Hello, welcome to this episode of the Theology Podcast. I'm Sierra Wiley and I am a senior editor at Touchstone Magazine and that's enough about me for now. Anyway, let's kick it over to you Tom. I'm Tom Price. I teach theology, Christian ethics, and philosophy, and that's enough about me for today. Okay, Glenn, why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself and then you will let you invite Natalie to speak. Okay, I'm Glenn Sunshine. I am a retired history professor in a senior fellow to Colson Center for Christian World View and since we're being very short, that's about enough for me. You know, we have as our guest today a doctor in Natalie at well, so Natalie, why don't you introduce yourself? I feel very pressured to have a short intro at this time. That's why we were short, so you can have fun. No, I'm kidding. I'm Natalie at well at own and operate a private counseling practice outside of this Charlotte and with Carolina area and I also teach adjunct at Liberty University in the Clinical and Mental Health Counseling Program and lately I've been doing some reading and teaching and writing on spiritual warfare and mental health. Great. Yes, you know, we've had you on before and at that point, you were exploring this topic of the relationship between well demonization and mental health, spiritual warfare and counseling, but just in the last month or two, you've come out with a new book. So why don't we just start off by having you introduce the book to us and what you were doing at it. Yeah, thank you. It's called Humanity Under siege, the unseen realm and the spiritual war against the mind. So it's about really the unseen forces that can be at play with your mind in the area of mental health. So how things can manifest as mental health that might not have been explored spiritually or in any way in a counseling setting or by anyone really before. Yeah, this is this is actually for me it is a very interesting subject because I've been doing more work with the idea of the unseen realm and one of the things that is always a little bit tricky. And when you look at scripture, you can see that when demonization occurs, again manifest in all kinds of different ways from physical ailments to mental health issues to all sorts of other things. So the question that's always been in my mind is how do you distinguish between, you know, scripture acknowledges the idea that, you know, mental, the mental illness occurs. I mean, that is something that's taught in scripture, but you also get these examples of demonization. So talk to me a little bit about how you've been exploring, discerning what is going on with the person, whether it is a simply mental health problem organic or otherwise, versus a spiritual issue. Well, one of the things that I've found in practice is really that people fall into certain camps when determining what's happening to a person. So they automatically want to go to a diagnosis for mental health or sometimes they want to go spiritually and say something's going on. And I really felt the need to slow down and assess the situation in different ways. So really how I determine it is through good clinical interviewing and assessment. And I created a new assessment called the other influences assessment. And that name is on purpose because I didn't want to just title it, evil influences or spiritual forces of darkness, you know, and scare people all because I am in a private setting that sees people of all different backgrounds, not just from the faith background. But so we really just want to slow down and not assume that it's psychological or that it's spiritual or even physical. So we really want to go through a process of determining in an assessment way if there could be more going on than what we were normally trained to treat or assess in counseling. One of the things that really strikes me as challenging about this is with psychology, you know, we are talking about something that aspires to be a kind of science particularly in that means that you got to have like repeatable and even clinically controlled experimentation to establish, you know, the nature of the illness or you know, or the approach that you're taking to address it. Think about spiritual forces as you've got personalities who need demons who can decide to play a coy, not cooperate, not reveal themselves when you'd like them to and things like that. How does that factor in with regard to the work that you're doing in this area? Yeah, I'm glad that you mentioned patterns because that is definitely something that we have to look at and treat from the scientific aspect of treating psychological problems and mental health. And where the spiritual comes in is weirdly we're looking for patterns also, but you're right, they're very sporadic at times when you're dealing with demonization. But also in the treatment model that I've created and using the other influences assessment, we're not just dealing with demonization, we're dealing with people who just maybe have dabbled in certain things or some people may say have opened up themselves to, you know, a certain influence. So we're not just dealing with demonization, which we can, but that is very rare. And I have had some situations that I've had to deal with in terms of, you know, that specific experience, but really a lot of times spiritual warfare can often look very remarkably ordinary, but people are missing out on some of the actual influences that could be presenting. And we're really trying to get to some of the root issues of what's going on with people. Right. It's interesting. I'm sure I'll boil this back to a question at the end of a kind of comment, but I, well, maybe I'll put it out on front. You probably get from certain people in your field, especially that aren't committed to kind of a faith vision, Christian vision, where there is more going on than meets the eye. And even sometimes within the Christian world, that it's kind of like the old saying, oh, yeah, prayer. We tried that, you know, we need to now find a solution. So there is this suspiciousness. And I think there is also, and I see this a lot in just the academic side of studying history of the church's thinking, is that there is often a time that even the early church is very naive in this, that when the Bible describes these things, they were just a bunch of people. They didn't have a good term for, you know, mental illness or something. So they just described anything, the demonic activity. And really the early church fathers were far more nuance from that. They did not have