"Bless me Father for I have sinned," I say according to protocol, kneeling in anonymity behind the privacy screen opposite the priest in the closet-sized confessional. A wooden crucifix hangs just above eye level.

“I went surfing instead of going to Mass on Sunday,” I say in a penitent tone.

A trip to Europe when I was 23 took me to the swell-rich Biarritz area of France. The waves were pumping on a Sunday morning, so I paddled out instead of going to church.

I was secretly hoping the priest would say, "I'm glad you enjoyed the waves," with a light-hearted tone and a smile I couldn't see but could feel. That would have felt like layers of weight evaporating. I didn't want to be there, in that confessional in a church in France. But it didn't feel like I had a choice. I had to do it, and it couldn't wait until I returned home from the trip.

This was life under the tyranny of scrupulosity, the religious form of obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) which had been my debilitating companion for the past dozen years. Maybe the French priest will at very least say something like, "It's okay to miss Mass occasionally,” I found myself thinking. That would have more than sufficed as a balm for a guilty conscience. I can't remember the words he said, but I do recall the lingering emotional ache. No relief, no lighter the load.

A few years later, I recall confessing immense amounts of self-hatred. But the priest I kneeled before didn't think it was something worthy of confession, and he told me so in no uncertain terms. Another time, with the same priest, I confessed to what the church deemed a sin against chastity: making out with someone. He told me I had two choices. “You either get married or you become a priest.” His words felt distant, rigid, binary. They were reductive and devoid of any modicum of pastoral care. He transmitted a kind of moral machinery while taking no interest in me as a human being. The priest saw a moral situation before him, not a person.

During this period, the scrupulosity wasn't quite as severe as a few years prior. Spiritual direction, therapy, and evolving spiritual and theological paradigms had moved the needle a bit. I had been slowly developing an interior world in which I could question self-condemnation and the voice of OCD.

“This guy is an asshole," I remember thinking as I walked out—while also wondering if it was a sin to have that thought. But I wasn't overtaken by it.

This was still somewhat unfamiliar terrain. For years, it felt something like living an anti-Romans 8 existence. That verse reads, "Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” For me it was more like, "There is now condemnation." I was living inside of it.

Before a life-altering mystical experience when I was 17, before I began going to church, reading the Bible, praying-- doing whatever I thought it was "religious people" did—there wasn't self-condemnation. After, there was. It felt almost prescribed, prerequisite, a non-negotiable to the religious life.

Every desire I had was suspicious. I had to confess things constantly. It felt like God was constantly evaluating me. I was petrified of committing the unforgivable sin.

The psychobiology of OCD, rooted in the neural circuitry of survival, organized my inner world. And faith was its fuel. Faith was recruited into the survival system.

Scrupulosity easily fractures us from our authenticity and desires.

We have to survive the divine rather than being able to rest in a Mystery resting in us.

The gospel according to OCD perpetually tells us we aren't perfect enough, we’re sinful and morally inadequate. The slightest sense of doubt or uncertainty has to be resolved immediately.

You might experience intrusive thoughts of a blasphemous nature, like I did. The more you try to exorcize them from your mind, the more intense they become. It is tyranny.

Prayers must be said perfectly.

Fear of offending God never eases.

Scripture is read and re-read compulsively.

It's a fear-driven, survival oriented liturgy. And it’s not possible to think our way out of this (although specific cognitive behavioral therapies such as ERP can be very helpful). Part of what we need is to feel that our humanness is welcome. This doesn't heal OCD. It doesn't silence scrupulosity’s liturgy. But it can loosen the shame that has become tangled with our humanity.

It took time, but I eventually understood that going surfing on Sunday is not something to confess, but maybe something to celebrate.

It took time, but I also eventually encountered priests, in confessional booths and out, who were different. Once, also while out of town, I entered the confessional carrying the familiar weight of guilt for a smattering of things, including getting drunk. I don’t recall exactly what I shared, something about having too many beers. That confessional had no privacy screen. I could see the priest’s wide, toothy smile as he said in a distinctive Kenyan accent, “If you want you can drink your beers at home instead of at the bar.” His response wasn’t logical in the least. But somehow, his strange little comment loosened the self-contempt, the unreasonable guilt.

His words didn’t make sense. But through his presence, I made sense, at least for a moment.

If you are struggling with scrupulosity or another type of OCD, you may feel like you don't make sense. You may feel broken, confused, or ashamed. I want to remind you that your humanness is welcome, that treatment is available, and you don't have to navigate this alone.

The algorithm loves a strawman argument.

They generate outrage. Outrage generates clicks. Clicks generate revenue. It’s part and parcel of social media that conveniently helps fill the coffers of Zuckerberg et. al.

The latest example arrived a few weeks ago in the trauma world, when a new journal article was published with the provocative title: “The Body Does Not Keep the Score.”

The internet promptly lost its mind.

It wasn’t because of anything the paper actually says, but because of what the title says. The controversy is largely built on a false bifurcation, a debate that doesn’t meaningfully exist among trauma researchers and clinicians. The power is in the headline, not the content. That’s unfortunate because the paper itself raises some important points.

My first reaction was immediate:

Shit. Not this again.

The title worked on me, too.

Without that title, the paper would likely have landed in relative obscurity. There’s no groundbreaking scientific discovery. There is no revolutionary new finding buried in its pages. Yet millions of people suddenly heard about it because the title was perfectly calibrated for the social media—designed in algorithmic heaven where the strawman keeps the score.

The formula is simple: The body keeps the score. No, it doesn’t.

This generates instant polarization, instant engagement, and instant virality. The irony is that the paper itself isn’t nearly as divisive as its title suggests.

The Body Keeps the Score Was Always a Metaphor

Part of the confusion stems from how people interpret the title of Bessel van der Kolk’s enormously influential 2014 book, The Body Keeps the Score.

The phrase was never intended to be taken literally.

Van der Kolk wasn’t arguing that trauma is physically stored in muscles, fascia, or tissues like some kind of toxic residue waiting to be released. And neither are any serious trauma therapists. His work argued something scientifically defensible: trauma profoundly affects the brain, nervous system, endocrine system, immune system, and bodily experience.

In other words, trauma affects the whole person. But right up front in the first paragraph, the authors of the new paper write that the phrase the body keeps the score is “implying that experience is literally inscribed in flesh…”1 Even a cursory read through van der Kolk’s book highlights the inaccuracy—laziness even—of this statement.

