welcome to the neuro Faith podcast I'm your host Dr Kirk Thompson and we are here to explore what it means to live at the intersection of emerging scientific discoveries about the mind and following in being formed by Jesus and how that can lead us into a world of Greater human [Music] flourishing the title for this our first season is thinking well during a pandemic we're eager to hear from our guests not only about the work they are doing but how it speaks to what it means for us to thrive in our present particular moment today my guest is Dr Jim Wilder Jim is first of all a friend of mine he is a well-known neuro Theologian for those of you whove not heard that term before we're going to talk about what that means today he is a psychologist who has been both active clinically and as well as one of the most precient thought leaders in the field of interpersonal neurobiology and the questions around what does it mean for us to love God with all of our mind but also Jim's work has Spann the work of a number of different areas of brain science and questions of spiritual formation and his work both in terms of his written work his spoken work work his leadership in workshops as well as his willingness to be a friend to so many people who are in this field um I count it as an honor to have the opportunity to have a conversation with him today his latest work is called renovated it is conversations with Dallas Willard and Neuroscience and what does it mean for us to be fully loved in our experience of God I can't uh tell you how honored I am and how glad I am to be able to speak with Dr Wilder today Jim welcome to the program yes thank you it's good to be with you too Dr Thompson so uh as is the case you are this this is the third in our series here in this first season of the neuro Faith podcast and we will get to this eventually one of the things that we're also trying to highlight in this first season is questions around these different topics that we'll talk about and how that has been shaped informed uh by the pandemic in particular as well but before we get there Jim I'd love for our audience to hear more about the story I love when I've heard you talk about these stories I I I love these and I I think as we're introducing people to this notion of the mind we're introducing people to what does it mean for us to be people who are paying attention to neuroscience and relationships and the brain and God's experience of us and US of him I'd love for our audience to hear a bit about what was it that that first Drew you into this field and how is it that you've come to be so passionate about it well it's goes uh you know back to very very early Roots the first thing to me was that I had a sort of a spiritual crisis when I was 19 having grown up with parents who were missionaries and hearing about God I had always you know sort of believed but in fact what I believe didn't seem to have much impact on on my life and so so I had this crisis period when I decided to find out if God was really out there and interact with me uh and in that time uh I went back to the Bible I said well I'm just going to instead of doing all the things I've been told to do I'm just going to practice what it actually says to do in there and I came up with three things one was that he supposed to talk with God about everything uh the impression was he'd answer you back MH M uh the second thing was that you were doing nothing out of fear and the third um was that um you're supposed to love people deeply and of course that's what I was afraid of was getting too close to people because they're the ones that would hurt me and so fast forward now I get into um psychology I'm um running uh or at least a assistant director at that point in a a community clinic PC and we're helping all these people recovering from traumas of one sort or another and we find that some of them are recovering and sustaining their recovery and other ones every time they come back they've got the same issues going on um you know they're getting the same treatment they have basically the same traumas the question in our mind is what's the difference between the two of them and so as what I would say miraculous answer to prayer at that point um we were in uced to the brain science of um identity formation and came to the conclusion that the people who had significant attachments in their life that worked right were getting something from those attachments that uh they weren't really picking up in therapy that that helped them throughout the week um and the Brain development you know gave us those details of what it was they were learning but the significant point was you know unless there's somebody that's attached to you in a meaningful kind of a way these skills aren't Acquired and uh they're all based on Joy and good relationships and turns out that's what forms the human identity to begin with and and at that point I became quite aware that that wasn't the way that we were introducing Christianity into people's lives and hadn't been the way it come into my life either you know it came in in the form of beliefs so I got very passionate about putting these things together I said you know whatever God tells us is true and turns out to be the way the brain works and learns things like identity uh that something you ought to get some careful attention because those overlaps have got to be pointing to some really significant uh things we should be learning and implementing better right I love how you write in renovated about attack M love that that term and its Concepts have begun to make its way into the general population a