Checking In, Part 1

by on November 1, 2024

This week, we’re checking in with you, dear listeners, in a candid and vulnerable episode. Days before the U.S. Presidential Election, Dan and Rachael share the emotional weight they’re carrying, touching on the intense anxiety, anger, and grief of this turbulent season and honestly acknowledging, “We’re not doing well.” 

Together, they explore practices that help them stay grounded and find hope. We hope that this conversation possibly helps you navigate similar feelings in uncertain times, or, at the very least, reminds you that you are not alone.

Listener Resources:

Dan and Rachael reference the following works during their conversation:

Further Listening:

  • Check out the Not Doing Well series, in which Dan and Rachael explore: How can we continue to pursue the work we are called to, continue to seek healing and growth, and continue to love the people around us when it feels like things are falling apart?
  • “How Did We Get Here?” with author and journalist Pete Wehner is an invitation to those of us within the body of Christ to consider the factors that influence our own stories, our faith, our political views, and our relationships with others.
  • “The Anxiety Opportunity” with author Curtis Chang invites us to think differently about the relationship between anxiety and spiritual growth.

Episode Transcript:

Dan: We are a week away from what I think most people would argue, and I certainly experience as a major significant transition in the present and future of our country. And that is an election. And if there is one simple sentence that we will offer, it’s please vote, please vote. Don’t refuse the incredible gift and right to cast your ballot. But beyond that, I want to at least begin with the question I hope you’re doing… Oh, it’s a statement, but it’s a question. And that is, I hope you’re doing better than I am.

Rachael: Oh gosh. I would love, no, I can’t lie to you, Dan. I don’t know if that’s the case. So I dunno if that’s the case.

Dan: Well, let’s at least say that if anyone is particularly well right now, it is either because you bear a maturity that I can only anticipate I will one day have when I stand before him and become as he is or as possible, it is not your maturity, but your dissociative distraction into other activities that allow you to, in one sense do far better. But I want to begin with that. How are you in this week?

Rachael: I mean, I think we’ve talked about this and really quick, I think your echo. Okay, I think I got turned off. Okay, good. I could hear myself. Sorry, which feels a little bit like how I feel this week. I’m hearing auditory hallucinations and I dunno if I’m talking out loud or if I’m talking to myself in my head. Side note. When I lived alone for four years and had a lot of free time to myself, I did start talking out loud when I was ruminating or thinking things through. And then that was really hilarious. When I got married, I became a stepmother and still was kind of doing that. And then people would be like, are you talking to me? Are you just talking about your thoughts? And I was like, oh, just externally processing what’s going on in my head that, yeah, how am I doing? I mean, the last time we went through a presidential election here in the United States felt unprecedented in the fact that you didn’t know even after the election, if the results of the election were actually going to be honored. And then we did have an event on January 6th where there was an attempt to dishonor and overthrow the results of the election. And we know a lot of disinformation that’s come out in the wake of that that’s persisted into this season. And so maybe as a young child or even as in my early years of voting, I really took for granted that this kind of sense of just like, oh, democracy is just a thing that’s guaranteed this nation and will happen and people have some sense of integrity and respect and we’ll do things. So I’ve come to experience in some ways I kind of think, oh, it wouldn’t really matter who is running. There’s such high levels of anxiety around not, I mean, yes, of course I have anxiety about the outcome of the election, but I have just as much anxiety around the ways in which the worst parts of our humanity have been invited to front and center. How much fearmongering, how much dehumanization and invitation to scapegoating that. Quite frankly, if I’m being honest with you, Dan, in the work I’ve been so privileged to do in other countries, what we see happening right now in our larger world, when you start to dehumanize people from the center of power, yes, there’s always been a use of harmful rhetoric in our human discourse, but when the centers of power are wielding that language and giving people full license, it is the kind of work that leads to a kind of frenzy and genocidal violence. So I have feel like a lot of fear in my body around what is being invited in and stoked and unleashed in our midst. And I will just say, the more I’m learning, the more I am. Some might use a word decolonizing your mind or the more I’m actually letting the stories of truth be held in my mind, heart and body. I know so much of what we’re seeing in the here and now is not necessarily new. We’ve used that language on the podcast before, that apocalyptic unveiling and that there are many people in our midst, friends and colleagues that we have who would say, yeah, this terror has been my normative experience in these contexts. I have a lot of anxiety going into next week. And also kind of a sense of like, well, there’s a certain level of powerlessness I feel, but a resolution to hold on to something of my humanity. And that feels increasingly harder and harder to do. The more scared I get, which is…

