In this season as The Seattle School has been looking back at the first 25 years, we, Dr. Paul Hoard and Dr. Doug Shirley, have been exploring what it means to live with the legacies and histories in our community, as well as how to engage with these proverbial ghosts and shadows, these systemic inheritances. Together in this series titled “Ghosts and Shadows,” we’ve examined the past and looked towards the future through three essays, and we also invited colleagues to join in the conversation and share their reflections in a series of podcasts.

To start the series, psychiatrist, speaker, and author Dr. Curt Thompson joined us for a conversation. In 2023, he gave a fascinating talk at The Seattle School and we were intrigued. Listen to this conversation as the three of us play together in these liminal spaces. [Note: this conversation has been edited for length.]

Our Guest for this Conversation

Psychiatrist, speaker, and author Curt Thompson, MD, brings together a dialect of interpersonal neurobiology (IPNB) and Christian anthropology to educate and encourage others as they seek to fulfill their intrinsic desire to feel known, valued, and connected. Curt understands that deep, authentic relationships are essential to experiencing a healthier, more purposeful life — but the only way to realize this is to begin telling our stories more truly. His unique insights about how the brain affects and processes relationships help people discover a fresh perspective and practical applications to foster healthy and vibrant lives, allowing them to get unstuck and move toward the next beautiful thing they’re being called to make. Through his workshops, speaking engagements, books, organizational consulting, private clinical practice, and other platforms, he helps people process their longings, grief, identity, purpose, perspective of God, and perspective of humanity, inviting them to engage more authentically with their own stories and their relationships. Only then can they feel truly known and connected and live into the meaningful reality they desire to create.

Transcript

Dr. Paul Hoard:
I am Dr. Paul Hoard, an Associate Professor of Counseling Psychology at The Seattle School. Dr. [Doug] Shirley and I have been working on this project we call Ghosts and Shadows in this season where the school has been looking back at the first 25 years and looking ahead to the next 25 years. And as we are preparing to move from this building to a new location, we’ve been exploring what are the proverbial ghosts that haunt us, the ghosts and shadows with us in our community, as well as how to engage with those ghosts and shadows, what we think about systemic inheritances. We’ve written a few essays and we’ve also continued the conversation in a series of podcasts with a few colleagues to help us reflect together. We are excited to have psychiatrist, speaker and author, Dr. Curt Thompson with us.

Dr. Doug Shirley:
Well, hey Curt. Thanks so much for being with us. The last time I was in the same room with you was on The Seattle School campus. You were kind enough to give a keynote at the gala, the 25th anniversary gala that we hosted here at The Seattle School a handful of months ago. And I was really taken by the keynote that you gave us. And so Paul and I have been working on this project that we call Ghosts and Shadows, where we’re trying to articulate really the ineffable, the things that are hard to reach out and touch and say and speak and grab, but that we know are there and we know are probably pulling at us, tugging at us, calling to us in ways that are probably pretty urgent and pretty active and pretty pervasive. So with that, with what you were saying about track one and track two, how an institution, how a system, how a community can move and can move with intention and purpose and such, again, was really striking to us.

So glad to have you here. As I listen to Curt, I think about, okay, so for Paul and me and every other faculty member and staff person at The Seattle School, we will have our ghosts and shadows moments of where we got that security, where we didn’t get that security growing up. We bring our family to work, so to speak. We create all the group theory and organizational stuff where my mind is hanging out is, okay, so now we’re in this institution of higher ed where we’re supposedly all adults, but we don’t always act that way. And let’s say we’re hovering, we’re wanting to move between track one and track two. As I was listening to you talk, I was thinking about we used your Anatomy of the Soul text for a handful of years, and of course I taught called Interpersonal Foundations. And I want to say maybe it’s towards the end of that text, maybe you’re working with Romans 12 and the importance of differentiation of body parts of the whole, but that sense of the renewal of the mind that comes in and through the body and in some ways each part having a part that it plays, trying to play a part that isn’t its part to play.

And I think again, that comes back to that’s what Paul and I are trying to work at, right? Is not some paternalistic, let’s tell the system how to get itself together, but how do we deal with the ghosts and shadows that are with us internally in psychically, but really sort of across this learning community.

