The Soul of Desire w/ Curt Thompson, MD

this does not resolve everything until we're dead until the new heaven and new earth appears and all the more reason for our community to continue to remind us that this is going to be an ongoing struggle that evil has no intention of going quietly into the night that it will look for the next time to come to find us and so i think that there's there could be great um comfort and relief in recognizing that we can hear our our community say hey by the way kurt this shows up again in about two weeks or in about a month or in about six months we want you to know it's not going to surprise us it's certainly not going to surprise god if you're doing the work like the devil's coming for you [Music] [Music] welcome to the faithful and true podcast we are here today again with one of our favorite guests dr kurt thompson is here uh joining greg and myself again today and uh we're here for a special reason because kurt has come out with a brand new book that's called the soul of desire and uh we're eager to talk to him about it uh both greg and i have had the opportunity to start our initial uh entry into reading and digesting this fantastic book and uh welcome kurt it's great to see you randy and greg thanks so much for having me back it's great to be with you again well thanks and as randy has talked about and we want to get into and just kind of explore this idea of desire and um really i kind of see two conversations so um we're going to divide this into two podcasts the first one will just be about um desire in general and just kind of the the language of desire and specifically the theology of desire you get into that and um even maybe the the fear that the christian faith has had around desires but then the second conversation which is also very applicable to our audience is when sexual desires become distorted or when the pain begins to be expressed in some sort of sexual desire and in the context of how do we live a healthy redemptive sexual life and name and include our desires and do them in a way that isn't hurtful for others yeah indeed well it's a great set of questions and um i know that uh you know the opening part of the book is really an attempt to just draw the reader's attention to what seems to be pretty self-evident and that is that we are people of desire and that that reality uh emerges at birth there is a sense in which our desires first get expressed as fundamental physical appetites uh but be and by physical appetites i don't i don't just mean the desire to have my hunger satiated uh but also this uh desire for closeness for connection that the newborn and the infant child experience particularly with mom because mom is a primary provider of so many things uh and it and and so uh but we we have to be careful not to somehow even at that stage separate the infant's physical needs from what we perceive to be the infant's emotional or psychological needs we can sometimes separate those things what we're what i'm suggesting is that the very physicality of the newborns development does provide the vehicle through which those emotional and psychological needs are being met this notion that we long to be seen sued safe secure which i go into in the book is a feature that is mediated through the body it's mediated through the parents engagement with the child and so in many respects what eventually becomes uh and and grows out of and becomes our sexual development begins in childhood in this sense of like my physicality is the vehicle by which my desires i even become aware of them let alone once i'm aware of them i then want to have them be met and somewhere along the line we would say that that longing that deep desire which of course many theologians have written about over the years i mean this is an ancient tradition of theological reflection um that longing eventually emerges into what i would consider to be one of the more significant ones which is this longing to be known this longing to be seen and soothed and safe secure as dan siegel and tina payne bryson talk about and we again we explore those four things and how that that those four words represent elements of longing that never go away we well and when you also say that even as the child as the infant the body is expressing those needs so if i'm anxious then it shows up in my stomach it's the racing of the heart it's the butterflies and so it's amazing how we were created in such a way that comprehensively the body is an expression not just of our physical needs but those emotional needs for safety or connection and the longing of the heart and loneliness and and what happens is we teach ourselves to not trust the expression of the needs through our physical selves right we we not only teach ourselves not to trust them because in insi at some point in time that longing which later on we talked about doesn't just stop with the longing to be known we want to be known on the way to making things on the way to creating and becoming beauty and goodness in the world part of the challenge is that as i've talked about in other places trauma and shame will hijack this process such that my body now becomes a vehicle not where in which i'm primarily trying to get needs met but by but my needs being met necessarily becomes a function of me trying to regulate my my shame and my trauma although i can have this sense and and this is where it's just like if you're a human being like life's tough right if somebody's like well life's difficult well then you you must have a pulse right right it's not just like you must be you know problematic in some special way i mean life is difficult if we're alive and and so it becomes really difficult for us to tease apart where my desire for beauty and goodness and my desire to become that somehow crosses a line and now becomes a devouring of something and you know we read about this in the third chapter of genesis and we see it in the rest of the arc of human history and the rest of the biblical narrative