Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 1332 | Inner Child, Shadow Work & Somatic Therapy: A Warning to Christian Women

Starting point is 00:00:00 The inner child, shadow work, somatic therapy, all of these therapeutic concepts are really popular, but are they biblical? We'll be getting into all of that on today's episode of Relatable. I am so excited, by the way, before we get started to speak at the last stand conference this summer, June 5th, and 6th, it's in Denver, Colorado. I'll be speaking alongside Seth Gruber, Frank Turrick, so many more. Go to the last stand.com. use code Alley for a discount. That's the last stand.com code alley. Hey y'all, welcome to Relatable. Happy Monday. Hope everyone had a wonderful weekend watching the Masters. We did. We love the Masters. I don't have FOMO very much. But I have the Masters FOMO.

Starting point is 00:00:54 We've had the privilege of going three times. We obviously didn't get to go this year. But for all of you who did, I'm trying not to be jealous. I'm trying just to be happy for you. And I want all of you, related girls and related bros, out there to promise me that if you have not been to the Masters and you ever have the opportunity to go to the Masters that you go, that you do whatever you have to do to accept the invitation of that very kind and generous person who has invited you. I don't care how much of a homebody you are. You are going to be very thankful for the experience of the Masters. I don't really say this about many things, but there's really nothing like it. It's like going back in time. It's like going to a different planet. It's an incredible experience. And I hope I get to go again

Starting point is 00:01:36 one day, but I hope you all got to enjoy it from the comfort of your home like we did. And I also just want to remind you that God's eternal planet of redemption is going off without a hitch completely and totally. There's nothing at all that has caused any detour, any delay. No speed bumps, no accidents. There's nothing that has happened that he didn't foresee that he didn't know about. He's never looking down and wondering how in the world am I going to clean up the mess. Oh my goodness, I didn't see that coming. That was a surprise for me. He's never thrown off. He's never taken aback. There is nothing that is happening in your life that he cannot handle. There is nothing that is happening in your life in the world that can ever separate you from the love of Christ. That's what

Starting point is 00:02:16 Romans 8 reminds us of. Paul just rattles off all of these reasons why someone might think they could be separated from God. All of these big, powerful things that could cause a wedge between them and their relationship with their creator. But because of Christ and what he has accomplished for us on the cross and how he defeated death, we don't have to worry about that. We are forever reconciled to God if by grace through faith we have been saved. And we are a part of this grand eternal plan of redemption that through the mostly unseen and unsung acts of obedience that we do as Christians every day, the seemingly mundane acts of faithfulness and worship that we do when we simply do the next right thing, God is accomplishing his grand purposes through us. He doesn't need us, but he has chosen to use us.

Starting point is 00:03:01 And how incredible of a privilege is it to be voices of clarity and courage in this age that is just riddled with cowardice and riddled with confusion? That is what the church is. That is what Christians are. We are beacons of clarity and courage in an age that is just infected by cowardice and confusion and chaos. We can be a bulwark against those things. We can be a tower of refuge against those things by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Starting point is 00:03:27 And we get that clarity and we get that courage from, yes, God, Him himself, the Holy Spirit that he sent as a helper to be in our hearts and to live inside of us, but also through his word. And that's why on Mondays I like to focus on these subjects, these evergreen theological subjects. I look for something that seems to be confusing. A lot of us probably confuse me at some point in my life, and especially what is confusing or what's causing chaos or what's causing some kind of dissonance or some kind of like theological mishap in the lives of Christian women. and I'm certainly not immune to those infections.

Starting point is 00:04:05 And how can the Word of God add clarity to that? And so that's what we're going to be doing today specifically about therapy culture and therapy language, specifically three concepts within that realm of therapy culture and therapy language. Before we get into it, just a couple of announcements, Share the Arrow speakers. We finally announced our Share the Arrow speakers, y'all. And I just have to say, can I just say this? I feel like I can say this without it being a brag because it has nothing to do with me,

Starting point is 00:04:35 that this is the best speaker lineup that you're going to get anywhere at any Christian conference. It just is. And it's because all of these people are so amazing because God has equipped them for such a time as this. So we've got Shane and Shane leading worship. Incredible. We've got Rosaria Butterfield back for the second time. She was our inaugural speaker at our inaugural share the arrows, got a standing ovation before she even spoke because she's amazing. We've got Kosti Henn, first male speaker this year.

Starting point is 00:05:02 Also amazing. He's been on the show several times. You guys love him. We've got Elisa Childers back for the third time. And she's going to be speaking with Natasha Crane, so good at breaking down the lies of the new age and of the culture and of progressivism. We've got Grace Anna Castleberry and Audrey Broge for our talk on motherhood and homemaking and all of that beautiful stuff. And then we have one more speaker that is to be a. announced. It's also to be determined. So we've got one more special speaker and then of course

Starting point is 00:05:33 yours truly will be there too. Go to share the arrows.com. Get your tickets today. October 10th, Dallas, Texas. Women only, sorry, Relator Bros. Maybe something there will be, someday there will be something else for you, but this is a Christian women's conference. Sharetheeroes.com. Get your tickets today and do not delay. Last thing before we get into it, please leave a review for Relatable. If you love Relatable, please leave us a five-star review, Apple Podcasts wherever you listen. Subscribe on YouTube, subscribe on Spotify, subscribe on Apple Podcasts. It helps the show a lot and make sure to tell your friends about Relatable. Thank you so much for being here.

Starting point is 00:06:13 Let's get into this very controversial subject. Are you ready? Okay. If you want to know what I think is the biggest threat, the biggest threat to Christian women's worldview today, to the theology of Christian women today, to Christian women's ministry. It's actually not progressivism. It's not feminism.

