Listening to Our Emotions: Healing Through Self-Compassion, Grief, and Acceptance, with Dr. David C. Wang

Emotional health is deeply intertwined in an ongoing journey with spiritual health. This involves opening to our pain, grieving our trauma, and patiently cultivating a resilience that stabilizes and secures our relationships and our sense of self. With compassion, pastoral presence, and emotional attunement, psychologist Dr. David Wang is using psychological and theological tools to help us understand and adapt to emotional realities, explore the wounds of our past, and find healing and strength through acceptance and grief. In this conversation with David Wang, we discuss: - The difference between human development and spiritual formation and how to understand maturity - The centrality of relationships in human life and growth, and how that’s grounded in divine relationality and our communion with God - How to become friends with ourselves, offering self-compassion and being moved by our own suffering - The impact of childhood trauma on adult emotional, psychological, and spiritual health - And finally, how a practice of grief can help us understand and work through traumatic experiences and move toward healing. Show Notes - Christian theology and formation - A philosophical approach to theologically informed strategies for transformation and growth - How the relational aspects of God ground an approach to therapy and spiritual formation - What are the markers of maturity? - Relatedness and connection to others facilitates the process of human growth and development - Emotional building blocks and relational capacities for maturity - Dave Wang on spiritual health and thriving - Theological and psychological frameworks of thriving - Holding the beautiful beside the broken - Becoming friends with ourselves - Show compassion, be moved by our own suffering, and accept limitations as we strive toward the hard work we’re all called to. - Two paradoxical needs to achieve spiritual maturity and health - We are made for relationships, but we also need independence - Balance - Spiritual and emotional maturity - Formation through practice, education, and healthy development - Can virtue be taught? - Can maturity be educated? - Can we *learn* to thrive and be spiritually healthy? - In his book, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, Dr. Gabor Maté writes that “The attempt to escape from pain is what creates more pain.” - When our brains and our bodies go into survival mode - Avoidance as a coping mechanism or strategy - Childhood trauma in childhood - “When the psychic pain is so unbearable, the felt threat so intimidating, we mentally and emotionally try to escape.” - Childhood trauma can reemerge in adult behaviors, relationships, habits, language, even physical illness or conditions. - Do I have trauma that I haven’t dealt with? - The symptoms or signs of trauma - How to approach the process of seeking help and healing. - Concrete practices that can help and heal traumatic experience - Learning to grieve - Christian spiritual practices of prayer - The emotional practice of grief and acceptance - Dr. Pam King’s Key Takeaways - Human beings need both relationships and independence. And learning how to balance and integrate them is a marker of our maturity. - Though we may try to escape from pain, to deal with trauma we need to practice acceptance and grief. It’s a difficult and complex relational process that brings us closer to healing and wholeness. - We can befriend ourselves in our pain through a practice of self-compassion. - In this life, we have to hold beauty beside brokenness. Cultivating the capacity to do so is the hard work of growth into spiritual and emotional maturity, and the joyful journey of thriving. About David Wang Dr. David Wang is a licensed psychologist and Associate Professor of Psychology at Fuller Theological Seminary, where he’s also the Cliff and Joyce Penner Chair for the Formation of Emotionally Healthy Leaders and scholar in residence at Fuller’s Center for Spiritual Formation. He speaks and trains leaders globally on trauma informed care. And he conducts research and teaches courses in Trauma Therapy, Dialectical Behavior Therapy, Multicultural Psychology, and the Integration of Psychology and the Christian faith. He is also Pastor of Spiritual Formation at One Life City Church in Fullerton, California.