At the start of the summer, I had a rough phone call from a friend. They broke some really sad personal news to me. I went into counselling mode a bit, but not totally. It reminded me of the times I’ve encountered clients as they are going through one of the worst things they will ever go through. It also reminded me of my own biggest low, a few years ago, and the ringing thought I had through it, that the story of my life was going wrong. And here was a friend living through their story going wrong. That’s how these seasons can feel when we’re in them.

And this all, I think, has the name suffering.

In the days before and after that phone call, I was re-reading Viktor Frankl’s profound work, ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’. This book is his observations of what happened to people in the Nazi concentration camps from the perspective of a Psychiatrist. I’ve felt drawn to revisit Frankl because all of my client placement hours have been in the prison context and I knew that he would have valuable things to say about how to find meaning in the sufferings of imprisonment.

In the re-read, I encountered again just how hard it is to imagine the level of suffering that Frankl endured in those years in the camps. The beatings, the lack of decent clothing, the dehumanisation, the bitter cold, the health issues, the human body running on so little. This story in particular brings this reality home.

‘I shall never forget how I was roused one night by the groans of a fellow prisoner, who threw himself about in his sleep, obviously having a horrible nightmare. Since I had always been especially sorry for people who suffered from fearful dreams or deliria, I wanted to wake the poor man. Suddenly I drew back the hand which was ready to shake him … At that moment I became intensely conscious of the fact that no dream, no matter how horrible, could be as bad as the reality of the camp which surrounded us, and to which I was about to recall him.’ p41

They were living a nightmare. But inside the nightmare, Frankl found a way to extend himself outside of it. To see beyond the confines of the camp, he looked inside himself. He observed this in others too.

‘In spite of all the enforced physical and mental primitiveness of the life in a concentration camp, it was possible for spiritual life to deepen. Sensitive people who were used to a rich intellectual life may have suffered much pain (they were often of a delicate constitution), but the damage to their inner selves was less. They were able to retreat from their terrible surroundings to a life of inner riches and spiritual freedom. Only in this way can one explain the apparent paradox that some prisoners of a less hardy makeup often seemed to survive camp life better than did those of a robust nature.’ p47

This inner life transported Frankl and his friends outside and beyond the nightmare they were living in. It is remarkable that those with inner lives outlived the physically fit.

This inner life kept them connected to what they loved.

He recalls being on some grisly work assignment with a friend and how they ended up talking about their wives.

‘And as we stumbled on for miles … nothing was said, but we both knew: each of us was thinking of his wife … my mind clung to my wife’s image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness … Real or not, her look was then more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise … Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation … man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfilment. For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, “The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory.’ p48-49

At this time, Frankl was not even aware whether or not his wife was still alive, but his inner connection to her was enough to take him far beyond the daily grinding pain of his existence in the camps.

He was still free to contemplate his love, as the angels are lost in contemplating God.

***

This lesson was a real help to me in my first year of real client work at the prison. It made me quick to find out what connections they had beyond the walls, how often they talked to their family members/if they do, if they have a faith, if prayer helps them. These are deep lines of inner resource. They carry us through when everything is taken away.

But Frankl also proposes that we can become worthy of our sufferings. Worthy of them. It’s a challenging idea and it’s worth noting that Frankl borrows it from Dostoevsky. Frankl knows it is possible for us to become worthy of our sufferings because he saw this happen in the camps.

‘We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms - to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

… Dostoevsky said once, “There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings.” These words frequently came to my mind after I became acquainted with those martyrs whose behaviour in camp, whose suffering and death, bore witness to the fact that the last inner freedom cannot be lost. It can be said that they were worthy of their sufferings; the way they bore their suffering was a genuine inner achievement. It is this spiritual freedom which cannot be taken away that makes life meaningful and purposeful.

… The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity - even under the most difficult circumstances - to add a deeper meaning to his life. It may remain brave, dignified and unselfish. Or in the bitter fight for self-preservation he may forget his human dignity and become no more than an animal. Here lies the chance for a man either to make use of or to forgo the opportunities of attaining the moral values that a difficult situation may afford him. And this decides whether he is worthy of his sufferings or not.’ p75-76

***

Frankl is a believer in finding the subjective meaning in your life. Even in the camps, he found his own way to serve others, acting as a doctor for the very ill and dying in the camps. In finding this way to serve others, he created meaning for himself within the nightmare.

At a time when many there was the opportunity to escape the camp, Frankl was confronted by one of his patients.

‘In a tired voice he asked me, “You, too, are getting out?” I denied it, but I found it difficult to avoid his sad look. After my round I returned to him. Again a hopeless look greeted me and somehow I felt it to be an accusation.

The unpleasant feeling that had gripped me as soon as I had told my friend I would escape with him became more intense. Suddenly I decided to take fate into my own hands for once. I ran out of the hut and told my friend that I could not go with him. As soon as I had told him with finality that I had made up my mind to stay with my patients, the unhappy feeling left me. I did not know what the following days would bring, but I had gained an inward peace that I had never experienced before. I returned to the hut, sat down on the boards at my countryman’s feet and tried to comfort him; then I chatted with the others, trying to quiet them in their delirium.’ p68

Frankl goes as far as to see suffering as an opportunity.

‘It became easy to overlook the opportunities to make something positive of camp life, opportunities which really did exist. Regarding our “provisional existence” as unreal was in itself an important factor in causing the prisoners to lose their hold on life; everything in a way became pointless. Such people forgot that often it is just such an exceptionally difficult external situation which gives man the opportunity to grow spiritually beyond himself. Instead of taking the camp’s difficulties as a test of their inner strength, they did not take their life seriously and despised it as something of no consequence. They preferred to close their eyes and to live in the past. Life for such people became meaningless.’ p80

For Frankl, life in the camp constantly posed an opportunity to exercise that, ‘the last of the human freedoms - to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances’.

‘What was really needed was a fundamental change in our attitude toward life. We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.’ p85

***

Hope was the spark of the inner life of those who kept going. Frankl writes that:

‘It is a peculiarity of man that he can only live by looking to the future … And this is his salvation in the most difficult moments of his existence, although he sometimes has to force his mind to the task.

… The prisoner who had lost faith in the future - his future - was doomed. With his loss of belief in the future, he also Hepe lost his spiritual hold; he let himself decline and became subject to mental and physical decay.

… He just lay there.’ p81 - p82

It is true that losing hope becomes existential for us. When suffering comes to feel too much, despair and hopelessness can feel like the natural response. But these are dangerous responses. They close us in on ourselves and take us down a dark path. This is maybe why I love the Christian Faith, that at its core is Jesus who suffers and dies and redeems through it. It is not an abstract hope, but a hope from the centre of immense suffering. It allows for a gritty hope when life goes wrong and it tells me that God is not far from suffering, but alongside.

How do we become worthy of our sufferings? By entering into it as an opportunity to deepen our inner lives and by living the last of the human freedoms, by exercising our unique ability to respond.

‘Sometimes man may be required simply to accept fate, to bear his cross … When a man finds that it is his destiny to suffer, he will have to accept his suffering as his task; his single and unique task. … His unique opportunity lies in the way in which he bears his burden.’ p85 - 86

Friends, this piece has been increasingly on my heart. I’ve been spending more time with the world of addiction recovery since my rehab placement and I now believe it is where my counselling road will lead. Here, I just want to talk about the spirituality I have found in the recovery world, why I love it and how it might be of broader use to those outside of recovery too.

Alcoholics Anonymous are so well established that, until I read up on them, I had assumed they were a government programme. I would say the same for the Twelve Step Programme. It was only on reading Richard Rohr’s ‘Breathing Under Water: Spirituality and the Twelve Steps’ that I discovered that AA had been founded by Christians who had found a spiritual way out of addiction when all else had failed. These co-founders are known as Bill W and Dr Bob, authors of AA’s ‘The Big Book’.

It was a real surprise to me that the most mainstream route out offered to addicts is a spiritual way. Amazing too that this way was created by Christians, alcoholics themselves, who found a way to offer the bare bones of the gospel to those who were desperate for help. This is effectively what the steps are.

One piece of genius that is at the heart of the steps is how they talk about God. Step Three is where this is most obvious:

‘Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.’

‘As we understood Him’ allows for anyone to get on board with God. It allows for the definition of God, or Higher Power, to be whatever you bring to it or need it to be. Whatever you understand by God. It doesn’t ask for any creedal alignment, it simply asks those who have admitted their powerlessness before a drug and the unmanageability of their lives to be open to something bigger than them helping them out of it. To be open to a spiritual solution.

I came to a deeper understanding of this when I spent 12 days at a Drug and Alcohol Rehab in Scotland. As AA was the first fellowship for addicts, its spirituality has been adapted by all the other fellowships. Whether its narcotics, cocaine, gambling or sex, the steps are the same.

In my own life, as pornography has been my drug of choice, I have benefited from learning some new ways of praying here, even as a practising Christian. I also have the feeling that the wisdom within this spirituality should have a broader audience than just those who have found themselves stuck in addiction. So here are a few more tools I’ve found in that world that I think you might dig too.

The Serenity Prayer

‘God, grant me the serenity

to accept the things I cannot change,

courage to change the things I can,

and wisdom to know the difference.’

There is a real genius to this prayer. Originally written by an American theologian called Reinhold Niebuhr, it is prayed by all addicts at meetings of anonymous fellowships. It was prayed every day at the rehab. For addicts who pray daily, it is often prayed first thing in the morning.

When I pray it, it is almost as though I am creating a Venn diagram of what is happening in my life. What is beyond my ability to change? Ok, I’ll accept that stuff as it is and know that there is no point feeling anxious about it (as best as I can). What is within my ability to change? Ok, I will need courage there to make that change. Importantly, to know what goes where in the Venn diagram, the prayer asks for the wisdom to discern that. Daily asking for wisdom is no bad thing.

‘Courage to change the things I can’ I think is worthy of being its own mantra. In a culture which seems charged with anxiety, we might not be talking enough about the virtue of courage. Anxiety is, after all, just a form of fear and courage is what we need when we’re afraid. I know for myself, addiction has been a fire escape door, a way to dip my responsibilities when things get too much.

Courage is what Christ calls his men to in the storm.

“Take courage, it is I! Do not be afraid!” Matthew 14:27

Sometimes, I shorthand it to the Italian ‘couragio’ which just seems to summon the spirit of this prayer. I use it with my brother who has Down Syndrome sometimes when he’s nervous about doing something. He has sometimes said it back to me. I’d like to have more of a couragio spirit.

Just for Today

The Serenity Prayer is pretty famous. I think the Just for Today prayer is much less known. This could be because it is longer (you can read the whole thing here). The opening is great.

‘Just for today I will try to live through this day only, and not tackle my whole life problem at once. I can do something for twelve hours that would appal me if I felt that I had to keep it up for a lifetime.’

Again, that’s just great no matter who you are. As an opening prayer to a day, that’s gonna contain whatever’s coming at you. ‘Just for today’ I don’t have to figure everything out. ‘My whole life problem at once’. What a great circuit breaker for when the to-do lists stack up to feel like a mountain and the future curves over like a wave.

Another great chunk:

‘Just for today I will try to strengthen my mind. I will study. I will learn something useful. I will not be a mental loafer. I will read something that requires effort, thought and concentration.’

I have particularly come to love ‘I will not be a mental loafer’. That’s another good mantra to live by. Sometimes I can catch myself in this mode. The thought, ‘am I mentally loafing right now?’ will come to me as the next podcast or episode rolls on and will prompt me to get up and do something better. Crucially, mentally loafing is not the same as rest.

Ok another gem but with qualifications:

‘Just for today I will be agreeable. I will look as well as I can, dress becomingly, talk low, act courteously, criticise not one bit, not find fault with anything and not try to improve or regulate anybody except myself.’

When I first read this I wasn’t sure about it. I don’t think being agreeable always leads to good outcomes, I’m much more convinced of the necessity of being congruent (dependably real) in our relationships. But, I think, ‘not try[ing] to improve or regulate anybody except myself’ is the gem here. A lot of my problems a few years ago came from me trying to improve or regulate the people around me. It stressed me out to no end. Ultimately, others are often within the ‘accept the things I cannot change’ column of The Serenity Prayer, and our own dysregulation and improvement is solidly within what we can work to change.

The ending, I think, is particularly great.

‘Just for today I will be unafraid. Especially I will not be afraid to enjoy what is beautiful, and to believe that as I give to the world, so the world will give to me.’

What a prayer. Keep me open to what is beautiful about the world. Help me to see it when it is happening, no matter what the day is like. ‘I will not be afraid to enjoy what is beautiful’ often comes to me on walks to and from work or towards my home. These are moments when a summer sky is particularly golden, lighting up parks, before the sun goes down behind a horizon blocked by London’s buildings.

‘To believe that as I give to the world, so the world will give to me’ has come to interact with my working life in some way that I can’t quite describe. I can feel satisfied at the end of a day that I have given to the world in my way, I have lived the day that was handed to me and put something meaningful out into it. I have not wasted it, and wasted days are something that those who struggle with addiction are used to. Then, in different ways, sometimes in opportunities or new contacts or friendships, I find myself on the receiving end of the world giving back to me.

The Gratitude List

This one may have mainstreamed outside of the recovery world, but it is a mainstay of what is recommended to all addicts: to, at the end of the day, write out a gratitude list.

Again, this is just a great practise for anyone but it is particularly good for addicts. If addiction is an escape from pain or the belief that your life is unbearable, building a foundational spirituality of gratitude begins to turn around this perspective on life. It allows you to, no matter how difficult the day has been, notice all that is gift around you. I freehand write these and often they just flow out. Names, friends, family, colleagues, great TV shows, food, trains that carried me home - whatever, I never struggle to fill an A5 side.

And then the future looks brighter because it is a way of noticing that life is good. It makes me think of Wendell Berry’s funny line, ‘Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.’ Perhaps the gratitude list allows us to see all the facts that would make us joyful anyway.

End of Day Review

This one is less a prayer but an exercise that prompts reflection. Often alongside a gratitude list, fellowships recommend that addicts carry out an end of day review.

As a Catholic, this and the Gratitude list have echos of the Jesuit Examen.

Here are its simple prompts:

• Was I resentful, selfish, dishonest or afraid?

• Do I owe an apology?

• Did I keep something to myself which should be discussed with another person at once?

• Was I kind and loving towards all?

• What could I have done better?

• Was I thinking of myself most of the time? Or was I thinking of what I could do for others, of what I could put back into the stream of life?

Again, for anyone, this is a great run of an examination of a day. To push myself to answer them, I can notice small things. ‘Was I kind and loving towards all?’ I have found particularly useful. It made me realise on a recent holiday that I had not been as good to waiters as I could have been, wrapped up as I was in the camaraderie of my friends. I’m not sure that would have surfaced into my awareness unless the bar of expectation was to be ‘kind and loving towards all’, not just people you know and love.

Ok, that is basically an addicts daily prayers, a kind of Liturgy of the Hours that those in fellowships are praying every day. I had no idea about this until this summer. I’m just struck by how so many are being brought into a bigger spiritual life by those who share in a common brokenness and have found that grace is the way out.

Big love to you all.

PS If addiction is something that you are/someone you know is struggling with, feel free to message me

When I was seventeen, I was stuck on the problem of suffering. It was a theological stumbling block. God was real, I was experiencing him and I had experienced him answering my prayers. So how did I square suffering with this? Classic problem of evil stuff.

My instinct to go and pick up books about topics that bothered me kicked in and I picked up C.S. Lewis’ ‘The Problem of Pain’ and Viktor Frankl’s, ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’. I was most drawn to Frankl because he had suffered the Nazi concentration camps as an Austrian Jew and had written his observations down. He was also a neurologist and a psychiatrist. Here was someone I was willing to listen to.

I remember pulling that book out of my denim jacket pocket on train rides and having to put it down every three pages or so. I found the details of the world he described harrowing and had to often turn away to look out at the passing fields.

Over a decade later, I was surprised to encounter him again on my therapy training course. I hadn’t known that beyond the best selling, ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’, Frankl had created his own complete form of psychotherapy which he called ‘Logotherapy’. My tutor pointed us to his main book explaining Logotherapy, ‘The Will to Meaning’. I picked it up that day and devoured it in two weeks.

And so, if you too had maybe heard about Frankl but hadn’t ever heard of Logotherapy, you’re in the right place. Here are my favourite insights from what he sets out in, ‘The Will to Meaning’.

The Existential Vacuum

In the introduction, Frankl talks about what is showing up in his psychiatry work back in the fifties/sixties - what he calls ‘The Existential Vacuum’.

