Restoring the Soul with Michael John Cusick

This is the second half of Michael's conversation with Dr. Dan Allender, and it's the more personal of the two. Dan opens by talking about his mother, her death earlier that year, the borderline unpredictability, the way she triangulated him into a surrogate role he never asked for and couldn't escape. He shares it not as a confession but as a map: here is where the wound began, here is how long it took to see it clearly, here is what it cost and what it gave. From there, they talk about what the healing process actually looks like — not as a program, but as a decades-long practice of reading your own life with new eyes. Dan's closing answer is one of the most quietly powerful moments in ten years of this show: write your story, read it to someone, and then face the unsaid. The fear, he says, isn't really that we'll discover how broken we are. It's that we'll discover how beautiful we are. Support the show ENGAGE THE RESTORING THE SOUL PODCAST: - Follow us on YouTube - Tweet us at @michaeljcusick and @PodcastRTS - Like us on Facebook - Follow us on Instagram & Twitter - Follow Michael on Twitter - Email us at info@restoringthesoul.com Thanks for listening!

Dan Allender has spent thirty years doing work most people would rather not look at — and in this first of two conversations, he and Michael go there together. Dan is a psychologist, professor at The Seattle School, and the author of The Wounded Heart, among many others. Michael first encountered his work in 1989, at one of Dan's conferences, in a season when his own double life had just come undone. That history is present in every minute of this conversation. They talk about why sexual brokenness isn't a category that belongs only to people who've experienced abuse — it belongs to all of us. They explore what lust actually means: not just desire, but desire as relief and as revenge. They discuss the ways women bear the image of God differently than men, and what that has to do with misogyny and the #metoo movement. And Dan talks about shame not as the wound, but as the thing that — when we stop running from it — leads us back toward God. Part two continues the conversation. Support the show ENGAGE THE RESTORING THE SOUL PODCAST: - Follow us on YouTube - Tweet us at @michaeljcusick and @PodcastRTS - Like us on Facebook - Follow us on Instagram & Twitter - Follow Michael on Twitter - Email us at info@restoringthesoul.com Thanks for listening!

As part of our Soul Care Summer, we're revisiting a conversation that's stayed with many listeners. Somewhere along the way, many of us picked up the idea that God can only look at us through gritted teeth, or worse, has to look away. Brad Jersak joins Michael to gently dismantle that picture, showing that the ache of feeling far from God was never God's doing. The conversation moves through a recovering addict's encounter with pure light, Cornelius in the book of Acts, and a fresh reading of Psalm 22, all pointing toward the same conviction, that the cross reveals a Father who stays present even in humanity's deepest cry of abandonment. Brad's higher Christology, it turns out, only widens the reach of Abba's love. Brad Jersak is an author and teacher based in Abbotsford, British Columbia, and serves as a reader and monastery preacher at All Saints of North America Orthodox Monastery. He previously joined Restoring the Soul in 2017 to discuss A More Christlike God, and returned to discuss In: Incarnation and Inclusion, Abba and Lamb. Support the show ENGAGE THE RESTORING THE SOUL PODCAST: - Follow us on YouTube - Tweet us at @michaeljcusick and @PodcastRTS - Like us on Facebook - Follow us on Instagram & Twitter - Follow Michael on Twitter - Email us at info@restoringthesoul.com Thanks for listening!

Michael continues his conversation with Dr. Curt Thompson, picking up where last week left off. There's a tender ache running underneath the neuroscience here — the ten-year-old boy on a summer evening, looking for permission to just be a kid, and the mother who couldn't see it. Most of us carry some version of that missed look, and Curt names how the body remembers what the mind can't always explain. From there, the conversation moves into the architecture behind that ache: the domains of consciousness and body, the difference between sensing and making sense, and why the left and right hemispheres were never meant to compete. Curt weaves in Scripture, his clinical work, and his own story to show how attention, attunement, and embodied presence shape not just our relationships but our capacity to receive love itself. Dr. Curt Thompson is a psychiatrist, author of Anatomy of the Soul and The Soul of Shame, and a leading voice on the intersection of neuroscience and spiritual formation. This conversation is drawn from his 12-part video series, offered in conjunction with his book, The Soul of Desire, published by InterVarsity Press. Support the show ENGAGE THE RESTORING THE SOUL PODCAST: - Follow us on YouTube - Tweet us at @michaeljcusick and @PodcastRTS - Like us on Facebook - Follow us on Instagram & Twitter - Follow Michael on Twitter - Email us at info@restoringthesoul.com Thanks for listening!

You were made for beauty and goodness. You feel that, even on the hardest days. What neuroscience is beginning to show us is that this longing isn't incidental. It's written into the architecture of how you were made. In this conversation, psychiatrist and author Curt Thompson opens up the world of interpersonal neurobiology and what it has to do with the soul, how the mind is not the brain but something that emerges between bodies and relationships, how 80 to 85 percent of a newborn's neural networks can only develop in response to someone paying attention, and what it means that God started with dirt before he breathed in life. Curt also brings his own story, the parts of his inner orchestra that never got developed, and why the gospel doesn't just want the polished instruments. This is a rebroadcast of one of the most beloved conversations in the show's history. Dr. Curt Thompson is a psychiatrist and author of Anatomy of the Soul: Surprising Connections Between Neuroscience and Spiritual Practices That Can Transform Your Life and Relationships. Support the show ENGAGE THE RESTORING THE SOUL PODCAST: - Follow us on YouTube - Tweet us at @michaeljcusick and @PodcastRTS - Like us on Facebook - Follow us on Instagram & Twitter - Follow Michael on Twitter - Email us at info@restoringthesoul.com Thanks for listening!

