Welcome back to the place we find ourselves podcasts. I'm Adam Young, and I am joined today by a guest who's been on the show before

Dr. Kirk Thompson, you are a therapist, you're an author, you're a neuro-scientist, Kurt, it's good to see you.

Adam, it is great to see you, and it's always a pleasure. It's just really, I've been really looking forward to this, so thanks for having me on.

I'm having you on because you've written another book, and it's a book on suffering. It's called The Deepest Place.

And let's just dive in, but we're going to dive in with a sentence from really towards the end of the book where you define suffering, and here's how you define it.

Suffering begins with pain, but becomes suffering because of our isolation and powerlessness in its presence.

Now, that's a good sentence. Let me really begin. Suffering begins with pain, but becomes suffering because of our isolation and powerlessness in its presence.

Now, I really resonate with that. My working definition of trauma is that there needs to be two factors for trauma to become embedded in our bodies.

Powerlessness is number one, and then abandonment by potentially protective caregivers.

And you're saying something very similar to that here because you're writing that pain turns into suffering because of isolation and powerlessness.

Can you expand on that? Can you put some more words to that, Kurt?

Our ability to tell time into the future means that I can have an experience of pain, and if my pain is not immediately resolved, I can begin to imagine that this pain is going to stick around for five minutes or maybe five years.

And so my sense of being able to imagine it into the future and being unable to do anything about it is problematic.

I know that if I cut my finger, like there's nothing I can do about stopping the bleeding right now, but I have a sense that in ten days this is going to be taken care of.

So I'm not like I don't have the same kind of suffering as I do with my cancer, with my marriage, with my trauma.

And so my capacity as a human being to tell time in the way that I do, which is both is a beautiful thing because God has placed it there which I can reflect on the past with gratitude or I can plan into the future with joy and hope.

Our brokenness and our traumas, you know, take me out of that realm into a different way of telling time, which is I look into my past with regret in my future with anxiety.

And that's where suffering lodges from a temporal standpoint.

And this sense of powerlessness, all right, I'm overwhelmed like I cannot, I cannot change this.

I cannot, which has to do with isolation.

I am unable to do something about this on my own, which is a direct function of my perception of being alone with my pain.

And so this feature of both being isolated with my pain, no one like I don't have that talking to me and saying come, tell me what this is like.

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