With & For / Dr. Pam King

• We reflect on our motivation for doing the practice.
• We attempt to frame the practice from the idea that practicing is altruistic - helping ourselves and others.
• Bring into your mind and heart someone you know and love.
• Consider their difficulties. As we breathe in, we practice removing their difficulties, and as we breathe out, we extend our love and our wishes for that person to be happy and free of suffering.
• Dedicate the practice - any insight or benefit to the wellbeing and welfare of others.
• Reflect on how a simple practice like this in our lives can be cultivated for the benefit of others.

Listen to the full episode. S1: E3 Cultivating a Healthy Mind: The Neuroscience of Awareness, Connection, Insight, & Purpose with Dr. Richie Davidson. Here Dr. Davidson guides you through an awareness practice.

About the Thrive Center

• Learn more at thethrivecenter.org.
• Follow us on Instagram @thrivecenter
• Follow us on X @thrivecenter
• Follow us on LinkedIn @thethrivecenter

About Dr. Pam King

Dr. Pam King is Executive Director the Thrive Center and is Peter L. Benson Professor of Applied Developmental Science at Fuller School of Psychology & Marriage and Family Therapy.  Follow her @drpamking.

About With & For

• Host: Pam King
• Senior Director and Producer: Jill Westbrook
• Operations Manager: Lauren Kim
• Social Media Graphic Designer: Wren Juergensen
• Consulting Producer: Evan Rosa

Special thanks to the team at Fuller Studio and the Fuller School of Psychology & Marriage and Family Therapy.

Help inspire the future of With & For! Click here to take our short survey! Four respondents will get a special box of goodies from the Thrive Center!

Show Notes

• Visit thethrivecenter.org for more resources on thriving and spiritual health!
• Why podcast about thriving and spiritual health?
• Pam’s deep desire for people to thrive and become who they’re meant to be, with and for others
• Practical and applicable insights for personal growth and well-being.
• Bringing in experts from different research methods, spiritual traditions, and cultural backgrounds
• Richie Davidson on declarative and procedural learning
• Dan Siegel on integration
• Growing through the throes of difficulties
• Cultivating virtues and deepening relationships
• Pam’s personal experience halfway through the season: caring for a child with a medical emergency
• What helped Pam through the recent trauma?
• When under threat, we go to what’s automatic
• 5 x 7 breathing
• “Her crisis was exacerbated by the fact that her coping skill was not possible.”
• “My holding her hand was very calming for her.”
• Cynthia Eriksson on trauma and activating the parasympathetic nervous system for
• Alexis Abernethy on self-care, rest, and rhythms
• “Coming home to my body… listening to my body… aware of the natural rhythms of my body… trusting our bodies more.”
• “A nerd with lipgloss.”
• Feeling Alone
• Pam King’s deeply relational theology
• Becoming is linked to our belonging and connection with others?
• Shared and validated by another
• Pam King’s co-authored book, The Reciprocating Self
• Dan Siegel’s approach to “intraconnection” and research about attunement and awareness of others.
• Alexia Salvatierra: “If you’re community is not well, then you are not well.”
• Richie Davison on neuroplasticity: we have agency in our life changing and growing
• Engaging in psychological or spiritual practices to expand our attention, deepen compassion, gain more insight into our values, and identify our purpose.
• Find the Center for Healthy Minds Innovations App (FREE)
• Purpose and Life Review with Bill Damon
• Belle Liang on telling a story and finding your purpose through your own life narrative and “letting your life speak”
• Sarah Schnitker and t he virtue of patience as a relevant and timely approach to life today
• Miroslav Volf on joy and sorrow in the context of Christian faith and redemption
• Hope for God’s presence amidst the sorrow
• Psychology of belief
• Theology is not just the study of God, but the knowledge and love of God, and seeking the kingdom
• Life unencumbered and free
• The Black experience and longing for living and dreaming unencumbered
• Thriving involves systems of access and justice
• “True human thriving contributes to a flourishing world. And our world will not be flourishing until all people live unencumbered.”
• Dwight Radcliff on hip-hop theology and an embodied response
• “Art engages us at the sensory level.“
• Susan David on emotions as signposts
• Art and beauty
• Three tips for thriving based on Season 1 of With & For
  1. Lean into love for yourself—finding compassion and grace for yourself
  2. Find love in your relationships, co-creating meaning and purpose
  3. Lean into love in the narrative of your life and your place and purpose in your community and the larger, bigger story of the world
• “Beyond-the-self” purpose as a central podcast value
• What’s coming next for With & For
• Thank you to our expert guests this season, our wonderful production team, and the administration and faculty of the Fuller School of Psychology and Marriage & Family Therapy at Fuller Theological Seminary

About the Thrive Center

• Learn more at thethrivecenter.org.
• Follow us on Instagram @thrivecenter
• Follow us on X @thrivecenter
• Follow us on LinkedIn @thethrivecenter

About Dr. Pam King

Dr. Pam King is Executive Director the Thrive Center and is Peter L. Benson Professor of Applied Developmental Science at Fuller School of Psychology & Marriage and Family Therapy.  Follow her @drpamking.

About With & For

• Host: Pam King
• Senior Director and Producer: Jill Westbrook
• Operations Manager: Lauren Kim
• Social Media Graphic Designer: Wren Juergensen
• Consulting Producer: Evan Rosa

Special thanks to the team at Fuller Studio and the Fuller School of Psychology & Marriage and Family Therapy.

Help inspire the future of With & For! Click here to take our short survey! Four respondents will get a special box of goodies from the Thrive Center!

“People who are patient are not less assertive, they are not passive, and if anything they actually achieve their goals more successfully. Anything worthwhile, you'll have to wait and you'll have to suffer. And so we need patience to be able to suffer well. Patience is not an eradication of emotions. It is the ability to feel those emotions, but to stay level headed to regulate through them. As a virtue, patience, I see as doing that for something beyond the self. So patience is really staying engaged continuing forward and pursuing the good.” (Sarah Schnitker)

We live in a high-speed, high-efficiency, get-it-done-yesterday society. Why would we talk about patience? But the old adage, “Patience is a virtue” is true. A core ingredient to our spiritual health in our frenetic modern world is the ability to live fully in the moment, exercise control and stability through arduous or challenging (and even traumatic) circumstances—doing so with poise and style.

Research psychologist Dr. Sarah Schnitker of Baylor University has pioneered the scientific study of patience among the virtues, exploring the physical, emotional, spiritual, and philosophical dimensions of this timeless and timely virtue. She defines patience as the ability to remain calm in the face of adversity and suffering—being able to wait well and not become inordinately overwhelmed by anxiety or sorrow.

Patience makes us ask not just “What’s worth waiting for?”, but “What’s worth suffering for?” Our English word for suffering comes from the Latin word for “enduring suffering.” And Sarah Schnitker brings theologically rich dimensions to her psychological study of patience.

In this conversation with Sarah Schnitker, we discuss:

• The definition of patience as a virtue
• The essential role patience can play in our pursuit of meaning and purpose
• The connections between waiting and suffering—and the theological and spiritual context for patience
• How patience is related to goal-setting and complementary to courage
• And Sarah offers guidance for how to cultivate patience in our own lives, using a research-backed strategy to identify, imagine, and think.

