The Numbing Trap: From Ozempic to "Biohacking" our Way Out of Reality 💉🧠

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Speaker 1: The world is becoming increasingly proficient at telling stories that deny God. As such, we need Thinking Christian to become as natural as breathing. Welcome to the Thinking Christian Podcast. I'm doctor James Spencer, and through calm, thoughtful theological discussions, Thinking Christian highlights the ways God is working in the world and questions the underlying social, cultural, and political assumptions that hinder Christians from becoming more like Christ. Now onto today's episode of Thinking Christian. He called to make a difference in mental health. Columbia International University offers graduate counseling degrees that combine professional excellence with Biblical truth from associates. Through doctoral program, CiU prepares you to bring healing and wholeness to others through a biblically based framework of compassion and care. Whether it's their k CREP accredited Masters in Clinical Counseling or their PhD in counselor Education and Supervision, You'll learn from experience faculty who integrate faith with real world application to cultivate a Kingdom impact through disciples who counsel, teach, and train. Whether you're starting your journey or advancing your career, CiU's counseling programs equip you to serve others both professionally and spiritually. Visit CiU dot edu to learn more about making a difference in mental health through christ centered education. That's CiU dot edu. Hey everyone, welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian. I'm doctor James Spencer. I'm joined again by Ben Matthews. Ben is a professor of counselor education at Columbia International University. And today we're going to be talking a little bit about addiction and the numbing effects of addiction and the new drug trends that are coming out. And Ben and I were talking a little bit before the episode. I'm most familiar with this. I still stay involved a little bit with the fitness industry and try to keep up there. And one of the things that you're seeing if you look at any sort of fitness thing on Instagram or if you just read any of the literature, you're seeing this increase in testosterone placement therapy. You're seeing an increase in steroid use. You're seeing use of drugs like the glp ones and ozembic those are kind of all over the place, and all of these maybe except for the GOLP ones, which there's not been a long term sort of study on these, but everybody knows what happens with the antabolic steroids, like it's not pretty later and you're having younger and younger kids get on this stuff, and no matter how much people push back in the fitness industry like hey, don't take this until you're older or whatever, it's being normalized in ways that is really strange and is creating these very short term trade offs between I can get a big Instagram following and get huge and get cut and I guess I don't care about the long term effects of anabolic steroids. It's a very strange movement. And my sense is that it's not limited to the fitness industry, and so that's sort of just a little entred into what we're to be talking about here.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, and it's something that we're seeing within the mental health community as well. In a past graduate program I did, one of my internships was at an outpatient psychiatric clinic, and so I was mainly working with physicians who were mainly just working with prescriptions. And this was kind of you know, late nineties, early two thousands, as we were seeing the rise of what's known as SSRIs selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors as a major advancement for therapeutic use for things like depression and anxiety and obsessive compulsive disorder and a host of other things that are connected to the neurotransmitter serotonin. What we've appreciated over time is that, yeah, there's probably an element of serotonagic engagement regarding mental health issues. But to say that it's simply a physiological that it's just a neurotransmitter that's being developed was the concern that we started seeing in that people just thought, well, if I just take this pill and get my chemistry right, life will be great.

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Speaker 1: All good, Yeah, it's all good, and.

00:04:15
Speaker 2: Not recognizing well, no, your physiology is one component of the problem, and yes, this may help that one component, but if you don't address all the other not just biological, but psychological, social, spiritual elements that go into holistic understandings of humanity, it's no surprise that we would only see the increase of dosage here because they're never dealing with it over there. Kind of like the steroid user, well, I don't want to have to do all things, but if I just increase my steroid intake, I'll get ripped faster and cut quicker. And well, yeah, no, you're you're actually making the problem worse, and that you're relying on this one what I call a common grace of God. I do look at medicine as a means that can help, and I don't want to again, kind of like technology, I don't think we should throw it all away. I think it's it's obviously done good for society in many many ways. But if we're just it's the mechanistic concern, right, if we're just a machine, then that's the answer. But from a Christian perspective, we know we're more than just a machine. We are this holistic reality of mind, body, spirit that all elements need to be engaged with. And there's sometimes a concern that we have that I think we're coming to an understanding of that with SSRIs. Yeah, there is another concern that we're now kind of treating the therapeutic community in general kind of as the next I can say it this way, the next SSRI. If I can just get the therapy I need, it'll all be great.