Starting point is 00:06:33 It's not the New Age, all things that I've talked about many, many times. It's not even the toxic empathy that's interwoven into all of these belief systems that I just listed. It's therapy culture. I actually believe that the progressivism, feminism, toxic empathy, emotionalism, me-centeredness, new age-ish stuff that unfortunately, in fact, so many women's Bible studies, Christian women's books, and conferences are all downstream from the secular therapy pop psychology pseudo-spiritualism that we find on social media

Starting point is 00:07:09 that is dedicated to women's therapy and therapy concepts. Now, in the past, we've talked about what I dubbed in my first book, Toxic Mommy Culture. Okay. So we've been talking about that, writing about that for years. And a lot of what we're talking about today was actually written about in my first book, but I hadn't named it the way that I'm naming it now. So toxic mommy culture is the fat of complaining about motherhood on the internet and drowning your stress and wine and smut fiction. And that concept, while terrible, is not exactly what we're talking about today, but it's related to this. This is toxic therapy culture. And that is the use of therapeutic language and concepts as an excuse for complaining and self-centeredness, a replacement for sanctification

Starting point is 00:07:54 for self-denial, for generosity, and the hard work of Holy Spirit-empowered holiness. Now, before we get into the specifics on this, this is not an indictment on therapy as a whole. I've told this story many times, wrote about it in my first book of the counselor who spoke unrelenting truth to me about my eating disorder, and God used that to reroute my life. We have had multiple counselors on this show talk about how therapy can be Christ honoring and can help Christians heal and reorient their lives around God and His Word. And so I believe biblical counselors are a gift to the church. And I think that there are many seasons in a person's life when seeking out counseling

Starting point is 00:08:35 from professional, wise Christians is necessary and good. But I think many Christian women have been duped by therapeutic ideas that sound almost Christian but are not. I have been. And actually, this directs us away from the truth that God's share. with us about ourselves, our purpose, our responsibility as Christians, and what we are actually capable of. A couple of weeks ago, I got into hot water because I talked about this specifically the concept of the inner child. I'm still getting DMs about it, still getting sent videos of

Starting point is 00:09:12 therapists online very angry about my videos. So we'll get into that to set up the context and then we'll get into our three problematic concepts today and what scripture has to say. Let me pause. Let me tell you about our first sponsor for the day. And it is range leather. Y'all, I love range leather so much. They're amazing. Their products are awesome. Somewhere around here in the studio, I've got my new range leather tote. I got it a few months ago. Absolutely love it. Travel with it. Bring it with me almost everywhere because it can fit everything. I love how easy it is to clean, how durable it is. It looks great. It matches everything. That's what you're going to get with all range leather products. I mean, it's the best of the best. Super high quality because it's all

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Starting point is 00:10:16 You'll get 10% off of all range leather products when you do. go to range leather.com slash alley. All right, a couple weeks ago. Former producer Bree, I'll just throw her under the bus really fast. No, I'm grateful that she did this. She sent me a video that was kind of going viral on TikTok, and I responded to this, and we'll just kind of play a silent video of this

Starting point is 00:10:45 so you can at least see what I'm talking about. And it was this viral TikTok of a woman speaking to her inner child before going into an interview. And in the video, the woman has her eyes closed. She's kind of cradling her body. She's rocking back and forth. She's speaking in a baby voice. She's affirming the fears of awkwardness, acknowledging her nervousness.

Starting point is 00:11:03 Now, some of you might be thinking, does this person have special needs? No, this is not what that's about. Certainly, we wouldn't be highlighting something like that. This is a person whose caption says that she is speaking to her inner child. And in my response to this, because I thought it was an important concept to respond to, it was not mocking this woman who filmed and posted this at all. I simply made this statement. Are you ready? This has caused a lot of shockwaves that I did not realize it was going to cause. There's no such thing as an inner child in the Christian worldview. Childhood memories, in some cases, traumatic memories. Yes. Childhood experiences that shaped us into who we are. Yes. Childhood pain that we still carry with us, possibly. That's very true for a lot of people.

Starting point is 00:11:52 But the concept of an emotional or spiritual existence of an internal version of ourselves at six or eight or 12 years old does not exist. And I actually believe speaking to ourselves in this way can actually arrest our growth as adults and as Christians rather than develop it. So hang with me. You might completely disagree with me. And that is, okay, there was a lot of agreement on my post when I talked about this. There was a lot of respectful disagreement, which I welcome.

Starting point is 00:12:22 totally fine with that. But there was also a lot of angry protestation in the comments and stitched together responses by Instagram therapists. And some, some, not all, but somewhat far beyond disagreeing with me and into the realm of ad hominem and downright temper tantrums about my statement, which doesn't surprise me at this point, but sometimes I'm like, do you not see the irony here? That there is, you know, childish behavior kind of being played out in some of these responses by people who claim that fostering their inner child has actually made them healthier and more mature and developed. But this kind of backlash really reminded me of how pervasive therapy culture and therapy language is, not just in our society today,

Starting point is 00:13:04 but in the church today. And I believe that it hurts our theology. And if our theology is infected, the rest of our lives are going to be affected too. So today I want to go through not only this inner child concept, but two other concepts or practices and therapy that I see Christian women involved in today that I think at the very least are not neutral. They're not neutral. They are probably not healthy. And I think in some ways, okay, in some ways, listen to all of the nuances and the clarity that I am taking pains to give, go against scripture.

Starting point is 00:13:39 And we need to be really, really careful when something is outside the bounds of scripture to ask ourselves, is there a biblical basis in this? Are there aspects of this that are not true? that are not healthy, that go against what I know about the gospel, what the God says, the God of the universe says about my body and about myself, about my past, and my purpose, we should be asking that about all things, but especially psychology, because psychology claims to know something about the inner workings of the mind, even while psychology itself, the practice of it in general, in principle, actually denies the person is made in the image of God

Starting point is 00:14:17 and denies the eternal soul. So we got to be really careful when we are walking along these roads. So the first concept that we'll talk about today is the inner child theory. The second one is shadow work. And the third one is somatic therapy. Okay. So that's like the body keeps score. You're holding trauma in your body.

