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Pam King: Emotional health is deeply intertwined in an ongoing journey with spiritual health.
This involves opening to our pain, grieving our trauma, and patiently cultivating a resilience that stabilizes and secures our relationships and our sense of self.
With compassion, pastoral presence, and emotional attunement, psychologist Dr. David Wang is using psychological and theological tools to help us understand and adapt to emotional realities, explore the wounds of our past, and find healing and strength through acceptance and grief.
Dave Wang: for me, Thriving is about accepting, making peace, and becoming friends with a truer story of yourself, others, and the world. you know, I see emotional formation, emotional regulation as, intimately tied to our relationship with ourselves.
Interior freedom.
Dave Wang: it has to do with, the freedom, of my, in my heart to feel what I need to feel in the moment, in the situation that I happen to be.
Pam King: I’m Dr. Pam King and you’re listening to With & For, a podcast that explores the depths of psychological science and spiritual wisdom to offer practical guidance towards spiritual health, wholeness, and thriving on purpose.
It can be counterintuitive, but pain, loss, and trauma are part of our thriving journey.
But the cognitive dissonance is definitely there. It’s common to see suffering as totally incompatible with flourishing. But our suffering isn’t the end of the story. It’s part and parcel of the human condition.
And there’s a rich history of theological reflection and over the past century, empirical psychological research that is all helping us learn to engage with our suffering and trauma and work toward emotional, mental, and spiritual health.
And my guest today, a friend and colleague brings together each of these categories of emotion, mental health, and spiritual formation. Dr. David Wang is a licensed psychologist and associate professor of psychology at Fuller Theological Seminary, where he’s also the Cliff and Joyce Penner chair for the formation of Emotionally Healthy Leaders and Scholar in Residence at Fuller Center for Spiritual Formation.
Dave speaks and trains leaders globally on trauma informed care. And back here at Fuller, he conducts research and teaches courses in trauma therapy, dialectical behavioral therapy, multicultural psychology, and the integration of psychology and Christian faith. On top of all that, Dave is also pastor of spiritual f rmation at One Life City Church in Fullerton, California.
Pam King: In this conversation with David Wang, we discuss
the difference between human development and spiritual formation and how to understand maturity.
The centrality of relationships in human life and growth and how that’s grounded in divine relationality and our communion with God.
How to become friends with ourselves, offering self compassion and being moved by our own experiences of suffering.
the impact of childhood trauma on adult emotional, psychological, and spiritual health,
and finally, how a practice of grief can help us understand and work through traumatic experiences and move toward healing and wholeness.
Dave, welcome to With & Four. Thank you so much for joining me. I have been so excited to have you on the show.
Dave Wang: Thrilled to be here at your podcast.
It’s a gift to have you here today.
Thriving often involves very deep and hard work. And today we’re going to get into some complex and for some heartbreaking reasons, um, stuff you work with people in the trenches of pain and trauma and healing.
And I’m really looking forward to having your expertise to impact how pain and loss and trauma can be part of our thriving journey.
As a clinical therapist, a professor of psychology, and a pastor, Dave regularly accompanies people on their journeys towards thriving. And this often means walking side by side with someone through the excruciating process of looking at their trauma, trying to understand it, and work through it. and learning a new approach that leads to strength and resilience.
I asked him about what brought him to this really challenging work.
Could you explain what you find so interesting about working at this intersection of psychology and spirituality or theology?
Dave Wang: I do wear quite a few hats in any given week, , you know, built into my role at Fuller is the intersection of mental well being and emotional health. And I’m also a licensed clinical psychologist and I, uh, in my private practice, I do a lot of trauma work. I do a lot of trauma work with religious leaders and, in our training, we, don’t typically get equipped to enter into those deeper, more profound questions, especially within the context of things like trauma. And I’m also part time a pastor still of a Christian congregation near the border of Anaheim and Fullerton, and I recognize that Many of us here in our audience, may not necessarily be Christian, but, I just wanted to locate myself, and, uh, that will be our launching point, but certainly I’d imagine a lot of our conversations will extend well beyond that religion, particular religious tradition, and perhaps, I’m hoping, can touch, a lot of our, uh, spirituality.
Pam King: You, you know, have been studying the emotional realities of being human. and I’d just love to know personally what drew you towards, Accompanying people in and through their trauma, and why, being with people in such difficulty.
Dave Wang: Yeah, I oftentimes will share that I was a pastor first, before I was a psychologist. And I’m a psychologist today because of what I witnessed and what I experienced as a pastor. So those two, callings, are an integrated whole in terms of my vocation and they’re interconnected.
And in my own personal life story, I,, uh, was unfortunately, In the middle of a, situation involving a young woman who, uh, was, sexually assaulted by another staff member at our church and, witnessing that, walking alongside, this individual and seeing the situation through, it really, opened my eyes to, a lot of challenges within religious communities as well as the, a lot of needs.
Emotional needs, spiritual needs, as it relates to trauma, and those, early experiences, kind of seeded this, longstanding interest in trauma, spirituality, healing, uh, recovery, and how all those things are often, interconnected,
Pam King: Well, I appreciate you pointing that out. It feels like within the context of clinical psychology, doing therapy, you remarked how many clinicians aren’t necessarily prepared to grapple with those existential issues, those issues of ultimacy, how you make sense of the world, that are often spiritual or religious.
and then similarly, in the context of ministry, where there’s pain and suffering, we would hope would not be the case, but ultimately it really is. But that also in terms of healing, when there is suffering and harm, that the resources weren’t there. And so both are agents of transformation in a sense, psychology and ministry, but that when they are brought together, they are all the more powerful, it seems.
Dave Wang: Exactly. Absolutely.
Pam King: Dave draws deeply from the spiritual well of Christian theology and formation, and offers a wonderfully nuanced philosophical approach to theologically informed strategies for transformation and growth. The fundamentally relational aspects of God in humanity, created in God’s relational image, ground his approach to therapy and spiritual formation.
Dave Wang: When I think of the holistic formation of religious or spiritual leaders,
the Roman Catholic approach to this, which looks at Through, four pillars or four dimensions, there’s the, spiritual formation of the leader, the human formation, the intellectual formation, as well as the pastoral formation.
And, in contexts such as ours, at a seminary, we typically are, quite attuned to the intellectual formation as well as the pastoral formation, kind of the,the imparting of, and the refinement of, ministry related skills like, facilitating conversations or preaching or something like that.