a monocosal understanding of that. They looked for somatic influences bodily. They recognized the demonic as as real and there, but it was not really their first step. It was really our kind of spiritual dimension that can be open just to sin and distorting of our own self through through the wrong use of our passions and loves, that oftentimes are influenced by the demonic, but not by being possessed. So they had a very sick way of understanding the human being, to which I think you'll see in the Orthodox tradition, it's still held. And you'll also see figures in that tradition, like his name Jean-Claude Laira-Shet, he's kind of a French Orthodox, but he wrote basically on this mental health and spiritual illness is the way he talks about it. So just with the pushback you get, because they often get the same pushback, that that's this outmoded worldview that is just moving to the superstitious rather than the supernatural. How have you had to deal with that? Yeah, it's sort of multifaceted in the way I can respond to that, because I've found, in depending on where the person's background of faith is or lack of faith, really determines kind of where they're approaching certain problems and situations. And we have to take that in account. I mean, you guys speak about worldview all the time, so that's definitely important. But I do sort of argue that we need to acknowledge the supernatural worldview and think about the possibilities of that. But in as far as church, and I love that you were mentioning the early church fathers, and they probably they had a much better way of treating and assessing things, not just going to one, you know, ditch or the other. But I do find that it isn't a pill battle for me as a clinician to try to push this out there that I think we need to be assessing for these things after we've gone through our normal modes of treatment. But some churches want to, you know, I'm sure you guys are aware they want to push it over spiritualize everything. But then I've also found some churches don't want to discuss it at all, and they want to also say everything's in the toilness. And I don't think that we really need to go about it that way either. Like you said, we really probably need to go back to the early church followers way of doing things and really have a more thorough way of assessing and thinking about things. And I think part of that is slowing down in our treatment. You know, we live in a fast-paced world where everything is so instantaneous and we want pills for things and I'm not against medication. And I believe God can heal people in an instance as well. But oftentimes treatment looks like slowing things down, really assessing it, getting to know the person, understanding their worldview, their beliefs, finding out the things that they have interacted with in relation to those things. And seeing if there is some type of influence there, but I've really had to battle it from a lot of different fronts, from churches doing harmful deliverance type ministries to churches wanting to assume everything's mental and, you know, everything in between. Yeah, I've been to both of those churches. Me too. They're both kind of scared. No, you do sort of want to avoid the one that endowed cast it out mentality. What I've run into in the particular circles I've been in is really more the opposite that there seems almost an embarrassment on the part of a lot of churches to really consider the possibility that, you know, spiritual forces maybe it were producing any kind of infirmity. At least in the world that I travel in that I think is from or come and then the other. Now I certainly realize the other exists. Now let me ask you another question. When I use the term demonization, I am referring to a much broader phenomenon than possession. Okay, I don't know if this is the way you would use the terminology, but the format that I've seen usually divides it into three categories, oppression, obsession, possession, and sometimes the lead of fourth, which would be infestation, where it would involve a location rather than a person. So when you're talking about influence, spiritual influence, would that fit on what I would consider the demonization scale or is it something different? Yeah, I would say it's on the demonization scale. I really don't like to get into the arguments about oppression, possession, whether a believer can be all these things, because really I just go off of what we're seeing when we're working with someone. And really we're just assessing for an evil influence that probably could be categorized as some type of demonization. And I do think that that is the spectrum thing. I mean, I've had everything from police officers call me who are dealing with someone who arguably could be considered demon possessed or demonized from someone who's come in playing really dark video games that seems to be somehow influence on an evil level. I know what necessarily put those things in the same category, but definitely on the spectrum. Yeah, so yeah, so I just I just wanted to clarify that because yeah, my use of the terminology is is rather broad. So now one of the things that I noticed right off the bat when I was looking at your book is the do note that there is there seems to be an increase in I believe you use the word strange or something like that. Uh, kinds of things that don't fit the normal clinical uh, things that you would have expected that this seems to be a growing uh, a growing phenomenon. So could you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, sure. That's really kind of part of what led me into doing different style of assessment and treatment is from anecdotal, you know, just seeing things in session. And I have over 20 clinicians in our practice. And so we we often get to talk to each other and talk about the experiences we're seeing. So there's kind of a natural data said there for lack of a better, you know, way of putting it. Um, and we have all noticed since probably COVID, just the more darker experiences that people had started reporting that they were having, whether they were having things such as sleep paralysis on a more ongoing basis that didn't it wasn't tied to a sleep disorder. Um, experiences that seemed really dark associated with the church. I talk about narcissism and the church, um, in the book. So there's cultural experiences that I've noticed. There's definitely things within session that we've seen lots of young kids who are, you know, having really dark experiences, seeing things, hearing voices, and some of it, you know, also