Chris and Beth Bruno host conversations at the intersection of psychology and theology. This podcast is powered by ReStory Counseling.
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Want to know what it takes to Restore Your Life? We are Chris and Beth Bruno and we lead a team of brilliant story work counselors around the country all committed to helping you come alive. We call it the Restorey Approach. So if you're a story explorer, kingdom seeker, or just a day-to-dayer, you've come to the right place. Welcome to the Restorey Podcast.
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So I know you think I'm weird because I have this giant blue
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And you hate it, don't you? Well, it's 50 pounds. It's not just large, it's heavy. It's, yeah, it's a giant weighted blanket that I absolutely love. I love sleeping under it, I love sitting on the couch underneath it, I love wrapping myself up in it, and...
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For me, it feels so, so comforting. But for you, it sounds like it feels claustrophobic or something, right? It is cla- yeah, it makes me feel a little trapped, actually. Yeah, trapped? Yeah. Okay.
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Yeah, our son feels the same way. He hates it. But our daughter, she has her own. Yes, that is interesting. Yeah, isn't it? So I got this weighted blanket during a season of my own life where it felt like I needed...
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to pursue some comfort, where just the external world felt a little out of control, and I needed to find some way to calm my body. And this goes back kind of to a story from my own childhood, where when I was in elementary school, there were, on the playground at the elementary school, there were these big concrete, round, kind of culvert things,
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like four feet in diameter. Some of them were maybe three feet, eight feet, you know, just these big things that they just put out on the playground and kids would jump on top and climb through and they would make tunnels and all that kind of stuff. Well, there was one that was tipped up on its end and it was maybe, you know, the cylinder was the open to the sky. And I remember getting in that and going all the way to the bottom. And then my friends, the people that I was playing with, they would like,
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dog pile on top.
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And I remember feeling so safe and so secure at the bottom of that dog pile. I would actually ask them to come pile on top of me at the bottom of this. I was like seven, eight, nine years old when this was happening. Right. That would be, uh, and I just, I just loved it. And for some people that would feel terrifying and trapping and claustrophobic, but something in me felt comforted by that. So what is that?
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was going on in your seven-year-old self and how was that related to your now adult self and why is that so different from me? Well for me I think there was such a longing in my little boy heart to be held.
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and to be enclosed, not trapped, but enclosed, where there would be some level of external containment to bring to me because I felt as a boy in my childhood story, it was all about how I had to bring containment and comfort to other people. I wanted something somewhere else to bring comfort to me. And so I bring this up because today on the podcast, we wanna talk about something that in the book,
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by the Yurkovich's, it's a, they bring up this concept that they call the deficit of comfort. And it's an important thing for us to reflect on and think about how were we or weren't we comforted
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by someone else in our childhood years? And what did that comfort bring to us? Or what did the lack of the comfort leave us hungry for? And so when we think about comfort, it's important for us to reflect on this a little bit. So the deficit of comfort is, it's important and they explore this a little bit in the book, but they say comforting is not where maybe you're sick and somebody brings you a bowl of soup.
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or you're bullied at the playground and you come home and you tell your parent and then they call the principal and they put an end to whatever it is that...
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you know, that the situation is. That's helpful and it's nice to have a bowl of soup or it's nice to have somebody, you know, rub your back if you're, you know, scared or sad or something like that. But there's more to comfort than just a bowl of soup or ending the problem. Comfort is where someone comes alongside of what you're feeling and offers their care, not to the external, but to the internal. There's some kind of offer of this is hard.
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This is sad.
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This is scary. This is terrifying. This is angering. This is overwhelming. This is stressful. Whatever that is, somebody comes alongside of you as a child and acknowledges what you're feeling and and maybe they acknowledge it because you said those words or maybe you don't even have words for what you're feeling and that other person, that parent, is offering you comfort in the midst of what you're experiencing. And it's almost like they give you something to hold on to, some kind of tether to
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I am feeling uncomfortable or discomforted right now, but you, parent, you're strong, you're solid, and I can hold on to you in the midst of my internal turmoil. So that comforting is what comfort is. And those, some people received that significantly when they were kids, and some people didn't. And the reality is that most of us didn't receive enough comforting growing up, and it leaves this comfort deficit.
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in our lives and so therefore if there's a deficit then we move into how am I going to have to comfort myself?
