Ep. 36 - Unraveling the Intersection of Psychology and Faith: Understanding Trauma, Responsibility, and Spiritual Growth

Ever wondered how an ancient understanding of the soul evolved into a modern exploration of human behavior? Join us as we promise to unravel the fascinating journey of psychology and its intricate dance with spirituality. We'll navigate the historical relationship between psychology and the church, two forces aiming to uplift humanity while often clashing over spiritual matters. Discover why embracing the nuances of psychology is vital for Christians who seek a more profound engagement with mental well-being and hear how spirituality is making its way back into psychological frameworks.

With Thanksgiving as our backdrop, we’re diving into the complexities of trauma, personal responsibility, and identity within Christianity. We explore the risks of defining oneself through personality assessments like the Enneagram and grapple with the ethical tensions of merging secular psychological concepts with biblical teachings. Through scriptural reflections, we'll discuss the challenge of acknowledging past wounds while upholding personal accountability. Witness God's transformative power as it can heal even the deepest traumas, though the path to peace is as unique as each individual journey.

Lastly, we’ll explore how psychology intersects with faith, contemplating the intricate dance between personal growth and spiritual relationships. From examining the impact of attachment styles on one's spirituality to addressing the pitfalls of self-improvement trends in churches, we’ll emphasize the balance between psychological insights and biblical truths. By the end, you'll gain insights into the power of relational service and gospel preaching in transforming hearts and hear our heartfelt thanks for your support as we journey through these compelling discussions.

Chapters

• 0:02 The Importance of Understanding Psychology
• 9:13 Understanding Trauma and Personal Responsibility
• 20:38 The Impact of Psychology on Faith
• 25:17 Navigating Psychology and Faith Relations
• 36:04 Empowering Service and Gospel Preaching

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

welcome back everyone to the psych and theo podcast, and we're getting close to thanksgiving man. This is, uh, by the time of this recording. We're in thanksgiving week, releasing a couple of episodes close out the year strong, and we just want to say thank you to all of you who have been listening, supporting the show and providing questions and topics, and hopefully we have touched on a couple of them and they were pretty well received by you guys. So thank you again just for tuning in and and sending in those, uh, those topics I will say so.

Speaker 2: 0:32

The last time we recorded was right before the election it was. So we are post-election now and it's a new world. It is a new world. We're about to talk about psychology, and then about trauma as well.

Speaker 2: 0:46

So yeah, yeah, we have two, hopefully two episodes that will be with knockout, but yeah, we're talking about judging yeah, judging by the memes and the reels on social media, mental health professionals are going to be in good business, okay, oh man, well, let's get do it. So this topic is about why it's important for christians to understand psychology. We talked about apologetics. That was the episode we just recorded and should have been released a week prior to this, but now let's talk about why it's important for christians to understand psychology. Yeah, and eventually we'll do one on theology.

Speaker 1: 1:27

But yeah, I'm sure there's a lot there. You like theology a lot, no.

Speaker 2: 1:30

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 1:31

Yeah, yeah. You can pick a lot from there Well, good, well, yeah. Well, why is psychology important? I guess that's a question that Christians have, or have, been concerned about, maybe for a couple of years.

Speaker 2: 1:44

Well, let's back up and let's define. It might sound like a basic question, but let's define what psychology actually is. Oh, yeah, okay. So when we say it's important for original understanding of psychology was, is that it was the study of the soul right.

Speaker 1: 2:00

Then, as the years passed by, they started really looking at what time period is this? This was like 60s, around the 60s, 80s, 90s, around there. It started to become the study of the mind. So you started seeing more of, okay, what are your thoughts, how does it affect your behavior. And then now it's really become the study of behavior, because we're now just looking and observing what people are doing and that's how we're determining. You know, okay, what actually leads to those actions and behaviors. What are the consequences of that? So you look at family systems, you look at trauma, different types of issues, personality traits and so on. So, yeah, I mean, that's essentially where it kind of started.

Speaker 1: 2:52

So Christians, during that time they were battling, I guess, for the same thing. They both wanted to help people. Psychologists wanted to help people, the church wanted to help people. And this goes way back into, I want to say, 1700s no-transcript in our development, in how we do church, how we do, how our relation with God is. There's a lot of factors that we'll get into today, but, yeah, essentially psychology was that the study of the soul. And now today, what you see mostly is kind of the study of human behavior that's fascinating.

