Restoring the Soul with Michael John Cusick

Shame doesn't only live in the dark corners of a broken life. It lives just as quietly in the person everyone else envies — the one who has achieved everything and still wakes up feeling like it isn't enough.
Ken Shigematsu grew up moving between Japan, England, and Canada, carrying the weight of a shame-and-honor culture that most Western theology never addresses. In this conversation, he and Michael explore why deep grace is different from knowing grace is true, what it means to grow our capacity to actually receive love rather than deflect it, and why beauty and joy aren't spiritual extras — they are among the most direct routes out of shame and into the self God made.
Ken also shares the simple daily practice that, over 30 days, can literally rewire the neural networks that make it hard to feel loved by God — even when you believe it.
Ken Shigematsu is a pastor in Vancouver, Canada, and author of Now I Become Myself: How Deep Grace Heals Our Shame and Restores Our True Self.
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Most people assume temptation is about weakness or willpower. But the wilderness story in Matthew 4 reveals something far older — evil moves first against the places where we have not been seen, soothed, safe, and secure.
In this conversation, Michael and AJ Denson walk slowly through the baptism and temptation of Jesus, presenting them as a portrait of attachment under siege. They explore how the devil's opening accusation — if you are the Son of God — lands precisely where God's voice had just spoken identity and belonging, why hunger, loneliness, and exposure aren't just physical states but the exact conditions evil exploits, and what it means that after the ordeal, angels came and attended to him — a scene almost never preached, yet the one that puts the bow on the whole story.
This is a co-host episode from Michael's ongoing series unpacking Sacred Attachment, chapter by chapter.
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Most people assume their distance from God is a faith problem. It may be something older — a pattern in the nervous system, learned long before you had words for it, that quietly shapes how close you let God come.
Dr. Geoff Holsclaw and his wife Cyd spent years watching people plateau spiritually and realized the stall wasn't theological — it was relational. This particular conversation with Michael John Cusick traces how our earliest attachment wounds create an image of God in our own likeness, why trying harder to believe rarely moves us from the head to the heart, and what it looks like to run new experiments in faith that slowly rewrite those patterns from the inside out.
Geoff also unpacks three concrete practices — cultivating joy, naming river and wilderness moments, and silence and solitude — and why the same practice works entirely differently depending on your attachment landscape.
Dr. Geoff Holsclaw is a pastor, theologian, and professor in the Doctor of Ministry program at Western Theological Seminary, and co-author with Cyd Holsclaw of Landscapes of the Soul.
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Dr. Liz Hall is a psychologist and professor at Biola who, at 45, was diagnosed with stage two breast cancer — and discovered that her training had barely prepared her for it. She joins Michael to talk about her book When the Journey Hurts, co-written with theologians Kelly Kapic and Jason McMartin, and what a decade of research and lived suffering taught her about meaning, faith, and staying human in the hard middle.
They talk about why the degree to which something threatens our worldview is exactly the degree to which it causes distress. They discuss the "problematic roadmaps" Christians often get handed — vague theology that begins and ends with Romans 8:28, triumphalism that rushes past suffering toward victory, and theodicy that answers a question no one in crisis is actually asking. Liz also describes a study on Ignatian prayer, walking people through twenty moments of Christ's suffering on their phones — and finding that identifying with Christ in suffering drew people closer to God in measurable ways. And they end where you might not expect: with lament, and with Psalm 88, which doesn't resolve.
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Welcome back to the Restoring the Soul podcast with Michael John Cusick. In this episode, Michael sits down with licensed therapist, author, and researcher Jay Stringer for a deep and vulnerable conversation exploring the core desires that shape our lives. Together, they unpack themes from Jay Stringer’s latest book, Desire: The Longings Inside of Us and the New Science of How We Love, Heal, and Grow.
Over the course of their dialogue, Michael and Jay examine the five core desires: wholeness, personal growth, pleasure, intimacy, and meaning. They candidly discuss the traps of mastery and control, the importance of radical self-hospitality, and the crucial role of self-acceptance in loving others well. You will hear stories from Jay’s clinical experience, thoughtful reflections on the nature of shame and transformation, and an honest look at how pleasure and intimacy can be both revealing and redemptive.
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