Dan: Again, let me start with two thoughts in response. The first is if we’re not anxious, and again all I mean at this point is if you are not feeling something of the reality of stress biochemicals where your body is suffering, what is unquestionably a significant threat to us individually and corporately. So when we use the word anxiety, it is appropriate to return to the fact that we are in a heightened, highly threatening environment. And it has been that for some season, but I think with the coming denouement, conclusion of a long process that has been tumultuous as you have used I think really important language, a great deal of dehumanization, then we can’t presume that the election finishes the process and it’s over. Well now it’s over. Now we can get on. And that’s true whether either candidate ends up being successful, it’s back to we are in a generational, we are in a kind of geographic, we’re in an ecclesial moment of profound disillusion. A kind of the center is not holding the things we might, as you put it very well at the beginning, might have presumed with regard to a commitment to the constitution, a commitment to law, a commitment to regard for the other side, even with profound difference to civility. All of that I think has been skewed in really tragic ways. But let me go back to indication, at least for me, I’m not doing well. I’m talking a lot out loud. I didn’t work that out beforehand, but it’s like, and Becky said that to me just literally a few days ago, she, you’re actually even saying things like, I need to get something from the car. It isn’t just talking out loud about scripture or about the light. It’s more like your mind seems to be going. So I can tell that generally most things, we handle what I’ll call subconscious processes. I don’t need to think through and name how to get from my home to our downtown. The route is so well woven into my understanding of how to live. I don’t have to quote-unquote think about it. But when there’s some disruption, there’s a road that’s being worked on, then I literally have to go from that foundational subconscious, not thinking, not naming, not having language to sub vocal. And that’s like, oh, internally I’m saying to myself, oh, don’t take that route. You need go up the hill and turn left. I’m instructing myself, but it’s sub vocal. But what research has actually indicated, as Becky said, that I started looking at how…

Rachael: Great, tell me how unwell I am. Let’s just see…

Dan: The answer is you’re not well, you are not well.

Rachael: or how the seasons when I was like, this is just normal because I have a lot of alone time I’ll just talk out loud.

Dan: If you’re talking out loud to yourself, usually what it’s an indication of is that our body has taken on stress and threat and what we’re doing is brilliant. And that is we’re actually responding hippocamp-ly with language with our left hemisphere to the kind of ongoing stress that our migdala is experiencing. And so there’s this lovely, lovely book written by a gentleman called Laurence Gonzales called Deep Survival. And one of the things that he does in this book is he looks at when there’s great threat and danger, and a lot of the work that he did was looking at accidents that occurred on Mount Rainier. How is it that certain people have a climbing accident and survive and others don’t? And one of the things that he discovered, which again is so intuitive, but again, it’s so intriguing, is that people who talk out loud to themselves when they’re lost, people who talk out loud to themselves when they’re in danger and threat actually have a means by which they can begin to tend to their bodies overreaction, but not actually overreaction very legitimate reaction to what’s happening. So I think that’s the beginning point to be able to say, well, I feel somewhat confirmed that you’re talking out loud because it’s been noted. I think what we’re doing is tending to the utterly appropriate threat to literally to our world, our culture, our families, in the context of a radically polarized and cruel, dehumanizing process. Thoughts to that?