Speaker 2: 3:54

So yeah, like the beginning of it is, the beginning of the discipline is assuming that there's a spiritual component to human beings. Yeah, and now the modern discipline is doesn't assume that at all, it's just kind of a cause and effect, like yeah, yeah, like yes, there's people behave this way, and that's an indication of what's happening.

Speaker 1: 4:15

Yeah, eternally and I think it's. It's so interesting, man, this is one of the the topics that I like to go to, because essentially, what you're looking at is a market, and what I mean by that is psychologists and counselors. They'll look at spirituality. They were starting to ignore that piece because they said, okay, well, let's leave that to the church. That's a spiritual thing that the church can deal with.

Speaker 1: 4:37

But because everyone and we talked about this in the last episode everyone is drawn to spirituality or drawn to the idea of God or the idea of a higher power, now they're going into that space and they say, hey, this is a part of the emotional, mental and physiological and spiritual side, like they do have spiritual side to them. So there's a lot of emphasis now being placed by counselors on the spiritual component. They want to address it, but it's very subjective because it's on what do people actually believe? And you know, as counselors Christian counselor we just need to be careful when we touch on that topic, because you don't want to impose your values on someone but at the same time, you know that they're wrestling with some form of spirituality.

Speaker 2: 5:19

Well, since you mentioned counseling, let's help our audience understand the difference between psychology and counseling. I think that's conflated a lot in people's minds.

Speaker 1: 5:26

Yeah, I mean in my mind I think in the minds of many is that counseling is this relationship between the therapist and the client seeking healing together, right? So the therapist comes alongside the client and tries to identify goals and how to meet those goals, what are the core issues, and so on. So that's the counseling process. Psychology is all the terminology for what's happening. We could talk about attachment, talk about personality traits Again going back to just the original definition study of the mind, study of behavior, study of the emotions, so on. So they're separate but they have a lot of overlap with each other. But counseling is really about the relational process between the counselor and the client.

Speaker 2: 6:13

Okay, all right, so we've defined what psychology is. Why is it important that Christians understand it?

Speaker 1: 6:20

Yeah, I think it's something that we neglect because we don't have any biblical foundation for it, right, there's no passage in scripture that we can look to and say so. Here's what tells us the psychology of mankind. And your next question could be well, where or how do we see that? And probably one of the most obvious ones and you can add to this part too about think about all the family dynamics that happen in scripture. Think about all of the pieces that reference God as our father. So this is the space that I've been with God attachment. Think about the birth order of children, think about the favorites, think about all these different. I mean, we see it in scripture, right? So it's there.

Speaker 1: 7:11

It's just not explicitly stated with the psychology terms that we use today. First, christians were kind of hesitant because they don't want to mix those two, and in a very to a very large degree, I agree with that, right, I think they are separate. Discipline, they're separate things, but there are things that are related to each other, you know. So when we talk about Joseph, when we talk about other characters in the Bible and we talk about their personalities, like Moses or Abraham or someone like that, we see a lot of psychological traits that we can speak to. We don't have to use necessarily biblical language to understand all of it. We can just make our observations based on what it is that scripture does say on those specific things and scenarios.

Speaker 2: 8:05

Do you think there's a fear that, if we start to put psychological categories on some of the behaviors we see in the scriptures, that we therefore would lose the spiritual side of it?

Speaker 1: 8:15

Yeah, yeah, there's this. There's this author. His name is Jay Adams. I think I've heard of him. Yeah, he's a Newthetic counselor, and Newthetic counselors are Bible only. Everything needs to come from scripture and it's specifically to teach and disciple the person that you're working with. That's the approach that they take, and throughout time. Then you have Christian psychology, then you have the integration, the integrationists and so on. But they were the ones. Their early counselors in Christian counseling were New Thetic counselors, which is Bible only. So whatever the Bible teaches, that's what I'm going to teach you.

Speaker 1: 8:52

It was very behavioristic in a lot of ways. Like the Bible says go and love your neighbor, go and love your neighbor. How do you do that? Right, and you have a whole process with that. But their fear was I want to stick to scripture, I don't want to pick anything outside of that. No research, no, nothing. Just if the scripture teaches it, I'm teaching it. If it's not in scripture, I don't want to use it.