00:05:49
Speaker 1: Yeah. This came up at the end of our last episode, and I think you said it really well there, it's like it's meeting the need, but it can sustain the need exactly. It can't be the long term solution here. Here there's you know, it's almost like there's a a little mini crisis happening. Let's say, and and so everybody's on triage and as the triage system. This is a really good triage, right, it's an aspect of a triage system. But if something else doesn't get fixed, this is going to cease to work at some point, right right, Like, this isn't gonna the mash ten is not going to hold we if we don't you know, if we don't figure something else out along the sides here, some other areas have to be addressed.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, And it goes from a point of well, yeah, it can meet the need. But when it, like we said before, it doesn't sustain it, but we keep on using it, it becomes then not just a matter of addressing the problem, but now I got to use it to kind of just numb the problem. Like, Okay, it continues not work, but I'm in the cycle of it now, I'm in the constant grip of it. Whether that be a pharma pharmacological reality, whether that be alcohol. The article we keep referencing talked about the particular spike of alcoholism, yes, and the corollaries to that, and how that just continue to see this increase of liver disease and all kinds of problems because they thought and it did help on a little level, but once you get into the grips of it, now you're just having to use it to maintain numbness, not health, not above the fray, but just to be able to kind of basic function, to just numb the pain that you're dealing with at some point. But it continues just to dig the hole, right, it actually makes things worse, so you just take more, and this endless cycle of addiction just continues to spiral out of hand.

00:07:53
Speaker 1: When I think it's an intes Mark Lewis wrote this article in the New England Journal of Medicine, and I'm not an addiction expert by any stretch of the imagination. So his argument was that addiction is less a disease state than it is a learned behavior. Now, I don't know that i'd be that strong on it, but one of the things he said really rang true with me, which was one we get into when people are addicted, their social world shrink. And so you know, Ben, if I'm addicted and I know that you're going to tell me I should go get help, I'm probably going to avoid you, right like I don't. You're of no help to me because you're not going to help me feed my addiction. So I'm going to seek out people who are only going to help me feed my addiction. And that's how the social world narrows, because now the point of life is to get past this, to get this thing that I think I need. And so the other options that might otherwise be available right to me, the choices that I might make in my life, sort of fade into the background. I can't see him anymore. There's a real way in which they cease to exist for me, right because I'm so focused on this one thing. And so he calls this like narrowing. It's been phrased as reciprocal narrowing, where the addiction continually narrows you down so that eventually you're just really seeking exactly what you're addicted to.

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Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:09:21
Speaker 1: Yeah, I like the model. Like I said, I'm not sure on the science, that's just not my area, but I like the model and it seems intuitively correct to say, even with something like therapy, you could see how that would begin to work. If therapy is the solution to my problem, I'm going to continue going to therapy, and it doesn't really matter what anyone else says to me, like, be sure, friends might help, but I've got therapy. You know, all these other being part of a community group, sure that might help, but I've got therapy. And like, a lot of these things are going to become I think, increasingly difficult to convince people to go and do, simply because if lewis right about his reciprocal narrowing, it's going to be really difficult to get people off, you know. And I don't think it's about drugs. It's about this sort of narrowing a perception so that these other solutions no longer feel like solutions. We've so framed the problem as Nope, it's a problem that only you know. The solution to this problem is therapy, and once you do that, it's very difficult to understand what other options might be available to you.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, and I agree, I think there may be an an oversimplification of maybe what he's stating, and we need to give some space for that. I do think there was a research done a number of years ago by Alexander It's called rat Park experiment. I don't know if you've heard of that before, but it was trying to get into some of these things that you were talking about. They essentially had two groups of rats, one that we're in a preclosed system, one that had this like essentially rat paradise. Right, they had open fields, they kind of had full access to, you know, members of the opposite sex, so very closed, and they both had access to a morphine drip. Okay, the research has been tried to replicate a couple of times with some levels of success and things like that, so there's some good criticisms of it. But what the finding is essentially were was that those that were in like rat paradise had a lower incidence of engaging with the morphine and continued engage or addiction of it. Yeah, comparatively to those that were in a much more stressful, confined space that didn't have all the luxuries as all the all the blessings if I can't even use that word. They found the utilization of the morphine drip to be more in the sense addictive Now again, I don't want to to to flatten addiction out to just well, just change your environment, life will be better. That's way too much of an oversimplification, agreed. But what the research did highlight was that we're again naive to think that there isn't a sociological societal connection to why people are constantly engaging with numbing activities like morphine, if not gambling, if not drugs, if not social media, whatever it is that we continue to then utilize, not just because of its numbing properties that kind of just flatten us out to not have to deal with the larger things, but because we're not engaging in these larger perspectives of what we need for a functioning society, community, recreation, engagement of intimacy, all the things that these rats were able to have. How much more do we need as people made in the image of God? That when those are gone, it doesn't cause addiction, but it makes addiction a lot more powerful, It gives it more precedence in a person's life. When you don't have all the things that you need for human flourishing, you will reach out for whatever you can to numb the pain. And there's something about that that I think that needs to speak into. I think what even counseling is doing these days, what the therapeutic community is doing, is we're providing another morphine drip of sorts where people are struggling and they're hurting, and again, I think we need to meet them where they're at. Yeah, but if we're not dealing with these larger systemic realities of what's constituting why they're in pain, am I just feeding the addiction? And that's part of the stewardship thing that I was talking about before that as part of a member of this community, I want to speak lovingly, winsomely, but clearly to my colleagues and say, what are we doing not just to help at the moment, but to actually help with the greater need that I think is pressing as to what got people into that moment as well.

