Dr. Curt Thompson, Achieving Attachment to Overcome Anxiety

Jessica Honegger [00:00:03] Hey, there. Welcome to Going Scared. I'm Jessica Honegger, founder of the world-changing brand Noonday Collection, and I'm so glad to have you here for today's conversation. Our Going Scared community gathers here every week for direct and honest conversations that help you live a life of courage by leaving comfort and going scared. Welcome back to our new series, Know Thy Self. This new series is your step by step guide to discover how to know yourself. They are short 30 minute conversations, and they are going to give you the ability to step out of your own experience, observe your feelings and with compassionate curiosity choose how to respond instead of react. And there was only one way to kick off this series with my therapist. That was the only way to start this journey. My therapist, Dr. Curt Thompson, I couldn't start a new series about knowing yourself without you hearing from the person who has helped me to know me more than any one. [00:01:12]Listen in today because we are going to talk about attachment styles, which is just a fancy therapist term for how you bonded and received security from your caregivers when you were a little babe. We start here first because before we can actually change, we have to become aware of the habits and structures that got us to where we are now, and that much of how we got to where we are now happened a very, very long time ago. That's where we began. [29.1s] In today's episode, you are going to begin to understand how your early life influences your relationships, your resilience and your courage. Today. Curt, thank you for joining us. I do believe you are for sure our first guest to be on the show basically for the fourth time, so..

Curt Thompson [00:02:12] Well, I can only say that I hope it's not the last.

Jessica Honegger [00:02:17] Oh well, we are doing a series called Know Thyself, and really there is not anyone else in the world who's helped me know myself more than you. So I couldn't actually have this series and have it be done to its fullest, most authentic self unless I had you on the show. So thank you.

Curt Thompson [00:02:36] Well, here we are. Here we are. My, my pleasure.

Jessica Honegger [00:02:39] So in your newest book, The Soul of Desire, which I cried through the first two chapters and in continuing to just immerse myself in this work because I feel so known just by reading it. So thank you for pouring your heart into this work, and everyone needs to go and get this book, The Soul of Desire. [00:03:04]And you talk about pretty frequently you talk about the significance of the relational process of attachment to human flourishing, and the development of secure attachment is enabled by a child experience of feeling what you call the four s's seen soothed, safe and secure. And in order for us to live lives of what I would say, courage, creative courage, being able to go forth and create beauty in the world, we first need to experience secure attachment. [34.4s] And I have done a lot of work over the years on myself on becoming more aware of myself and the stories I tell myself and how shame plays a story in myself. But this last year has really been the first time I have really come to understand how attachment has impacted my relationships and my view of others therefore myself and how it can play into me living into my shame story or living into my story of creating beauty in the world. And you've been such a huge part of me coming to understand myself in this way. So I really wanted to start there. I wanted you to help our listener understand what is attachment.

Curt Thompson [00:04:18] [00:04:18]Well, I think if we were going to just kind of roll it out fairly succinctly from a kind of scientific research standpoint, we would say that attachment is a process whereby which a newborn because it starts the moment that we're born, and some might even argue that it begins even before that, that it is a relational and neurobiological process where in which the newborn and then infant and toddler with their underdeveloped brain utilizes the more highly developed brain of their adult caretakers, parents, grandparents, whoever is taking care of them to help organize itself. [40.4s] So newborn comes into the world and parents recognize the newborn. And as we like to say in the business, that no two siblings ever grow up in the same house because each person is going to have their own particular temperament. And that temperament is going to have a particular combining effect with the parents and the parents' temperaments in their parenting style. And that's going to be unique for each kid. And they come into the world and the parents recognize them, and the parents are going to respond to that child's temperament. We have two children that are adults, and their temperaments were very different. That parent is going to respond to that child in their temperament, and that child is then going to attach. They're going to move toward the parent. They're going to use that parent's posture toward them, the child. They're going to use that as a way for the child's brain and mind to regulate itself, to bring itself to a place of composure, to bring itself to a place where it is no longer in distress. And we have various ways of responding to those ways in which our parents approach us as a way for us to bring, you know, a sense of of comfort and confidence to my life. Now, if I have if I grew up in a house where my, you know, when I'm upset, my parent notices this and attunes to this and is empathic with this, while at the same time setting limits, that parent enables me to learn that the thing that I feel when I'm in distress is a thing that is not to be frightened of or worried about. And I can feel that and know that my parent will respond and they will help me kind of grow into and integrate that. While at the same time, over time, my parent is also helping me to regulate this because at some point it won't just be my parent that regulates my emotional distress when I'm upset, they will help me learn how to regulate it myself. But I can't really do that unless I know that the thing that I'm feeling is in the first place, acceptable and valid in the world. Now, if I grew up in a house where every time I'm upset, my parent gets upset at my being upset. Then I'm going to take a very different tact at learning how to regulate what I feel. I may over time again without knowing about this, because this process takes place long before a child has conscious awareness or thinking practices. I'm going to find a way to reduce my distress, but in that process, I may learn to do it such that my anger or my sadness or whatever it is, my shame, my fear. I'm just going to put that on the back burner. I'm going to have to find a way to no longer pay attention to that. And that's just one way that I might put emotion to the side as a way for me to be OK in the moment. And in this way, I'm forming a particular attachment process. And there are a number of different ways in which we do this. And, you know, you know, perhaps at another time we could talk about the details that but suffice to say that we tend to attach in ways that are either secure or ways that are generally insecure. There are a couple of insecure forms.