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Right? And I think I remember when we had, the kids were little and we had this whole conversation about they're gonna need to cry it out or they're gonna need to find some way to self-soothe and they're gonna need to hold their blanket or their stuffed animal or suck on the pacifier, whatever it is they have to find some way to self-soothe. There is a pursuit inside of all of us to go from discomfort towards comfort. And when we don't have someone externally helping us manage that,
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ways to comfort ourselves which then as we grow up leads into a whole realm of unhelpful ways of self-comfort. So you're saying that and I'm picturing
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you know, our firstborn who we did that with and he would never, he actually never figured that out. He never sucked his thumb. He wouldn't hold a pacifier. He never had a blankie or a little stuffy, you know, stuffed animal. At some point though, he started twirling his hair. I forget at what age, but he is 21 years old and still curling his hair. Yes. Not to shame our son. Not to shame our son,
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he can name now as a young adult man that it is soothing. It is soothing. And so I guess I'm wondering at what point, you know, when we discover this as children.
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You know, we encourage pacifiers to be dropped and thumb sucking to stop. And we enter into a new realm of seeking comfort and finding comfort. How does that play into kind of what we do for ourselves and what we need externally from our parents? Yeah, so the, you know, the pacifier or even the hair twirling or whatever, those are pretty innocuous things to find comfort in. And he still does it and we all still do things that help us find comfort. So those are great.
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become challenging or difficult is when those very comforting, those comforting actions become counterproductive.
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to where now they've become addictive processes. And he may have an addiction to twirling his hair, it doesn't matter much, but it's when the addiction goes into all the things we normally do, like binge watching TV as a way of bringing comfort, drinking, any kind of addiction, working out too much, working too much, all those places, those are ways for us to mitigate our discomfort.
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and we go to a thing or a process rather than to a person, that's where it becomes counterproductive. And so with the kids when they're young and they have the pacifier, it's helped them find comfort, and then at some point they need to bring their discomfort not to the pacifier but to the parent.
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and they need to bring their fear outside of themselves, now that they have language, to bring their fear outside of themselves to a parent, to someone else to help them process through that stuff.
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And so I just find it fascinating to think about how much of our discomfort moves towards a process, especially into adulthood, that can be counterproductive and now becomes something that it was never designed to be. So if someone finds themselves identifying with this and thinking, yeah, I probably have a comfort deficit.
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What does that look like and how do they heal?
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You know, it's all of us in some level, like I said, have a comfort deficit because we weren't raised in the perfection of what God designed for us. And so the fact is that we're not raised in Eden, as I've said before, and so therefore there is some level of deficit of comfort, which a whole other trajectory of conversation we could go down is that is why then God identifies himself as the God of all comfort and why he brings comfort to us.
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of comfort. The spirit of God is the comforter. And so I think we have to grapple with the reality of who God is for us and wants to be for us and yet who we demand other people to be for us instead or other things to be the comforter for us instead. And that's just all kind of how again, how we were raised. So if we find ourselves in
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reflecting on this with, yes, I did have, I do have a deficit of comfort in my story, then I think the first question is gonna be, and so what am I doing with that? Where am I taking that? How am I mitigating my discomfort by seeking some other way to find comfort? That's a really hard question, and it calls all things into question.
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It calls in how I am engaging with another person. What am I doing with things? What am I doing with media? What am I doing with my daily life and my daily habits? Where am I finding comfort and then beginning to backtrack a little bit and in which places might I find comfort instead in either a relationship with a trusted person or in uh my relationship with god himself
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And so the movement and the healing is moving away from those other things and towards a grounded relationship, which should have been there for us in the beginning, which should have been part of what we were offered from our parents in the beginning. So give us one sentence to say to ourselves that would, one prompt that would get us going on that process. In what way?
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Am I finding comfort in something other than a relationship or God? Alright friends, thanks for listening. If you haven't left a rating on iTunes, we'd love for you to do that real quick. And here's the thing with our name change. We're trying to offer more cohesion to all the things we do with restoration. We've got counseling and stuff for marriages and dads and moms and the list goes on and on.
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One of the ways we started talking about it recently is to, rather humorously and affectionately, refer to it all as the Restory Universe. Doesn't that sound interesting? Well, if you want to learn more, just head over to RestoryUniverse.com to see what we're up to. And we'll see you same time, same place, next week.