and i think one of the reasons why community is so important is because and we often see this in the confessional communities that i go on to talk about later in the book uh there's no end to my longing to be able to like so greg could you and randy please just explicitly tell me where the line is between what's okay for me to long for and do and be and what's not okay for me to and like we can't find that line right and this is where the whole you know god's whole project of making us uh you know wades into the process of relationship and trust and how god's not about to arm twist god's not about to just make us limit us to being paint by numbers here's where the line is stay on this side and no we need a community to help us discern these things and also to help us recognize when we have crossed into territory in which i'm no longer really paying attention to beauty now i'm really devouring it right and really really getting underneath the question of like well what is it what is the unfinished business what is what is the unhealed trauma where is shame still lurking in my own life experience such that i'm becoming a person of devouring rather than a person of desire well and and i i that word devour just kind of stood out to me and we hear the scripture describing evil as this roaring lion looking to devour and so we may think of it in those contexts but this idea that i become a devourer that in my own shame and my own fear in that sense of scarcity that my needs are not going to be met then i become one who devours others and in that perpetuate the chaos that i'm wanting to avoid and be healed from right you know it's it's funny i uh i mean this is this is recent we're recording here at the end of january two days ago i woke up i can't explain all the reasons why it showed up as it did but i literally woke up from a dream the explicit memory of which i don't have but what i do recall is being exquisitely aware of the degree to which i'm anxious all the time at in in you know not not that anybody would heck not often that i would know but there are these this just this undercurrent that pops up and discovering how there are hundreds of moments every day in which i do things as a way to regulate my anxiety without being aware that that's what i'm doing and because i'm not aware of it this becomes one of those moments where desire isn't just simply my interest in doing or becoming beauty it is a way to like turn my anxiety off right and if that means doing a whole range of different things it ends up devouring other people in the way then so be it not because i you know set out to do that but that's what i do because i began practicing this when i was probably somewhere between two and three years of age well and with that there's even this idea of self-devouring that i position myself you know maybe i over function i overwork in order to manage my anxiety and to try to create safety so i position myself in front of that which will devour me and i don't have the capacity to have a yes or no to whatever it is that is in front of me so i become consumed myself exactly yeah i would also say your experience is so common to the men and women with whom we work where they don't even realize their anxiety so many of the men who are struggling with addiction and seeking recovery one of the first things that they awaken to and this was certainly true for my own story is how much anxiety and fear they live with all the time but because they were taking some sort of behavior or substance to distract them it wasn't until they tried to kind of recalibrate into the truth that they even became aware of their anxiety and their fear right and i think that what i'm what what we what we talk about in these confessional communities so much is i live in a world of scarcity i live in a world in which i don't believe you like like you all that randy neither you nor greg are coming to find me and if you do and you find the parts of me that i hate the most then i know like i already have the movie playing out what you're going to do and it's not going to look good i need to have at least enough experience of revealing enough of me that is anxious in your presence but gives me a different response to that your response of being curious your response of wanting to know more not just like well what's wrong with you but what happened to you tell us more about your story in a way that i can practice actually learning to be with my anxiety because you're with it and you're with me and this enables me to do that long enough for me to pause from impulsively doing what i typically do to mitigate it to then see oh my gosh my anxiety really is about this part of me that is still waiting for my dad's voice to show up and i get an echo of his voice when you guys are talking it's an echo of a voice that i didn't even know that i was looking to hear until i hear it at which point that anxiety that i've been feeling dissolves not just because oh i now have the cognitive awareness of i've been looking for my dad's voice but because i literally have the embodied experience in the room of hearing your voices and seeing your eye contact and i sense the gentleness and firmness of the presence of your bodies being with me in a way that i haven't ever experienced well and what's what's interesting is if we're not careful we begin to believe that our community is a false substitute for the intention that if i hear something from my community that comforts me or soothes me then i may easily perceive it as well i i needed it from my dad i didn't get it from my dad so i will have to settle for this and yet when we begin to expand and fully understand the significance and the divine component of community we begin to realize actually when i hear it from my community is as if i'm hearing it from god which was the intended voice all along that my dad's voice was god's voice and this is also god's voice right i think i think you put your finger on something that's really really challenging