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Pam King: Welcome back to With & For.
I hope you have enjoyed your summers. I was grateful for some extra moments to linger, savor. Connect and reflect and we’re getting ready to launch season two of the WithinFloor podcast on January 6th, 2025,
The season is going to be rich. I am so excited to share with you the wisdom and insights and inspiration of the guests that we have coming. The interviews have been extremely meaningful for me and have really challenged the way I consider thriving and the way I see the world.
While we’re ramping up for season two, we’re going to be sharing some shorter clips, some shared episodes and focusing on some practical applications, for your life so that you can pursue spiritual health and thrive.
I’m very excited to share with you today, an episode from You Have Permission, which is hosted by Dan Koch, who is a licensed therapist a brilliant, thought provoking podcast host and a great colleague and friend of mine, Dan’s an expert on spiritual harm and spiritual abuse the episodes on his show feature the overlap between psychology, religion, and spirituality.
Pam King: Our conversation was particularly provocative to me because of Dan’s attention to spiritual harm and abuse, he asked some really hard questions about what does ensure that spirituality is healthy.
We both aligned in our conversation with the desire to understand when spirituality goes right, because most of us have had experiences. that it can go really wrong and be really harmful for people. Through the lens of psychological research we talk about how spirituality and religion can be helpful for people and ultimately is required to enable us to thrive and become full persons.
Dan asked me about how I understand spiritual health. And I end up walking Dan through Thrive Spiritual Health Framework, which if you haven’t seen is on the landing page of the Thrive website, the thrivecenter.org. You can find You Have Permission on any major podcast app. And also you can find a link and subscribe right on the show notes of today’s episode.
I hope you enjoy our conversation
Dan Koch: Welcome back to You. Have Permission, the show that aims to take both Christianity and the modern world of science and culture very seriously. I’m Dan Koch. I’m a licensed therapist and a post evangelical liberal Christian, and I’m here with Dr. Pam Epstein King. Pam was on the show I think three years ago or so.
We’ll have, we’ll have Josh put a link in the notes. But Pam, I, uh, I loved having you on last time. I honestly don’t know why I haven’t had you back sooner.
Pam King: Dan, I am thrilled to be here. I. Just absolutely enjoyed our last recording. Um, and so I’m really looking forward to joining you again today And I know we are quite aligned in many ways and looking forward to seeing how that all gets teased out in the next bit
Dan Koch: I would say primarily you’re a research psychologist.
Is that is that the right term to use?
Pam King: Yes. I primarily am a research psychologist, particularly in positive developmental psychology. But with a heavy bent or addiction to theology as well.
Dan Koch: Which probably does you no favors at professional seminars and conferences and stuff now. Yeah. Yeah. That’s actually a nice place to start.
Don’t you think the tide is kind of turning on that? It, now I, my perspective as someone recently educated, right? So I just wrapped up classes on a doctoral psych education, a counseling psych education. So this is on the ground, right? They are preparing us to be clinicians, but at the doctoral level, which includes things like ADHD or brain injury or forensic assessments, fitness to understand trial, things like this.
So, pretty wide, pretty wide, and my, my school did a very down the middle kind of American Psychological Association style training, and it came up over and over again that, you know, we have the biopsychosocial model, which is now a couple decades old, maybe, of like, we do have to look at people’s biology, we gotta look at their psychology, we also gotta look at their social connections.
And then adding spiritual to that came up constantly. Now it was a Christian school that I went to, but it wasn’t super Christian y education. Like this was coming up with, you know, secular papers and textbooks. And it does seem to me like, oh, people are kind of coming out of this Reactionary, anti religious, anti spiritual haze, perhaps, and the psychological community is waking up to the power of spirituality and religion in people’s lives.
Is that your sense?
Pam King: Absolutely, Dan. And it’s been a really long time in coming. Um, I finished my dissertation in 2000, to date myself, and when it came out like in only paper with the keyword spirituality and religion are keywords, I guess, in the top tier developmental psychology journals at the time.
Dan Koch: Wow.
Pam King: And a colleague, a dear colleague of mine, Chris Boyatzis, and I have done quite a bit of writing, documenting, especially within developmental psych, the emergence, um, and trends in the studies of spirituality and religion, especially like spiritual and religious development. Like, what is the psychology of what is taking shape?
How is our minds, our cognitions, our affective, our emotional life? How is that all involved? We’ve done a lot of work documenting the trends in the emergence of that study. And it’s, it’s really been in this millennium that that started. And frankly, When I was in grad school, I was in theology, studying theology then, the Columbine shooting happened, which was one of the first youth school shootings in Colorado or in the country that captured people’s attention.
And, um, actually they brought in an expert in adolescent development, a guy named William Damon from Stanford who studied moral development, also not a terribly popular field of study. But he’s And the few people they brought into that conversation, there was an article in Time Magazine. I still have it.
I could go dig it off my shelf. And they started talking about the role of faith in kids lives. And I felt like in that moment, all of a sudden people started saying, hey, or psychologists started noticing like people who have some sort of faith, some sort of belief system, They behave better. Um, and it, it was that crude, like they behave better.
It wasn’t like they feel better. It was they behave better. They drink less. They’re less violent. Uh, they graduate from school more. Less risky
Dan Koch: behaviors. Yeah. Yeah.