‘Ever more patients complain of a feeling of emptiness and meaninglessness, which seems to me to derive from two facts. Unlike an animal, man is not told by instincts what he must do. And unlike man in former times, he is no longer told by traditions what he should do. Often he does not even know what he basically wishes to do.’ p. x

Straight out of the gate, I felt as though Frankl could just as easily be talking about 2026. I soon thought that perhaps the same kind of person who has been stumbling onto Jordan Peterson’s meaning work on YouTube in recent years, Frankl was encountering as his patients decades earlier.

‘ … despite the crumbling of traditions, life holds a meaning for each and every individual, and even more, it retains this meaning literally to his last breath. And the psychiatrist can show his patient that life never ceases to have a meaning. To be sure, he cannot show his patient what the meaning is, but he may well show him that there is a meaning, and that life retains it: that it remains meaningful, under any conditions.’ p. x

Those last lines connect his theory to his life. Frankl found a way to endure the horrors of the holocaust without losing his sense that his life was meaningful. He became convinced that life remains meaningful under any conditions and that we could discover meaning in our sufferings too.

Logos = Meaning + Spirit

So, what is Logotherapy? Frankl does a breakdown of the word here, in particular how he using the word ‘logos’ in this context.

‘In addition to meaning “meaning,” “logos” here means “spirit” - but again without any primarily religious connotation. Here “logos” means the humanness of the human being - plus the meaning of being human!’ p. 5

So, in effect, Logotherapy is a form of psychotherapy focused on helping people to discover the meaning in their life and in their experiences. He sees it is the necessary response to the many patients who are presenting before him with an existential vacuum, people who have not had meanings passed down to them by tradition and do not know where to find it.

In an age such as ours, in which traditions are on the wane, psychiatry must see its principal assignment in equipping man with the ability to find meaning. In an age in which the Ten Commandments seem to many people to have lost their unconditional validity, man must learn to listen to the ten thousand commandments implied in the ten thousand situations of which his life consists. In this respect … logotherapy speaks to the needs of the hour.’ p. xi

As a trainee therapist, the idea that therapy could help people not just to discern their problems, improve their relationships and become more congruent but to uncover meaning in their lives was an exciting thing to read. I wonder if Frankl were alive today, whether he would still see this as the ‘principal assignment’ of psychiatry/therapy. Perhaps he would feel this even more strongly.

Meaning for Self-transcendence

Frankl also has a deep conviction that human beings need to transcend themselves.

‘ ... being human means being in the face of meaning to fulfill and values to realize. It means living in the polar field of tension established between reality and ideals to materialize. Man lives by ideals and values. Human existence is not authentic unless it is lived in terms of self-transcendence.

Man’s original and natural concern with meaning and values is endangered by the prevalent subjectivism and relativism. Both are liable to erode idealism and enthusiasm.’ p. 34

It is because of his conviction that human beings need to live in terms of self-transcendence that Frankl sees a secularising and relativistic Western society as the source of this existential vacuum in his patients.

I have really seen this erosion among my generation. It reminds me of a conversation I once had with friends in the A-Level common room, One of them was convinced that science had already or would eventually explain everything, that religion had no place. I recall trying to explain to him how science explored ‘how’ questions and faith explored ‘why’ questions. He said he saw no point in why questions, he never asked them.

So perhaps where Frankl’s generation of patients once experienced an existential vacuum, Gen Z is a generation that never really bothered to ask why in the first place. Many of them could be unaware that they are even experiencing an existential vacuum.

For Frankl, meaning is how human beings achieve what he calls self-transcendence, how we move beyond our purely selfish desires,

‘Human beings are transcending themselves toward meanings which are something other than themselves, which are more than mere expressions of their selves, more than mere projections of these selves. Meanings are discovered but not invented.’ p. 41

Self-transcendence is why Frankl has no time for the idea that therapy should aim to help people to become ‘Self-actualised’. Many popular theorists (Abraham Maslow among them) see this as the goal of therapy, to help people to realise and fulfil their maximum potential. Here’s Frankl’s take.

‘Self-actualization is not man’s ultimate destination. It is not even his primary intention. Self-actualization, if made an end in itself, contradicts the self-transcendent quality of human existence. Like happiness, self-actualization is an effect, the effect of meaning fulfillment. Only to the extent to which man fulfills a meaning out there in the world, does he fulfill himself. If he sets out to actualize himself rather than fulfil a meaning, self-actualization immediately loses its justification.’ p. 22

Discovering Unique Meanings

So how can people discover meaning if tradition and society no longer hand it to them?

In an age of ‘crumbling and vanishing traditions’, Frankl believed that what he calls unique meanings can be discovered.

‘ … even if all universal values disappeared, life would remain meaningful, since the unique meanings remain untouched by the loss of traditions. To be sure, if man is to find meanings even in an era without values, he has to be equipped with the full capacity of conscience.’ p. 44

When our tutor presented Frnkl and existentialism, she posed a question to us. The question was:

If you died tomorrow, what would you leave unfulfilled? And what would this mean to you?

When she asked us this, two things leapt to my mind: the unfinished work with my clients and an unfinished piece of writing I was working on. I was surprised by both of these things. I did not think about my job or my friends/family (not that those things aren’t important to me) but suddenly two very meaningful parts of my life stood out from among the rest. This kind of exercise unearths unique meanings.

More recently, I’ve used a values exercise with a client. The exercise is that you are faced by a page of twenty or so values (like honesty, friendship, patience) and you write next to each one a score from one to ten, one being the highest. Then you talk them over. I was struck by how different my scores would be from my clients, the things that were most meaningful and valuable to me were not what was most meaningful and valuable to her. But it unearthed for us both what was most important to her, what things made her life meaningful, what her unique meanings were.

Frankl describes the work of a logotherapist this way:

‘His work is based on empirical … analyses, and a phenomenological analysis of the simple man in the street’s experience of the valuing process shows that one can find meaning in life by creating a work or doing a deed or by experiencing goodness, truth, and beauty, by experiencing nature and culture; or, last but not least, by encountering another unique being in the very uniqueness of this human being - in other words, by loving him.’ p. 48

Meaning in Suffering

How can people find meaning even in their sufferings? Here, Frankl believes that it is ultimately about the stance we have towards our sufferings.

‘ … the noblest appreciation of meaning is reserved to those people who, deprived of the opportunity to find meaning in a deed, in a work, or in love, by the very attitude which they choose to this predicament, rise above it and grow beyond themselves. What matters is the stand they take - a stand which allows for transmuting their predicament into achievement, triumph, and heroism.’ p. 49

He fits this idea of the stands we take into his framework of three kinds of values, three main ways that we find meaning in life.

‘If one prefers in this context to speak of values, he may discern three chief groups of values. I have classified them in terms of creative, experiential, and attitudinal values. This sequence reflects the three principal ways in which man can find meaning in life.

The first is what he gives to the world in terms of his creations;

the second is what he takes from the world in terms of encounters and experiences;

and the third is the stand he takes to his predicament in case he must face a fate which he cannot change.

This is why life never ceases to hold a meaning, for even a person who is deprived of both creative and experiential values is still challenged by a meaning to fulfill, that is, by the meaning inherent in the right, in an upright way of suffering.’ p. 49

So a shorthand for looking for meaning in your life would be:

1. What you give to the world (creativity)

2. What you take from the world (encounter + experience)

3. The stand you take (towards suffering)

Becoming Worthy of our Sufferings

It was Frankl’s work on meaning in suffering that first drew me to him as a teenager and now as a trainee therapist, it was this that drew me back to him.

In my rediscovery of him, I came by this line:

‘We must become worthy of our sufferings.’

It’s the kind of line that I can’t fully understand. I wrote it on my whiteboard to sit with it over the months. He borrowed it from Dostoevsky.

‘Dostoevsky said once, “There is only one thing I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings.” These words frequently came to my mind after I became acquainted with those martyrs whose behavior in camp, whose suffering and death, bore witness to the fact that the last inner freedom cannot be lost. It can be said that they were worthy of their sufferings; the way they bore their suffering was a genuine inner achievement. It is this spiritual freedom - which cannot be taken away - that makes life meaningful and purposeful.’ ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’

Ok, one last Frankl quote and I’ll leave it there.

‘ … even the tragic and negative aspects of life, such as unavoidable suffering, can be turned into a human achievement by the attitude which a man adopts toward his predicament. … Logotherapy is in no way pessimistic; but it is realistic in that it faces the tragic triad of human experience: pain, death, and guilt. Logotherapy must justly be called optimistic, because it shows the patient how to transform despair into triumph.’ p. xi

‘How was it?’

Sometimes this is an easy question to answer. Sometimes you don’t know where to start. This is how I feel currently, after my 12-day placement at a Drug and Alcohol Rehab in Scotland. Where to begin? Whilst it’s all still fresh, I wanted to write this to bottle what I learned in my time there and, as always, in the hope that this might help others.

Connection is the opposite of addiction

When I arrived, I felt like a fish out of water. My placement was a patient experience placement. The idea was just to experience what a patient does every day for 12 days. For the first few days, I didn’t really know how to do this. I felt like Louis Theroux, an outsider who’d been let in. I was no one’s therapist and I wasn’t anyone’s patient. I didn’t know if it was appropriate for me to hang out with patients and I was overthinking boundaries. I was being awkward about it.

Early on, a seasoned therapist there gave me some time and I explained my confusion about the role to him. ‘You’re a patient!’ he interrupted. He encouraged me to speak more in group therapy and to bring my life experience to the group, just like anyone else would. This felt like permission to fully be a patient, to hang out.

This was the first big lesson. Many addicts have gradually found themselves being drawn away from human connection towards their drug of choice. By the time they have ended up in rehab, they have been spending a lot of time alone with the drug. ‘A lot of time isolated in a small room with the curtains closed’ was how it was phrased once. A drug which once served as a solution has now made the addict’s world very, very small. And at some point, the message, ‘connection is the opposite of addiction,’ seemed to start coming through to me. On returning home, I looked this up and found it in the well-known TED talk by Johann Hari:

‘The opposite of addiction is not sobriety, the opposite of addiction is connection.’

And I realised that we were living this. Phones are taken away on arrival, which means that so much of the patient experience is just being together. Group therapy every morning, eating three meals a day together and hanging out in between groups. Across this, I would get to know what people did for work and what their families were like. I made a lot of good friends. Even for me, this was restorative. I felt how I feel when friends have been over for dinner or a games night and after spending hours in their company, I come away with a full heart. I felt reconnected with the fact that we are relational beings who need each other. This is a part of the wisdom behind the anonymous fellowships: addicts have become isolated and they need fellowship first. They need to experience connection again.

Recovery should be fun

This message also ran through my time there, sometimes explicitly and often implicitly. Rehab and fun would not have been things that I would have put together before, so what was the thinking?

One day, the question, ‘Who thinks that recovery is going to be boring?’ was asked. I think some hands went up. The general gist of what was presented back was, ‘Recovery has to be better than active addiction, or why would you do it?’ The therapist presenting this was an addict in recovery who embodied this spirit of fun and joy that he had found living in recovery. He said to the room, ‘I have the most fun in recovery, I promise you, it’s incredible.’ Fun. Joy. Gratitude. This was what recovery should feel like.

And so my time there was often fun. I found the guys who liked to play board games and probably played four games of CATAN and two games of Cluedo. I lost all but one of my chess games there. I came to realise that this was not distracting people from their recovery journey, this was part of it. If fun had become synonymous with a harmful drug of choice, then regaining a vision of healthy fun was important.

You already know your Higher Power

The 12-Step Programme was core to the treatment there, alongside therapy and the communal life. All were being encouraged to go through the early steps as the beginning of their recovery journey.

The 12 Steps are inherently spiritual and ask that, having accepted your own powerlessness about your drug of choice, you then are open to a Higher Power being able to help you with what you cannot solve yourself. Many addicts struggle with the concept of a Higher Power, as most people are now atheists, many without a spiritual dimension to their lives. This was a common sticking point for patients there.

Just as I was starting to really think, ‘someone just needs to tell them: ‘here’s how to pray’’, exactly that happened. I showed up to a group and a priest was sat there. He had trained as a therapist for years before his priesthood. He began by sharing his belief that everyone already knows their Higher Power. The room shared theirs. Family, God, Jesus, the fellowship itself (G.O.D. = Group of Drunks), loved ones, partners. He drew out that the universal quality there was love. Love was what everyone was talking about, in one way or another. He spoke of love as a cosmic energy that breaks into our world. At the end, he shared that in the Gospel of John, it states that God is love. And we closed on that.

Recovery is often life and death for drug addicts and alcoholics, so hearing about the God of love in this context did not sound hippyish in the slightest to me, it sounded vital. This message seemed to layer on top of the idea that connection is the opposite of addiction. Connection to a Higher Power is part of this, a source of grace and a direction towards which to turn our innermost selves in prayer. Perhaps communion then, is the opposite of addiction.

As someone who has been a practising Catholic for most of my life, I have still been able to learn so much about prayer from addicts with no religious affiliation but who pray sincerely every day. Since coming home, I have begun to address my prayers to the ‘God of love’, a title which has taken on all of this new meaning for me.

White Knuckling vs Emotional Sobriety

Relapse prevention was also a continual effort flowing through my time there. As warm as the environment was, there was a current of anxiety about returning to normal life and about relapsing after all of this effort to begin living in recovery. The message that this was a life-and-death situation was said most days. This makes relapse prevention feel critical.

On my last day, I went to a lecture on relapse prevention that has really stayed with me. Two versions of sobriety were presented: White Knuckling or Emotional Sobriety. White Knuckling was the ongoing mental effort to just not do the behaviour, a life built around just not doing something, not reaching for the drug of choice. Often, this meant cross addicting, so needing to drink non-alcoholic beer every day instead and freaking out if this wasn’t possible. Cross addiction could also look like compulsive gym use or online shopping, for example.

Emotional sobriety was being able to feel the feelings and not needing to use something to regulate the feelings away. Addiction is most often a solution to feelings that we don’t want to feel. This is what I heard from patients there in their own painful and traumatic life stories. Addiction often follows trauma, especially early-life traumas. Simply put, the drug helps you feel better.

Emotional Sobriety means finding other ways to regulate these feelings, not leaning for the escape door every time a triggering emotion comes up, but living closer to these feelings and learning to regulate them without the use of the drug.

I think that part of this is discovering the spirituality you need to do this, which is where the steps come in. Some patients were genuinely surprised to hear from therapists who were addicts in recovery that they no longer had the urge to use, that it was gone, because the part of them that now desired recovery was so much stronger than the part of them that wanted to use. Here was lived emotional sobriety. It was wonderful just how many of the staff there were witnesses of this, many having been patients at that rehab themselves only a few years before.

The Serenity to accept the things I cannot change

The most moving experience I had there played out on Easter Sunday, which was also family day. I agreed to attend a family session which I foolishly presumed would just be for patients. When I opened the door onto that room, I was met by a circle of family members sitting silently, awaiting the therapist who would facilitate. I knew I was about to witness something powerful.

I listened as family members related to each other across their pain. And I struggled. I struggled to hear about the patients who had become my friends, to hear the other side of the story, to hear the pain that they had caused their loved ones. How much they worried for them. A message that was relayed to them was that ultimately, they cannot change their addicted family member. Ultimately, addicts must choose their recovery and prioritise it. This reminded me of The Serenity Prayer, the famous prayer popularised by Alcoholics Anonymous and used by all anonymous traditions:

‘God,

grant me the serenity

to accept the things I cannot change,

Courage to change the things I can,

and Wisdom to know the difference.’

This prayer, it seems to me, has multiple dimensions for those in the world of addiction. ‘Accepting the things I cannot change’ could help addicts not to build up resentments towards people whom they cannot control. It could help family members to know that ultimately, they cannot fix their addicted loved ones. And it could help therapists to know that unless an addict takes their recovery seriously, they cannot make them recover either.

I was the first to leave the family therapy room. I opened the door to take some chairs out and was struck by the sight of many of my patient friends stood, silently in the corridor, awaiting their family members. I hoped that they could not see how moved I was and I ducked my head to return the chairs.

In that moment, the normal walls of therapy came down. In my client work as a trainee therapist, I always start with mapping the client's family tree with them, because we all go on to talk about our family relationships and because they formed us so much. But here, for the first time, I had heard the family side of the story too. Having sat in on group therapy, the therapy team meetings and now family therapy, I felt able to see every side of the story.

I was deeply moved by that day with the families on Easter Sunday. This was also the day it snowed.

On returning to my normal life

After Easter Sunday, a strange thing began to happen. People started to leave ahead of me. Friends started to head for their lives outside of rehab, hopefully for lives in recovery. Someone leaving is marked by a few rituals.

The night before they leave, at the end of day reflections in the library, an ‘exit interview’ is hosted (by patients for patients, in a spirit of fun), when everyone can share memories and which is capped off by everyone praying The Serenity Prayer for that person.