i mean you know we've walked with people i i have patients i've been seeing for 20 years who are categorically in very different places than they were 20 years ago three years ago and they have used the community as a way to hear god's voice powerfully and at the same time they will still have experiences in which they encounter some moment where they find themselves still longing to hear the voice of their father or of their mother and of course one of their first reactions to this is why is this still a problem i thought i worked on that i thought we resolved that like i hear god's voice now on a regular basis in my community i like i'm doing all the work and this is where actually i think the the things that we're learning about neuroscience is actually really helpful because it it can it can remind us that the fact that i have an a moment in which this gets reactivated does not mean oh i haven't done enough work oh there's not enough right it may mean oh this is a reminder that my uh neural networks that represent a very long-standing embedded memory of my longing for a particular person's voice not just my father's voice generically but like for my like i want lewis thompson's voice that's what i want and that that i don't have it like i can reactivate all that old stuff in a moment's notice and i i'm i'm struck by luke's gospel's rendition of jesus being in the in the desert after his baptism where we read luke wright and the devil left him for another time this notion that jesus does all this hard work in the desert resisting temptation like taking his growth at baptism and even extending that and then you kind of figure okay like i'm good to go no more trouble like even when the devil shows up like there's no way no like i've done all my trauma work and then we find it again and so i think that one of the other things that we have to contend with as part of our narrative is that at the same time that we sense growth the same time that we sense increased sense of comfort and confidence all the things of the very thing you're talking about greg that we are able to hear and sense the voice of the holy trinity in this community and that that does echo what our intended father's voice was to be for us that this does not resolve everything until we're dead until the new heaven and new earth appears and all the more reason for our community to continue to remind us that this is going to be an ongoing struggle that evil has no intention of going quietly into the night that it will look for the next time to come to find us and so i think that there's there could be great um comfort and relief in recognizing that we can hear our our community say hey by the way kurt when this shows up again in about two weeks or in about a month or in about six months we want you to know it's not going to surprise us it's certainly not going to surprise god if you're doing the work like the devil's coming for you right well and isn't there also that peace and you kind of allude and talk about grief but this idea that where there is longing and desire there will be grief right because there are those spaces where the longing cannot be met in the way that we need or in the way intended or in the way that we desire and so um very much i i often talk about recovery it's like running a marathon on a track you end up doing the same lapse over and over again and someone gave my wife this image of another lab and so it's like another lap of grief when i realized that that voice will not be heard by me in my lifetime and it does come at a cost there is a loss with that right and i you know i think um uh i i'm just aware that i live in a world that not unlike genesis 3. uh there there is a world that that does lots of things to prime me and wire me to anticipate that there should be a point in time in life in this life in which there should be no more discontentment all of my longings should be met whether that's i'm going to find the right person to i'm going to find the right job that will give me the right retirement and then i will all i'll just have to golf right i mean all these things like there is this sense of i i can reach this benchmark this permanence where i no longer have to work which of course in some respects flies in the very face of the ecclesiastes writer when he says he's put eternity into our hearts to say like no it's like it's not ever like our longing is made for eternity it's longing to continue to grow and the fact that we can have it met to some degree and yet it's not met completely only serves to reinforce that we have this sense that we were made for someplace else we were made for something else but we have a world that wants to say look you were made for amazon you were made for google and in fact though google and amazon will tell you like no we at amazon were made for you the very way they tell you is actually communicating that you were made for us and you are ours to devour which is what we're about to do and so we live in this world in which we think that we shouldn't have to suffer over the long haul but we see a biblical narrative in which right to the very end jesus is like it's a like it's a merciless go right he's in the he's in gethsemane and he's asking for help he's on the cross and he doesn't say i forgive you he asks for help he asks god to forgive them right there is this sense that there is this longing that right up to the very end it's not finished until it's finished i'd like to think it should be finished like in maybe an hour from now after we get on this podcast this podcast should like like it'll it'll take care of all my all my throats we'll just tie everything up just bring it together with a bow [Laughter] well you know one one of the things that you're identifying that i think is so chaotic is the invitation is to be content with where we are and at the same time desire more and this is you know one of the things that we teach is that we are taught to be content with where you are to be satisfied to