Jessica Honegger [00:07:56] You can go ahead and break those down because I feel like that has been very clarifying for me.

Curt Thompson [00:08:01] Well, I mean, to put it again, to be succinct, I would say that, you know, [00:08:05]a secure form of attachment would be one in which we sense that as a child, I'm sensing that my parents are sensing me and not just that they're sensing me and therefore give me whatever I want, but they are helping to usher me into a space in which what I'm feeling is validated, while I'm also learning how to put boundaries around that feeling [20.0s] so I can like they might validate that I'm upset and angry, but they also put boundaries on me, you know, throwing the lamp at them so I can feel that anger. But I've also learned how to incorporate it in helpful ways. That would be a way to be securely attached, or I expressed joy or exuberance, and they also welcome that into the room while also helping me learn how to put boundaries around that as well. Because in my exuberance, I might say, Gosh, this is so great. I just want to run out to the street and play. But that's not going to be helpful for me as a three year old when the car comes. [00:08:58]And so they're helping me to set limits while they are welcoming my emotional states into the world. [4.6s] Now, if I have parents who kind of in some ways, maybe not intentionally, maybe not like on purpose, but some ways deliver the message that the certain feelings certain emotional states are not really welcome here because they're too upsetting to the parent. [00:09:17]The parent may do a number of things to send the signal to the child that what the emotion is that you're carrying is not valid is not OK. And so the child finds ways to bury those emotions. The child find ways to avoid the emotion. And we care for call this an insecure, avoidant form of attaching, and we can attach differently to one parent than we do to another. But what that ultimately means is that I practice even neuro biologically I practice not paying attention to or having access to particular emotional states. [31.2s] Now, this doesn't mean that my brain is not in contact or in touch with those emotional states. It just means that they're being worked out in ways that I may not be aware of, and often in ways that are not very helpful or integrating for me personally or for my relationships. [00:10:05]On the other hand, another form of insecure we might call insecure anxious attachment is not the parent who doesn't really want to have anything to do with emotion, but a parent who is so rather unpredictably driven by their own emotions that they find that they end up kind of intruding into my world and they don't pay attention to my emotional life. [20.9s] So the mom or dad who because they feel a certain distress themselves, they want to interact with their child, but they don't notice that their child is just playing quietly by themselves. But they suddenly swoop in and they interact with their child and their child is startled. And their child is now made to feel anxious because they're not really sure when their parent is going to come and where their parent is going to go, and if their parent is going to go, are they going to go and leave for good or are they going to come back? And so a child's undercurrent of emotion begins to be one of anxiety. I'm anxious, I'm anxious all the time. And so attachment for them as they grow up is that relationships are not necessarily able to be predicted all that easily, emotionally. And so when people get close, I might like that, but I might. Are you going to get too close and like, you know, swallow me or when you go away, are you going to go away permanently and abandon me? I don't really know. So I burn a lot of energy doing that. Of course, I don't know that I'm doing this, but this is a way that I learn to navigate relationships. [00:11:27]We then have a fourth category that some researchers categorize in different ways, but it's a fourth category that we call this insecure and disorganized form, and this really is highlighted by those stories in our lives in which we have unresolved trauma or unresolved grief that is significant or maybe even severe, but that we don't really have a way of taking care of this. And in this way, we find ourselves often engaged any time in relationships themselves, the very act of moving toward me can create a great deal of emotional distress, not just the anxiety of an anxious attachment pattern, but ways in which I can even tend to in the worst cases, I can tend to relationally decompensate. [45.6s] I quit my job. I leave the house and leaving my kids and my husband. But they don't know where I am. I become fairly narcissistic in my approach to life. There are lots of different ways in which this disorganized fashion is a response to trauma. I had a young 35 year old once who was in my office and who would talk about how when he was a young boy and he had two younger siblings, he was about five and his siblings were three and two and his father, after putting to bed at night, turn all the lights out. But then his father would start in the upstairs hallway, running down the hallway, screaming like a monster. Now, of course, we hear this and we're thinking, How is that possible? What's going on? And of course, these children would be frightened out of their minds, and then they wouldn't really know what to do in their relationship with their father because their father, as much as he was to be their protector, was also the very source of not just anxiety, but terror and fear that he would evoke in them. Now, of course, later, when my patient confronted his dad about this to try to have a conversation, his dad remember doing this, but his posture was, Look, I was just trying to have fun and connect with you all as kids, because I didn't know how to do that very well. And this is not a father who was trying to frighten his kids. This was not a father who is trying to have his kids grow up to be really relationally unhinged. He was trying to connect, doing the best he can, but it really revealed that my patient's father himself had had a violent upbringing, had had lots of experiences in which when he was treated violently, there were no repairs made. So these are different forms and the thing that I think is really important for us Jess on this, this count is that our attachment processes and pattern show up in every relationship one way. And we can't avoid that. We take them to work, we take them to church, we take them into our social setting, we take them into our school environments. We take them everywhere that we go, any time that we come within contact with a relationship. And that means even in the context of my own mind. And this is why maybe we'll get to this too. This is why paying attention to those four S's that you, you know, began with or can be really helpful ways of reimagining what our attachment patterns can be in the face of insecure attachment patterns that have established themselves as adults and the research in neuro psychiatry and in neuroplasticity. One of the beautiful things about this is that, you know, when I was in medical school 30 years ago, 35 years ago, we used to think, gosh, once the brain is set, you know, after about eight, 15 years of age, it's it's pretty much fixed. And now we know that through neuro plastic change, people can move from relatively insecure, even disorganized in securely attached persons to earned secure attachment. And the really beautiful news is that when we do the work of telling our stories more truly of doing the work of allowing ourselves to be seen, soothed, safe, and secure, we can move into these places where we don't just feel better, but we actively engage in promoting and creating flourishing relationships, not least just not only in our families, but in our places of work where we long to create beauty and goodness in the world, not just relationally, but even in the very products that we design and make, you know, make possible for the public.