Starting point is 00:14:37 Okay. Wait till we get to all of these because I know some of you are gunning to, you know, try to already respond. So let's go to the first. this idea of the inner child. So depending on your TikTok algorithm, you may have come across some videos of grown women, adult women, coaxing themselves through situations as if they're children. And I am playing these for you to give you an example of what I'm talking about so you don't think I'm just pulling this out of a hat, not to mock these people, certainly not to make them

Starting point is 00:15:09 a target for anything, but these people did post this publicly. And so I think it's fair to say, We're talking about a concept. Here's an example of what I'm talking about, Sot 1. Hey, sweetie. I'm really sorry that she hit you, that she's been hitting you. You're sad and you're mad. And you also feel like you need to forgive her because she's little. And I love that about you.

Starting point is 00:15:37 But right now you just get to be upset that you've been hit, okay? Yeah, you don't like it. You don't think it. Okay. So I'm just going to play that one example. The other example that we had to play was actually the video that we've already played in the past. And you saw the voiceover of that just a few minutes ago. But there are several videos like this.

Starting point is 00:16:01 And I'm not minimizing the hurt feelings that these people have. I simply do not think that talking to ourselves as children is actually the path that we are supposed to take to deal with very real pain. So I want to talk about what the inner child concept is and how it originated. that tells us a lot about what it means. And if Christian should be toying with it, is not just a social media fad. This psychological term, inner child actually has roots in the New Age movement. And quite frankly, has parts of it that a Christian really just shouldn't tolerate and shouldn't play with. So let's go back to its beginnings. Sigmund Freud, a lot of you know who he is. He was an Austrian physician. He was often called the father of modern psychology. He argued

Starting point is 00:16:48 that early childhood experiences form unconscious patterns in our thinking. And he popularized the idea that repressed childhood trauma is what drives much of our adult behavior. So already you can see that some of that could be considered true. And other parts of it, you're like, well, is that true? Does it really drive all of our unconscious patterns of thinking or even most of our unconscious patterns of thinking? Does it really contribute majorly to who we are and what we do as adults. I think all of us just using our own common sense, whether you're a psychiatrist, psychologist or not, can say, yeah, of course. Things that have happened to us may affect how we think and how we think may affect how we talk and the things that we do. But is it driving our

Starting point is 00:17:32 subconscious. Is it driving our behavior as adults? Partly, but then also it can't be completely that because we know we just also have a sin nature that was inherited from Adam that ultimately is responsible for the wrong things that we do. Carl Jung was one of Freud students, and he expanded on this idea of the inner child and what he called the divine child. Young was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychologist who lived from 1875 to 1961. He was hugely influential in the field of psychology, and he's best known for developing the concept of archetypes, so the kind of types that people can be. And one of these archetypes is the divine child. And in Young, conception, it wasn't just the childhood trauma that affected you, but actually the concept that there

Starting point is 00:18:21 was a pure self inside of you trying to become whole. And if you read my first book or if you're familiar with people like Glennon Doyle or even people like Rachel Hollis, they might not directly cite the psychological literature, but this idea of this divine pure self inside of you, this concept of basically having an inner goddess that if it weren't for the mean things people did or said to you, if it weren't for capitalism and the patriarchy and all of and racism and all of these unfair systems, if it wasn't for mass advertising and unfair beauty standards, she would be perfect. And your goal in life, your journey in life is to go back and find her and to release her from all of these unfair expectations and your childhood trauma. And once you're able to do that, then you can manifest all of these different areas,

Starting point is 00:19:15 success. I'm not saying that's the fullness of what young taught, but we certainly see that narrative in so much of what women read and are taught today, this underlying assumption that if it weren't for all of these other factors, my inner self would be perfect and perfectly loved. And if I can find her and find a way to perfectly love her and heal her, then I'll just be okay. That is a secular new age idea. It's not a biblical idea. Jeremiah 17 tells us that our heart is actually desperately sick, who can understand it. It's not something that we should follow. Again, we inherited our sin from Adam. And so we are depraved inside. We don't have a beautiful, perfect inner goddess. We are sinners who need to be saved. And so this journey to finding the untainted, perfect, divine self

Starting point is 00:20:02 inside of us is a losing battle that actually will just encourage more self-focused, which is the thing that is depressing and trapping us, not the thing that's going to liberate us. The Jungian concept of the inner child really moved beyond psychology circles and into mainstream awareness in the 1990s. It was largely through the influence of an American counselor named John Bradshaw. In 1992, Bradshaw published Homecoming and it became a New York Times bestseller. And in that book, he argued that the inner child carries unmet emotional needs, that individuals could begin healing from mental trauma by reparenting themselves. So that's a lot of what we're seeing on TikTok.

Starting point is 00:20:45 Bradshaw's message reached an even wider audience through frequent television appearances. And he, of course, was on Oprah. And he guides her through a reparenting exercise. Just imagine you could see a little child, a little child you once were, really take a look at them. What are they wearing? Tell them, I'm the one that wrote you the letter. And I've come to get you. I want you to come home with me.

Starting point is 00:21:21 I know better than anybody what you've been through, and I love you just the way you are. Okay, so that is how that concept was kind of driven into the mainstream. And you can see Oprah's audience is female, and there's a reason why this resonates more with women than it does with men, because we are more empathetic, because we are more emotional, we are more in touch with those childhood memories and more susceptible to this. idea that we have an inner child that is in us that needs to be reparented and reloved. Before I get into all of my theological response to that, I do want to go back to who Carl Jung is, and Carl Jung is, rather, and the foundations of this belief and how what he believed is really intertwined with what we know and think about the inner child today.