Pam King: Exactly. So, and that’s right when my academic interests, uh, like kind of, I was coming of age academically. And fast forward a few years, I did my dissertation on looking at social capital as a model saying that religious young people had access to more beneficial relationships.
They had better social networks than less religious people. They had more caring adults that were mentor types, friends that were, better, better influences, more connected, more trustworthy, and parents that were closer and more connected than their less religious peers. And actually, it was those relationships that technically fully mediated the relationship between like religion and religious attendance or valuing spirituality on moral outcomes.
And that paper was in Developmental Psych, and it was like, wow, it was like one of the first papers to show here are some resources available in this paper, young people that can help them become good human beings.
Dan Koch: Yeah.
Pam King: My work has really focused on how do we offer people insight into the psychological benefits available in spirituality and religion at their best.
Not always.
Dan Koch: This came to a head the other day. We had a, um, I believe she’s 13. We had a babysitter over, uh, you know, watching the boys because we were packing up for a move and she was kind of chatting with my wife and I. A little bit in the kitchen and she was talking about like these youth groups that she’s going to and she used to go to two of them now there’s just one but she’s trying out another one and like it was such an interesting moment because I’m sitting there in my kitchen and my wife too and we’re kind of making eye contact, you know.
And we’re 40. And we remember literally being that age, being just as involved in youth groups. Obviously, a lot has happened since those days for us, you know, in those 26 intervening years. And I felt this almost like battle in real time in my mind of like, what do we do here? The therapist in me ultimately won out.
And I decided I’m just going to validate and encourage this excitement in her by asking a couple more questions. And maybe I’ll make one little comment about what a good time I had in youth group. Now that’s not the whole story.
Pam King: What was the other side of you wanting to say? Can I ask that?
Dan Koch: Well, there was actually kind of three sides.
So then there was a part of me that I didn’t get too much, didn’t get too much play, which is like, I heard one of them was Baptist and she’s going to be turned into a culture warrior and it’s going to be awful for her. That’s the kind of liberal socio political side of me that feels sometimes embroiled in a culture war with conservatives.
Thankfully, the therapist in me with the psychological education and some developmental sense of, you know, not nearly what you know about that. That’s not really my field, but some sense of kids to teenagers, to adults and their brain growing. And I was like, okay, well, that’s. That’s not a foregone conclusion because 85 to 90 percent of my fellow youth group friends when I was 14 are now voting Democrat So like that’s not even a good Assumption to make the part that I was more drawn to Maybe a little bit of a Messiah complex was like what’s the question?
I could ask that would get her thinking about the potentially harmful theology And I thought no, I’m just leaning into like She’s got friends. They are, like, she’s gonna be encouraged to do fun things with her friends that aren’t drugs and alcohol. Probably purity culture is still running amok. That sucks, but I’m not gonna talk to the 14 year old girl I barely know in my kitchen about sex.
And
Pam King: you have a potential client budding to do therapy with in the future, you know, after they’re racked with some Forbearing youth group culture. Potentially.
Dan Koch: Yeah. Between, between having babysitted my sons and, uh, and then my expertise in spiritual abuse, we’d have instant rapport. That’s dark, Pam. Uh, that’s funny.
So no, so I didn’t, I just, we just encouraged it and we were just encouraging her. She’s just a sweet girl, but yeah, it’s interesting. It’s really cool to kind of hear you, you narrate some of that. I want to lay out for people what we’re going to do today. So you are working on a book. And we’re not going to worry about when the book’s coming out.
It’s going to come out later. But you have come up with this rubric of six facets for spiritual health. And I, I love that. I mean, first of all, listicles are great for podcast episodes because they structure time. But also, I, What I want to do is kind of go through them fairly quickly, because I think there is a value In the zoomed out perspective in doing a few minutes On each of those and kind of keeping them all in our minds and then we’ll break And non patrons we will bid them adieu and send them to your links, but anybody who’s joined the patreon community We will then continue and we’re gonna We’ll get a bit more inside baseball.
We’ll talk about developmental psych. Um, I want to talk with you about stuff like stages of spiritual development. If you think that stuff is legitimate or if it’s like a little bit ivory tower ish, uh, or even actually kind of, uh, looks some of like the, the Fowler stages of faith stuff, I think kind of looks down on conservatives at a base level so we can get.
Kind of more into that plus whatever else comes up while we’re talking about these six facets of spiritual health. So that’s the plan. How does that sound?
Pam King: That’s awesome. I’m taking notes for juicy tidbits. Okay. Yes, please. I will do the
Dan Koch: same thing. I have a note open for juicy tidbits. You do the same.
Pam King: Okay. Sounds great.
Dan Koch: All right. So you got these six, I’m going to read them off really quick. We’re going to talk for three or four minutes about each one. The idea here is not to dig too deep, but it’s just to give a general sense. And the idea of like, when all of these things come together, and this is the positive psychology, right, that we’re looking for thriving and flourishing.
We’re not just looking for diagnostics and treatment, but what makes a really, you know, resilient, full human life. So we’ll do that, and then we’ll pop over to the other side. So here are the six. Transcendence and spirituality. Habits and rhythms. Relationships and community, identity and narrative, vocation and purpose, and ethics and virtues.
Now, are they in any particular order? That’s just an order that I saw them on your website.