Show Notes

• Learn about Sarah Schnitker’s research on virtue and character development on Science of Virtues Lab.
• Pam King introduces Sarah Schnitker (Baylor University)
• Biblical concept of patience as “long-suffering”
• David Bailey Harned—eradicating problems and losing faith in patience
• “Anything worthwhile you’ll have to wait and you’ll have to suffer.”
• “I think many people don't have that clarity about what it is in their life that they are willing to suffer for. So I think that search for meaning and purpose involves that.”
• Patience as a “beyond the self” virtue
• Definition: “the ability to remain calm in the face of adversity, suffering, and waiting”
• “It's not that you don't get emotions. It is the ability to feel those emotions, but to stay level headed to regulate through them.”
• Patience and goal-setting
• Patience and self-control as different but working together
• “Patience is really part of that facilitation of adaptive goal pursuit, which is really cool to find and also to show that meaning really matters too. That meaning pushes you to be more patient.”
• Telos: “the intersection of our goals, our roles, and our souls”
• Patience and courage
• Habits to help us reappraise meaning and purpose in the world
• “This moment is not forever…”
• Kendall Bronk on patience in emerging adults
• Patience as “the ability to stay calm, but actively engaged in the face of frustration or suffering.”
• Depression, mental health
• Mark Labberton’s story of allowing the rituals and habits of Christian sacraments and liturgy to calm and regulate and provide meaning
• Autopilot as the virtue
• Gratitude and patience as a communal practice—what is communal patience?
• What is your gratitude? What is your growth?
• Virtues help us as a fuel system and guidance system
• Patience in Sarah Schnitker’s personal life
• Cyclic Vomiting Syndrome
• Virtue Ethics and Greek philosopher Aristotle
• The “Golden Mean” of virtues
• Impatience is too little of the virtue of patience (the vice of deficiency)
• Passivity (or the spiritual vice of “acedia”) is too much of patience (the vice of excess)
• Weaponizing patience is not a virtue.
• How patience pairs well with courage
• When you have both patience and courage, that’s when you’re pursuing your goals well and loving boldly, seeking justice
• Patience and loving your enemy
• Practical Steps: How can we become patient?
• Identify, Imagine, and Sync
• Identify your emotions, notice what you’re feeling, developing a larger emotional lexicon
• Imagine, think about things differently, think differently, reappraisal to bring down the emotion, perspective taking
• Sync, moving forward with a goal based plan connected to meaning and purpose
• “Patience is a whole-life game.”
• Patience and the Muslim practice of Ramadan
• Measuring the impact of fasting during Ramadan on the cultivation of patience
• Understanding the sacred practice of spiritual fasting and its connection to virtue development
• Patience increased significantly during Ramadan
• Practicing patience as a spiritual community
• How practices connect us to our bodies, purposes, and beliefs
• Sarah Schnitker on “What is thriving?”
• Loving God and loving others for the sake of justice in society
• Pam King’s key takeaways:
• Waiting is not easy, but in our fast-paced world, we need to slow down and cultivate the timeless virtue of patience.
• Patience helps us both to regulate and reappraise our emotional life, helping us deal with really difficult situations.
• We can learn and cultivate patience in a variety of contexts in the family, school, work, and its uptake is enhanced when supported by a spiritual community.
• When paired with courage, patience has the potential to make us truly resilient.
• Patience is transformative for our thriving and deeply connected to our pursuit of meaning and purpose.

About Sarah Schnitker

Sarah Schnitker is Associate Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Baylor University. She holds a PhD and an MA in Personality and Social Psychology from the University of California, Davis, and a BA in Psychology from Grove City College.Schnitker studies virtue and character development in adolescents and emerging adults, with a focus on the role of spirituality and religion in virtue formation.She specializes in the study of patience, self-control, gratitude, generosity, and thrift.Schnitker has procured more than $3.5 million in funding as a principle investigator on multiple research grants, and she has published in a variety of scientific journals and edited volumes.Schnitker is a Member-at-Large for APA Division 36 – Society for the Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, is a Consulting Editor for the organization’s flagship journal,Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, and is the recipient of the Virginia Sexton American Psychological Association’s Division 36 Mentoring Award.Follow her on Twitter@DrSchnitker.

About the Thrive Center

• Learn more at thethrivecenter.org.
• Follow us on Instagram @thrivecenter
• Follow us on X @thrivecenter
• Follow us on LinkedIn @thethrivecenter

About Dr. Pam King

Dr. Pam King is Executive Director the Thrive Center and is Peter L. Benson Professor of Applied Developmental Science at Fuller School of Psychology & Marriage and Family Therapy.  Follow her @drpamking.

About With & For

• Host: Pam King
• Senior Director and Producer: Jill Westbrook
• Operations Manager: Lauren Kim
• Social Media Graphic Designer: Wren Juergensen
• Consulting Producer: Evan Rosa

Special thanks to the team at Fuller Studio and the Fuller School of Psychology & Marriage and Family Therapy.

Help inspire the future of With & For! Click here to take our short survey! Four respondents will get a special box of goodies from the Thrive Center!

"The life review is a way of going back in a systematic way into your past and looking for things that you never understood—mysteries. And I had a big mystery in mine, which was: Who is my father?"

We hang on to so much from our past. Regret, remorse, guilt, shame, rumination, unforgiveness… How should we think about our past? Can we reframe and redeem it for the present?

Developmental Psychologist William Damon has spent his career studying the human lifespan and for almost 30 years at Stanford University's Center on Adolescence. Since the 1970s, he's been conducting research that has shaped our understanding of human growth and thriving.

He’s the author of numerous research articles and several books, including The Path to Purpose: How Young People Find Their Calling in Life, having written widely on character virtues, the moral dimensions of work and vocation, and moral formation for children and adolescents, and more.

In the last 20 years, William has systematically studied purpose and how to operationalized it for human thriving. He defines purpose as “an enduring life goal that is both meaningful to oneself, but also makes a difference beyond the self.”

But more recently, he's building a new area of study around life review. His latest book is A Round of Golf with My Father: The New Psychology of Exploring Your Past to Make Peace with Your Present. in it, he articulates a process that he's developed for investigating and kind of interrogating your life and your past for clues about your direction and purpose.

William shares vulnerably about his own discoveries regarding mystery and his own upbringing that has shed new light on the latest chapter in his life.

In this conversation with William Damon, we discuss:

• Positive youth development and the opportunities of childhood and adolescence.
• The practice of a life review, and how to look at our past in ways that lead to a healthy and fruitful future.
• The definition of purpose and how it plays a central role in human thriving.
• And he explains how charting a path to purpose took a very personal turn for him when he came to learn about the father he never knew, and how that impacted his life and his perspective on thriving at 60 years old.
• In that context, we discuss the emotional connections between courage and curiosity, particularly when it comes to pursuing self-understanding and exploring our sense of purpose and a life of thriving.