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Starting point is 00:23:28 legacy box.com slash alley. So Carl Young, again, who is considered hugely influential in modern psychology and really helped to deepen and popularize this inner child concept. He was heavily influenced by the occult and astrology. And he was one of the foundational figures who influenced what we call the New Age movement, which we've talked about a lot on this show. You can go back and listen to some former episodes. You can read my first book.

Starting point is 00:24:01 we talk about that a lot. Young did not believe in a traditional conception of God, but he emphasized God as an archetype that occurred across cultures. That's what he believed about Jesus, someone that we can kind of all aspire to. You've probably heard of this idea of the Christ's consciousness. And while that was not his main idea that he popularized, he certainly pushed forward this idea that you can like take on the mind of Christ in a way that really is an alignment with Christianity at all. Again, this kind of pseudo-spiritual terminology. He also didn't believe in a Trinity. He posited something called a quaternity with Satan as one of the persons of the godhead and his archetype. He believed that good shouldn't really overcome evil, but it should

Starting point is 00:24:45 reconcile with evil. That's according to the Christian Research Institute. He also wrote that this opposition between good and evil means conflict to the last. It is the task of humanity to endure this conflict until time or turning point is reached where good and evil begin to relativize themselves, okay, until they become relative, to doubt themselves. And the cry is raised for a morality beyond good and evil, he believed. And in the age of Christianity and the domain of Trinitarian thinking, such an idea simply out of the question, because the conflict is too violent for evil to be assigned to any other logical relation to the Trinity than that of the absolute opposite. And we can get the rest of that quote because it just goes kind of on and on. So he had a completely unbiblical

Starting point is 00:25:28 idea of God of the Trinity of good and evil, sin, darkness, light, goodness. And he basically used the biblical process of salvation by faith and sanctification with a process of individuation. So he used that as a metaphor for the process of individuation or becoming whole. Again, going to that inner divine self, that inner divine child. And he used, He saw this as the process of integrating your shadow and accepting all parts of yourself, including your divine child. Okay. So that is what Carl Jung believed about the self, about God.

Starting point is 00:26:07 He certainly didn't believe in the Amago Day, like Christians believe in the Amago Day. And yet, what he believed about the self and who we are in our purpose in life is so intertwined with what students learn. when they're becoming psychiatrists and psychologists today, and so much of what we read online about the process of healing. And that's problematic that you have someone who pushed new age ideas, who believed in astrology, who basically pushed the cult of self-affirmation and the God of self that we talked about in my first book, You're Not Enough, who is really the father of those concepts. We cannot allow him and his ideas to influence what we think about ourselves and our purpose, right?

Starting point is 00:26:50 it's not that people who are false teachers can't ever say something that is true and helpful. All truth is God's truth. And so we can appreciate that. Maybe you can take aspects of what someone says and apply it to the truth. But the bigger question is that is what he is saying, is it true at all? And is it helpful? And is there an alternative in God's word that is better? And when it comes to the inner child, yes, there is an alternative or a truth in God's word that is better.

Starting point is 00:27:19 So let's explore this. Is the inner child concept biblical? So it's not. It has no real basis. It doesn't have a scientific basis, of course, but it also doesn't have a biblical basis. We simply do not have a younger self emotionally or spiritually. Obviously, I know that people aren't saying we have a physical younger self inside us, but even emotionally and spiritually living inside us.

Starting point is 00:27:42 We have memories and lasting effects from our past. You are who you are right now. you only exist in this moment at the age you currently are with all that you've lived through no part of you as a child you cannot heal the six-year-old self who was neglected and that neglect was very real if that's something that you experience and the pain you feel from that neglect it matters and it's real but only the 25 or 32 or 45 or 56-year-old self staring back at you in the mirror can actually be healed and she can't be healed by you. You've probably heard me say this before I say it all the time. The self cannot be both the problem and the solution. The self can't be both the problem and the solution. So if inside yourself you are finding these very real feelings of depression, of insecurity, of fear, you are not going to find the solutions for these emotions

Starting point is 00:28:36 in the same place you're finding the problems. It's actually a power outside of you that can heal you as you are right now. Namely, it is the God who created you, who alone has the power to heal you and to help you. And yes, he speaks to you as his daughter, no matter your age, but not as a toddler. He sees and cares about your childhood, but he communicates to you as the adult you are, not as the baby that you were. There is value, I think, in acknowledging the past and owning the pain, processing unresolved bitterness that is lingering within us. But the Christian approach to trauma is compassion. Yes, absolutely. But it is,

Starting point is 00:29:18 it is also the difficult Holy Spirit empowered work of finding our worth in Christ and forgiving those who have wronged us. And this is where true liberation is found. It is not found from self-discovery and self-love. No amount of speaking to your inner child, which doesn't actually exist, will lead you down a path of lasting fulfillment. It's only Jesus. It's only his words that can do that. And counseling in light of that truth can be helpful in healing for the Christian, but no borrowing of new age psychology will do. In scripture, we kind of see this idea, at least spiritually, of prolonged juvenility and prolonged adolescence, mimicking childishness. I won't even say childlikeness because we are called to have a childlike faith in Christ,

Starting point is 00:30:09 but a childishness, that it's not good, that it's a sign of arrested development. It's a sign of immaturity, not a sign of healing. 1 Corinthians 1311 says, when I was a child, I spoke like a child. I thought like a child. I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. Also, Ephesians 414, urges maturity so that, quote, we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried out by every wind of doctrine.

Starting point is 00:30:39 doctrine by human cunning. Children are precious within Christianity, but this prolonged adolescence is associated with a lack of spiritual development, okay, not an advancement of spiritual development. This inner child concept has the potential, I think, to untether us from reality, to focus on our own power to self-heal rather than on the healing power of the God who created us and the Christ who died for us. Hebrews also stresses the need for believers to become matured. For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of God. You need milk, not solid food. For everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness since he is a child.

