Being Known Podcast

Welcome to season 5 episode 5 where this season we are bringing you personal stories and deep teaching into Curt’s book, The Soul of Shame .  This week we are looking at chapter 4, “The Story of Shame You Are Living”.   We’re all storytellers.  Unlike any other living creature, humans are the only animals that tell stories in the way we do.    It is in those stories that our shame takes up residen...

Welcome to season 5 episode 4 where this season we are bringing you personal stories and deep teaching into Curt’s book, The Soul of Shame .  This week we are looking at chapter 3, “Joy, Shame and the Brain”.   We were made for joy. ⁠ ⁠ The bible and our greatest literature attest to this. But not only this: research in attachment reflects that joyful human relationships are the key to our well-be...

Welcome to season 5 episode 3 where this season we are bringing you personal stories and deep teaching into Curt’s book, The Soul of Shame.  This week we are looking at chapter 2, How Shame Targets the Mind.   It has been said, “Keep your friends close. And keep your enemies closer.” If we want to know what evil is up to as it uses shame in its quest to devour us, the first thing to know is how th...

Welcome to season 5 episode 2 where this season we are bringing you personal stories and deep teaching into Curt’s book, The Soul of Shame .  This week we are looking at chapter 1, Our Problem with Shame.   It’s not enough to know what shame IS. We also have to know how and where it works. Our problem with shame is not just a sensation in which we feel bad. It’s about all the ways that it hijacks...

Welcome to season 5 episode 1 where this season we are bringing you personal stories and deep teaching into Curt’s book, The Soul of Shame.  This week we are looking at the introduction section, The Story That Shame is Trying to Tell.   ­­­­­­­­­­­­­­What is it about shame? Why is it that it just doesn’t seem to go away?   Moreover, what makes it so destructive? Is it its mechanics? Or is it becau...

Being Known Podcast normally ends our season with a wrap up episode highlighting each episode with one more nugget of wisdom.  This season we mixed things up a bit and asked our listeners and followers what they wanted to know more about.   We received over 40 questions seeking additional wisdom on sexual trauma, generational trauma, trauma and the church and more.   A few of the questions asked i...

Welcome to Season 4 of Being Known Podcast where we are looking at trauma through the lens of hope and not fear.  This week we talk on how we can begin to heal from trauma with a look at the wholeness of integration.   We were made to create beauty and goodness in the world.  But evil has other plans, and wields trauma as a way to devour us before that goodness and beauty can be realized.   But -...

Welcome to Season 4 of Being Known Podcast where we are looking at trauma through the lens of hope and not fear.  This week we talk on how we can begin to heal from trauma.   If there is anything we know about trauma, it’s that it depends on disintegration and isolation to do its dirty work.  And if there’s anything we know about its healing, it’s that the presence of others is the beginning of in...

Welcome to Season 4 of Being Known Podcast where we are looking at trauma through the lens of hope and not fear.  This week we are looking at trauma caused by the church.   One thing we know about infections: some of the most difficult to treat are actually contracted inside hospitals.  How is it that the place where we come to heal can also be the very place where some of our most painful experie...

Welcome to Season 4 of Being Known Podcast where we are looking at trauma through the lens of hope and not fear.  This week we are talking families!   Despite our fierce commitment to individualism, trauma is far more likely to follow the way the mind has actually been made, rather than the way we have for the last several hundred years tried to pretend that it works. We would like to think that t...

Welcome to Season 4 of Being Known Podcast where we are looking at trauma through the lens of hope and not fear.  This week we are looking at the sensitive, hard and beautiful topic of sexual trauma.   What is it about sex that seems to make everything – especially trauma – so much more difficult?  Moreover, how is sexual trauma so much more debilitating than some other forms of our topic?  No mat...

Welcome to Season 4 of Being Known Podcast where we are looking at trauma through the lens of hope and not fear.   This week we connect trauma and shame.   Of all the things trauma can do, its capacity for self-perpetuation is unmatched.  And at the core of that experience is our neurophysiological encounter with shame.  Be it the way we sense the world, or the story we tell about what we are sens...