Speaker 1: 9:13

So, for example, a person, a Christian, can learn a lot about their personality by taking one of the personality tests. You know the big one right now is the Enneagram. Right, it speaks to a big part of your personality, but again, it's not definitive, that's not your definitive state forever, but a lot of people take it that way I'm an INTJ, or I'm a wing two, wing three, whatever the case is, and they make that their whole identity. And again, we've talked about this multiple times, where People will attach themselves to something, a disorder, a personality, and make that their whole identity. But as Christians, you know, we're always in that process of sanctification and growing and learning more and more about ourselves and our relationship with God. But that was a fear early on about mixing those two together.

Speaker 2: 10:03

Yeah, it seems like that fear is a little misplaced. I see this sometimes in theological circles, believe it or not, and in the ethics world. I've seen this where in the world of ethics and philosophy we have all kinds of categories and terms that we use, for example, in ethics. There's ethical theories or frameworks, as we call them, that basically tell you how to interpret the world, how to come up with the system of right and wrong, and so you have. You might have duty ethics or utilitarianism, or virtue ethics or relativism. You know you have these different theories, okay, and um, sometimes some ethicists will go to the scriptures and point out that, well, the Christianity seems to look like some sort of mixture of virtue and duty ethics.

Speaker 2: 10:58

I think I've actually talked about this in a previous episode and others will will say no, you can't bring in those categories at all because those are philosophical categories. The scriptures talk about love and obedience and other things like that, so they're using biblical categories. But if you're talking about the same thing, you're just. It's just different terms in different language, and it seems like in the realm of psychology that might be happening with the new thetic counselor guys. That might be happening, whether they they're saying no, no, no, we have to use biblical categories. But you're saying well, you're really talking about the same thing, it's just by a different name.

Speaker 1: 11:35

Right. Right, I mean, one of the emphasis that Jay Adams did a lot was identifying things as sin. Right, so there's the natural sin you know we're born in sin and then there's everything else that you do is a result of sin. But one emphasis that later counselors started to place focus on was well, what about being sinned against? Right, and this is where the trauma piece comes into play.

Speaker 1: 12:00

Right, the person, through no fault of their own, you know, has a neglectful parents and that creates in them a system of a system of insecurity. Right, and they grow up not knowing who to trust, or trusting too much and being hurt, and then that leads into a relationship with god. So do I trust god? Because all I've ever had was bad relationships, so I can't trust anyone, right? So there's all these things that happen in real life and, you know, some christians would want to stay away from explaining it in psychological terms, but we see the hurt that's been there, that's been done. There is that people have also been sinned against and that creates problems in how they relate to others.

Speaker 2: 12:39

So I think this is a good area to talk about with respect to examples in the Bible, because in modern psychology there is a tendency to and I know you don't know, you're not saying this, but there's a tendency to for people to say, well, the reason I behave this way is because of my past hurts, and sort of to sort of rationalize and justify their behavior by their past hurts.

Speaker 2: 13:02

And I think and if I could just speak in defense of the new thetic counselors I'm not one, but I'm just going to play devil's advocate for a minute if I could just speak in defense of the New Thetic counselors I'm not one, but I'm just going to play devil's advocate for a minute they would say if you bring that mentality to the Bible and say, well, the reason that people sin is because of their past hurts, well then you're rationalizing sin and you're you're abdicating or you're you're absolving people of their responsibility. They're more of a responsibility. So how would you respond to that? And with it, are there examples in scripture that you would point to where it's like this person is behaving in a certain way because of something that's been done to them, but again, the scripture doesn't absolve them of the responsibility of their sin. So how would you respond to all of that?

Speaker 1: 13:44

yeah, I mean the way that you explained there and the second, uh part of that is essentially kind of how I would address it. There's a very large difficulty that people have withholding two things at the same time. I mean it's possible that you've been hurt in your childhood and that's affected the way that you behave and, yes, it's a tendency that you have. And at the same time, there's the other part of when you become a Christian, that God is able to change all of that in your life. Now, there's a process to that and I think where people get discouraged is that they'll hear these testimonies and this is what all of us want, right, this highlight reel of, oh, when I got saved, everything changed.

Speaker 1: 14:25

And we hear those stories and people get discouraged because they hear that say, well, why haven't I changed? And they have this deep trauma they haven't worked through, you know, abused by parents, abused in relationships, all these different things and they come to know the Lord and they're expecting that shift. But the Lord doesn't work like that with everyone. I've seen some people who have gone through some severe trauma and the Lord I don't know how, but he does it where they just are healed from that, you know they're able to relate better. The Lord just changes their hearts. They, you know, have lived a life of sin and they just completely change. But that's not the story for everyone and people get discouraged with that.