And I think in recent decades, in more evangelical circles, there’s much more of a, awareness of the importance of our spiritual formation that, attending to dynamics between implicit as well as implicit in our relationship with God. And, and I think something that, Psychologists and, who happen to be Christian are also naturally attuned to is how our human formation is interconnected with all those other dimensions, of formation.
That is, for us to be spiritually flourishing, for us to be spiritually mature, whatever language we might prefer. And I know it’s tradition dependent. there are implications, from, of our spiritual maturity on our human maturity. That, uh, maturing as a human being, maturing in our relational capacities, maturing in our insight and our self knowledge, all of that is, it’s not a separate, disconnected reality from our spiritual, development.
It’s very much intertwined, between the two. And I think, those of us who are in psychology and fields like it, can, uniquely speak into those interconnections.
Pam King: Yeah. What categories do you find most helpful and practical for people to think about human formation? And I’ll name that you just graciously said it’s very tradition dependent. So perhaps depending on your culture, your religion, your denomination, Your disciplinary background, you might use different words.
Dave Wang: Yeah, I think a good place to start is, this reality that our spiritual development it’s ultimately a, development in our relationality. You know, that is our relationship with the divine. I think our Roman Catholic friends would talk about a union with Christ and union with God.
And that’s actually, again, my preferred language myself, but, that spiritual formation is fundamentally relational. And, and that’s the starting point to a very important bridge between spiritual formation and human formation, which is,if we are, if we lack the capacities that are necessary for us to build trusting, intimate, healthy relationships with other human beings whom we can see and speak to directly.
If we’re not able to do that, what likelihood do we have to develop similar, intimate, trusting, close, differentiated, healthy relationships, uh, with divine who’s both imminent but also transcendent?one of, one area of, in my research on spiritual formation, focuses on, uh, you know, what are markers, that would suggest that somebody is, uh, spiritually mature, or however you might want to articulate it.
And, from the empirical research on the topic, one of the most Robust predictors, and this comes from not only my own work, but also the work of my colleague, Steve Sandage, out in Boston University, is intercultural dispositions. Are you inter culturally competent? And usually people don’t put those two things together.
I know some religious communities might look at, inter cultural competence with skepticism, thinking that it’s more of a, a political kind of, related to some sort of political agenda. But, my pushback to that would be to start with this foundational notion that our relationship with God is fundamentally inter cultural.
God is not American, and when I it’s important to remind people of that. And when I’m in Asia giving talks on this, I’ll say that God’s not Asian. And when I’m in Africa, I’ll say God’s not African. and, the, and I would suggest that the more we think God is American as Americans, The less we probably actually know God, because when we’re in a relationship that crosses cultural boundaries, there are relational capacities, that are needed for us to be able to relate to someone and make space for someone to exist and be seen in their light, not in the light that we would like to place on them.
And, in the Old Testament. It talks a lot about idolatry and warnings about idolatry. And I think cultural idolatry is a form of idolatry, which, and the idea behind idolatry is, this notion that humans, at least from a Christian tradition,we understand humans to be created in the image of God and idolatry flips that 180 degrees where we, instead of being formed in the, in God’s image, we form God out of our image, which can include forming God out of our cultural image, thinking that God votes like us, thinks like us, has exact same sets of values.
And. And that’s idolatry. And that also stifles our capacity to see and relate to God as fully as he is, because we’re in many different ways trying to fit him into a box.
Pam King: People often ask me, what are the markers of maturity? myself, I think about the ways that our relatedness and connection to others facilitates the process of human growth and development.
There are emotional building blocks and relational capacities that we need to cultivate to thrive as a mature person.
I’d love to hear you talk then about both relational development or formation and this concept of emotional health,
Dave Wang: I’ll start with There’ll be multiple parts to my response to this. um, A couple of years ago, I flew out to Mount Angel seminary, which is a Benedictine seminary near Portland, Oregon, and, had a focus group with a bunch of spiritual directors. And I asked them the question, how do you discern between, the difference between someone who possesses a substance of spiritual maturity and someone who versus someone who perhaps is in fact spiritually immature or less developed, but they’re just trying really hard to look the part.
And one of their responses was, they said that spiritually mature people are people of communion. With deep relational capacities, not only with God, but also, with one’s neighbor. And another,descriptor that they offered is that they, possess, affective maturity or emotional maturity.
That, they’re aware of their internal emotional states, and, They know where they’re coming from, like why, what emotion I’m feeling, why I’m feeling it. And as a result, to cope with these internal states. And, and how I put these together is that, I see emotional formation, emotional regulation as, intimately tied to our relationship with ourselves.
You know, just as we might ask a question, do you know other people intimately, in a trusting, uh, way? we can also ask a similar question, do you know yourself, intimately? in a harmonious way as well. And that relationship with ourself is really key to emotional health.
Pam King: I really appreciate that. I feel like what I’m, an image is coming to my mind of these somewhat emotional building blocks of like our emotional capacities to regulate,to attune to ourselves, to attune to others emotionally through empathy or take their perspectives, to be self aware that these emotional building blocks, these psychological capacities enable us to relate to ourselves, know ourselves, relate to others, and those same capacities also allow us to relate to our understanding of the divine or to
Dave Wang: absolutely,
Pam King: And, I, when your comment earlier about us often projecting like our culture, my North American perspective on who God might be. When the more self aware we can be and understand what is uniquely ours, and that, that’s limited in generalizing to the people around me, let alone to God, the more control or more openness we might have to experiencing others in their own uniqueness and God, as God presents himself
Dave Wang: Oh, that’s right. Absolutely.
Pam King: We came to a great point, and I asked Dave what he thinks of spiritual health and thriving, it within both his theological and psychological
I’d love to step back and ask you when you hear the term spiritual health, what is spiritually healthy to you?
Dave Wang: Great. Yes. Great question. I think, for me, there’s at least two components, that I believe are central to, this notion of spiritual health. I think the first one is,this relational union with God.and the second one. is more, interior and, and I’ve come to prefer this term much more than, say, other similar terms like, emotional well being or, a lack of distress, or, positive emotions, there’s a place for all of those things, but, in my opinion, I feel like a more robust, outcome would be,interior freedom.
Again, I’m going back to my Roman Catholic friends, So, union with God on one hand, and then interior freedom on the other hand. And the reason why I prefer the term interior freedom is that, it, it has, it’s a much more flexible term, and it has to do with, the freedom, of my, in my heart to feel what I need to feel in the moment, in the situation that I happen to be.