little more frequently but your particular take on this reflection on attachment and the what we learn about scripture and how does scripture in particular talk about this particular kind of love there's a particular word the Hebrew word that you like that you that you so poignantly pointed out to your readers i' love for you to talk a little bit about what is so important about attachment and give us just a a little primer on how that works and what is it about attachment love that makes such a difference for us yeah that's another way to introduce another one of the elements in this story as well and that is uh one of my early supervisors there was Jane Willard and her husband Dr Dallas Willard um who's half of the book there I renovated um came into our office to talk to the staff and he said you know the psychology that's the care of Souls and the most important question in the care of souls is do you love them now that really severely messed me up oh my goodness because I had been taught in graduate school that the thing to do about as a psychologist was to form no attachments to anyone H you know and um uh stayed you know sort of distant and disconnected uh from people let them process their you know it's very important not intrude into their their process at all but if that's a kind of psychology I was practicing this very hands-off kind of psychology uh and what really was getting the profound change was somebody that was being loved and and and connected to a sort of a shared life experience uh that challenged my my beliefs pretty badly so I went back to looking at at the at the what the Bible had to say and saying is there is there a word is there any anything in the Bible that really refers to a a a very secure ongoing attachment to another person which you won't let them go and shares life with them uh always with the intention of making their life better what would that be called that in psychological terms that'd be the kind of attachment that forms between a mother and a child between you know us and our dog um you know it's it crosses species and stuff like that but but once it's connected in the mind it's Irreplaceable so I'm thinking in the Bible this would have to be the kind of love that shouldn't be replaced with anything else and every time we come back to it in the Old Testament there was this word hassid that talked about this sort of unfailing UN dying um well-intentioned for our good and purpose love that God showed for us and that we were supposed to show for each other and every time there were loyal relationships in the Bible hessed was the word used for it and then moving to the New Testament uh there's always been this mystery about the word Agape uh you know it's not a common word in Greek and why were they uh using it in the New Testament um and it appears that when the word hessed in the Old Testament is translated into Greek by the New Testament writers they use the word agapy how about that so I'm thinking hey we got this same connection right it's this connection with an Irreplaceable other who has good for in mind good intentions for you and that's what every good parent every good husband and wife every uh good lover of God is supposed to be growing in so we should pay attention now you know I I I want to say that you know you and I both know that we live in a world in which knowing stuff is really important you know and somehow if I just say to you I love you uh if we hear it preached from a Pulpit God loves you somehow even though we're not announcing this explicitly we're living almost tacitly as if the fact that you now have access to that information somehow should be enough what is it what's what would you say like and and and even feel free to talk a little bit about what's happening in the brain uh what what makes the difference between this we we who think that knowledge is really the most important thing having more knowledge more information what is the big difference between this sense of knowledge and this hetet attachment that you're talking about well the the simplest way of distinguishing it is that knowledge what we know what Michael Palani the philosopher might have called tacit knowledge the things that we know but we can't explain exactly how we know them they operate in sort of a right hemispheric dominant kind of a way and most of our words and stuff like that is trying to put into words the things that we already know and most of us can remember even with word the word love you know remember like how do I actually put into to words something that I feel deeply inside and and when you do that the word love ends up coming up kind of shallow um and and we've all had that experience we know what it's like what are what are the the deeper things that run they're the meaning and and meaning is pretty widely distributed throughout the brain whereas words are very sort of very localized yeah very localized and it's so in the brain there's always meaning in search of words the problem is that with the enlightenment um came the idea that I well it was deaz uh deasio that pointed it out in one of the early books in that was part of the revolution of in the how we understand the human brain uh that that deart made the statement I I think therefore I am and that moved philosophy in the direction of thinking what I think which at this point we're only talking about conscious thoughts right we actually think in a much broader Spectrum than what we can pull it pull it into conscious thoughts so it's all thinking but uh conscious thoughts got priority theology kind of got influenced by that and so it's what you believe