know that it is enough that because of who god is and because of who you are you are enough and at the very same time to desire more and what we see is if someone is content but doesn't desire more it can become apathy or it can become a sense of entitlement or if i desire more but i don't know how to be content it's this life of anxious striving and so that balance where i name my desires i i own my longings and in this space in between now and them getting met i can also find peace and contentment right you know one of the things that we find is you know we we like to talk about in this in these communities this notion that we are people of great longing and we are people of great grief those are the two things that are going to be with us until we're dead but in the middle of this runs jesus words in john's gospel that where he says i have said things i have said these things to you so that in me you will have peace in me in this world you will have tribulation but be of good cheer like he doesn't just say but but it'll be okay no he's like no but actively be of good cheer because i the one in whom you have peace which is a completely mind-blowing idea like oh i have peace like i have peace when we get rid of the romans i have you know the from the romans perspective we have peace when like our swords are bigger than yours like it's no different now we have peace because we have the military to do what we need to do or because i'm completely content i'm completely powerful i'm completely in control of my environment whether it's internal or external in these communities what we say often when we have longings that are not being met over and over again people who are in marriages that are that that really are painful and difficult but they're they're not gonna they're not abusive but they're not going to leave the marriage how does that person remain in this space where they long for things that are not necessarily being realized and one of the things that we discover is that in this community that person who suffers with this longing that is not going to be met they are met with voices that say we get it this is really hard and we aren't ever going to grow tired of your telling us how much you want this because one of the things that evil wants to do is to suggest not only that i can't have what i want long term but that if i say to you guys this is what i want looks like i can't have it that once i've said that i shouldn't have to say it again next week or the week after that or the week after that at some point despite the fact that the longing still exists in me you're gonna get tired of it you're gonna get to a point where you're gonna say kurt like you've told us this every week now for the last six months i think it's okay for you to stop like we do we get it okay we get it and i'm already thinking this this of course evil like evil will tell us like nobody else wants to hear your trouble anymore and this then becomes yet one more layer where in which shame wraps itself around my sense of who i am so that the longing even to be heard the longing to be heard in my longing is cut off and this is where we would say that we see that jesus dialogue from the cross in matthew's gospel that we sometimes can shortchange because the whole notion of the opening line of psalm 22 my god my god why is that forsaken me that's not just a one-line throw-off like that's the beginning of an entire psalm that processes through grief the whole way and that's a long process and in many respects we are processing our grief for the very purpose of the very act of that process being a creative act of beauty i want to because i think something got stirred up in me we work with so many couples where it is difficult it is painful there has been betrayal and one of the the ways that it can be expressed is almost a sense of victimhood of i have to endure this i don't have another choice kind of this is my lot in life and there there is this significant shift i think that can occur where i go from i am a victim to my circumstances or my earlier choices to an empowerment that says no actually i have the opportunity to leave and i choose to stay and in that choosing then i can find my grief what's interesting is my experience personally in working with others is when i am a victim grief is elusive when i am in truth then the grief becomes accessible because i can clearly name my loss right and i think that you know what we find from a neurobiology biological perspective is that the whole notion of of that that posture of being a victim all you know the states of the state of mind that a person would encounter when they are living in that place is a state of mind in which the yes there are certain things that we feel but there are also what the one of the primary features of it is my my my deeply felt sense of isolation i am alone with this and so when i am connected to others who are empathically able to validate my emotional state and by validate we just mean we're acknowledging that this is really hard it's not validating or naming or describing like yes you are a victim it's acknowledging that this is hard and those are two very very different things this is hard and the degree to which i now feel connected to you in my difficulty literally changes my perception of my state and if i am now aware that i'm not alone with my experience it gives me a greater capacity to imagine agency right so to your point like i can choose i choose to stay it's not just whether i stay or i go it is that i am choosing right and this is a huge thing that like agency we like to see this this notion of movement that i have options to move movement is a primary sign of biological life shames part of one of the one of shane's primary features is stasis my inability to move emotionally functionally relationally i can't perceive myself moving i am a victim and this notion of being connected to others eventually gives me an awareness that there is movement and even when that movement