The next day, the gong used for calling people to lectures and the bell rung to wake people up are both clanging away noisily for the person leaving as the whole place gathers to applaud them to their cab. I watched this happen four times in my time there. It’s a beautiful thing to behold.

But I didn’t like losing friends. I realised that this is a pain of the patient experience, being left behind, losing your closest rehab friends and having to make new ones. By the time I was set to leave, I was glad because it felt as though my wave of friends was on its way out.

I have been trying to live these life lessons and messages since I returned to my normal life. I realised that my normal life was lacking for connection and I set in motion a handful of ways to live a more connected life in my evenings. I have felt on a connection kick since. I made a reluctant housemate watch ‘Notting Hill’ with me the day I got back. I don’t know why that movie seemed able to bridge me back to my normal life in London. We had a great time.

I also started drinking decaf coffee and n/a beers. Decaf was all you could get at rehab and I acclimated to it. I want to check my own emotional sobriety, to be closer to not using things to regulate my feelings but to notice them more.

On a spiritual level, I felt the experience reset something in me. That it had left me with a new appreciation for life. Patients at rehab were so encouraged to envision the positive vision of their recovery that I too have felt inspired to relook at how I live and to live more deeply connected to God and others and to live in gratitude. It has felt like a new lens on ordinary experience.

I miss not going to a big house full of people every day and I miss the friends I made there. I have been praying for them, for their recoveries. Their stories will remain with me.

I behold the mountain

ahead of recovery house,

ahead of all of us.

It is all that we must summit.

It is the pain of living

and the struggle to find

the strength and the grace

to calm the storms inside.

We shed our loads at its base,

frozen angers and soul pains,

the shame of who we became,

the self-pity of our histories.

We go together

or not at all.

We cut our feet

on the grass.

I behold the mountain

and it beholds me back.

One step enough for me,

for us.

The decaf coffee is finished.

A friend will ask a nurse for more.

Decaf coffee and honey here.

Caffeine would be too much.

Sugar would be too much.

A landline phone in a pantry,

phones locked away on arrival.

Just raw relating.

Losing at chess.

Trading sheep for wood

across late night CATAN.

Breaking open in group.

Breaking bread together.

Pain, triggers and drugs of choice

a world away.

No euphoric recall.

Just raw remembering.

And letter writing

to younger selves.

Writing consequences.

Telling life stories.

Just raw feeling

and holding each other

and the grace

of a Higher Power.

(A quick note: my friend asked me to see if I could write an essay for the expo he was putting together around the theme ‘Transient’. That prompt is where this essay came from.)

I am staring into the dark corner of the train times display again. Rocking on the soles of my trainers. Amber LEDs bear down the time to me, in dots of light, digital alarm-clock style.

I do this every day in London. Multiple times a day. I am fast on my feet until I am waiting on the next train. And I get trains almost every day. Fast trains, slow trains. So does everyone. This is normal.

Transient. I am holding the word as I stare up at the time in lights. What do I know or feel about that?

Well, I am turning 30 this year. I am single. I do not own a house. I do not know what my job will be in 10 years, or where I will live. Or what my life will look like when my parents are not around anymore. Or whether any of these dating apps will work between now and then.

So my mind turns over all my worries about my rootlessness. In London, rootlessness seems like a virtue. Being able to bounce from meetings to coffees to churches to communities all around town. But I’ve always felt this is a young man’s game. And I am getting older, despite what my sparse facial hair would tell you.

Being transient is at the heart of my worries. My lack of a ‘Secure Base’, as John Bowlby, the guy behind Attachment Theory, might put it. Will I move? Will I stay? Will I find someone to quote ‘settle down’ with? Am I the reason why the West is seeing its population collapse?

I am good at worrying.

Transient.

Definition: ‘lasting only for a short time; impermanent’.

Etymology: Latin ‘trans’ meaning across, Latin ‘ire’ meaning go.

The direct translation for transient then is going across.

And into my mind flashes the wisdom of a saint.

‘The world is thy ship and not thy home.’

This is St Therese of Lisieux’s line, the 19th-century French Catholic nun and Doctor of the Church, known for her ‘Little Way’. Her image of the world as our ship made a mark on me years ago and returned to me staring at the train times that night.

My childhood was all ships. I was one of three brothers and my dad’s dad was in the merchant navy. This meant that boys’ trips were to docks, to Portsmouth, or wherever we could find the biggest, oldest ship. Many HMSs were played upon, reenacting scenes from all the ship-based movies and TV shows that fired our boyhood imaginations. ITV’s Hornblower, the perfect Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World and The Pirates of the Caribbean movies.

I was seven years old when The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King came out in cinemas. I bragged about seeing it on opening day in the playground. My dad returned from work for the next four days saying, ‘who wants to go again?’ I believe I saw it four times with my dad and brother Andrew, the hardcore fans. My dad loved it, I think especially for its ending at the docks of The Grey Havens.

The Grey Havens are where our heroes depart Middle-Earth for the mysterious ‘Undying Lands’. We are told that this is where the elves come from, but we don’t know much more about it than that. Even as a boy, I knew that these ships were how our heroes were passing into the afterlife. Watching that film as an adult, I noticed that it is full of conversations about death. All of the characters we love expect to die for this quest, this alliance against evil. When under siege, Gandalf the White counsels the anxious hobbit Pippin about this fate. Here, it seems that he is talking about the Undying Lands.

‘End? No, the journey doesn’t end here. Death is just another path, one that we all must take. The grey rain-curtain of this world rolls back, and all turns to silver glass, and then you see it ... White shores, and beyond, a far green country under a swift sunrise.’

The ultimate transience is to know that we were born on a ship that is not our home.

In the Napoleonic war stories I grew up on, I always liked the presence of ‘powder monkeys’, the young boys who were part of the crew and who would run powder to the guns, like the chimney sweeps of naval warfare. They grew up on the ship. There were also those who were press-ganged after getting drunk in British port towns, only to wake up at sea, now a crew member. They had no say in waking to find that they were now going across.

St Therese’s words are a wake-up call to all of us, as people who would quite like to forget that the ship will dock one day. We would like to have deep roots. Like hobbits, we would like to settle down and live out peaceful days. But our earthly homes are temporary.

This is turning 30. Ageing is the great reminder of living on a ship. Having grown up on the ship, ageing helps us to become aware that we are transient here. We would like to turn this awareness off and we could really amuse ourselves to death. We have more options for this now than ever.

In his book ‘The Shattered Lantern’, Ronald Rolheiser describes the experience of transience in the secular West this way:

‘A key prong in the self-definition of the secular mindset is that we experience ourselves and everything else as mortal and transient. Secular experience, they assure us, affirms that all is in time and is due to die. Nothing will last, all is time-bound between birth and death. Accordingly, the relevant environment for our hopes and fears is confined to what is contained within this life. Concepts such as ‘for ever’, ‘next life”, ‘eternity’, and ’kingdom of God beyond history’ have no meaning beyond expressing naive wishing. There is only this life.’ (The Shattered Lantern, p123)

But how should a Christian person respond to this reality of going across? Of knowing that we will not be here forever? How should we live, knowing that?

Well, Jesus is our model, as always, and he is not one for anxiety, especially when it comes to open waters. ‘Courage, do not be afraid!’ are his words to those lost at sea in the storm.

And then there’s this run:

‘That is why I am telling you not to worry about your life and what you are to eat, nor about your body and how you are to clothe it. Surely life means more than food, and the body more than clothing!

Look at the birds in the sky. They do not sow or reap or gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are we not worth much more than they are?

Can any of you, for all his worrying, add one single cubit to his span of life? … So do not worry; do not say, “What are we to eat? What are we to drink? How are we to be clothed?” It is the pagans who set their hearts on all these things.

Your heavenly Father knows you need them all. Set your hearts on his kingdom first, and on his righteousness, and all these other things will be given you as well.’ Matthew 6:25 - 34 (edited)

So turning 30, home ownership, dating apps, rent, bills and the accumulated list of reasonable things to worry about, are all ‘ship’ ways of thinking. But we are to set our hearts on His kingdom first. And he’s right, worrying isn’t going to keep us on the ship for any longer than we would like.

Taking a break from a life freak-out moment not long ago, I pulled up the next episode of The Chosen, TV’s best Jesus show. And I noticed that the cast of characters in that show are the most transient of people. Roaming from town to town, worrying about paying rents, worrying about feeding people (sometimes lots of people), never staying still, all of them functionally homeless. The Son of God, too. Home ownership, settling down and roots were not at the top of their agenda. It is not what discipleship looked like. This helped me to feel a little more at ease with my own transience. As he puts it himself:

‘Foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.’ Matthew 8:20

Jesus lived a thoroughly transient life. In his thirties. Single. Homeless. Always on the move.

Bedouins still live a transient life. Roaming as tribes across desert lands. My dad worked in Riyadh in the seventies and knew some of them, saw that they still live that way. They told him, ‘close to nature, close to God’. Their nomadic lifestyle pre-dates the borders drawn.

Our natural anxieties and worries are where we will need grace to transform us into the kinds of people who will be able to greet the Undying Lands with peace in our hearts. I hope I will be among those who can, but if I live as though the ship is my home, I will be shocked when I must depart it. I must cultivate this in myself. I must ask for this grace. I must resist becoming consumed by doing.

As Rolhesier puts it:

‘... finally, when doing is everything and being is nothing, we end up with nothing helping prepare us for death, for letting go, since our ability to produce is our meaning and so we must cling to our careers and occupations as if they were life itself.’ (The Shattered Lantern, p32)

One tradition of the church may help us here, the ‘Memento Mori’, Latin for, ‘remember you must die’. This is not a morose or depressing mantra but one of faith, a call to stay awake in the way that St Therese was. Death should spur us on to live fruitful lives, lives in which we seek to find our vocations, to find where we are called to meet the world’s needs and to live that life before we arrive on the white shores.

Those who try to live this mantra often have skulls on their desks to directly connect the daily work of their lives with the finiteness of earthly life. To keep the end in mind. I have one on my desk as I write this. It’s plastic and has a spring connecting its jawbone. I feel friendly towards it now, maybe in the way Saint Francis did, when he named death, ‘Sister Death.’ Sister Death will one day lead us home.

What do we know of our home? What do we know of the Undying Lands? Only what revelation has given us, the rest is mystery.

I don’t know how you feel about eternity. I struggle with it. How more foreign a land could there be for human beings, our experience so marked by time. What great mystery. In this, all I know to hold onto are the words that Jesus gives us about this home.

‘Do not let your hearts be troubled.

Trust in God still, and trust in me.

There are many rooms in my Father’s house; if there were not, I should have told you.

I am going now to prepare a place for you,

and after I have gone and prepared you a place, I shall return to take you with me; so that where I am you may be too.

You know the way to the place where I am going.

… I am the Way, the Truth and the Life.

No one can come to the Father except through me.

If you know me, you know my Father too.’

John 14 1-7

Until then, we live on a ship. The ship is busy and noisy and full of things to worry about and do and worry about doing. But if we let this consume us, we will not arrive home with open hearts and hands.

What a thing, to have woken up on the ship and to discover that it is not our home, like powder monkeys or drunks. We did not even choose to be here, but became aware that we exist and that we will not be here forever. We could see this as having been press-ganged, or we can know that being on the ship at all is a gift. And maybe gift is the right place to end.

Here’s Ronald Rolhieser on that.

‘Be alert to, and searingly honest in accepting, all that you find present in your experience and you will find that you are not a self-sufficient being but that, at each second of your life, you are being created, sustained, challenged, and redeemed by some absolute beyond you … Classical theism, as a contemplative tradition, invites us to recognise God in the experience of being gifted … When we see our lives correctly, we see that all is gift.’ (The Shattered Lantern, p141-143)

You can find the Creators Collective and Expo here:

The Pursuit of Good Stuff

A spiritual habitat for creators. Welcome to our library of practical insights so you can explore what it means to pursue good stuff and nurture a community to renew culture.

If you enjoyed the Tolkien themes in this, you might like this new book, ‘A Light from the Shadows: The Spiritual Heart of JRR Tolkien’.

Happy New Year Substack friends!

It’s probably too late to wish you Happy New Year but this piece is really a New Year’s piece.

This Christmas, one of my sisters gifted me an absolute barnstormer of a book, Ronald Rolheiser’s ‘The Shattered Lantern’ and, having just finished it, I want to offer its nuggets to you.

Rolheiser is a Catholic priest, who I came by through John Mark Comer’s ‘The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry’. He is likely the Catholic whom Comer quotes the most, and if you like Comer, you will like Rolheiser. He was writing in the 90s and 00s what Comer is now.

So, this particular book refocused me on living a contemplative life, right at the top of my year. Hence this title, How to live a contemplative 2026. After a month of 2026’s news cycle, maybe the wisdom of this book is even more pertinent now.

If we wanted to live a more contemplative year this year, where might we start? What are we even aiming for? And why is it so hard to live in a contemplative way?

Anyway, don’t expect any great writing from me here, this is another quick ‘look at all these great quotes’ piece. Enjoy.

Rediscovering God’s presence in everyday life

This line is the subtitle of the book.

Rolheiser is writing at a time when Church attendance is dropping off, New Atheism is on the up and belief in God is beginning to dwindle. He is writing to that world.

He takes the title of his book from Nietzsche’s story of the madman who smashes a lantern in the town square and declares that ‘God is dead’.

‘We live in an age of unbelief. What sets this apart from past generations is that, today, this is often as true within religious circles as outside them. The problem of faith today is especially that of unbelief among believers.

Belief in God, for many of us, is little more than a hang-over. We feel the effects of a religious activity of the past, but our own consciousness borders on agnosticism. Rarely is there a vital sense of God within the bread and butter of life. We still make a certain space for God within our churches, but God is given a very restricted place everywhere else.

A hundred years ago when Friedrich Nietzsche made his famous declaration that God is dead, he was not so much suggesting that God had died in the heavens as he was saying that God no longer really mattered in day-to-day life.’ p15

I had never come by this take on ‘the pure of heart’ before, probably only hearing it used in the context of sexual/bodily purity. As Jesus himself connects purity of heart to those who will, ‘see God’, this makes it key if we hope to rediscover God.

Why is this hard?

So if awareness and purity of heart is key, why do we struggle to clear our awareness? Bearing in mind that Rolheiser is writing in a pre-smartphone and social media age, here is his take on how Western societies don’t make a contemplative way easy to live.

‘Experience has shades of quality, degrees of openness. We are aware and awake according to more or less. Given this, God can be very present within an event but we can be so self-preoccupied and focused upon our headaches, heartaches, tasks, daydreams, and restless distractions that we can be oblivious to that presence.

Heartaches, headaches, pressing tasks, distracting restlessness - narcissism, pragmatism, and unbridled restlessness, as we shall later name these - severely limit what we are aware of within ordinary experience. Normally there is a huge gap between what we are actually aware of and what is radically available for us to be aware of within experience. Thus, awareness or non-awareness of God within ordinary experience’. p19

‘Narcissism, pragmatism, and unbridled restlessness’ are his diagnoses of our society at large, but I was challenged by his point around self-obsession.’ Heartaches, headaches, pressing tasks’ - that sounds like daily life and reminded me of the cloud of thoughts I can easily become consumed by, without lifting them into prayer at all.

Later on, he quotes Theologian, Jan Walgrave:

‘our age constitutes a virtual conspiracy against the interior life’.

This line was picked up by Comer and it is great. The world around us is not for slowing down and therefore being able to feel/see God in awareness. This is how religious people can also come to live as practical atheists, living in the ambient, ‘narcissism, pragmatism, and unbridled restlessness’ of our surrounding culture, but just checking into church.

I do this. I get swept up. I notice it weeks later and have to start over again.

How to wake up

Rolheiser has connected contemplation with purity of heart, but later he goes on to give his definition.

‘Contemplation is about waking up. Simply defined, to be contemplative is to experience an event fully, in all its aspects …

To be contemplative is to be fully awake to all the dimensions within ordinary experience. And, classical spiritual writers assure us, if we are awake to all that is there within ordinary experience, if our ordinary awareness is not reduced or distorted through excessive narcissism, pragmatism, or restlessness, there will be present in it, alongside everything else that makes up experience, a sense of the infinite, the sacred, God.

… When we are fully awake to ordinary experience, it brings with it a certain contuition of God. Conversely, when our ordinary awareness is reduced or distorted, when it is not contemplative, God dies in our awareness and eventually in our churches as well.’ p19-20

Being vs doing

This has been a recurrent point for me. When I first went on a silent retreat, it took me a whole day to get out of doing mode and into being mode. This struggle is at the heart of why we find it difficult to pray at all - there is so much to do - doing is important, and prayer isn’t that.