The book title served as a corrective to decades of approaches that treated trauma primarily as a cognitive phenomenon. It highlighted something many survivors already knew: you cannot simply think your way out of trauma. Over the past decade, the phrase evolved from a metaphor into a book title, then from a book title into a cultural axiom.

The Debate Nobody Was Having

The new paper seems aimed at those who claim trauma is literally stored in the body. I share the authors’ concerns about that language. But here’s the problem: no respected trauma researchers or clinicians were ever making that claim in the first place.

The authors appear to be arguing against a position that exists mostly on the fringes of social media, wellness culture, and oversimplified trauma discourse. That’s worth correcting. But it isn’t a refutation of trauma science.

In fact, much of the paper actually supports what many trauma researchers have been saying all along. The brain is part of the body. Predictive processing—the idea that the brain constantly generates expectations based on prior experience—is already a well-established framework in neuroscience.

Traumatic experiences shape those predictions. They influence perception, emotion, physiology, attention, memory, and behavior. That sounds remarkably similar to what many people have meant by “the body keeps the score.”

Healing Is Not Excavation

One of the ideas in the paper is its rejection of the notion that healing requires digging out some hidden traumatic residue. As therapist Pierre Bouchard puts it, “Trauma is not stored in the body, but it is encountered in the body.” That’s a helpful frame.

Elsewhere, Bouchard writes, “We were handed the metaphor ‘the body keeps the score’ and something in us sniffed it and said, ‘yes—there’s something wrong in me and I can get it out, and then I’ll be okay.’”

That captures an unfortunate misunderstanding that has emerged in some corners of trauma culture. Healing is not the extraction of a buried object. Healing is not excavation.

Trauma therapy is not about locating something lodged within tissue or sinew and removing it. It is about helping the nervous system, brain, and mind develop new patterns of prediction, safety, regulation, connection, and meaning. It's about re-patterning what was organized around threat.

It is about regulating dysregulated survival responses.

It is about reconsolidating traumatic memories through evidence-based interventions.

It is about expanding flexibility where rigidity once existed.

It is about undoing aloneness.

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A Sensational Title Hiding an Important Conversation

The tragedy is that much of this nuance gets lost beneath the headline. Without the title, few people would be talking about the paper. With the title, almost nobody is talking about what the paper actually says. Instead, we’re arguing over a metaphor, despite the fact the paper emphasizes some very important neuroscience.

“The body keeps the score” was never meant as a literal statement. It was a powerful and catchy shorthand for a complex psychobiological reality. The metaphor helped millions of people understand that trauma is not merely a problem of thought, but something that affects the whole organism. That remains true.

The new paper offers useful clarifications. It challenges simplistic notions of trauma being “stored” in the body. It encourages more precise language. It highlights predictive processing and the brain’s remarkable capacity for adaptation. Those are worthwhile contributions.

What it doesn’t do is overturn decades of trauma research. Nor does it meaningfully refute the central insights that made van der Kolk’s research, and The Body Keeps the Score, so influential in the first place.

Science advances through refinement. If we want a better understanding of trauma and its treatment, the goal should be to test claims rigorously, discard what doesn’t hold up, and strengthen what does, not to knock down oversimplified versions of arguments that few serious practitioners and researchers are actually making.

The conversation deserves more precision, more nuance, and more curiosity. In other words: more science, less strawman.

The D word. Dysregulation. We hear hear it all the time these days.

It’s become shorthand for a wide range of distressing states—panic, anxiety, anger, depression, dissociation, and everything in between. It’s synonymous with internal dysfunction or disturbance.

We assume that when or if we find the solution—which is of course, regulation—voilà, calmness, stability, or peace returns. Nothing wrong with that.

But sometimes regulation evades us. The sought-after state remains just out of reach.

I was sitting with a client a few weeks ago. He was experiencing anxiety related to the war with Iran and our politically volatile landscape. He looked at me and said, almost apologetically, “I’m just so dysregulated lately.”

My immediate thought was: of course you are. You’re supposed to be.

We began to unpack what his dysregulation might actually be communicating. As we slowed down, a memory surfaced from when he was a teenager attending a church service. The pastor was preaching about the US invasion of Iraq, framing it as a sign of the end times—the second coming of Christ, imminent judgment, death, destruction, and salvation for a select few.

For him, it was terrifying. It wasn’t abstract theology, but existential threat.

The war with Iran in the present, combined with echoes of militant religious rhetoric from his past, reactivated something old. Beneath his sense of generalized dysregulation was something very specific: a survival response that had never been integrated.

What initially appeared as dysregulation revealed itself as meaning, as memory, as protection on top of unwitnessed pain.

Through the therapeutic process, my client shifted from a posture of, “Something is wrong with me. I’m dysregulated and I shouldn’t be” to “Of course I feel this way. My system is remembering the past, plus I’m living through a chaotic present.”

From there, something new became possible: contact with the younger, terrified part of him that had never been met with care. And welcoming, rather than resisting, his anxiety related to what is actually happening in the world now. He made room for the past and the present to speak.

Chronic Regulation

There’s no shortage of reasons for dysregulation. The threat of nuclear war. Genocide. Climate change. The erosion of democratic institutions. Economic instability. Racism. Violence. Alongside these collective pressures are the more personal ones: work, parenting, finances, health, relationships.

The individual and the collective layers are heavy. They leave a residue—emotional, cognitive, somatic. Many of us feel overwhelmed and overstimulated, or else shut down, submerged in a subtle but persistent sea of despair. We search for calm, but can’t seem to access it.

But in an era of polycrisis, should we expect to be regulated all the time?

To be chronically regulated in a chronically dysregulating world might mean we are engaging in avoidance. A disconnected avoidance. Or the eschewal of paying attention to reality.

Wisdom in Disguise

Within dysregulation—though often obscured—lies intelligence. Self-protective intelligence. The intelligence of nature. The wisdom of survival. Yet, we rarely see it that way. When our emotions and bodily states intensify, we tend to view them as problems to solve, symptoms to eliminate, or evidence that something is wrong with us. At worst, we experience them as a kind of internal breakdown.

This brings to mind something Herman Melville wrote:

“There is a wisdom that is woe. But there is a woe that is madness.”