So, for example, there’s plenty of situations where, positive emotions like joy and gratitude and peace are fully appropriate, of course, we might be concerned if there, someone is in a very peaceful, joyful circumstance and they can’t connect to those emotions and, you know, I think we’d be rightly concerned there.
and yet something I’m noticing a lot more, especially in more contemporary culture and more contemporary, feeling, thinking, is that there’s this unconscious or conscious expectation that,to thrive,or to be, in a flourishing state means that I’m only, experiencing happiness and joy all the time.
And it’s never,it never varies beyond that. It’s just going from, in religious, Christian religious language, going from victory to victory and, uh, going from perfect peace to perfect peace. And I don’t think that’s, Consistent with, uh, or religious, beliefs. And it’s also not consistent with, the realities of life that, you know, without the pain and the sadness, uh, things like joy aren’t meaningful.
you need both, both give each other meaning, and it’s about the harmony between the two. So, as a clinical psychologist, I will be just as concerned if somebody just lost a loved one that they. They care about deeply and they’re unaffected and they’re still happy and moving on with their life and as if nothing happened, that would actually be a concern for me, and, this notion of interior freedom is really more speaking about, you know, do I have the flexibility in my heart to feel what I feel?
I need to feel as a human being. Do I have permission and flexibility to be human when I need to,
regardless of the circumstances? I mean,
Pam King: I almost imagine like when you have interior freedom, you’ve got a love seat and joy and sorrow can sit down simultaneously and, you know, anger might be, you know, Relaxing, um, or sitting in a chair and that we are complex humans and knowing when to allow space for all of these complex emotions to sit by side by side and maybe even hold hands for a while.
Dave Wang: yes, absolutely. And one of the insights that neuroscience teaches us is that human, yeah. human emotions and human cognition. It operates in parallel. It’s not, it doesn’t process things serially like one after another.
We can process multiple threads and multiple emotions at the same time. And this makes perfect sense because when you think of, again, that example of losing a loved one prematurely, or,it’s quite normative for us to feel both happy and sad at the same time. If someone was suffering, we might be, happy for them that they’re not suffering anymore.
At the same time, we feel sad because we miss them and both coexist without having to cancel each other out. And that our brains are hardwired for that as well.
Absolutely. I think that’s so important to just give people permission and this is where like information is helpful. Like you can process and hold two emotions at the same time and that to embrace that and the American dream doesn’t have to mean, just all happiness. Right.
Pam King: joy doesn’t even mean delight and pleasure and glee and being ecstatic all the time.
Pam King: For Dave, thriving is about holding the beautiful beside the broken,
And another incredibly evocative and challenging idea, to become friends with ourselves.
This means learning how to show compassion, being moved by our own suffering, and accepting our limitations as we strive toward the hard work we’re all called to do. for me, Thriving is about accepting, making peace, and becoming friends with a truer story of yourself, others, and the world.and,perhaps distilling it is being able to tell a truer story. Of your life. and as, my friend and colleague, Dan Allender, he’s a trauma psychologist, works with,childhood sexual trauma.
Dave Wang: it’s also,his, how he would articulate healing from those kinds of, hurtful situations, which is, he would say, telling a truer story requires us to,speak to not just the beauty, but the brokenness as well and, that there’s this, an indicator of healing and recovery is actually a, the cultivation of a greater capacity to hold ambivalence, to hold both the beauty and the brokenness side by side, all at the same time that I don’t need to erase one.
Or the other, and it’s possible to, I think it’s very common for us to gravitate towards one or the other, the beauty or the brokenness where, on one hand, I’ve seen some individuals, oftentimes religious people who, only want to talk about the beauty and never want to talk about the brokenness.
And sometimes that can devolve into toxic positivity, you know, with a religious veneer and that’s not helpful, and on the flip side, it’s also possible to just, ignore the potential beauty and just focus and ruminate on the,brokenness and that’s also, I mean, even though that’s true.
to do so in a ruminative fashion and to, to stay there, it’s also not productive. That’s, it’s also ultimately not a, a life giving pathway. so, telling a truer story for some is going to invite them to, To trend and move towards acknowledging the beauty while for others, it’s going to do the opposite where it’s going to involve, invite them to acknowledge the brokenness and, to be able to hold both and to make peace with it.
and to,to squeeze every drop of wisdom, uh, that we can from that, tension, I think is very much a sign and, and a means by which we flourish in my opinion.
Pam King: Absolutely. That’s beautiful. part of, I think, my own journey has been able to hold the brokenness and the beauty simultaneously and to feel the brokenness and the hurt and the pain. And I have to imagine something that you said, in your definition of thriving, becoming friends with oneself.
Resonates with a lot of our listeners, and I’m even wondering in this moment, if you might take a moment to guide our listeners into how they might become better friends with themselves.
Dave Wang: Sure thing. And let me share a short preface and then we’ll jump into that. I, especially with my highly religious clients that I work with at my private practice, religious leaders, I’ve,
Pam King: I’ve seen, this, keen need for, self compassion. And, and what I will often do is, as therapists, we’re kind of a mirror and we kind of reflect,people’s, inner life, back to them so that they can see themselves more clearly.
Dave Wang: And I would suggest that most of us, if we were to,be able to put a tape recorder, in our minds, and if we were to record and transcribe, uh, the things that we say to ourselves, it would be quite cruel. you know, We would dare not say any of that to any other human being, but we are constantly saying that, to ourselves, to a point where sometimes I will reflect to others and I’ve observed this even in myself as well.
Sometimes we, oftentimes we have a contempt for ourselves. That we look at our humanity, we look upon our limitations, with contempt and lack of acceptance. Everyone else can have boundaries, everyone else can have limitations, everyone else can have flaws, but not ourselves. And, and what I’ve done sometimes,when the moment is right and when an individual is ready is, for me to model compassion to them, because most of the time when we bear witness to somebody else’s suffering, It doesn’t take much for our hearts to be moved by their suffering, right?
and this notion of, self compassion, which is derived from Buddhist spirituality, you know, very much appreciative of many of their insights, is this idea of, well, can we observe our own suffering in the same way we observe and bear witness to the suffering of others, and allow and give freedom to our hearts, give our hearts permission to not only be moved by the suffering of others, of another person, but allow ourselves to be moved by our own suffering, you know, affirming our humanity.