My therapist, who I don’t believe has a faith, recently offered me the admittedly cheesy phrase, ‘we are human beings not human doings’ and I think it’s bang on. We probably prefer doing mode and our culture puts a huge value on doing and efficiency. Just look at the narratives around AI - its all about doing more faster - the promise of more done in less time. Achievement is valued very highly.

Rolheiser pulled these themes together by addressing our culture’s valuing of pragmatism.

‘If we take the pragmatic principle what’s good is what works, it can become true in reverse: you are only good if you work ... and you are only as good as the work you do. Those equations wreak havoc within our lives …

In a pragmatic society doing counts for everything, being counts for nothing.’ p32

‘Beyond this obvious effect on contemplation, one can perceive a more subtle manner in which pragmatism works against contemplation. When self-worth depends upon achievement then very few persons are going to spend much time in prayer or contemplation since these are by definition non-utilitarian, pragmatically useless, a waste of time, a time when nothing is accomplished. One of the major reasons why we are not more contemplative, why we do not pray more, and why we do not take time to smell the flowers, is that these activities do not-accomplish anything, produce anything, or practically add anything to life. We feel good about ourselves when we are doing useful things. Contemplative activity, by definition, is pragmatically useless.’ p35

How often I have skipped prayer to get right into the day and its doing, buying this idea that doing is more valuable than being. Then, I come to feel that God is hard to find in my everyday life, making no time to give him the space to appear in my awareness. So many mornings. I still find valuing being mode to be a struggle and it is the main barrier between me and a more contemplative life.

Life is gift - Classical theism

My favourite chapter of the book was on Classical theism. I’m only going to be able to overview it here but it was game-changing for me. I’m not sure I’d ever heard anyone explain the philosophical tradition of Classical theism before and it was powerful to read.

‘‘We shall never become theists if we take the world for granted; but so long as we do not take it for granted we are within measurable distance of taking it as granted us by God.’’

These words by Eric Mascall summarise the contemplative praxis of classical theism … Classical theism is … a school of thought which invites one to contemplate existence in a certain way.

… Be aware of what is gift in your life. Be alert to, and searingly honest in accepting, all that you find present in your experience and you will find that you are not a self-sufficient being but that, at each second of your life, you are being created, sustained, challenged, and redeemed by some absolute beyond you.

When Nietzsche’s madman proclaimed that God is dead, he, in the view of classical theism, was not announcing that no God exists beyond the here and now, but that, in the here and now, we have become so engrossed with the marketplace and business as usual (narcissism, pragmatism, and excessive distraction) that we have begun to take their existence for granted and, when the sense of gift is lost, we concomitantly experience the death of the Giver!

… Classical theism, as a contemplative tradition, invites us to recognise God in the experience of being gifted (for that is what contingency means). When we see our lives correctly, we see that all is gift. If we appropriate this, then our eyes will be opened and we will recognise that God has been walking on the road with us all along and we will say to each other, ‘were not our hearts burning within us as he spoke to us through all those experiences that we felt were only secular?’’ p142- 143

Good lungs

A contemplative way of life seems to be something we grow a capacity for over the course of our lives. The more we can step into being mode, the more normal a gear it will feel and the more we will yearn to spend time there, not considering it wasted time.

So, we need a pair of good lungs.

‘God is not found at the conclusion of a syllogism, nor on the basis of miraculous interventions within ordinary life, but in living a certain way of life.

Blessed are the pure of heart, the contemplatives, they shall see God. The existence of God, like the air we breathe, need not be proven. It is more a question of developing good lungs’. p58

Here’s to a contemplative 2026 and a year of bearing great fruit.

The first time I wrote a poem about addiction I ended up writing about two wolves.

The image comes from a famous Cherokee story in which a grandfather is explaining to his grandson how good and evil fight inside a person, like two wolves. When his grandson asks which wolf will win, his grandfather replies, ‘The one you feed.’

It’s a cliched image, one that floats around online as an internet meme now. But, when I started writing poems, I decided to allow myself whatever images and words best captured what I was experiencing and so I allowed myself the ongoing use of the two wolves. And friends did send me the memes.

It’s an image I have found profoundly helpful in displaying a split interiority, in particular, how addiction leads to a complex relationship to the self.

As Paul writes,

‘I cannot understand my own behaviour. I fail to carry out the things I want to do, and I find myself doing the very things I hate.’ Romans 7:15

These verses hit me powerfully when I first read them. ‘Paul gets it,’ I thought.

I’ve been on a journey with the wolves. I’ve been trying to learn their names. I think I have now.

Pornography was my drug of choice, ultimately, stumbling on it at twelve. It has been my context for this experience of a split self. And it has been my main context for grace.

‘Drug of choice’ was a helpful idea I came by in Anna Lembke’s book ‘Dopamine Nation’. Pornography was such a potent drug for me that I struggled to believe that it wasn’t for everyone around me, but then, people are different. I can have a whisky of an evening and call it, some people can’t. Drugs of choice. Different bodies, different souls. Each to their own.

We live in a time saturated with stimulants. Sometimes, we can find the digital or behavioural ones harder to get our heads around. If there’s a substance going into the body, it’s straightforward, easy to understand. But addiction is incredibly varied. In ‘The Brain That Changes Itself’, Dr Norman Doidge writes that:

‘People can be seriously addicted to gambling, even to running. All addicts show a loss of control of the activity, compulsively seek it out despite negative consequences, develop tolerance so that they need higher and higher levels of stimulation for satisfaction, and experience withdrawal if they can’t consummate the addictive act. All addiction involves long-term, sometimes lifelong, neuroplastic change in the brain.’ (Doidge, 2007, p106)

Gen Z grew up with online stimulants.

Each new platform was designed more addictively.

Big Tech studied the psychology of addiction and deployed addictive design on us to keep us on their platforms for as long as possible, to trap us in their Attention Economy, their Brave New World.

When I see kids with their heads down on London buses or trains blasting TikTok out loud, this is what I see. It’s a new phenomena, people who so need to be entertained, who are so hooked, that they don’t care about the people around them hearing every dull video the algorithm serves them. They’re just looking down, consumed. It’s a miserable, thoroughly modern image.

Pornography has been among Gen Z’s online drugs. It is now showing up in therapy rooms, so much so that it was recently the cover story of ‘Therapy Today’. A psychotherapist is quoted as saying:

‘Over the past three to four years, it used to be that I would get maybe two or three queries a month specifically about PPU [problematic pornography use]; now it’s usually three or four queries a week, particularly from teens and young adults’.

The story sites Ofcom research that found that 13.8 million UK adults (29%) accessed pornographic content services in May 2024. Roughly a third of UK society. It continues:

‘Many of those consumers would assess their personal relationships with such material to be largely healthy and non-concerning. But significant numbers of others … [describe their pornography use as] characterised by feeling ‘out of control’, causing distress and having negative consequences.’

Pornography showed up in my own therapy. I’d had a better run in my mid/late twenties due to some great practical tools but in a particularly bad year it had reappeared as a coping mechanism for the stress of it all. This was something then for early therapy sessions.

In those sessions, as in poetry, I tried to find the language for what I had experienced in that bad year. I committed to always trying to ‘go for it’ in therapy, to be as congruent (authentic) in this relationship as I could be. So, we got into it. It became a space in which I was able to name the deeper dynamics, to try to name the wolves.

I believe they are called shame and desire. I have been trying to untangle them since.

I have barely heard these words spoken aloud, but they have both run through so much of my experience of life. I feel as though both words are poorly defined by our culture and must be defined to be untangled.

I’ve explored shame before. When my therapist first suggested the word, he told me later that I turned from him to talk in another direction, something I hadn’t noticed at the time. Shame causes us to hide, to exile ourselves from the tribe, to withdraw from our relationships, anticipating rejection. It is the opposite of vulnerability and it generally leads to spiralling. The experience of shame is largely why addiction is not a solution to our problems. It is a momentary escape, a fire escape. The shame comes on the return journey.

Which begs the question, what are we escaping?

In his book, ‘Room for Good Things to Run Wild’, Josh Nadeau offers the experience of his alcoholism as an answer.

‘The hunger remains, and we don’t all numb it the same way, but we all do try to numb it. We hope there is more than this. More than the boredom and monotony, more than the mechanical explanations, the hope that there is something, anything, that might make us feel or forget what we haven’t felt in a long time. It’s all the same. Needing a taste of wonder, a brush with the transcendent, a moment to forget the mundane. Something needed to transform the perpetual grind.’ (Chapter 6)

We yearn for more. More than monotony.

We might call this yearning desire.

I wonder how you relate to the word desire?

Desire is not a word we hear much outside of ads. When it’s used then, it is mostly used to suggest temptation. I think Christians in particular can have a strained relationship with desire. Nadeau writes this experience too, how his upbringing in the Church formed his thinking about desire.

‘That way of life showed me nothing of beauty or how to enjoy good gifts or how all of life, the food, the drink, the sex, the people, the clouds, the sea - all of it - oriented me towards the source. Instead, I was given the idea that pleasure was the seedbed for rebellion and disobedience and that the majority of life was a joyless trudging. Avoid at all costs, lest you slip all the way down, lest pleasure lead to bondage. I was given a burden of guilt with no path to life. The entire framework and structure of my living didn’t match up with what it meant to actually live. It sounded good and maybe lots of the stuff we told ourselves was true, but somehow it didn’t translate into growth or change. For some reason, those ideas weren’t my instinct when life got hard. It wasn’t the platitudes or dogmas I ran to when death creeped into my soul, it was the bottom of a bottle.’ (Chapter 2)

It seems many have come to think of desire in this way, as aligned with temptation and as something to be avoided.

Can we reclaim it?

Years ago, a priest handed me an essay on desire that described it not as something dangerous but as the lifeforce within us, the yearning that drives us out to the world and its people. The essay, Schindler’s ‘The Redemption of Eros’, at one point imagines what the person with no desire would be like.

‘To see that desire is not in itself selfish, it is enough to try to imagine what a person who had absolutely no desire of any kind would be like, if such an entity were at all possible: he would be utterly indifferent to the world, utterly selfcontained; he would never for a moment find himself outside of himself because of the transporting attraction of goodness and beauty; he would never discover his own being in another, which can occur only if one has a constitutive need for the other. In short, he would be perfectly egocentric. It is thus not desire that makes a person selfish, but the lack of desire that would make a person selfish.’

This yearning for more is inbuilt, and it should drive us outwards. Addiction hijacks a person’s desire and draws them inwards. Dr Gerald May, in ‘Addiction and Grace’, describes this hijacking in the language of spiritual attachment.

‘The word attachment has long been used by spiritual traditions to describe this process. It comes from the old French attaché, meaning “nailed to”. Attachment “nails” our desire to specific objects and creates addiction.’

CS Lewis said a similar thing in a letter about pornography, that, for men, the women in pornography:

‘become merely the medium through which he increasingly adores himself ... After all, almost the main work of life is to come out of our selves, out of the little dark prison we are all born in … The danger is that of coming to love the prison.’

Desire should direct us out of ourselves, into the world, into relationship with neighbour and the needs of the world. Addiction turns desire in on itself and leads to muted lives.

Like Schindler’s image of the man with no desire. Like those bombing through short-form video on commutes, volume up. Like every stat we see about Gen Z that tells us they’re more anxious and lonely, and less social and happy than those who came before them. Abounding in stimulants, desperately unhappy.

It’s funny that we talk about ‘slop’ content now, the AI trash that pours through our digital shared spaces, when Lewis once used the image of mud pies to illuminate this way of life.

‘It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.’

We weren’t meant to live on mud. And we weren’t supposed to tangle desire and shame up together. Desire is the good wolf. It is supposed to lead us out of ourselves.

I feel like we need to reclaim the narrative around desire, because we all yearn for this more.

The world of anonymous groups is full of wisdom on this, paths trodden by many who had to disentangle the same wires, name the same wolves. These groups also point all members towards spirituality as the way, that recovery is a spiritual path, that a Higher Power, God (as you understand God) is our cause for hope here.

Fr Ronald Rolheiser maps this in his great work, ‘The Holy Longing: The Search for a Christian Spirituality’. He describes desire as holy fire. His book opens with the Plato’s lines:

‘We are fired into life with a madness that comes from the gods and which would have us believe that we can have a great love, perpetuate our own seed, and contemplate the divine.’

From Plato, mystics, Freud and Jung, Fr Rolheiser contends that they’re all,

‘ultimately talking about the same thing—an unquenchable fire, a restlessness, a longing, a disquiet, a hunger, a loneliness, a gnawing nostalgia, a wildness that cannot be tamed, a congenital all-embracing ache that lies at the center of human experience and is the ultimate force that drives everything else. This dis-ease is universal. Desire gives no exemptions.’ p4

This holy fire needs an expression, a way of being channelled outwards, in a world of stimulants looking to draw us inwards. Fr Rolheiser suggests that this is what spirituality is.

‘Spirituality is, ultimately, about what we do with that desire. What we do with our longings, both in terms of handling the pain and the hope they bring us, that is our spirituality. Thus, when Plato says that we are on fire because our souls come from beyond and that beyond is, through the longing and hope that its fire creates in us, trying to draw us back toward itself, he is laying out the broad outlines for a spirituality. Likewise for Augustine, when he says: “You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” Spirituality is about what we do with our unrest.’

***

One last story about wolves.

Not long after I used the story of the Cherokee wolves, I went to see the exhibit on St Francis of Assisi at the National Gallery here in London. Here I saw Luc-Olivier Merson’s ‘The Wolf of Gubbio’ painted in 1877. In it, a town butcher is offering a scrap of meat down to a wolf with a halo. A young girl is petting the wolf.

The story goes that when St Francis arrived at the small town of Gubbio, he discovered that they were being terrorised by a wolf. The wolf had begun by eating the livestock and had now moved on exclusively to people. By the time Francis arrived, the people of Gubbio refused to go outside the town walls at all. They were in siege mode. Francis being Francis, he announced that he would go and meet the wolf. He did. Francis spoke to the wolf, called him ‘brother wolf’ and offered him a peace deal, which the wolf accepted, putting his paw in Francis’ hand. From then on the inhabitants of the town fed him every day, the wolf transformed now into the tame pet of the people of Gubbio.

When I came by this story, I was still early in trying to understand how I should relate to the addict part of myself, the destructive part. I was struck by Francis’ extension of friendship and family to the wolf - ‘brother wolf’.

Many of us have grown up with our desire hijacked in one way or another, numbing it in different ways, picking up poor coping mechanisms just to get by. Perhaps we picked up some shame along the way too. My journey has been increasingly to reclaim the animating power of desire as something God given and good, to break it free from the lure of stimulants and the effects of shame.

To know it for what it truly is, a holy fire.

Here is a harrowing hallowing,

a spirited path of futures,

splitting life wide open

under the falling blow of raw potential.

Trust returns,

in a hope,

in who we could be,

in a long-forgotten memory.

Renewing fire roars through the mind,

the power that purges the past

blazes ahead

and before.

The alive dead and alive again one

holds me still in my tears,

in my sister’s arms,

in her beaded prayers.

Nothing compares

to the self-shattering rock of grace

that I break on over and over,

waveform on eternal return,

reforming me, child, lost son, man,

on the same spirit, the same God.

Yes, the great impossible for me,

So over to you, wild being, next blessed breath.

My niece is a spinning wind, golden maned,

ecstatic earliness, earthiest love.

She sparks my name with her whole body,

a refraction of your love for me,

of the grace I could tumble right into,

the glass wall a hairs’ breadth away.

Split my atoms under your weight,

press fully into your reality.

These are your hands and feet.

made for so much more than office jobs.

In hotel rooms, in crypts,

in London’s rented box rooms,

from coffee tables in living rooms,

bus stops, gravesides, bedsides and birdsong,

in the cries of addicts,

in financial panics,

in the pain of my next bill

and my heaviest burden yet

- this world is yours.

Reform me as a light wave,

point my summers and winters

across your skies

and into the evermore.

The flight attendant intones:

‘Sort your oxygen mask first,

the kids can wait.’

The Clinical Psychologist rules:

‘you’ll give your damn dog his meds,

but you won’t take yours.’

The Deep Magic spoke it first:

‘Love your neighbour

as you love yourself.’

The Gardener too:

‘Without me,

you can do nothing.’

The lesson sinks in, and out.

We care too much.

We forget ourselves.

Until we’re bearing bad fruit,

scratchy on the inside,

yesterday’s sins stuck in our teeth.

Some wind up at railings,

noticing how fast the train goes by,

feet hot on their soles.

Ground me in communion,

oxygenate me with presence

and remind me to breathe.

Phones. Can’t live with them, can’t live without them.

I’ve been writing about tech for some years now. I started back in 2018, when there was still a fair bit of optimism about technology. Smartphones had only become the norm after 2012 and although there was a lot of talk about ‘digital bubble’ echochambers after the 2016 US election, things were still fairly chipper.