we when we start asking deeper questions, we found that they're playing these dark video games where they are actually putting curses on people. They're doing new age practices. I'm not really sure if parents realize that that's probably not a video game. 11 year old boy should be playing, but, you know, and, you know, right now we can't always say this directly is leading to this type of mental illness, but I think there's an argument to be made that we can make some sort of correlation, you know, only truth is in scripture, but I think I would like to do more research on seeing if we can tie some of these influences to certain types of behaviors and symptoms that people are experiencing. But really it's pretty vast in the different symptoms and even just things that people share like, you know, they're dabbling with practices and not seeing results. Maybe they're doing crystals for marriage problems and, you know, of course, that's a very legalistic system in the new age and those types of practices where you have to keep doing the same thing more and more and more to achieve the same result. And that creates a whole nother set of problems. So it's everything from that to strange symptoms. I've treated many people with dissociative identity disorder or some people, I should say not many, because that's a pretty rare disorder. But so I know what that legitimately looks like. Whereas I have been treating some people who are explaining dissociative symptoms, but do not have the disorder. So there's definitely some weirdness there, not to mention an increase of people just talking about the voices that they're hearing. And so Natalie, would you explain the nature of this mental and this dissociative, I can't remember the full term because that's new to me and I'd like to imagine there are other people that are curious to know what it is to. I'm so glad you asked because so many people get it wrong and really Hollywood definitely gets it wrong. It used to be called multiple personality disorder. And now it's called dissociative identity disorder. And really what it is is it's rooted in deep childhood trauma that started most often under the age of six and usually at the hands of a caregiver and most often it involves sexual abuse, like really, really dark things. And what happens is when a child is being so severely abused that their normal trauma responses they cannot enact. So a child can't always fight back. They can't always flee the situation. They can't always do those normal things that you're thinking about. So what happens is their body disconnects from what is going on in that moment in a way of preserving them or helping them to survive the trauma. Well over time as you disconnect because the trauma is so recurrent and repeated that your body develops these altars or dissociative states that are just adapted in nature that help you to adapt into the trauma. So it helps you, you know, maybe you're being abused as a child but then you need to go be a child on the playground two hours later. So it helps you to be able to adapt in that way. But what happens is as you become an adult and you have these dissociative states that were survival in nature, for survival in nature in childhood when you become an adult it can be associated with a lot of harm and depression and mental problems. But unfortunately in the communities of people who are talking about demonization they often think that this is one disorder that's very closely linked to it. And I would argue that it's not that this is one that really probably if we're looking at demonization it's if there is a person demonized in that scenario it would be the abuser not the victim. Well that that's a curious thing though itself because you're dealing with a dark cause in this situation too. And so it wouldn't be direct possession or influence of this the the victim. But definitely the causal relationship is still something. Yeah and what is curious there is does that particular disorder show up in people traumatized by a more neutral kind of childhood trauma or is it usually connected to some kind of dark and and something that breaks down kind of normal ways of relating normative ways of relating normal family life and things like that. Yeah research suggests that it's always or almost always I don't know any other case and you just can't always say 100% in research studies but that it is repetitive ongoing childhood trauma under the age of six. So I would say that it's always a dark type of trauma. Trauma, interesting. Yeah. And sure. Yeah it's it's pretty horrible. I actually did an expert opinion on a case this year of a girl and amazingly her dad was able to go to jail for 40 years for the harm that he did to her. So to God be the glory on that because it's a very difficult disorder to explain because of the fragments and they don't always have clear memories and all those things but yeah I'm really glad you guys asked. Yeah just as another observation on the other side of the spectrum I have been doing little research for a break point commentary that I just wrote I don't know when it will be out but right now there are more wikens in America than there are Presbyterians. And that is self identified wikens people who are associated with it it doesn't include people who are just doing witchcraft on their own or anything like that or people who are doing witchcraft but don't identify as wikens. The other stat that is kind of interesting is that you can go to Etsy right now and there are over 5,000 items that are under the category of curses. Yeah so we're getting into this well new world of kind of post secular you know we've talked a little bit about that we're it's not as though we're just talking about a choice between traditional Christian belief and nothing there are just lots of lots of other things out there. Now we had something happen in an airplane here was it last week or the week before I don't know if you saw that. I did see that. Natalie what was your take on all that that was pretty remarkably wild event. Yeah and to to Glenn Sunshine's point also there's witch talk that's very popular on tick talk where people are following that so yeah and we're seeing these things more and more as people I think are really interested in sort of a reenchantment they're really interested in more spirituality but it's not always like biblical spirituality there's this dark side of it and so yeah I did see that with Jonathan Khan actually who's you know a Christian author and I think he has some interesting things to say I don't