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What If You Never "Get Over It"? Chuck DeGroat on Trauma, Compassion, and the Long Road to Healing

• Tabitha • Season 1 • Episode 22

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Is healing from trauma ever really “finished?" In this compelling episode of Hey Tabi, trauma therapist and host Tabitha Westbrook sits down with Dr. Chuck DeGroat—therapist, pastor, and author of "Healing What’s Within"—to unpack the long journey of trauma recovery, especially in faith-based spaces.

Together, they explore:

  • What it means when trauma lingers for decades
  • Why “getting over it” isn’t always the goal
  • How to practice self-compassion when your nervous system says you're not safe
  • The connection between developmental trauma, spiritual abuse, and physical illness
  • What churches often get wrong about trauma—and what survivors really need

Whether you're a survivor, a spiritual leader, or someone walking alongside others in pain, this episode offers deep validation, wisdom, and hope for the slow, sacred work of healing.

👉 Don’t forget to subscribe for more conversations that blend trauma-informed care with real, faith-integrated dialogue.

📘 Learn more about Chuck’s book & grab a copy: "Healing What’s Within" - https://amzn.to/3SilvN7

#heytabipodcast #ChuckDeGroat #TraumaHealing #SpiritualAbuse #ChristianTherapist #FaithAndTrauma #ComplexTrauma #HealingJourney #ChurchHurt #NarcissismInTheChurch

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🚨 Disclaimer: This podcast is not therapy and is intended for educational purposes only. If you're in crisis or need therapy, please reach out to a licensed mental health professional.

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Speaker 1:

Welcome to hey Tabby, the podcast where we talk about the hard things out loud, with our actual lips. We'll cover all kinds of topics across the mental health spectrum, including how it intersects with the Christian faith. Nothing is off limits here and we are not. Take two verses and call me in the morning. I'm Tabitha Westbrook and I'm a licensed trauma therapist. But I'm not your trauma therapist. I'm an expert in domestic abuse and coercive control and how complex trauma impacts our health and well-being. Our focus here is knowledge and healing. Trauma doesn't have to eat your lunch forever. There is hope. Now let's get going.

Speaker 1:

Well, welcome to this week's hey Tabby. I am so excited to be here with an author and pastor and professor. I think he does all the things, but I'm going to tell you a little bit more about him. I am here with Chuck DeGroote and he is a follower of Jesus, a husband to Sarah for 30 years, he's a father to two amazing daughters and he serves as a professor of counseling and Christian spirituality as well as the executive director of the clinical mental health counseling program at Western Theological Seminary in Holland, michigan. He's a faculty member as well for the Soul Care Institute. He's a licensed therapist, a spiritual director he's authored six books, which is amazing and a retreat leader as well as speaker.

Speaker 1:

He's a therapist that specializes in pastoral and leadership, health, abuse and trauma, navigating spiritual and emotional obstacles on the faith journey, and he doesn't only work with pastors, but with anybody longing for flourishing and wholeness in their lives, which is so good. He's also a minister of the word and sacrament in the Reformed Church in America. He's pastored in Orlando, san Francisco, and then transitioned to training and forming pastors. He's got more than 20 years experience training clergy in issues of abuse and trauma, which we know is something that is so needed. He's also conducted pastor and planter assessments and he's facilitated church consultations and inquiries of abuse among pastors and within congregations. He's got a bunch of books we will make sure to link them all in the show notes and his newest book is Healing what's Within, which is one of the things we're going to talk about today. Chuck, thank you so much for being here and welcome.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, thank you. Great to be with you, Tabby.

Speaker 1:

We are going to have such a good time, hopefully on the podcast, so tell me what led you to write Healing what's?

Speaker 2:

Within. Well, so I feel like this is one of those books that has sort of been in me, but it hasn't. It didn't quite emerge earlier, it took some time, it was in the crockpot, so to speak. Right, and because, as you know, I work with three questions that come from Genesis 3 that I find incredibly curious and compassionate when are you who told you and where have you taken your hunger and thirst? And those are questions I've been working with for a long time in retreat settings.

Speaker 2:

But I don't think I quite had a sense that it was all coming together until the last few years. I had written this book on narcissism in the church and abuse in the church really, and I think one of the questions that came up after that was well, how do we heal? And I was talking often about the difference between abuse and trauma, right, abuse being what happened to you, trauma, the lingering impact within which requires a bit of nuance, right, in terms of how we deal. I really emerged out of that question how do we heal? But I also knew that at some point this was with the encouragement of editors and I knew I had to write a little bit more about my own story I don't write a ton about my own story, but my own experience of abuse within the church too, and so it all sort of came together at the right moment.