Speaker 1: 15:00

So what I'm saying is that when you go through so many of these different things or past hurts, is that there's also a process, and I think a lot of Christians get discouraged that it's taking too long to overcome, maybe, a certain sin or to overcome a certain behavior, and they give up and they feel like, well, I must be a bad Christian because of that, and we talked about this on our shame episode. Is that there's so much shame, especially in these legalistic cultures. That ties into that in that they're wanting to change, they're trying to change, but these deep hurts that they've had from their past is still influencing their behavior. So they feel like, am I doing something wrong? There must be something wrong with me, because I'm doing the same thing everyone else is telling me to do. I'm praying, I'm reading scripture, I'm having community and I'm still struggling with this. What's going on with that right? And a big part of that could just be that they don't have an outlet for sharing those deeper hurts.

Speaker 1: 15:57

A lot of Christians are afraid to just talk about that topic in general. Now it's becoming much more open. Right Now, everyone wants to share trauma, almost that it's watered it down even so. I do fear that. But, yeah, people are becoming more open to it and maybe even creating problems that aren't really there for some not everyone, but for a good number of people. So, yeah, it's possible to have both those things together. You could be affected by the neglect or abuse that you experienced in your childhood and even in your teen years, and it's affecting you today, but also is true that God is continuing to do a work in you. So that's kind of how I usually try to frame it for people who are in that process of trying to understand, you know the change I guess on the side of God's doing a work in you.

Speaker 2: 16:47

I think what I'm trying to hone in on is the personal responsibility side Is how do we get, how do you balance those two things of, yeah, you're affected by this and this drives your behavior, but we do have sin, all of us sin, and we do things that are wrong. Yeah, even if what the wrong thing we do is driven by something from our past, we still have a responsibility of the way we're behaving. So how do you balance?

Speaker 1: 17:16

that yeah.

Speaker 1: 17:17

Well, this is one of the things that we're trying to help clients understand is that they have agency right, that they have the ability to make these changes, and you try to kind of empower that in them and you look for examples. Okay, what are some examples in your life where you did have control? What are some examples in your life that you saw yourself be successful in? Interestingly, people who have experienced a lot of trauma become very productive in nature because it's a way to overcome all of that pain and, in a big way, it's also a way to hide that pain right. So they get so busy and become so successful with other things that that becomes secondary to them. So they become resilient throughout that process. Those who have a stronger social support system are going to do better in recovering from any type of trauma or abuse, but everyone has the capability to overcome whatever issues that they're going through. So you emphasize personal responsibility. Okay, what's within your control? We know what's not within your control and what happened, okay, and we can accept that. But now where you are today, what is within your control? And that's really where we try to hone in on and say, okay, here's where you can take responsibility. There's an author I want to say it's Scott Peck from the Roless Travel and he really he does a really good job. At least it was a kind of aha moment where he says you know responsibility, taking responsibility, ownership of something is really, if you look at the word responsibility, break it into, you have response and then you have ability, which means you have the ability to respond to whatever situation that you're going through. Right, and I thought that was very important to communicate to clients, because you're trying to teach them that, hey, here's an experience that you're going through right now, in the present. How do you want to respond to this? We're not focusing on how the past impacted you. We're not focusing on any of that. We're just focusing on right now. What do you want to do? And let's see if we can take a couple of steps towards that. And, as they see themselves, take step one, step two, step three, and they're successful in that. That's empowering, right, so they're taking responsibility for what they're able to do.

Speaker 1: 19:27

Now, christians who live in shame take responsibility for things they're not able to change anymore, which continues that cycle. Right, they like looking back at their past because it was a situation that they weren't in control of, so they can continue to justify their behavior. So the more they focus on them not having control, the less empowered they feel in the present moment. So you really have to hone in on what's in the present. What in their past were they able to control or take ownership of and then move forward from that?

Speaker 1: 19:59

I feel like a lot of counselors may feel scared to say, well, here's where you may have had control to do right and maybe you made a mistake there we try to remove responsibility from. But that's actually disempowering because then you're teaching them that anything else that happens in the future, if it's bad, it's not their fault and you don't want to communicate that to people, because the only way to change is you acknowledge a mistake and you be able to move forward from that and make the changes necessary. So really focus on the present, really focusing on what is within your control. To emphasize responsibility, taking responsibility for decisions.