necessarily align with him on everything from a theological standpoint but I do think he has some bad things to say and I actually just watched his response to that whole situation yesterday and I think one could certainly argue that he was dealing with some type of demonic influence there in that person's life I don't think that that's being broadly told by the media of course but I do think things like that are on the rise and they're happening more and more I saw an article last week about an NFL player saying that he was demon possessed or dealing with that and it just seems to be this is more prevalent and then so that's another reason why I think it's important to talk about with it in the context of mental health because we're often seemingly the front line of these treatments or conversations yeah it seems to me that in the history even just of the United States there have been periods where this sort of thing is more evident you know I think about the late 70s the early 80s it seemed that period of time was I think marked by this kind of phenomenon where you just had more people talking about spiritual just spiritual things in general but dark stuff in particular and you know you can go back and and it gets this again when we're dealing with say the assumptions that scientists make about sort of the steady state character of our world there's no sort of a way to describe this sort of stuff scientifically because we're dealing with agents you know if you were not talking about just you know natural forces that do things the same way every time you know depending on how you're relating to say another person a person can behave very differently at different points of time and if we're talking if we believe that spiritual realities are you know made up of you know there are agents at work and it makes sense to me that there can be periods of time where they're just more active than not and it's hard to help people or or reconcile people to that reality unless they've had some kind of experience with it so I'm just thinking about your typical materialist who would just say oh listen as Tom noted earlier oh that's just nothing but you know people in there in sort of fads and things like that but it doesn't take into account the possibility that no there are these times where there's just more stuff going on yeah and I do feel like we're in one of those times I mean there's even been conversations to kind of even bring it to another no current event type situation like the Lindsey Clancy trial and you know there you have mental health professionals on both sides you can't agree and you know then there's the report of her saying you know she's hearing voices saying kill herself and others well that's hard to argue that there wasn't some type of demon you know demonization or influence when you're hearing that type of message and I would love to have given her my other influences assessment if I had been able to treat her because I would argue that at some point there was some type of evil introduced to her or you know she opened herself up to something I mean it's at least got my curiosity going to super tragedy yeah well I've got to this is my personal story I spent time in foster care because my mother heard voices telling her to kill me and she said they were satanic voices a demonic voices and I as a kid about that same time would have experiences that in my mind validated that there were spiritual forces at work in our in our household that were demonic now you can't really explain that to people who've never had it and that kind of experience but I remember waking up the next morning and the authorities were there to take me away I was maybe 14 at the time wow and but so I and I do believe that that was what was happening with my mother that there was demonic activity yeah I have run into it directly too with people that were in a situation of pregnancy and literally saying the devil wants to take me the level you know they were you know what some would see as a state of kind of you know mania it was very dark turning it didn't turn towards just wanting you know it would be bad enough to turn to go out and just want to have a happy time but this was very it was very dark and and you see this you see that part sometimes even more frequently than say you know like you said you know something more extreme but those thoughts work with the passions work with the person and their brokenness and that cocktail that can be just destructive and I you know I think that case with the you know the woman that everyone's talking about as a clear case clear case of that well here's an interesting thing because you know coming at it from the theological and Christian ethics and moral spiritual theology which I do a lot of the Protestant world is very unprepared I think for what's coming they probably you know immersing themselves in scripture as good start a but also the way in wisdom in which it was applied in situations that dealt with this for the first time like the fathers when they confronted paganism in particular and encountered a lot of the darkness and have a lot of wisdom a lot more wisdom than a lot of people realize for how to deal with it but where do you go when it gets into the territory of spiritual illness and demonic possession because those just because one is is equipped and gifted with the therapeutic doesn't mean necessarily they can handle those well I mean we have traditions and and you know kind of liturgical traditions in which you have exorcists or priests that kind of live a life prepared for this kind of thing but you know where does one turn where you don't want them getting into something worse like the deliverance ministry person and you know pastor Bob over at the local church you know he's got a few good verses and he's got some good theology but he doesn't know how to deal with this what do you do then yeah I mean that's honestly one reason why I'm trying to do this assessment and pushing this work out and do the treatment model I mean if you would have told me 10 years ago I would be doing this I would have been like me are you kidding me but it just kind of has grown out of the need because like you said the church is unprepared I would definitely agree with that and we're seeing that in droves in the mental health setting so again if I'm just trying to apply I love good theology I think good theology can cure a lot of things if applied rightly you know and so really my model is designed to use scripture to apply it correctly do the assessment do our normal modes of