Pam King: Very good. Well, if you start with transcendence, and you spell the first, take the first word of each facet. Oh my gosh, it’s right in front of me.
Dan Koch: It spells thrive. Check that out. So that’s why. So no like logical order, but a nice, uh, acronym order.
Pam King: It does work out a bit, um, actually, but there, there’s not a terribly logical order and there’s a lot of overlap between the facets. So that gets somewhat confusing. And before I dive into them, I might just premise it with something. Um, we were talking before about spirituality more rampantly entering the psychological space, both clinically counseling or in research.
And that’s really important. And that’s, that’s where this model. comes from is comes from existing research that highlights potential resources available through religious participation or being a spiritual person that can promote our well being. And I’ll say well being generally because there is both a decrease in like mental health issues, like symptoms, like some, like minor anxiety and depression.
There’s good research that shows religion and spirituality in some circumstances can buffer against that. And we also know it can increase it in other circumstances. But that these are all things that can go well and not all religious communities or spiritual communities or spiritual experiences actually capture these or optimize these.
And my hope is the work that I do through the Thrive Center will really enable people who are either leaders, spiritual leaders, spiritually engaged therapists, nonprofit leaders, clergy, to be able to be a bit more savvy about how they offer. programs, worship, practices, interventions, whatever they’re doing to their communities so that they can gain more psychological benefits out of spirituality.
And that’s great. Yeah. And I’m not so that’s a little bit of a functional approach. I’m not negating like you want to grow as a spiritual person. I’m not. I also think this framework is really insightful in how like you might pursue spiritual formation, but in it’s for the moment, the facets are really designed to highlight the psychological resources within spirituality and religion.
Dan Koch: One of the things that psychologists study is mechanism of change. And you know, other people, chemists study this too, you know, people from pharmaceutical companies and their. Yeah. In their studies, they, they are looking for this kind of thing, but psychologists do it too. And we, we look for almost a psychologist, those of us in this world look for.
Why did that work? You know, like what was going on there? You kind of mentioned this earlier with one of your papers was like, oh, actually this stuff is fully mediated by Social relationships another way of saying that is most of these benefits are coming through Connection with other people because if you control for that And you take the participants who don’t have that, they’re not getting the other benefits.
And so that’s a good way of saying like, Oh, you want your youth group kids to grow in compassion or something like that. Now you could do a six week series. Teaching about compassion. But if you were to, for instance, look at research that said this tends to grow through friendships, then you’d go, ah, well, can we pair these kids up?
Can we group them together? And the same group stays together for six weeks. And it’s not just teaching. We’re, we’re having them do some stuff together. And we’re going out into the community for this thing. And we’re doing this thing together. And we are, we’re There’s some compassion related items here, but we’re going to lean into that social connection if that’s where we think it actually is coming from.
for instance.
Pam King: Absolutely. Developmentally, young people need relationships. And in fact, all of us, older or not. I mean, that’s why we’re in this loneliness pandemic, and it’s so awful, is because when we’re not connected to people, when we don’t have a sense of belonging, we, you know, get depressed, we become anxious, etc.
So, um, quote unquote, like a developmental function or a social function that like congregations or youth groups have played historically, is gathering young people together for connection. And, and they often have a shared purpose or their shared vision or values, which are very important to the types of relationships that influence you.
Not all peer groups, not all relationships are positive influences on us. We know that, you know, whether adults or kids. So this actual framework tries to highlight, you know, sure, relationships and community, that would be facet number three, is really important. And there’s a ton of research that does adult and youth that demonstrates that social community is really important aspect of religion for psychological benefits.
And physical health benefits in adults, but what that research doesn’t unpack is the nature of that community. And, and actually that study I mentioned earlier got pretty gritty into details. That whole social capital model looked at the fact that these relationships were not just present, but they, you actually spent time, check this out.
talking to them and physical time with them. Okay. This is like pre social media, this study, but you know, it did look at like kids reported how much time a week they actually spent with these people and how frequently they spoke to them. It also involved having shared activities and like for a young person, that’s really important.
Actually for adults, it’s really important. We know with our, spouses. It’s good to have shared activities that we mutually enjoy. And these relationships were also characterized by trust and support. And you hope. Not always the case, but like in a religious congregation, you should have trustworthy and respectful relationships with adults, parents, intergenerationally, and kids.
You don’t always. And the third, which actually ended up being extremely powerful, was something, um, and this is a model that came out of Wharton Business School, um, shared vision. And that was really having shared goals, shared purpose, shared values. A congregation, or in the case of your babysitter, a youth group, should have those things.
But increasingly, with the fragmentation of our society and our very transient and digital affiliations, we don’t have the richness and the thick connections that we once did in our local, you know, social gathering community. organizations, YMCA, congregations. And so, you know, it’s some of that bowling alone phenomena, but
Dan Koch: yeah.
A buddy asked me yesterday, based on the fact that I had done, you know, a podcast years ago called depolarize, he was like, where do you like. It where do you see that actually happening after my joke that you know, it was fully successful. I successfully depolarized America. Um, obviously not. But I said, you know, it is it’s in these kind of it.
I did include churches. I mentioned churches that were not caught up in the socio political culture wars. But I talked about bowling leagues. I was thinking of Robert Putnam and his bowling alone. research and the decline of fraternal organizations of any kind, right? These sort of third space, not work, not school, not the home rather, right?