What if some of what we call dysregulation belongs more to the former (wisdom) than the latter (woe, madness)?

The tight chest that labors for a deeper inhale. The jaw that clenches. The constriction in the gut. The electric, pulsing charge that comes out of nowhere and has nowhere to go but through you again and again.

We know what dysregulation feels like. It isn’t theoretical. It isn’t abstract. It is lived through the body, through emotion, through thought. And almost instinctively, we try to make it stop.

But what if, before we try to regulate it away, we listened?

The 13th-century Persian poet and mystic Rumi wrote, “These pains you feel are messengers. Listen to them.”

Dysregulation is a messenger. Can you listen to it? Can you be with it? Even partially? Five percent, if that’s all that’s available?

What if, instead of turning away in urgency, we turned toward in attunement?

Yes, nervous system regulation matters deeply. Without some degree of regulation, we lose access to presence and connection, choice and agency. But regulation can subtly become an ideal we strive for. Pressure to always be calm, grounded, and okay—especially in the midst of real or perceived threat—can itself become a source of dysregulation. The autonomic nervous system does not respond well to being forced into calm or stillness.

And we are not designed for constant equilibrium. We are designed for shifting states, for movement and fluidity somatically and emotionally. The surge of fight energy—anger—has its place. The descent into grief, sorrow, and depth has its place too.

We can’t regulate our humanity.

Listening is different from fixing. Listening is attunement, a turning toward rather than a turning away. When we immediately try to regulate every uncomfortable sensation or emotion, we may be silencing something essential and severing ourselves from the deeper intelligence of the psyche and soma.

What if what we automatically tend to judge as madness was actually wisdom in disguise?

When we tune in and listen, something begins to shift. Dysregulation becomes less of an enemy and more of a signal. Not something to be feared, but something to be understood, honored, and witnessed.

To be human in a world like this—a world of beauty and brutality, wonder and grief—is to experience dysregulation. It is not a failure. It is not a disorder. It is an appropriate response. There are moments when what we most need is not to seek calm, but to allow ourselves to feel fully, to burn with anger, to tremble, to ache.

And in those moments, perhaps the invitation is not to resist dysregulation, but to bless it. To trust that within it there is intelligence. That within it there is something trying, however imperfectly, to bring us back into relationship with ourselves, with others, and with the world.

This is not only an individual process. Attunement is also collective. We are meant to be with each other, not isolated and alone. Through embodied presence, we can learn to listen not only to our own nervous systems, but to the collective nervous system—to the larger story it's telling in this time and this place where we find ourselves.

And maybe you can begin to imagine what it is to not be chronically regulated, but chronically alive.

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The day after Jesus was crucified, his lifeless body was laid in a tomb. The disciples, along with Mary, the mother of Jesus, were likely bewildered, shaken by grief over the loss of their beloved teacher, her beloved son.

That Saturday was engulfed by the stark impossibility of imagining life regained.

There was no guarantee that breath would return to animate his limp, cooling body. The future could not be foretold. There were no signs of life. Mary and the disciples were left without answers.

Holy Saturday is the theological container for unknowing.

It is the space of in-betweenness, of threshold, waiting, tension, transition.

It reminds us that our bewilderment in the wake of trauma and loss is not only normal, it is necessary.

So much of our lives are lived here, in the ambiguity of Saturday. We teeter in this suspended space, awaiting a word of life. Holy Saturday invites us into intimacy with the unknown, with the lack of resolution, with what has not yet taken shape.

Resurrection, Fast and Slow

Resurrection is not a hurried movement to overcome suffering, loss, or tragedy—though it can feel that way, especially within a culture captivated by quick victories and triumphalist tendencies, a culture in which the algorithms of ascent preach an endless climb toward self-optimization—a gospel of perfection, success, and limitless expansion—what David Zahl has called the tyranny of optimization.

But in the liminality of Holy Saturday, we come face-to-face with a pervasive ambiguity and questions that do not yet have answers. Like Mary and the disciples, we may find ourselves in a season of profound bewilderment about what tomorrow, next month, or next year may hold—for us, for our families, for our communities, for our world.

And so we sit. We sit with grief, sorrow, and fear.

The silent waiting of Saturday invites us to witness the suffering within us and around us—to be present to it without rushing toward resolution, without grasping for easy answers or miracle fixes.

Which raises something worth considering:

Resurrection does not follow crucifixion. Resurrection follows liminality.

There is no expansion without the in-between of Saturday. New life does not arrive with immediacy in the gospel narrative, though we often read it that way. And it rarely arrives quickly in our own lives in the aftermath of deep loss or pain.

Yet Holy Saturday is rarely given any attention—except perhaps by a few who have lingered there long enough to take it seriously (check out the work of theologians Shelly Rambo, Hans Urs von Balthsar, and Alan E. Lewis).

What happens in that space, where all we can see is a tomb, where ambiguity settles into the body, where even the echo of hope feels distant? It is here, in the disorientation, that we go downward.

We descend into the fecund depths of psyche and soma.

We fall into liminality.

Rarely do we choose this descent. Egoic consciousness prefers the known, the secure, the controllable. Nothing about liminal terrain is comfortable.

It is where wounds wait and, if we remain long enough, wisdom.

If we stay with the ache in the chest, if we resist the urge to prematurely resolve, explain, or transcend, something begins to shift. Slowly. Barely discernably.

The path of descent invites us not merely to understand Holy Saturday as a theological concept, but to encounter it as lived reality.

It draws us into intimate contact with what remains unresolved within us: the pain, the diagnosis, the loss, the estrangement, the unraveling. Here we may find ourselves in an “apprenticeship with sorrow.” Or perhaps facing unmetabolized anger as it asks to be met. Or touching the void where unprocessed trauma has lingered, waiting to be witnessed.

The long, slow work of integration happens in the liminal territory of Saturday.

We can trust the fall into liminality.

The descent is unpredictable, and it is trustworthy. Both.

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You may have seen the headlines on social media.

Polyvagal Theory disproven.

Polyvagal Theory debunked.

RIP Polyvagal Theory.

The story these headlines tell is dramatic.

Recently, psychophysiologist Paul Grossman and 38 other researchers published a paper in the journal Clinical Neuropsychiatry titled Why the Polyvagal Theory Is Untenable.