Starting point is 00:31:22 But solid food is for the mature for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish from evil. So that's Hebrews 512 through 14. So again, I just want to highlight. It's not that being a child is bad within Christianity. One of the culturally radical aspects of Christianity is how valued children are that we had this Jesus who came to earth as a baby. And against the protestation of his disciples said, let the little children come to me for such as these belong, the kingdom of heaven and says we must have faith like a child to enter the kingdom of heaven. So there is a preciousness of children within our faith. but we also recognize the naivete of children, the vulnerability of children, that when it comes to

Starting point is 00:32:08 our spiritual growth, that we are to look more like grownups, more like adults, more like the mature and less like children. Because as we just read, they have the propensity to be tossed to and fro by every wind of doctrine. There is a strength that we who are mature are meant to take on through the power of the Holy Spirit. And I think at worst, the kind of self-coddling that we see in a lot of the at least social media inner child work has an infantilizing effect on us and actually might, I'm not saying it always says this, might lead us to a lack of accountability and a lack of ownership of our life, a lack of realizing that we do have agency. And we have been given by God authority in certain realms of our lives and the ability to grow up

Starting point is 00:33:04 into him who is the head. That's what Ephesion says that the body of Christ is to do. We are to grow. We are to change. And again, it's not to discount that what happened to us as a child matters that there may be something to heal from. But I don't think the self-infantilizing talk is going to, quote, re-parent you into self-discovery and self-fulfillment. God is our father. If you have a father wound, if you have a mother wound, you have a God who created you, who knows you, who cares for you, who loves you so much that he sent his own son to die for you, who calls you, his daughter, if you have been saved through Christ.

Starting point is 00:33:42 And that is where, that is real re-parenting if you want that. You can't do it yourself, okay? The reliance on the self that we see. the inner child work, I mean, it goes back all the way to the garden. Did God really say, you can be like God? You can't be like God. And I think it's important for us to realize this. Okay, let's talk about shadow work. Let me pause, tell you about our next sponsor. It is Every Life. Okay, you should join the Changing Lives Club. That's what you're a part of when you subscribe to every life and you get their awesome diapers in wipes or pull-ups and wipes every month. We subscribe to

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Starting point is 00:35:05 Here's the truth. The version of you who procrastinates, who people pleases, who avoids, who overreacts, chases validation, gets defensive, picks, fights, or numbs out. She didn't come out of nowhere. She's a collection of everything that you had to become to feel safe in a world that didn't feel safe. That is your shadow. and ignoring her is what's keeping you stuck.

Starting point is 00:35:24 Okay. So see again. We have this new age definition of human nature. The dismissal of the reality of the sin that we have inherited. The dismissal of the reality of our agency over bad choices that we make, a lack of accountability, a lack of ownership, a lack of responsibility. Also, there's a relativism here between good and bad. And I see this a lot in children's movies.

Starting point is 00:35:52 nowadays. The trend now is to recast previously understood villains as like these misunderstood characters that are, you know, oppressed by Cinderella are like actually nice underneath it all. And I actually think that's very dangerous and you're teaching kids, one, not to take responsibility for their actions, but also to blur the lines between right and wrong and good and evil. Okay. So this is just another way to excuse bad. So the concept of the shableness. So the concept of the shadow, just like inner child work has its roots in Freud and Young. Freud posited that a lot of our impulses are unconscious motivated by parts of our psyche that were unaware of. And then his student, Carl Young, introduced this concept of the shadow as part of the unconscious mind. And his

Starting point is 00:36:40 formulation of the shadow is essentially a group of traits that we repress or deny, describing it as the thing a person has no wish to be. So here's another. explanation. Stop five. Shadow work is finding and focusing of yourself. We have learned over time to hate and judge these parts. Shadow work is important to send these parts love to accept these parts. Why you may ask, these dark parts make us whole humans.

Starting point is 00:37:21 Okay. So you see a little bit of the concept of what we talked about. earlier with young believing that we need to reconcile good and evil. It's not that good needs to conquer evil. It's that we need to reconcile good and evil. Go beyond the idea of good and evil into something more transcendent. If you don't see how satanic this is and how Satan uses a sophisticated sounding language to make sin seem palatable, then it's just time for us to be reading our Bibles a little bit more and ask God for wisdom. And he promises to give us wisdom if we ask for it.

Starting point is 00:37:55 So Young argued that the shadow self can include negative impulses like anger or resentment, but also positive impulses like creativity. So again, you see these blurring of the lines. In this formulation, integrating your shadow self as part of understanding your past, childhood relationships, repressed trauma. Integrating the shadow self into your persona helps you unlock hidden potential. The idea is that we repressed this shadow to conform to moral expectations and social norms of our culture.

Starting point is 00:38:21 So it's not that, according to Young, the shadow is necessarily bad. Again, it's just kind of like misunderstood. His ideas were largely confined to the field of psychology. But again, just like the inner child in the 1970s and 1990s, these ideas spread into the self-help movement. Thank you, Oprah, New Age spirituality, human potential movement. And also people who claim to be part of the church are like a part of this. The big self-help movement in the prosperity. gospel preachers. Like, they preach a version of all of this, even if they don't realize they are. The concept of shadow work really boomed in popular culture in 2021. There's a publication of the Shadow Work Journal by Keila Shaheen. And I think we have a video of that. Yeah. So this book just, it's apparently super popular and people are writing in their journals about it. And of course, people claim that it's changing their lives. By 2023, the Guardian reported that Shadow Work videos on TikTok had passed one billion views. So the question is, of course, is it biblical? Is Shadowwork

Starting point is 00:39:31 biblical? Shadowwork is not biblical. It's an approach based on moral relativism, and it stems from Young's heretical system influenced by mysticism, by Eastern philosophy. Our sinful nature and our impulses like envy and anger and lust are not parts of us that we need to integrate or understand better. The Bible does not treat sin as something to integrate into our lives or to understand better. Paul writes very clearly, put to death, therefore, what is earthly in you. So it's not shadow because again, these people are trying to make good and evil as something as abstract. But Paul says it's actually the least abstract thing in the world. It's earthly. Earthly in you, sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire and covetousness, which is

Starting point is 00:40:18 idolatry. Colossians 3.5. It is true that we may be unaware of the extent of our sinfulness and need to bring that to lay because the prophet Jeremiah wrote, the heart is deceitful above all things, desperately sick, who can understand it? Jeremiah 179. David also says, who can discern his errors, declare me innocent from hidden faults? Keep back your servant also from presumptuous sins.