Jessica Honegger [00:15:27] So you mentioned that most of us are not aware. How do we begin to become aware of these patterns? What do we begin to pay attention to that gives us a clue to, Oh, I have completely withdrawn from that person and have I been avoidant? Or for me, I tend towards insecure attachment where I can get real grabby or, you know, I don't know if I've ever told you this, but I for many years woke up with just this vague sense of anxiety on Saturdays, and I would feel very, very alone if I didn't have plans, if I didn't have plans to connect with someone or to meet with someone. And some of that's because I married an introvert husband who I felt like for the first decade of our marriage couldn't quite give me the connection that I longed for. But then my mom randomly mentioned one time a couple of years ago, she talked about how she when she was a mom, she was always anxious on Saturdays because my dad was always gone working and she felt really alone. Hmm. And I thought then that's why I'm anxious on Saturday because I couldn't make sense of my mom's own anxiety and aloneness that she felt on a Saturday. So I share this story because I want our listeners. I think we hear these categories and we can paint these in very broad strokes. And I'm like, Well, I wasn't abused as a child and, you know, I wasn't neglected. But these patterns can show up in these very nuanced ways. So I know for me, I, as I begin to pay attention to where I feel that sort of that anxiety or that like, I got it, I got to make plans. If I didn't make plans come Monday morning for my Saturday night, I would feel anxious all week and I didn't want to live like that anymore. So I think it was beginning to become aware of where I sort of that showed up in me. Mm-Hmm. So I'd like for you to share how if someone is not yet on this journey of awareness, how do they become aware? And then, yes, I do want to understand how do we restore these places and reimagine how this soothes secure and safe places for ourselves that we perhaps didn't get as children? Right?

Curt Thompson [00:17:38] [00:17:38]Well, you know, the really beautiful and hard news about the developing mind, about human flourishing is that when it comes to relational growth, it really is true that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. [17.4s] And that's the way it is. And what what do we mean by that is that we may be listeners who will listen to this and hear this, and they may have their curiosity raised a little bit while they're listening to this. And as soon as we're done, they're going to go back to whatever it is that really has their attention is keeping them busy and the curiosity will fade. Hmm.

