Restoring the Soul with Michael John Cusick

Dan Allender has spent thirty years doing work most people would rather not look at — and in this first of two conversations, he and Michael go there together. Dan is a psychologist, professor at The Seattle School, and the author of The Wounded Heart, among many others. Michael first encountered his work in 1989, at one of Dan's conferences, in a season when his own double life had just come undone. That history is present in every minute of this conversation.
They talk about why sexual brokenness isn't a category that belongs only to people who've experienced abuse — it belongs to all of us. They explore what lust actually means: not just desire, but desire as relief and as revenge. They discuss the ways women bear the image of God differently than men, and what that has to do with misogyny and the #metoo movement. And Dan talks about shame not as the wound, but as the thing that — when we stop running from it — leads us back toward God.
Part two continues the conversation.
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As part of our Soul Care Summer, we're revisiting a conversation that's stayed with many listeners. Somewhere along the way, many of us picked up the idea that God can only look at us through gritted teeth, or worse, has to look away. Brad Jersak joins Michael to gently dismantle that picture, showing that the ache of feeling far from God was never God's doing.
The conversation moves through a recovering addict's encounter with pure light, Cornelius in the book of Acts, and a fresh reading of Psalm 22, all pointing toward the same conviction, that the cross reveals a Father who stays present even in humanity's deepest cry of abandonment. Brad's higher Christology, it turns out, only widens the reach of Abba's love.
Brad Jersak is an author and teacher based in Abbotsford, British Columbia, and serves as a reader and monastery preacher at All Saints of North America Orthodox Monastery. He previously joined Restoring the Soul in 2017 to discuss A More Christlike God, and returned to discuss In: Incarnation and Inclusion, Abba and Lamb.
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Michael continues his conversation with Dr. Curt Thompson, picking up where last week left off. There's a tender ache running underneath the neuroscience here — the ten-year-old boy on a summer evening, looking for permission to just be a kid, and the mother who couldn't see it. Most of us carry some version of that missed look, and Curt names how the body remembers what the mind can't always explain.
From there, the conversation moves into the architecture behind that ache: the domains of consciousness and body, the difference between sensing and making sense, and why the left and right hemispheres were never meant to compete. Curt weaves in Scripture, his clinical work, and his own story to show how attention, attunement, and embodied presence shape not just our relationships but our capacity to receive love itself.
Dr. Curt Thompson is a psychiatrist, author of Anatomy of the Soul and The Soul of Shame, and a leading voice on the intersection of neuroscience and spiritual formation. This conversation is drawn from his 12-part video series, offered in conjunction with his book, The Soul of Desire, published by InterVarsity Press.
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You were made for beauty and goodness. You feel that, even on the hardest days. What neuroscience is beginning to show us is that this longing isn't incidental. It's written into the architecture of how you were made.
In this conversation, psychiatrist and author Curt Thompson opens up the world of interpersonal neurobiology and what it has to do with the soul, how the mind is not the brain but something that emerges between bodies and relationships, how 80 to 85 percent of a newborn's neural networks can only develop in response to someone paying attention, and what it means that God started with dirt before he breathed in life. Curt also brings his own story, the parts of his inner orchestra that never got developed, and why the gospel doesn't just want the polished instruments.
This is a rebroadcast of one of the most beloved conversations in the show's history.
Dr. Curt Thompson is a psychiatrist and author of Anatomy of the Soul: Surprising Connections Between Neuroscience and Spiritual Practices That Can Transform Your Life and Relationships.
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Most people picture narcissism as loud, obvious, and easy to spot. The research says otherwise — and so does the Enneagram.
In this second conversation with Chuck DeGroat, Michael and Chuck work through all nine Enneagram types and the unique way narcissism hides inside each one: the nine's quiet, invisible anger; the two's helpfulness that quietly demands to be needed; the three's stage self that performs even in the counseling room; the seven's flight from anything that feels like limitation. Beneath every number, Chuck argues, the same question is lurking — do you see me, and am I enough? — and the answer we've constructed to cope with that question is where narcissism takes root.
They also talk about what it looks like to hold a narcissistic person without becoming reactive, and why real change — when it happens — is always slow and always looks more like yeast in bread than sudden transformation.
Chuck DeGroat is a professor, counselor, and author of When Narcissism Comes to Church: Healing Your Community from Emotional and Spiritual Abuse.
Click here to listen to Part One of Chuck's conversation with Michael.
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ENGAGE THE RESTORING THE SOUL PODCAST:
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