Predictably, click-driven interpretations followed.

As a result of these posts, many people are confused by what they are seeing and hearing.

Can the nervous system map they use personally and professionally be trusted?

Is it even scientific?

There’s a subtle anxiety in the air.

And for some, it’s an outright battle to prove their side is correct and take down the developer of PVT, Stephen Porges.

The sensationalist headlines regarding a technical scientific critique sound like, by and large, they are coming from people who have not closely engaged the paper itself or the response from Porges published in the same journal issue.

Here’s an overview of what the recent published critique (Grossman et al., 2026) focuses on:

Respiratory Sinus Arrhythmia
Respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) is the variation of heart rate with breathing. Heart rate increases during inhalation and decreases during exhalation. Numerous studies have linked higher RSA levels to increased emotion regulation capacity. Reduced RSA is a biomarker for depression, anxiety, and stress-related disorders. This research is independent of PVT. However, PVT treats RSA as an index of vagal influence on the heart. The critics argue this relationship is not specific. RSA isn’t a reliable index of cardiac vagal tone according to Grossman (2024) and Grossman et al (2026). Further, they posit that RSA is shaped by a complex interplay of respiratory dynamics, baroreflex processes, and other physiological variables, and therefore cannot be cleanly mapped onto the ventral vagal system. They essentially are saying Porges is oversimplifying a far more complex process.

Vagal Nuclei
Polyvagal Theory proposes important distinctions between pathways associated with the nucleus ambiguus (NA) and the dorsal motor nucleus (DMN) of the vagus–both located in the medulla of the brainstem– linking them to different adaptive states. In PVT, the NA is the source of the ventral vagal complex which supports “safe and social” states. According to PVT, the DMN is the source of the dorsal vagal complex associated with immobilization responses. The critics argue that the neuroanatomical evidence does not support the clear functional separation of the NA and DMN implied by the theory.

Evolutionary Framing
Polyvagal Theory suggests that mammals alone evolved a ventral vagal system associated with social engagement. The critique questions whether this evolutionary distinction exists, pointing to evidence in non-mammalian vertebrates of similar behavior rooted in similar neurophysiology.

Broader Physiological Interpretation
More broadly, Grossman and co-authors argue that Polyvagal Theory risks oversimplifying autonomic organization by presenting a reductive model that doesn’t reflect the complexity of neurophysiology. What they are arguing is not that the neurophysiology of social engagement does not exist. Rather, they question whether the specific neuroanatomical and evolutionary claims made by Polyvagal Theory are sufficiently supported.

What This Debate Might Actually Mean

Many of these critiques are not new. Variations of these concerns have been raised for two decades, beginning with Grossman in 2007. The old debate has resurfaced. And it is a debate about biological precision, not clinical usefulness.

And that is where much of the online discourse goes awry.

Scientific critique is being interpreted as a verdict. But what is actually happening is a disagreement about levels of explanation. The authors are asking whether particular neuroanatomical claims hold up under current evidence. Porges, in his response, argues that the theory was never meant to function as a literal anatomical map, but as a systems-level framework describing patterns of autonomic organization.

In other words, perhaps this is a normal scientific disagreement. Scientific models are revised constantly. Mechanisms are refined. Measures become more precise. When it comes to the therapeutic/clinical realm, the Polyvagal Theory framework will likely survive because it captures something experientially meaningful even though the precise biology is not yet agreed upon.

Polyvagal Theory may not be as neuroanatomically precise a presented; there’s a strong likelihood of that. Yet that possibility does not invalidate clinical value. It also doesn’t discount its profound phenomenological resonance. People feel states of mobilization, immobilization, and safety/connection/presence in their body and mind.

What Polyvagal Theory offers is language: a way to describe how safety, connection, threat, and shutdown are experienced in the body. For many clinicians and trauma survivors, that language has been profoundly organizing and helpful, leading not only to insight, but to self-compassion and empowering ways to work with rather than against autonomic responses.

Declaring the theory “debunked” misunderstands both the critique and the nature of scientific progress.

The field is doing what fields do as they mature: moving from enthusiasm to refinement, from adoption to precision, from certainty to dialogue.

The main problem right now, as I see it, is neither Porges’ Polyvagal Theory nor Grossman’s critique. It is the headlines and hot-takes on social media promulgating certainty where the science itself is still evolving.

Sensationalism, not scientific debate, is what is untenable.

I’ll follow up with another post that does a deep dive into more of the nitty gritty of the science, both what remains theoretical and what is considered consensus. If you want to do more reading around PVT and the debate, psychologist Arielle Schwartz wrote an excellent piece worth checking out.

Prior to the advent of systems of formal education, we had the tradition of apprenticeship. It is probably humanity’s original model of learning. From ancient tool-making to artisanship, healing, and spiritual practice, the apprenticeship model immersed the learner in the context, rhythms, and way of the craft.

Learning wasn’t just about what was taught; it was about what was caught. It was embodied and relational, a long journey in which the apprentice absorbed not just knowledge or technique, but also wisdom. The master shaped the apprentice, and in turn, the apprentice was in a continual process of growth and formation.

Apprenticeship has survived in certain spiritual, artistic, and therapeutic lineages. Yet it has been all but replaced in the West— first by modernity’s educational methods and more recently by the digital training landscape that, however helpful and convenient, rarely offer a path into true depth or a way toward mastery.

Scroll through Instagram and you see the result. A young therapist, clearly informed, posts solid content—but nothing is new. All of it has been said by others. Yet he calls himself a “world-renowned therapist,” a bogus claim. Another uses the title “Dr.” despite holding no doctoral degree.

The Facebook ad I saw this morning read: Become a Polyvagal Therapy Coach by next week! You can start a practice and begin seeing clients right away.

According to the comments section, people were signing up in droves, taken in by the low price and promise of a pseudo-credential. These days, there are a million trainings, certificates, and courses available in the therapeutic marketplace. Some are legit, taught by experienced, highly qualified practitioners, and require significant investment of time, energy, and financial resources. Others are laughable. “Open your private practice next week!”

The latter are irresponsible and set inexperienced people up to unintentionally harm clients. They are like the fast food industry of therapeutic education—leaving you feeling satisfied for a few moments, but there is a steep cost.