Show Notes

• Get your copy of William Damon's book, A Round of Golf with My Father: The New Psychology of Exploring Your Past to Make Peace with Your Present
• Read about Bill Damon’s approach to Life Review at the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley
• Stanford - Center on Adolescence
• “How does where you've been contribute to where you're going? How does your story shape your sense of purpose?”
• “I had a big mystery to uncover.”
• “Regret, remorse, guilt, shame, rumination, unforgiveness. How should we regard our past?”
• Living life on purpose
• Definition of Purpose: “an enduring life goal that is both meaningful to oneself, but also makes a difference beyond the self.”
• Pam King introduces William Damon and summarizes the episode
• Studying purpose through lifespan psychology
• Young people and their potential
• Whole person, not just cognitive development.
• John Gardener: “What we have before us is breathtaking opportunities disguised as problems.”
• Peter Benson: “Everyone young person has a spark.”
• Positive youth development
• Youth development: Focusing on strengths and assets rather than character flaws or trouble
• William Damon on a scientific study of purpose
• Enduring and long term
• Personal and meaningful
• Transcendent and beyond the self
• Agency and energy
• Purpose doesn’t do it all—it doesn’t bring ethics or happiness
• “Purpose is not a silver bullet.”
• Purpose is not a replacement for a moral code, or a guarantee of bliss or happiness.”
• “Telos”—Greek for purpose or goal
• “Purpose is a lifespan developmental capacity.”
• “Purpose is never really complete.”
• Life Review and Robert Butler
• Who we’ve been, who we are, and who we’re becoming.
• Forward-looking doesn’t mean you ignore the past.
• William Faulkner: “The past is not dead. It’s not even the past.”
• William Damon reflects on growing up without a father
• “A Round of Golf with My Father”
• What is a life review? A systematic way of looking into your past and history in order to understand who you’ve been and what that means for your present and future.
• How to do a life review
• “Making a case study of yourself”
• Role of difficult emotions in dealing with your past and finding your purpose
• From blaming to claiming to gaming.
• Courage and Fear
• How to develop and cultivate courage
• Aristotle on courage
• Overcoming challenges and the role of courage in leveraging your purpose to thrive
• Small steps make a big difference.
• Moral exemplars and heroes—faith, courage, and self-regard about managing risks, danger, and threat
• Religion and faith as an object or source of purpose
• “Purpose is not an elite endeavor.”
• “It’s not all about you.”
• Purpose, growth mindset and teaching undergraduates life review and purpose
• William Damon reflects on “What is thriving?”
• “Thriving is becoming the person you always dreamed you’d become.”
• Erikson: “I am what succeeds me.”
• Pam King’s Key Takeaways
• All of us show up in this world with a spark, and it's a gift we give to each other to help fan that spark into flame. So we might ask ourselves, how am I fanning that flame in others today?
• We don't ever have to stop learning about ourselves. And the procedure of a life review can facilitate this growth. And to learn more about the life review process, head to our website at thethrivecenter.org.
• It takes courage and curiosity to confront the difficult or traumatic aspects of our past. Cultivating this courage is an essential virtue of a thriving life.
• And finally, purpose extends beyond our personal motivations and self made goals to include a wide range of psychological, moral, relational, historical, and spiritual factors

About William Damon

William Damonis the Director of the Stanford Center on Adolescence, Professor of Education at Stanford University, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. Damon's research explores how people develop purpose and integrity in their work, family, and civic life. Damon's current work focuses on vocational, civic, and entrepreneurial purpose among the young and on purpose in families and schools. He examines how young Americans can be educated to become devoted citizens and successful entrepreneurs. Damon's work has been used in professional training programs in fields such as journalism, law, teaching, and business, and in grades K–12 character education programs. Damon’s most recent books are A Round of Golf with My Father: The New Psychology of Exploring Your Past to Make Peace with Your Present; The Power of Ideals, and Failing Liberty 101. His other books include The Path to Purpose: How Young People Find Their Calling in Life, Taking Philanthropy Seriously, and Greater Expectations, winner of the Parent’s Choice Book Award. Damon was editor in chief of The Handbook of Child Psychology, fifth and sixth editions. He is an elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Education, and the American Educational Research Association. Damon has received awards and grants from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, The Andrew Mellon Foundation, the John Templeton Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, the Thrive Foundation for Youth, and the Pew Charitable Trusts. Before coming to Stanford in 1997, Damon was University Professor and director of the Center on the Study of Human Development at Brown University. From 1973 to 1989, Damon served in several academic and administrative positions at Clark University. In 1988, he was Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Puerto Rico, and in 1994–95 he was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.

About the Thrive Center

• Learn more at thethrivecenter.org.
• Follow us on Instagram @thrivecenter
• Follow us on X @thrivecenter
• Follow us on LinkedIn @thethrivecenter

About Dr. Pam King

Dr. Pam King is Executive Director the Thrive Center and is Peter L. Benson Professor of Applied Developmental Science at Fuller School of Psychology & Marriage and Family Therapy.  Follow her @drpamking.

About With & For

• Host: Pam King
• Senior Director and Producer: Jill Westbrook
• Operations Manager: Lauren Kim
• Social Media Graphic Designer: Wren Juergensen
• Consulting Producer: Evan Rosa

Special thanks to the team at Fuller Studio and the Fuller School of Psychology & Marriage and Family Therapy.

"What does a healthy community look like? This beautiful image of being unafraid, of everybody having what they need, of everybody having the opportunity to reach their dreams, everybody being able to take care of themselves and not having it taken away from them—all of those are part of the vision of a good life. It's not just an individual good life, it's a communal good life. Concertación, if you were just literally translate it, means 'coming into harmony' and the way that it works in our communities is to hear somebody else with your heart. You hear them from the heart. And when you hear them from the heart, you spontaneously shift. You are automatically standing on common sacred ground and you just shift generously." (Alexia Salvatierra)

Wellbeing begins with we. “If your community is not well, then you are not well.” Thriving is collective. But our atomic individualism and narrow focus on ourselves is constantly pulling us away from the mutual belonging, reciprocity, and vibrant flourishing that can only be found by seeking the good of the wider human community—the neighbor, the stranger, the migrant, the farm worker, and the poor.

Rev. Dr. Alexia Salvatierra is a scholar, organizer, activist, and pastor, and is Academic Dean of the Centro Latino as well as the Assistant Professor of Integral Mission and Global Transformation at Fuller Theological Seminary.

She offers a healing message for those who wrestle with the pain and suffering caused by structural and systemic injustice, calling for listening, empathy, and action. Alexia’s faith is rooted in community and kinship. She affirms the wisdom of the body and cautions against over-intellectualization, offering instead a larger emotional vocabulary, emotional attunement, and the ability to hold and live with complex feelings.

The power of community is on display in our ability to celebrate and suffer together. And in Alexia’s work as an activist, she shows how fractured communities can reconcile through the power of a shared dream.

In this conversation with Alexia Salvatierra, we discuss:

• The unique wisdom that Latin- a/o culture brings to spiritual and theological conversations about thriving and spiritual health
• The complex, communal, and collective nature of thriving
• How her theology as a Lutheran pastor was formed by compassion and concern for the poor
• The challenge of Western Christians to see beyond individualistic rationality and the atomic unit of the self when thinking about wellness and thriving
• The transformative potential of a common dream to unify and reconcile
• The power of beautiful stories that are deeply connected to truth and goodness
• Seeing relationships as not just an end goal of thriving, but a means to thriving.

About Rev. Dr. Alexia Salvatierra

Rev. Dr. Alexia Salvatierra is the Academic Dean of the Centro Latino at Fuller Theological Seminary, as well as the Assistant Professor of Integral Mission and Global Transformation. Her work is a beautiful mosaic of immigration reform, faith-rooted organizing, cross-cultural ministry, and building vital holistic Christian community. Throughout her career, she’s played a central role in founding and convening communities for social justice, including the New Sanctuary Movement, the Guardian angels Project. Matteo 25 a bipartisan Christian network to protect and defend families facing deportation, the Evangelical Immigration Table, and the Ecumenical Collaboration for Asylum-Seekers. She is co-author ofGod's Resistance: Mobilizing Faith to Defend Immigrants and Buried Seeds: Learning from the Vibrant Resiliency of Marginalized Christian Communities.