treatment slow the process down help them to understand what being a human is that it's an imager of God and that the enemies of God want to attack that and then we go through a biblical model of confession repentance and sometimes confession just means sharing your story telling me what's going on and then you know leading into confession so we use some language that can really be you know a little bit softer easier for people who might be newer to this casting out and renouncing it's really a lot of replacing laws with truth so really scripture gives us a lot of good things to do and then with good clinical excellent treatment like cognitive behavioral therapy which is evidence base you can use tools to do that rightly so I'm actually hoping to turn this book into a workbook but it's not just for clinicians I mean it could be for pastoral counselors it could be for people who are just curious about the subject matter but I just again as you kind of said I feel like there's a huge need in doing that and and on the other hand there are also clinicians in the secular vein of what we do um who are introducing really dark practices as a mode of treatment and I think we may have talked about that last time but you know I'm I see it all the time unfortunately from everything from their group especially it'll they'll stop popping up around this time of year I saw one last year on queer resistance how to use witchcraft in your area and it was a therapy group to push back queer resistance oh yeah and my wife is a therapist as well and and uh shares a building with you get all kinds but but the interesting thing there is here exactly right they they recognize a spiritual dimension but it's one that's you know not contained within truth that's where the importance of the biblical grounding you're talking about but it's one that doesn't even recognize certain things as vices and so they celebrate these things as as things to actually cultivate rather than to uproot and kind of re-obituate yourself in things that are you know not vices um and so yeah you I can't imagine what happens to the person who goes through that because it's just they're usually a re re-centering on an egocentric view of things which has been part of the problem to begin with very true now I want to connect this in this is actually what I wrote the break point about I want to connect this in with critical theory because you get the idea that um you know if you if you adopt the critical theory mindset the world is divided up into various categories of oppressors and oppress the oppressors are always evil the oppressors are always virtuous um and if you adopt that idea then any group that can claim victimization is de facto good and so coming from that kind of a mindset why not have a you know a a focus on onqueerous why not have a you know why not turn to witchcraft what's wrong with it I mean you know you can use this to amend the wrongs that have been done to you which by the way usually means throwing one of those curses you buy it at sea you know it it you know it it it it's all of the peace and the you know the critical theory component is one of the things that I think I think critical theory is almost an ideal philosophy for people who want to go into witchcraft or maybe I should word it the other way around maybe witchcraft is the ideal religion coming out of critical theory because of the way that it views oppression the way to views victimization and the way it says the system isn't going to achieve true justice in my situation so I'll take it into my own hands and do it myself which of course then leads you into all kinds of very dark places yeah I've not thought about it that way but that's an excellent point of kind of where culturally we are and how it's leading into this dark at least dark pagan practices really yeah what I see there Glenn is a rationale or rationalization to use spiritual powers that are illegitimate um because you feel like you've been victimized and you know it's fair it's fair to do that and uh yeah I think the soil is fertile for that kind of thing you know it's it's a it's a bad seed but you know we we're living in a time where people are open and um willing to experiment with that kind of stuff you know I actually looked over I like said I just wrote this break point today I actually looked over the curses that were available on Etsy and what did you find they range they range from some very very you know claiming high power things for dealing with major issues all the way down to curses that you throw on the person who got the job you wanted or the boyfriend that dropped you yes well that's that's the thing you know I you know if we were talking about just uh you know people who wanted to be healed you know uh because they have cancer or you know they're trying to maybe cast a curse on I don't know Vladimir Putin but when you get down to it you know what you're trying to Donald Trump and actually just before this had the nation Charlie Kirk well there you go did that kind of stuff but when when you when you're talking about your neighbor or your your your your sibling or your work associate you know that kind of weird kind of obsessive bitterness that can resort to this kind of stuff again what what I also think it demonstrates is there's a kind of um maybe just a sense of impotence that people have uh that this is the thing that I have to resort to because maybe this other person has all the advantages in other words if they've got the money or they've got the strength or they've got the connections and I've got nothing and the only way I can get back is to resort to this well is it is it a sense of weakness or is it a sense of power I can't well they want power they want power that's why they're resorting to that right yeah I think it well let's at this kind of a taking a tiny bit of a different direction but I still related is Natalie there's a lot of things culturally that have become sort of what you call quote unquote neutral spiritual practices it's like the Sunday late morning after you've gone to church and you go grab a coffee and you have in the middle of west heart for yoga day where everyone is out there instead of worshipping the triumed god doing all these so-called health gestures and breathing right in these contemplative practices and we know there are Christian traditions where you have spiritual practices that include certain kinds of things like this but again they're contained um do you see dark fallout in in in uh psychologies that have really turned to this as a solution