that became you know our faith or our belief uh is sort of how we Define religion right yeah you know what are your beliefs what are your faith as opposed to what are your loves who are you loving who are you attached to and uh and okay pces of my my family I've watched them you know love someone get divorced uh and then love someone else and notice how strongly what they believed was influenced by who they loveed and most of us have have watched that happen in in people's live it's if you want to get into the part of your brain that controls your belief now we've got to talk about the loves and that is a part of the brain that does the attachment it's like who's significant to me and and when we do that we actually have this right brain to right brain communication that runs faster than conscious thought and that creates sort of a mutual mind space in which you know I kind of know what you're thinking and you know what I'm thinking and neither one of us has put it in words yet right exactly and I'm I'm uh I'm struck by uh this notion of how in the gospels we so often read that Jesus knew what was in their hearts we read that statement and you know I think that uh reading that statement uh through the lens of a modernist perspective through the lens of a of an Enlightenment perspective there's this sense in which we you know imagine that Jesus magically kind of knows a fact he knows certain stuff as opposed to him being so deeply connected to the people around him in ways that there were even places literally Lally even in his own body and things that he sensed an image that he could pick up on because he was paying so much more attention to people around him and the world around him through the lens of attachment through the lens of meeting people in their right hemisphere with his right hemisphere at least this is how I imagine that that was taking place and then this notion of how he then pulls people along right brain to right brain as opposed to trying to shoehorn facts from the left brain into the brain to get people to somehow magically change Behavior just because they have new information yeah a matter of fact Jesus was pretty mysterious about a lot of his information he was always talking in Parables which uh convey meaning to the uh the right hemisphere in terms of the images they use but the left hemisphere is sometimes left you know um kind of like huh what are you talking about here exactly that would have been I'm I'm not quite sure why we don't read more of that in the gospels like why we don't just like in the English translations and the people said huh because it's so frequently it's it's the very thing that we feel that is taking place you know one of the things that I notice um is how we can become so familiar with the gospel in terms of what we kind of read on paper that we don't necessarily then recognize the tacit underlying message that uh Jesus is trying to get to one of the things that I know that you and your colleagues have done is that you have really taken this notion of attachment love of hessed love and you've also explored the way particular spiritual disciplines can enhance that experience I wonder if you could speak to our audience a little bit about this notion of how do we develop and mature in this realm of hessed love through the implementation of certain spiritual practices and maybe give us one or two examples of how that operates uh sure the um thing about spiritual disciplines is that um you they activities that primarily make room in our mind for something relational to happen with God they they clear room like fasting or quiet or you know just um uh meditation a lot of that is pulling out of the way the stuff that would otherwise be running through our brain um consistently uh and what our brain is not terribly well trained to do is to notice thoughts that come from God and in fact our brain has um systems and that primarily uh operating over in the r hemisphere here uh that are the we've called the relational circuits uh I think the term was first pulled up created by Carl Layman uh but it's the things uh that help us to be aware interpersonally and the interesting thing about that is that those are the same systems in our brain that give importance to something so we can actually read or hear a verse or hear some a thought from God and if we're not in a relation frame of mind uh we'll just be annoyed by it um yeah I I remember my my mother when my brother and I would start fighting she would start to sing be ye kind to one another be and it would just annoy like it's like throwing gasoline on the fire oh yeah yeah but as she sang on we would begin to uh you know get into a relational frame of mind remember that's my mother singing and i' look at my brother and he'd look at me and we' go like yeah you know well we we do like it better when we're kind and she would actually sing us back into this relational frame of mind but it would start out being very annoying because we were both in a non-relational uh State and and this is the problem that you can quote the Bible to somebody who's in a non-relational state and they'd be nothing but irritated by you whereas if you you're feeling relationally connected um to God like remembering times when you're pretty sure that God was touching your life you're feeling thankful you're feeling relational you're feeling connected you you're curious you know the prefrontal cortex is on you're what what could God mean by that and in that framework you know we're able to connect with God and with others and that is what the spiritual disciplines are meant to do make room for this