Rachael: I mean, I actually do feel slightly comforted that I’m not the only one talking out loud to myself. So thank you for that vulnerability. Yeah, I mean, I think just what you put words to, just to acknowledge and honor that it feels like there is a level of threat. And again, to me that hasn’t felt just correlating to this upcoming election. It’s felt very real and palpable and building, but it’s coming to a fever pitch. And I think I also, underneath the fear and anxiety, I do feel like an empowered sense. You and I were talking, all is not lost and we cannot give our hearts over to despair. And so much of the work, even in our political environment happens not so much on the national stage, but even in local and state level work. So just paying attention to those levels of civil servants and people doing work. But I think I also have just a deep grief and it doesn’t feel like a debilitating grief. It feels like a very honoring grief that things are not well, I have no illusions that even if the outcome of this election happens in the way I hope it will, that will bring a level of, okay, like you said, okay, well that’s done and now we can all go back to whatever we’re going back to. It feels like, no, we’ve actually crossed a point of no return and however we’re moving, I’m going to need the best parts of myself. And when I think about what does it mean then to be a follower of Jesus and in an increasingly traumatizing violent world who’s acquainted with the impact of trauma? So I do think I always hated that book, Deep Survival. This is the first time I’ve ever felt like maybe I would survive cause I talk out loud to myself because when I read that book, I was like, so basically I die. That’s what I’m taking from this. Look, every time he explained it was like the person with the overactive amygdala doesn’t make it out.

Dan: No, I’m going to remind you this is not that pertinent, but he does describe this one event where a Navy SEAL dies and a 6-year-old girl doesn’t. And that was one of the premises of what happened differently. And the person who thinks they can get themselves out of danger is often the person who is operating without stopping, without ceasing, without in one sense, they’re moving too quickly with a plan versus being able to hold something of the heartache and the terror in that moment. And I think there is something about being able to say, this is a terrifying part of, I mean, in my 72 years of living, I have never seen an election quite like this. Now again, the one prior was not exactly a piece of cake or the one prior to that, either. Nonetheless, the era has grown to such an exigency of rage, of vitriol, of humiliation, of deceit and outright un-freakin-questionable lies. All that to say, the process has brought us to a point where, again, if you’re not anxious, I’d want to say, please don’t blame your lack of anxiety on maturity. And on the other hand, the issue of I feel so much grief, so much sorrow in the process of literally opening up the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times. Those would be the two worlds I read fairly regularly. And Becky just the other day said to me, well, what did you read? And I said, I scanned. I couldn’t read anything. I found myself opening up an article beginning to read, and then within a paragraph or two, I found myself overwhelmed and having to close it down again. I’ve never made any major statement about my level of maturity, so I’m not claiming others are experiencing this, but I just can’t bear more sorrow. I can’t bear more of the egregious harm that I feel is being passed back and forth in a way that is virtually intolerable and all that to be able to say, how are you doing with grief? I’m having to limit what I see, what I read, what I engage to sustain some degree of stability.

Rachael: Yeah, I mean, I would say probably throughout this past year I have been cultivating greater resilience to move. Gabes Torres has a really brilliant work that she’s created around activism, and she has this term which makes sense, oscillation that in order to actually stay embodied in human size and rooted in justice oriented work, that’s not just about contending with what needs to be dismantled and harmed, but what needs to also be anticipated and built and dreamed and imagined. And that if you lose your humanity in the midst of that, and there’s such urgency, right? Because people’s lives, people are dying in our world, children are dying. There’s massive conflicts and genocidal violence playing out in our world in multiple regions, and we’re seeing it on social media. And so she uses the term oscillation that we have to oscillate between not turning away, not becoming numb, not getting so overwhelmed in our nervous system that we shut down and lose creativity, lose imagination and/or think this is something we can just think our way out of or isolate our way out of or give it to the powerlessness. And I really appreciated that. Michael and I were just talking and we were talking about social media and he was like, you used to post a lot more on Facebook before we got married. And I said, well, I had a lot more time before we got married and before I became a stepmom and moved my whole life. And then a pandemic came, and then the world changed in so many ways. And I was just saying to him that it feels like if you’re not leveraging whatever platform I have to try to make a difference for the most vulnerable people, that in some ways it’s the point of posting. And so we were taught, he was like, yeah, but we also have to point to the beauty and the joy and remember what it is we’re fighting for. It was a good reminder for me and how to oscillate between those things in order to actually grow greater resilience, to stay present and sober when the truth is these are very scary types. And I don’t think anytime soon we’re going back to whatever we perceived as normal and as someone who believes that the work of God has to be present with us in some way, shape, or form. I don’t think we’re supposed to go back to whatever we had as normal that worked for many people but didn’t work for everyone. And so I am finding I actually have to develop intentional practices of what am I grateful for? And sometimes that’s hard because it actually makes me feel more terror because there’s more to lose. But what am I grateful for? How can I pay attention to the really beautiful things happening with my 2-year-old who at this juncture is in ways I’m so privileged by very much shielded from a lot of heartache and horror in this world and is mostly concerned with connecting with us and playing and singing songs and building things with magnet tiles, and how can I hold onto and remember the community I am a part of, the beloved community I am a part of, and that there is still much good in this world, even in the face of grave danger. So those have been some of the ways that I feel Jesus has been like, okay, this is in some ways there’s nothing new under the sun. It’s new to you, but it’s not new under the sun. And I think sometimes we hear that and can almost hear it as a dismissive sense of, so get over your suffering, or it’s not that big of a deal. I hear it more as like you are not without resource and a very embodied, deeply knowing spirit that’s not esoteric, but connected to the one who has lived in time and space in a body, in a context, in a culture, in the midst of profound violence and possibility, right, and possibility.