or you know is it sort of something that's kind of it's become so gutted of its origin and kind of distorted spiritual vision that it just is sort of a set of exercises now um I've heard it put kind of both ways but I've seen people very suspicious that are that are Christians um dealing with some of this of these even simple practices like yoga as being problematic and and affecting the health and not helping heal the person yeah I think from what my experience in in working with people and it's changed the way even I view certain types of exercise for sure um is I've seen it definitely different situations I've seen people go into a basic yoga practice but then it's a slippery slope it seems especially if they don't have a faith community if faith background they're intent in that does seem to make a difference but then again it's a very legalistic system and they need to do more and more and more to get the same result of peace or whatever they're looking for um but then I've also had clients who've reached out um who maybe came from a very new age background and have become to Christ and they would argue they would never do yoga again they would never they don't want any involvement in it because they saw how dark it could become so really that it's hard not to let that shape you even as a therapist um and so I just I'll try to do other stretches I'm just not going to do yoga I'm not saying that prescriptive what scripture would say about that but I just think that it's such a slippery slope that we have to be cautious about especially within the cultural systems that we're in right now and where the direction seems to be going yeah on yoga two observations first of all one of the basic yoga sequences is the sun's cell mutation which is so called because it was a set of exercises used to worship the sun so you've got an idolatrous connection right there the second thing is if you talk to somebody who's a genuine Hindu and and seriously into this they will tell you that yoga is prayer yeah so you were praying to deities this poses in my mind a real problem yeah that's what I was I was about to note is that this practice didn't just uh you know come into existence so the people could feel limber they they came into existence as part of a larger spiritual tradition but the the thing you know that is also curious is I have you know I have known people involved in sort of kind of uh very contemporary churches where they don't have a lot of classic spiritual practice not much by way of you know deep kinds of prayer regular consistent patterns of prayer and and other kinds of classic practices and so yoga seems like a you know kind of available and around the atmosphere kind of spiritual practice it seems neutral and doesn't necessarily because you don't have to overtly participate in some kind of worship even though maybe it's you know again more more subtle the way it's practiced now um but then you're right I've seen the slippery slope I've seen people that started that now are at the ashram and see have left the church I've seen some have no problem going to the ashram and then to church as if there's a compatibility there um and uh christia and and eat early on new how to and worked very hard to assimilate things of other cultures that were pointing to christ but it also put up a strong fight against those things that really were subtle ways of taking people and ripping at their soul so I just I wonder with certain kinds of practices I know someone who's not a believer will just look at that as silly but somebody who is a believer who does recognize that the gestures we make and the sources they're derived from our body and souls are very connected they're they're integrated in a way that you know our soul sees through the eyes our soul feels through the touch and the practices we do impact um as well as the soul shaping and guiding the rest so they can't it can't be neutral the question is is I don't know if you've seen kind of directly any kind of people you've counseled with that it's it's turn sour or dark yeah just in terms of the what you described you know people who left the church and went there actually have one client who's very into yoga not not a believer but went to some type of yoga retreat in mexico and it scared her um so I was you know I just pray for her outside of session and like and just pray that god will give me the wisdom to lead her in the right ways you know as I'm able to do and meet her where she is but yeah and so I that's arguably a negative effect there as well but yeah I I've also heard you know every pose is like a worshipful pose to and some other deity and yeah if you look at the supernatural world view people believe those are real and I think you could argue from scripture that there is some type of spirit behind that that could be real in the unseen realm although we don't think it's real and I think that's where a lot of american Christians or western Christians probably say well those aren't real deities well they could be fallen beings for sure and those people believe they're actually real I've been to india and watched people try to wake up these idols but they're they're hoping a spirit will come and have that thing and they absolutely believe the spirits are real so uh nellie I don't know if I mentioned this last time we spoke but I familiar with Scott pack he was author I'm curious to know your thoughts on him because he's he was I think he was a psychiatrist if I remember right and he wrote a book entitled this he was a big deal in the 1980s most people don't remember him but he was like on the New York Times bestseller list for like years people the law yeah people of the line he had another one too well the way less traveled the way else travel was the popular one that was sort of well he started when he wrote that book I because I actually he became a believer he became a Christian uh after he wrote or actually midway through the the road less traveled uh he he wrote that and then by so he started as a Buddhist about how he was done he was a Christian and I actually saw him at at um trinity and copley square in Boston in the late 80s the place was packed and he got up and he said I'm an evangelist and he came you know he gave a pretty um direct gospel presentation but people of lie you know was his second book wasn't wasn't nearly as popular because he wasn't talking about love he was talking about evil and he he uh in that book talks about demonic possession and uh his own witness things um so I'm interested to know what your take on