Therapist and author Chuck DeGroat writes, “With the proliferation of psychological resources across different platforms on trauma, attachment, abuse, boundaries, parts work and more, we’re seeing the growing danger of armchair experts, ill-informed influencers and under-developed pseudo-practitioners. And it’s leading to confusion and inadequate care.”

He continues, “You wouldn’t hand a scalpel to someone who has only read medical texts. No, you need expert training, formation, closely supervised practice, mentoring, community, and the proper metabolization of disappointment and failure along the way. We know from centuries of formative soul work – this is how wisdom is cultivated.”

When apprenticeship is gone, immersive, ongoing learning can easily become obsolete. Social media clout—followers, likes, perceived authority—now substitutes for a lifelong journey of growing toward mastery.

With the proliferation of self-proclaimed experts, it’s often impossible for people to discern the overnight, armchair authority from someone with decades of rigorous, hard-earned experience. A large following now provides social currency, equating followers with expertise. Yet true pioneers paved the way for what we know and practice today as it relates to therapy and healing. They didn’t earn their status overnight. They mastered their craft over decades and shaped the field we operate within: the actual world renowned, pioneering researchers and practitioners in whose footsteps we walk.

Contrast that with a coach with minimal formal education and training who has 300,000 or a million followers on IG. They are perceived as on par with masters, even though, in a bygone era, they may still be in the earliest stages of apprenticeship. Their focus is maximizing engagement and financial gain, producing content optimized for virality, not slow growth toward mastery or genuine formation.

In the digital egosphere,1 it seems everyone is fighting for ground to stand on. Shouting to be seen. Grasping for relevance. There’s pressure to grow platforms, to expand reach, to stay visible in a crowded virtual landscape that rewards immediacy over depth.

There’s pressure to pledge allegiance to the algorithm and it's cadence of constant posting, its appetite for engagement, its implicit narrative that your worth—and your bank account in some cases—is measured in impressions and clicks.

In a culture built on posturing and promises, speed and scarcity, who can blame them for doing so? They—we—are embedded in this larger system and are not immune to its influences on how we show up online and in real life.

Algorithmic allegiance and the slow formation of apprenticeship will forever pull us in opposing directions. We live in the tension of opposites. Of capitalist extraction (yes, even in therapeutic spaces), and slow, soul stretching growth. Personally, I feel this contrast daily. Perhaps you do, too.

I don’t think the answer is to shun social media or the undertrained who overstate their credentials. Perhaps the most radical choice we can make in this moment is not to grow faster, but to grow deeper, returning to the long, slow work of formation that shapes not just what we do, but who we become.

In the corner of the ancient Near East known as Judea—in present-day Israel/Palestine—Jews lived socially and politically marginalized under Roman occupation. Rome’s presence meant oppression, constant instability, and the unrelenting weight of fear. “Law and order” was maintained through violence, most notably crucifixion—a method not only to kill, but to terrify and intimidate, a public display of the empire’s absolute power.

Famine was frequent. Peasants and laborers lived under constant strain, while a widening gap between the ruling elites and the common people intensified social tension. It was a world marked by crushing economic conditions, a fractured social order, and pervasive political instability.

Rome’s rule ensured a heavy military footprint: Roman soldiers, local militias, layers of surveillance, and networks of informants. The empire maintained its so-called “peace” through terror, coercion, and relentless economic extraction.

Herod the Great eliminated rivals with ruthless efficiency. He cultivated favor with Rome while manipulating Jewish authorities. Shrewd and strategic, he was both admired and deeply feared. His final years descended into chaos, paranoia, and violence.

This was the context in which the Jews longed for the coming of the Messiah who would radically reverse reality— socially, politically, economically, spiritually.

This was the social and political backdrop just prior to Jesus’ birth.

This was Advent in the empire.

Under the violent Roman imperial occupation lived a teenage girl named Mary. In the first chapter of Luke’s Gospel, we find the Magnificat, also known as Mary’s song, a hymn of praise she sung upon hearing the news that she would be the mother of the long awaited Messiah.

Mary announces that the unjust structures that have fashioned her and her people into a subaltern state of existence were being reversed. She breaks out in song, praising the God of the Israelites who had freed her people from the slavery of Egypt and Babylon.

This was Advent in the empire.

Mary’s words recapitulate the Jewish prophetic tradition of interrogating empire’s oppression of society’s outsiders and impoverished. Her song of praise isn’t a submissive canticle of compliance to God’s will as is told from pulpits nationwide every December. Her canticle isn’t lyrically docile. It is praise—raw and status-quo disrupting.

Her words have been seen as a threat to dictators and authoritarian leaders for two millennia. They were banned from being read or sung in India during the British colonial administration and in El Salvador and Guatemala in the 1980’s. Argentina outlawed them during the Dirty War years— the mothers of disappeared children put Mary’s song on public display and in response, the government forbade the words in public places.

A song of salvation whose social, political, and economic dimensions cannot be underestimated, Mary’s words portending the end of empire’s oppression intimidate the leaders of the domination systems of this world—a threat even more potent coming from a young, pregnant woman.

Neither a peaceful dove nor a gentle mother as so many of our cultural hymns would have it, Mary’s feminine power was wild and courageous. Mary of Nazareth is Christianity’s original subversive woman.

Her words are immanently relevant to our reality today, here in the USAmerican empire. We are governed by an administration that, not unlike that of ancient Rome, seeks to destroy whatever might stand in the way of its power. It fears any sign of its own vulnerability, which is seen as weakness and thus a threat to its control and dominance. The empire must not not feel, must remain numb to ensure it can never hear the cries of the oppressed.

Empire cannot hear the wailing of the pregnant mother who stands on the street corner with her two year old son, both zip tied by masked ICE agents after being dragged out of their apartment at 2 AM.

Empire cannot hear the silent terror of the children in school who aren't sure if they'll make it back home this afternoon or be snatched and disappear into an unmarked van.

Empire cannot hear the woman working the night shift who glances at every shadow on her walk to the car, convinced that safety is a luxury reserved for other people, not for women whose very existence is treated as a threat.

Empire cannot hear the refugee father whispering for mercy as he is beaten inside the walls of an immigrant detention facility.

This is Advent in the empire.