Jessica Honegger [00:18:16] They're going to be making those anxious plans, right?

Curt Thompson [00:18:19] And they're not going to take

Jessica Honegger [00:18:20] it is soothing. It was soothing, right?

Curt Thompson [00:18:23] That's exactly right. And you know, not to not to sound overly harsh about this, but that's exactly what addiction is. [00:18:29]Addiction is anything that I do with my mind or with my body that leads to instant gratification, as opposed to moving toward relationship as a way to experience flourishing. Anything that I'm doing that I can do by myself that is leading ultimately away from relationship. This doesn't mean that anything that I do by myself is not leading to flourishing, but anything that I do by myself that is not leading to flourishing starts to wander into the territory of addiction. [29.5s] And so it becomes easy for us. And so we become addicted to anxiety we become addicted to. I need to get this done before anything else gets done.

Jessica Honegger [00:19:07] And let's preach for a second that we become addicted to our own anxiety. Right?

Curt Thompson [00:19:13] We become addicted to urgency, and my urgency becomes the thing that I now have to feed. I. And it is the thing that I, you know, wake up and I worship in the morning and I worship it all day. And so because this because I like I got to get things done. This and you know, of course, there are things that we get done as long as these things are in the service of drawing us closer to others relationally. But so much of what we were doing, and of course, as a as a person of faith, like I'm a I'm a believer in evil and evil's intention. I think it is to devour us and part of how they do it is to see to it that we become a greater we become more and more separated relationally from one another. And so one of the things that is so important about this as we're listening is when you notice yourself being curious in the way that you're like as you're talking. You talked about being curious about like what's going on with me on Saturday mornings. You were curious, but you weren't just curious. You acted on that curiosity. You were going to follow it. You were going to do something about that. And so the reality is that by the time people get to a point where they're either curious enough or they cross, they crossed a threshold of pain that is painful enough. Those become the signals that I need to do something about this. [00:20:27]And here's the other thing it's really important we live in a world in which the messaging that is explicit but largely implicit is that I need to fix these things by myself. What am I going to do? What am I going to do? And I want to tell our listeners that that's not the question. The question is always, what are we going to do and what am I going to? What am I going to do with you? What am I going to do with someone else? And so if I want to move from a place of relatively insecure attachment to a relatively secure attachment, it's not going to be what is Kurt going to do? It's who is Kurt going to do it with? [40.1s] Hmm. Am I going to do it with Jess? Am I going to do with my friend Neil and Byron and my friend Pepper? I mean, who are going to be the people that are going to enable me to feel felt such that I can walk into the halls of the parts of my story where my neurally engaged, insecure attachment lies to find where the shame is, to find where the trauma is, to find where the fear is, such that those very embodied emotional states are re-regulated in the presence of others who are coming to find me such that I can tell that part of my story different, such that that part of my story is not is not now told as I am a four year old boy who has been left by his mother, who's going on a trip but who feels the anguish of that departure so acutely and somehow has to find a way to figure out what to do about that all by himself. And so consequently, the whole notion then of someone getting close to me is coupled necessarily with my deep conviction that the closer you get, the more likely it is that you are going to leave and you're going to leave violently. Now, by and violently, I don't mean you're going to like, punch me in the nose. I mean that when you leave, I am going to feel your departure. With such anguish that I won't be able to tolerate it, and so therefore, it's just easier for me to really allow you to get as close, you know? [00:22:42]We're just going to like do the COVID thing and keep you at six feet of distance. But I'm not going to let you become so close that I run the risk of losing you. But if I'm willing to do this work and let you get to within four feet and then three feet, and then we can like, sit at the table together and have tea. And then I let you into my soul. That's when things start to change for me, not just in terms of my subjective experience, but the very neural networks of my brain begin to change. My mind is renewed. And it allows me to have access to parts of me that were once broken that now become the very source, the very wellspring of new creativity, [38.8s]

Jessica Honegger [00:23:22] so good and so true. And thanks to your work, I mean, I can even think in the last 24 hours, I even yesterday, I had such fear and anxiety evoked in me, and I was able to just look at my business partner. It has to do with business and just big decisions that were making around the business, and I said, I know that I need to be in a place of creativity and possibility. And when I am in fear that part of my brain goes off line and I need it to be online right now, and what helps me to be online is to know that you are not leaving the room and that we are in this together. And it would be so helpful to me if you multiple times a day during this season just looked at me and said, You don't need to be afraid, I'm here. We've got this.