Home work slash school home. And then a third place, a bowling league and a coffee shop where people actually congregate or like in British culture, the pub. Where you can actually hang out and build relationships there and talk with each other. And we really are lacking those and instead that time and attentional space has been put online and there are a bunch of tech companies making billions, even trillions of dollars on us spending that time on those platforms instead.
Pam King: Absolutely. And regrettably, there’s some great things that can go on, but there’s some obviously detrimental stuff that can happen. It’s really fascinating. But that’s where considering the facets. It’s not just about one. It’s, it’s, it’s really taking them into consideration.
Dan Koch: Yeah. Well, so we just did, we went out of order.
We did relationships and community, so that’s great. Yeah. Great. Yeah. I think that’s, that’s pretty clear. We, we’ve sort of been hitting on that one of how that leads to spiritual health. Let’s go to the top transcendence and spirituality. So I talk a lot about spirituality on this show and I usually use Lisa Miller’s definition, which is, Participation with or belief in or something like that a higher power that is loving and guiding and she stops there She doesn’t add any more detail when you’re talking about transcendence and spirituality Operationally definitionally, are you in a similar ballpark as as dr.
Miller?
Pam King: Yeah, I am. And some of my research has provided a little more nuance, especially how, like, I operationalize or understand transcendence. So when I think of transcendence, I think of something beyond the self, whether that’s, you know, some people argue for something sacred, but I will say something with a sense of awe.
ultimacy within my own tradition, that would be God, Jesus, Holy Spirit. For others, it might be nature. I just recently finished a few year study on cosmic gratitude and who people think for things that are not attributable to human beings. So like a beautiful day, like, you know, in the Judeo Christian view, we might thank God, but for others, if there’s no God in their worldview, who do they think?
Karma, nature, et cetera. So something bigger than the self that has and orienting power on one’s life. So that’s my understanding of transcendence. And then experiencing and responding to transcendence. So a lot of people will stop with the experience. I feel connected. I feel something bigger than myself.
But in my work, especially early on, I did a really, well, I thought it was cool, but I’m a geek, intimate study with spiritual exemplars, young people around the world for who were nominated for living with profound spirituality in their culture. So whether they were an atheist from Northern Ireland, because why would you believe in God when everybody’s blowing up each other to, you know, a Catholic in Peru or a Sikh in India, but just really getting into the narratives and their experiences.
And they really were aware of something bigger than themselves. And they did have different ways of conceptualizing that. But they responded to it, and their responses might have been their own identity, like how they saw themselves as a beloved daughter of God or, um, as someone who’s responsible. And it informed their identity, their beliefs about the world, and gave that guiding sense of motivation that Lisa talks.
So it motivated them, but guided them in a certain direction. And these kids were quite exemplary because they not only could clearly articulate this experience of transcendence, but there was a fidelity to the beliefs and the meaning that was made because of the sense of profound, you know, orienting other.
And they lived with a lot of coherence. Like they lived out those convictions.
Dan Koch: Wow. I’ve got a lot to follow up with you about on that for the Patreon second half just to just to put in a little ad for that. I think you might be helping me go from a two item model of spirituality and religiosity or religion to a three item model.
That includes transcendence at the beginning. And I want to talk about maybe some theological implications of that as well. But we’ll move on for now. But fantastic and very helpful. And I like how it kind of plays with Lisa Miller’s work, but sort of has its own vibe, habits and rhythms. This is not something that we like, I’ll speak for millennials.
I think habits and rituals or rhythms, a lot of my friends have a lot of allergy to this because I don’t know, maybe just bad church experiences or maybe it is that our generation, at least white millennials are tremendously, tremendously autonomous. And individualistic and we kind of like freedom oriented, essentially like freedom of time, attention and energy.
And so, what do I need to do? Habits and rhythms. And then, then maybe we get really into fitness or, you know, something and then we go hard that direction. I have not gone hard that direction yet myself. I, I’m not holding out hope, just maybe some balance
Pam King: with music.
Dan Koch: Uh, yeah, yeah. Maybe music’s got rhythm.
Uh, no, but, but even then, but actually, no, I think that’s interesting because creative fields, which is what I have been in for most of my working life, you know, music, creativity, you know, habits and rhythms, like the whole point is you don’t have to have too many of those. That’s why you, that’s why you’re a musician or a creative type.
But now I’m digressing. So tell me about. Awesome.
Pam King: That’s great. Well, okay, let me just, I’m going to say in the context of transcendence, so also alluding to a comment you made earlier, I really think in this era, people are so at the ends of themselves. that loneliness is not just a social psychological crisis.
There is a spiritual crisis that we are longing for connection. We are longing for connection with one another. And I really think as humans, we long for meaning. Um, we need meaning in this day and age to orient our life because we have so many options. So we need to make good choices. So where does meaning come from?
And that often comes from something beyond the self, whether it’s your political group, the padres, your church, et cetera. So though, I hate to burst your millennial bubble about not liking habits
Dan Koch: in rhythm. Nobody likes
Pam King: them? No. But, but the reality is, as humans, we often find freedom with some structure.
Oh yeah. You know, a jazz musician can riff and be awesome because they’ve put in the hours. Because they’ve put in the time. So like time goes in somewhere, you know, study of habits, atomic habits, we can talk about Malcolm, Malcolm Groudwell, all these people have demonstrated like we actually need habits that instill capacities for us.