relational connection but a lot of times people are just practicing the disciplines have been disappointed because now they've got space but they don't know what to notice uh should be in that space I'd love for you to speak to our audience a little bit about the connection between our having had traumas that necessarily take place often in the context of intimate human relationships and those traumas frequently will shape our imagined relationship ship with God I'd love for you to speak a little bit about the degree to which we can notice or experience a shift in our relationship with God by having a different kind of relationship with another human being or community of human beings that can more directly connect my brain to theirs such that I can begin to imagine a renewed or different relationship with God that here to for I couldn't because if God is anything like human beings and I don't want anything to do with God I'd love for you to hear to to talk a littleit about about how it is that our relationship with human beings invites us into a space where we are able to imagine a relationship with God that is different than the one that we've had in the past well it's absolutely fascinating how um this theory of Mind center of the brain which is primarily in the singulate cortex develops between about two months of age and five months of age by which a baby can look at a face and realize there's a mind behind the face that they're looking at and they do that if the mother or whoever they're training from is trustworthy so that what they're displaying on their face is authentic and true and it's like this is what I really feel about you and you know and there's a wide range of experiences now that becomes your interpreter for what other minds are like and if you have a trauma then it takes some section of that what other minds are like and says that mind uh doesn't have my best interests at heart it's not hessed to use the Old Testament term and so when we look at at U what a mind is thinking or saying we interpret the motives based on how this little inter interpreter runs so if our our interpreter says people are always up to know good and we look at God and we try to read you know really it's really amazing we can understand anything about God because God is a mind so much bigger than ours right I sometimes think about it if I was trying to explain computers to a fleet right exactly you know I think that that's what most people who are working with computers when they're talking to me I think that's who they actually think they're talking with they think they're talking with the flea there's a gap there for sure believe you me you have no idea yeah so you you get this you know you get a metaphor going or something like that and you hope the flea follows along with that well and we're trying to understand God type thoughts you know we're really not going to grasp them for very thoroughly but in the in this interpreter that's trying to figure out what what it is that this greater mind is telling us if we don't trust that mind to be honest that The Interpreter says they're always lying they're up to something else it's really really hard to feel connected with God because there'll always be doubts and worries running around so what we want to do and you know God does reveal himself and but he's often mystifying uh and now we need to practice with another mind could that actually work could someone actually have good intentions for me I remember at one point in our Counseling Center we were seeing about 1,200 appointments a month of sexually abused women and my my office happened to be near the front of the building and they would dread walking past my office because in their mind all men were predators and so they would gather at the other end of the hall till they got a group of you know eight to 15 of them and then they'd come rushing past my office shooting me really dirty looks because in their mind you know it you know they're protecting themselves from this horrible Predator at the end of the hall U and uh you know there that this is a a sign of what we can do to God you know we can you know just try to make sure that uh I don't know how many people have said you know I heard that if I God heard that I liked anything too well he'd take it away from me you know that sort of a thing he's just out to find anything that I might find pleasurable and so we're in our minds we're hiding from this you know this very grouchy uh and but if we practice with another person we and we begin to see in them actually what God sees in them they see in us what God sees in US it gives us a chance to grow a whole new interpreter but we have to practice that with the brain we have to have a person to practice with uh the things that God might reveal to us it's sort of works from both sides right you know I um I'm I'm [Music] you you've taken these Concepts we've talked about attachment love we've talked about the way the brain works right brain to right brain this notion of having a shared mind space and this has gone on to become uh in its most uh in its fullest form what you call the life model uh I would love for our listeners to hear more about this because I'd love for them to have greater access to it and love for you to talk a little about um how the life model came to be and what that's been like for you to watch that flourish over the time that it has that's a fascinating story for me back in about the middle of the 1980s um we realized that there was a different treatment protocol for everything that was going on so that if someone was in had an addiction at that point the