Curt Thompson [00:24:13] Right on, right on.

Jessica Honegger [00:24:15] And I just I would have never been able to voice that out loud even two years ago. Even being able to say that and have him being able to provide that to me like we got this, this is why this is why we're partners, you know, because we are a we were in this together. And even today, my mood has been one of more security because it really does go back to those four S's seen and soothed, safe and secure. So let's move into that now, Kurt, because you began to create the opportunity for confessional communities in your own therapeutic practice. And just full disclosure, I am in a confessional community right now with a group of seven women, and Kurt is is helping to lead that group. And what you say is that these confessional communities are and are designed to enhance integration of the mind's nine domains of functional activity, and that this leads to the development of earned secure attachment, primarily through providing the opportunity for participants to be seen, soothed, safe, and secure. It bolsters the social engagement system while enabling participants to widen their windows of tolerance, which prevents them from moving into fight or flight and ultimately, which enables us to go forth and create beauty in the world. So. Mm hmm. Let's talk about a confessional community and you know, full disclosure I started this. So Kurt's work with me, I he started talking about this a couple of years ago, and me and another friend both felt led like, we need this. And so we've been just, you know, we're just about a month in only. But even with that one month, you know, I'm practicing OK that I think about the child in me, the anxious one that was perhaps alone and overwhelmed. And that's what trauma is when we were alone and we were overwhelmed and felt like we didn't have anyone to help us. So now we're reimagining what that child can have now within the safety of a group. So I say that because I know that there are listeners who think I don't have anyone or that's great that you have that. Look at you, Jessica, but I'm all alone. And I always want to speak to that person and I want to offer her or him this idea that you can go create this, you can go be makers of a confessional community. So how could we guide our listeners in being makers of confessional communities?

Curt Thompson [00:26:59] Well, I think, you know, as one, one thing to bear in mind is, again, as a as a person of Christian faith, I have a particular model for this. And this is, you know, not all of our listeners may hearken to that. But I want to I want to suggest that, you know, this question is asked of me often, how do we like, where do I find my confession, where I find a confession to where I find these communities and I will often pause and reflect that the question I would invite you to reframe the question because the question that is important to ask is how do we create them? Not How do I find them?

Jessica Honegger [00:27:36] And love it. Yep, yep.

Curt Thompson [00:27:38] Because these are not naturally found human beings are not naturally inclined to create them

Jessica Honegger [00:27:45] because of all of our insecure attachment issues.