Speaker 1:

That's awesome, not that you were abused, but that it all came together. I think that's. It's actually really comforting to hear parts of your story. I think, as a fellow survivor and as someone who works with a lot of survivors, that knowing someone's got the street cred, if you will, and is working on coming out the other side, because I don't know that we are always fully out the other side. You know, I think things come up as we hit different activation points and things like that. What is your sense of that for folks?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I don't think we fully come out the other side. It's always there, right, the body keeps the score. And really the night before the narcissism book was published, I mean, I didn't sleep that night and I had a sense that the pastor that fired me many years before would come after me.

Speaker 1:

Like in my body.

Speaker 2:

I had said it wasn't rational, right? But we don't. We know how that works, right? Like my body was screaming he will come after you, he wants to hurt you, and I do think that that surprised me, because that all goes back to 2003. That other book came out in 2020. So that's 17 years, right, and lots of therapy, and so it still lingers. But through some of the work I talk about in the book, the work that you and I do, I do think that it diminishes in terms of its power and we grow in a sense of resilience.

Speaker 1:

Absolutely. I think that's such an interesting thing. Backing up to when narcissism comes to church, like that was a profound book for so many people because it gave language to their experience, their lived experience. And I think it's interesting that even with the distance between when your struggle occurred, when the harm occurred, to releasing the book, even with lots of healing, there was that body activation. I know a lot of people are like I wish the body would stop keeping the score because this is not a competition, but we know that it happens and these things get buried so deep within that they can pop up.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, absolutely, and I think this is why we, on our work, we invite people to self-compassion, because I do think that there, you know this very well. I'm sure there are times when some of this will be activated for me and I'll think, gosh, why aren't you over this by now? Other people have done better work. They've probably done harder work than you, or they've. You know all the comparison that we get into. I can still be hard on myself when it comes to my own healing journey. So when I'm working with someone who's like a year out of church harm and abuse right and they're like I should be over it by now, sometimes it's helpful for them to hear from me. Well, I'm about 20 years, 22 years now, and it still lingers within in different ways Now, and I also want to convey to folks that there's a hopeful path too. It's not the same as it was in year one or five or 10. It's certainly a lot different. I'm growing, becoming more resilient, but there's still that lingering memory within, absolutely.

Speaker 1:

And I think people underestimate the compound nature of traumatic experiences. So a lot of folks I work with and I'm sure you work with as well have developmental trauma, which is trauma that happened when they were kids and their attachment ruptures and all kinds of shenanigans that take place. And so then you add church harm on top of it, or domestic abuse or any other kind of trauma, and you've got this layered effect. And so it takes time to peel that onion back.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, that's right. I'll often say for me in my own story there's early developmental trauma, there's complex relational trauma throughout my life. I think, in some ways, what I went through in 2003, maybe someone who was more securely attached might have been more resilient coming out of that, might have looked for the kinds of resources, but my body, I mean. I look back now and I was a trained therapist at the time, trying to say and do all the right things that we try to say and do, and something inside me said, nope, I am going inward and I'm buckling down and no one's going to know or see. I'm just going to forge my way ahead and for the next number of years after that it took a toll on my body and so we can have all kinds of resources, but it's tough to tease out these layers that you're talking about, this compounding trauma, and that's why I think early on in my journey I'm curious if you've experienced this in your work I think I was looking for the smoking gun.

Speaker 2:

What's that one thing that happened that I can look at and I can grieve and I can do all the things that we were taught to do 25 years ago in counseling cathart and cry and be through it and be done with it forever right, and you realize. Oh no, it's so much more complex and layered than that and we just need a lot of kindness and self-compassion along the way.

Speaker 1:

We do, and I think the church the big C church of the 80s and 90s and early 2000s, I think struggled in some ways with that and I think that also contributed to a lot of the pull up your bootstraps theology that I know I had growing up, and as a young adult as well of just like, well, you have to get over it and it's not that bad, and you're a sinner. All you deserve is hell and death. And you didn't even get that, so like suck it up buttercup. And so you shove inside and shove inside, and some people move to addiction, some people move to overachieving, which can also be a problem I would definitely be on the over-functioner side of things and then you realize at some point, like none of this is working and it's all still there and I just stuck a bandaid on a bullet wound.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, that's it, and I'm with you on that over-functioner side, but that looks better in some ways to folks. I did that as a pastor and I was commended for my quote-unquote resilience a misunderstanding of resilience, right and for how productive I was. But that season of productivity was really born out of. I will never let what happened to me before happen again. You will never be able to say to me fill in the blank, you know you didn't do enough, you didn't come through, you didn't. Well, by then I was in my early forties and it takes a toll in your late thirties, early forties. In a way. It doesn't take at times in your late twenties, early thirties, right.