So when it comes to spirituality. It’s the same thing. Like, if you want to have that zen emotion regulation, be able to be present to your inner, what do you want to call that? Like, your truest desire, your inner self, uh, be present to whatever the need of your family is or what the day is or what the Holy Spirit might be telling you.
Like, however you center. to get in touch with that guiding, in Lisa Miller’s word, inclination of spirituality. Like there’s work that’s got to be done. You just don’t wake up someday and do that. So I, those are the habits that I, um, want to elevate in spiritual health. And I actually think here, psychology is a great friend because there’s a lot of beautiful science right now, particularly coming out of like, you know, an emerging field of contemplative neuroscience.
Like you could think of Jon Kabat Zinn, Richie Davidson, the Center for Healthy Minds, folks who are demonstrating that like when you meditate. Your brain starts to look and behave differently. You’ve got a lot more control. That amygdala is no longer ruling the roost. As fun as that can be sometimes, it can get you in a lot of trouble.
Dan Koch: Yeah, the amygdala, the, the, if I’m correct, the seat of fight, flight, freeze, right? Our kind of base level brain that we share with reptiles and other mammals and, and it, it regulates, uh, you know, crises essentially.
Pam King: Absolutely. And for sensitive types, you know, who don’t, who struggle with regulation and they might be sensitive for various reasons, personality issues, trauma, et cetera, they’re going to be really reactive.
Um, so cultivating habits, you know, whether you’re pursuing therapy and doing like DBT and working on emotion regulation, this is so helpful to your spirituality. And something in my middle age I’m, I’m reckoning with is like rhythms of things of like rest. and play. As a working mom, like, I am a grinder.
Like, I can get a lot of shit done in a short amount of time. I can burn the candle and, and at my age, it starts to catch up with me. So like, wow, maybe there is something good about Sabbath, about just letting, you know, detox of adrenaline.
Dan Koch: I just told Jeffrey, we, we, we gotta try something on, we gotta try some sort of Sabbath thing here that like now with two kids, like we need some kind of built in rhythm where we rest.
Yeah. And it’s normalized and we don’t have to feel bad about resting.
Pam King: Exactly. Like I literally, you’re gonna laugh at me. Okay. This is how crazy I am. Like, especially when my kids were little, like your stage. I have three kids now. My oldest is about to turn 21, then my next will turn 19, he’s 18, and then the next will be 17.
But when they were younger, at some point, I mean, they weren’t too young, I had to put watch TV on my sticky note for the day, because like, I, I had to just like, cool it for 20 minutes. Like, You know, not meditate, like not, not try and train my brain, not read scripture, not run, but just like zone out. We need rest and we rest differently.
And something like the Sabbath, what I think is the beauty behind it is that I’m the one of person who wants to check off all the things on their sticky list and then I can rest. But it teaches us like, you know, the sticky, the sticky note is never done. It’s never
Dan Koch: done. No. And so you, yeah, you have to find a way to, to hack that and give yourself.
And that’s what these, these ancient rhythms, you know, that, that’s some of the wisdom of wisdom traditions. Is things like Sabbath and the way that the Jewish tradition narrates the week with God resting and that gives us permission to rest ourselves sometimes because, and that’s like a very practical piece of wisdom.
And then there’s, you know, of course, legalistic versions of that where people are then fighting over whether they can preheat their oven or not. And, and obviously that we get to where we’re missing the point, but the basic general gist of that. That’s wisdom. That is practical wisdom from thousands of years ago that we can avail ourselves of.
Pam King: Absolutely. And different traditions show different ways. And whether you, you know, find those moments daily or weekly or retreating, you know, quarterly or annually, those are important.
Dan Koch: I think we can skip over relationships and community just because we kind of already did cover that. That’s, that’s the fourth one.
We got two left before the break. Uh, vocation and purpose. Now obviously there is a purposeful, like a directional aspect to community. There’s a directional aspect to a religious community that has a shared creed or set of values or whatever. But vocation and purpose, that language makes me think you’re, you’re thinking at a more individual level.
Pam King: Hmm. Not necessarily. Not necessarily. Okay. Yeah. So within most philosophical or like religious traditions, there’s, you may or may not know, one of my favorite words is te us There is, you know, the, the
Dan Koch: purpose for something, the, the teleological is, is to think about. What
Pam King: is this for? Yes, exactly. And, and I’m so excited to tell you that actually within developmental psychology, telos or teleological perspectives are actually coming back.
We’ve realized by just describing normal teleology. development and also treating symptoms, like, doesn’t really get us very far as a species. We are having to be intentional to think about what are the qualities that we want to nurture in humans that will perpetuate our society. So, um, Another fan concept of mine is the notion of the reciprocating selves.
So how do we enable people, not to become autonomous, independent people, but how do we enable people to be reciprocating, to live in reciprocal relationships with those close to them and with those different from them increasingly, like how do we enable people that are attuned to justice? So and enabling people all to pursue purpose.
So even psychology is looking at like questioning what is the purpose of development? Like we have gone for freedom and independence forever and realizing that that is not necessarily helping the planet. More is not always more. More is not always more. or one another. So what can we learn from even a psychological perspective of what kind of capacities will maintain, I will say, like a thriving trajectory for a communal whole, not just individuals.