Most people picture narcissism as loud, obvious, and easy to spot. The research says otherwise — and so does the Enneagram. In this second conversation with Chuck DeGroat, Michael and Chuck work through all nine Enneagram types and the unique way narcissism hides inside each one: the nine's quiet, invisible anger; the two's helpfulness that quietly demands to be needed; the three's stage self that performs even in the counseling room; the seven's flight from anything that feels like limitation. Beneath every number, Chuck argues, the same question is lurking — do you see me, and am I enough? — and the answer we've constructed to cope with that question is where narcissism takes root. They also talk about what it looks like to hold a narcissistic person without becoming reactive, and why real change — when it happens — is always slow and always looks more like yeast in bread than sudden transformation. Chuck DeGroat is a professor, counselor, and author of When Narcissism Comes to Church: Healing Your Community from Emotional and Spiritual Abuse. Click here to listen to Part One of Chuck's conversation with Michael. Support the show ENGAGE THE RESTORING THE SOUL PODCAST: - Follow us on YouTube - Tweet us at @michaeljcusick and @PodcastRTS - Like us on Facebook - Follow us on Instagram & Twitter - Follow Michael on Twitter - Email us at info@restoringthesoul.com Thanks for listening!

There are at least three wrong ways to write about heaven, and Brian Zahnd spent his new book carefully avoiding all of them — too sentimental, too sensational, too escapist to bother caring about the world right in front of us. In this conversation, Brian and Michael talk about why heaven isn't a far-off destination but a realm woven through the space between every atom of this one, and why love and wonder might be the most reliable hints we get of its nearness. Brian shares the mystical moment in Rocky Mountain National Park that reshaped his understanding of the incarnation and makes the case that a faith stripped of transcendence eventually collapses into mere politics — however well-intentioned. They also talk about pilgrimage, the discipline of praying written prayers, and why so many people are having real spiritual experiences with no idea where it's safe to talk about them. Brian Zahnd is a pastor of forty-four years and author of Unseen Existences: Of Heaven, Earth, and the Divine Mystery in All Things. Find Brian Zahnd online here. Support the show ENGAGE THE RESTORING THE SOUL PODCAST: - Follow us on YouTube - Tweet us at @michaeljcusick and @PodcastRTS - Like us on Facebook - Follow us on Instagram & Twitter - Follow Michael on Twitter - Email us at info@restoringthesoul.com Thanks for listening!

For decades, the church's answer to struggling marriages has been clear: pray more, submit more, give him what he needs. Sheila Wray Gregoire's research asked a different question: What if the advice itself is the problem? Drawing on a survey of 20,000 women, the largest ever done on Christian women's marital and sexual satisfaction, Sheila lays out what the data actually shows: a stark gap between men's and women's experiences, the quiet damage done by teaching women that sex is only his need, and why so many couples reach intercourse on their wedding night only to wonder if something is broken in her. She makes the case, gently but firmly, that if a teacher consistently produces bad fruit, the teacher's teaching deserves a second look. This is a rebroadcast of a 2021 conversation that remains one of the most meaningful in the show's history. Sheila Wray Gregoire is a researcher and author of The Great Sex Rescue. Support the show ENGAGE THE RESTORING THE SOUL PODCAST: - Follow us on YouTube - Tweet us at @michaeljcusick and @PodcastRTS - Like us on Facebook - Follow us on Instagram & Twitter - Follow Michael on Twitter - Email us at info@restoringthesoul.com Thanks for listening!

We can know we are loved and still not be able to let it in. The gap between believing something and feeling it in the body is not a faith problem — it's a physiological one. In this second conversation with Aundi Kolber, Michael and Julianne press deeper into what it actually takes to change: why being loved is not just a comfort but a biological prerequisite for growth, why asking someone to change before they feel safe is, in Aundi's word, cruel, and what it means to come home to yourself rather than keep fleeing from what hurts. Aundi also draws a line between the shame that keeps us stuck and the compassion that actually moves us — and why God is calling us home, not calling us out. This is a rebroadcast of one of the most-listened-to conversations in the show's ten-year history. Aundi Kolber is a licensed therapist and author of Try Softer: A Fresh Approach to Move Us Out of Anxiety, Stress, and Survival and Into a Life of Connection and Joy. Support the show ENGAGE THE RESTORING THE SOUL PODCAST: - Follow us on YouTube - Tweet us at @michaeljcusick and @PodcastRTS - Like us on Facebook - Follow us on Instagram & Twitter - Follow Michael on Twitter - Email us at info@restoringthesoul.com Thanks for listening!

Most of us were taught, somewhere along the way, that the answer to pain is to push through it. Try harder. White-knuckle it. And for a long time, that worked — until it didn't. Aundi Kolber wrote Try Softer as a love letter to her younger self, and in this conversation with Michael and Julianne Cusick, she unpacks what it actually means to pay compassionate attention to your own experience — not as self-indulgence, but as the very thing Jesus modeled in taking on a body. They explore why our survival strategies stop serving us long after the danger has passed, how embodiment is the missing piece in most approaches to emotional and spiritual growth, and why the command to love your neighbor as yourself may be more demanding than it first appears. This is a rebroadcast of one of the most-listened-to conversations in the show's ten-year history. Aundi Kolber is a licensed therapist and author of Try Softer: A Fresh Approach to Move Us Out of Anxiety, Stress, and Survival and Into a Life of Connection and Joy. Support the show ENGAGE THE RESTORING THE SOUL PODCAST: - Follow us on YouTube - Tweet us at @michaeljcusick and @PodcastRTS - Like us on Facebook - Follow us on Instagram & Twitter - Follow Michael on Twitter - Email us at info@restoringthesoul.com Thanks for listening!