Speaker 2: 20:34

Yeah, that's good Something that was said to me many years ago. This person wasn't a professional counselor, they were a pastoral counselor and I shared with them something in my past I was dealing with regret from this. I was this event happened, regret, yeah, regret, you know, from a decision I had made and I told him, I explained him what I did and why I did it, and I was like I feel like that was the right, the right thing to do. You know, I felt like I was doing something wrong and so I, so I did this other thing and then I was like I feel like it all blew up in my face, you know, and he said to me you made, after talking through it, he said you, you didn't make a wrong choice, you made.

Speaker 2: 21:18

You made the right, you made a righteous choice, but a rash choice. So you, you acted righteously but also rashly, like it was a. It was like I went to an extreme of doing something the right, like wanting to do the right thing, and I went to an extreme and doing that. And that helped me kind of see, like, okay, yeah, I wanted to do the right thing, but the way I did it, I went way overboard and kind of messed things up again.

Speaker 1: 21:51

But it wasn't like I was, I wasn't sinning, but it was a mistake, you know, yeah, yeah, so no, it's good, you know, there's um, there's a lot of freedom with that, the idea that that we're human, that we're affected by, by sin, that we're, that we make mistakes. And I think it's harder when people feel like, not that they can make mistakes, but that you want to limit the number of mistakes. That you have right, that you're learning from your experiences, and I think that's what we look at in human behavior. Right, we're talking about what psychology is is okay, well, what are the patterns that are being demonstrated here? So someone keeps going into relationships over and over and they're getting hurt in some way. It's like, oh, what are the patterns? So you take a look at that and you're like, okay, here's what we can change within that. Right, if you make a mistake one or two times and you look at that and you say, okay, did that change afterwards? Yeah, okay, so then you learned. But if you keep making the same mistake over, then you're not paying attention to a certain pattern.

Speaker 1: 22:51

And I remember someone said to me I think you even you even mentioned this to me on an episode. It was very encouraging Actually you said, like, who has time to keep going back to their mistakes and you can't do anything about that anymore. But there's some people would find like some sense of uh, not relief, but it does something to look back at at a situation that you weren't in control of and feel like either it justifies or just makes you feel good because you're not taking responsibility for it, you don't feel the weight of it, so it's not going to spur you to make any significant changes. But yeah, if we keep looking back at past mistakes, you're never going to be able to move forward. Right, you're always looking back. You don't know where you're going. You're going to trip again.

Speaker 2: 23:34

Well, and rumination, that's what that is, you know, like ruminating on the past. When you ruminate on the past, the problems of the past become bigger. Yeah, they are so like. The more it's like this cycle of, the more you ruminate on something, the bigger it actually seems in the present yeah the less you ruminate on it, the smaller the problem actually seems.

Speaker 1: 23:57

Yeah yeah, and this is important for our faith because a big part of our faith and you know, timmy and I have similar backgrounds in in the way that we grew up where, you know, you felt heavy shame for things that maybe weren't even supposed to be your shame right.

Speaker 1: 24:12

And so imagine, when you think about this aspect of okay, why is psychology important for us as Christians to understand? Is that, well, when you grew up in a family or a culture where everything that you do is being observed, every action that you take, you're always looking either for the approval of others or, if you make a mistake, it's the biggest mistake you could ever make. So then you take that into your relationship with God and it's hard to understand grace. So you, understanding your background, your culture, all of these different things, you're going to take that into your relationship with God and it's hard to understand grace. So you, understanding your background, your culture, all of these different things, you're going to take that into your relationship with God in some way, shape or form. So if you have heavy shame, any little mistake that you make in your relationship with God, you'll pull away from him. You'll feel like he doesn't want anything to do with you. But scripture teaches that he does want us to draw close to him. He wants us to repent and also to draw close to him after that. So it affects your faith, it affects your relationships. So understanding these dynamics of why you're operating the way that you are is going to influence all these other areas.