And again, speaking from the Christian tradition that I happen to belong to, I will continue that with one more step, which is now consider How might God view your suffering?and, so, so again, illustrating this kind of holism between compassion for other people’s suffering, compassion for my own suffering, and then being attuned to and receiving the compassion and the pity of God as he bears witness to our suffering as well.
And there, there’s been a number of beautiful powerful moments when that finally clicked and they realized that, whoa, God may not talk to me the same ways that I talk to myself and can I open myself up to the reality of how God actually sees and wants to speak to
Pam King: That’s so helpful to hear and, and I do know cognitively that third person perspective on our own life, our own story can be so helpful for us to process our feelings, see our feelings in new light and begin to open us to having God’s compassion or another compassion, other person’s compassion for us.
If you would be willing to share. In your own life, if there’s been, you know, a moment, kind of an aha of when, because you’re human, I have to imagine that Dave Wang even holds himself in contempt at
Dave Wang: Oh, absolutely, absolutely.
Pam King: is, there’s something you might share with us of a time where you realized like
Dave Wang:
Pam King: that you were holding yourself in contempt and. And how you work through that or continue to,
Dave Wang: Absolutely, all the time and still andand I think the only difference now as I’ve made some You Some steps of progress isI notice it, I observe it earlier. so in the past I would, kind of, have trains of thoughts. sometimes I would just hop on top of that train and just, I just ride and let the train take me wherever it wants to go.
And usually it doesn’t lead me in a very helpful place, so those trains are still very common in my mind. and I think, growth for me, isn’t that those trains disappear, cause I think to some extent they’re going to, Be around, as long as I’m alive. growth rather is more about noticing them earlier and knowing how to pivot yourself internally, and sometimes those trains, having something important to say to us but if we listen well to it and, we receive the wisdom it’s trying to communicate to us, it actually, quells the train, um, much more effectively than if I were to try to confront it or try to, go into some sort of like, you know, rational logic, logical wrestling against it,which I’m also very prone to do.
but the one area in particular that I struggle with the most, and I think this might be, Common among other people as well is, having contempt over my limitations.
you know, And, me not being enough. And, sometimes my, it’s my body that’s trying to Some sort of limitation and I either ignore it, I look at it with contempt, like, Oh my goodness, why can’t I do this anymore? I, I should be blah, blah, blah, blah.
and,and other times maybe there’s a very tense situation and I’m, Very, uh, vigorously scrutinizing my, my decision making, process, and in those situations, I will often, ground myself with the phrase, you know, Dave, um,I I I did the best that I could. With the information that I had,
like, did I do the best that I could with the information I had and with the resources available to me at that end?
can I say that I, yes to that question, throughout the process? And even if. Some of the, decisions were not accurate, didn’t lead to some of the, outcomes that I would hope and wish for. And often times in, in, you know, real life situations, we are placed in impossible situations where there are consequences regardless of what choice we make.
Pam King: Right.
Dave Wang: More about choosing which consequence we can live with, rather than choosing, pretending there’s an option that will, forego all consequences, and I think this was also part of my religious formation, this kind of notion of this just world hypothesis, right? Good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people. So, I would reverse engineer that and say, well, if a bad thing happened, it must’ve been meant that I made a bad choice and I’m therefore a bad person.
and, and accepting the reality that is not accurate most of the time, you know, that, in fact, Max Dupree puts it quite well that, you know, he says good leaders,bear pain, they don’t cause pain, it’s, choosing in an, bad decision, bad options in an impossible situation, but doing so that, minimizes pain for other people.
And perhaps for a time it might, still bring pain upon yourself. and, you’re actually making the most courageous and wise decision, even in that case. And, to accept that, there isn’t that one miraculous decision that I can make that can avoid all sorts of pain.
Pam King: Really helpful to keep in perspective. you know, You mentioned the train. You jumped on the train, you know, the steam is coming out of the train.
You can, we’re feeling it. It’s flying away and I’m ruminating or I’m beating myself up with the whatever. It was a bad decision or I should have been able to do more. I’m not enough, whatever that is. How do you get off the train?
Dave Wang: I will, I’ll defer to my, um, my, my colleagues who are experts on mindfulness, and I’ve practiced this myself and, um, they would say that the moment you’re able to observe the train, you are on your way off the train, right? Because if I’m not observing the train, I think the train is a completely accurate reflection of reality.
so, I’m thinking that I’m a failure. I’m feeling as if I’m a failure. That must mean I’m a failure.but for me to be able to engage in some meta cognitive capacity and to recognize, oh, well, I am thinking this and I’m feeling this, but this is actually a train of thought that I’m having.
That is likely temporarily and likely connected to something very understandable that I’m navigating through in my life. And for me to take that critical first step to recognize this is a train of thought, an interpretation of reality rather than reality itself, that opens up a capacity, and an ability for me to step off of that train, and to,and to do something with it.
Pam King: Humans have two paradoxical needs to bring into harmony in order to achieve spiritual maturity and health. we are made for relationships, but we also need independence and we need to be able to bring both of them into balance. Dave’s research on spiritual and emotional maturity is showing that each of these needs are mutually reinforcing and can be formed with practice, education, and healthy development.
This resonates so well with my concept of the reciprocating self, that the goal of human development, the journey of thriving, leads us into deeper reciprocating and mutual relationships with one another, we are created for relationships, and also for particularity. And it’s when these come together that we more deeply come to know ourselves and encounter ourselves as we encounter one another and God.
Dave Wang: Another empirical predictor of, spiritual maturity is, uh, differentiation of self.
Pam King: And this notion of differentiation speaks to how we bring into harmony These, paradoxical, human relational needs, on one hand, as humans, we have a profound need to be connected with other people, to be intimate with other people, to belong to a group or a cause that is greater than ourselves.
And on the other hand, coexisting with this, uh, need for connectedness, we also have this need for independence and autonomy, for me to be able to think for myself, to think on my own. and these two coexist both at the same time. And when I think of, uh, differentiation, a good place to start with is to think of, different ways that I can fail to differentiate.