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Speaker 1: No, so you're saying we need a rap paradise at the end of the day, I'm hearing that clearly, totally get No. I agree, I mean, and I don't want to boil addiction down to just environment either, but I'm with you. I think there are factors. Environmental factors are real. We shouldn't be ignoring them. The chemical dependencies are real and we shouldn't be ignoring them. That you know, the psychological factors are real and we shouldn't be ignoring them. And so in saying just those three, if you are only to address the psychological factors and environmental and the physiological aside, you're.

00:14:34
Speaker 3: Probably not going to solve the problem, right, exactly, right, Like there needs to be these more holistic approaches and understandings to how we would go about addressing these things, because if there aren't.

00:14:46
Speaker 1: The problem is going to probably not going to get solved. Yeah, right, And I mean I think that's sort of the challenge here is we we don't know how to we probably should we probably we probably should know how to address it holistically. But again, as our study that we've been basing this on the death of the spare study, I'll use this example as barriers as there are lower barriers to entry to anything, you can expect for the quality of those things to decline. Yeah right now, I'm not saying that the therapeutic environment is in decline. So when I'm saying quality, here's what I'm saying. The sort of people who are going to come and seek therapy, probably don't necessarily need to come and seek therapy, right, Like, That's part of the overall quality of the environment. And I think you've articulated that really well. So it's not saying you're going to get a second rate therapist, it's saying you probably didn't need therapy in the first place. That degrades the quality of what's going on there to some degree. It sort of pulls it down from when you're dealing with someone who has a complex trauma to someone who you know, got a paper cut this morning and they're really distraught about it, right right. So so there's that aspect, And what kind of comes to my mind, you know, is we think about access and what we have access to and what's fairly addictive. Nowadays it's not just drugs, although that's also the case, but you know, you think about something like pornography.

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Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:16:21
Speaker 1: Yeah, Like I can remember growing up as a kid and you had these video stores, these mythic animal video stores that nobody knows what I'm talking about anymore. You used to have to go to a store roun a.

00:16:33
Speaker 2: Video to go to a place, right Yeah.

00:16:35
Speaker 1: And even before VHS tapes, you'd have the CD sort of adult theaters. But just think about the societal restraints that were in place to access these places. You had to be over a certain age to get in, You had to overcome any sort of fear that you would be seen entering or exiting these places. Right. You know, in the case of a video store, if you wanted to get an adult movie, you had to actually bring it to whoever was at the counter, and right, like, you have all these like sort of oddities that you have to go through, and you like psychologically you have to overcome these and be like, Okay, I guess it's worth it, right, Whereas now there are basically none of those nothing, right. And so even some of the legislation related to age requirements that has been put in place, I was I've been doing some watching of that, and people are actually saying, like, it's curtailing pornography use because people don't want to verify their age because it makes the activity less anonymous. And so that's what I mean, Like, when we have these barriers to entry that are really really low, people are going to flow into those spaces that have no reason to be there. Yeah, right, and and this sort of over flows the system.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, right, which is where we're at it, right.