Minnesota model was really growing and it's like you get in their front face you confront them uh you tell them they're going to die if they don't change and you don't let up until they hit the bottom and then at the same time we had other people who were in trauma and you said now trauma you always support you never confront you take very good care from them uh some of the Christian Council are saying well we pray for healing and the Holy Spirit comes on them others say we cast the demons out the people who are in the addiction recovery say well we can't use medication that's a drug and another group was saying you know we need drugs to to help people with depression and so what happens if you have a depressed trauma victim who needs support and deal with their addiction and something for their depression there was no model that took care of all of that and so we were trying to find a integrated model we invited about 30 people from different schools of thought from Ministries prayer healing uh Psychiatry social work and we said uh we want to hear what works cu the at the inter intersection of what's making a difference in people's lives there must be some things we need to to notice and the question that everybody is trying to answer whether you're planting a church or raising children is how do we raise people or how do we create people or how do we heal people to become the ones that God was intending for them to be so there's this there had to be some model for life you know what it should look like where are we all headed that we should agree on and then we could look at the steps that get us there so a few years of meeting intermittently as this group uh we began to pull together the process which included one of maturity you know really well-developed three-month-old looks different than a really well-developed three-year-old than a fif 13year old or a 30y old and so on uh so this model across life of what it would look like uh became a multi-generational thing you in order to get this to happen there's things people have to do and there's stuff that has to be provided by their communities and things that need to come from God and and it just became a whole lot of fun to put this together then come of late 1990s the brain science came in and it's like hey here's something that tells us and this the science of alen shore the same dates that we developed from the Bible and from observation that changes go on in cultures and families and identities match changes in the brain and suddenly we have this overlap and the amazing ingredient that came out of that was oh it all develops in response to either Joy when it develops well or fear and then it develops abnormally so ah this goes back to what God told me originally you know don't do anything out of fear right that'll warp you right right fear and so now this this group began to say okay well now here's we've got the Science Now of how it should have developed is it possible to go back and remediate that can we do it later and if so what do we need to to make that work and that's been our experiment for the last uh 25 years probably figuring out ways to to make this work in community uh and so now we can integrate to fairly significant degree how do you grow a church with how do you heal from trauma uh to how do you deal with what medications you might happen to need if you're nervous system isn't running right right even as people are listening to this each person hears what we are talking about each person hears these words of encouragement and hope that you're offering and I as The Listener find myself thinking oh this is what I'm this is great this is what I'm having to do what I have to do and I whether I know it or not I can sometimes find myself living as if I'm still having to do this on my own that I'm ultimately responsible for this without actually really capturing the notion that my joy my healing really does require the engagement with other people one of the things that you talk about in your work especially as you think about the healing not just of individuals but the formation of mature people of faith is this notion of intergenerational connections and you know we live in a world that is now continually increasingly separated not just individuals from individuals from but Generations from generations for all kinds of social reasons I would love to hear you talk a little bit more about the significance that you're finding and the importance of what is it that being in an intergenerational connected Community does for people that we have found a way to forget in our modern time well that that is a uh big hairball you just uh put out on the table right there oh great I love yeah there's so many elements to that right there um you know at this point the um average person is spending I think think somewhere between 8 and 12 hours a day looking at a computer screen of some kind whether it's a TV or something else um very significant thing about computer screens is that uh pre-recorded me uh program material is very interested in having you follow the material it doesn't care about you and what you're thinking at all when you're interacting with another human being it that interaction runs well as long as both of you are interested so we're basically training our brains for huge amounts of time each day to interact with things that aren't interested in us and in so doing we're not be developing the skills about being interested in someone else and how do you do this in real time uh and so one of the side effects actually of the covid isolation is that people have found a certain degree of fatigue