Dan: You’re already beginning to name again. How do we bear a kind of cultural honor to the honesty required without being anxious or without, in one sense engaging grief. What I also find, at least in this oscillation, I love that term, it does feel at times like I’m bipolar, overwhelmed and despairing and then manic and then pressing on, getting busy. And again, those who struggle truly with the term bipolar, I’m not putting myself in that position that is unique suffering that is never chosen and is part of, again, a neurological process that needs to be engaged, but using it metaphorically. When we understand oscillation, there are times where if there is not grief and being overwhelmed, you’re not facing reality. And if in your own ways of tending to your own anxiety, we all have structures that at times are highly successful and wise and other times really dissociative and disengaged from it. But I’m also finding and just checking in with you as we’re trying to put words to what you all might be experiencing, I also find I am just angry.

Rachael: Oh, well, yeah. Let me just, yeah, there’s no sainthood here.

Dan: No, but again, my level of maturity is sometimes in the particular really non-traffic world I’m in. And what I mean by that is literally cars, trucks, et cetera. If I have to wait five persons, five vehicles to get through a stop sign, I’m like miffed. And I’m finding myself, and I say like many others where I’m just reacting to things that don’t matter because there are so many things that do that I really sense I have very little influence or control over. And so that sense of powerlessness, this election from my standpoint, will affect my life as a 72-year-old man, but even more so, it will affect my children who are your age and my grandchildren who are the ages of your boys and your daughter. Now, I’m like at times irrational in my rage, and Becky has heard me reading one or two of the articles and swearing because of what I’m hearing, a certain person or person speak about the nature of reality or a community or a group of human beings and trying to engage all of the essential cultural trauma. And again, I want to come back to the important phrase I may be suffering, but there are friends and communities that have suffered this since Jim Crow and prior to Jim Crow and to other realms of, again, the first true terrorist organization in the United States was the Ku Klux Klan. So there are many people who’ve known terror, terror as to the political process and the violation of humanity and goodness. But when we start straying into what I see to be the Christian communities in one sense, carrying on the blasphemy of manifest destiny into Christian nationalism, and so the gospel gets wrapped up into a particular political party or to a set of specific policies, and only those policies, I begin to lose my mind as to what in the name of God has happened to people with regard to, in some sense, the loss that we are members first and foremost, to the kingdom of God at America, is not the kingdom of God anymore any less. Then France is or Jamaica. So when we begin to actually go now, how are you holding the, in one sense, the different than the word oscillation into merger of anxiety, of despair, of depression, of grief and anger. Now I want to go back to what are some of the practices you have been utilizing as we come within days of a so-called election?

Rachael: Sorry, I’m just feeling like deep emotion probably because she talked about Christian nationalism, and I just think there’s nothing more spiritually abusive and toxic than the wielding of empirical power, but confusing it with anything gospel. And I’ve just seen some statistics really recently around how many primarily White Protestants agreed with statements about immigrants in our country linked to a word like vermin being called vermin.

Dan: 80% believe that immigrants are polluting the blood of America and have been referred to by more than one person as vermin the language that was used by Hitler, by Pol Pot by virtually everyone who has perpetrated, including the violation and destruction of the Tutsi’s, we’re in a world where…

Rachael: And I just want to add what we’re actually hearing rhetoric out of Israel towards the Palestinian people in Gaza as well. Not that there hasn’t been rhetoric both ways, but it is playing out in our world in huge scales right now that have life or death implications and being done in God’s name no less.

