Curt: 鈥淣o science ever exists independently, apart from being understood through a particular anthropology. When we understand the data that we discover through a lens of Christian anthropology, we come to recognize that the science itself is pointing to this inseparability of our spirituality and our biology.鈥�

Curt shares about his path to psychiatry, about being in medical school and becoming passionate about exploring the nature of suffering and the human response to it. He had already been asking big questions鈥擶hy do we do what we do? Why is it so difficult to change? What has that got to do with the Gospel?鈥攁nd bringing his spirituality to the field of psychiatry gave him room to wrestle with these questions in deep and meaningful ways. Now, with the growing body of insight from the field of neuroscience, Derek and Curt reflect on how that might energize our understanding of God and give us new language for what God has been up to all along.

Curt: 鈥淚n this particular time and space, neuroscience is one of the ways that God is not leaving Himself without a witness.鈥�

As Curt shares what he is learning about resilience, the conversation touches on education, parenting, and more. It鈥檚 clear that these insights into how we respond to suffering and how we foster resilience in relationship have a great deal to teach us about who we are, who God is, and how the world around us reveals the nature of both. It鈥檚 also clear that these are big ideas with significant implications, so we hope you鈥檒l join us April 20-21 as we welcome Curt Thompson back to 天美视频 to continue this conversation.

Curt: 鈥淲e have put thousands and thousands of people in fMRI scans to give us a sense of what a normal brain looks like under unstressed circumstances. But what if we got this wrong? What if a normal brain is a brain that is connected to another brain? What if that is actually the most resilient brain? […] It takes us right back to the Genesis account of creation.鈥�

Resources to Go Deeper

• by Curt Thompson
• by Curt Thompson
• by Lesslie Newbigin

About the Host

Dr. Derek McNeil is the Senior Vice President of Academics at 天美视频. He has a PhD in Counseling Psychology from Northwestern University and an MDiv from Fuller Theological Seminary, and his research, writing, and speaking have focused on issues of ethnic and racial socialization, the role of forgiveness in peacemaking, the identity development of African-American males, and marital intimacy. Learn more about Derek here.

The post Spirituality and Science with Dr. Curt Thompson appeared first on 天美视频 of Theology & Psychology.

If you have been paying attention, you will notice that lately there has been a growing interest in certain circles about empathy. It has, thankfully, moved out of the privacy of the mental health consultation rooms and neuroscience research studies and into the classroom, the boardroom, and the bedroom. In fact, there really is no human interaction that will not be better because the participants are attuned to empathy and its place in the engagement.

Empathy, at its best, involves several elements. First, and how it is most broadly understood, it is the notion that one person (the listener, in this case) is able to be receptive to and feel the (usually painful) emotion of another person (the speaker), simultaneously holding that emotion in such a way so as to move thoughtfully to reduce the speaker鈥檚 suffering or distress. To experience empathy is, as Dan Siegel has put it, to feel felt. This is the first step toward moving out of painful emotion: to share it with an attuned, compassionate listener.

In real life, it amounts to the poetic cadences and language of a host of nonverbal and verbal attunements in which one person鈥檚 body language, facial expression, tone of voice, and eye contact (among other cues) align to match those of one who is afflicted and engage with his or her feeling not simply as an abstraction, but in an embodied moment in time and space. If you have had this experience, you know what I mean, and you won鈥檛 ever forget it.

Another feature of empathy is that it is a practice we necessarily must learn as human beings; we do not simply come by it naturally in the same way that we come by breathing. We learn about it by witnessing it being practiced by others or receiving it ourselves. Moreover, empathy moves us beyond compassion to kindness and human flourishing. In this sense, it is not just something that is intended to reduce pain, but also to increase hope, energizing us toward justice: we move to change our behavior on behalf of the plight of others who cannot change things themselves.

鈥淓mpathy moves us beyond compassion to kindness and human flourishing.鈥�

Hopefully, then, with empathy, we do not merely feel what someone else feels; we behave differently as a result. And most importantly, that behavior is more likely to be sustained on their behalf; it鈥檚 not just a one-off moment, but a lifetime moment. I am far more likely to make sustainable changes as a husband on behalf of my wife if I am truly in touch with what she is feeling than if I am doing what she asks mostly because I feel ashamed or guilty for not having done so before. As I like to tell patients, it is impossible for us to maintain sustainable behavioral change on behalf of another person in the absence of empathy. We can white-knuckle it for a certain period of time, but ultimately, unless we have made contact with the emotional state of another in such a way that our felt sense of mercy is mobilized, we will eventually regress to the mean of our previous behavioral norms.

All of this represents a posture in which one welcomes, says 鈥測es鈥� to the emotional state of another. So many of us have only experienced the dismissing 鈥淣o!鈥� to our afflicting emotional states, that when we encounter empathy it can feel like nothing short of a cold drink of water for a parched throat. In fact, one of our greatest problems, not least for people of faith, is our well-practiced manner of ignoring what we feel. And we鈥檙e so accomplished at this that eventually we not only are unaware of what we feel, by extension we become unable to sense what others feel. Naturally, it is virtually impossible, with this much neuroplastic reinforcement, to imagine a God who could actually feel what we feel. Don鈥檛 get me wrong. We might buy the theological idea that God can do that. But I am talking about the actual experience of feeling God feel what we feel.

The Hebrews wrote about this. They put down in words鈥攖o be kept and remembered, and to be re-experienced by those who followed鈥攖heir encounters with a God who they believed could take it. They threw everything they had at God. There is not one human emotional experience they refused to offer, be they experiences of joy or affliction. The Psalms are replete with the poetic rhythm and hum of a people who approached a God of empathy. A God who could welcome, receive, hold, and鈥攖hrough sheer force of God鈥檚 own perseverance in remaining with the deepest agonies of his people鈥攖ransform their hearts, their minds, their souls.

But many of us have never met this God. Our imaginations are paltry and afraid, atrophied as they are from so much time spent waiting for the microsecond-to-microsecond distraction of the shifting of the Internet as we peer soullessly into our screens. For our imaginations to be fired into life, we must first acquaint them with embodied experiences with other embodied people to which they can further appeal in memory and in reading the stories and poetry of the scriptures and the best literature; engage the depth and beauty of nature; receive all that art and music has to offer鈥攁nd so open the portals of our souls through which we may enter into the depths of our rawest terrain to join the God who has been awaiting us all along.

To whom do you run to be found? To be known? To offer your fragile, terrified self in order to have the cataracts of empathy cascade over you? If it鈥檚 not a real human, then it鈥檚 even less likely that it will be God, for we have a hard time imagining what our bone and blood do not know in real time and space. But the good news of the Gospel is that a real human has come to find each one of us, and is looking for us still. His gaze is waiting for you to see him seeing you. Hearing you. Feeling you. The One whose empathy can take it because he has already taken everything else.

At a time when our minds are becoming in many respects as disintegrated as ever, even as we swallow the illusion of greater connection through technology, as our social and political fabric feel like they are fraying apart at the seams, empathy that begins and ends with God鈥檚 good creation of our minds is just what we need.

God can hardly wait. He is already feeling how good you鈥檙e going to feel about it.

The post The Poetic Justice of Empathy appeared first on 天美视频 of Theology & Psychology.