Dave Wang: So for example, one way to fail in differentiation is to fail on the side of connectedness, you know, so, you know, I’m sure we’ve, encountered individuals, religious or not, that might belong to some larger cause or some larger group, and their group membership is so important to their identity that they have effectively foreclosed on any independent thought, so whatever that group suggests, and again, from my, Christian, uh, religious, upbringing, I, I grew up in a church where the head pastor said that trick or treating was evil because Halloween is from the devil,
So, for those of us who weren’t very highly differentiated, we just went along with it. And, you know, would, foreclose on the ability for some delicious snacks, and some fun costume wearing and we might even take it a step further and judge other people, you know, and, on grounds that I think are, not that, uh, robust, and can cause harm,
so, differentiation will require us to, call out and, separate ourselves from a system when it is unhealthy and dysfunctional. And a failure to differentiate is to go along with it and to kind of condone this stuff. On the other hand, you can fail to differentiate by valuing our independence, and,our critical thinking so much that we forgo any kind of, connection with other people.
This idea of, and again, as a religious illustration, there are many people who are thinking, after COVID, why should I even attend church in the first place anymore? I’m perfectly fine reading the Bible on my own. I can just watch sermons on YouTube and listen to, to, to Christian music on the radio.
I don’t need other people. I can just do this myself. but again, going back to this notion of spiritual flourishing, something is missing if I,if I’m just doing this alone. So, and again, tying this back to this, larger notion of spiritual flourishing and thriving that we’ve been talking about all along, there is a spirituality, that is done in a community, and there’s also a spirituality that needs to be done, alone.
And perhaps another way to describe a flourishing spirituality is one in which I have a robust, spirituality in solitude that is in harmony and coexists with a robust spirituality in community. And those aren’t threats to each other. They, reinforce each other and they inform each other.
I Can virtue be taught? Can maturity be educated? Can we learn to thrive and be spiritually healthy? In his teaching roles, Dave is exploring how to do this in creative and imaginative ways.
Thank you.
Dave Wang: you have spent quite a bit of time doing research in educational settings. and currently in our culture, there is a little bit of a crisis of the meaning and purpose of education.
Pam King: and I don’t just mean that in like theological education, but higher ed, universities, colleges are so expensive. Why should I send my child? Why should I pay 80, 000? Why should I take out loans? So in the context of this question of what is the purpose of education,I’d love to hear. Because I know you’re passionate, not just about education for gaining information and, propositional knowledge and learning facts and learning the rules and skills for a career, but that distinction between gaining information and that human formation that you’ve talked about.
How is your research informed what the meaning of education should be and, and what can it be?
Dave Wang: Yes, indeed. And, The way I view education is that it’s fundamentally formational, right? And, some of, a lot of my research, and I know this is not much of a surprise for many people, is that, more traditional, modalities of education that are, it’s okay to include this, but if it’s restricted to just, reciting and memorizing facts, knowing which propositions are right and which ones are not, and again, within the context of theological education, it’s like learning theology through multiple choice questions, right?
It’s, theology is not meant to be learned through multiple choice, and what forms us is, is tension and struggle. and how education can be uniquely formative is it can put us an environment where there are other people that are just as serious about learning what we want to learn, but they see the world and they see life from a very different perspective, and again, from within the context of theological education, they’re just as committed to the Bible or Scripture, but they see Scripture and apply Scripture differently.
And there’s something about, the process of recognizing that there are other, perspectives, and that those perspectives aren’t all evil, that there aren’t all threats to your perspective, and,that, that invites us to, see the world through other lenses, to see the world through other eyes, through other perspectives, to bring that back to bear, on my own perspectives and to allow my perspectives to evolve and,and to become more full and more robust, to allow me to, in, in ways that are helpful, of course, perhaps question my own views, especially those views that perhaps need to be questioned, And sometimes as we question them, we might realize that I believe them even more,but perhaps from a different angle with a different depth.
and there’s something about that struggle that is, so formative, not only in our spiritual life, but also,to, to who we are as human beings. And this reminds me of a recent conversation I had just a few weeks ago there, I’m part of a think tank or two on AI. and mental health as well as AI and theological education.
And,and, there’s a lot of excitement of like, Hey, AI can help us think theologically. It can help synthesize all this information together, so on and so forth. And, and for me, I’m not trying to put the brakes on all of it, but, my feedback to them was,there’s a part of the struggle that we.
Shouldn’t offset to an AI engine, because if we take that struggle out,we actually, deprive our students of the very ingredient that forms them,
Pam King: so it’s not just that the end point of education, but it’s the process of education, but when it comes to the deeper existential questions that don’t have a clear understanding that we have to struggle with,those are the things we need to struggle with.
Dave Wang: and it’s,the people that have the greatest depth,in their thought life and in their application, it comes from,the second simplicity, you know, there’s a first simplicity and a second simplicity. and I think there’s a, a French philosopher, Ricoeur, who speaks of the first naivete and the second naivete.
Mm-Hmm.And, before we’re educated, before we’re aware of all the perspectives, we might have a first naivete that was, that is more oversimplification. It’s an oversimplified view of the world, black and white, because we just don’t know any better. But then once we immerse ourselves in the complexities of the issue, it can feel quite disorienting for a time.
But if we stick with it long enough, Sometimes the Ph. D. can require five or six years and beyond. it’s beautiful when we bear witness to people entering into that second naivete where, you know, even through the complexity, they’re, speaking, simplistically. Once again, it makes sense once again, after I struggle with the complexity and there’s that kind of thing is slow cooked.
We can’t drink, you know, swallow a pill and just kind of teleport there. we have to go through the struggle.
Pam King: Well, just to try to connect that back to, what you were saying earlier, even about spiritual maturity and how, relationality is part of spirituality. that the ability to rub shoulders, live, journey, wrestle with those with different perspectives is so formative to us and that we need to be open to other people’s perspectives.
And again those emotional building blocks of perspective taking, of empathy, of people who hold different views.
And entertain, hold other people’s perspectives and realize that, you know, we are all commonly human, all of those come back to even that cultural competency you were saying that we need to be able to take other people’s perspectives.
Dave Wang: That’s right. that intercultural competency and that human competency, which, you know, I hope this doesn’t take us to another tangent, but I think this is, you know, the technology is not inherently evil. Social media is not inherently evil, although there’s plenty of research that suggests that overconsumption of social media is not good for our mental health.
but, something I’m noticing with. Perhaps younger generations that grew up with social media is that, they didn’t benefit from a lot of the human formational experiences that old folks like me who grew up in the eighties and I’m kind of locating myself age wise now where, we just played with the neighborhood kids, whoever happened to be there, we’d goof around and, we got into conflict and we had to fight things off and learn how to.