Speaker 1:

So yeah, yeah, when we were in our twenties we could, like sleep on a tree root, get up and go to work at like 5am. In my late forties Now almost 50, I can turn the wrong way and harm some part of my body, which is, like, I think, honestly God's irony and in some ways, his delight, because if we could just keep sleeping like a pretzel or shoving it down, then we wouldn't reach out for him, we wouldn't come to the end where we're like nothing is working. What next? And you, really you came to that point. You tell a story in the book of ending up in the hospital because you had shoved it all down and your body noped you right out of that.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah. I was in some really good therapy at the time, by the way, with this IFS practitioner who's really close to Richard Schwartz and had done the early training. I felt like I'm doing my work. You know that's sometimes we convince ourselves that I'm in therapy weekly. I'm doing my work, but I think in some ways I'd leave my session and I go back into my old strategies of over functioning.

Speaker 2:

And I noticed in my body in the year before this vacation I took, I noticed growing fatigue. I'd gotten gluten-free because of heartburn and the stomach pain and things like that. A few more ibuprofen every day, too much caffeine in the morning, maybe an extra drink in the evening to numb the anxiety right. All these things sort of happened slowly and suddenly. And then I remember we were headed down to Cabo Mexico. I'd never been down there. Our family was really excited. My daughters were a little bit younger and my stomach was hurting so bad. My wife said can you go? And I did what I always do. Of course I can go. I'll just take more medicine with me, you know.

Speaker 2:

And over the first few days there was in so much pain. And one night my wife finds me in the shower, the hot water pulsing on my back and says we have to get you to the emergency room. And so a friend and my wife took me to the hospital and I was really ill. I mean, they did a number of different tests, discovering that I had gallstones. But when they went in to remove the gallstones, they discovered that my system was septic.

Speaker 2:

And I had no idea, and this wasn't something that happened overnight, right, this was the accumulation, the compounding effects of trauma, really, and so I didn't realize that at the time. But in the next few days in the hospital, when they said you have to stay here longer than we told you you'd have to stay, when I wanted to just get up and go home as fast as possible, you know, as I'm laying there and I don't speak I speak a little Spanish, but not fluent Spanish by any means a lot of time to reflect and realizing that something needs to shift. I will need to make a choice to step away from maybe an area that we lived in San Francisco, a job that I loved, and simplify it a significant way to get healthy. And so it's not that the grass is always greener on the other side. But I began to realize in that few days after that, some things would really need to shift.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I think that's a very profound statement, because it's really hard when you're in that place to make shift, especially when you find meaning in the work that you're doing. You're finding meaning and comfort and a reduction in anxiety from over-functioning and all of those things that take a. I actually need to slow down, which safety and slow to a nervous system habituated to chaos is terrifying. To chaos is terrifying, Terrifying. So what was it like for you to walk a path that probably felt?

Speaker 2:

pretty dysregulating for you. I think what you said is so important because I think we expect that we're going to make the shift and things are going to get better. But there are parts of us and that connect to our body. You know our body's intuition that practically scream. This isn't okay.

Speaker 2:

You know, and I remember in the work that I was doing out in the Bay Area I was growing in terms of a sense of recognition. You know these things that we think we want, particularly in our late 30s. You know getting to speak in various places and write and all of that sort of went away overnight. I moved to the small regional seminary as a junior professor. It took a big pay cut and felt very obscure and my body was revolting. I remember, as people would ask me where I lived, I'd continue to say San Francisco and I kept it on my bio on social media because I wanted to still be there in some ways. And I remember a friend coming to me at one point saying you've not moved. You moved to West Michigan but you're not here yet.

Speaker 2:

You're still there and recognizing that there's a part of my, parts of me that were freaking out. You know, like I can't lose that I can't leave that behind, and so that shift that you're talking about, this is where we need good care. This is what we call titrated work, slow work, paced work, where I begin to take an hour every day, midday in my office, shades, closed door closed, to do some meditative work. That's something I never would have done before. Waste an hour, right. But my body slowly began to adapt to a new reality. Parts of me began to relax, but that took a while, and that's all to say. This isn't fast work, as you know, as you work with clients, and it unfolds in often in unpredictable ways and sometimes chaotic ways, as you're mentioning.

Speaker 1:

Absolutely. I think it's a hard thing for people to reckon with when we live in a society that is, I call it, the McDonald's society, where we're just like give me my Big Mac, it's going to look just like the picture on the ad, whatever, and recovery is not that, it's not. We are more complex when we think about being fearfully and wonderfully made, which we absolutely are. There is a lot of resilience that God has created us with, and it is a hard path to change our neural pathways, to change our way of being, to sit with those parts of us that are freaking out and give them kindness when maybe all we've ever been told is suck it up you know and to be able to give that tenderness and say no.