and exhaustion and even depression of having reduced all of their time to talking to screens even if there's a person on the other end of the screen uh there's a lag that's introduced there by the internet that keeps us from really connecting well with others and people are beginning to realize hey I think I need a more connection with other people than I thought I needed that was pretty satisfied with my busy life uh so I think there's been a little increase going uh back into that need but the the thing about our identity and we haven't really talked much about our identity but the best parts of our brain let's say the prefrontal cortex are all about figuring out what it's like me and my people to do right now in this kind of circumstance which is constantly changing so we're having to sort of reinvent ourselves as we go along so that we act in ways that are really satisfying to us and that's what the prefrontal cortex tries to figure out so it has a lot of mirror neurons and our identity most of what's in our identity is built up of these mirror neurons now the complication with that is your brain then isn't configured to know who I am based on looking at myself exactly it's based on knowing who I am if someone else is looking at me and telling me that that's who I am so to really have a good identity we have to have people around us who can recognize uh who we really are and further we need brains that know something that we don't uh about being human and we don't we certainly can use brains no more than we do about computer but if we never become like them it doesn't bother our brain very much it's like I'm glad you're around but about being human now we need somebody who can show us ways of Being Human and primarily that means staying connected with you while you or I are upset exactly that's what disrupts us so if I'm sad if I'm angry if I'm hurt if I'm uh lonely you know can we stay connected when that's going on and if so I learn how to be human from somebody that knows something more than I do and that's this multigenerational community and furthermore uh and this might be quick corner to go around am I just the person who has to receive everything or do I have something to give and if I have something to give I need someone who's Downstream from me who's not quite as mature as I am so I can receive this from someone who knows more than I do but now I become the one who knows more and I can pass this on to somebody else and we're basically teaching each other everything that we know about how to be uh you know everything a human being was designed to be our best human you might say right so I'm hearing you talk about when we we talk about maturity you know when we when we think about education uh and we think about well I'm going from first grade to second to Third and then senior in high school and then wherever else I'm going in my education there is a sense in which we kind of tacitly assume that this means I'm just receiving more and more and more from whoever is Upstream from me whoever has more information than I do whether it's a student or whoever that that's what growth in knowledge is that's what you know we can come to believe that that's what it becomes means to become more mature but you're talking about maturation and it sounds like as I'm hearing you say that maturation isn't just me receiving from people who are Upstream from me that maturation is a process wherein which I'm both receiving from people who know things I don't and by know I don't just mean information I mean people with whom I'm experiencing these relational encounters wherein which there are even ruptures that we repair and at the same time I'm also giving away Downstream to others people are receiving from me there is this aspect of being a conduit and not just a bucket that's being constantly poured into I'm a I'm a conduit yes I'm receiving but I'm also giving away and that it requires me to be in a community wherein which I'm receiving from people who are more mature than me giving away to people who are less mature than me in any given moment that time if I'm hearing you correctly yes I believe you're exactly right there one of the side effects of the Industrial Revolution on education was that we needed children to know a bunch of stuff but we also had to put them in a parking lot where they didn't do anything significant until they got to be 18 or 20 and we could put them in the workforce if you go back to what we consider more primitive societies hunters and gatherers and people who live in community you'll find that children are engaged from the second they uh are old enough to do something and taking care of the community so you uh you know you give them the cookies they take it to grandma or whatever else they part of the ongoing process of life and and that's what we're really talking about restoring back into our our culture where we're actually uh you know when as soon as I've got some goodness because now we're not talking about jobs skills are talking about identity I'm full of life if I if I'm getting more life in me I should immediately get a chance to help you get more life in you that that is that's what keeps us alive that makes us wake up and want to be part of the next day uh and and that process is relational and even up to 100 years ago we're all living in multigenerational homes uh most people couldn't work after age 40 because they were disabled by their jobs which were pretty you know know brutal jobs um and so the older people were in the home and they required care but they also taught you how to be human and how to treat other people and and