Starting point is 00:40:40 So we don't even know all of our sins. They're deep inside of our intentions. Let them not have dominion over me. But David doesn't say I'm going to do my shadow work and do my work of self-discovery to try to really understand these misunderstood parts of myself. And he actually was being unjustly pursued and oppressed and misunderstood in a lot of ways. And yet he is seeking God to search him out. In another part of the Psalms, he says, search me and know my heart, see if there be any wayward way in me. So there may be aspects of our motivations that are dark, that we aren't aware of,

Starting point is 00:41:17 but the solution is to pray to God that he would reveal those things in us and confess them and call them evil and say, I am responsible for those things. It's a little bit difficult to understand these theological concepts of inheriting original sin and also being responsible for the sins that we commit. And there are many theological scholars who have talked about that reconciliation. And yet it's true. This mystery is true is that we are born sinful with the capacity, propensity to sin. It doesn't mean we've actively sin yet.

Starting point is 00:41:47 but also we are responsible for our sins. John writes, and this is the good news, this is the real liberating news. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. That's first John 1.9. There's a manifestation coach who talks about shadow work and talks about shame specifically when it comes to a person's shadow. We'll get to the subject of shame in just a second.

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Starting point is 00:43:13 So there's this idea that shame is incredibly harmful. You've heard this. You've heard this in Christian circles, that shame is bad, guilt. it's good, shame is bad. Shame is always bad. Shame is always of the devil. Again, that's not a biblical concept that comes from popular psychology. And here is what it sounds like in popular psychology. SOT 6. There's nothing to be ashamed of. There's a quote by some philosopher that I should now for credibility. Nothing that is human is alien to me. It's essentially realizing that you can waste your life being ashamed over a whole plethora of things. Really, even the darkest parts

Starting point is 00:43:46 of the human psyche deserve a voice because the more they are repressed, the more they out in passive, aggressive action. Think about how spirituality is repressed in the Christian church and how that plays out. That's a call for shadow work. Okay. So your bad impulses should absolutely not only be repressed and suppressed and controlled because self-control is a fruit of the Holy Spirit, but they need to be crucified, right? Like, yes, they may need to be brought to light, but brought to light in order that they may be crucified, not that they manifest themselves in a non-passive aggressive way. And like what is what's the better thing there in her mind? Oh, oh no, your feelings of anger might manifest themselves passive aggressive. Yeah, I'd rather you roll your eyes at me than like commit

Starting point is 00:44:34 murder. Like I think passive aggressive is actually a better for society manifestation of our evil impulses than aggressive. And so repression, suppression, crucifixion of bad impulses is like a really good thing. These evil impulses are not misunderstood. They're actually worse than we think. That's one of Jesus's main messages. When he says, you've heard it said, thou shall not murder. I'm telling you that the anger that you have in your heart is akin to murder. You've heard it said, don't commit adultery. I say to you, the lust that you have for another woman is the same as committing adultery. And, oh, it's better to pluck out your eye than to look at a woman lessfully. It is better to cut off your hand than to steal, than to want something that's not yours than to covet. Okay, so Jesus takes sin to a whole other internal level.

Starting point is 00:45:24 It's not just about what we do aggressively or passive aggressively. It is about the state of our heart. It's about the state of our intention. So again, all of this just flies in the face of the Christian message. It flies in the face of Jesus. Now, speaking of shame specifically, there are times when shame is bad, when Satan the accuser is bringing up past sins that God has already forgiven you for, you've repented of when he's making you feel ashamed of abuse that you endured for someone else that is someone else. That's not your fault. But by and large, shame is not the problem that we have in our society. Sin is the problem that we have in our society and shamelessness over sin. In mere Christianity, one of my favorite books of all time. And so if you have not read it, read it. C.S. Lewis writes

Starting point is 00:46:05 this, human beings all over the earth have this curious idea that they ought to behave a certain way and cannot really get rid of it. Secondly, that they do not in fact behave in that way. They know the law of nature, they break it. These two facts are the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in. So he's saying that shame is a part of that. Shame is the delta between what you're supposed to do and what you actually do. If there is a delta, then that is where shame exists. And when people can't name that, when they can't say, oh, the reason that there's a gap between what I feel like I'm supposed to do and what I actually do is because it breaks God's law when they can't name it or when they don't believe or hate Christianity, then they say,

Starting point is 00:46:49 well, then the shame I feel must be wrong. Then there must not really be a gap. I must just be able to determine what's right based on my feelings. That's why it's so important for us to speak the truth. But that's where the shadow work thing comes in to try to justify and rationalize away shame. The shame all human beings feel and not being able, or maybe not all human beings, but many human beings should feel about how they're supposed to behave actually does point us to a law. It points us to God's law. It points us to God. And the Bible has the answer for the problem of shame. 2 Corinthians 7 9 through 11 says, as it is, I rejoice, not because you were grieved, but because you were grieved into repenting. For you felt a godly grief so that you suffered no loss through

Starting point is 00:47:33 us. For godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation without regret, whereas worldly grief produces death. For see what earnestness this godly grief has produced in you, he writes to the church in Corinth, but also with eagerness to clear yourselves, what indignation, what fear, what longing, what zeal, what punishment. True shame and true guilt over sin leads us to repentance. It's a good thing. In Christ, we can be washed of the shame of our past. That's the only way to be truly cleansed of guilt. But of course, we continue to send and we continue to feel guilty in a lot of ways. But we can be rid of the accusations of the evil one,

Starting point is 00:48:16 not just by rationalizing the bad things we do or the bad impulses that we have, but by saying, Lord, I surrender them to you. I know they're not right. And sanctify me, make me more like you, continuing to confess our sin and through the power of the Holy Spirit to be better. And we long for the day when we actually are cleansed from sin.