Speaker 1:

And that's one of the things I loved about the questions and the way that you phrase them in the book, which are so tender and gentle and kind. But just where are you? I know I was taught in church that it was a demanding, upset, angry father God that was looking for Adam and Eve, but that's not who he is Now. Is he a God of wrath and justice? Absolutely, because sin is a serious matter. However, when he's talking to his kids who have messed up, he's not the punitive father.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, it's such a big shift and I mean, I think probably all of us have a bit of a punitive father inside of us. You know, it's easy to map that onto God. I knew that as I approached, particularly in those years after the hospitalization, as I approached myself that kindness I've been using that question in retreat settings, but not for me, you know. So there again, hearing that kind where are you? And being able to say I feel really tired. So there again, hearing that kind where are you and being able to say I feel really tired. I mean, I thought something was, as you know from your work, I thought something was deeply broken in me in my mid forties. I'm laying on my couch in my office at two in the afternoon, having left a job that was the job of my dreams in the Bay Area, and feeling in my body like the doctor even said to me. Feeling in my body, like the doctor even said to me, what we see in your body with this sort of septic condition is a man in his 60s, not a man in his early 40s, you know. So, feeling in my body like something's really wrong. I'm so broken and I will never be better. It took so long for my body to heal.

Speaker 2:

I do these five-day intensives oftentimes with pastors, but with lots of different folks, and I was sitting with a pastor last week and he said so okay, so we've done it five days. What do I need? Another two, three, four weeks of doing some of this? You know this breathing and these practices and I'll be good. You know I was like. You know that hospitalization was back in 2012. So I'm like 13 years into this work, this kind of work now, this more trauma-informed, polyvagal, body oriented work, and I still go back to my old strategies. I still over-function. My brain still knows those neural pathways that work so well.

Speaker 1:

Absolutely. And it's always an interesting question to me when folks ask something like that like you know, do this two or three more times? Do I need like one more intensive or another week of therapy or whatever? And I even say that to myself, like you know much like you like how much longer, god? How much longer? Why are we still here? And I think part of the kindness is leaning into the process and the slowness of the process and allowing it to take its course, which is frustrating in a society that doesn't support that. We don't support slow, we don't support taking rest breaks. Now, there's a lot of talk about it, but we don't actually support it. It's like lip service, right, but there is something so profoundly beautiful for the heart when we do when we lean in like that yeah.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I don't know that I quite knew what I was talking about back then, but the first book that I ever wrote when I was in this season post spiritual abuse of some recovery was this book on finding God in the wilderness places, this Exodus storybook, Right, and I realized that that journey should have taken 11 days but it took 40 years.

Speaker 2:

I had no idea that that could have taken them 11 days if they were, you know, if they're really going, but 40 years and that sort of feels like our lives. Sometimes, I mean, that can feel like a downer to some folks who get into therapy and they're like, okay, let's go, let's get healed, and particularly in spaces that offer quick treatments cognitive, behavioral kinds of treatments that are sort of fast and furious but that's not how the body works, right, that's not how the body heals. And so I do think that question where are you is an invitation to a kind of tenderness. My clients know this. Even in sessions my hand is often. I mean, this is a reminder, an embodied reminder to me to be listening within, even as I'm sitting with you right now, to what cues my body is giving me. And so this is the slow work that we invite people to.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, also just for the sake of our listeners. To think about is we're looking at in light of eternity, right? So I think sometimes we get caught in this physical temporal place that we can see, touch, taste, and that's. We're really playing a much longer game, you know, and sanctification looks far different than I think. Maybe I was taught in the 80s that it's such a different process, such a different expansion versus a reduction actually.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I mean, because what we got was like God is this anxious, like helicopter parent, you know, and come on, come on, come on, we have to go, it's time. You know, that kind of thing that I remember very well from my mom, back in the day, you know, but I think that sense, or maybe that quiet, avoidant, angry dad who doesn't really chime in except when you do something wrong. Wrong and then you get smacked, you know, and I do think that a lot of us carry that in our bodies. So this idea that God's moving toward us, that God's safe, that God's attuned, that God sees us in our hiding, that God's first words are where are you?

Speaker 2:

Which is someone reminded me at a conference at one point in the Hebrews, the first word of the book of lamentations. You know, it's a word of lament, it's a word of heartbreak, it's a word of empathy. Can we still use the word empathy, by the way? I know that's under attack nowadays, but it's a word of empathy. And so, yeah, that's a shift too, as you know, particularly for those of us who've experienced abuse and for a number of my clients. In fact, in writing this book, I had to ask my clients along the way. So how does this feel? Because I know I've been on the journey for a little while but it might not feel at all comfortable to use these questions and I've had clients say, nope, we're not going there, we're not using these questions, we're not opening our Bibles, we're going to do this work right now and maybe eventually we'll get back there.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, it's a hard thing. I use a lot of different Bible translations. If I use Scripture at all outright in a session, we joke that we use the NTT, which is the New Tabby Translation, which is my exegetically and hermeneutically correct summarization of something, because it is so tricky. It's been so weaponized, particularly in cases of domestic abuse, where scripture is often used to, you know, force, subjugation and wicked, wicked things for people, and that just breaks my heart because it is so not the heart of God for somebody, but it takes understanding, tenderness and learning that kindness. It is God's kindness that leads us to repentance, not hellfire and brimstone. And I look at Jesus and how he approached all of these people that he touched and the only ones he had hard words for were the Pharisees, and even that was an invitation to think about what you are doing. You are being a whitewashed tomb full of dead men's bones, like that should have made them go home and go. I am like permanently, ceremonially unclean. What happened, yeah?

Speaker 2:

yeah, yeah, I was working with a woman not too long ago with a story of really painful abuse from a family of origin and a husband Christian husband Christian home. You know, the church did all the things that a church shouldn't do. In the midst of this, it became her fault if she would do this better and that better and all the things that you know so very well. Right, and I remember she said, after meeting a number of times, she said, I think that because I often talk about a survival orientation versus a connection orientation, you know, and she said, I think because I grew up in that survival orientation, I just found churches and theologies and a husband that matched that and I lived in vigilance and so in a sense I found myself in church spaces that matched my family of origin.

Speaker 2:

So now the shift into a connection orientation is a shift into, I think, a really beautiful place. I call it the still waters of God. A beautiful place where I think God does dwell, where God is really kind. But it's like she's over there now, but so much of her body still remains over here and it's like what do I do with this juxtaposition? God is kind, god looks at me with a smile of delight. God pursues me. I don't even know what to do with that.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, it's such a game changer for folks theologically to really, when you look at the whole counsel of the word of God, when you look at the actual whole Bible and go wait a second. His orientation is so long suffering, it is so kind. Yes, there are consequences for junk, without question, but his orientation toward his people is please come back, please come back, I'm here, I'm here for you, I'm here with you, I love you. I will get in the dirt with you and that is where I find the best healing is in the dirt, like that is for sure, where God does great work and, I guess, the church. Sometimes we're a little bit afraid to get messy.

Speaker 1:

We're afraid to get in the dirt with people, but that is where we're called to be. Yeah.

Speaker 2:

I often talk about it in terms of humility and that old word humus. You know, in the soil, in the dirt, like there, there is a kind of humility that emerges like that. But if you've lived like you and I, have, over functioning, we live three to five feet off the ground all the time in perpetual motion. Find our way back down to the dirt, back down to the soil, to a place of humility is simultaneously sort of identity shattering, right, especially if you've lived perfectionistically and over-functioning. But boy, your body is like thank you, because I don't think we could have gone much longer at that pace and that survival orientation.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and again that feels so unsafe at first and this is something I walk through with clients quite a bit is when goodness starts for them. Let's say they've been in abusive spaces and now they are in a space where they are in good community with wonderful people, and then it feels off and they're crying a lot and they're like I don't know what to do. I'm like, oh, your body is not used to it, you know, like let's lean into the discomfort and allow it some space and let's check in with the parts that are scared and be really gentle. You know, because sometimes kindness and care was the means to an end for abuse. So anytime you got gentleness you knew something was coming after, and so it's really then hard to trust it and hard to trust goodness, and so when you're confronted with true goodness, it feels radically unsafe.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I mean again, you know this, but this is where we can't do it on our own right. I think in some way, that's the mistake I made in 2003 when all of this went down, Because even my therapist at the time was commending me for how well I was doing, you know so clearly he was missing something and I was not revealing everything, right. I think that that space where we can be held, where we're known, where we can tell those stories, that's so important for this work.

Speaker 1:

Absolutely. You know. I think about the Maya Angelou quote that there's nothing worse than holding a story that hasn't been told. And I know that there's the EMDR and maybe brain spotting practitioners that would be like, oh, you don't have to talk, and I have questions about that. To be honest, just the more story work of my own that I have done and with others.

Speaker 1:

You know that, yes, we don't want to overly traumatize people by having them recount details that they are not ready to recount However one of the most profound things I ever had happen was my own therapist looking at me at one point and saying have you ever told anyone the details of what happened to you? And it was related to sexual assault. And I said never.