the church should be part of restoring that because it's one of the places where we have a chance for multi-generational community and uh so this is a discussion I want to have us getting engaged with if we get fasinated with how to do this better communities will figure out ways to do it couldn't agree more and I think that for listeners uh all these things that you've been describing are uh words of great hope you've already spoken to you you've touched on this notion of how being in the middle of a pandemic has in some respects shaped even more powerfully our pensent toward isolation our being on screens and so forth I'm wondering if there's any other word that you might have for us the things that you're seeing in particular about our being in a pandemic and then what words of Hope would you have for us in particular relative to what we've been talking about that we can think about as we kind of come out of this phase of the pandemic where we happen to be at the moment not knowing exactly where this is going to go even though we might have some sense of that would love to hear any other Reflections that you have in particular about what this all that this you're talking about how does this speak to our lives in our current time in particular well I would say that uh you know we've got a bunch of uh depressed youth because that's the time in life when you really want to be active and making a difference in the world and you don't really don't feel like you're making a big difference in the world if you're just watching social media and trying to see whether you get likes that that makes you like I'm waiting to receive something as opposed to I've got something to give so we we need to figure out ways to help youth uh do worthwhile things during this time um and that became an obvious need but the other thing that you haven't mentioned and that is the degree to which there's become to be separation or alienation between families and whole groups most churches have lost half of their members uh either over masks or vaccines or not saying anything about masks or vaccines the last political campaign has huge numbers of is not talking with each other if it isn't the mask issue it's something else uh we have reached the point at which it's become being critically obvious that we feel someone isn't on our side basically our brain has put them in as a enemy mode you know they're they're not on my side they're not going to connect with me all we can do is cut them off and and defriend them uh unfriend them you know not go to their house anymore don't call me anymore uh this is becoming a huge problem in our world and it goes back to what we were talking about earlier and that is how do we go about connecting with somebody and this is the nature of hessit I stick with you even if we've got some problems in our relationship I keep the relationship bigger than the problem and and instead of figuring out uh you know who's right on the vaccine issue we are in much bigger need of figuring out how do we keep good relationship even if we don't agree on the vaccine or whatever else it might be that that is the thing that we need to be discussing and obviously at this point we have to say most churches have no answers they don't know how to repair as you mentioned earlier so the wonderful thing about the brain is once it knows a solution is possible it goes about starting to figure it out right so it is possible to keep relationships bigger than problems and if we simply got together and started figuring out how are we going to do this we got the kind of brains that are going to be making progress on that issue and I think first hope is to say let's reintroduce into the environment that the thing that's most important to your brain is to have good attachments indeed any other issue can be less than that which brings us full circle back to where we started and uh Jim I I just want to uh thank you thank you ever so much for your kindness in joining us today uh you have been a speaking of Life model you've been a model for me I'm grateful for the opportunity to uh count you as a friend I'm glad for our opportunity to speak here today to our audience again I want to just highlight the life model from Dr Jim Wilder and his colleagues and also his uh most recent two books the other half of church and uh renovated uh I would invite you to um check those out uh Jim is there is there a way for people to uh what's a way for them to reach you or to contact you or find out more about your work well they can go to LIF modelworks dorg that's a good place to find Central in information right there and uh I appreciate U you sending folks that way so we can begin to work on this again more as a community more Minds we have working on how to keep our Rel relationships bigger than our problems the better we're going to be and I really appreciate uh you having me on this podcast um your uh relationship U and your work has been one of the big encouragements for me over the last uh decade and a half um because you know you're you're helping people to be authentic about being together that's a topic we didn't bring up but how do you form good attachments when you're not authentic and I think your word has a lot your work has a lot to do with what keeps us authentic and the kind of shame that keeps us from going there and so again thank you for what you're bringing to the field Jim you're most welcome again thank you so much for being with us and thank you to our audience for joining us on another episode of neuro Faith join us again for our next time together we look forward to being with you [Music]