Have conflict well and still be friends and not dehumanize someone who happens to, have a misunderstanding or see the world differently, and, and that isn’t well cultivated or facilitated by social media, and it is a fundamental human capacity that is so important, not just for human maturity, but our spiritual maturity.
Can we, relate to people who disagree with us without dehumanizing them?
Pam King: In his bestselling book, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, Dr. Gabor Mate writes that
the attempt to escape from pain is what creates more pain. But that desire to run, to hide, to cover up, to suppress, it’s so strong because our brains and bodies go into survival mode.
This is avoidance. It’s a classic coping strategy.
Particularly when we experience trauma in childhood, if it’s unaddressed, the effects can be traced throughout the rest of a person’s life.
When the psychic pain is so unbearable, the felt threat of facing those feelings is so intimidating. We mentally and emotionally try to escape. And this is often at an unconscious level, so we don’t even know we’re doing it.
The problem is, this does not work. The pain does not go away as we get older and separate from the memory or experience.
Instead, it gets passed forward, so to speak, into our adult behaviors, relationships, habits, language, and even our physical illness or conditions. I asked Dave to help us get oriented to the significance of childhood trauma for our adult emotional and spiritual health.
The World Health Organization has research that suggests that about 70 percent of the world has encountered or will encounter trauma of some sort.
And. Perhaps clergy and those in religious professions have experienced even more. So in a sense, trauma is everywhere. and a lot of it happens in childhood. And I would love for you, to just help us understand how childhood trauma, especially relational trauma, plays out in adulthood.
Dave Wang: Yeah. I’m guessing many of us in the audience is likely familiar with the research on adverse childhood experiences. And, this line of, research on diverse childhood experiences is essentially a line of research on childhood trauma.
So, a couple of researchers in Kaiser Permanente in,San Diego, a couple decades ago. So this is a fairly middle class, mid to upper class affluent, community of individuals who do have health insurance. they did a longitudinal study, and they started collecting data on historical, You know, what they called adverse childhood experiences, or historical childhood trauma.
And, they found that,most of the individuals they’ve surveyed had at least one adverse childhood, experience, with the vast majority actually have, survived more than one. in rates comparable to the World Health Organization, I think they were around 66 67%. And because they had longitudinal data, they were actually able to track how the greater number of aces or adverse childhood experiences, it actually increased one’s vulnerability or increase the likelihood for problems later on in life.
So, for example, trauma in childhood can disrupt our neurodevelopment, which can disrupt our social, our emotional, our cognitive, functioning and development.and that also is predictive of, Uh, risky health behaviors when you’re a young adult and when you’re in adulthood.
And, and then that in turn, increases the likelihood, or vulnerability for disease or disability or social problems. And it’s like this pyramid that goes all the way to the top of the pyramid, which is early death. So, you can trace all the way from childhood trauma to an increased likelihood maybe three, four decades later on things like hypertension, diabetes, heart disease, high cholesterol, and eventually leading to early death.
So I think one of the main takeaways from this research is that,if it’s left unaddressed,the, the, the long term consequences and sequelae of trauma,they’re long standing, so it’s not true to assume that if you take a child who has suffered trauma and just put them in a loving home that all The consequences are going to magically disappear.
Certainly putting them in the loving home is a really helpful thing. and it will certainly do good, but it doesn’t mean that all these potential, consequences are going to magically disappear.
Pam King: What I hear you saying is both, validating, but also terrorizing to say that name that early childhood violations, whether it’s a trust violation, boundary violation, repeated issues with a parent with a personality disorder. sexual violence, whatever that is, like to validate that’s so heavy, it impacts us.
And so even though we have gone on and been in loving relationships or in a loving home or pursued a career, the terrifying thing is it’s still with us and that trauma is an adversity, can be very disruptive. So want to validate, yes, it’s real and painful, but also validate the reality that you need to face it sooner or later.
Pam King: I’m always very careful about self diagnosing, but there are times when certain patterns or experiences start to make us think, do I have a trauma that I haven’t dealt with? Because of the way our brains try and escape from psychological suffering,
it’s very common to be unaware of past experiences that impact us.
So I asked him to walk through some of the symptoms or signs of trauma and how to approach the process of seeking help and healing.
I’m wondering, for our listeners who are maybe, not so versed in trauma and that’s a word we hear a lot. We hear big T trauma, little T trauma, repeated traumas. I’m wondering if you could just flesh out that so people might understand like, what trauma is, and then what might be signs that you’re experiencing trauma as an adult?
Dave Wang: Yeah, certainly. So the textbook definition of trauma, and this, a lot of limitations to this definition, is, uh, a trauma is, uh, defined as when a person has experienced, witnessed, or been confronted with an event or events that involve actual or threatened death or serious injury, or a threat to the physical integrity of oneself or others.
so there’s a lot of potential, situations and circumstances that can fit this. things like domestic violence, sexual assaults, combat trauma, natural disasters, so on and so forth. when we’re talking about adverse childhood experiences, they’re talking about a subset of these kinds of experiences that happen, throughout childhood, not just as a one time thing, but.
Oftentimes, throughout, over time, things like physical abuse, emotional abuse, sexual abuse involving children, neglect, physical neglect, emotional neglect is a form, but also included in adverse childhood experiences are, you know, when, there’s domestic violence in the family, when there’s, incarceration or mental illness in the family system, these are kind of pervasive.
they’re kind of the air that we breathe. So oftentimes when we talk about trauma, You know, we usually think of these acute, you know, one time, life threatening situations, which are traumas, too. And that reflects a bias in how PTSD is defined in the literature. It’s actually normed after a Vietnam veteran kind of combat trauma.
Pam King: And we’re realizing that while that is certainly a valid form of trauma, most of the traumas that people experience aren’t exactly like a combat trauma, like or a car accident or something like that. It’s more, someone’s entire childhood and they didn’t know it was a trauma because that was just what they’re used to.
Dave Wang: Like, Oh yeah, that’s how dad was. That’s how mom was. That’s how they treated each other. And I thought that was normal. And, a lot of, our work as trauma practitioners is to recognize that, yes, that certainly is norma normative because you’re not alone. but, that was harmful.
Pam King: Yeah. No,that’s really helpful. And you’re saying, like, the toxicity is part of the air you breathe. and so it might have felt as normal as, Anyone else’s air, but your air was not always so helpful. Dave, what if people are asking like, well, gosh, that could have been me. I’m not totally sure what might be signs as an adult that there might be unaddressed trauma, in your past or in your present, because it doesn’t leave you.
