Curt Thompson > Quotes

“Remember that emotion is not a debatable phenomenon. It is an authentic reflection of our subjective experience, one that is best served by attending to it.”
― Curt Thompson, Anatomy of the Soul: Surprising Connections Between Neuroscience and Spiritual Practices that Can Transform Your Life and Relationships

“What do I pay attention to? Paul says that what we pay attention to doubles back and governs us. Hence our attention is deeply associated with either death or life.”
― Curt Thompson, The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe About Ourselves

“Being known. Our Western world has long emphasized knowledge—factual information and “proof”—over the process of being known by God and others. No wonder, then, that despite all our technological advancements and the proliferation of social media, we are more intra- and interpersonally isolated than ever. Yet it is only when we are known that we are positioned to become conduits of love. And it is love that transforms our minds, makes forgiveness possible, and weaves a community of disparate people into the tapestry of God’s family. Attention.”
― Curt Thompson, Anatomy of the Soul: Surprising Connections between Neuroscience and Spiritual Practices That Can Transform Your Life and Relationships

“Healing shame requires our being vulnerable with other people in embodied actions. There is no other way, but shame will, as we will see, attempt to convince us otherwise.”
― Curt Thompson, The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe About Ourselves

“In other words, we will be aware of (know) God, others and ourselves in the same manner as we experience God’s awareness of us. There is no hint of shame in his gaze or his voice. Our attention is drawn so irresistibly to him and how he is attending to us that we lose all awareness of the shame that has for so long kept parts of us hiding in the dark. Toward that end we need to pay attention to the things that are the summation of our lives: faith, hope and love. To live faithfully is to trust, to deeply attune to the presence of the Holy Spirit in whom we live and move and have our being. As we live faithfully, we actively imagine that he joyfully delights in being in our presence, and that all we do, we do with God, mindful that we live in dependence on him and each other.”
― Curt Thompson, The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe About Ourselves

“what we do with shame on an individual level has potentially geometric consequences for any of the social systems we occupy, be that our family, place of employment, church or larger community. It”
― Curt Thompson, The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe About Ourselves

“But narratives are not the only instruments within Scripture that can help us integrate our minds and lives. Poetry is another powerful literary tool. It has several distinct features:    By activating our sense of rhythm, poetry accesses our right-mode operations and systems.    Reading poetry has the effect of catching us off guard. Our imaginations are invigorated when our usual linear expectations of prose (that one word will follow obediently behind another on the way to a predictable end) don’t apply. This can stimulate buried emotional states and layers of memory.    Finally, poetry not only appeals to right-mode processing, but to left mode as well, given its use of language. This makes it a powerful integrative tool.”
― Curt Thompson, Anatomy of the Soul: Surprising Connections between Neuroscience and Spiritual Practices That Can Transform Your Life and Relationships

“In your life, God’s “way” is about loving him and loving your neighbor with all the parts of you. And this is hard work, especially for those parts of your “heart, soul, and mind” that have not had much practice doing that—the wounded parts, the weak parts, or the functions, such as memory or emotion, that you may not pay much attention to.”
― Curt Thompson, Anatomy of the Soul: Surprising Connections between Neuroscience and Spiritual Practices That Can Transform Your Life and Relationships

“But beyond this, and even more important, my problem is not just what I am sensing but that I do not feel adequate to respond to it. I perceive, beginning at nonconscious levels of awareness, that I do not have what it takes to tolerate what I feel. I am not just sad, angry or lonely. But ultimately these feelings rest on the bedrock that I am alone with what I feel, and no one is coming to my aid. Shame undergirds other affective states because of its relationship to being left. And to be abandoned ultimately is to be in hell. This terror of being alone drives my shame-based behavior and, ironically, takes me to the very place I most fear going—to the hell of absolute isolation.”
― Curt Thompson, The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe About Ourselves

“even though you cannot change the events of your story, you can change the way you experience your story. Have”
― Curt Thompson, Anatomy of the Soul: Surprising Connections between Neuroscience and Spiritual Practices That Can Transform Your Life and Relationships

“Researchers have described shame as a feeling that is deeply associated with a person’s sense of self, apart from any interactions with others; guilt, on the other hand, emerges as a result of something I have done that negatively affects someone else. Guilt is something I feel because I have done something bad. Shame is something I feel because I am bad.”
― Curt Thompson, The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe About Ourselves

“sexual addiction. During their initial period of abstinence, abusers often find themselves flooded with emotions they do not yet have the mental or spiritual maturity to regulate, and as a result, quickly return to their old habits.”
― Curt Thompson, Anatomy of the Soul: Surprising Connections between Neuroscience and Spiritual Practices That Can Transform Your Life and Relationships

“Our vulnerability, ultimately to potential abandonment (of which shame is the herald), is simultaneously both the source of all that is broken in our world as well as its redemption.”
― Curt Thompson, The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe About Ourselves

“It may be revealing to know that telling your story begins with someone else. Long before you arrive on the scene, before and then after you were conceived, people started talking about you: they talked about your gender, what you will be named, who they hope you will resemble in appearance and character (and likewise, who they hope you will not resemble). And even before this, perhaps your parents had months or even years of longing for you. Or perhaps no one longed for you, and you were eventually passed on to someone else for your care. We are all born out of preludes of beauty and tragedy, each of us with our own ratio of both. You began your life out of and into this narrative that others were already telling.”
― Curt Thompson, The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe About Ourselves