I know a framework for you is confessional communities. So this sense of here we’re trying to do this higher ed thing that is so rife with so many problems, so much promise, but so many problems. And here we are at this sort of interesting point, 25 down, hopefully 25 to go, and we are trying to say what does beauty and goodness look like, especially in community and especially in a community that hasn’t, when you’re talking about that dad who comes and says, that was me. I raised my voice. I didn’t need to, or I was tired, I didn’t need to talk to you that way, or I didn’t need to talk to mama that way, whatever it is, especially in a system where we haven’t necessarily been inclined to speak to each other that way we have a real problem speaking to each other, adult to adult, human to human, beauty and goodness and shadow to beauty and goodness and shadow. Can we sort of parlay this conversation into how could this look for us in this community as we think about growing a sense of security together?

Dr. Curt Thompson:
Well, I would harken back to I think earlier in our conversation when I would, I’m now just completely imagining something, spitballing something and thinking like, oh, if the two of you had a room, you like, look, we’re going to start with a small group. We’re just going to start with somebody with a small group and see what it does. We’re going to pick people that we think would be willing to try this on. I’m making this up, I don’t know if this would be wise or not, but we’re going to pick six or eight other people and we’re going to say we want this institution to be more than, and we have the experience of longing for beauty and goodness, and we are aware of shadow, we’re aware of it. And again, these are my words and I’m aware of how shadow can keep us on track one and do things in ways that are not helpful. And we want to live increasingly in a space where more of the opportunity that track two gives us is something that we can access. You see like, oh, what would you think about that? They might say, oh, okay, that’d be good. And then you say, so here’s what I want. I actually want the opportunity for all of us to talk about the pain of the shadow.

Because one of the things that we talk about in the confessional communities is that it is not too difficult for people. Well, it is less difficult for people to talk about what their longings are in very general abstract terms than it is for them to talk about their longings in very concrete terms in the room until and or unless they have named their griefs. And by name them, I don’t just mean made a list of them. I mean, I’ve brought my experienced grief into the room with the vulnerability that is associated with that. And I’m taking the risk of telling you, this is my grief about what happened here, about what has happened here, what is happening here. The very act of doing this is just scaring the living daylights out of me because I’m worried about what. This is the other thing we do in a group, we will say, well, I’m worried what other people will think. What are the people which named

Because until I, this whole moving from the imagination to incarnation, the more I move toward incarnation, the more I actually have agency to do something in real time and space that gives my body a very different experience of being with the shadow in the room with someone else who is not leaving me with the shadow, who’s being hospitable to the shadow. And in so doing, allowing the shadow to be transformed, at which point I can then more easily say, I want to build a relationship with you, you with whom the story I’ve told actually for a while is that you don’t like me.

That’s the story I’ve told. Well, because let me just give you one example of something that happened between you and me, but I think what we have found is that when people are able to name their griefs, we talked about it, we are people of belonging. We are people of grief, but my longings remain much more vague and much less embodied in their naming before it had lessened or until I name my grief and I can’t name my grief in the abstract because if that’s where it stays, I am not actually able to do anything with it in an embodied way.

Dr. Doug Shirley:
Then our longings were remain in abstract too.

Dr. Curt Thompson:
Right? Exactly.

Dr. Doug Shirley:
Which I think there’s all this, this phrase “love well” that has been circulating in The Seattle School for a long time. My wife tells the story of having done therapy with the child of a Seattle school graduate who the parent was saying to the child, I just want you to love well. And my wife turns to this teenage kid and says, do you know what that even means? Because I got no idea. We have phrases like this I want to “love well.” What in the world does that even mean? Right?

Dr. Curt Thompson:
Right. It sounds good, right? Yeah. But your body knows. Your body knows. I know when I’ve been loved well when I sit in the room and tell you a hard thing just about me and you’re compassionate, let alone when I say to you, you really hurt my feelings when you said that, and you say, oh, gosh, tell me more about that.

Dr. Paul Hoard:
And I would say the flip side of that, I also know when I have been told that I’ve been loved well, and I don’t feel that, [oh, dude], or when the words, I think when we’ve leaned so far into the imaginary, into the words, into the sounding and the impression that as if yet that incarnation as you called it, the actual us togetherness is not there. And I think, thinking of context, right? Everything from Seattle to Western culture to maybe The Seattle School, that’s definitely one of these aspects that I think is there that you’re talking about, Doug, that we can then pass on these words that then become even more and more empty and more and more almost the negation of the very concept that perhaps it was originally intended to speak to. Now love well is in place of loving. Right?