Curt Thompson [00:27:48] Exactly, exactly. And I and I and of course, I would have other there. I think I believe that there are other things in play that prevent us from doing this there. But but no small part of it has to do with our unresolved traumas, large or small, our insecure attachment that would not have us necessarily having the courage. I love that that that word is so much a part of your work that that we don't have the courage to step forth and create this because we can imagine that to do the things that we might do. Like, anybody would look at us and go like, that's nuts. Like who? Like who would sign up to be this vulnerable? Who would sign up to believe that vulnerability in a context of confidence and security without shame being in the driver's seat of that relationship? [00:28:30]Who in their right mind would think that vulnerability is the source of the most durable beauty that we can create? [6.7s] Like, we're not going to think that we think I'm going to play to my strengths as if that's all that easy to play to. And of course, strengths are important, but strengths are important only to the degree that they are also keeping in mind that the vulnerability and our weaknesses that we also bring to the table are important sources of the creativity at its deepest. I do want to make a comment about this whole notion then, though, of keeping in mind that, you know, we say we want these confessional communities. And one of the things we continually come back to with folks when things get difficult is to remind us that we are on a journey to pursue and to create and establish relationships in which we are seen, soothed, safe, and secure. And those four words are crucially important for us to like a really good routine exercise in the gym, come back to over and over and over again. Now these this collection of four words were first coined to my knowledge by Dan Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson in one of their books, one of one of their presentations. And they talk about them in a particular way - Dan does. I talk about the word secured a little differently than Dan does? The way I talk about these things, first of all, is that any newborn needs to be seen. First, we like we come into the world looking for someone looking for us and we need to be seen. And many of us, as it turns out, we live in sand. We grew up in families where we actually weren't seen. Certain parts of our personalities, certain parts of our temperaments, there were certain things that were OK and certain things were not OK. You know who I mean, you you know who you are, who I'm talking to, who have parts that just feel invisible. We're not seen. And if we're not seen, then we're not soothed and by soothed, not just from our distress, right? I'm I'm a newborn. I'm an infant. I'm crying. I need to have that be soothed. But I also have this suit I want to be. I want this longing. I want this longing to make stuff and create things. I just want this energy to go and play. And there's a certain sense that if I don't get to do that as a three year old boy or a five year old girl, there's a certain soothing to that creative outlet. And if I'm not given that space, that also is something that I'm then going to have to somehow learn to regulate. So first I'm seen in order to be soothed. And with that practice of being seen and soothed over a period of weeks and months and years, I develop a confidence, a sense of safety and the environment in which I'm being raised. I am safe. I am confident within this environment of my family and then of my school or of my church or my neighborhood. I have a certain sense if I can go and play and run and do the things, and even if I fall down and get hurt, I'm still within a context that is ultimately safe. [00:31:12]But this then leads us to the fourth S, which is what I when I talk about security what I mean by this is in establishing safety. Having been seen and soothed, we then launch out into territory that is less predictable. We learn to take risks. We learn to go out to places where we can't guarantee good outcomes. We learn to ask somebody out on a date, only to be turned down. We learn to take a risk trying to start a business and the business doesn't work out. We learn to have a hard conversation with someone who rejects us. But even in all those places where there are even ruptures, where we make mistakes, where we take risks in which we don't succeed, we know that there will be a place to return where we are seen soothed and safe. [54.1s] This is what secure attachment development is all about, that a child has a secure base from which she or he moves out and tries new things and they may skin their knee. But they come back. They get that knee tended to and they go back out again and they come back and get the knee tendon. They go back out again and they continue to push the boundary. As you said earlier, we are widening the window of tolerance of our emotional states in such a way that we are becoming character logically more durable and more resilient, and we are becoming living, breathing outposts of beauty and goodness in the world. Because as we do these things of establishing creativity in places where it hasn't been established and especially in places where it's most, it seems the least likely to establish it. We discover that we become people of greater love, joy peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control, and nobody's going to argue with that. And the thing is, this whole notion of being seen, soothed, safe, and secure begins at birth, and it never ends. I need to be seen in the boardroom. I need to be soothed by my attending physician when I'm a resident. I need to be made secure, I need, you know, I need to have the sense that like I'm going to have a I have people who are saying like, Yes, go try this. This seems really reasonable. Yes, there's risks, but we want you to try this because this is a wise thing to do. If we try and it doesn't work out, you need to know that we're not leaving the room. You come back and we're going to talk about how it is that you got your nose bloodied. We're going to bandage it up and we're going to figure out how to go do this again. [00:33:46]And this, I think, is important because this whole process that we talk about attachment, it's easy for us to just assume that this is really child's play. This is really something that is primarily about children and certainly begins in that in that time of our developmental stage. But I want to assure us it is a lifelong process. It is a process that carries us from birth to death. And there will never be a time when I mean, I'll be fifty nine in just a few days and there will be. There will never be a time when I won't be looking to be in a relationship in relationships where I can be seen, soothed, safe and be launched out into a place of taking risks in a secure fashion. [40.2s] And I just want to say for listeners that, you know, Jess in the time that I've come to know you, I'm just amazed. I'm just so proud of you. So amazed at how hard you're working. Your work at really telling your story as truly as it can be told. And as such, being illuminating to others to do the same thing in such that when people are wondering what does it mean for me to take the risk of being in a confessional community? They can look at you and they can know how it gets done.

Jessica Honegger [00:35:07] Thank you. Thank you, Kurt. It is worth the journey. You sold it. You sold it today. Who doesn't want peace and joy and security? I mean, those are all set. They're all things that we long for. Who doesn't want to create beauty, and those things are available to us. So thank you so much and we are all going to go out today and get The Soul of Desire. Thank you so much, Dr. Kurt Thompson.

Curt Thompson [00:35:34] You're most welcome. Always a pleasure.

Jessica Honegger [00:35:41] So good, so good. Would you spread the word that Going Scared is back and it's back and better than ever, shorter than ever and more helpful than ever before? Go ahead and give it a screenshot. Share it on your Instagram Stories and tagged me Jessica Honegger, and you will be entered for the chance to win a few Noonday Collection gift cards. So go spread the word we are back and it's only going to build from here. And if you love today's conversation, go check out episodes 121 through 123 where Kurt and I do a deep dive on what does it mean to be known? Today's music is by Ellie Holcomb, and I'm Jessica Honegger. Until next time, let's take each other by the hand and keep going scared.