Starting point is 00:48:34 That is one thing, shadow work and all of the psychology stuff is trying to do. it's trying to in an un-biblical satanic way bring the goodness of future heaven here on earth saying oh you don't want to feel bad about sin anymore you want to be liberated from these oppressive systems you want to not have to worry about your mistakes you want to no longer feel shame here you can do all of these things when for the christian we know we get a taste of all of those things through christ here on earth but it won't be until the other side of glory that we are truly liberated from the pain and the burden and the effects of sin.

Starting point is 00:49:09 Psychology has a parallel, maybe it's perpendicular, but it's like parallel but an evil track toward paradise, toward utopia of salvation and sanctification that leads you closer into yourself. What it doesn't tell you is that when you get there, you find a lot of ugly and shameful stuff. It's not this beautiful inner child divine self that you were promised that you were going to find. Christianity leads you away from the self. You die to yourself.

Starting point is 00:49:44 You deny yourself. And it's really hard along the way. It's not fun. It doesn't go viral. It's not popular. You're not going to see it glamorized in modern culture. But at the end of that, you get Christ. At the end of that, you get real satisfaction in heaven.

Starting point is 00:49:57 And gosh, it's just like Satan to do that, to switch things up on us with things that sound really good. All right. Let's now talk about, let's end this on somatic therapy or unleashing trauma that is trapped in the body. And I'm going to have to shorten this a little bit. And if you're like, oh, gosh, I really wish that we had talked more about that. Then I will try to follow up on this because I know that this is one that's super popular among Christian cultures or Christian women. And it's a little bit more nuanced because I don't think all of this is a lie. I think it is incomplete. and therefore can lead us in their wrong direction. So I'll try to get through this last part as quickly as I can. Let me go ahead and tell you about our last sponsor before I get there. And that is NetSuite. So every business is asking the same question. How do we make AI work for us? The possibilities are in list and guessing is too risky, but sitting on the sidelines is not an option because one

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Starting point is 00:51:41 Okay, somatic therapy. I had known about this, seen videos about this. I hadn't really thought very deeply about it. I was kind of one of those people that just believed, yeah, like this is probably true. This is a really interesting way that God made us. And I still think that partly, but once again, we get into some new age things that just aren't biblically true. So let's talk about what somatic therapy is first. It's a form of body-centered therapy that claims trauma is trapped in the body, the nervous system, and the muscles. There's a health and wellness coach named Mike Chang. He gives his movement guide to releasing trauma stored in the body, SOT 7. The first thing is vibrating and shaking the body. Doing so allows you to be able to increase the

Starting point is 00:52:23 energy circulation and get the energy moving. The second thing, is doing strength training. Something like doing push-ups exerts the body so we're able to go deep inside the muscles to literally force that energy to come out. The next thing is stretching. Something like doing a pancake split, elongates the muscle, stretches it out. So this way we're able to release emotions through stretching. Okay, I have a little bit of a hard time with that because I've done all of those moves before. And I've never felt emotional except for I wish I could stop doing this because it hurts. So I don't know if there's also some mental aspect where you have to think about like releasing trauma. We have some exercises that we can show you voice over

Starting point is 00:53:09 two that like, okay, so these these are the kinds of things like you're supposed to, if you're watching this, throw a pillow down on the ground. I'm not kidding. It says sumo wrestler stance. You're supposed to flex and point your feet. This is going to release fear, going to release anger, it's going to release overwhelm, you pull one ear firmly, anxiety. It's supposed to help you kind of in the fetal position. And I don't doubt that some of these mechanisms may have a calming effect on your body. But here's the underlying idea in this. SOT 8. Even if you don't consciously remember your trauma, your nervous system does. Trauma isn't just the event. It's what gets imprinted on the body. Even when your mind moves on, time passes, your body stays stuck in survival.

Starting point is 00:53:55 This shows up as chronic patterns of fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. We see it in our posture, our muscular tension, our breathing patterns, in persistent feelings of unease, distressed, or hypervigilance without really knowing why. Now, trauma doesn't just disrupt memory. It actually enhances implicit memory or unconscious memory. This means you may not be able to remember or verbalize the event clearly, but your body still reacts as if it's happening. Okay, maybe.

Starting point is 00:54:23 And then we have, okay, so there's V-O-3 is like, this video shows a man allegedly releasing stress from his body by shaking. I think this is a man or a woman. This is, again, one of these sessions where people, it's almost like those like super Pentecostal revivals where people are kind of like on the floor shaking, filled with the Holy Spirit. It reminds me of that. Okay, I saw this. Singer and songwriter, Leon Rhymes, she's brought to tears after a few movements with a somatic therapist.

Starting point is 00:54:58 These are really going around right now. Sot 9. I got you. Oh, my God. You got it. I feel safe. I feel safe. I can let this go.

Starting point is 00:55:09 I can love this girl. Oh, my God. Wow. Oh, my God. Do we carry grief in our hips? Yes. Okay, so there's a lot of videos going around of her really, you know, emotional crying after some of these position changes. So this idea was popularized by this book.