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Speaker 1: And and it's like maybe if we just ratchet the barriers up a little bit, if we if we created some environmental structure and and and made it so that not everybody needed to come in, we could solve this problem. But that's not a therapist problem. That's a societal problem.

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Speaker 2: And that's that's a great point, James, because the hope is that we're I mean, the deeper work of healing is about rebuilding meaning and belonging. That that needs to happen in the context of those communities that were becoming more isolated for more anonymous from you know that the problem is not necessarily uh that that we are sexual beings and desire to find stimulation of that. It's where we think it's best found, right exactly that that that that continues to be the narrative unfortunately from the garden right. If I can just get it on my terms, if I can just build my own reality, then I can be God. I can do as I want in that sense, And unfortunately, we continue to believe the lie. We continue to build the lie and become much more insular, much more isolated. And so for me again as a therapist. I want to give space opportunity for people to talk about those things, those struggles, And yet I also realize I need to push, I need to challenge people to say, yeah, but this needs to happen long before you probably came into my office. Now, whether that's a lack of the local church or the community, or yourself, or it's probably a mix of most of those things, right, And so how can I then both give you space to kind of discuss those realities and say, Okay, how do we rebuild that? And that, to me is part of the joy of what I do in counseling. I not only want to help you in the moment, I want to help rebuild towards something better that this is. I mean to put it in the arc of the gospel narrative, we're on this side of the cross. The work is done, and we're doing the work. He declares triumphantly, it is finished. And so we know that the redemption, as it were, is complete. And yet kind of like the garden, we're in the garden two point zero where God says, Okay, now, I'd like to partner with you to then re engage, to re repurpose the earth and the communities that I set up for flourishing, not because I need you, not like he needed Adam and Eve in Garden one point. Oh right, but he wants to work with us as image bearers. I now have a chance not just in the therapy, but beyond the therapy to help clients and others say, how do we start rebuilding these communities of flourishing. What does that look like for this to actually be a part of what we need. Because it's easy to get the therapy, it's it's I want to be care why I say that it's actually quite hard to find a therapist. Yeah, but we're making more therapists, and that the the opportunity to get counseling is much easier than it was in the past. Yeah, yeah, I'm sorry, say I the stigma is lower, like exactly, You've mentioned that too, Yeah, right, the stigma is lower, And so in that sense, it's it's easier to get counseling. Yeah, But just because it's easier, as we've seen with so many other addictions, just because the barriers are removed, doesn't necessarily mean that it's it's necessarily a better thing. Even when it's a good thing. I mean, it's one thing to talk about illicit drugs and pornography and all these vices. I am not saying that therapy is on par with.

00:21:41
Speaker 1: Those vices, No, no, Yeah, the point is the barrier. When the barriers are brought down, you're going to have an influx of people who are going to try this. They're they're going to see it as an a ready solution. Yeah, And I think part of it you'd mentioned it in a previous episode, where you know you're not going to drift toward all holiness. Yeah, I do think we tend to drift toward ease, right, And so you know, you think about counseling, like there was there used to be a stigma around counseling. If you're going to counseling, it's like, oh right, marital count Oh that's wow, you guys must really be on the rocks. Whereas now marital counseling it's like, that's cool, that's probably good for you. Right. You know, there's been this complete shift away from from that stigma of any of it. And so what that does then is it makes it just that much easier. And and I think there's a there's an importance to that. It needed to get easier, right, but then it gets too easy, and then it and then it gets like and then it's it's like if you're not in counseling, you feel less normal, you know, you have like there's these gradations of ease that I think are really problematic for us. And that's where I would say, you know, the the connection between some of these other addictions as becomes like it's just easier to go and take a pill as opposed to actually work on myself. It's easier to you know, go find pornography on the internet and had to go find a sexual relationship, right, right. And I think that as we sort of move into the next generation, these are things we probably have to be concerned with. Yeah, you know, it's life has It's not that life has become easier, it's that access to some of these things that are really important has become easier. I mean it was just sorry, some innocuous, like well quasi innocuous. The legalization of marijuana.