Speaker 1:

And he invited me to that place and I remember the terror of saying things out loud that I thought I would take to the grave, but the healing that followed it and it was just like oh, you know and all of the lies that were in my own head about who I was and my worth and my value and my cleanliness and all of the things were pulled out into the light and God was able to heal that. And it was because I told my story to a safe person. And I think about that often and how we've essentially pushed that out of the church at times because it's messy and scary and we don't know what to do with it and sometimes there's some pretty faulty beliefs in some places and yet it's so healing when we allow it.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, sort of like only success stories, welcome. You know, the ride to church on Sunday mornings was when my parents would fight the most and something would shift as soon as we walked in the doors of the church and they were all smiles and I learned unwittingly that the church is not a place where we bring these parts of our story, and it's one of the things. You know, I've operated as both pastor and therapist and so I've lived in both worlds, and it makes me sad sometimes when people are like, well, you therapist, you're just trying to make people mad at the church, but the reality is that so often the folks that come to us are like I tried to bring this to the church, to my community group, to my pastor, and I did not find safety there. I have found safety at the Wednesday night women's group. I do find safety in my therapist's office, and so it's a really tricky thing because I long for our churches to be those kinds of spaces.

Speaker 2:

But I know years ago you know the name, larry Crabb, I'm sure Years ago Larry Crabb wrote a book called the Safest Place on Earth about the church and I remember he left therapy to do this work in the church and I remember sitting with him about three years later and he was in tears and he's like it wasn't what I thought it was going to be. It was so hard, it was so painful, so disappointing, you know yeah.

Speaker 1:

I think that's, I would say that's the invitation that people like you and me and others who are out there just talking about these things, we want the church to be the safest place, because Jesus is the safest place. You know he really is and I, I know I love the church and I am still a church member. I still go, even though I know that, with what the work that I do, occasionally I'm like oh for the love and it's like oh goodness, but there's still, like this hope and prayer that as people press in, as people learn the path of healing and really I know this is a word that some people think is a four letter word, I just like to use it anyway.

Speaker 1:

Deconstruction, as people really deconstruct, and I've always just said that is really sanctification, you know, is what I was told. The truth. Let me go to the word of God and look for myself. Let me behold the face of Jesus and be a good Berean and look for myself, me behold the face of Jesus and be a good Berean and look for myself. And I'm finding, and my clients find, and I think you've probably found, that not everything was quite accurate. And then people get vilified when they start asking questions and that's heartbreaking.

Speaker 2:

Oh, it's heartbreaking. Yeah, years and years ago I was at one previous iteration of my vocation many years ago, was going to go off and do a biblical studies PhD and thankfully decided to go the therapeutic route and get trained there. But I remember reading Walter Brueggemann's book Psalms in the Life of Faith and this framework of psalms of orientation, disorientation and reorientation. I think you probably heard of this model, but that there are psalms of disorientation. We call it deconstruction nowadays, but I mean, it's right there in the Bible and there's lots of disorientation in the Bible, but for some reason there's not a whole lot of permission nowadays for us to name those things out loud. And so I think in some ways the therapeutic space for many have become that place to lament in the way that the church was meant to be, to say this hurts, ouch. We're not given permission, as I talk about in the book, to say, ouch, this really hurts. You know, that's what I should have said after 2003. Ouch, this really hurts. I can't go on, I need help, I'm really hurting.

Speaker 1:

But something inside me was like it's not safe to so, yeah, yeah, and I think about the women's retreats that I serve at, and one of the most profound things is to let someone have their ouch and to wrap your arms around them and just hold them.

Speaker 1:

I have held countless people, both men and women, as they have wept and there is just something profoundly healing for them in that, to just have their pain be held and just to hear someone go yeah, that's an ouch, that's a big ouch. One of my favorite we talked about this right before we started One of my favorite things in the book was the exercise at the end of chapter six and healing what's within, which is the three candles exercise, and I will tell you what my favorite parts of it were. It was the third candle. So the first candle is blessing and I want to make sure I get this right, so I'm going to double check it but representing what's known in your story, to honor what you've learned about yourself. And the second one represents what is yet to be discovered and the third is what may never be known.

Speaker 1:

And that one was the most hard, difficult, profound one of the bunch and I love the invitation you have in there of like, take your time lighting that one and I think about that one because that for a survivor is the hardest is what might I not know, especially if there's developmental trauma and you don't remember. There's that black hole or your Swiss cheese memory and you may never know. Your body knows and you can go. Something was wrong. I can feel it, but I don't know the explicit.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, that's right, the developmental trauma, the generational trauma, that there's something there. I mean, you said it a little bit earlier there's some trauma therapists today who are like stories don't matter, it's all about present moment and sensation. You and I both agree that story matters, but there are parts of our stories that we'll never know and sensations that we have that might just have some faint sense that maybe that's because I know. For me, maybe that's because when I was born I was brought to the ICU and spent the next few weeks there and my mom and dad went home, and so maybe there are some early attachment, but I don't remember that. I don't have a narrative memory of those weeks in the hospital. Remember that I don't have a narrative memory of those, you know, those weeks in the hospital, but I do know that there's something inside, that there's a faint ache inside. You might just say so I light that third candle because I don't have that smoking gun memory that we talked about earlier. Right, that we're all looking for that thing. That's like if only I knew it's because my fifth grade teacher said that thing to me.