And we also know from a psychological perspective, just to bring it back to earth, that when we have a sense of purpose, there’s a very like operationalizable concept in psychology that is not just meaning in life, like, Oh, I want to glorify God, but I have a purpose. It’s an enduring goal that’s actionable.
It’s something I can do. Like, you know, I’ve heard you say, I just want to, in my corner of the world, move people towards a more, you know, loving posture. That’s what my words, not yours, but I know you’ve wanted to make a difference, especially around issues around culture war and polarization. So, If that’s your enduring goal,
Dan Koch: you
Pam King: have done that through podcasting, you’re doing it in counseling, you’re doing it as a dad, I’m sure, but we pursue that purpose in different ways.
But the purpose has to be meaningful to ourself and it needs to make a difference beyond ourself. That’s the kind of purpose you read about in Forbes magazine or the Harvard Business Review that makes a difference in people’s lives. Again, it attracts people that are like minded, it gives you focus, it gives you priorities, um, it gives you a sense of accomplishment.
So many psychological benefits when we have a purpose.
Dan Koch: I think you can prove the truth of that actually by thinking of counterexamples like the Theranos’s of the world and these various like companies that use this real strong missional purposeful language, the fact that every Silicon Valley. Company seems to think that they’re changing the world by making as much money as they possibly can But but that just shows that like we are drawn to that like there there is a module In our mind that needs that and if we don’t have it We’re just we we can’t sustain energy for something very long if it seems kind of meaningless If we’re just building widgets and moving a dollar from one account to another account and taking five cents every time we do it It’s not that meaningful and people they kind of break under the weight of, of that sort of, uh, purposelessness.
Pam King: Absolutely. And like, there’s great neuroscience on that. Like, I don’t know if you know, Mary Helen Immordino Yang at USC has demonstrated, and this is more youth research, that like kids, when they don’t have meaning, the default mode network, which, you know, gets angry, anxious, which is always like, you know, looking, It’s the
Dan Koch: default mode
Pam King: network keeps us alive.
It’s kind of how I think of it. It does. But when you internalize beliefs, that are meaningful to you. When you have meaning, it starts to co opt that default mode network. So all that energy that’s like looking for potential attack or what I should be anxious about or what I, you know, causes rumination becomes purposeful and can be used to direct us.
And that is some of the most extraordinary research like on the planet to me these days. And spirituality, one of the most core aspects of spirituality is meaning making. And it’s actually not a facet. Because it’s part of every facet, and we can talk about that in the next segment of the show.
Dan Koch: Okay, bring, bring meaning making into it.
Okay, we got two more to talk about before we switch over there. The first is identity and narrative. Now, I don’t think this one’s really come up. So what do you mean by that? How is that a facet of spiritual health?
Pam King: That’s great. So earlier on when I was talking about spirituality being a connection or an experience of transcendence and a response, when we experience loving transcendence, like when we experience like the idea of a God who loves us, that impacts, when we internalize that, when we make meaning out of that, as I was just saying, that impacts our identity.
So when our spiritual narratives should be loving and convey the concept that we are beloved.
Dan Koch: Well, I, and I’ve talked about this many times, but autobiographically, that for me was the moment that I was able to admit that I was a theological liberal was when I felt through contemplative practice directly accepted by God and, and really it lines up with sort of what I consider to be my vocational calling.
It’s all kind of tied together, but like, That kind of calmed down this nagging sense that so many of my clients struggle with it very naturally Which is like well, I did leave behind this fundamentalism, but like what if they’re right? And I am going to hell and there’s like a, you can never totally turn off that the nagging question, but what helped me so much was that felt bodily and intellectual sense of like, Oh, like if God exists, then I’m God’s kid.
I’m good. God obviously loves me. This might just be random firings of neurons in my brain. That’s, that’s releasing a bunch of bunch of, you know, serotonin or dopamine or oxytocin or something like that. Sure, that might be all bullshit, but if it’s not, and if there is God, and if these spiritual experiences actually correlate to something, then the clearest thing I know is I’m good.
I’m loved. I’m accepted. And then, oh my gosh, that then opens up. Absolutely.
Pam King: I mean, so that’s like the ultimate transcendence is like those experiences that connect us to that divine love, to being fundamentally loved. And then, and then we can draw an attachment theory, you know, attachment research and say like, right.
When people have a secure base, they can explore, they can grow, they can pursue their vocation. So this is why identity is so important. So essential to our spiritual health. Because so many people walk around with really crappy spiritual identities. I’m not good enough for God, I was rejected by the church, I don’t follow the rules, um, my hair’s the wrong color, I’m the wrong sexual orientation.
But ultimately spiritual health involves an identity in which we are the beloved. And it’s not just an identity we know, but there’s a transcendence that we experience, that we are beloved. And the narrative, I put narrative in there because narrative is so agentic and proactive. You know, like as a therapist, you know, you can work with people’s narratives.
You just gave me a beautiful narrative of like, before I was a contemplative, this was my experience. I did not say
Dan Koch: I’m a contemplative. But yeah, before I tried out contemplative practice, yeah, let’s put it that way. Don’t want to push you
Pam King: over there with those mystics.
Dan Koch: Especially with two kids, I mean, my, I am at a, I am at a 5 percent of what I was at before kids and it wasn’t that high to begin with.