There’s been a vibe shift.

2020’s ‘The Social Dilemma’ platforms Big Tech’s leakers. TikTok goes mainstream in the pandemic. All the other platforms ape it and everything becomes short-form video. Dating moves online via ‘the apps’. ‘The Gen Z Mental Health Crisis’ becomes a phrase. Musk buys X. Johnathan Haidt’s book ‘The Anxious Generation’ stirs major Western countries to begin banning social media for teens. AI begins Web 3.0. ‘Was this post even written by a person or is it just AI slop?’ becomes a daily thought. Incel becomes a word people use. As does brain rot. Brain rot. This becomes Oxford’s 2024 word of the year. Frances Haugen leaks that Facebook knew the negative impacts of its platforms on teenage mental health. Age-verification becomes widely legally required for porn sites (finally). Andrew Tate is a name you now know. ‘Adolescence’ is the show you must watch. The US President posts an AI video of him dumping diarrhoea from a jet onto protestors. Announced just this week, the UK bans choking in porn to curb its real-world influence. And pretty much everyone you see on your commute is looking down at their phones non-stop.

I’m sure I missed some things there.

A wild ride. Remember YouTube cat videos?

So, any normal person might be led to a very practical question: what do I want my relationship to technology/my phone to be?

There are a lot of thoughtful responses to that and it’s one for personal discernment.

Some camps have emerged. My friends have taken different approaches.

There’s the ‘I quit social media’ crowd - just delete all those scrolly accounts and go live. There’s the brick phone crowd, just let my phone be phone, call and text and that’s it, like it’s the 90s. There’s the dumbphone crowd - the industry of digital minimalism, more limited phones that maybe still have internet access and apps.

None of those are bad options, it’s a personal discernment, I just want to make the case for something else, a middle way: The Smartishphone.

Utopia & Dystopia

In the years I was writing and speaking more about tech, I would often hear the choice put something like this: should I just throw my smartphone away and get a brick?

I, personally, never discerned that that would work for me or most people. Why?

In ‘The Social Dilemma’, former Google ethicist and founder The Center for Humane Technology, Tristan Harris, has a great line. He sums up our life with modern technology as utopia and dystopia at the same time. Utopia and dystopia. I’ve never forgotten this description, firstly because it feels so accurate and secondly because it allows us to not have to be fully anti or fully pro modern technology. As he says, you can summon a car at the touch or a button and there’s a mental health crisis, particularly among teen girls. It’s both/and at the same time.

This has been my experience.

Utopia. I love writing. I have loved writing and being able to share it with any of my friends online who’d care to read. I’ve produced podcasts and run campaigns for events. I’ve seen the connective power of the technology. I don’t want to lose the ability to do that, or to simply check in on the lives of friends every once in a while.

Dystopia. It’s also been the single most distracting thing in my life. I first started writing about tech because of a pornography addiction that not only stole a lot of my time but brought a lot of darkness into my life. It was only after starting to deal with that more intentionally that I began to see the less obviously pernicious parts of my relationship with technology, the sheer hours I was giving to YouTube, Facebook and Instagram.

You’ll have your own story, but in my experience, growing up with this virtual world deeply affected my relationship with others, with myself and with God.

So, I have been working to keep the utopian and curb the dystopian. I still have a smartphone and a Mac that I use everyday, and I would say, that we have figured out how to get along.

So, if you’re interested in some hacks, here's how you might go about creating a Smartishphone, a tool with which to live a more fruitful, less distracted life.

Creating friction

Because it’s utopia and dystopia, the game is really: how can I keep the good stuff and lose the bad stuff? The answer to this seems to be creating friction. This means making access to the bad stuff harder, genuinely creating some limits where you need them, that you can’t work around. The great paradox here being that limits free us.

Here are some great ways that I have found to create friction in my online life.

1 Screen Time - App Limits

If you’re on Android or Google, this is likely called ‘Digital Wellbeing’ or something like that, but on Apple, it’s Screen Time.

You can input the time that you want to spend on an app so that when you reach that limit, it boots you out.

The major hack here is to ask a friend to make up the screen time code. Otherwise, you can just hit ignore limit, which is approximately 0 friction. Many of my housemates have served this role for me and I love them for it - I have done likewise for others.

A friend who was spending more time on TikTok than they would like asked me to make up their code. At first, they asked for an hour of TikTok a day. Weeks later, they asked to take it down to half an hour a day. Big wins.

2 Brick

I got a Brick recently. It’s a hack on top of a hack because it uses Screen Time.

Basically, you download the Brick app, tell it what apps you want to block for a while, then tap your phone to the Brick and it blocks them until you tap it again. Physical friction. I set mine up and then left the Brick in my office for maximum friction and for the chillest of weekends.

Basically, it would allow you to leave the noise at home, tapping it on your way out, so that you really read that book in that coffee shop, or just really take in the world around you as you’re out and about.

3 freedom.to

I can’t recommend this enough, especially if you are a writer. Freedom.to is a software that basically allows you to block lists of distracting sites for as long as you ask it to. Once a block list is running, that’s it, you’re locked in, distractions gone. Great friction.

When I was working in a creative agency, I was working to bring a start-up into life but I still had all the procrastinative habits of a uni student. I had to kill these to write. This is where freedom.to appeared and was a total fix. I have a list called ‘Big Work’ - I still use it pretty much everyday. I’m using it now to write this.

Then it took on a broader purpose. I made a blocklist ‘YouTube and Socials off for the weekend/weeknights’. Killer. This allowed me to truly take a relaxed and non-distracted break from the online world. It’s been great for my weekends and a real help in writing and reading more.

* Down Time

Down Time is another part of Screen Time, so at least a feature for Apple products. I only started using it about a year ago but it was great for regulating sleep. It basically can shut down apps you choose at a set time.

I use it for my laptop. At 11:45, Down Time effectively limits my options to go read a book or just go to bed. This was great to counter the part of me that is convinced that ‘if I just go until 1:30am I’ll finish the thing I’m working on’. This was a real pattern for me, which would inevitably throw off my next day and very rarely actually produce any decent creative output.

** Canopy.us

As I’ve mentioned pornography here a few times, if you are looking for a way out of that particular internet swamp, I’d recommend Canopy.us, which uses AI to block what it finds to be explicit and it’s really effective.

Keep the good

And with that, you may have achieved The Smartishphone. You’ll still have the notes app for your to do lists, you’ll still have Uber and Google Maps for getting around, you’ll still have a camera phone, alarms, Trainline, banking, spiritual apps - all that good stuff. You’ll just have removed any of the bad options. Utopia without the dystopia.

It’s great that these new tools exist - they didn’t use to - and there will be more out there. All of them enable us to use technology as a tool and not to be used by Silicon Valley types who have made the most money ever from hacking attention spans on a global level.

So keep the good and bear fruit. In the space, listen out for the life you are being called to live. Show up to your relationships, to self, neighbour and God. Live your one precious life.

Because it all adds up. Your daily scroll is part of your lifetime. How you spend your hours and days is how you spend your life.

I’m preaching to myself as much as you.

Happy discerning.

Isaac

Further notes

Books

• John Mark Comer: The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry

• Jonathan Haidt: The Anxious Generation

• Matt Fradd: The Porn Myth

Films

• The Social Dilemma

Tools & Softwares

• Brick

• Freedom.to

• Canopy.us

Substacks

• Girls | Freya India

• After Babel | Johnathan Haidt & team

• Generation Tech | Jean M. Twenge

PS If pornography is something you struggle with, my DMs are open.

The only times you speak on one of these silent retreats is with a spiritual director at the beginning and end of the retreat. A beginning, ‘why are you here?’ conversation and a concluding ‘what happened?’ conversation. My spiritual director was a Jesuit priest.

At the end of our first conversation, when we had talked through why I was there, I spotted something poking out of my bag and thought it was worth mentioning. I pulled out my copy of Henri Nouwen’s ‘The Return of the Prodigal Son’ and explained that I hadn’t meant to bring it on retreat, I just had it on me to maybe use for something I was writing.

‘Perhaps God packed it for you,’ the priest joked. Or suggested. Or both.

I agreed with him. Maybe I was supposed to bring it to this retreat. I believe in providence in that way, the small nudges that God gives us.

The book is a spiritual classic. A meditation on the story Jesus tells of the Prodigal Son, Rembrandt’s painting of this story and Nouwen’s own open-hearted sharing of what it came to mean for him.

I read it in the first lockdown when I was spiritually untethered and didn’t know where I was going. I know it played a part in keeping me around, as a reminder of the depths of the life of faith.

I wandered up the hill to sit with the book and a coffee. I sat on the floor of an old shed with one of my favourite views, the blue mountains of North Wales, fixed mighty waves on the way off horizon.

I knew where I should pick up the story.

On first reading, in my green house with my cat in the lockdown times, I had been struck by Nouwen’s identifying with the elder son. In Jesus’s famous short story, he includes a curious epilogue. The younger son returns to the father’s house, having gone all out sex, drugs and rock’n’roll and his father embraces him and throws a party. They thought he had been dead the long years he had been away. His older brother, the elder son, who had never left his father’s house, erupts in anger at this.

I had heard this story at many youth retreats and I had always put myself in the shoes of the younger son - perhaps I had been encouraged to. It was through Nouwen that I came to see that my life was much closer to the arc of the elder son than the younger son. I had never really strayed away from or openly rebelled against faith or family. I had kept the faith, but had never really become disciplined about holding space for daily personal prayer in the quiet place. This was the story of the elder son. Showing up to the externals of his faith, but growing resentful inside. Nouwen, as a priest and literal oldest brother, had lived this too.

So, I thought, on top of the hill, I am the elder son, I will pick back up there, with him.

Exactly the page where I decided to re-engage the book, Nouwen chooses to recap the younger son to draw the contrast out, and I read this:

‘The younger son sinned in a way we can easily identify. His lostness is quite obvious. He misused his money, his time, his friends, his own body. What he did was wrong; not only his family and friends knew it, but he himself as well. He rebelled against morality and allowed himself to be swept away by his own lust and greed. There is something very clear-cut about his misbehavior. Then, having seen that all his wayward behavior led to nothing but misery, the younger son came to his senses, turned around, and asked for forgiveness. We have here a classical human failure, with a straightforward resolution. Quite easy to understand and sympathize with.’ p71

In reading this, I had one of those moments where I felt pierced by words, as though someone was writing to me.

I have become ok with saying that 2024 was a bad year for me and that things have gotten much better since. There is an arc to that year for me, a rock bottoming, a God moment and a turn. It was a big experience of suffering, coping, shame and then of grace.

When I read this chunk overviewing the younger son, I realised that I had had that experience now. As addicts put it, ‘my life had become unmanageable’. As Nouewn phrases it, ‘all his wayward behavior led to nothing but misery’ and he, ‘came to his senses’. You can only return if you’ve really left. That year, I know I got the furthest away I ever had.

By the end, the passage had made me laugh. ‘We have here a classical human failure … Quite easy to understand.’ Hearing that I had joined the ranks of classical human failure was just quite funny to me. It still is. That’s a killer phrase.

It shifted the shape of my retreat. Recontextualised me and my arc with God in recent years.

By the end of that year, I had tried to pull my poems into a collection and had struggled to name it. Because there were two types of poems, far from God/goodness, close to God/goodness, I landed on the title ‘Many Returns’. That is how faith and life had begun to feel.

*

Nouwen’s genius in the book is to see both sons as equally lost, just in different ways. His immediate next paragraph is on the lostness of the elder son.

‘The lostness of the elder son, however, is much harder to identify. After all, he did all the right things. He was obedient, dutiful, law-abiding, and hardworking … Outwardly, the elder son was faultless. But when confronted by his father’s joy at the return of his younger brother, a dark power erupts in him and boils to the surface. Suddenly, there becomes glaringly visible a resentful, proud, unkind, selfish person, one that had remained deeply hidden’. p71

He goes on to share how he identifies with this elder brother, in the vulnerable way that is the real mark of his writing.

‘I know, from my own life, how diligently I have tried to be good, acceptable, likeable, and a worthy example for others. There was always the conscious effort to avoid the pitfalls of sin and the constant fear of giving in to temptation. But with all of that there came a seriousness, a moralistic intensity and even a touch of fanaticism— that made it increasingly difficult to feel at home in my Father’s house. I became less free, less spontaneous, less playful, and others came to see me more and more as a somewhat “heavy” person.’ p71

Here, he alludes to the greater goal for both sons - to arrive at feeling ‘at home in my Father’s house’ or as he puts it in nearby pages:

‘I had stayed home and didn’t wander off, but I had not yet lived a free life in my father’s house.’ p70

To be free in the father’s house.

It was a revelation to me years ago that you could stay in the father’s house and not be free. But of course, we see this theme many times in Jesus’s words about the human heart, especially to the outwardly religious of his day. And he is the author of this short story. He always seems so concerned about the human heart. Yours and mine.

Now, what I held onto from Nouwen’s words was that time away had allowed me to arrive at my own miserableness and not to confuse that with freedom. This is what a rock bottom gives you. And then you know what being free really looks like. Then you can know in a new way what it is to be free in the father’s house.

Saint Augustine of Hippo got this: ‘In my deepest wound I saw your glory and it dazzled me.’

*

I’d like to leave you with the great final act of the book. It is not about either son, but remarkably, about becoming the father, another angle on this famous story that I had never heard before Nouwen.

‘As the returned child of God, living in the Father’s house, God’s joy is mine to claim. There is seldom a minute in my life that I am not tempted by sadness, melancholy, cynicism, dark moods, somber thoughts, morbid speculations, and waves of depression. And often I allow them to cover up the joy of my Father’s house. But when I truly believe that I have already returned and that my Father has already dressed me with a cloak, ring, and sandals, I can remove the mask of the sadness from my heart and dispel the lie it tells about my true self and claim the truth with the inner freedom of the child of God.

But there is more. A child does not remain a child. A child becomes an adult. An adult becomes father and mother. When the prodigal son returns home, he returns not to remain a child, but to claim his sonship and become a father himself. As the returned child of God who is invited to resume my place in my Father’s home, the challenge now, yes the call, is to become the Father myself. I am awed by this call. For a long time I have lived with the insight that returning to my Father’s home was the ultimate call. It has taken me much spiritual work to make the elder son as well as the younger son in me turn around and receive the welcoming love of the Father.

The fact is that, on many levels, I am still returning. But the closer I come to home the clearer becomes the realisation that there is a call beyond the call to return. It is the call to become the Father who welcomes home and calls for a celebration. Having reclaimed my sonship, I now have to claim fatherhood. When I first saw Rembrandt’s Prodigal Son, I could never have dreamt that becoming the repentant son was only a step on the way to becoming the welcoming father. I now see that the hands that forgive, console, heal, and offer a festive meal must become my own. Becoming the Father is, therefore, for me the surprising conclusion of these reflections on Rembrandt’s The Return of the Prodigal Son.’ pp 118-119

All pics by me and my nifty second-hand 50mm, of the beautiful St Beunos - I highly recommend them to you - you can check them out here: https://www.beunos.com/

Friends, hello and sorry it’s been a while. At this point in my counselling training things have truly stepped up! Anyway, last weekend I slayed the 4000+ word beast known as ‘The Human Development Essay’. It was exactly what it sounds like.

As part of that, I had to read a lot of theorists in their own words and apply their work to my life. Among them, I particularly enjoyed John Bowlby, the father of attachment theory.

The language of attachment theory has gone mainstream in recent years, particularly in the world of dating, so you might have already come by it. Perhaps you’ve already heard someone describe themselves as securely, anxiously or avoidant attached.

If you find all of that stuff cringe, I’d implore you to hang in there and hear Bowlby out in his own words. Here are some of my favourite bits of his, all pulled from his book, ‘A Secure Base’.

‘We have created a topsy-turvy world’

Bowlby’s opening pages explain why he chose to focus on making the case for the importance of the early years of development.

‘To be a successful parent means a lot of very hard work. Looking after a baby or toddler is a twenty-four-hour-a-day job seven days a week … if they are to flourish they still require a lot of time and attention … Study after study … attest that healthy, happy, and self-reliant adolescents and young adults are the products of stable homes in which both parents give a great deal of time and attention to the children.

I want also to emphasize that … looking after babies and young children is no job for a single person. If the job is to be well done and the child’s principal caregiver is not to be too exhausted, the caregiver herself (or himself) needs a great deal of assistance … In most societies throughout the world these facts have been, and still are, taken for granted and the society organized accordingly. Paradoxically it has taken the world’s richest societies to ignore these basic facts.

Man and woman power devoted to the production of material goods counts a plus in all our economic indices. Man and woman power devoted to the production of happy, healthy, and self-reliant children in their own homes does not count at all. We have created a topsy-turvy world.’ P2

How good is that?