00:23:42
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah easier.

00:23:45
Speaker 1: Right. It used to be you could get in trouble for owning, you know, for having marijuana. Now you can walk in almost like there's like six stores on my way to the grocery store, right your stop and get something, you know, so anyway, go ahead, Sorry, No, you.

00:23:58
Speaker 2: Got to be thinking about that. That phrasing that I really like that you're using the ease of utilizing steroids so you can forego working out the ease of pornography so you don't have to, so you can forego real intimacy and the work that that takes. Again, fully recognizing we're not saying therapy is on par with those vices, but there is an ease of therapy that makes the harder but good work of rebuilding community a lot harder, right, And I want to applaud where we can applaud that there has been a destigmatizing but I continue to appreciate how you're phrasing it that way. The ease, yes, and whether it is the actual therapy, whether it is digital platforms that allow for that, which again I think started for some really good areas, people in rural communities, those who are disabled, those who don't have that have mobility issues. There's good reasons that we develop these technologies in order to meet marginalized communities. That's a good thing. Yeah, And you know what, happens is that those who probably don't need it want to use it, right, And then it's that little Yeah, but it's easier for me just to sit on my couch and get therapy.

00:25:10
Speaker 1: It's easy, I know.

00:25:11
Speaker 2: It is, But is it better?

00:25:13
Speaker 1: Yeah? And I mean I think we're seeing that in a whole host of places, and so maybe And I wouldn't call any of these addictions necessarily. I know we've kind of we kind of circled through it through addiction. But I think when you start to get into the ease you mentioned in a previous episode, you know, it's easier for me just to PLoP down my fee, come and talk to Ben, and to go meet friends. Making friends is hard, it's awkward, it's sometimes annoying. That's difficult, but I know what I'm getting when I come to my therapist, and I'm willing to pay for it, and it's just easier for me, right, Like you, we get in this groove of I'm just going to follow the path of least resistance because it's there, and if somebody can't follow the least resistance, we're kind of like, well, what's the matter with you?

00:26:03
Speaker 2: Yeah? Yeah, exactly. And in ways that then, because I realize again, since I don't drift towards holiness, I do drift towards ease. To put it in your phrasing, Yeah, I'm not convinced that struggling towards holiness, if I can kind of use that language, then is actually better. It just seems like work, and it is work. I want to fully affirm that it is harder in that sense. It is, But but am I convinced that? This is where I referenced Careker guard before? To me, he was helpful, say are you willing to take, as it were, a leap of faith? And I don't think he was arguing an irrationality to faith. I think he was arguing for a willingness to believe in something that is beyond understanding but is still better. Whereas the writer of Hebrew says, faith is the assurance of things not seen. It's both it's and it's an assurance. It's this heartfelt conviction. I don't get it, but it's better. Am I willing then to push into it? Like many of the heroes of our faith did in generations past, they didn't always see the promise that was to come, yet they endured with great patience. I'm realizing how we need to build that. I'm pleading as I love my works as a professor in developing the next generation of therapists. We also have a PhD program, so I'm developing the next generation of professors who are developing the next generation of therapists. I feel incredibly blessed to do both, and in some ways kind of like a fraud because I'm also telling them, yes, help all the people you can and make sure they don't need you all the time. Like, I don't think there's gonna be a lack of counseling. But if you're continuing to see the same people over the same issues, I wonder if we're not exacerbating the problem that's bringing them in to begin with.

00:28:04
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think there's this idea in technology technological circles about revenge effects. I don't you ever read it, but there's a book out there. I can't remember who wrote it, but he coined this idea of revenge effects. So every technology has its revenge effect. Everything we create tends to come back to biteas in some way. Oh wow, OK, right, And so the way I tend to think about this, it's like Yeah. I had a friend one time use this analogy with me. It's like a babymobile. Any side of that babymobile you touch it, other sides are going to move and you're not going to be able to predict exactly how they're going to move. Right. Every time you touch it, you create a little bit of chaos, Right, And I think that's the situation we're just in. Yeah, I don't think it's something we have to work toward. And I think even in working away from where we are, we're going to be find ourselves in another situation of chaos.

00:29:00
Speaker 2: This side, and it affects this thing over here.