No, I’ll get there. I’ll get back there sometime. I know my
Pam King: friends were always like make changing diapers a spiritual practice. Try confession. Yeah, exactly.
Dan Koch: Honestly. Well, I, I honestly, our, our youngest, he loves getting his diaper changed. So it is kind of a spiritual experience because he just smiles and giggles.
And I’m just like you, I just narrate, Oh, we got a pooper this time and we have fun with it. So in that sense, I suppose it is a spiritual Experience, but not in the way of I’m like choosing for diapers to be my personal quiet time. That’s bullshit. That’s toxic positivity right there, Pam. There you go.
There you go. There’s your, there’s your definition.
Pam King: Okay. So narratives though, like the other beautiful thing is in your identity in spiritual health is it’s not just unbeloved, like, Oh, I’m going to feel kumbaya in my heart and it’s going to reverberate, but it’s, I’m a part of something bigger.
Dan Koch: Yeah.
There’s directionality to narrative. There’s beginnings and ends. That’s the purpose
Pam King: is part of the narrative as well. And so that’s where narrative is so important. There’s so much great work being done and that can be done at a really practical level of like, what’s your spiritual narrative? Where’s it going?
Like, for me, you know, I mean, you and I both, we have, you said I’m a research psychologist. Yeah. Yeah. Yes, but darn it. I want to change this world. I like can’t go to bed without like really wanting people to thrive And when I see all the great stuff going on in religious communities and people aren’t accessing that I’m like I need to make a website and have a podcast and tell you how they can thrive through faith
Dan Koch: Yeah.
Okay. One more before we switch over ethics and virtues. That’s no big deal. We’ll just leave that for the end. Why does this matter? Really quick. Ethics is, you know, for people who are like, what do these terms exactly mean? Ethics is sort of real world application of moral thinking. So what is it okay or good for a business to do?
That’s business ethics. Uh, ethics is like how we relate, like whether or not to eat meat and what kind of meat that’s ethics and virtues that goes back to Aristotle and the Greeks and other wisdom traditions. This is more about building up certain regular capacities in ourselves such that we will naturally make good ethical choices.
So that’s the kind of ethics is a bit more surfacy. And virtues is a bit more below the surface. Do you like that delineation, Pam?
Pam King: Love that. Love that. And we could say like ethics have to do about like what you think you should do. And virtues have to do with creating the capacities, like you said, or the psychological muscles so you actually live them out.
And I like highlighting virtues because in our crazy world with things changing so fast, to be loving. You know, it looks different minute to minute to be compassionate, um, and that we actually, if we want to be compassionate, we Need to practice that. We do that in small ways. We practice taking people’s perspectives.
We, we do the meta prayer. Like, you know, Christians, when we do intercessory prayer, it’s like a laundry list. Like, Oh, pray for Dan and his podcast. Pray for my husband, pray for this, pray for that. Buddhist traditions often this very slow, like, I wish you well, you know, I wish you health. I wish you safety.
Like, it actually provides us the opportunity to take the perspective and begin to have empathy and feel feelings of other people. So that’s where psychology can be so helpful and, and the practices that might shape our virtuous life. But ethics and virtues are so important because they are essential to a life worth living.
If we don’t know what we value and what we think is moral and good. then we are thrill seekers, which is awesome until it’s not. And pursuing like our own happiness just becomes a dead end street fast. And we all know that. So I just want to say one of the greatest gifts that religion at its best is can offer a sense of ethics that people need to internalize, you know, not the 13 year old who might buy it hook, line and sinker, but needs to try them on and figure out how to work them out in their life.
But to avoid moral injury. But that moral aspect of being a human is is so important. Rarely spoken about other than but like David Brooks, but that like a life worth living famously
Dan Koch: hugely popular amongst Gen Z, David Brooks,
Pam King: as he should be, as he should
Dan Koch: know he should know he should be. I mean, no, but yeah, you’re right.
It’s like people don’t It’s a lot of our ethics and virtue stuff are implicit in the stuff that we consume and think about and talk about, uh, and often not explicit until people are older or raising children or writing curricula or something like that. And then they have to kind of start thinking about it.
Pam King: So you back to your 13 year old real quick. So our brains at 13 black and white is not bad, like abstract reasoning and all those. nuances that you and I could stay up all night thinking about. Brain’s not ready for it. So actually being surrounded by a peer group and some caring adults or a social community that says, Hey, these are good things to do.
These are bad. And actually models them, provides good examples of them. Not bad for a 13 year old. What becomes a problem is like, when the scaffold, that support, is never comes down. And kids are not taught to think for themselves, or to explore, or to question. At a certain point, it’s really great for parents to be like, Hey, This is right.
And this is wrong. Um, and at some point though, you got to let kids explore and choose for their own.
Dan Koch: Yeah. Okay. I’m excited to get nerdier, to go further afield. Before we switch over and do that, we’re going to put a link to the thrive center. org. This is your website and center, but who would be going there?
Why would, why would a listener go to the thrive center.org right now?
Pam King: You’re awesome. You would go there because you want to grow as a person and you might have a hunch like, hey, I think faith has got something to offer. On some days, I’m not always sure. Some days it feels absolutely not relevant. Go and check out.
