1KHO 892: The Hidden Cost of Holding Everything Together | Dr. Alison Cook, The Secure Soul

**Ginny Yurich** (0:00)
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Welcome to The 1000 Hours Outside Podcast. My name is Ginny Yurich and the founder of 1000 Hours Outside.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:08)
And I've just read a phenomenal book of all these things I have never ever heard of before. It's like about like coming to terms with your inner self.

**Ginny Yurich** (1:18)
You've got a controller and a shadow side. And I was, I just, you know, you hear about like rupture and repair.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:24)
And this is like about your internal work.

**Ginny Yurich** (1:26)
And this, so this book, it blew me away. I was taking pictures of it and sending it to friends. It's called The Secure Soul, Finding Inner Strength and Connection When Trust Doesn't Come Easy. Dr. Alison Cook has written several other books, has a community with 80,000 soul members, has podcasts of her own. Welcome, Alison.

**Alison Cook** (1:44)
Oh, I am so excited to be here. I follow you online. We've never met. And I can't tell you how many posts, cause I live here in the great outdoors, primarily in Wyoming. And everything you're doing, I'm like, yes, yes, yes, yes. I just love what you're doing. And so thrilled to be here with you.

**Ginny Yurich** (2:01)
Give us a little bit of your background on your story. So you're a therapist, but you're also trained, I'd never heard of this, as a psychologist of religion. So you talked in your book about how often there's these two extremes. Like we're not either, we're not including God, or like we're too focused one way or the other way. So can you talk about when you were halfway through your doctoral training, and you transferred out of secular psychology into a joint program in psychology and theology, because I couldn't bear to study the psyche, which I had always thought of as a soul, without studying it in relation to God.

**Alison Cook** (2:33)
Yeah, I mean, I started out as a therapist, went on to get my PhD in psychology, and a lot of the classes I was taking were statistics, and learning how to do ANOVA and Maynova and crunch numbers. And it was interesting to me, there's a part of me that kind of likes thinking that way, but I was like, I'm not learning about people. I'm learning about how to do science, and I understand, again, I don't minimize the scientific process of trying to gather data, but I was interested in questions of meaning and purpose. And then I would be sitting with clients during my training, and my clients, just as young, I had no idea what I was doing. When you're an early therapist, I mean, you're going in, I mean, I can't believe they let you know, you're going in, you're supervised.

**Ginny Yurich** (3:14)
I mean, it's the same for teaching. You're like 22, you're like, I've never done this before, but I'm going to take these 26 kids every single day. Yeah, and I totally get it.

**Alison Cook** (3:24)
You know, you're sitting there. But what would happen is the people would respond to my presence and the genuine humanness, but my supervisors were like, we can't figure out what you're doing, right? You know, like, what tactics are you using? And I was like, I'm just being like a caring human, you know? And so it was through that I thought I was interested in questions about meaning and belonging and purpose. You know, psychology has changed a lot. You know, you can definitely find all of that as well. But at the time, it was kind of bifurcated, you know? It was sort of like really trying to be, you know, something over here. And so that's why I switched into this joint program, because religion tends to be where we think about those larger questions, a purpose and meaning and why are we here and am I loved and what's my work? You know, and so I kind of was trying to cobble those two things together.