What empire cannot hear, we must listen for. The cries of fear and pain, the silent lamentations, the songs of joy, the words of hope. All of it—that which is arising within ourselves, in those we love, and in those whose faces and names we do not know, but yet are kin.

As Winn Collier writes, “Advent meets us in our grief over a child, in our silent despair over a stack of past due bills. Advent moves among the abandoned innocent in Gaza. And if our Advent doesn’t land amid every human struggle and misery, then it’s no Advent at all.”

If our Advent in the empire doesn’t resist empire’s numbness with fullness of hearing, fullness of feeling, fullness of expectation, then it’s no Advent at all.

May we make space this Advent for decolonizing acts, subversive longing, imagination re-centered on anti-imperial shalom, compassionate presence, and care for each other.

The obsessions about my mother dying began when I was ten. I’d mentally repeat nonsensical phrases over and over in my head, turn off and on light switches–whatever the neuropsychiatric condition known as obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) compelled me to do to temporarily reduce the anxiety.

Despite understanding its irrational nature, I couldn’t stop the ritualistic behaviors that are a hallmark of OCD. Somehow, I managed to keep it hidden from everyone around me year after excruciating year. Eventually, the anguish of the undiagnosed disorder led to an acute despair, prompting me to reach out to God from the bowels of psychological affliction. One night when I was 17, I prayed fervently out of desperation for relief–for something, anything.

I was suddenly enveloped by an infusion of divine love. I sensed a divine presence with me and an ineffable peace washed through me. I rested in ecstasy, in the embrace of a God I didn’t know existed.

Waking up the next morning, I was saturated in the embodied realization that something deep within had shifted. This mystical experience catalyzed a re-architecting of the spiritual, psychological, and neurobiological dimensions of my life. My symptoms of OCD vanished.

This mystical experience also inaugurated a fledgling faith that would grow and evolve over the following decades. I’d go on to have many more powerful mystical experiences over the next twenty years. But I also struggled with debilitating anxiety, depression, PTSD, and complex trauma. In 2021, I received ketamine–a legal psychedelic medicine–therapy for treatment resistant depression. During one of the sessions, a mystical encounter, similar to the previous unmedicated experiences, unfolded. A profound spiritual connection with Jesus and the Virgin Mary accompanied by a transcendence of time and space brought consolation, solace, and joy radiating through my core. Not only did the veil of depression lift, but once again the veil of illusion of separation from God did as well.

My ketamine experience is not an isolated, random occurrence; research indicates that mystical experiences in psychedelic assisted therapy (PAT) are correlated with symptom reduction and quality of life enhancement. Although causation has not been established, the clinical data points to a strong correlation. Several studies utilizing a variety of psychedelic substances including MDMA, ketamine, psilocybin and ayahuasca have linked mystical experience and therapeutic efficacy, including reduction in depression and anxiety as well as improvements in mood, quality of life, and sense of meaning.

Mystical experiences are also part of the lifeblood of the church. The Bible itself as well as the Christian tradition as a whole are rich with stories of people who had life altering experiences in expanded states of consciousness. Jesus and the Apostle Paul both, according to the New Testament, had mystical experiences. Some of the early Church Fathers such as Origen, Gregory of Nyssa and Augustine wrote about personal mystical experiences. Later, iconic figures such as Hildegard of Bingen, Teresa of Avila, Julian of Norwich, and John of the Cross put language to the ineffability of inner experience. The continuity of Christian mysticism extends from the origins of the church to the present day.

Unfortunately, the mystical tradition has largely been marginalized over the centuries, often pushed aside for the pseudo-certainty and control of a left hemisphere dominant cerebral religion. There has been a depreciation of the mystical dimension that exists at the heart of the Christian faith. Further, the policy and rhetoric related to the war on drugs has contributed to a widespread societal misunderstanding of psychedelics, creating a cultural milieu–especially among Christians–that holds not a healthy skepticism of but a fearful suspicion toward psychedelics.

Healthy skepticism might include critically examining our biases, assumptions, and perspectives as well as their genesis, while creating room for empirical evidence to inform our understanding of and relationship to psychedelic medicine, as well as considering the documented risks involved. Fearful suspicion, however, prematurely forecloses on the opportunity to engage with the truth about what psychedelic substances actually are and their ability to potentiate healing processes in the psyche and soma.

A Christian client who I will call Mark struggled with a debilitating sense of worthlessness, emotional numbness, and depression as a result of complex trauma stemming from childhood abuse. After several months of working together, he decided he wanted to try ketamine assisted therapy (KAP). During the first session, the numbness in which he had been encased cracked open. Underneath it, Mark encountered a living, breathing world of emotions that he had been alienated from. This was accompanied by a felt sense of being at home in his body and world, something he had never before experienced. At one point in the session he said, “Finally, I am safe. This is the warmest, softest universal embrace.”

Mark didn’t experience divine union in his low dose KAP session, but several of the indicators of mystical experience–as measured by the Mystical Experiences Questionnaire (MEQ-30), an empirical method of assessment–were present, including internal unity, noetic quality, positive mood, transcendence of space, and ineffability. Mark continued to struggle with intermittent depression, but hope returned as his emotional and spiritual health and overall quality of life improved.

I am not a fanatical psychedelic evangelist trying to unreflectively convert anyone to a psychedelic gospel. I’m not going to tell you that the ancient Eucharist involved magic mushrooms (as some speculate) or proselytize about a psychedelic Jesus. I am not an overly zealous lobbyist for the psychedelic cause. But I am convinced of one thing: there is space for the therapeutic and transformational use of psychedelics within the wide stream of Christian orthodoxy.

The mystical dimension of our Christian inheritance can be our starting point. This isn’t about attempting to sneak Christianity in the backdoor of a psychedelic ideology or worldview. It isn’t about campaigning for a kind of Christian flavored version of 1960’s psychedelic advocate Timothy Leary’s regrettable adage, “turn on, tune in, drop out.” It is about simply noticing the front door of the church open wide, inviting psychedelic medicine into the pews where traumatized, hurting multitudes sit, many of whom are seeking greater intimacy with the divine, healing from mental health disorders for themselves or loved ones, or both.