It made me think of my many friends and siblings who have gone on to become parents and have struggled with this topsy-turvy Western society, that values parents working over creating the conditions for the flourishing of children. ‘It has taken the world’s richest societies to ignore these basic facts’ - so good.

Not just about kids

Bowlby goes on to say that attachment affects us throughout our lives, as we make bonds as adults too.

‘ … attachment behaviour is in no way confined to children … we see it also in adolescents and adults of both sexes whenever they are anxious or under stress.

… A feature of attachment behaviour of the greatest importance … is the intensity of the emotion that accompanies it, the kind of emotion aroused depending on how the relationship between the individual attached and the attachment figure is faring.

If it goes well, there is joy and a sense of security. If it is threatened, there is jealousy, anxiety, and anger. If broken, there is grief and depression. Finally there is strong evidence that how attachment behaviour comes to be organized within an individual turns in high degree on the kinds of experience he has in his family of origin, or, if he is unlucky, out of it.’ P4

I just want to hone in on the intensity of the emotion point here for a second. As I was reading Bowlby, I was dating. It was going unusually well, I was excited about it, we got to eight dates and were at a tipping point - our communication was deep and I had begun to feel secure. Then I didn’t hear from her for days. I freaked out in a way that surprised me. I would compulsively check my phone. I got really anxious. In therapy, I dove into how confused I was that I was reacting so strongly to this and that’s when we began to look at it through the lens of attachment theory.

‘If it goes well, there is joy and a sense of security. If it is threatened, there is jealousy, anxiety, and anger. If broken, there is grief and depression.’

I’m sure someone has already written the great Substack on breakups and attachment theory, so I’ll leave this point here, but I offer it to back up his point that this plays out for adults and with a real intensity of emotion.

A Secure Base

It’s then that Bowlby introduces his big idea, a secure base.

‘This brings me to a central feature of my concept of parenting - the provision by both parents of a secure base from which a child or an adolescent can make sorties into the outside world and to which he can return knowing for sure that he will be welcomed when he gets there, nourished physically and emotionally, comforted if distressed, reassured if frightened.

… In these respects it is a role similar to that of the officer commanding a military base from which an expeditionary force sets out and to which it can retreat should it meet with a setback. Much of the time the role of the base is a waiting one but it is none the less vital for that. For it is only when the officer commanding the expeditionary force is confident his base is secure that he dare press forward and take risks.’ P12-13

I love this image so much. It reminds me a lot of ’s great book ‘The Anxious Generation’, which really encourages parents to let their children take more risks and go on more unsupervised adventures to grow in resilience and to become less anxious. He uses the image of how trees need to experience winds to deepen their roots. Kids will trust they can take risks if they know they have a secure base.

Here’s another way Bowlby phrases it:

‘Attachment behaviour is any form of behaviour that results in a person attaining or maintaining proximity to some other clearly identified individual who is conceived as better able to cope with the world.’ P29

Not everyone experienced a secure base. Many grew up unable to trust that those in the watchtower would welcome them back from their adventures, or comfort them if they had gotten themselves hurt out there. This is what Bowlby believes leads to different types of attachments that begin in our family of origin and that can then go on to shape our adult relationships.

Three types of attachment

This is the more famous part of the theory that Bowlby and others worked to establish. It’s been updated since, but at the time he is writing this book, he just writes of these three types of attachment. I’ll just give you his words on these.

1 Secure

‘These are first the pattern of secure attachment in which the individual is confident that his parent (or parent figure) will be available, responsive, and helpful should he encounter adverse or frightening situations. With this assurance, he feels bold in his explorations of the world. This pattern is promoted by a parent, in the early years especially by mother, being readily available, sensitive to her child’s signals, and lovingly responsive when he seeks protection and/or comfort.’ P140

2 Anxious resistant

‘A second pattern is that of anxious resistant attachment in which the individual is uncertain whether his parent will be available or responsive or helpful when called upon. Because of this uncertainty he is always prone to separation anxiety, tends to be clinging, and is anxious about exploring the world. This pattern, in which conflict is evident, is promoted by a parent being available and helpful on some occasions but not on others, and by separations and, as clinical findings show, by threats of abandonment used as a means of control.’ P140

3 Anxious avoidant

‘A third pattern is that of anxious avoidant attachment in which the individual has no confidence that, when he seeks care, he will be responded to helpfully but, on the contrary, expects to be rebuffed. … such an individual attempts to live his life without the love and support of others, he tries to become emotionally self-sufficient’. P140

Perhaps that brought something up for you. Friends of mine have heard these kinds of descriptions and gone, ‘oh, that’s me!’ Those same friends discovered the great attachment resources that are out there now, so a mountain of good books and podcasts await you too if you recognise yourself in Bowlby’s words.

Generational attachment

A final point before we wrap up is that this theory shouldn’t just lead to everyone blaming their parents. Bowlby encourages that we can also look beyond our parents to their parents and the kind of attachment that they experienced from them.

‘In raising these questions, it is always useful for the therapist to enquire of the patient what he knows of the childhood experiences that the parent in question may have had. Not infrequently this leads the patient to gain some understanding of how things had developed and, from understanding, often to move on to a measure of forgiveness and reconciliation.

… As already mentioned, this strong tendency for attachment problems to be transmitted across generations, through the influence on parenting behaviour of relationship problems stemming from the parent’s own childhood, is at last receiving the research attention it deserves.’ P165

To love and be loved

I lucked out with my parents, totally through the lottery of birth, I am someone who had a securely attached childhood. I have no struggle accepting the reality of attachment theory, it just sounds like real life to me. I’m almost bemused that it had to be studied and formalised as a theory. Again, ‘it has taken the world’s richest societies to ignore these basic facts.’

My therapist began our therapy by drawing out my family tree. I now start the same way with my clients. It is an exercise in attachment and in an hour you know so much about what formed the person before you. Sometimes, it is a very saddening reality to hear.

But Bolwby says that his is a hopeful theory, that we can improve these relationships, that they are not fixed.

Really, it is all just about how we were loved, our ability to love others and to experience being loved.

Thanks friends, I hope this was a helpful read. As I study, I’ll try to keep throwing up my favourite nuggets here.

Your friend,

Isaac

‘Have you seen ‘The Bear’?’

This is how I’ve started a lot of conversations recently, so I might as well start this piece here too.

For whatever reason, when someone tells me about a great new TV show, I shrug them off. ‘Yeah, yeah, sure it’s great, there’s just too much great TV, let me live.’ I’m too busy and too cool for your cool new show. I did this with ‘The Bear’. I wish I hadn’t.

The opening gambit of this show is that a genius level chef, Carmy, (short for Carmen) is left the burger joint of his brother, Mikey, after his tragic death (that’s all set up, I’m not spoiling anything.) It’s in serious debt, has a crew of loudmouth Chicagoans who just want to keep doing things the same way and who are all also grieving the loss of their leader and friend, Mikey, Carmy’s brother.

What ensues is, for no apparent reason, the best show about workplace culture, anxiety and purpose you’ve probably ever seen.

Carmy goes on to struggle to drag the crew of a burger place into the shape of a top-tier restaurant. It’s become known as one of the most anxiety-inducing shows around, really taking you into the moment-to-moment of a kitchen under maximum pressure.

As I watched its first three seasons over the Easter holidays, I couldn’t help but project all the teams I’ve been a member of onto it.

I could see myself in it, the character I realised I was and the characters others were. I could see my struggle to regulate my own anxiety mirrored. I watched characters live through how work can make us feel sometimes. I was so glad to find that experience in a story, to see that others had had this kind of experience too. (Not that I’ve ever been under the amount of stress depicted in ‘The Bear’).

So, fans of this show, love to talk about it. Often, these conversations turn towards the workplace and it appears that there are some universal trends here.

Someone who really mapped these patterns is the great Edwin Friedman.

When I watched ‘The Bear’, I had just finished reading Friedman’s ‘Failure of Nerve’ (which came to me via John Mark Comer). It gave me a language for what I was seeing play out in the relationships of this high-anxiety kitchen and for the common pitfalls of workplaces universally.

So, here I’d like to share my favourite insights from that book, in the hope that (what I’m going to title) Friedman’s ‘Anxious Systems Theory’ helps you to map your own experiences too.

I hope you like long quotes from books.

It’s all relationships

I started to talk to some buddies about ‘The Bear’ over lunch, and everyone got into their experiences of management and different teams real fast. The patterns repeat. People are people everywhere. Relationships are relationships everywhere.

This is what Friedman began to see.

In his life, Friedman was a part of all of what he calls western society’s, ‘systems of salvation’: religion, education, psychotherapy and politics. He spent twenty years as a pulpit rabbi, an overlapping twenty-five years as an organizational consultant and family therapist and became a community relations specialist for the Johnson White House.

Friedman was an early expert in Family Systems Theory, the theory that relationships function together in a system. His big idea was to apply what he had learned working with families in crisis to larger systems beyond family, like churches, synagogues, companies and nation states. He saw that all of them could fall into the chronic anxiety that families in crisis did and that all of them were ultimately systems of relationships.

Here’s how he reflects on his work with families in crisis:

‘I began to see that stripping families of their cultural camouflage forced family members to be more accountable for their actions and their responses to one another. I also saw that once one focused on how families were similar rather than on how they differed, it was possible to see universal "laws" of emotional process that were obscured.’ p7

These universal laws of emotional process, he then maps onto all these other contexts - all of them ultimately being workplaces.

‘Institutions, I was coming to see, could be conceptualized as emotional fields-environments of force that, for all their influence over peoples thinking processes, were, like magnetic fields or gravitational fields, largely invisible to the naked eye.’ p15

I love this idea of workplace as an emotional field - it feels accurate to me, we go to work and we experience the relationships on a level separate to the tasks.

How to know you’re in an anxious system

Sometimes, our systems of relationships, in family, work, church or any of the contexts Friedman refers to can become anxious. So how would you know if you were in that situation? He gives five helpful characteristics.

‘1. Reactivity the vicious cycle of intense reactions of each member to events and to one another.

2. Herding: a process through which the forces for togetherness triumph over the forces for individuality and move everyone to adapt to the least mature members.

3. Blame displacement: an emotional state in which family members focus on forces that have victimized them rather than taking responsibility for their own being and destiny.

4. A quick-fix mentality: a low threshold for pain that constantly seeks symptom relief rather than fundamental change.

5. Lack of well-differentiated leadership: a failure of nerve that both stems from and contributes to the first four.’ p54

Does this sound like anywhere you have worked? Any team? Your family, at some stage? It does sound like the early days of the restaurant ‘The Bear’.

Blame displacement is a really resonate phrase for me here. I have been a big one for blame displacement in my teams over the years and I have seen it a lot. I think it’s one that makes sense, it’s a go-to defence - how can I shift the blame for this missed deadline somehow so that I don’t have to take the hit here? How can this not be my fault? When I’m like that, when I don’t take responsibility for my failings, I’m playing a part in an anxious system.

The solution? Becoming a non-anxious presence (or a well-differentiated leader)

This is where John Mark Comer tweaks the language to becoming a ‘non-anxious presence’ - a phrase I have found that sums up my efforts in my counselling training, I love it. Friedman’s phrase is a well-differentiated leader and he sees it as the keys to the kingdom for cultural change.

Firstly, the leader in an anxious system needs to know what they are up against, that really they are seeking to lead a system of relationships out of anxiety.

‘ … a leader's capacity to recognize sabotage for what it is — that is, a systemic phenomenon connected to the shifting balances in the emotional processes of a relationship system and not to the institution's specific issues, makeup, or goals - is the key to the kingdom.’ p11

I really love that line, the work is to change: ‘the shifting balances in the emotional processes of a relationship system’. How do you do this?

In working with families in chronic anxiety, Friedman came to the realisation that he had to focus on building up a leader who could be well-differentiated within it. As he puts it:

‘… the way out [cannot] be obtained simply by developing some new method for "tinkering with the mechanics," or by redoubling our efforts to try harder. The way out, rather, requires shifting our orientation to the way we think about relationships, from one that focuses on techniques that motivate others to one that focuses on the leader's own presence and being.’ p4

What does Friedman mean by a well-differentiated leader?

‘I want to stress that by well-differentiated leader I do not mean an autocrat who tells others what to do or orders them around, although any leader who defines himself or herself clearly may be perceived that way by those who are not taking responsibility for their own emotional being and destiny. Rather, I mean someone who has clarity about his or her own life goals, and, therefore, someone who is less likely to become lost in the anxious emotional processes swirling about. I mean someone who can be separate while still remaining connected, and therefore can maintain a modifying, non-anxious, and sometimes challenging presence. I mean someone who can manage his or her own reactivity to the automatic reactivity of others, and therefore be able to take stands at the risk of displeasing. It is not as though some leaders can do this and some cannot. No one does this easily, and most leaders, I have learned, can improve their capacity.’ p14

How good is, ‘someone who can be separate while still remaining connected’?

This insight changed everything for Friedman in his work.

‘I stopped trying to get people to "communicate" or find better ways of managing their issues. Instead, I began to concentrate on helping the leader to become better defined and to learn how to deal adroitly with the sabotage that almost invariably followed any success in this endeavor. Soon I found that the rest of the family was "in therapy whether or not they came into my office. For it is the integrity of the leader that promotes the integrity of prevents the "dis-integration" of the system he or she is leading.

I then started to function in the same way with organizations, regardless of their nature, their purpose, or their size. I stopped collecting mounds of data, trying to foster team-building, focusing on the difficult people. I stopped polling the workers or going around to the different divisions. Instead, I concentrated on working with only one or two leaders at the top. Soon I found that for organisations, too, by focusing on and supporting the strengths in the system rather than letting the pathology or the pathogens (read troublemakers) determine my focus, the rest of the network was "in therapy" whether or not they came into my office and whether or not I joined them on a retreat.’ p19

Keeping the system loose through humour (on the death of playfulness)

A final note that I took from the book was about playfulness as an indicator of where your culture is at.

‘What also contributes to this loss of perspective is the disappearance of playfulness, an attribute that originally evolved with mammals and which is an ingredient in both intimacy and the ability to maintain distance … Chronically anxious families (including institutions and whole societies) tend to mimic the reptilian response: Lacking the capacity to be playful, their perspective is narrow. Lacking perspective, their repertoire of responses is thin. Neither apology nor forgiveness is within their ken. When they try to work things out, their meetings wind up as brain-stem storming sessions …

the relationship between anxiety and seriousness is so predictable that the absence of playfulness in any institution is almost always a clue to the degree of its emotional regression.’ p64

It’s that last line that really stood out to me. I get serious, man.

Work can make me not very fun and that’s not normal for me because I’m the youngest of five - my default is fun. But stress will do that to the best of us. And when I lack the ability to be playful in a team, I know I’m no fun to be around and I’m playing a part in dragging the culture down. Not that it needs to be overly fun, I just know in myself when my relationship to my work has become overly serious and I am tunnel visioning myself into my tasks with no time to be warm to those around me. I can switch that side off and this is now always my own internal indicator that something’s started to go wrong.

Friedman later just phrases this, ‘Keep the system loose through humour.’ It’s a good rule.

The journey of a lifetime

For leaders, this is not a switch to be flicked but an ongoing formation. Friedman believed that this called for leaders to focus on continual growth and maturity.

‘The kind of "sensitivity" that leaders most require is a sensitivity to the degree of chronic anxiety and the lack of self-differentiation in the system that surrounds them. The development of that ability requires that they focus primarily on maintaining a self-regulation of their own reactive mechanisms, and that they muster up the stamina to define themselves continually to those who lack such self-regulation.

This is not merely a matter of putting one's own oxygen mask on first. It has to do with leaders (or parents or healers) putting their primary emphasis on their own continual growth and maturity.’ p137 - 138

He sees this as the journey of a lifetime.

‘For the endeavor to gain more regulation over one's own reactive mechanisms requires commitment to the lifetime project of being willing to be continually transformed by one's experience. Frankly, it is easier to focus on data and technique. Yet, at this point, I am convinced that to the extent leaders of any family or institution are willing to make a lifetime commitment to their own continual self-regulated growth, they can make any leadership theory or technique look brilliant.’ p20

Full transparency, I am doing the early stages of this lifetime project.

In the last two years I was responsible for managing younger creative minds and I didn’t nail it. At points, my anxiety got the better of me and I overstepped into people’s work in a way that was disrespectful, totally because I was anxious that something wouldn’t get done in time or well enough. Thank God, when that did happen, they were usually very good at calling me out for that kind of thing. In those experiences too, I was grateful for Friedman’s work here as a guide and key for what was playing out.