Show Notes

• Explore Alexia’s work in God's Resistance: Mobilizing Faith to Defend Immigrants and Buried Seeds: Learning from the Vibrant Resiliency of Marginalized Christian Communities.
• “If your community is not well, then you are not well.”
• Pam King introduces Alexia Salvatierra
• Mision Integral and Liberation Theology
• Alexia Salvatierra answers, “What is thriving?”
• Bien estar—”wellbeing”
• Isaiah 65:17-25: “For I am about to create new heavens and a new earth; the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind. But be glad and rejoice for ever in what I am creating; for I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy, and its people as a delight. I will rejoice in Jerusalem, and delight in my people; no more shall the sound of weeping be heard in it, or the cry of distress. No more shall there be in it an infant that lives but a fewdays, or an old person who does not live out a lifetime; for one who dies at a hundred years will be considered a youth, and one who falls short of a hundred will be considered accursed. They shall build houses and inhabit them; they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit. They shall not build and another inhabit; they shall not plant and anothereat; for like the days of a tree shall the days of my people be, and my chosen shall long enjoy the work of their hands. They shall not labour in vain, or bear children for calamity; for they shall be offspring blessed by theLord—and their descendants as well. Before they call I will answer, while they are yet speaking I willhear. The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, the lion shall eat straw like theox; but the serpent—its food shall bedust! They shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain, says theLord.”
• The sounds of healthy community
• Equal value
• We all want to belong
• Frederick Buechner: “Vocation is where the world's deep hunger and our own deep gladness meet.”
• Trauma and faith, agency to combat hopelessness
• Spiritual gift of justice
• Dolorismo: ennobling suffering, suffering in silence
• Orthopathos: when suffering can be useful to make a change
• “The Holy Spirit is your consolation, your consuelo.”
• Surfing the Spirit: Fluidity and dynamic balance
• Serenity Prayer
• “I don’t make the collective an idol.”
• The importance of freedom, while critiquing “super-individualism”
• Discern in the context of community
• Individual discernment
• Liberation theology: “You learn by doing.”
• Meditative Prayer Practice: The Serenity Prayer (In English and Spanish)
• Civil War in Guatemala and Panama
• Dr. Oscar Arias of Costa Rica—informal peace process behind the scenes
• The Dream Exercise and Concertación (”coming into harmony”)
• The difference between concertación and negotiation
• “It’s about generosity.”
• Generosity vs dividing up the check
• Dream Exercise
• “As poor people, we have trouble believing that our dreams can come true, period.”
• Eli Finkel’s All-or-Nothing Marriage: How the Best Marriages Work
• Social capital and trust
• Jesuits in Asia
• Enculturation: Encountering the truth (and each other) at the intersections of culture
• Orthopoesis and beauty
• Knowing God through beauty, not just truth or goodness
• “De Colores”—the joy of all the colors
• Adrienne Marie Brown and Community Social Transformation
• Peter Heltzel and “revolutionary friendships”
• “We’re a very graceless society. A society at war is a graceless society.”
• Reconciliation: Navajo on opponents instead of enemies, and South Africa
• Hoyt Axton’s “Less Than The Song” (1973)—”I cannot rest easy until all your dreams are real.”
• The co-evolutionary relationship
• “Seeing the wholeness of the other” in concertación
• Loving the child in the other; calling the best forth in each other.
• Truth, Beauty, and Goodness
• Pam King’s key takeaways:
• If your community is not well, then you are not well. Thriving is collective.
• We all have a core psychological drive to belong and be received and contribute in our families and communities.
• Caring for our emotional brains and bodies is essential in seeking collective thriving.
• Thriving involves a necessary commitment to justice, and is beautifully captured by terms like shalom and concertación.
• The Christian tradition of compassion and concern for the marginalized can pull us out of our heads, out of our tunnel vision, and move us toward the transformation of society.
• Communicating a common dream or shared vision can help us move from an atomic individualistic mentality to loving community and reconciliation.

About the Thrive Center

• Learn more at thethrivecenter.org.
• Follow us on Instagram @thrivecenter
• Follow us on X @thrivecenter
• Follow us on LinkedIn @thethrivecenter

About Dr. Pam King

Dr. Pam King is Executive Director the Thrive Center and is Peter L. Benson Professor of Applied Developmental Science at Fuller School of Psychology & Marriage and Family Therapy.  Follow her @drpamking.

About With & For

• Host: Pam King
• Senior Director and Producer: Jill Westbrook
• Operations Manager: Lauren Kim
• Social Media Graphic Designer: Wren Juergensen
• Consulting Producer: Evan Rosa

Special thanks to the team at Fuller Studio and the Fuller School of Psychology & Marriage and Family Therapy.

Note: This episode contains content about trauma. Listener discretion is advised.

The path toward hope and healing is often charted through pain, suffering, loss, and grief.

Coming from two decades spent studying post-traumatic stress disorder, researcher and clinical psychologist Dr. Cynthia Eriksson Cynthia has worked with individuals and communities in the wake of major tragedy. Her psychological and spiritual perspectives emerge from first hand experience with Cambodian children exposed to the atrocities of war, Ugandan refugees, Haitian victims of earthquake catastrophe and infrastructure collapse, or at home in Pasadena tending to frontline workers who are often left burned out and traumatized from relief work.

Cynthia Eriksson discusses how to pursue resilience and recovery by reflecting on the role of faith and spirituality; habits and rhythms of life; and relationships and community.

How should we understand the difference between resilience and thriving?

Resilience focuses on the adaptive capacities that people need to bounce back from trauma, creating the capacity to bounce back, and the skills to increase one’s ability and agility to recover. Whereas thriving refers to adaptive growth through adversity, trauma, challenges, and opportunities, all the while in pursuit of one’s purpose.

Both resilience and thriving recognize the complexities of life, and both affirm and require the actualization of human agency.

In this conversation with Cynthia Eriksson, we discuss:

• How leaders and helpers and caretakers can identify trauma in themselves, and come to recognize, accept, and respond.
• The importance of paying attention to our brains, bodies, and environment.
• The 5 R’s of resilience to trauma and recovery from trauma.
• Spiritual responses to suffering and pain—which can often result in incredibly profound experiences with God—and this includes expressing anger at God within a struggle.
• And practically, we talk about how to deal with avoidance, defensiveness, and blaming others or ourselves—basically, the potentially destructive nature of coping mechanisms.
• And we close with a beautiful grounding practice that connects us all to our bodies and emotions, to engage trauma, and stay on the path to thriving.

Show Notes

• Resource: "Thriving through Trauma: Five R’s for Resilience and Recovery" (via thethrivecenter.org)
• Resource: "Practice: The Five R’s of Resilience and Recovery" (via thethrivecenter.org)
• Resilience versus thriving—what’s the difference?
• What is trauma? A threat to existence.
• Extending from trauma to suffering and helping other people build resilience and recover
• Cynthia Eriksson’s personal experience of trauma (and not realizing it)
• Problem solving and seeking control as a coping mechanism and defense against acknowledging and dealing with trauma
• Dissociation
• Experiencing trauma is not the same thing as being traumatized
• Fight, flight, freeze, or fawn (”tend and befriend”)
• The symptoms of trauma and areas of disruption
• What happens in our bodies
• What happens in our minds (thinking)
• What happens in our relationships
• What happens in our sense of meaning, justice, and making sense of the world
• Resilience
• “What are some of the things that we can all do that help us to build some muscles when it comes to navigating life's suffering?
• Resilience as a skill everyone can cultivate through personal growth, rather than a static trait
• “Neurons that fire together wire together.”
• The Five R’s of Resilience
• 1. Regulation: bodies and emotions
• 1. Reflection and Right Thinking: truth and factual acceptance
• 1. Relationships: community, connection, friendship, and support
• 1. Respite and Rest: disengagement and Sabbath healing
• 1. Reason: meaning and transcendence
• How to deal with big, overwhelming feelings in the wake of trauma.
• Grounding and settling practices: feeling where you are. “I’m here now, and I’m safe.”
• Lament as a healthy spiritual response to trauma
• Anger at and with God
• Spiritual practice of lament
• Asking a hard question of God: “Why aren’t you here, God?”
• Lament and anger at God as a practice to stay in relationship with God
• “There’s this tension of: “If I show up for God, will God show up for me?”
• Orienting to the pain and suffering of others: “How do I show up for the people that are around me who are in pain what does it mean for me to actually open myself up to the pain of others and stay present?”
• “Do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly.” (Micah 6:8)
• Coping mechanisms: substances, shopping, Netflix, avoidance
• Unhealthy responses to trauma-based emotion: the dangers of replaying, ruminating, and regretting
• Rumination is not a constructive processing.
• What kind of grace can I show myself?
• Book: Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies
• Book: Lisa Najavits, Seeking Safety: A Treatment Manual for PTSD and Substance Abuse
• Guided meditative practice: Grounding
• Explaining the science behind Grounding Practices
• Practical ways to get help
• Book: Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Braim, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma
• Book: Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror
• Book: Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies
• National Child Traumatic Stress Network (currently under website maintenance as of March 4, 2024; contact helpdesk at [email protected] or in an emergency, dial 911)
• National Center for PTSD
• Cynthia Eriksson on What is thriving?
• Joy and Freedom
• Pam King’s Key Takeaways
• A life of thriving on purpose actually includes pain and sadness. A history of trauma is not a disqualification from thriving.
• Coping strategies are tricky. They tempt us towards avoidance, defensiveness, defensiveness, substance abuse, blaming, and self judgment. Our goal is not coping. Our goal must be thriving.
• Lots of R's here, but regulation, reflection, right thinking, relationships, respite, and rest, and reason are core components to developing resilience and enacting recovery.
• It's okay to be angry at God, and it helps to tell God that's actually the case.
• We can find emotional grounding and regulation through intentionally enhancing a deep connection between our bodies and minds.
• And the path to thriving is often one where our minds need to follow our bodies and all their glorious complexity.
• For more information about resilience recovery, org. In Cynthia Erickson's framework of five hours, visit our website at thethrivecenter.org.