Speaker 1: 25:17

So we talk about God attachment, we talk about the avoidance. So the avoidance, so the avoidant is the person who's been abandoned or neglected, so they've had to depend on themselves and they don't need anyone. So they're kind of the go-getters. They use people for only whatever it is to get to their goal and they don't see they can't develop any deep intimacy with other people. So the relation with God is very similar, is it's like I acknowledge that God is there, I know that he's good, but that's where it stops, right. There's no deep, intimate relation with the Lord, there's no connection. It's just I know that the Lord is providing just this general acknowledgement. Then you have the anxious attachment who questions everything about God, like does the Lord like me right now? Like, am I good? Am God? Questions everything about God. Like does the Lord like me right now? Like, am I good? Am I performing well enough? Like, am I being a good Christian? Am I attending all the services? Am I serving all the home? Like all these questions that they'll have, which are good. But they take it to the rumination piece where they're just constantly thinking about all the different ways in which they not only that they've served God, but also the way that they failed him. So typically they have a lot of shame as well. So, again, all of these are psychological concepts that do relate to our faith. Right, the way that we relate to the church, the way we relate to family members, the way we relate to God. It's a big part of it.

Speaker 1: 26:35

Okay, and I'm not saying please understand this, I am not saying that psychology should take precedence over the scriptures. I'm not saying that and please understand this. I am not saying that psychology should take precedence over the scriptures. I'm not saying that. I'm really big on making that clear that the Bible is the word of God. Psychology helps us understand parts of ourselves, but it doesn't help us understand our deepest need, which is salvation through Christ alone. Which, again to your point earlier about what is that Christian's fear? I think it's that they fear that the self-help part. Right, a lot of churches. This does bother me is that there's a lot of churches and pastors who promote self-help. The pulpit is not for self-help. The pulpit is for preaching the word of God and discipling the body of believers. You're teaching them the word of God, you're helping them, teaching them how to spread the gospel and how to live for the Lord. So yeah, the self-help stuff really bothers me, because there's a space for that, but not from the pulpit.

Speaker 2: 27:35

Yeah, and not every problem in your life is a psychological problem.

Speaker 2: 27:42

Exactly you know, like not everything can be solved through therapy Good point and sometimes it is a spiritual problem, like it's not that you and I don't we don't agree with the new thetic model where it's Bible only but it's sometimes like a problem can just be spiritual. I think this is where the psychologists kind of go wrong and I think you probably agree with me on this where there seems like modern psychology just seems to have this naive naive maybe not the right word a lack of emphasis on the power of human beings to deceive themselves and each other. You know, because we we can be incredibly self-justifying but in the process, self-deceiving, yeah, yeah, and that is a spiritual thing. That's going on, you know, and I think we need to recognize that is like the scriptures talk about that, where if we say we have no sin, the truth is not in us. This is first john 1, 8 and 9. If we say we have no sin, the truth is not in us. This is 1 John 1, 8 and 9.

Speaker 2: 28:42

If we confess our sins, he's faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us of all unrighteousness. This is, if we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. There, it is right there. We deceive ourselves when we say we have no sin. So I think Christians especially need to be really attuned to that. That it's like we need to be careful that we're not operating out of like shame or avoidance, and that's the base code that's running in our minds, you know.

Speaker 2: 29:14

But arrogance and pride can blind us to our own sin and like. Even if, even if we do struggle with shame or struggle with hurts from our past that influence our relationship with God, we can still sin, and when we sin, we can still hide from that sin or deny it in some way, and that's a real, that's a dangerous place to be. So I could go on about that, but I think there is this when you talk about the self-help preachers, yeah, there just doesn't seem to be a lot of emphasis calling Christians to really examine themselves, to ask am I deceiving myself here into saying that I have no sin? Not in a blanket sense of we know the Bible enough, all of us, but like I know I have sin, but specifically, like that thing you're doing, is that sin or is that a problem in your life? Is that a besetting sin in your life? You know a lot of us want to just sweep that one under the rug, like I don't want to talk about that one.

Speaker 1: 30:20

Absolutely yeah, yeah, no, and that's a great point too. Just the idea of self-deception is that you could tell yourself a different story than what reality actually was, so much that you start to believe it and leads to that self-deception. I think that's. You know, it's one of the big problems I think for with psychology is that they think that if you remove the responsibility away from yourself, that that's going to help you heal, and there are parts where you may have been responsible for. Now, the difficulty with that is someone could grab that passage that you mentioned about. You know, if one of us says that there is no sin, they'll kind of apply that to this aspect of trauma and say well, you know, according to this passage, you did have some sin, you did have some plan in this, and they may have not.