Dr. Doug Shirley:
And even reminds me, so Curt, we’re going to do an interview with our colleague Monique, and Monique is the newest of the faculty to come to us, and she’s been saying that to us, Paul, this sense of we do these things Curt called residencies, where we have our low resident students who come two to three times a year. They come on campus, they do a whole bunch of stuff, and it’s times when the faculty gets together. And so we will do, one of the things we did in this last residency was to talk about the spiritual work that we all find in our vocation. It was lovely, it was personal, it was connected, it was vulnerable. But Monique comes along and says, this is interesting. We do this in front of students, but as faculty, we don’t necessarily do this with each other. So there’s almost this performance. We do it as a performance, but then we stop when the curtain draws, then we stop doing it.

So it has taken her, I think, even with her new eyes and again, even, and what’s interesting about Monique is she lives in Atlanta, so she is the first faculty member to be here, not here. The rest of us. Paul can catch a ferry to the campus. I can drive 40 minutes down to campus. Monique’s got to hop a plane. And so there’s this interesting thing of even she has a sense of difference that she brings where she’s able to look in and go, something’s fishy. It kind of comes back to this thing of we need other people to see us. She’s come in to see really some of the places where, how did you just say that, Paul? The words that we use end up negating the very thing that they were intended to signify in the first place. She’s been one to say it kind of smells like that in here.

Dr. Curt Thompson:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m struck, one of the phrases that we use repeatedly in our communities is this notion that whatever we’re talking about isn’t really ultimately true for us until we feel it in our chest. It doesn’t mean that it’s not true in the abstract, but it’s not true for me ultimately. That God loves me isn’t true until I feel it in my chest and I not, and it is that to it to respond by believing.

Dr. Doug Shirley:
Well, and that makes me think about Paul, your blog post around, I think some of the folks who have been a part of our community, kind of wr large since we’ve begun, probably what they have felt most in their chest is a sense of fragmentation. So the transformation didn’t run its course, let’s say, but somehow in the middle of the track, one, track, two rhythm, not rhythm, they got stuck or we got stuck even in how we interacted with them. And fragmentation was the deliverable, so to speak. That is a big part of our collective history thus far. A lot of fragmentation, a lot of polarization, A lot of this is either the best place to go or the worst place to go.

Dr. Curt Thompson:
Would you

Dr. Doug Shirley:
Say that, I just wonder, Paul, I’d love to hear what you say, Curt, would you add to that, Paul, anything you would say to that?

Dr. Paul Hoard:
No, just that I think, I mean, one, I am always coming from my context of I’ve only done two years there, so what I speak to is what I felt and seen, but only in my two years having been a part of the system. So not knowing beyond just some of the stories to pass down. But I think the other part that I go to when you talk about that fragmentation is also being curious about how that was survival at one point, how the fragmentation was necessary, kind of like you were saying, Curt, earlier, that depression, the anxiety, the symptoms that our patients bring to us is actually their minds working correctly. But there’s something that, there’s an aspect of the context. There’s a part that we don’t understand, which is why it is disjointed. And so it makes me wonder what made fragmentation necessary and why do we keep passing that on? I can’t remember the story, but the story of the family, that big leg of lamb, and every time they do it, they kind of cut it at this particular point. And then sort one day the child asks, why do we cut that? And the mom says, I don’t know. And then ask the grandpa, and the grandpa says, well, I don’t know. And then eventually you find out it’s because the great grandparents just had small pans, but it’s been, it was this necessary solution to a problem that doesn’t exist anymore.

So instead of us then splitting on, let’s kill the fragmentation, like you’re saying before, Doug, is like, I want to actually listen to what it’s telling us.

Dr. Doug Shirley:
Right?

Dr. Curt Thompson:
Yeah. It reminds me of this whole notion of, you’re familiar with: It’s often more helpful to ask the question of what happened to you rather than what’s wrong with you. And so, I mean, we are so often caught in just trying to manage our symptoms as we are trying to cope. That the notion of reflecting that would, because that’s so much of a track one posture, the notion of being curious about what happened such that I find myself where I am is hard to do because I am by myself. That’s how I’m living. I’m living in an isolated mind’s experience. And in order for me to ask that question, it often requires someone else to ask it first. And being with someone who can say, what happened to you? What happened here? What happened here at the school? What was the event that felt fragmenting?

Again to put it in? And of course, people are loathed to say these things because the whole storytelling thing, if I say what happened to me that I’m going to have to say that it was John who did this, or Sarah who did that, and I feel like I’m blaming you, actually. We’re not really talking about John or Sarah. We’re really talking about you. It’s your story that we want to hear, and we’re going to have to invite you to trust us to know that we’re not going to hold John or Sarah in contempt while we listen to you tell your story. Nor am I going to hold you in contempt if your story involves me. I’m not going to hold myself in contempt either.