About Cynthia Eriksson

Cynthia Eriksson is Dean of the Fuller School of Psychology & Marriage and Family Therapy, and is a Professor of Psychology in the Clinical Psychology Department.

Her research is particularly focused on the needs of cross-cultural aid for mission workers, as well as the interaction of trauma and spirituality. This work has included trauma training, research, and consultation in Monrovia, Liberia; Kobe, Japan; Phnom Penh, Cambodia; Amsterdam, the Netherlands; Barcelona, Spain; Guatemala City, Guatemala; Gulu, Uganda; and Amman, Jordan.

Eriksson also collaborated with colleagues in the US, Europe, and Africa on a longitudinal research project on stress in humanitarian aid workers funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. She also participates in the Headington Program in International Trauma at Fuller.

She has completed research on risk and resilience, exposure to stress, and spiritual development in urban youth workers funded by theFuller Youth Institute.

Eriksson and her students are currently exploring the intersection of cultural humility and culturally-embedded resilience practices through collaborations with ministry agencies and Fuller colleagueAlexia Salvatierra.

About the Thrive Center

• Learn more at thethrivecenter.org.
• Follow us on Instagram @thrivecenter
• Follow us on X @thrivecenter
• Follow us on LinkedIn @thethrivecenter

About Dr. Pam King

Dr. Pam King is Executive Director the Thrive Center and is Peter L. Benson Professor of Applied Developmental Science at Fuller School of Psychology & Marriage and Family Therapy.  Follow her @drpamking.

About With & For

• Host: Pam King
• Senior Director and Producer: Jill Westbrook
• Operations Manager: Lauren Kim
• Social Media Graphic Designer: Wren Juergensen
• Consulting Producer: Evan Rosa

Special thanks to the team at Fuller Studio and the Fuller School of Psychology & Marriage and Family Therapy.

“Our relationships really shape how we feel, how we think, how we remember things, how we tell the story of who we are, the sense of self, where you focus your attention, what gives you a sense of purpose.

Relational integration in a family leads to the growth of neural integration inside the child's nervous system. Every time you say regulation—like regulating emotion or your mood, regulating attention, thought behavior, self-understanding, morality—it depends on integration in the brain. So the neural integration is the basis for optimal regulation, but it comes from relational integration.

We all can follow Picasso's suggestion, which I think is really beautiful: The meaning of life discovering our gift. The purpose of life is giving it away.” (Dan Siegel)

In developmental science, there are lots of debates between nature and nurture. And Dr. Dan Siegel’s groundbreaking work in interpersonal neurobiology demonstrates that we are naturally wired for nurture—and furthermore, we cannot thrive without it.

Over the past five decades, he has sought to explain through attachment theory and a study of the brain, how relationships shape our feelings, thoughts, memories, stories and personal narratives, and how all these offer an opportunity for us to integrate all of our personal subjective with the world outside us.

Our relational tendencies and inner being are malleable—always growing and changing. We are under construction our entire lives, and that’s good news for those of us who feel the weight of loneliness, relational struggle, or the challenges of mental illness.

Dan Siegel’s work helps us become deeply present to others—in friendships, romance, or parenting—by becoming deeply attuned to your inner life, including all of our emotions, plans, pain, and our ongoing and evolving stories.

His research shows that caring and attuned relationships provide a safe and secure environment in which we can experience integration and gain insight into what is most meaningful to us. He calls this concept “mindsight”—how we gain an inner sense of self is intertwined with how we relate to others.

And he offers how mindfulness and meditation are important to this process of becoming intraconnected. Life today is characterized by isolation and fragmentation, but Dan’s wisdom and practices offer helpful guidelines on how we can grow whole—and persons in deepening, reciprocating relationships.

Dr. Dan Siegel is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine and the founding co-director of the Mindful Awareness Research Center at UCLA. He has authored numerous research articles, books, and accessible materials that apply what we know about the brain to our most sacred and significant relationships. His many books include the groundbreaking introduction to interpersonal neurobiology, The Developing Mind—as well as Mindsight, Parenting from the Inside Out, The Whole Brain Child, and his most recent book, Intra-Connected.

In this conversation with Dan Siegel, we discuss:

• The connection between the mind and the brain, and why that matters for our thriving
• Coming to terms with big, challenging emotions—especially fear
• How psychological integration creates flow and harmony and helps us deal with chaos and rigidity
• The scientific connection between focused attention, open awareness, and compassionate intention
• He walks us through a mindfulness exercise he calls “the wheel of awareness”
• The neurobiology of interpersonal relationships
• And we discuss how that impacts not just our spirituality and relationships, but society as a whole.

About Dan Siegel

Dr. Siegel is a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine and the founding co-director of the Mindful Awareness Research Center at UCLA. An award-winning educator, he is a Distinguished Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and recipient of several honorary fellowships. Dr. Siegel is also the Executive Director of the Mindsight Institute, an educational organization, which offers online learning and in-person seminars that focus on how the development of mindsight in individuals, families and communities can be enhanced by examining the interface of human relationships and basic biological processes. His psychotherapy practice includes children, adolescents, adults, couples, and families. He serves as the Medical Director of the LifeSpan Learning Institute and on the Advisory Board of the Blue School in New York City, which has built its curriculum around Dr. Siegel’s Mindsight approach.

He is author of many books, including, The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are, Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation, The Whole-Brain Child: 12 Revolutionary Strategies to Nurture Your Child's Developing Mind, Survive Everyday Parenting Struggles, and Help Your Family Thrive, Parenting from the Inside Out: How A Deeper Self-Understanding Can Help You Raise Children Who Thrive, and his most recent, IntraConnected: MWe (Me + We) as the Integration of Self, Identity, and Belonging.