him is I'm not like like a super fanboy of his or something like that so if you've got a you know questions about him and I'm fine with hearing this effect I'd like to know those I haven't looked at those books in the years yeah I'm more familiar with the people of the law I really found that book fascinating especially in terms of being a mental health therapist I think there's so many you know intriguing stories of his own experiences with clients and I love to hear how he came to be a person of faith um honestly the biggest thing about him that I love was his definition of mental health and that is that mental health is a commitment to reality at all cost in some way shape or form um that was sort of what he was saying I might have missed a word or two there but um the the unfortunate thing is today people are doing the opposite of that they are wanting to escape at all means possible um so that's really the the most significant thing he did for me as far as just defining mental health and seeing it in light of today's issues um I will say I did read that towards the end of his life I'm not sure if he walked away from the faith or kind of what his experience has seemed to get a little weird and blurry at the end to be honest but I haven't read about him in a long time but I still definitely value his work and to your point a lot of psychiatrists who've worked with really dark situations and I think he had a history of working with people related to like politics and high power you know types of families and things but people who've worked in like the prison system for example or juvenile justice system a lot of those people the psychiatrist will even if they're not believers will argue demonization is absolutely real because they've seen it up close in personal yeah yeah I remember I remember his definition of evil was militant ignorance uh the idea that you know you will get violent over uh that you're a denial of the truth yeah that's your your passion and reality relation yeah the um yeah I was uh similarly I was reading again large-shet's work and he was talking he was writing this in the 90s but he said that the the reductionist models in you know overall in their popularity were just losing steam and there was a ever-growing increase of people working in the field recognizing not just the supernatural if we could use that term but the demonic and having to find ways to to grapple with that it was it was a conversation that was not small according to him and so peck probably would have been coming out around that time I imagine uh he's probably referring to that but I don't know enough about the field to know others to whom that happened um yeah you know unfortunately too I mean when you bring up the 80s and we talked about the association earlier um that was also a time when people talked about false memories and all those things so I do think you know I don't know that all those stories were true or not true but I I hate that that whole thing became such a story because dissociation is real and I also believe that there are people who have been ritualistically abused do I believe every situation that could have been categorized or discussed in the 80s would would fall into that camp maybe not but I don't think that we should say it doesn't ever happen yeah yeah that comes up a little bit in a book that I actually wrote a review of for a magazine entitled The Devil's Best Trick and can't remember the name of the author but but it's an exploration of this sort of thing in fact the the very thing you're talking about um and but also um it's just really the dark kind of history of Mexico um particularly with the Aztecs and all of the things that we we know occurred then it's interesting that there's an attempt now to sort of uh I guess whitewash all of you know that from the history books uh the physical evidence is just there his do we you know you don't get all those piles of skulls without that sort of thing you know so now I agree I totally agree yeah we took our family to Peru my oldest son is very interested in all the blurry things but from a biblical perspective he loves Michael Hazard so that helps um but it was very fascinating to you know hear their narrative of the story versus you know things that we think would be more of a biblical understanding of what really happened maybe even including giants so yeah I do think there's a lot more people ask these questions and having these conversations and yet sort of own every continent too yeah yeah right right so Rod Draer at the touchstone conference a year or two ago uh was talking about uh the Santa Muayrata which I looked up it's actually the fastest growing new religion globally and it is a synchronization of uh it looks very much like it's a synchronized version of Aztec uh religion with a sort of a near of Christianity's a little bit attached to it um and young Rod told the story about running into a shrine the Santa Muayrata is is Saint death okay and he ran into a shrine in New Orleans I think to it and he talked to the homeowner who had this shrine he said why are you well you know what what what's this with this shrine and he said well Santa Muayrata has given me everything I've ever asked of her yeah the one who delivers the goods gets the worship I guess um it's the idea yeah yeah another concerning thing if I can mention it is in some of it is rooted rooted in some of these you know South American practices like psychedelics that's another big issue that we're seeing um with people and mental health really pushing some of these different drugs and you know I just I think the jury still out it's very hard for me to say when we're another but I have had clients who have had very dark experiences even with you know assisted therapy in a in a setting where there's a mental health therapist it's in the US it's legal or whatever and I just I don't know I feel like it's anti what we talked about earlier I think it's more escapism versus bringing the things to light that God should heal it's that's a that's a very interesting I didn't realize that was still going on help help maybe me and and maybe other people listening know why they would be prescribing that and what they think the benefit is from that in in the field of mental health prescribing psychedelics so arguably the most popular one currently is probably ketamine assisted therapy oh yeah yeah and it is growing I mean every you know conference I go to outside of a Christian conference it seems as if that is growing there's more people pushing that as a therapy and