part mess going on in there perhaps,
or
maybe, I don’t know if that,
How dare you be human, Andrew!
is that the definition of humanity:?
Part mess?
Pretty sure it’s one of ‘em.
Okay.
Yeah.
So how was it for you doing this exercise?
I do feel a bit vulnerable.
I don’t know if it’s the exercise or
it’s that I’m talking so frankly about it
Yeah.
with you.
It’s nice to know that I
can write things like that.
Feels like maybe there’s, there’s some
growth, there’s some self awareness
that’s beyond cognitive awareness.
I think maybe I’m recognizing
feelings, emotions.
So it is interesting how a written
exercise can make headway something
that’s not exactly cerebral
Yeah.
at all.
That’s not something I would’ve
thought to do, or try to do.
What was particularly difficult about it?
I was like, oh, what
do you say to anxiety?
And I’m like, well, that’s not
the point of this exercise.
I’m not trying to say
something to anxiety.
I just kind of landed on the
fact that, well, whatever is
being felt I can feel too.
Mm. Mm-hmm.
That must be true.
Right?
It’s me.
So let’s make sure every part knows that.
Hmm.
Well, do you wanna hear one of mine?
Yeah.
It’s really uncomfortable letting
other people hear how I talk to myself.
I’m so afraid of being judged for that.
Dear Love, what would
you have me do today?
Little Bean, I’m so glad you phrased
this question differently today.
Your sweet little brain gets involved
when the question is about knowing.
We are not here so I can
drop cosmic wisdom on you.
Any cosmic wisdom is incidental.
We are here so I can love on you.
That’s not a brain game, although
your beautiful thinker is
certainly invited to the party.
I love her too.
You asked what I would have you do today,
and at the same time, I also see the
part of you that’s so afraid of getting
an answer to that question because it is
so afraid of one more way to fall short.
Oh my love.
This is a vulnerable one.
Go get your cozy blanket.
Stay there for a minute.
Get warm.
Good morning to the part of you that’s
already wondering how this letter will
sound to other people, whether they’ll
hear what they need to hear from this.
My love, you are welcome to share
this with whomever you like, but
remember that you are not responsible
for their relationship with Me.
Every single person out there has
this same tool available to them.
You have a tendency to pass love
on to others as soon as you receive
it, keeping none for yourself.
I know you know this, I love that you’ve
set a boundary where you don’t share
every conversation we have, because
you know you need that container of
privacy for true intimacy to develop.
That’s wonderful.
You wouldn’t publicly post every
conversation you had with a spouse.
You don’t have to publicly post
every conversation you have with me.
You don’t have to post any conversation
you have with me, including this one.
You are not depriving anybody of me if you
choose to keep our correspondence private.
They all have the same access you do.
The only way to lose access is to
buy the lie that you have no access.
The temple curtain tore, remember?
Everybody’s welcome in the Holy Presence.
So you can’t let anybody down by
holding the boundary you need to hold.
You are serving others by
keeping that container as
sacred as you need to keep it.
Now about this notion of failure, my love.
This is coming from an
expectation that I will ask of
you things you are unable to do.
Where is that belief coming from?
Beloved, you are the only one who expects
things of you before you’re ready.
Well, yes, other people have
their expectations too, but those
expectations are about them, love.
They’re not about you in the slightest.
You are accountable ultimately
only to yourself and to Me
and to your beloved Christ.
And I tell you that neither Jesus nor
I will ever ask you to do anything
that you cannot do unless we are
going to show up and do it with you.
That’s how this works, my love.
Participation, not perfection.
So there’s no way to fail
at any of this, my love.
Do you see?
Even a refusal to participate
is ultimately a participation.
Some things shouldn’t be participated in.
You have every right to test
that, to experiment, to play.
Failure is a lie that culture
invents to keep you in line.
It is not real.
Know why?
Because there is no failure, no mistake,
no missed step that cannot be learned
from while you still draw breath.
That’s your key, my love.
So yes, by all means, be careful with your
actions because yes, those actions have
consequences for others besides yourself.
Yes, allow yourself to sit with
and be expanded by the pain
and grief of realizing you wish
you’d done a thing differently.
But feeling that pain and grief instead
of numbing it is the thing that forms
the neural pathways in your brain to help
you choose something different next time.