Speaker 1: 31:06

And I actually have a book, I think it's called Let them Pray, let them Pray. So it talks about leaders who abuse church members and they use scripture to manipulate them. And you know, I interviewed a lady who talked about that. I think it was like her youth leader or something like that. It happened for like three years and used passages of scripture Like here's what the pastor says about your leaders and the influence that you need to let them have in your life and so on. So he used that against her and so they can distort God's word like that by addressing something regarding sin and just really do a lot of damage to people. And again, there's power differential, so that would be a psychology term here. There's a power differential there which affects the relationship. But again, just we just need to be careful when we're trying to provide a psychological solution or a biblical solution for something that may not be relevant in that moment.

Speaker 2: 32:06

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 32:07

You can do a lot of damage there. So it's being careful on both sides.

Speaker 2: 32:10

Yeah, yeah, there's lots of examples in the New Testament. We could spend a lot of time on where Christians can be mistaken about stuff. They could think something is wrong when it's not. You know, paul says this is first Corinthians seven. He references he's, he's talking about marriage and family and stuff, and he, he makes reference to a man, this hypothetical young man, who wants to be married, but it says he's not able to keep his virgin. That's the language there and essentially it's like he's basically just consumed with passionate desire for his betrothed to the point where, if this were to linger, they would just start having sex. So he says let them marry. He does no wrong, but there was this mentality in the church, in church at that time that singleness was better than marriage and so they were preventing people from getting married. So that's why he says do not forbid marriage. Yeah, so that would be an example where people got something wrong, like the christians were getting something wrong, and paul says that's, that's not wrong for him to get married. Let him get, let them get married.

Speaker 2: 33:20

You know, with the first John passage we just quoted, john is dealing with a group of false converts who were basically saying there's really not, there really is no sin. Anything you do with the body doesn't matter the physical reality, it's all going to pass away. It doesn't really matter that. Your true self is the spiritual self. So the body, whatever you do with the body is just the body. So there can't really be sin and the body so he's, he's dealing with that problem. But it does relate to what we're saying is that sometimes people they're engaged in some sinful behavior but they're listening to the world that says that's okay, you can do.

Speaker 1: 33:59

That says that's okay, you can do that, right, right, that's okay.

Speaker 2: 34:01

You got some trauma. Go ahead and do that, you know, and that's that's wrong. The Bible does call us to to live holy yeah.

Speaker 1: 34:08

Yeah, and you know, just to you know, kind of close this out a little bit is that the big part of all of this is that counseling, psychology, Christianity. One thing that it does have in common is that it's trying to emphasize relationship and the relationship specifically, at least for us as believers, it's our relationship with each other, relationship within the family unit, our relationship with God. These are the things that influence everything else your upbringing, your parents, your family unit, the church that you went to, like all of these things influence your current way of relating to others in the church and to God, and even to non-believers. If you grew up in a judgmental, maybe legalistic church, you were probably told to avoid non-Christians because if you got too close then you'd be in a way, stained by them and you'd start to pick up their habits, which there's some wisdom there, right, and you know, my, my dad did a pretty good job of keeping us away from, I guess, other bad kids. But that that idea of don't engage with the world at all, that I mean, that wasn't something, wasn't something that was taught to us. It was just don't do the things that they're doing, engage. But very briefly, others were told no, go and engage the world.

Speaker 1: 35:30

You have parents who are saying to their five, six, seven-year-old kids no, I want my kids to go to post-school so they can influence other children. They're not going to influence the other children, they're not because they're kids, right, they're being influenced by everything else around them. That doesn't mean that if you went to post-school that you're bad or anything like that. I'm just saying the realities or the things that people bring up is that I'm going to let my kids immerse themselves in the world and hopefully I've given them enough so that they can counter the challenges. But a lot of times it doesn't work out that way. So, yeah, I think that is. There's a good, a good spot to be in of be relational, be of service to others and continue preaching the gospel. You know that's what's going to change hearts. All right.

Speaker 2: 36:14

Everything. Yeah, it's a good way to wrap it up, Well good stuff, well, good stuff.

Speaker 1: 36:16

Well, guys, hope you guys enjoyed this episode and we will bring back another exciting episodes right before the end of the year. Hopefully we'll probably finish right before Christmas break or something like that. Have a little break and we'll keep you posted. Thanks for tuning in.