really what from what I can you know derive from it or understand it seems to be that it helps with trauma as almost as if it erases the trauma in your mind um so that's it's I'm very curious about it and I can I can really understand someone who's had significant trauma wanting to do that um but at what cost what exchange is happening there um so it's it's definitely pushed as far as that and then you have big name people pushing things like MDMA or you know just ecstasy or whatever all those other things and people going to ayahuasca retreats and and all these things that are having spiritual experiences and I think kind of like yoga you think you're getting one benefit and then it leads into something else and I I fear that is what's happening but you have a lot of people pushing that in the mental health community right now yeah I ran into one guy who I've been blanking out on his name but he was a pretty well-known podcaster who was talking about using some sort of psychedelic to deal with PTSD for military service and just recently he uh he said don't do it you know he said very clearly this is dangerous and it opens you up to the demonic and you need to steer clear of this stuff you know so that that guy actually you know he he was going in as a professing Christian and he was treating this as you know basically drug therapy you know the illegitimate drug therapy but he he discovered that there was more going on than met the eye and and he ended up leaving it behind wow I wonder who that was I'll try to track I'll try to track down the guy and they'll send it to you okay but I just I just ring into this a week or two ago where he reputed it that's amazing that's great so as we think about people that you might come with that you come across that you might suspect there's some kind of demonic activity and they're not a Christian you know that you know that would be interesting to know how you how you'd go about broaching the subject you know if there's a Christian the resistance might be well I'm a Christian that's not supposed to happen to me you know you know I'm I know I belonged to Lord and therefore nothing back in happening it's like you know Job not noted he was right just man but bad things happened to him and it was a devil but when it comes to say somebody you know who says that's not even the in the realm of possibility but you're thinking no this is really possible this might be it how do you how do you go about that so the assessment that we we give is not something we give in the first intake but like you said once we've built a relationship with them and we get to the place where we think something else is going on the other influences assessment that I created is not going to be something that's going to make them think we're pushing Christianity on them or going to say their demon possess it's just an exploratory type of means it does ask some very deep and weird questions to some people but honestly when they get to that point where we do give the this type of assessment it's sort of freeing in a way that they're excited that we're going deeper and we're asking other questions really it comes into play in terms of treatment and we can do a lot of work around hey we think this might be influencing you so this is a practice that you probably wouldn't want to engage in we can also then say hey I think there's some lies you're believing in relation to this so I still will go through somewhat of the same treatment model I just won't use scripture you know as blatant as I am and obviously you can only go so far if they're not a believer but the prayer is that maybe they ask enough questions that one day that's where it will lead well we're getting to a point where we should probably start wrapping up uh Glenn uh this is kind of your baby to kind of land so I'll hand it over to you oh there uh what I'll just say is that going through the book there are so many other ideas so many other themes that are important here I'm just going to say get the book and read it I mean because yeah I mean you know so for example you you do uh go into hyzer uh for example you know in terms of understanding something more about the invisible world uh the three rebellions coming out of uh second temple Judaism all kinds of things like that that I think a lot of Christians are not familiar with but it's definitely important I think for people to understand them they may not accept everything in them but they need to at least encounter the ideas think through them and uh really take them seriously you know whether or not they end up agreeing with everything there's important material in there about the the invisible world and the way it interacts with our world that I think is just really important to grab hold of and then you take that and work from there into all right what are the implications of this for uh for mental health um so uh I'll just sort of put in the advertisement for the book there I think that there's a lot of incredibly important stuff uh in there that uh that people would really benefit from um the from wrestling with again whether or not they accept everything is a different question but it's important I think to at least encounter the ideas think them through and uh and evaluate them and for what it's worth I'm pretty much an agreement with you well it and the books available on amazon so we'll have the link in the show notes anything else anything you want to say as uh we close things out here Natalie? I'm honored to be here like I said you guys are some of my favorite to listen to um so the fact that you would have me on and and want to you know encourage people to read the book would is very it's humbling for me and I feel like it is a message that god gave me just to really do what it says and effigions to do is just to expose the deeds of darkness to not engage with it and and I want hope to do that in truth and love so thank you that's great that's great okay well let's let's uh call it a show and thank you for listening to the theology podcast we're really grateful for your interest and uh sticking with us all the way to the end and if you like what we do uh there's a link in the show notes store patreon page and you can help us out but there will also be a link in the show notes to the book that we've been talking about today anyway thanks a lot for listening and bye bye bye the theology podcast is a ministry of west minister presbyterian church and battleground Washington the theology podcast is produced and edited by a widely craft productions of Nashville Tennessee