Welcome to Season 4 of Being Known Podcast where we are looking at trauma through the lens of hope and not fear.   This week we connect trauma and the brain.  To the great surprise of many, our bodies are how our minds most often and most powerfully let us in on reality.  As we like to say in the business, first we sense, and only then do we make sense of what we sense.   But what if our “sensing”...

Welcome to Season 4 of Being Known Podcast where we are looking at trauma through the lens of hope and not fear.   This week we continue looking at the mind.    If the mind goes first, it necessarily will involve the brain.  Therefore, in this episode, we will explore how trauma affects the brain in particular – not least how it perceives our inner and outer worlds – and how being aware of this ca...

Welcome to Season 4 of Being Known Podcast where we are looking at trauma through the lens of hope and not fear.   This week we begin our exploration of how trauma affects us at the beginning—for it is with our minds that we perceive that trauma has occurred in the first place and what its nature is.  Pepper and Curt review what the mind is and how trauma affects it.   Listen in as we catch the fi...

Welcome to Season 4 of Being Known Podcast where we are looking at trauma through the lens of hope and not fear.   This week, Curt and Pepper look at the questions: What then, is trauma, exactly? How do we understand trauma to be different from other wounds that we experience over the course of our lives?   This much we know: although many of us are able to avoid awareness of trauma, no one avoids...

Welcome to Season 4 of Being Known Podcast where we are looking at trauma through the lens of hope and not fear. Description: There are few places you go these days without being made aware that there is a thing called trauma. It has begun to take up residence in the collective social consciousness—and it’s really of little surprise that it has. From the pandemic to racial injustice to political r...

Curt and Pepper spend time spotlighting each episode of Being Known Podcast season 3 which is based on Curt's book, The Soul of Desire .   Video version available on our YouTube channel!  

What happens when we faithfully practice dwelling, gazing and inquiring within the confessional community—within the house of the Lord? As it turns out, nothing short of the emergence of beauty and goodness within the community itself, the very place where the hard work of hope is done.   Goodness and beauty that then spills out into every other domain of life that the members of the community occ...

First, we dwell. Then we gaze. But eventually, these states of mind lead to our inquiring, asking questions with curiosity and without condemnation.   We live in a world that rarely creates space for such inquiries. But we will see that the questions we explore in this episode are the ones that God has already asked of us—and will continue to ask as he enables us to collaborate with him in creatin...

It requires little effort to gaze upon a brilliant sunset. But what about our trauma? What about the parts of us that we hate the most? Who wants even to glance at that, let alone gaze upon it?   But as we will see (no pun intended), it is when we take the time, by dwelling, to look upon our wounds in the presence of others—and do so long enough to fully take them in—that we begin to experience wh...

To remain in one place while not being continually entertained or stimulated from something outside ourselves is increasingly difficult. But if we are to become outposts of beauty and goodness—like any artist—we must be willing to remain in the presence of others and of ourselves, over and against our impulse to run away as quickly as we can to reduce our distress as expeditiously as possible.   J...

The emergence of beauty and goodness in our world requires that we first imagine it to be so.  But trauma and shame shatter and atrophy our imagination, leaving us fearful of imagining, let alone naming the beauty and goodness we long for. For new creation to dawn, it must be led by our willingness to imagine a world we cannot yet see.   Moreover, once we catch our first glimpse of a newly imagine...

Trauma, shame and their healing, at their heart, take place in the context of intimate human relationships. How does participation in a confessional community create space for the healing we are seeking to emerge?   In this episode, Pepper and Curt explore these ideas and more, inviting you to begin to imagine how being part of a vulnerable community not only makes possible the healing and vocatio...

It takes very little to see that if longing and beauty go hand in hand, then trauma and shame are more than willing to make sure that none of that ever lasts, and in some cases makes sure no handshake ever happens. For truly, as sure as we are people of desire, we are people of grief.   From our brains to the rest of our bodies, from our inner lives to our relational realities, our grief so fills...