Show Notes

• Explore Dr. Dan Siegel’s Website Resources
• Dan Siegel’s latest book: Intraconnected: MWe (Me + We) as the Integration of Self, Identity, and Belonging
• Practicing the Wheel of Awareness (guided meditative exercises): https://drdansiegel.com/wheel-of-awareness/
• Emotional realities reverberating throughout our lives
• Picasso on meaning and purpose: “The meaning of life discovering our gift. The purpose of life is giving it away.”
• Host Pam King introduces Dr. Dan Siegel
• Living life on auto-pilot
• “For those of us feeling isolated, lonely, or cut off. You are not a finished product. … We are under construction our entire lives.”
• “What in the world is going on?”
• Growing up with an undercurrent of fear; Dan Siegel shares about his adolescence and his family dynamics
• Understanding internal, relational ecosystems
• Communicating and connecting with people in crisis; Dan Siegel on working for a suicide prevention service
• Vivek Murthy and the epidemic of loneliness
• John Lennon’s assassination and the mental illness of his murderer
• “What would a healthy mind be?”
• The 1990s: The Decade of the Brain
• What is the relationship between the mind and the brain?
• “Our relationships really shape how we feel, how we think, how we remember things, how we tell the story of who we are, the sense of self. So, you know, whatever you call those things. Feelings thinking, narrative meaning making, where you focus your attention, um, what gives you a sense of purpose.”
• Attachment research and linking relationships to the mind and the brain
• The difficulty of defining the mind for scientific study
• How could they all be correct?
• Energy transmission and connecting neurology to sociality
• Emergent Properties and “optimal self-organization that creates harmonious flow”
• Relational integration and integration in the brain
• Differentiation and linkage
• What does “integration” mean?
• Environmental factors and the shaping of attachment styles
• Parenting from the inside out
• “Feeling felt”
• Presence, attunement, regulation
• Curiosity, openness, acceptance
• What is thriving?
• Living as a verb and avoiding “nounification”
• Rashid: “Having abandoned the flimsy fantasy of certainty, I decided to wander.”
• “Wander with them through the journey of life.”
• Understand your own childhood experiences and then liberate them
• Patterns of developmental pathways
• Life is scary and full of uncertainty.
• “We've identified three subcortical networks that involve agency, which is a drive for empowerment; bonding, a drive for connection; and certainty, a drive for safety.”
• Agency - feeling seen
• Bonding - feeling soothed
• Certainty - feeling safe
• “Who we are is really energy flow.”
• Finding harmonious flow between the shores of chaos and rigidity
• VUCA life: Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous.
• Minimize exposure to information
• Picasso: “The meaning of life is discovering our gift. The purpose of life is giving it away.”
• The Wheel of Awareness
• attention to be focused, awareness to be open, intention to be kind
• The hub of the wheel: the source of knowing
• The rim of the wheel: that which is known
• Creating a loving state inside you
• “Empty but full.”
• “Connected to everyone and everything”
• Feeling an open sense of love
• Christian contemplative tradition and centering prayer
• Silence and stillness—leading to heightened awareness
• The illusion of certainty
• Me + We = MWe
• Well-being and thriving
• Adaptive developmental regulation
• Leaning into love: “the manifestation of love is kindness and compassion”
• Spiritual health and being “intraconnected”
• Intraconnected: MWe (Me + We) as the Integration of Self, Identity, and Belonging
• “Feeling into the truth of our intraconnected identity”
• Host Pam King’s Key Takeaways:
• We are embodied creatures with glorious brains that we're still only beginning to understand.
• Caring attuned relationships can create opportunities for us to be and become who we are, realizing our deep connection to others.
• There's a constant balancing act between ch

“It really has to do with this ability to, to dream and to live unencumbered.” — Dr. Dwight Radcliff

Seeing justice, equity, and social transformation through the lens of hip-hop culture and Christian faith, Rev. Dr. Dwight Radcliff offers a vision of freedom and unencumbered life for the future of the Black community to which we can all bear witness.

Raising challenging questions about the meaning of thriving in a culture dominated by fear, he speaks in a prophetic voice, interweaving the powerful, compounding effects of the language of the Gospel and the language of hip-hop.

As a cultural theologian, community leader, and pastor, one of Dwight’s many gifts is presence—presence to emotion, to the realty of injustice, and to the complexities of thriving in the context of race and gender.

He speaks about the power of purpose and calling in his life, pointing out the unique insight hip-hop, rap, and R&B music can offer the human experience. He calls us to be attuned to the whole reality of pain, suffering, trauma, and struggle when discussing psychological and spiritual health and thriving. And he bears witness to fear, anger, and grief—re-sensitizing us to our pain and vulnerability—speaking truth for the sake of beauty and justice.

In this conversation, we discuss:

• Thriving as the ability to dream and live unencumbered, and the ways the Black church embodies that thriving
• The grievous reality of Black double-consciousness that results from systemic racism
• And his personal experience as a Black man today
• Mental health in the Black community
• The power of sanctified purpose
• How hip-hop culture and music help us understand thriving at embodied, emotional, and familial levels, beyond the horizon of rational understanding
• And how the prophetic vision of hip hop operates in the same tradition of justice spelled out by the Gospel that Jesus taught and lived.

Show Notes

• Check out Rev. Dr. Dwight Radcliff’s Hip Hop Playlist (Note: Explicit Content)
• What is it to live unencumbered?
• “Hip-hop culture keeps me in check. It reminds me that the church of Jesus Christ is also supposed to be a prophetic and subversive voice.”
• Hip-hop and the Black experience
• Introduction: Rev. Dr. Dwight A. Radcliff
• Dwight Radcliff: What is thriving?
• “I think it really has to do with this ability to dream and to live unencumbered.”
• Fear and the experience of Black men
• “The American dream is not available to all equally.”
• “What is unencumbered life for Dwight?”
• W.E.B. Du Bois and Double Consciousness
• W.E.B. Du Bois’s book, The Souls of Black Folk (Project Gutenberg)
• Double consciousness is “fatal to self-confidence,” producing “a peculiar wrenching of the soul, a peculiar sense of doubt and bewilderment.”
• “I don’t get to just be me.”
• Dr. John M. Perkins
• “Where does our pain come from? Why are you hurting? And I give you your pain and I say that you are hurting; and you give me my pain and we say that we are hurting.”
• Honest, vulnerable conversations
• Trauma and inherited trauma
• “Why do we have to be Black?”
• “One of the things that I'm lamenting right now in our society is our inability to have honest conversations—our inability to say, ‘Hey, this happened, this was horrible.’ There are ramifications and ripple effects of that. How do we address it, talk about it, and begin to take corrective action so that all of our children can begin to dream and live unencumbered.”
• Where are honest conversations happening?
• “I might not change the world, but I'll damn sure inspire the mind that does.” (paraphrase of Tupac Shakur)
• Socioepigenetics: the impact of genetic inheritance for emotional trauma, depression, anxiety, and the effects of social injustice
• Mental health in the Black church and broader Black community, and the mistrust of mental health providers
• Barbara Holmes on Black contemplative practices and spirituality
• Hip-hop culture and expression of pain and suffering
• Dwight Radcliff’s journey through hip-hop
• Pentacostal Holiness church and seeing hip-hop as the devil.
• “You’re more concerned with the curse words than the cursed worlds.”
• “I began to do a dangerous thing: I began to read the Bible.”
• James Cone, The Spirituals & the Blues
• West African spirituality and “holding all things together”
• Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five, “The Message”
• “Don’t push me, cuz I’m close to the edge / I’m trying not to lose my head”
• “It’s like a jungle sometimes / It makes me wonder how I keep from going under”
• 2Pac, “I Wonder If Heaven Got a Ghetto”
• C. Dolores Tucker, a Black congresswoman and critic of 2Pac
• Hip-Hop as a way of life, unencumbered and wholly oneself
• J. Kameron Carter on poesis and creativity
• “Poesis… making a haven in a ghetto.”
• “I am hip-hop.”
• Lament and Good News

About Dwight Radcliff

Theologian and pastor Rev. Dr. Dwight A. Radcliff Jr. is Academic Dean and director of the William E. Pannell Center for Black Church Studies and is Assistant Professor of Mission, Theology, and Culture at Fuller Theological Seminary. Prior to coming to Fuller, Dr. Radcliff taught at Vanguard University, Azusa Pacific University, and the Southern California School of Ministry.

He has published in The Journal of Hip Hop Studies, and is a recipient of the Parish Pulpit Fellowship graduation prize and the Hooper/Keefe Preaching Award. He completed post-master’s studies at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas and the University of Oxford.