That is how you grow, my love.
That is how you participate.
So what would I have you do today?
I’d have you drink enough water.
I’d have you feed yourself
nourishing things.
I’d have you leave your cell
phone in the other room so you
can attend to one thing at a time.
That’s it.
No, really, that’s it today.
All those other things you’re thinking of,
posting to Substack, tidying the house,
being present during Lectio Divina, those
are your expectations, lovey, not Mine.
Your capacity is much lower than
your culture tells you it should be.
I would have you accept that as a gift
instead of resenting it as an imposition.
You have permission to tend
to yourself, my darling.
I love you forever and always.
Yeah.
That seems so in line with the big
theme of our podcast here, right?
Like you, what would you have me do?
Yeah.
It’s not, it turns out if someone
loves you, they’re not concerned
about what you’re gonna achieve.
Like they want you to nourish yourself.
Yes.
Yeah.
They want your life to be tended to, yeah.
There’s thriving and flourishing
with regards to life that’s what Love
desires, not some sort of achievement.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, Love is not worried about whether
you’re living up to your potential.
Love is your potential.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Oh yeah.
Nicely put.
Yeah.
How did you feel while reading it?
So uncomfortable.
So uncomfortable.
Yeah.
Okay.
And compared to like when you wrote it?
Oh no.
While I’m writing them, it’s always fine.
Yeah, yeah,
Yeah.
I’ve noticed that my different
parts have different handwritings.
And I can always tell when
I’m not quite in Love.
Like when it’s a part trying to take
over and write the letter because my—
I, I start making spelling mistakes.
I don’t ever make
spelling mistakes, Andrew.
Ever.
Oh, okay.
Not even when I’m handwriting shit.
Like it’s, it’s so vanishingly rare.
Wow.
But it’ll happen four or five
to a page when I know I’m
actually in that flow state.
Yeah.
Oh, wow.
So, yeah, it’s an ongoing practice to
try to not go back and edit though.
Oh, I see what you’re saying.
So you’re escaping the editor that by
actually going back to edit, you might
be diluting some of what was getting
out or I, or am I still thinking of it—
I know you’re not saying that it would
be a wrong thing to, to go back and
edit, but I guess even as I’m asking
the question, I’m starting to think
that maybe I’m still got a content
focus on what’s the thing that said,
and, and refining how it’s said, when
maybe that’s not actually the point of
Mm-hmm.
the exercise is not a clear thought,
but a clear acknowledgement?
Yeah.
It’s just that moment by moment attention.
Mmm.
When you describe that, after you’ve
done it for a while, the writing
might be a bit superfluous or
mm-hmm.
that it’s not necessary.
That you find it’s become a
gaze that you’re familiar with
Yeah.
enough that it can come and see
you and speak in any moment.
I guess I’m curious, when you sit down
to write, we have a prompt, right?
Mm-hmm.
Dear Love, what would
you have me hear today?
…know, change, do today?
When it’s happening outside of
the framework of a practice with
a writing prompt, out there in the
wild, not because you’re sitting
down to do a practice, but it, it,
it just happens and the voice comes.
Do you find that it’s, is
there a consistent prompt
for it that happens to you?
Or are you turning toward?
Do you find yourself like, okay, I
need to find where’s love right now?
What’s, what’s love gonna say?
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
Is it something happening to you,
or are you turning toward it?
Or is that question even relevant?
It’s a totally relevant
question and the answer is both.
A lot of the time there can be things
in the outside world that happen
that like Love will just be right
there going, oh honey, I know this
is about to be real hard for you.
We’re just remember that I’m here.
You’re not alone in this.
We’re, we’re gonna have a minute here.
Yeah.
And then other times, yeah.
It is something that I deliberately
turn toward because I can feel myself
getting ramped up and hyper anxious
and maybe I’m too blended with a
part and I don’t have access to my
Self-self in that moment, well, there’s
somebody else’s Self who’s available.
Even if there’s not somebody else in the
room, like a therapist or a friend or
somebody else who can physically bring
the Self energy, the Self energy is
there anyway, and it’s pretty awesome.
So I just find this to be the most
wonderful and accessible tool to
begin to heal that shame wound.
Yeah.