Dan: Right.

Rachael: And I think I just want to say that’s what I was, my little phrase. It’s getting harder and harder and harder to not dehumanize those I am afraid of. And I will be honest that I am afraid of the 80% of white Protestants who have given their hearts over to fear, to hate, to a worldly antichrist kind of protection that will not save them, and in fact will actually cause harm to others, but also cause deep harm to their own souls. And I by no means am perfect, and I don’t have answers to all the complex problems facing us, but as someone who finds myself working in the realm of spiritual abuse, I can’t help but see the ways in which so many of the tools and weapons, which we’ll talk about on another podcast of spiritual abuse, are being leveraged against people. And I guess that’s a way that I try to hold on to something of 80% of the people who responded to the surveys humanity. That there’s something they’re so afraid of that this invitation to dehumanize others to hate others to scapegoat others bring some level of safety. So I’m trying to stay curious as to what is under the surface. And I’m also trying to stay honest about the powerful people who are being given a platform, and I’ll stop there.

Dan: Well, again, not only do you not need to stop there, the phenomena that we’re trying to put words to, at least for two of us on this podcast, you and me, we’ve got to be able to enter anxiety and in that threat and grief in that there is just such loss of things that matter and should matter to all of us, a degree to which we do not vilify those whom we are different than–even different in terms of who we choose to vote for. So in that framing of being able to go, we’ve got to own our grief, our anxiety, our anger, and ultimately not try to gut it out nor concede to, in one sense what seems to enable us to escape all that, but to be able to honor it by holding it and saying, this may be my condition at the moment a week before, but it is not who I am meant to be, and it’s not who I will choose to be, but now I’ve got to wrestle with it. And part of that wrestling is being able to honor when Becky said, you’re talking out loud, and some of it’s mumbling, what you mean? Do you mean mumbling? She said, you’re talking out loud, but you’re not being clear. Say what you need to say and you can invite me in. If there’s something that you need to get in the car, then tell me. I might be able to get it for you or hold it with you in memory for you to be able to do so. Another way of saying the very same thing, we need to be together rather than to let diabolos the word that we use for the word devil, the word diabolic. Diabolos means to scatter, to divide. And in many ways, the date is from my standpoint, that irrespective of who is elected, the ultimate winner at this point is diabolos. And that is, we are so divided that we cannot find something of the commonality of a care for one another, even with differences. And again, I’m not trying to find just the kumbaya moment that we somehow pretend everything’s going to be just fine, but when we lose our humanity because we’ve joined some form of accusatory structure and dehumanizing the other who’s dehumanizing me, I need to be able to enter something of the heart and the mind of the one who I think is desperately wrong, and yet they have not indeed lost being made in the image God as well. So it requires a level of maturity, at least at this point. I don’t have or is not, shall we say, fluid and florid in the particularity of my own life. Yet I think even this discussion, but even the work we’ve done to be able to have this, I know I want to be one who lives out the presence of the kingdom of God. And I don’t wish ever to be a person of a party or a candidate or an approach, but it always requires to be a member of the kingdom as a citizen of this particular country to vote and to vote with wisdom and to devote with a sense of as much an understanding of what moves me to make decisions. All that to say I’m not doing well, but even this discussion helps me a little to at least know we’re moving in some direction that bears goodness.

Rachael: Yeah.

Dan: Any final thoughts?

Rachael: No, I, I do feel a different level of grounding and calling to mind the faces of people whom I love, who see the world very differently right now in ways that at times can be really heartbreaking for me and terrifying. And yet I love them. They’re precious to me, and they are a gift that help me not dehumanize or kind of make, and when I say dehumanize, I just mean make someone almost faceless, nameless without a place, without a sense of belonging. And so I’m actually deeply grateful for that. And I also know if I’m moving away in disgust or fear or contempt, I can’t actually move toward in a way that might have the possibility of a different kind of transformation together that we could move together in a different direction. Now that touches in even different longing that I will take a step back from. But I am grateful for your invitation to remember that. So thank you.

Dan: Well, we’ll continue this discussion as this podcast comes before, and the next podcast technically will not come before the actual results. We’ll say that again. But we want to cover how we anticipate our lives and hearts will engage the next step. So see you in a few days.

Rachael: Indeed.