The mystical experiences of Jesus, Paul and various saints and sages weren’t mediated by psychedelics; there is no scholarly evidence to argue otherwise. But that doesn’t disqualify psychedelics as a catalyst that can potentiate both intimacy with the divine and clinical mental health benefits, just as it doesn’t disqualify any other practice, modality or approach that seeks healing, wholeness, and human flourishing. That which enhances shalom in the body, brain, psyche, and relationships is from God. As Augustine pointed out, all truth is God’s truth.

Research indicates that PAT has the potential to catalyze the inner conditions – neurobiologically and phenomenologically, medically and mystically, somatically and spiritually– in which people can experience significant clinical gains in their recovery from PTSD, depression, anxiety disorder, OCD, and addiction. The data gleaned from current clinical research and the wisdom garnered from the ancient Christian tradition are both clear: mystical experiences are a significant way human lives are transformed, spiritually and therapeutically.

The legal, responsible, safe, ethical, therapeutic use of psychedelic substances is not only compatible with Christianity, I think psychedelic therapy and the broader psychedelic renaissance present a gift and opportunity for the church. However, the church tends to lag behind society when it comes to embracing cultural paradigm shifts.

Will the church ignore the psychedelic renaissance for the next decade, avoiding or dismissing both the zeitgeist and the clinical data?

Will the church offer a lukewarm response, a distant acknowledgement of the potential benefits of psychedelic therapy but perhaps nothing more?

Or will the church embrace the many potential avenues available to provide support to those in its care through psychedelic-informed pastoral care and spiritual direction, and a space for open and honest dialogue?

The church is being offered a critical opportunity to prioritize science over stigma, honor mystical tradition over maladjusted metanarratives, and remain open to both witnessing and participating in how the Spirit catalyzes embodied shalom through psychedelic medicine.

The false binary of Jesus or psychedelic therapy can instead become Jesus and psychedelic therapy.

TW: animal cruelty

“You have anxiety,” he told me, his voice laced with agitation and contempt.

Mark, my sister’s new boyfriend, had just started dating her a few weeks prior, charming her with his charisma and seemingly genuine affection. But beneath the surface of his charm lay something darker.

I had just confronted him after catching him abusing my sister's beloved dog, Bella, in the bedroom of her apartment. He looked at me with disdain as he dismissed the reality of what I had witnessed. “Come on man. We were just playing. You have anxiety,” he asserted again.

My sister couldn't see the reality of who Mark was, even as neighbors called the police after witnessing his cruelty, even as I pleaded with her to wake up to the nature of his egregious harm, even as Bella’s health mysteriously deteriorated.

Bella died a year later due to injuries sustained at Mark’s hands. Not long after, my sister rescued two Boxer puppies— littermates who she named Jack and Jill. Within a few weeks, Jack had “swallowed a stick” and had to go to the vet for treatment. A litany of these mysterious injuries began to pile up.

A few weeks later, Jill disappeared. Mark, of course, had an explanation: a Latino man had assaulted him during a late-night walk with Jill and stolen her. Another predictable sham, racist and entirely fabricated. The truth is he had killed Jill.1

When I confronted him again, I received the same gaslighting refrain: “You have anxiety.” It was another calculated attempt to make me doubt my own reality, a common tactic employed by individuals with sociopathic tendencies and malignantly narcissistic character structures.

Matt’s actions weren’t just cruel. They revealed a complete absence of empathy for life, that of dogs and humans. G. M. Gilbert, a psychologist at the Nuremberg Trials, said, “Evil is the absence of empathy.”

Matt’s sociopathic traits—manipulation, violence, charm, deceit, and lack of remorse—mirrored what we see in the political arena today. From gaslighting the public with falsehoods to dismissing compassion as weakness, we are witnessing actions every day that reflect the same dangerous empathic absence Gilbert spoke of. Stripping resources from the vulnerable, dressing exploitation in the language of virtue and calling it progress. An administration that defunds dignity while demanding devotion. Leadership devoid of empathy and behavior characteristically sociopathic.

The word sociopathic is derived from two parts: 1) socio, from the Latin socius, meaning "companion" or "ally, relating to society and social relationships. 2) pathic, from the Greek pathos, meaning "suffering," "disease," or "feeling." It’s often used in psychological terminology to refer to disorders affecting behavior. “Sociopathic" essentially means a condition related to dysfunctional or harmful interactions with society. It describes a pattern of lack of empathy and disregard for the rights of others.

Politics is fundamentally about our shared life together. “We are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity,” wrote Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. These words describe the heart of the body politic. When elected officials fail to recognize this, fail to honor the dignity and humanity of everyone— due to ideological allegiance, greed, racism, or something else—a failure of empathy is evident, one that maligns the fundamentals of our shared life together. Embedded in the current administration is sociopathy—eerily similar to Matt's murderous malignancy, perhaps a bit more subtle, ostensibly under the guise of doing what is good for the country. Yet, it's a form of sociopathy nonetheless, with all of the characteristics of the disorder present. It’s imbued with politicking that is manipulative, deceitful, and devoid of ethical concerns and regard for the well-being of others. It reeks of gaslighting, exploitation and ruthless Machiavellianism.

What I find perhaps most troubling of all is how the absence of empathy has seeped into mainstream Christian circles. Some have gone so far as to label empathy a sin. This rhetoric twists the gospel message while simultaneously supporting dangerous, dignity-stripping policies. Empathy is contorted under a heavy, collective narcissistic weight and weaponized, one more piece of ammunition in the arsenal of those who seek to consolidate power, identity, and animate the racialized mythology of making America great again.

From this level of consciousness, any threat must be swiftly annihilated lest it foment to such a degree that it undermines the individual or group in some way—such as loss of control, privilege, wealth, or identity. Despite it being central to the gospel message, empathy and it's adjacent postures (compassion, kindness) are desecrated. In this vacuum, violence easily becomes permitted, if not sanctified.

We have no need to fear empathy, but we have every reason to question its absence and weaponization. If empathy is a sin, cruelty is codified as a virtue. There's a very thin membrane of morality that lies between empathy and evil.

Jesus always moved toward suffering wherever he encountered it. He didn't spend effort determining who was deserving of or worthy of healing or presence or care. He simply entered into pain, never allowing ideology, tradition, or religious positioning to impede where he stood. Jesus embodied empathy. From the cross he uttered, on behalf of those crucifying him, “Father, forgive them. They know not what they do.” These words are perhaps the theological apex of empathic relating—words of love spoken while hanging from an imperial execution stake. There is simply no theological ground whatsoever for “the sin of empathy” to stand on.