Yeah, so research has found that,like the traditional PTSD diagnosis is more associated with, one time kind of combat traumas that happen during adulthood.
There’s another, emerging literature on, complex trauma, which isn’t a formal diagnosis, at least not yet. And, that is more normed after, childhood relational trauma, so It’s happened repeatedly over time involving people that kind of a perpetual kind of crossing of boundaries, in your childhood.
Dave Wang: And, research has found that the,the key, sy symptom associated with complex trauma is, dissociation.
when you notice, uh, someone else or yourself, just space out, and sometimes you can tell. When someone spacing out just by looking at their eyes where they’re looking at you, but they’re kind of staring out into the distance.
And it’s almost like they’re having an out of body experience and they’re not all there. like your physical body’s there, but my mind is not here. And, and again, some level of dissociation is very normal, normative. It’s part of human experience. But,when you’re noticing patterns of rigid and pronounced dissociation in situations where dissociating is really not helping the situation, then, oftentimes that might be an indication of, childhood removal.
And it’s really hard to get insight into this because when you’re dissociating, you know, you’re not engaging in metacognition. You’re, you’ve got, you’ve hopped on that train and that train has gone, a really long way already.
Pam King: And in a sense, it’s more of a train to nowhere than like a train of rumination or self doubt. But it’s more of a blank train. Is that correct?
Dave Wang: Exactly. and sometimes I’ve encountered individuals, and this is not uncommon, where you might ask them, can tell me about your childhood? And their response is, I honestly don’t remember anything. And that could be, and so dissociation can be mental, relating to our memory, but it can also be behavioral.
Pam King: Could also be sensory. It could also involve knowledge. anytime we’re disconnected from our faculties or our, capacities,
So let me ask you this for our listeners. you know, right now the whole issue of like attention, focus, ADHD is very common. We’ve all, trained our minds to like not be present because we’re like, Oh,what’s that? So what’s the difference between like being inattentive and getting distracted, and dissociating?
Is there a difference there? Like how would
Dave Wang: I would describe being distracted as a mild form of dissociation that is usually not problematic. but in the more severe forms, it goes all the way to, the diagnosis of, dissociative identity disorder, which, took the place of multiple personality disorder, which was a historical diagnosis, where, depending on the context and their state of being, they might actually be a completely different person with very little.
Awareness or acknowledgement of the other personalities that might co exist in their mind. So that would be a more extreme form of
And there can also be, dissociative episodes that are induced by substances. So when someone drinks so much alcohol, they just black out. They weren’t actually blacked out.
They were driving and they, hit a fire hydrant or something, that’s also, another example of dissociation. Or when, perhaps more commonly we had, a grandpa or an uncle that had dissociative rage, where who their typical personality is very, kind of logical or, analytical, and then something triggers and then all of a sudden they, get into this other state of uncontrollable range.
And they are oftentimes dissociated there. dissociation was actually quite common during COVID when people checked out and wanted to watch Netflix and wanted to check out, uh, mentally check out from, from the world. And, kind of binge watch, and that’s also a form of dissociation, potentially, as well.
Pam King: When it comes to the concrete practices that can help and heal traumatic experience, learning to grieve is a core and essential skill that will help us grow in the wake of our history of pain, harm, abuse, and other events that we might have suffered. And here is where Dave brings together more of his Christian spiritual practices of prayer with the emotional practice of grief and acceptance
there’s healthy ways to deal with trauma in some unhealthy ways, and you have identified grief as a potentially very helpful emotional mechanism to, to deal with trauma. could you say more about that?
Dave Wang: Yeah. All trauma therapy is, in fact, grief therapy. Because, every form of trauma involves some sort of loss, whether that loss is, symbolic or concrete, you know, usually when we think of grief and loss, we think of, uh, losing people, losing jobs, losing concrete things.
And that’s certainly fair and valid, but we also need to recognize that loss can be symbolic. Like, for example, when we were in COVID, a lot of us were struggling with the loss of our future plans, the loss of,
Pam King: can I even make plans for the future? and even though we couldn’t isolate or, it’s not this concrete sort of form of loss, it’s a loss nonetheless.
Dave Wang: and, and a lot of trauma healing, and I would, by extension, say a lot of, a key to flourishing is actually knowing how to grieve well when we need to grieve.and grieving is about, taking steps towards acceptance. And acceptance doesn’t mean I’m happy about it or I would prefer it.
Acceptance is really more about, I acknowledge that this is the reality that I’m in. I would have preferred to have a reality, live in the reality that I used to be in with, with my loved one, with, these things that weren’t lost yet, but whether I like it or not, this is the reality that I’m in, and, I have to accept and make peace and move forward, accordingly, and again, going back to my religious,starting point, when I think of prayer, There are, prayers that are prayers of avoidance.
that I don’t think is fundamentally helpful. It does not cultivate mental wellbeing and it does not cultivate spiritual maturity or spiritual flourishing. And within the Christian tradition, prayers of avoidance are prayers like, God, take this away from me.your ways are higher than my ways.
I don’t want to deal with this. I don’t want to think about it. I just want to give this to you. There’s, they’re kind of a place for, there’s somewhat of a place for that. But if that’s the only prayers that we have, I think there’s a problem. there’s a concern there.and what I would encourage people to do in their prayer life is to consider, is your prayer, bringing you closer to reality, or is it bringing you farther from reality? Is it bringing you closer to the reality of yourself, closer to the reality of others, closer to the reality of the world? Even when that reality is not very pleasant, and I would prefer it to be something else, can it be a mechanism by which I can come closer to it?
And I think the, if the answer is yes, Then in the long run, that is going to be a spirituality that’s going to contribute to your flourishing and that’s going to be a spirituality that’s going to deepen, in maturity and substance over time. And the prayer that I, that I, love to, to mention when it comes to prayers of approaching reality rather than avoiding reality is Jesus prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane when he says, Father.
if possible, take this cup from me. So he’s being very honest with the reality of this heart. He would prefer not to go through with dying on the cross, like as any other person would. And yet at the end of the prayer, he says, and yet not my will, but your will be done.Uh, so he’s being,it’s a prayer that is honest with his own reality.
And it’s a prayer that ends with, coming closer to the reality of the situation that he was about to step in.