Speaker 2:

You know, some of us, the complexity of trauma. We just we won't know and there won't be that thing, that we'll discover that. That's the secret key. When I say that to my therapist and I cry those tears, everything will be better. I think there was a time earlier on in the sort of the therapeutic world where there was something of that myth, therapeutic world where there was something of that myth. But if anyone is listening right now and has that sense that, if only I find that thing, maybe it's, maybe the third candle is for them, but it's a tough one. I did a presentation for a group of therapists and one of my dear old friends was there, rachel, and she said I don't know that I can like that third one that feels like I'm going to have to surrender at some level in a way that I'm not yet ready for. So that's important too.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah it is. And, as you were telling that, I noticed the feeling of grief. You know the grief of the not knowing, because sometimes and I think a lot of times at least my brain wants the details right, Because then it makes sense, right, it makes sense why I'm feeling this in my body or why there's a time of year I feel some discontent or struggle, or a thing. A smell, a taste, a touch will make me dysregulate and I'm like I have no idea why. And there isn't necessarily a finding the why, it's just something's there.

Speaker 1:

And to honor the grief of the not knowing, the grief of the surrender because it's still lost, right, the not knowing is still lost. And to give that to god and to say, yes, let us lament. And that man, I love a good lament. I always thought that would be so scary, but but they are so beautiful.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, that's right, and there's a kindness, there's a compassion, even in, you know, particular seasons. I tell the story. I won't tell the story here, but I do tell a story in the book of working with a woman where she had looked at her past in great detail and she was ready to say, you know, I don't know that I'm going to find that thing that explains my severe depression, my anxiety. And so there are these seasons, I think, where I think we as therapists and our clients, we sort of agree together OK, we're not going to, we're not going to press as hard as we were to look for that thing. You know, and sometimes when you relax in that way, the body does things. You know, and I know, as I tell the story in the book, for my client it was an awakening to a deeper level of her pain that she couldn't see when she was trying to chase down the why.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah, and that's such a common occurrence. I know that in my own story I was working on something wholly different. It ended up being tangentially related, but we were brain spotting and I dropped into something that I had not been able to remember and it was like the Lord kicked open the door to a room that was a wasteland, that looked like Terminator.

Speaker 1:

And I just remember standing there going oh crap. And I just remember the sensation of Jesus saying I'm with you, I've always been here, it's just time to open the store and hold my hand, and that was profoundly tender and helpful and terrifying all at the same time. And even in the not known and I just want to say this because I think people might be listening and going what do you mean? Like this could go on forever. And oh no, is there's still such goodness, because healing is still possible, whether you explicitly or implicitly know something, that there is still amazing resilience, amazing strength, amazing healing. That does happen. We may not get through everything this side of heaven In fact we won't, because when we're done then we go home but we will still have goodness in the land of the living. Yeah.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, that's beautiful, you should preach. I hope you preach. Yeah, yeah, that's beautiful, you should preach.

Speaker 1:

I hope you preach. Sometimes I get in trouble for that.

Speaker 2:

Goodness in the land of the living. I mean, I think that's what our clients are fighting for. You know to spot that goodness every now and then. I remember sitting with a particular client and we had. She had felt well, we'd been together for a few years and had been bleak and we were turning a corner. And just in that moment it's pretty cloudy here in the winter in West Michigan and the sun sort of breaks through the window.

Speaker 2:

There are those moments that you can't predict. You know, sometimes you're sitting in a session. We're so not in control. People think we therapists are like oh, I know exactly what I'm doing, step by step, there's a recipe. No, we're so not in control, right. But there are these moments, you know, you might be working with someone for three years and there's this breakthrough moment and they find themselves transported to the land of the living and they take their first deep breath like they've come out of water, come out of a suffocating place, right, and it's really beautiful. That's why I love this work. I know you love this work too. It's so transformative.

Speaker 1:

It is. I always tell people I'm not the healer, but I do know him and I get to have a front row seat to the stuff he does. And you know it's like being a divine Sherpa. I'm going to lead you in places, I'm going to walk with you, I'm going to hold your hand, I'm going to carry your bags with you, I'm going to carry hope when you can't. But you know we may walk through the valley of the shadow of death, but I am not making camp.