This experience also gave me more empathy for leaders. They are at the tip of responsibility and the inherent anxiety that comes with that. Here, more than anything, leaders need grace and the presence of Jesus with them. The one who speaks, ‘Courage, it is I. Do not be afraid.’ After all, anxiety is fear relating to the future. Jesus’ constant message to us is to not be afraid. Allowing these words to seep into our hearts will also be a lifetime project.

So, in short, it’s all about presence, and mostly about the presence of leaders, but we all play a role in how we show up. Prayer is good. Breathing is good. Sleep is good. It all helps. Because ultimately, how people experience us is what they will remember. Maybe my favourite line from John Mark Comer’s talk on this is:

‘it is very hard to tempt well rested emotionally healthy happy people. It is very easy to tempt exhausted burned out workaholic people under chronic stress. How often do we do most of the enemy’s work for him?’

As [according to the internet] Maya Angelou famously put it, ‘people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.’

Alright, good luck out there! Power to you in this effort of a lifetime.

(PS Go watch ‘The Bear’, it’s like, really good.)

‘I could get there today’

he says of the Welsh blue mountains

and to himself.

He has seen where his Camino legs

can carry him,

if he could only re-find them.

He knows that he could do

the range behind them too,

(at a push).

Thats where his body would meet

its limits

and burn at its joints.

He could do it without you Lord,

but it would be plodding,

not the adventure of Gods’ Great Game.

Spirit is his other daily reality

and it needs a companion

just as the pilgrim relies

on the kindness of strangers.

Bring on the suffering,

let it flow.

May it be the formation

of the heroic you.

Summoning your parts

together, to arms,

your old wolves

running at your side.

Bring on the saint,

the hope in your chest,

the transcendent goodness,

that one chosen thing.

Bless it all,

sanctify the pain,

call me out,

again and again.

Nothing lost,

on to tomorrow,

with history at our door again,

in the smalls things too.

We are people of the springtime,

pilgrims of hope

and pain was only ever

how God would bring out his saints.

A repurposed/edited talk I gave for Pure in Heart, on April 30th 2025.

I have to tell you up top that I have stolen the title of this talk and much of its content. If you YouTube ‘Becoming a non-anxious presence’ you will find a much better talk given by John Mark Comer, a man who has really affected how I live my life. I watched that talk to give this talk.

This is a talk about anxiety and trying to be non-anxious.

My life currently makes me quite anxious.

The last 4 months of my life were maybe its most intense run, by sheer volume of tasks. My job is demanding and I am part-time training as a counsellor too and I need to get a placement and I am freelance producing a podcast (which helps me to be less poor as I work part time and train) and I decided to help out on an Alpha course. Oh, and essays. I was experiencing overwhelm most weeks.

Around Christmas, I started to go to sleep to podcasts. With an earphone in, I would calm the anxious voices in my head by hooking my attention to an Australian improv comedy podcast - amusing nonsense - and drift off out of consciousness. I knew that this was a red flag. I also knew that I was coping and I became ok with coping.

For years, I had lived without earphones. My image of a London douche was someone who wears a suit and always has earphones or air-pods in and is always stood waiting or commuting holding their phone, slouched down towards it. I did not want to be this person.

I screen timed the heck out of my phone so that if I was commuting I was either sleeping, reading the book I was carrying, proactively messaging (not scrolling) or just reflecting, or allowing myself to be bored, or praying, or being close to my feeling and thinking self.

When I started to sleep to podcasts, I also began to commute to them. Soon enough, I pretty much always had earphones in. I was drowning out my anxiety. Leaning on an easy comfort. Trading out the contemplative values I had developed.

So, at the off, I would like to tell you that I am no expert in the practise of being non-anxious. But boy do I have a lot of great theory I can share with you. And I’m glad that I had to write this talk right now because I think I needed to write this talk right now.

Defining our terms

What do we mean when we say anxiety? It’s Gen Z in a word - it trends in the billions on TikTok, it was the title of Jonathan Haidt’s blockbuster, law changing book ‘The Anxious Generation’ - (go buy and read this now) - it’s Doechii’s new viral track - but what does it mean? And how did it come to seemingly define our generation?

It wasn’t always this way. I recall the first time I was at a youth retreat and someone wanted to be prayed for for their social anxiety. It was a remarkably brave moment of vulnerability and the first time I had heard a young person really say that this was the primary thing they were struggling with. Now, it’s everywhere you look.

Here are some reliable definitions.

‘Anxiety is usually a natural response to pressure, feeling afraid or threatened, which can show up in how we feel physically, mentally, and in how we behave.’ NHS

‘Anxiety may be defined as apprehension, tension, or uneasiness that stems from the anticipation of danger, which may be internal or external.’ National Institue for Health

‘Anxiety is both a mental and physical state of negative expectation. Mentally it is characterized by increased arousal and apprehension tortured into distressing worry, and physically by unpleasant activation of multiple body systems—all to facilitate response to an unknown danger, whether real or imagined.’ Psychology Today, UK

We might say then that it is very close to fear, especially it seems fear of the future.

And, it’s important to note that it’s a natural response - as the NHS emphasises there. Meaning, it is not something we can get rid of. I have come by people who want to get rid of anxiety totally - if that’s you I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, it ain’t happening. It is an emotion that we will experience from time to time. We need to listen to it, it is trying to tell us something.

Something I learned in my first year of counselling theory is that there are two separate anxiety disorders - so whilst anxiety is a natural response, it can become disordered, which is a more serious problem. The two anxiety disorders are Generalised Anxiety Disorder (or GAD) and Social Anxiety Disorder (or SAD) - sometimes called social phobia.

‘Generalised anxiety disorder (GAD) is a common mental health condition where you often feel very anxious about lots of different things.’ NHS

‘Social anxiety disorder, also called social phobia, is a long-term and overwhelming fear of social situations.’ NHS

Ever had a ghost flatmate? Noticed that someone is particularly reclusive, even by introvert standards? This is a thing. (Or maybe you’re just really annoying to be around, always an option… )

But, for most of us, anxiety is just a normal emotional reaction to situations in life that should make us feel anxious. Gen Z has lots of good reasons to feel anxious. Perhaps you dream of home ownership. Perhaps you don’t want to have to do National Service in Ukraine. Perhaps you work in hospitality or a kitchen (I have just finished watching ‘The Bear’ - wow the anxiety of post-COVID restaurant life). Perhaps you run a business and you just learned what a tariff is. Perhaps Greenland is up for grabs now? And Taiwan? And Palestine? And you don’t trust politicians or the media or your neighbour - it goes on.

So, you know, perhaps you have some good reasons to feel anxious from time to time.

But so did my mum’s generation, who were in school through the fear of the Cuban Missile crisis. And so did my dad’s dad who was on three ships that were sunk by German U-boats - and on by the third time he had learned to swim. My dad was born in 1948 and he recalls as a child playing around the bombed-out buildings of our town. He remarks on how he has lived in a blip of peacetime, rare in the course of human history.

So it’s not all new.

But what is new is that we do live in a strangely connected time, where we can know way beyond what our tribe designed mind can cope with. Here’s the great quote on this:

“The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.’ Edward O. Wilson

The Anxious Generation

is a real thing, not just a catchy phrase.

It was the now late Pope Francis who set me down this path back at the 2018 Youth Synod. He referred to us as a ‘disorientated generation’ and spoke to the ‘darker realities’ that we were experiencing. It was the first time that anyone had told me that my generation was messed up. Like, unusually and historically so. And it was the Pope. So, I paid attention. When I came back to London I wanted to research this, seem if it wasn’t all hype, what some call a ‘moral panic’. For years after this I gave tentative talks about how technology, particularly smartphones and social media, might not be good for our overall well-being or our spiritual life. But, I had to say ‘there are people on both sides of this’.

Last summer, Jonathan Haidt’s book, ‘The Anxious Generation’ freed me and everyone else up to drop the tentativeness. The data is in. Social media played havoc with a generation of young people, their sense of worth and their ability to connect with others.

Perhaps most shockingly, technology made young people what they dread most: boring. As one great Substack essay title put it, ‘Your phone is why you don't feel sexy’.

All adolescent behaviours are down, compared to previous generations - spending independent time with friends. learning to drive, dating, having sex. Less of it all. (Although I have since wondered how social researchers know how much sex people are having).

As Dr Jean Twenge, author of ‘IGen’ puts it:

‘... teens today differ from the Millennials not just in their views but in how they spend their time. The experiences they have every day are radically different from those of the generation that came of age just a few years before them.ʼ Twenge, 2017

‘At first I presumed these might be blips, but the trends persisted, across several years and a series of national surveys. The changes werenʼt just in degree, but in kind. The biggest difference between the Millennials and their predecessors was in how they viewed the world; teens today differ from the Millennials not just in their views but in how they spend their time. The experiences they have every day are radically different from those of the generation that came of age just a few years before them.

What happened in 2012 to cause such dramatic shifts in behavior? ... it was exactly the moment when the proportion of Americans who owned a smartphone surpassed 50 percent.ʼ Dr Jean Twenge

Johnathan Haidt’s essential premise is 2 fold: Gen Z has been overprotected in the real world and underprotected online.

Through the nineties there were many scares about child abduction and trust in society broke down. Previous generations of kids were told to come home ‘when the lights came down’ (think the 80’s kids in ‘Stanger Things’ biking around in a gang) and my dad in the early fifties playing around the rubble of the Blitz.

Gen Z was not allowed out of the sight of its parents until much later in life, into their teen years, and always with a phone, maybe even with ‘Find my phone’ on so they could be literally tracked. They were overprotected in the real world. They had less opportunities to learn how to navigate tough situations without their parents. They had less risky play. They had much more screen time. They literally went outside less.

When I was 14 I would come home from school and spend 4 horse, easily, on Facebook. And my parents would ask me what I was doing. And I would say I was talking to my friends and make the case that this was actually really connecting me. And I spent an awful lot more time inside because I had the option of connecting with them this way.

I also was able to come by online pornography when I was twelve/thirteen. I wish I hadn’t been able to. It is so tragic to me that so many children are saddled with the weight of shame because of this. And it goes on to harm so many relationships in the real world, really early on. If you want a pretty tough read on this, check out the 2023 UK Children’s Commissioner report, ‘‘A lot of it is actually just abuse’- Young people and pornography’.

They were underprotected online.

Underprotected from constant social comparison, from addictive design, from un-realistic body image, to name but a few. Social media was designed this way. It didn’t have to be. It’s a conscious choice by powerful companies to make us feel more anxious to hold our attention, in what’s called ‘The Attention Economy’.

‘We are more profitable to a corporation if weʼre spending time staring at a screen, staring at an ad, than if weʼre spending that time living our life in a rich way. And so weʼre seeing the results of that, weʼre seeing corporations using powerful artificial intelligence to outsmart us and figure out how to pull our attention for the things they want us to look at rather than things that are most consistent with our goals and our values and our lives.ʼ Justin Rosenstein, co-creator of the Facebook like button.

So this is new. Don’t listen to anyone who tells you that this is the same as TV or radio, or that this is a moral panic. It’s not. The graphs on teen anxiety, depression, self-harm and suicide are all alarmingly sharp, especially for teen girls. And Big Tech created this situation and they made a lot of money from it and we should be righteously angry about it.

Wasn’t this talk about being a Non-Anxious Presence?

Haven’t I just given you an immense amount of reasons to feel anxious. Yep.

Partly because I now want to remind you that anxiety is a natural response. There are reasons why this generation is marked by anxiety. It has good reason to be.

So, how can we be non-anxious presences in an anxious generation?

Well, this phrase comes from a different book, Edwin Friedman’s ‘Failure of Nerve’.

In short, Friedman was a Rabbi, a therapist and an early expert in family systems theory. This theory is the basic idea that relationships function together in a system and he applied this to larger systems beyond family, such as churches, synagogues, companies and nation states. His basic premise was that whilst the West was progressing in many ways (medically, scientifically, technologically etc), the data showed that it was regressing emotionally and relationally. He has 5 characteristics by which you can know an anxious system.

‘Five interlocking comparisons are made between highly anxious, regressed families with acting-out children, on the one hand, and the functioning of contemporary American society, on the other. The fire aspects of chionic anxiety are reactivity, herding, blaming, a quick-fix mentality, and lack of leadership - the last not only a fifth characteristic of societal regression but one that stems from and contributes to the other four. Each of these perverts natural principles of evolution, namely, self-regulation, adaptation to strength, the response to challenge, and allowing time for processes to mature.’ p24

In his work as a family therapist, working with families in crisis who are experiencing system-wide anxiety, Friedman would look for the one person with the potential to become a non-anxious presence. He became convicted that the only way to stop system wide anxiety in relational systems was to insert a non-anxisous presence into the heart of it. He often called this a ‘well differentiated leader’.

‘without question the single variable that most distinguished the families that survived and flourished from those that disintegrated was the presence of what I shall refer to throughout this work as a well-differentiated leader.

… by well-differentiated leader … I mean someone who has clarity about his or her own life goals. and, therefore, someone who is less likely to become lost in the anxious emotional processes swirling about. I mean someone who can be separate while still remaining connected, and therefore can maintain a modifying, non-anxious, and sometimes challenging presence. I mean someone who can manage his or her own reactivity to the automatic reactivity of others, and therefore be able to take stands at the risk of displeasing. It is not as though some leaders can do this and some cannot. No one does this easily, and most leaders, I have learned, can improve their capacity.’ p14

So there it is. We can all just be that. well-differentiated leaders, non-anxious presences.

It’s one thing to know the theory, another to become this. How do we do it?

The Quiet Place

At the end of his book, Friedman talks of his own crisis, in which his theory was put to the test. He went through the experience of mysterious pains, numbness and tinglings and had to meet with a lot of doctors about potential diagnoses, plans and surgeries. He bullet points some methods that pulled him through, kept him non-anxious.

‘I practiced … deep breathing. Biofeedback specialists have found that like meditation or prayer, deep breathing can keep you focused on yourself, and it has the additional advantage of oxygenating the blood. (I even tried it on the operating tables before going under.)’ p244

His further principles in times of crisis are:

• Develop a support system outside of the work system, such as professional helpers, family, and friends.

• Stay focused on long-term goals

• Practice deep breathing, prayer, or meditation.

• Listen to your body.

• Work out the balance between being responsible for self and being labelled obstreperous.

• Keep the system loose through humor.

• It's time to make decisions when the same question brings no new information.

• Accept the possibility that your own functioning brought it on, which means that you may be able to influence your recuperation.’ p245

There’s a lot here, but prayer is in there a bunch.

And I could keep it that simple.

Jesus often went off to pray on his own and taught others to pray in ‘the quiet place’. Sometimes, it is translated that Jesus went off to pray in a solitary place, or wilderness, or desert. The root Greek word used is eremos. Why? St John Chrysostom tackled this.

‘For what purpose does Jesus go up into the mountain? To teach us that loneliness and retirement are good when we pray to God. He is continually withdrawing into the wilderness, and there he often spends the whole night in prayer, teaching us earnestly to seek such quietness in our prayers, as time and place may confer. For the wilderness is the mother of quiet; it is a calm and a harbor, delivering us from all turmoils.’

When my life goes into crisis mode, prayer is the first thing I drop, even though I know it grounds me.

I know that I always have 10 minutes, even in the most intense times. I can always find 10 to sit with the gospel of the day. I journal when I pray, it keeps my thoughts from drifting, focuses me up. I recommend that. I’d also recommend a time limit - 10 minutes, that also keeps your mind focused. The deep breathing too, slowing your body down.

And here, we’re talking about contemplative prayer.

What does contemplative prayer look like? Feel like? I love this famous story, featured in John Mark Comers’ ‘Practising The Way’.

‘The retreat leader and spiritual director Marjorie Thompson tells the story of a conversation between an eighteenth-century priest and an elderly peasant who would sit alone for long hours in the quiet of the church. When the priest asked what he was doing, the old man simply replied, "I look at Him, He looks at

me, and we are happy,"

This is the apex of Christian spirituality. Saint Ignatius of Loyola once called God "Love loving.’ In doing so, he spoke for the millions of contemplatives down through history’ p46

It’s just about being with God. This tends to slow you down. It tends to make you feel ok. We call on the Holy Spirit and he tends to come and be with us. Then, it’s just about us showing up. As we are. Thomas Merton has a great quote about sincerity in prayer.

‘The most important thing in prayer is that we present ourselves as we are before God as he is.’

He mets us there, and tells what he told the disciples in the storm: do not be afraid. Anxiety is fear about the future. If we have faith, anxiety is our opportunity to lean in. To trust.

If we practise this, if we maintain the quiet place every day, we will be less easily thrown off course by the storms. John Mark also points out we’ll be less easy to tempt, to stumble into our bad patterns and coping mechanisms.

‘It is very hard to tempt well-rested, emotionally healthy, happy people. It is very easy to tempt exhausted, burned-out, workaholic people under chronic stress. How often do we do most of the enemy’s work for him?’