He currently serves as senior pastor of The Message Center in Gardena, California, where he leads with his wife, DeShun Jones-Radcliff, who serves as the church’s director of administration. He and his wife have two daughters.

About the Thrive Center

• Learn more at thethrivecenter.org.
• Follow us on Instagram @thrivecenter
• Follow us on X @thrivecenter
• Follow us on LinkedIn @thethrivecenter

About Dr. Pam King

Dr. Pam King is Executive Director the Thrive Center and is Peter L. Benson Professor of Applied Developmental Science at Fuller School of Psychology & Marriage and Family Therapy.  Follow her @drpamking.

About With & For

• Host: Pam King
• Senior Director and Producer: Jill Westbrook
• Operations Manager: Lauren Kim
• Social Media Graphic Designer: Wren Juergensen
• Consulting Producer: Evan Rosa

Special thanks to the team at Fuller Studio and the Fuller School of Psychology & Marriage and Family Therapy.

“Love of God, love of neighbors. Seek the kingdom, the good of the world. And in that good of the whole, your own good. And be attuned to what is around you in joy and also in sorrow.” (Miroslav Volf)

We’re in a crisis of meaning. It’s like our existential compasses are off kilter. Uprooted from faith, social, and civic communities—the very institutions that once supplied narratives, a sense of identity, and belonging.

But meaning and purpose are central to our spiritual health and therefore thriving. And theology comes into play because psychologists are more concerned with how meaning is made descriptively—looking at the cognitive and affective processes of our brains and behavior. Whereas theologians are concerned with prescriptive meaning, commenting normatively about how we should live.

This episode features renowned theologian Miroslav Volf (Henry B. Wright Professor of Systematic Theology at Yale Divinity School / Founder and Director of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture) and author of the bestselling book, Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most.

We need stories of love and hope to define our lives. And much of Miroslav's life's work has been devoted to understanding what constitutes a life worth living.

In our conversation, he shares about a God who is with us, who is loving, and who created us for love, calling us to an active role in the flourishing of this world.

In this conversation, we discuss:

• How to discern what really matters and how to be intentional about a life worth living
• The need to challenge the hyper individualistic assumptions of our day, focusing on thriving life as a life of connections and convictions
• Spiritual health as dependent on our relationships with one another, with God, and creation
• Spiritual practices that quiet, create space, and slow us down—allowing us to attune a broad and secure space for human becoming and unfolding
• Miroslav speaks openly and vulnerably about his own experiences of faith, suffering, hope, and flourishing

Show Notes

• Learn more about the Yale Center for Faith and Culture
• Check out Miroslav’s best-selling book, Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most (co-authored with Matt Croasmun and Ryan McAnnally-Linz)
• Reorienting theology around the concept of human flourishing
• Honor everyone, love God, love neighbor, seek the kingdom, stay attuned in joy and in sorrow
• Crisis of meaning and the need for deeper reflection on what matters most
• “We need stories of love and hope to define our lives.”
• Interdisciplinary research in psychology and theology
• Miroslav reflects on his early life in 1970s Croatia (then Yugoslavia)
• Anthony Kronman’s Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life
• Miroslav’s early faith: “Jesus is alive.”
• “His experience was that people who believe are idiots, that they can't know anything, that they are these parasites that want to undermine whatever the society's trying to do. And so that was my first initiation, so to speak, in the public living of my faith. … but, it was also beautiful.”
• A way of life that is worth suffering for—holding a treasure.
• “Another occasion where we were actually beaten and chased out of a village that was completely communist-dominated. And we kind of disrupted it by … We spoke about Jesus … and they chased us out of the city to beat us up … and then we had this kind of sense of joy.”
• Practices vs Reflection
• Moral practices and felt experience
• “There's always a kind of excess beyond what we can actually say, what we can describe, what we can explain. We stutter often when we try to—especially describe experiences like joy or like suffering. They're beyond the words. That's the beauty of them—giving oneself to them.”
• Miroslav Volf on thriving
• Thriving is framed around three elements of human experience: agency, circumstances, and emotions—knit together through the lens of the kingdom of God and Christian imagination
• Agency: Love God and Love neighbor.
• Circumstances: “Thy kingdom come” vs “give us this day our daily bread”
• Emotions: Attune to the world. “Rejoice with those who rejoice and mourn with those who mourn.”
• “Love of God, love of neighbors. Seek the kingdom, the good of the world. And in that good of the whole, your own good. And be attuned to what is around you in joy and also in sorrow.”
• Primordial goodness: Goodness is always prior to evil.
• Spacious public faith and Christ as the key to flourishing life
• Christ as a moral teacher and exemplar
• The “aliveness” and presence of Christ
• “I often don't experience God.”
• Martin Luther on faith: Christ as a gem, encased in our faith
• Church fathers on the presence of Christ as “heated iron in fire”—the heat doesn’t come from the iron but from the fired—similarly, God heats us from within.
• Exclusion & Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation
• Porous boundaries and our nature as relational beings
• Jürgen Moltmann’s autobiography A Broad Place
• “Religion really cramps our style… But in Miroslav's theology, personal wholeness in Christ is spacious and freeing.”
• Exodus 3: God promising to lead Israel out of bondage and constraint and into freedom and a broad space
• Love
• Relational image of God and relationality
• God as ultimate lover—”God loves us while we are still so far away”
• Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most
• Christian faith and pluralism
• Articulating a coherent answer to what it means to live a life that’s worthy of our humanity
• The Recipe: “You can’t put all the ingredients together as you wish. They have to fit together.”
• “We make truth claims.”
• “I think we go wrong when we don't honor people's own search for truth. The whole book is about having truth-seeking conversations about something that has a claim upon your life. And argue with others, but argue in such a way that honors everyone. And so for me, this is a kind of central Christian conviction that comes straight from the Bible, from 1 Peter. Short commandment: Honor everyone. That's what I need to do. Whatever they do, whatever they think, especially honor those who've spent so much time trying to think through some of these issues as many of the figures have that have, that are not necessarily Christian.”
• “Honor everyone.”
• Nurturing the ascetic practices of self-reflection and discipline
• Spiritual exercise by Pam King: Creating Space
• Teresa of Avila and the Interior Castle
• Relationality, reciprocity, and mutual flourishing
• Robin Wall Kimmerer in *Braiding Sweetgrass: “*All flourishing is mutual.”
• “Human thriving isn't thriving when it's the expense of other people's thriving.”
• “And it's a kind of strange paradox. At our disposal, but it's all reference to me and to my experiences. … We have a really narrow scope of concerns.”
• Mary’s Magnificat: “God coming and taking the mighty down from their thrones and transforming the entire world.”
• “What I want is the expansion of the horizon of concerns. Our horizon of concern is the horizon of God's mission in the world. God’s mission is our mission.”

About Miroslav Volf

Miroslav Volf is the Henry B. Wright Professor of Theology at Yale Divinity School and is the Founder and Director of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture.

He was educated in his native Croatia, the United States, and Germany, earning doctoral and post-doctoral degrees (with highest honors) from the University of Tübingen, Germany. He has written or edited more than 20 books, over 100 scholarly articles, and his work has been featured in theWashington Post, Christianity Today, Christian Century, Sojourners, and several other outlets, including NPR, On Being with Krista Tippett, and Public Television’sReligion and Ethics Newsweekly.

His books include Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation, Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace, Allah: A Christian Response, After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity, A Public Faith: How Followers of Christ Should Serve the Common Good, The End of Memory: Remembering Rightly in a Violent World, Flourishing: Why We Need Religion in a Globalized World, For the Life of the World: Theology that Makes a Difference(with Matthew Croasmun), andThe Home of God: A Brief Story of Everything(with Ryan McAnnally-Linz).