Speaker 1:

We're going out the other side and it is so fun to me to see Jesus show up, you know, when you least expect it and you're like holy cow, like there've been so many times I have left like work for the day and just sat in my vehicle and just breathed and been like how do I get to do this? How do I get to see God's glory? And do it for a job Like this is amazing. There are the hard days that make you like go wow, oh gosh. But there's so much beauty and there's just beauty in sitting with someone in their pain and bearing witness to even that.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, well, that in and of itself it doesn't feel oftentimes to us or to the client like anything's really happening there, right, but that in and of itself is so transformative, right, that attunement, that bearing witness if there are any therapists listening right now know that in those moments it's so important, right, that's there's something happening there, mirroring an attunement that likely never happened before, you know. And so, yeah, it's really slow work and it can be profoundly unsatisfying work. If you need, like the quick I'm noticing, maybe you have too. I know a number of therapists who are pivoting to coaching and other things, because it can be hard to sit with people over the course of a long time. The change is so slow and yet, yeah, what a gift that we get to do it.

Speaker 1:

Absolutely, and I think you know. Speaking to therapists that might be listening to us, I would just encourage you learn how to get into your own body and learn how to get somebody else into theirs, because that is a game changer and we can't take someone where we won't go and if we're scared of our own bodies, then it's going to be really hard to press in with someone else's. I had the immense privilege of speaking to a room full of marriage and family therapists in March of 2025. And I had a brave volunteer get up on the stage. She did not know me from a hill of tacos and this one was so incredibly brave. I knew what I was about to do. She had no idea and I didn't say. I just said who's willing to do something with me? I need a volunteer, and she bravely got up there with me and I slowed everything down, dropped into my own body and, within about 10 seconds, dropped her into hers.

Speaker 1:

And I could see the vulnerability that she let me have in that moment. The whole room could feel it and I was very gentle and careful. We did not go places super deep, though I could see them because, like dude, she didn't even know what she was signing up for and it was so profoundly tender. And when we were done I said this is why we do it this way. And the room was like, oh my gosh. And she came to me after and said that was, I felt, seen, so seen. And that is like Kurt Thompson says we come into this world looking for someone, looking for us, and we're giving them something of Jesus in that moment because we're looking at them.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, that's it at the core and that's what's most healing, I think too.

Speaker 1:

Absolutely. What is, if you could say anything to the audience listening, what is the one thing that you hope that they take away from healing? What's within that you hope that they take away?

Speaker 2:

from healing what's within. Yeah, I wanted to demystify trauma. You know trauma is a wound. I mean I think so often when people think about trauma they think about this complex. There are complex conversations, as you know, if you've ever read Alan Shore or Peter Levine but it's a wound to the soul and it's a wound that festers in aloneness and in overwhelm and most of us can relate to that at some level. And it's a primal wound, Our earliest wound in Genesis, chapter 3 of disconnection, Adam and Eve hiding in shame. All of us know that. All of us bear something of that in our own bodies.

Speaker 2:

If you've ever heard trauma talked about in a way that like, oh, I don't have that, that's for that really serious person that was hospitalized last week. You know. To know that you're dealing in wounds and I'm dealing and we all have our wounds, and to pay attention, to listen for God's kind, where are you? And to attune to what God might want you to attune to and attend to in your own life. I think that's what I'd say, Some version of that.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I think that's a beautiful gift honestly to lean into Jesus and let him call to you and hear that when are you, so much differently than maybe we were taught back in the day, and to trust that his arms are open and that he wants to take you up. That's one of my favorite things that I know the Lord has done in my own life is he gave me a vision a long time ago. I was in the middle of the worst panic attack. I honestly could not drive, I was shaking, it was awful, and I was like Jesus, please, help, please. And there was like no one. And I just remember saying I need a hug and I'm like in the middle of Mississippi in the woods, like there's nobody to hug me and I'm not walking up to people and going hi, would you please give me a hug? That's dangerous.

Speaker 1:

And the Lord said just crawl in my lap and let me hold you, and that was a visualization that I had, and I could feel him so close and it was such the invitation. I was like like, oh, but this is what you say to all of us come close, I'm here, yeah, and that's beautiful, so I love that yeah so thank you, chuck, for hanging out and for chatting and for talking about your book.

Speaker 1:

The book is healing. What's within it is absolutely fantastic. You can get it wherever books are sold. Again is my favorite, and you did read your audio book because I've. So I have it on all three formats I have your audio book, the paperback and I have the Kindle, because I just never know when I'm going to need it, and I'm so grateful for all of that. I'm so grateful for the work that you do, for the work you do helping people with their spiritual formation and their healing and pointing them to the ultimate healer in such a tender, beautiful way. So thank you for hanging out with me. Oh, you're so kind. Thank you Thanks for joining me for today's episode of hey Tabby. If you're looking for a resource that I mentioned in the show and you want to check out the show notes, head on over to tabithawestbrookcom. Forward slash heytabi. That's H-E-Y-T-A-B-I and you can grab it there. I look forward to seeing you next time.

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Tabitha Westbrook, LMFT-S, LCMCH-QS, LPC-S, CSAT, CCTP, CCTCP

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