00:29:03
Speaker 1: And so I think that we sort of have to give ourselves a little bit of a break in recognizing that, hey, if this is what needs to be done in the moment, let's do it in the moment. Where I think we may give ourselves a little too much of a break. Isn't saying I'm only going to do this in the moment, I'm going to ignore everything else. And so there has to be this sort of realization that the solutions we're putting into effect or will actually probably solve a very particular problem. But there's a big, bad world out there, and we've got to figure out how then to solve the rest of these problems. How do we incentivize certain things, decentivize certain things, How do we form people who are going to have the sort of instincts that will lead them away from the perils of easiness and toward a more of a formative struggle, right, Like, those are the big questions that we're always going to have to ask and answer it as human beings. Yeah, and so I think as we as we kind of talk like numbness, like whatever we're using to numb ourselves is really just an escape from the pain. Maybe it's legitimate pain, like some sort of trauma of some sort of you know, like you know, I blew out a disc in my back when I was in my twenties. Still hurts, right, So sometimes you want to take something to numb that pain. Right. I think there's legitimate times when numbing is appropriate.

00:30:30
Speaker 2: Right.

00:30:31
Speaker 1: But if all we're doing is numbing and numbing and numbing and numbing and numbing, now what are we doing. Well, we're ignoring the formative aspects of our lives and we're just focused on getting through without hurting.

00:30:44
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, and what if the pain that we're trying to numb is actually intended to bring you to something bigger and better. Can we just keep on? Philip Brief, he's a sociologist, talks about how, yeah, the religious man was as you say, the religious man was born to be saved, the psychological man was born to be pleased. Yes, this is the concern that I have with a therapeutic community. We can help here, but we miss some of the realities that because we are we're not either religious or psychological, we're both. So we we think that if I just deal with the psychological everything will be fine. But we're not because there's still this other reality, this this disconnection that the pain is trying to wake us up. Right. Lewis talks about pain being God's megaphone to rouse a deaf world. What if we're doing more disservice by not allowing that pain to have its recourse, to have its day in court as it were, to be able to move us towards something better, towards the the the needs that are not just religious or psychological, but are both. Yea, and I think that then helps us engage in a much more holistic sense what we're trying to do with humans what we're trying to do with society and has has the ship sailed? Perhaps, and it's not going to turn on a dive. And this is the Titanic, right, just because we see that the iceberg doesn't mean we're we're probably still gonna hit it. And we're seeing the effects of that today in all kinds of horrific ways. And yet this is I still think the joy of what we as Christians have part of why I love coming on your podcast, James, because the ability to think creatively, how can we consider the iceberg but still be part of the process of moving still still be part of the restoration, the recreation of what was lost at the fall, what was fought for at the cross by our Lord, and what we now get to enter into as is image makers that we are giving meaning to something more.

00:32:54
Speaker 1: Yeah, because I think the interesting part about that analogy you're using, right, You're on the Titanic, You're in the front, and you're sitting there going, yeah, we're gonna hit that iceberg. It's like there's no way to turn it, like you know, and so where our minds need to start going is not how do we avoid the iceberg. Right, it's what do we do after we hit it?

00:33:15
Speaker 2: Right? Right?

00:33:16
Speaker 1: And and that's sort of what I'm I think it requires an alertness to have that sort of mentality, Yeah, and not give up. That requires grit, which we've talked about across this series. Numbness fights against all of that. Yeah, right, Numbness is the guy who's you know, sitting there going, well, we're hitting the iceberg. I guess I'm dead.

00:33:39
Speaker 2: Let's just sit back and watch the show.

00:33:42
Speaker 1: Yeah, let's see what happens. You know, who knows what it'll be like to die in freezing water? I guess we'll find out whatever like there. But that's what I think. Numbness sort of breeds. It's not going to breed solutions, and it's not going to breed faithful activity. It's just going to breed numbness.