Dr. Doug Shirley:
Curt, I’m aware of time.

Dr. Curt Thompson:
Yeah,

Dr. Doug Shirley:
I’m aware of time. So I want to ask you this question because just before we started recording, I think your word was demand, right? You spoke of this demand for something more and not a demand that is obligatory, but a demand that is calling. Even as you’ve interacted with us, is there any demand you would bring to us today, even to this project, to your sense of what we’re trying to do, to what you know about minds and institutions and the work

Dr. Doug Shirley:
Of the spirit and all the things? Yeah. Would you bring any sense of demand?

Dr. Curt Thompson:
Oh gosh. I think even as we’re talking think, oh, what do I really mean by that? We’re like, I believe that Jesus places demands on us. And I think what I really mean by that is what I mean that Jesus places demands is the same thing that I mean when I say that if you want to build a skyscraper, that gravity is going to place demands on your project. It is not going to do it with condemnation. It’s not going to do with contempt. It’s not going to do with derision, but it is just the way the world is and there’s no getting away from it. And likewise, this is what I hear Jesus posture being: the way the world is that you don’t want to allow me to heal your wounds, then heaven’s not going to work for you.

It’s just not going to work. If you are having a hard time imagining giving me your story, healing’s not, it’s going to be tough. It’s going to be tough for you. Jesus was, Mark’s rendition of the rich young ruler just really captivates me because it’s the one doc that says he looked at him and loved him and then said, there’s one thing that you lack, and he missed the look or the look undid him. Maybe he didn’t miss it. Maybe he saw the look and the look was too much, but it’s a look, this is the look that we’re going to get. Jesus isn’t going to apologize for being himself when he looks at you and he doesn’t look away, and he looks at you with someone who’s like, come on, come be with me. But you’re going to have to give up. The part of you that really just thinks all you have to do is work really hard to get me to love you. That part, it’s not going to work here.

And so there are those demands. So I don’t know that…what demands do I have? There is the part of me that longs for you all to, you are sensing things. And if you’re sensing things, I would interpret that. My sense of that is like, oh, the spirit is on the loose. The spirit is knocking on doors, spirit’s opening cupboards. And I would want you to hear Jesus’ voice saying, don’t be afraid. Don’t be afraid. Or at the very least, don’t be afraid to be afraid. And I hear you saying, oh, look, you guys are getting after it. This stuff is percolating. This stuff is moving. I hear you talking. It’s like, oh yeah, these two cats are, they’re going to have a hard time not doing something about this.

To which I would want to say, please listen to the spirit and take one step at a time. Take one step at a time. My guess is you probably have a sense of some other people in your space that would be open to starting a process, three or four people maybe. It might not even be a whole room full. It might be three or four people. And if that works well, then you say, oh, we’re going to take the risk of inviting three or four more people into the process, and we’re going to name this and we’re going to do this work thoroughly. We’re going to do this work patiently. That’s how the most durable beauty gets created over a long time.

But it always requires risk. It always requires vulnerability. It always requires our willingness to make mistakes and know that, okay, Jesus is not worried about the mistakes. He’s too busy being with them. And then what are we going to do next? And the last thing is, I would want you to, I be just becoming so increasingly, the Trinitarian theology has just got me by the shirt collar, and in Luke’s version where Jesus says from the cross, father, forgive him for the, I’m like, why doesn’t he just forgive him? Why doesn’t he just say, y’all we’re good. You don’t know what you’re doing. I’m going to forgive you. I go, oh my gosh, he’s asking for help. I don’t know if I’m hanging on the cross. Maybe I need somebody else to start this process and I’ll catch up when I’m ready. You know what I mean? Not trying to make this be, not trying be whatever, but you know what I mean. The sense that we need help doing these kinds of things. And so I would want the two of you, or I would want you to be supported from something that is outside of you, outside the system, to say and terms, yep, this is really hard. This is really hard. Let’s keep trying.

Dr. Doug Shirley:
Yeah. Yes. Well, thank you for doing that in part with us even today. Thank you for saying yes to the conversation, and yes to the play, man, durable beauty. That stuck with me too. Holy toledo, we going to have to do something with that durable beauty. Well, Curt, bless you.

Dr. Curt Thompson:
Well, thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. Alrighty, y’all have a good day. You too. Alright guys. Thanks. You too. We’ll see you. Bye.