So the prompts that I’ve heard so far that
I remember from Elizabeth Gilbert: Dear
Love, what would you have me hear today?
What would you have me change today?
What would you have you do today?
The consistent point there though of all
the examples so far is the today, right?
This is a here and now
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Sort of exercise.
Would you, I mean, I know you’re
not gonna say don’t do it.
You’re like, yeah, do it,
whatever, you know, just try it.
Find out.
But if you were to start asking
questions like, Dear Love, how do
I make sense of what happened two
weeks ago with this terrible thing?
Or what do you think about
this decision I’m gonna have
to make before this next thing?
If you are pushing yourself outside of
the here and now, would you expect, I
mean, I don’t know, maybe I just need to
ask Love and find out what, like it said.
But for people that are listening and
haven’t tried this before, would you
recommend them to stick to the here
and now with their prompts at first?
I guess I’m trying to get at
what’s the essential component
to this prompt, if there is one.
Maybe it’s just turning to Love?
Yeah, the turning to Love and the
attentive presence to whatever comes up,
those are the really essential pieces.
So ask away, whatever questions you have.
Is there any question that
you wouldn’t bring to God?
No.
Yeah.
There’s no question that you can’t bring
to Love either for the same reasons.
And at the same time, my experience
from doing this and somebody else’s
might completely vary, but for me it
is very much a manna in the desert
kind of practice, where you’re gonna
get just what you need for today.
Mmm.
Love is not going to tell you what
your life is gonna look like in
a year or five years or 10 years.
Love is not gonna tell you all
the things that you have to do.
That for me is always a
sign that I’m in part.
When there’s an agenda in
the room, it ain’t Love.
It’s always trying to bring me back
to the present moment and always
trying to bring me back to far fewer
things are essential than you think.
But yeah, asking Love for a bigger
perspective on something that
happened that I’m stressed out
about, that happens all the time.
Asking Love for presence to be
with me when I’m dealing with
some highly activated parts, that
happens a lot where it’s just like,
yep, sit here and breathe with me.
We’re just gonna sit here and
do this and I’m just gonna keep
writing this over and over again.
And it doesn’t matter
that I’m repeating myself.
We’re just gonna keep doing this until
your nervous system is regulated.
Does that answer your question?
Yeah, yeah.
Definitely.
What was your favorite part of doing it?
Well, I felt like I might’ve made
some headway with parts work, which
is, I’d say I’ve been banging my
head against the wall, except that
would imply that I’ve been trying
consistently, which I’m not sure I have.
That I had a, an encounter
with a distinguishable part.
Yeah.
I’m not sure I’d had that happen yet.
So that was, that was nice.
Yeah.
And you, I mean, you could hear in my
letter I’m just constantly switching parts
‘cause parts are coming up and leaving and
coming up and I’m just like, hello to you.
Hello to you.
Hello to you.
I just keep noticing, keep saying hello.
Yeah.
Keep being hospitable.
Yeah.
So, yeah.
Letters of Love is a practice that.
It’s always available.
It’s always there.
And it will destabilize the shame
game that gets played in your head.
It’s good at that.
And so, yeah, we invite you guys
to practice that if you have time.
And that’s probably it for today.
Our next episode, we are still talking
about violence, but as we all know.
Yeah.
It’s not just internal, it
can be external as well.
And when it happens, it
looks a lot like blame.
Yep.
Yeah, when you’re looking for
something to blame, it’s easy if you
can find something disgusting, right?
If you’re on the lookout
for something to blame.
Mm-hmm.
We’ll be talking a lot
about that too, I think.
Thanks for joining us.
We’ll see you next time.
You’ve been listening to Theology
Kills, a podcast about letting
our shame and violence die so
that life and love can thrive.
Your hosts are January Jaxon and
Andrew McRae, and Season One was
written and produced by January Jaxon.
Our theme music is "Things to
Do In a Day" by Simon Lepine.
Theology Kills is
exclusively listener funded.
If you’d like to support our work or go
deeper with practices, bonus content,
and community conversations,
join our Patreon at
patreon.com/TheologyKillsPodcast.
You can find everything we’re
making at www.theologykills.com.
That’s everything we have for you today.
Thanks for listening,
take care of yourselves and each other
and we’ll see you next
time.