We’ve got resources. We have practices. Don’t tell Dan. Um, we might make suggestions on some healthy habits, but we, I subscribe as a developmental psychologist that people are very unique and what people need or what works for them is really different and at different times of their lives. So there’s a plethora of offerings, there’s not a specific program that you have to follow, um, but Click around the facet wheel and check it out.
I also have a podcast, uh, within four that brings on experts that Dan is joining me on. I’m so excited that we’ll offer more insights into these facets, but you also might be one of those. I’m done. I’m a nun. I’m spiritual and not religious. Go explore how your spirituality can be more robust and have more meaning in your life and, and also why it’s important to share it with others.
Dan Koch: That’s a pretty good ad right there, Pam. That’s you’re a natural. I care about this. And if you want to join us for the second half here, uh, patreon.com/DanKoch, that links in the notes at seven bucks a month, you get at least two of these full length, additional episodes, plus membership in the Facebook group, and maybe some other things by the time this episode comes out, I’m not totally sure, but we’ll see you on the other side.
Pam King: Looking forward to it.
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 Jurgensen 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.
Pamela King
Pam is the Executive Director of the Thrive Center and the Peter L. Benson Professor of Applied Developmental Science in the School of Psychology at Fuller Theological Seminary. Her life’s purpose is to help people thrive. To this end, her academic work focuses on psychological and theological perspectives of human thriving and social flourishing.
Dan Koch
Dan hosts the You Have Permission podcast and am a licensed therapist in the state of Washington. His Spiritual Harm & Abuse Scale was published in May 2022 in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. He is most interested in overlapping questions and interactions between psychology and religion/spirituality.
Episode Summary
Pam King joins licensed therapist Dan Koch on his podcast, You Have Permission, for a discussion of the six facets of spiritual health.
Announcement! With & For Season 2 is dropping on January 5, 2025! And until then, every Monday from September to December, we’re sharing some shorter clips, practical features, and other talks or interviews featuring Dr. Pam King, to offer insight into what it means to thrive and pursue spiritual health.
Show Notes
Pam King joins licensed therapist Dan Koch on his podcast, You Have Permission, for a discussion of the six facets of spiritual health.
Announcement! With & For Season 2 is dropping on January 5, 2025! And until then, every Monday from September to December, we’re sharing some shorter clips, practical features, and other talks or interviews featuring Dr. Pam King, to offer insight into what it means to thrive and pursue spiritual health.
- With & For Season 2 is dropping on January 5, 2024!
- Subscribe to Dan Koch’s podcast, You Have Permission and his Patreon at patreon.com/dankoch
- Pam’s research interests: positive developmental psychology and theology
- How do psychologists perceive religion, spirituality, and theology?
- How does spirituality and religion factor in human development?
- William Damon (Stanford University) on moral development in the wake of the Columbine shooting
- “My work has really focused on how do we offer people insight into the psychological benefits available in spirituality and religion at their best.”
- Youth group
- “What's the question I could ask that would get her thinking about the potentially harmful theology?”
- Purity culture at youth group
- The Thrive Center’s rubric of Six Facets of Spiritual Health
- What are the six facets of spiritual health?
- Transcendence and spirituality. Habits and rhythms. Relationships and community. Identity and narrative. Vocation and purpose. Ethics and virtues.
- “This model comes from is comes from existing research that highlights potential resources available through religious participation or being a spiritual person that can promote our well being.”
- How religion and spirituality buffer against mental illness
- Psychological benefits of spirituality
- “Mechanisms of change”
- Benefits mediated through relationships with other people
- “Young people need relationships.”
- What is the nature of healthy spiritual community?
- “But increasingly, with the fragmentation of our society and our very transient and digital affiliations, we don't have the richness and the thick connections that we once did.”
- Polarization and culture wars and Robert Putnam’s “Bowling Alone”
- Transcendence: ”something beyond the self”
- Spirituality: “experiencing and responding to transcendence”
- Habits and rhythms.
- Creativity and music
- “The reality is, as humans, we often find freedom with some structure.”
- Atomic Habits
- Contemplative neuroscience
- Fight, flight, freeze
- Built in rhythms of work and rest
- Sabbath
- Ancient rhythms and practical wisdom that give us permission to rest
- Listen to Pam and Dan discuss facets of “Relationships and community” and “Identity and narrative” in the Patron-only second half of the conversation, available via patreon.com/dankoch
- Vocation and purpose.
- Teleology and Telos (end, goal, purpose)
- Reciprocating relationships
- Pursuing purpose as an “enduring goal that is actionable”
- Mary Helen Immordino Yang (USC) and the default network
- Meaning making
- “The moment that I was able to admit that I was a theological liberal was when I felt through contemplative practice directly accepted by God.”
- “If God exists, then I’m God’s kid.”
- “And if there is God, and if these spiritual experiences actually correlate to something, then the clearest thing I know is I'm good. I'm loved. I'm accepted.”
- Ultimate transcendence and connection to divine love
- “Ultimately spiritual health involves an identity in which we are the beloved.”
- Contemplative practices
- How to make changing diapers a spiritual practice: “Oh, we got a pooper!”
- Directionality to narrative
- Ethics and virtues.
- Ethics as “real-world application to moral thinking.”
- Virtues as “building up certain regular capacities in ourselves such that we will naturally make good ethical choices.”
- Intercessory prayer and loving-kindness meditation
- How youth approach morality in the context of community and family
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