means i'm going to make the choice to stay because my relationship or my state in this relationship in and of itself no longer defines who i am right and even this idea i'm not staying for anybody else you know i'm not staying for the kids i'm not staying for my spouse i'm not staying for the church i'm not staying for the culture it's i am staying for myself because this is my path my journey in becoming who god created me to be is very much a place of empowerment and i also i think another kind of distorted perspective of victimhood is and no one will understand because suddenly what i'm doing is i'm i'm looking at the uniqueness of my circumstance it's so unique to me that nobody will understand which immediately pushes me into isolation and i'm unable to receive the affirmation the connection whatever it is that my community may be offering to me right you know one of the things that we uh talk about with trauma and by this we even mean if let's say that you're the wife of someone who has betrayed you you're the wife who's been betrayed painfully brutally terribly repeatedly one of the one of the challenges with trauma as we say is that we talk a little bit about this in the book that this this notion that it shears off and really [Music] asphyxiates my capacity to imagine a different future and evil depends upon our capacity to remember and the notion is that if i um if i actually allow you to be connected to me in such a way that i move out of a victim posture necessarily what i'm going to have to do is i'm going to have to imagine a future that is different than the one i've been kind of holed up in in my victim state but the very act of imagining a future in which i could be connected to someone and that someone could be in this community connected to god necessarily has me imagining some kind of intimate interpersonal interaction and part of the challenge is that interpersonal interaction for me historically especially in my circumstance has been nothing but brutal and so part so it's kind of like as we say like that one of the kind of basic models that i use is if you have a near drowning event in a pool uh the safest thing that you're going to want to do is like you just never go back to the pool again but if that's where life is to be found because all my friends are there and they want to have a pool they would just keep having pool parties and they want me to come i'm going to have to find a way to get past the aroma of chlorine in the chop of the water that i hear and the way that that's going to happen is if somebody in my community is going to be willing to say we're going to sit with you at the edge of the pool and we're going to help you practice do what you need to do to get back in the pool over time little by little by little by little but it's going to require that you not say gosh i'm a victim i can't get back in the pool the pool is way too big for me at some point you're going to have to make the decision that like well do i want to be with my friends do i want to do you know ideally do i want to be able to swim in a pool if the answer is yes it's going to require you to allow yourself to be seen and known even in your trauma in order for you to take the first tentative steps to overcome what your remembered past is going to want to do to you and that's where evil wants to like hang out and play and have you be afraid that like it's just gonna be the same thing after the next time you trust somebody it's just gonna be the same old story all over again which is why we do this little by little and those communities give us the opportunity and the courage to do it well and what you're also talking about is a shift where i no longer see the pool i see my friends exactly and by seeing my friends there's an invitation to risk and step back into a painful chaotic experience and even this the word i heard was the consuming word that what happens is an old experience continues to consume me and i have to have the capacity to kind of resist that consumption and not be defined by that experience anymore um i was just gonna say that this is a good place for us to i was gonna say we're gonna leave take a break we're gonna leave curtis on the edge of the pool and with your feet dangling but not alone that's exactly right we're going to put your water wings on and sit next to you and uh we're looking forward to uh having part two of this great podcast with you we've been talking with dr kurt thompson we've been talking about his brand new book the soul of desire we highly recommend that you uh pick this book up uh kurt what's the best way for our listeners and viewers to get a hold of your new book you can get it wherever books are sold that would be on amazon although we've already had that conversation you can uh you can get it through christian book distributors you can get it through intervarsity press that the publisher they have their own website uh and i would also just highly recommend if you have a local christian bookstore to the degree that they still exist out there i would i would want you to you know patronize them and give them the benefit of your money that sounds great well thank you so much for joining us today kurt it's great to see you we will look forward to reconnecting again to continue this conversation uh and until then we want to thank our viewers and our listeners for joining us uh if you're a man out there and you're struggling with issues of sexual addiction or sexual integrity we invite you to look at our website faithfulandtrue.com and look into our men's journey workshop we're here to help you and we hope that in the coming week you're going to find a week that's filled with many blessings and with great vision [Music] you

Channel: Faithful & True

Views: 2,099

Keywords: Sexual Addiction, Recovery, Marriage, Faithful & True, The Faithful & True Podcast, The Soul of Desire, Curt Thompson MD

Id: _jfOtvj5yqY

Length: 36min 30sec (2190 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 04 2022