So, (at my best) I pray when I get to the office. I’m terrible at getting up early so I’ve given up that battle. I get to work, I get a coffee and I go sit. Before the siege of the daily whatever comes in, I connect. I try to show up. I have often drifted away from this daily rhythm, but I come back.

One prayer I have found powerful comes from anonymous addict circles. It turns out that most addicts in those rooms are concerned with work and stress and anxiety and are very sure to maintain their peace in case they wobble into their coping mechanisms again. The prayer they pray is called ‘The Serenity Prayer’ - it goes like this:

God grant me the serenity

to accept the things I cannot change;

courage to change the things I can;

and wisdom to know the difference.

Don’t duck your feelings.

One last note. A final helpful spiritual key is handed to us by St Ignatius of Loyola.

Known as ‘Ignatian Indifference’ it is better translated as a kind of freedom. It doesn’t mean you don’t care, it means that you are free on an emotional level from the need for your life to go a certain way. Not stoic, or repressed. You feel your feelings but they don’t disturb your peace or joy, because these come from God.

At the beginning of the Spiritual Exercises, Ignatius writes:

‘We should not fix our desires on health or sickness, wealth or poverty, success or failure, a long life or a short one. For everything has the potential of calling forth in us a more loving response to our life forever with God. Our only desire and our one choice should be this: I want and choose what better leads to God’s deepening life in me.’

Ok, let’s finish where we started - podcasts - drowning out the anxious voice.

I was using podcasts to numb. Numbing doesn’t really get rid of anxiety, and, as Brene Brown puts it, ‘when you numb, you numb everything’ - the good and the bad.

In a world of noise and an attention economy, what we give our attention to matters, it is what we become.

Last week, anxiety came for me again. Even though I’d prayed in the morning. I went and found the breakroom sofa and closed my eyes. And I felt its weight on my chest. And I felt like I was underwater. My timer for 8 minutes went off. I hit it for another 8. Then another 15. By then, a colleague friend sat next to me as a joke, and the future I was worrying about cleared a little. Then I went back to work on doing my part in making what I was worried about better. And I cleared more than I thought I would be able to.

I didn’t duck the feeling. I didn’t plug in the podcasts to drown it out. I let it wash over me. I felt it all. I was meant to. This is how God made us.

I’m gonna leave you with one last quote.

‘Bad times, hard times, this is what people keep saying; but let us live well, and times shall be good. We are the times: Such as we are, such are the times.’ St Augustine of Hippo

By session four of personal therapy, I had assessed that my therapist was good at his job and that I would go for it.

It took three sessions to try him out on some lighter material, see if we ‘worked’ together. I was new to all this, only having ended up in therapy because I have to get 70 hours of personal therapy to become a counsellor. Anyway, I began to share the story of the hard year behind me, one that made the arrival of therapy in my life seem providential. I wasn’t going to be struggling for material after my 2024.

The next week, in trying to share the story in more detail with him, I found that I had a strong emotional reaction and he suggested that I stop and notice what I was feeling. I identified it as a kind of strong sadness. He suggested the word shame. I hadn’t used that word at all yet. I shrugged this off and said that I was very familiar with shame but didn’t think this was it. He asked me if I noticed what was happening in my body. I resisted, saying that nothing new was happening in my body, that I felt the same as I had done before he brought up shame.

Towards the end of that session, he told me that when I had talked about shame, I had fully turned my body away from him, towards the wall on my left. I remember smiling. It was true, I had done that. As much as I like to look around as I talk, I had totally redirected my body away from him. All the while, I was actively saying that nothing had changed. In that moment, my body was acting more honestly than my mind. Shame had entered the room and had quickly come between me and my therapist.

This was a turning point for us. This blip of mind-body connection told me that we had struck something big and that he had named something accurately. I knew that we were drawing something familiar and hidden out into the light.

We went on to explore shame more in future sessions, how it alienates us from others, cuts us off from our relationships and leads us to fear rejection from our tribe, often irrationally.

I asked him who was good on shame and he gave the name I had expected: Brene Brown. He assured me that the hype was justified. I asked someone to gift me her book ‘Daring Greatly’ for Christmas. Nothing like a shame theorist to brighten up your Christmas season. Here’s an attempt at sharing what I’ve learned since.

Separating shame from guilt

What is shame? I didn’t have a strong definition of shame when we first started batting it around in therapy. It was probably interchangeable with guilt and self-hate for me. The first thing that Brene Brown did for me was to draw shame apart from its siblings. In particular, she draws a sharp line between guilt and shame, which allows us to keep the good and know what to look out for. She writes:

‘We often use the terms embarrassment, guilt, humiliation, and shame interchangeably …

How we experience these different emotions comes down to self-talk. How do we talk to ourselves about what's happening? The best place to start examining self-talk and untangling these four distinct emotions is with shame and guilt. The majority of shame researchers and clinicians agree that the difference between shame and guilt is best understood as the difference between "I am bad" and "I did something bad."

Guilt = I did something bad

Shame = I am bad.’ p71

This distinction has been really helpful to me. I can try to catch my self-talk and name it. Interestingly, it’s also allowed me to make peace with guilt as something proactively helpful in my life. ‘I did something bad’ is often just objectively true, but it doesn’t have to lead to shame.

As a Catholic, you often hear about ‘Catholic guilt’ and more broadly in society, we seem not to have a context for guilt, it’s in the pile of knotty and uncomfortable emotions that we’re not sure what to do with. Brene Brown, it turns out, is pro-guilt. She sees it as a positive force for good.

‘… let's say that you forgot that you made plans to meet a friend at noon for lunch … If your self-talk is "I'm such an idiot. I'm a terrible friend and a total loser"- that's shame. If, on the other hand, your self-talk is “I can’t believe I did that. What a crappy thing to do” - that’s guilt.

Here's what's interesting … When we feel shame, we are most likely to protect ourselves by blaming something or someone, rationalizing our lapse, offering a disingenuous apology, or hiding out …

When we apologize for something we've done, make amends, or change a behavior that doesn't align with our values, guilt - not shame - is most often the driving force. We feel guilty when we hold up something we've done or failed to do against our values and find they don't match up. It's an uncomfortable feeling, but one that’s helpful. The psychological discomfort, something similar to cognitive dissonance, is what motivates meaningful change. Guilt is just as powerful as shame, but its influence is positive, while shame's is destructive. In fact, in my research I found that shame corrodes the very part of us that believes we can change and do better’. p72

I think I always intuited this positive attitude towards guilt because the phrase ‘Catholic guilt’ has always grated on me. In my experience, my faith has been the catalyst to become the better version of me and the marker by which I can judge where I am on that journey. Guilt is a part of this, but a helpful part of it, which holds me to my values and reveals to me where the dissonance is. Brown puts it perfectly there, ‘We feel guilty when we hold up something we've done or failed to do against our values and find they don't match up.’ In fact, we even say those very words in the Mass, ‘for what I have done, for what I have failed to do’. Confession is obviously then amazing for this - pouring grace directly into these places. What a gift.

Shame on the other hand, I am concluding, really doesn’t have this positive dimension to it. Brown believes that shame is actively destructive.

‘Shame is highly correlated with addiction, violence, aggression, depression, eating disorders, and bullying. Researchers don't find shame correlated with positive outcomes at all … In fact, shame is much more likely to be the cause of destructive and hurtful behaviors than it is to be the solution.

… it is human nature to want to feel worthy of love and belonging. When we experience shame, we feel disconnected and desperate for worthiness … we are more likely to engage in self-destructive behaviors and to attack or shame others …. shame erodes our courage and fuels disengagement, and what we can do to cultivate cultures of worthiness, vulnerability, and shame resilience.’ p73

Vulnerability, coming out of hiding

Ok, so what does any of this have to do with vulnerability?

In Brown’s words, shame often looks like, ‘hiding out’, withdrawing from relationships, believing that if people knew what we were like - that ‘I am bad’ - they would reject us.

The story of Adam and Eve is a great example of a shame story. After eating the apple, doing the bad thing, we are told that they hide from God.

‘Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God.’ Genesis 3:8

After this, Adam tries to displace blame, also a classic symptom of shame.

This movement to hide is its own kind of trap because we long for relationship, we are wired for it, with God and neighbour. By withdrawing the parts of ourselves that we are ashamed of from our relationships, we limit the ability of others to love us unconditionally.

In a word, this will require vulnerability.

Previously, the word vulnerability was a vauge therapy-speak term to me that I had no connection to. Now, I see it as the key out of the shame trap. Brown talks of it this way.

‘As I look back on what I've learned about shame, gender, and worthiness, the greatest lesson is this: If we're going to find our way out of shame and back to each other, vulnerability is the path and courage is the light.’ p110

If shame is the movement away from the other into hiding, vulnerability is the movement out of hiding towards the other.

So, if it’s this important, let’s define the term. What is vulnerability? Brown defines vulnerability as, ‘uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure’ p34. She draws from the etymology.

‘ … the word vulnerability is derived from the Latin word vulnerare, meaning "to wound." The definition includes "capable of being wounded" and "open to attack or damage."’ p39

Why is vulnerability defined as risky? Because to be vulnerable with another is to trust that they will still accept you, flaws and all. It offers them the opportunity to act unconditionally. They won’t always - this is the risk. And because it’s always a risk, it’s always courageous.

I’ve come to realise that I have admired vulnerability for years. I would hear public speakers talking pure theory and think, ‘but where’s the real stuff? Say something real, about you.’ It’s also what I have always loved about songwriters who were clearly drawing from their real, hard experiences. It’s what I loved about ‘DMCs’ (deep meaningful conversations) as a teen, then great group sessions on the Alpha Course - people sharing real things about their real lives. And about my first experience of spiritual direction, now four years of spiritual accompaniment. And about anonymous addict groups, that allow entry to a circle of vulnerability via the thing an addict would feel shame about. Connection via shame. Genius. And any great conversations with friends that ‘go deep’. It’s all vulnerability. Sometimes we literally feel ourselves drop down into it as it deepens.

It’s also why I love poetry now. Other poets ‘going for it’ vulnerably has helped me. That’s why I write vulnerably too - what’s the point otherwise? Say something real that only you could say. If anyone could say it, if it risks nothing, is it a good poem? Brown notes how the arts and vulnerability relate in this way too - by being real in our creative expression, we risk rejection.

‘To put our art, our writing, our photography, our ideas out into the world with no assurance of acceptance or appreciation - that's also vulnerability.’ p34

We risk this with our Substacks too… (like & subscribe… ).

Ground rules for vulnerability

So, is vulnerability always good in all contexts? Nope.

Ever heard a celebrity crying about their childhood on a podcast and thought, ‘something feels off about this?’ You’re not alone. I felt this way before I understood why.

So what are some good ground rules? Thankfully, Brene Brown has had a crack at this too.

‘Vulnerability is based on mutuality and requires boundaries and trust. It's not oversharing, it's not purging, it's not indiscriminate disclosure, and it's not celebrity-style social media information dumps. Vulnerability is about sharing our feelings and our experiences with people who have earned the right to hear them.’ p45

‘People who have earned the right to hear them.’ Amen. This is Brown’s criteria for what she shares in her public speaking.

‘I don't tell stories or share vulnerabilities with the public until I've worked through them with the people I love.

First, I only share stories or experiences that I've worked through and feel that I can share from solid ground. I don't share what I define as "intimate" stories, nor do I share stories that are fresh wounds …

Second, I follow the rule that I learned in my graduate social work training. Sharing yourself to teach or move a process forward can be healthy and effective, but disclosing information as a way to work through your personal stuff is inappropriate and unethical.

Last, I only share when I have no unmet needs that I'm trying to fill. I firmly believe that being vulnerable with a larger audience is only a good idea if the healing is tied to the sharing, not to the expectations I might have for the response I get.’ p161-162

Marble Jar friends

An image that really stayed with me from the book was the image of the marble jar

Brene Brown tells the story of her daughter Ellen’s first betrayal by her elementary school friends. She had shared a secret with these two friends and they had told her whole class. When she came home, she told her mum that she was never going to tell anyone anything ever again. Searching for a way to explain to her daughter that she shouldn’t shut down forever, Brown reached for an image her daughter could understand, her teacher’s marble jar.

‘Ellen's teacher … kept a bag of colored marbles next to the jar, and whenever the class was collectively making good choices, she would throw some marbles into the jar. Whenever the class was acting out … the teacher would take marbles out of the jar.

… I told Ellen to think about her friendships as marble jars. Whenever someone supports you, or is kind to you, or sticks up for you, or honors what you share with them as private, you put marbles in the jar. When people are mean, or disrespectful, or share your secrets, marbles come out. When I asked her if it made sense, she nodded her head with excitement and said, "I've got marble jar friends!"

… When I asked her how her marble jar friends became marble jar friends, she thought about it for a minute and replied, "I'm not sure. How did your marble jar friends get their marbles?" After thinking about it for a while, we both started blurting out our answers. Some of hers were:

• They keep our secrets.

• They tell us their secrets.

• They remember my birthday!

… Trust is built one marble at a time.’ p47 - 49

Marble jar friends are those who have earned our trust and they deserve our vulnerability.

Who are your marble jar friends?

Offering tours

One of my marble jar friends is a housemate. We talk a lot and near the close of the year, I began to refer back to 2024 as a bad year. He told me he was surprised by this and said something along the lines of, ‘I live with you and I didn’t know you were having a bad year.’

This was a wake up call for me. It showed me how good I was at seeming ok, even when I was just coping.

This has now largely shaped my therapeutic journey - the desire to move from shame to vulnerability - to hide less and show up more.

My therapist now sits next to a high marble jar. I’ve let him in to a lot and it’s really had a ripple effect on my other relationships, outside of the room.

Our conversations have helped me to notice when a marble jar friend offers me an opportunity to be vulnerable. I don’t see this as indulgent anymore. When someone close asks me how I’m doing now, I see the opportunity to say something more real and I try to. Often, this is me sharing what I’m stressed about or what I’m worried about or, if we have more time, how my year went. It’s an attempt.

Unexpectedly, this has often caused them to do the same. I didn’t expect this. It’s like creating a new norm in a relationship, modelling a new behaviour. ‘If I can do this, you can do this too.’ Even just a bit. Marble by marble, our relationships become a little more real than they were before.

One day, when I’ve run it by those who love me, I’m going to find a way to share more about what I came to refer to as the bad year. I know that I’m being nudged to. But I’ll run it by my high marble jar friends first and then probably write about it here. It’s not all bad actually, it was the context for a massive moment of grace and a deeper understanding of hope.

Maybe 18 sessions in, my therapist and I started to talk about reviewing our journey. I asked him what he had made of it and he said it was as though I was mapping terrain ahead of us and slowly showing him. This really got me, because midway I had written a poem about this journey called ‘The First House Tour’. We acknowledged that we had some kind of synergy here, a very similar image. The poem was about how I was taking a risk with him, showing him around what I was not proud of, trying to move towards a more vulnerable way of being. I think it’s where this piece should end.

Stay free friends.

The First House Tour

I got good at covering the tracks

to my hiding place.

I sweep the snow on return journeys

back from the house of requirement.

These days I am bringing another

and for the first time offering tours.

We go room by room at my pace.

He is helping me to name them more accurately.

I can hide from essays here.

Or from crackling things.

Or from time passing and from growing older.

I click a pocket watch and hit pause on it all.

But I am done with hiding,

hence the tours I am offering.

My first guest does not judge

the jenky-armed sofa,

nor how little light gets in,

nor the dust it catches.

He just wills me on,

partners with my restoration.

I would like to have the whole tribe over one day

and new loves too.

Maybe some will join the project

like how my Dad could not abide

the squeaky hinges on my uni house.

His love is a doing word.

With all this, I won’t have tracks left to cover,

they’ll be lost in the slush my guests turf up.

Then I’ll have to bring that wolf in too.

We named him shame, by the way.

I got good at covering the tracks

to my hiding place.

I sweep the snow on return journeys

back from the house of requirement.

These days I am bringing another

and for the first time offering tours.

We go room by room at my pace.

He is helping me to name them more accurately.

I can hide from essays here.

Or from crackling things.

Or from time passing and from growing older.

I click a pocket watch and hit pause on it all.

But I am done with hiding,

hence the tours I am offering.

My first guest does not judge

the jenky-armed sofa,

nor how little light gets in,

nor the dust it catches.

He just wills me on,

partners with my restoration.

I would like to have the whole tribe over one day

and new loves too.

Maybe some will join the project

like how my Dad could not abide

the squeaky hinges on my uni house.

His love is a doing word.

With all this, I won’t have tracks left to cover,

they’ll be lost in the slush my guests turf up.

Then I’ll have to bring that wolf in too.

We named him shame, by the way.