“It is equally true that in order for me to be liberated from the shame I carry, I need someone to be able to say to me, “You’re right. You were wrong to have done this.” I need to hear that my behavior was really as bad as I think, if not worse, while simultaneously sensing that the person I am confessing to is not leaving. Shame has the effect of coaxing us into pretending that sin is not as bad as it seems; for if it really is that bad, and I have to face it, it would be too much and I fear I would be overwhelmed. When someone seeks forgiveness for the wrong they have committed, we who have been wounded must be able to acknowledge the reality of the pain inflicted if forgiveness is to be real, and if the offender’s shame is to be effectively healed.”
― Curt Thompson, The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe About Ourselves

“It is common for people who are depressed to have a very different understanding of their past, as well as their future, compared to when they are well. Via neuroplasticity and Hebb’s axiom, practice tends to make permanent. Thus, if we tell ourselves, using imagery and sensations as much as words, that our life isn’t going anywhere, we literally wire our brain to continue in that pattern of storytelling. It becomes an embodied reality, and no amount of theological facts that state otherwise, apart from equally embodied action, will necessarily change the story’s outcome. Robert began to see how the “facts” of his life were not immutable realities but were as much a function of the story he told himself on a moment-to-moment basis.”
― Curt Thompson, The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe About Ourselves

“Research in marriage and family therapy suggests that approximately 80 percent of the emotional conflict between couples is rooted in events that predate the couple knowing each other. That’s why one of the questions I commonly ask in marriage counseling is how much of each spouse’s reaction to the other is his or her “80 percent.” In other words, how much of the conflict is not so much a direct outgrowth of a current event as something that flows from parts of their minds that are remembering?”
― Curt Thompson, Anatomy of the Soul: Surprising Connections between Neuroscience and Spiritual Practices That Can Transform Your Life and Relationships

“Because when our attention is firmly ensconced in the past or the future, we remain outside the present moment, the only dimension of the temporal domain of integration in which we are able to find joy and create beauty, even in the presence of our suffering. The psalmist offers a commitment to focus on something different than what we commonly do.”
― Curt Thompson, The Soul of Desire: Discovering the Neuroscience of Longing, Beauty, and Community

“that life is not about not being messy but about being creative with the messes we have;”
― Curt Thompson, The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe About Ourselves

“Left-brain mental processing disregards the right-brain emotional elements of trust that are necessary for life to thrive. When I know that I know something because I can logically prove it, I step away from trust. When I no longer trust, I am no longer open to being known, to relationship, to love.”
― Curt Thompson, Anatomy of the Soul: Surprising Connections between Neuroscience and Spiritual Practices That Can Transform Your Life and Relationships

“Narrative. As our minds develop, eventually we try to make sense of our lives. We take the input from our awareness of our conscious, vertical, horizontal and memory domains, and begin to tell our stories, with most of that content being nonverbal and nonconscious in nature. This narrative is highly influenced by our most intimate attachment relationships. Thus, who I am (i.e., what I tell myself about myself in visual images, sensations and feelings as well as words) is always going to be understood in terms of my current relationships—and by current I am referring to all relationships, past or present, that currently are influencing my mind’s activity. Thus, even people who are deceased can continue to have sway over my life, depending on how I continue to process my ongoing experiences with my memory of them. This is why I can continue to have feelings of shame when I have memories of events involving a parent who is no longer living.”
― Curt Thompson, The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe About Ourselves

“Who would we become if we could see the moments we occupy as opportunities to create beauty, not least on our relational canvases?”
― Curt Thompson, The Soul of Desire: Discovering the Neuroscience of Longing, Beauty, and Community

“What they needed from me was not, first, right theology; they needed me to be their embodied imaginer of beauty, if you will, while their brains tried to catch up.”
― Curt Thompson, The Soul of Desire: Discovering the Neuroscience of Longing, Beauty, and Community

“In particular, he said that an important part of how people change—not just their experiences, but also their brains—is through the process of telling their stories to an empathic listener.”
― Curt Thompson, Anatomy of the Soul: Surprising Connections between Neuroscience and Spiritual Practices That Can Transform Your Life and Relationships

“In an environment where we are unafraid, mistakes are not our enemies but our friends.”
― Curt Thompson, The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe About Ourselves

“As Siegel has said, of all the variables that encourage the development of secure attachment in a child, the single most powerful one is the degree to which the child’s parent has made coherent sense of his or her own story.”
― Curt Thompson, The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe About Ourselves

“We also see that the serpent has no trouble talking about God rather than inviting the woman to have a conversation with God. This is one of shame’s most important means of creating the isolation that supports its affective gravitas. At this point the woman can begin to consider God in her own mind, by herself. She is given the opportunity to decide independently who God is and what he thinks and feels in response to her. She begins the process of analyzing God—of judging him from a distance, rather than interacting with him.”
― Curt Thompson, The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe About Ourselves

“With little to no awareness, we seamlessly respond to shame with judgment, which emerges as words. But more significantly, these words carry the emotional arrows slung as much at ourselves as they are at others.”
― Curt Thompson, The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe About Ourselves

“I’ve come to call what I experienced the process of being known. This is a much deeper and richer experience than simply knowing the bare facts of my story. It reflects what neuroscience and related disciplines are teaching us about what it means to live an integrated life—both as an individual and as part of a community.”
― Curt Thompson, Anatomy of the Soul: Surprising Connections between Neuroscience and Spiritual Practices That Can Transform Your Life and Relationships

“Hearing the sharpness in her voice, which interrupts the child’s movement, he or she next hears it soften as Mom says, “Let’s go this way!” quickly moving physically to redirect the child elsewhere. Joy is not at risk of being undermined, even in the instance of limit-setting, when a parent’s mind is attuned to maintaining connection with the child.”
― Curt Thompson, The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe About Ourselves