00:33:59
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:34:00
Speaker 1: And that's a scary thought to me, is that, you know, the younger generation gets frozen in this place where they can't even muster the energy to face the problems. You know, I think a lot of times when people ask me about shut ole in the Old Testament? Right, what is shut Oh? And I'm like, here's the way I conceive of it, right, it's the underworld and the Old Testament. I'm like, I think of it like the beach vacations I used to take with my wife. Right, I'm pretty energetic guy. I like to be out hiking or doing whatever, and so we go on the beach and she just likes to lay in suntan. That's just her vibe, right, She'll read a book all week. That was the worst possible vacation for me. I'm like, I just feel like a lump of sludge that has been laying here forever. And I'm like, you just get in this funk, in this malaise where it's just like like can it be over yet? Home yet? Can I go back to work now? And I'm like that was show O in the Old Testament. It's this sort of malaise that comes over us where we're just almost tortured by the non event that is the afterlife. And when I think of numbing, that's what I think about. It's like everybody's trying to get to the non event. Oh wow, and you just sit back and you're like, well, no, this is where some drugs could help, right, And I'm not talking about like psychedelics or something like that. But like this is where we need to sort of plug in and actually you know, say, you know, like maybe you need some vitamin D man, Like you know, like there are these things where we we could actually benefit. Maybe you do need some therapy, maybe you do need this, maybe you do need that. But at the end of the day, I think the trajectory of all of this, and this is where i'd kind of encourage you is like everything you've talked about across the across the series has been when a client comes in, what you really want them to do is you want them to go out and have agency something. Don't just keep coming to me. I'm going to keep pushing you away from me, Right, That's the agency that I think we need. We need to stay away from the numbing and push people whack out, not into the pain necessarily, but certainly into the struggle. Yeah.

00:36:17
Speaker 2: Because yeah, we're not favoring masochistic responses here, that that's not the intent here. But in fact, what I think is Victor Frankel talked about this in man Search for Meaning, when when people have no meaning that they distract themselves with pleasure. Yeah, yeah, yeah, And if anyone I mean as a survivor of the Holocaust. This is literally what he saw in the camps was if there was a person in that context that had no meaning, they would die before the gas chamber and would welcome the gas chamber if they didn't. But if a person had meaning, they could actually go to the gas chamber with still a sense of joy, and that much more survive after it if they never had to endure that that meaning. Now again in froncles constructing, I don't think he was necessarily thinking about a theological response to the Gospel. But I think you and I understand, and our listeners that have that understand how much more when we're able to push individuals to the greatest meaning that then not uses pleasure as a distraction, but actually puts it in its right order, right, It puts it in a construct that says, now God made pleasure to be part of this experience, because I can find the giver of the pleasure, not just the pleasure itself. That to me is I'm constantly telling my students I want you to have a good work and a good practice, and ethically, I think you need to work yourself out of a job. I don't think actuality that will happen. But I think we do a disservice to our clients when we're not helping them develop more sense of autonomy an agency in the ways that actually not just helps them, but actually helps society and has a healing effect on the nations.

00:38:08
Speaker 1: Agreed.

00:38:09
Speaker 2: The thing that I think that we're all moving towards come the Lord's return as well.

00:38:14
Speaker 1: Yeah, No, I think it will always be there. I don't think they're going to have any trouble not working themselves out the job, but I agree with you that they should try. Yeah, that is the you know, you've talked about the tension Chesterton's tension, right, that is, that's what it is. You should be working yourself out of a job, but you never actually will.

00:38:35
Speaker 2: So sore both. Just embrace both, Just embrace towards both. Do the best you can with the clients in front of you, and do the best you can to make sure they don't have to stay in front of you.

00:38:46
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think that we could say the same thing for the people who are seeking it out. You know, maybe you know, maybe the right diagnosis is, hey, don't don't just jump into therapy, right, maybe not make it your first option, but if you need it, it's fine. Just know you're working your way.

00:39:02
Speaker 2: Out of it right right structures in place that help you give some guidelines to it exactly.

00:39:08
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, man, this has been awesome, great episode, great series. Really appreciate you being on.

00:39:17
Speaker 2: Has been good conversations hopefully.

00:39:20
Speaker 1: Folks. This is the last episode of the series. If you missed the previous ones, go back and listen to them. They're absolutely worth worth a listen. And thanks for sticking with us as far and we will catch you on the next episode of Thinking Christian. Take Care. I just want to take a second to thank the team at Life Audio for their partnership with us on the Thinking Christian podcast. If you go to lifeaudio dot com, you'll find dozens of other faith centered podcasts in their network. They've got shows about prayer, Bible study, parenting, and more.