Pam King: I’m really grateful for you bringing your wisdom and, the complexity in which you, seamlessly integrate psychology and spirituality, that realizing that we have psychological tools that can help change, open our mind, help bring transformation, help wrestle with conflict or conflicting views, to wrestle and hold with loss.
But I think one of the things that I will really take away in this interview is, How does either our pursuit of psychology or spirituality bring us deeper into reality,
Dave Wang: Mm into relationships with others, deeper into our understanding of the transcendent, confronting pain and loss and grief in our life?
Pam King: embracing it, healing it, and also being true to joy and delight and that fullness of life. And thank you so much for the insight you’ve given of welcoming that emotional complexity of being human and how all those are emotions are part of our journey.
Dave Wang: Well said. Thank you so much. It was such a joy to be part of this conversation panel.
Pam King: David Wang’s approach to spiritual maturity is integrative. Bringing together our emotional, mental, and spiritual components is a core aspect of human thriving and growth into relational, healthy individuals.
The key takeaways that I will carry with me from this conversation are the following.
Human beings need both relationships and independence, and learning how to balance and integrate them is a marker of our maturity.
Though we may try to escape from pain, to deal with trauma, we need to practice acceptance and grief. It’s a difficult and complex relational process that brings us closer to healing and wholeness.
We can befriend ourselves in our pain through a practice of self compassion.
and finally,
In this life, we have to hold beauty beside brokenness. the capacity to do so is the hard work of growth into spiritual and emotional maturity and the joyful journey of thriving.
With & For is a production of The Thrive Center at Fuller Theological Seminary. For more information, visit our website, thethrivecenter.org, where you’ll find all sorts of resources to support your pursuit of wholeness and a life of thriving on purpose. I am so grateful to the staff and fellows of the Thrive Center and our With & For podcast team.
Jill Westbrook is our senior director and producer. Lauren Kim is our operations manager. Wren Jeurgensen is our social media graphic designer. Evan Rosa is our consulting producer. And special thanks to the team at Fuller Studio and the Fuller School of Psychology and Marriage and Family Therapy.
I’m your host, Dr. Pam King. Thank you for listening.
Dr. David C. Wang
Dr. David C. Wang is a licensed psychologist and Associate Professor of Psychology at Fuller Theological Seminary, where he’s also the Cliff and Joyce Penner Chair for the Formation of Emotionally Healthy Leaders and scholar in residence at Fuller’s Center for Spiritual Formation. He speaks and trains leaders globally on trauma informed care. And he conducts research and teaches courses in Trauma Therapy, Dialectical Behavior Therapy, Multicultural Psychology, and the Integration of Psychology and the Christian faith. He is also Pastor of Spiritual Formation at One Life City Church in Fullerton, California.
Episode Summary
Emotional health is deeply intertwined in an ongoing journey with spiritual health. This involves opening to our pain, grieving our trauma, and patiently cultivating a resilience that stabilizes and secures our relationships and our sense of self.
With compassion, pastoral presence, and emotional attunement, psychologist Dr. David Wang is using psychological and theological tools to help us understand and adapt to emotional realities, explore the wounds of our past, and find healing and strength through acceptance and grief.
In this conversation with David Wang, we discuss:
– The difference between human development and spiritual formation and how to understand maturity
– The centrality of relationships in human life and growth, and how that’s grounded in divine relationality and our communion with God
– How to become friends with ourselves, offering self-compassion and being moved by our own suffering
– The impact of childhood trauma on adult emotional, psychological, and spiritual health
– And finally, how a practice of grief can help us understand and work through traumatic experiences and move toward healing.
Show Notes
- Christian theology and formation
- A philosophical approach to theologically informed strategies for transformation and growth
- How the relational aspects of God ground an approach to therapy and spiritual formation
- What are the markers of maturity?
- Relatedness and connection to others facilitates the process of human growth and development
- Emotional building blocks and relational capacities for maturity
- Dave Wang on spiritual health and thriving
- Theological and psychological frameworks of thriving
- Holding the beautiful beside the broken
- Becoming friends with ourselves
- Show compassion, be moved by our own suffering, and accept limitations as we strive toward the hard work we’re all called to.
- Two paradoxical needs to achieve spiritual maturity and health
- We are made for relationships, but we also need independence
- Balance
- Spiritual and emotional maturity
- Formation through practice, education, and healthy development
- Can virtue be taught?
- Can maturity be educated?
- Can we learn to thrive and be spiritually healthy?
- In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, Dr. Gabor Maté writes that “The attempt to escape from pain is what creates more pain.”
- When our brains and our bodies go into survival mode
- Avoidance as a coping mechanism or strategy
- Childhood trauma in childhood
- “When the psychic pain is so unbearable, the felt threat so intimidating, we mentally and emotionally try to escape.”
- Childhood trauma can reemerge in adult behaviors, relationships, habits, language, even physical illness or conditions.
- Do I have trauma that I haven’t dealt with?
- The symptoms or signs of trauma
- How to approach the process of seeking help and healing.
- Concrete practices that can help and heal traumatic experience
- Learning to grieve
- Christian spiritual practices of prayer
- The emotional practice of grief and acceptance
- Dr. Pam King’s Key Takeaways
- Human beings need both relationships and independence. And learning how to balance and integrate them is a marker of our maturity.
- Though we may try to escape from pain, to deal with trauma we need to practice acceptance and grief. It’s a difficult and complex relational process that brings us closer to healing and wholeness.
- We can befriend ourselves in our pain through a practice of self-compassion.
- In this life, we have to hold beauty beside brokenness. Cultivating the capacity to do so is the hard work of growth into spiritual and emotional maturity, and the joyful journey of thriving.
- www.drdavidcwang.com
- https://www.seminaryformationproject.com/
About the Thrive Center
- Learn more at thethrivecenter.org.
- Follow us on Instagram @thrivecenter
- Follow us on X @thrivecenter
- Follow us on LinkedIn @thethrivecenter
About Dr. Pam King
Dr. Pam King is Executive Director the Thrive Center and is Peter L. Benson Professor of Applied Developmental Science at Fuller School of Psychology & Marriage and Family Therapy. Follow her @drpamking.About With & For
- Host: Pam King
- Senior Director and Producer: Jill Westbrook
- Operations Manager: Lauren Kim
- Social Media Graphic Designer: Wren Juergensen
- Consulting Producer: Evan Rosa
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