Starting point is 00:55:35 I had heard of this book. I don't know if you have by this 2014 book called The Body Keeps the Square, Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. He wrote trauma is not just an event that took place sometime in the past. It is also the imprint left by that experience on mind, brain, and body. This imprint has ongoing consequences for how the human organism manages to survive in the present. So these theories are very scientifically contested in a 2021 study. They found that somatic experiencing effectiveness and key factors of a body-oriented trauma therapy, that there is some preliminary evidence for positive effects for things like PTSD,

Starting point is 00:56:15 but overall studies quality assessment indicate that the overall study quality is mixed. Also, clinical neuropsychiatry a study says that this idea is not supported by past or current knowledge and in several instances is inconsistent with a broader evidence based that it's actually untenable because it is not defensible based on existing neurophysiological evidence. And so scientifically, just from a secular perspective, it is very contentious actually whether or not this has a scientific basis. But also, we've got a new age crossover here. it is popular online form. It has significant overlap with these new age and eastern ideas. Pop therapy trends that push somatic experiences, use phrases like your body's wisdom or your body knows from a post on trauma therapist institute titled Reconnect with Your Body, Sematic Exercises, and Reflections, allow you to honor your body's wisdom and its capacity for healing,

Starting point is 00:57:13 marking significant steps in a holistic healing process. So again, lot of the language we see is that it's about the self, that inside you there is this inner knowledge, this divine wisdom that just needs to be tapped into by this work of self-discovery and self-love. This framing of the body is a source of sacred knowledge or higher intelligence mirrors very classic New Age ideas like the body as a manifestation of psyche or spirit. Example in New Age literature would be in the 2007 self-help book, the secret language of your body. We see, quote, wisdom of the body language, like in this quote, you need to learn how to focus within and allow the innate wisdom of your body to notify you as to when it needs to

Starting point is 00:57:59 work and when it needs to rest. In all of this, just like all new age concepts have ties to Buddhism. In his book, Somatic Descent, how to unlock the deepest wisdom of the body, Buddhist academic Reginald A. Ray writes for tantric Buddhism, the tradition in which I was trained, the old ultimate enlightened wisdom is found in the body. The wisdom of the body is not just one spiritual experience among many others. It is the ultimate experience or realization, including all others, capable of bringing us to complete human fulfillment. Okay. So there are some troubling aspects of this that I think we need to be careful about. We do, of course, have brain body loops. Our brain does talk to our body all day long. It sends signals to the body, receives feedback

Starting point is 00:58:43 from it, creating ongoing feedback loops that influence. everything from our heart rate to our stress responses that is very well established. But there is no evidence of energy leaving your body when you shake. Many systems of thought build on a small kernel of truth and extend it far beyond with the evidence actually supports. The presence of something true at the foundation does not mean that the entire framework on top of it should be accepted. Stretching can be healthy. That doesn't mean that we have to embrace yoga in all of its corresponding spiritual practices. Even if the evidence shows this is helpful to make you feel better, it can't resolve your deepest need. And I think that's what's important here. Like breathing exercises

Starting point is 00:59:23 can be helpful, but they're not going to deal with your sin. It can't make us more holy. It can't make us more healed ultimately because that only comes from Christ. So my issue with this is not that like getting massages or stretching or certain kinds of exercises can't help regulate your nervous system or I don't know. Maybe there is some emotion. effect that it can have that we don't totally understand, but know that this is not a treatment for sin and suffering. Treating sin, suffering, or emotional struggles as purely physiological problems solvable by these techniques instead of God's word falls into medicalizing the mind, as we discussed in our interview with Dr. Greg Gifford, which I just really encourage you to go back and

Starting point is 01:00:05 listen to. There's something that he said in that interview that I think about every day, he said your body can't make you sin. Your mood, your hormones, like how tired you are, what time of the month it is, it can't make you sin. Okay. So if that's true, if like the body doesn't have that power, the body also can't heal you from sin and trauma. One of Satan's subtler tactics is not to directly oppose Christian teaching, but to introduce an alternative way of thinking that gradually erodes and replaces it in our lives. So these somatic exercises can subtly shift blame to the body. My nervous system is just dysregulated rather than calling for sanctification and for repentance.

Starting point is 01:00:48 Jesus had to deal with all kinds of confusion over the role of the physical body. The Jews had extreme focus on physical rituals that he thought would keep them clean. But Jesus, again, he brought it to the heart. It is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but what comes out of his mouth, this defiles a person. And so Jesus dealt with a lot of this confusion. about what righteousness looked like, what cleansing looked like, that it wasn't just about these physical aspects. Certainly wasn't these pseudo-psychological new age aspects, that it was a matter of soul and heart in mind and body intertwined, but only through the power of the Holy Spirit,

Starting point is 01:01:31 not by going more deeply into ourselves, but into God, his objective truth and his word, rightly understanding ourselves and sin and good and evil. Really all of this, so much of modern psychology is all about self-help, self-healing, self-discovery, self-fulfillment. And of course it's enticing. It's enticing for the same reason that the fruit and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was enticing because it entices you to think that you can be like God. I'm not saying every aspect of every psychological concept or every aspect.

Starting point is 01:02:06 or every aspect of somatic therapy is all demonic and wrong. I'm saying really be careful. Really compare everything you do, everything you imbib, everything that informs your patterns of thinking to the Word of God. And I'm telling myself that just as much as anyone else. I think there are so many underlying assumptions that affect our theology and our view of ourselves that we don't really understand. So maybe it's just a good thing for you to think about, for us all to think about,

Starting point is 01:02:34 is what I think about myself in healing. Is it informed by scripture? Is it informed by therapy? Is it informed by the rock of ages or is it informed by the new age? Because that really matters. All right. That's all we got time for today. We will be back here on Wednesday.

Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 1332 | Inner Child, Shadow Work & Somatic Therapy: A Warning to Christian Women

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