In empathy's absence, harm is readily justified under a smokescreen of righteousness. Rejection of empathy is both a personal moral failing as well as a grave societal danger. Without it, abuse and injustice flourish— from the individual level to the familial, institutional, ecclesial, and political. Without empathy, a just society is impossible.

. . .

I’m reminded of a fact about Mark’s childhood that research links to the development of disorders of personality: insecure attachment. The core of the attachment bond is caregiver attunement—an interactive, interpersonal neurobiological process that, when secure, promotes mental health and emotional regulation. The physical abuse Mark endured as a child likely set up a disorganized style of attachment which research has linked to the development of more severe disorders. His childhood trauma was the fertile soil in which the characterological traits linked to sociopathy would eventually take root and flourish.

Sociopathy has an origin story. It is forged in the crucible of deep relational trauma, a constellation of survival strategies that harden into a way of being. When that wound is never acknowledged, let alone tended or resolved, the harm reverberates outward. Mark’s case is a personal microcosm of a much larger pattern, one we see playing out on the political stage, where untended wounds and unchecked power coalesce into systemic harm.

When deep change isn’t possible—whether due to a lack of willingness or structural barriers—resistance becomes a moral imperative. Protecting the vulnerable and countering harm with collective action are the only viable paths forward.

. . .

It’s not spoken outright, but I hear an echo of Mark’s words, “You have anxiety” in today’s political rhetoric:

Look, the golden age of America is returning—don’t you want that?

No, we aren't racist, it’s DEI that creates discrimination.

Once we deport the dangerous illegals, our country will be safer.

No one is dying from USAID cuts, and besides it's not our duty to support the poor overseas.

Tariffs will make us a wealthier nation.

Relax, God chooses the president.

Gaza will be a paradise when we take over.

The Proud Boys and Oath Keepers are very good people.

Don't you see how Canada will be better off as our 51st state?

It’s not Christian nationalism—it’s just biblical values.

We’re not banning books—just protecting children from filth.

“You have anxiety,” Mark said. “We were just playing.”

“You have anxiety,” they said. “We are just making America great again.”

I’ve begun writing again and, as you can see, I migrated over to Substack. I plan to use this space to share short essays and reflections with you regularly on therapy, healing, trauma, spirituality, neuroscience, and the like —things to do with the intersections of soma and soul. And it goes without saying if you aren’t vibing with the writing here or just have too many messages showing up in your inbox, please feel free to unsubscribe at any time.

. . .

Beneath the words and presence of every therapist is a model and method offering structure, language, and orientation to the unfolding work. Models have immense value. But without awareness and humility, they can easily harden into rigid systems in which the flexible becomes fixed, the open absolute. This can cause flattening of the vitality of the therapeutic encounter, eroding of the practitioner’s flexibility, inhibiting of attunement, and foreclosing on curiosity—the very qualities that animate real relational healing.

When we cling too tightly to a model or modality, something sacred can quietly begin to slip away. The living, breathing presence of the person in front of us becomes filtered through a framework. The mystery of the other is reduced to the object of a method.

The relational encounter risks becoming a clinical procedure. When method takes center stage, the human being readily becomes reduced to a case conceptualization. We stop seeing with fresh eyes. We start seeing through the lens we were trained to trust—pathology over person, technique over presence.

But what if we could hold a different posture?

What if we could say—with honesty, with humility—that every model is inherently limited, inherently deficient? That every framework contains both wisdom and limits? When a practitioner can hold this truth, a more robust integrity becomes possible, a deeper honesty emerges as well as a methodological humility. Research from the American Psychological Association (APA) highlights that clinical expertise is not correlated with methodology, but interpersonal skills, including “encoding and decoding verbal and nonverbal responses” and “responding empathically to the patient’s explicit and implicit concerns.” 1

To recognize a model as both good and deficient is not to devalue it but to honor it more fully. It is to enter a mature relationship with it, one that allows us to explore its strengths and its liabilities. We honor its goodness and where it falls short and accept it as a whole.

This paradox is essential to effective practice because when we let go of the illusion that our models are at the heart of therapeutic change, we can begin to turn toward something more vital: fidelity not to the method, but to the human being in front of us.

Our belief about the therapeutic models we use can and should evolve. They are tools, not truth. They are not supreme. They are scaffolding— scaffolding that supports the great cathedral of healing and becoming—not the structure itself.

And the invitation, rather than to rigidly adhere to model or method, is to return to the mystery of the one before us, to fully encounter this person in this moment. Yet, we don't reject the model. We see it as scaffolding. We don’t let go of the method. We let go of a rigid grip on it.

Research also indicates that “sensitivity and flexibility in the administration of therapeutic interventions produces better outcomes than rigid application…of the principles.”2 As we soften the tight grasp of overidentification with interventions, our effectiveness actually increases.

And in that softening, what once felt like structure reveals itself as partial, provisional. The scaffolding stands, but no longer conceals what it was meant to hold. What emerges is something subtler, more difficult to describe: we could call it the architecture of agenda-less presence.

This is a sanctuary not built by theory, but by affective with-ness. By embodied attunement. By nonverbal, autonomic resonance. By surrendering certainty in order to enter the raw intimacy of genuine encounter. Whitehead describes it like this: “Every time we make therapeutic contact with our patients we are engaging profound processes that tap into essential life forces in our selves and in those we work with. . . Emotions are deepened in intensity and sustained in time when they are intersubjectively shared. This occurs at moments of deep contact.”3

Neurobiological repatterning and deep psychic reorganization occur as a direct result of attuned relational presence. The therapist’s right brain resonance with the client’s affective states enables a deeper relational connection that facilitates emotional healing.4 This is the science of the art of presence, through which therapist and client co-construct the cathedral—not by method, but by the shared aliveness of two bodies, two brains, two unconscious minds, two nervous systems in coherence.

And when we return to the orienting lens of our models—as we inevitably will—they are no longer the center. Instead, the process is infused with greater relational dynamism. With the loosened grip, something deepens. In the shimmering aliveness of the therapeutic dyad, attunement expands, intuitive sensitivity strengthens, and the method finds its rightful place: in service to presence, not in place of it.

Here, the cathedral is built not from methodology, but from the embodied resonance of the relational field.