About the Thrive Center

• Learn more at thethrivecenter.org.
• Follow us on Instagram @thrivecenter
• Follow us on X @thrivecenter
• Follow us on LinkedIn @thethrivecenter

About Dr. Pam King

Dr. Pam King is Executive Director the Thrive Center and is Peter L. Benson Professor of Applied Developmental Science at Fuller School of Psychology & Marriage and Family Therapy.  Follow her @drpamking.

About With & For

• Host: Pam King
• Senior Director and Producer: Jill Westbrook
• Operations Manager: Lauren Kim
• Social Media Graphic Designer: Wren Juergensen
• Consulting Producer: Evan Rosa

Special thanks to the team at Fuller Studio and the Fuller School of Psychology & Marriage and Family T

“Our society doesn't want to hear about how interdependent we are—doesn't want to hear that if we want to thrive, we have to put people first and we have to create community. And people need connection with others like they need oxygen. If you create a world where that connection isn't very available or it all happens on a screen, you are going to have huge problems. You are going to have huge problems with depression, anxiety, suicide, emptiness—people are going to make terrible choices.” (Sue Johnson)

We need each other. We are relational beings, and our thriving—or languishing—often hinges on relationships. In this episode, psychologists Sue Johnson and Jim Furrow not only explain why relationships are so important, they offer practical advice on how to pursue healing, emotional regulation, and lasting thriving in all kinds of relationships.

Sue Johnson is the creator of Emotionally Focused Therapy, the gold standard in tested, proven interventions of couples and author of many books including Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love. Jim Furrow is a marriage and family therapist and an internationally renowned trainer of Emotionally Focused Therapy.

This conversation goes from profound to practical, covering the biological and psychological science to explain why belonging gives way to becoming. We discuss the rampant emptiness and loneliness, fear, and depression people today experience and the connection between relationships and a sense of meaning in life. Sue and Jim also provide a framework for how to understand your attachment style and the way it impacts your relational health. And they discuss the practical ways we can grow and change so that we can engage in and sustain fulfilling and life giving relationships.

In this conversation with Sue Johnson & Jim Furrow, we discuss:

• What it means to be fully alive, in all the existential fullness that being human means
• How to bring together the spectrum of emotional realities with our lived experience
• The crisis of loneliness we face today, and what we can do about it
• The role of empathy and caring in the healing process
• An introduction to attachment science, the role of attachment figures in thriving relationships
• And the therapeutic and relational practices that lead to security, a sense of worth, empowerment, and competence in life.

About Sue Johnson & Jim Furrow

Sue Johnson is the creator of Emotionally Focused Therapy and author of many books including Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love. Jim Furrow is a marriage and family therapist and an internationally renowned trainer of Emotionally Focused Therapy.

Show Notes

• Learn more about Emotionally Focused Therapy (including ways to find a therapist)
• Sue Johnson’s book, Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love
• We’re made for relationships.
• “We need to understand how crucial relationships are for us. They are oxygen. We need to help people value them and learn how to have them.”
• “If we're not willing to risk and we're not willing to reach, we're not going to necessarily be found.”
• “You can't be a self or by yourself. I think that says it all. That's the most basic human interaction. Do you share my reality? Is my reality valid? Do you see what I see? Can you make sense of it? Can you help me make sense of it? Is what I'm feeling making sense? Can you share it? Am I alone? I mean, this is the most basic human contact of all.”
• The purpose of our being and our means to becoming.
• Episode Summary
• Pam King welcomes Sue Johnson and Jim Furrow.
• What is thriving meant to you?
• “Full existential living… fully alive.”
• Carl Rogers
• “Trust yourself to go through life in an active way.”
• “Fulsome being… not only who I am, but who I’m with.”
• Purpose, meaning, and connection
• Therapy is not only about reducing thriving to the treatment of symptoms.
• Coherence vs Binary Thinking: “How does all of this cohere in a new way of making sense?”
• Mother and Child: Explaining reality and needing other people to do so
• Unexpected, unknown, and fear
• Attachment figures
• Fullness vs. Emptiness
• The relational isn’t just a means to an end. It’s our purpose.
• Sue’s relationship with her father: “He was an amazing attachment figure.”
• “I’m an ardent feminist.”
• Understanding attachment through loss and grief
• Sue Johnson on working with trauma survivors
• John Bowlby: “You do unto yourself as you’ve been done to.”
• “Just to have some sort of sense of who you are, coherent sense of self, you need the recognition from another person. Yes, you matter. Yes, you're important. Yes, you have meaning. Yes, I see you. … to not feel seen, to not feel like you matter to anybody is, it's excruciating for human beings.”
• “One safe relationship with a loving other. seems to protect us and create resilience.”
• Jim’s loss of his father: “I know he's going through a difficult time, but I believe in him and I know he will make it.”
• The power of attachment
• Fully oneself, fully connected with another
• Attachment to God: foundation, protector, shield, transcendent
• Spirituality and experience of attachment through the beauty and transcendence of nature
• “My life is part of this beauty.”
• Animate, invigorate, create.
• “Your worth comes from your connection to others.”
• “But no, we're not enough. But I think our society doesn't want to hear that. It doesn't want to hear about how interdependent we are. Doesn't want to hear that if we want to thrive, we have to put people first and we have to create community.”
• Interdependence and affective dependence
• How to forge relational bonds.
• Attention
• “Love and bonding is about attention and if you don't give attention to the other person in your relationship, which means if you don't take the time, make it important enough and focus down and spend time, then whatever connection you have naturally erodes.”
• ARE—Accessible, Responsive, and Engaged
• “It’s more than date night… it’s about engaging with the other person.”
• “Loneliness and depression are going to be the main problems for the next century.”
• Relationship-driven church communities
• “One of the things that is a heartbeat in our work in emotionally focused therapy is calling individuals into opportunities to share vulnerably with one another.”
• John Cacioppo (loneliness researcher): we have changed deep relationships from an essential to an incidental.
• Vulnerability and loneliness
• Depressed or heartbroken?
• The impact of smartphone technology on relationships
• Empathy and caring in the healing process
• “When the vulnerability becomes specific and makes sense and is accepted, then people have words for it, they can tolerate it, and they start to be able to share it. And when they do that, they pull their partner towards them. They evoke empathy and caring. That’s the only solution to human emotional pain that there really exists—s the empathy and caring of another. That is true in religion too. It's the empathy and caring of a God figure. That's about bonding. It's about sharing vulnerability.”
• “No one goes through vulnerability alone.”
• Belonging leads to becoming
• Pam King’s key takeaways:
• Being fully alive means finding coherence and connection with others. finding meaning in human and spiritual relationships.
• Relational bonding is built in to our genetic code. We're built for connection and made for relationships and we have to work at it.
• Relationships are powerful. They are capable of bringing sorrow and joy. To the extent that they're able to break us down, they're even more able to build us back up and bring us to healing.
• Longing for relationships is natural and normal. While loneliness can be so frightening, it does not need to be stigmatized. But it does need to be worked through.
• Often healing comes through the very wounds we're hurting with. We heal when we open up in vulnerability, when we seek transcendence and connection with others, and ultimately with a loving and caring God

About the Thrive Center

• Learn more at thethrivecenter.org.
• Follow us on Instagram @thrivecenter
• Follow us on X @thrivecenter
• Follow us on LinkedIn @thethrivecenter

About Dr. Pam King

Dr. Pam King is Executive Director the Thrive Center and is Peter L. Benson Professor of Applied Developmental Science at Fuller School of Psychology & Marriage and Family Therapy.  Follow her @drpamking.

About With & For

• Host: Pam King
• Senior Director and Producer: Jill Westbrook
• Operations Manager: Lauren Kim
• Social Media Graphic Designer: Wren Juergensen
• Consulting Producer: Evan Rosa

Special thanks to the team at Fuller Studio and the Fuller School of Psychology & Marriage and Family Therapy.