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The Role of Ritual and Reflection in Transformational Healing-with Dr. Christy Bauman (Pt. 1)
24 Plays2 days ago
Have we got a treat for you! Surviving Saturday is so excited to bring you our first podcast GUEST, the intrepid, insightful indomitable, and inimitable Dr. Christy Bauman! Christy joins Wendy for a delightful conversation about their respective journeys as women counseling other women dealing with issues and challenges they, themselves, know all too well. They also vibe strong on the transformative and healing power of "body work" (also known as somatic experiencing" and healing rituals, as a complement to more narrative based "story work."
Christy is a counselor, author, and teacher based out of Brevard, NC. She earned her Masters in Counseling at Reformed Theological Seminary and her Ph. D. in counseling at Seattle Pacific University. With her husband, Dr. Andrew Bauman, she is the co-founder and co-director of the Christian Counseling Center for Sexual Health & Trauma, and she has spent over 18 years counseling women dealing with the aftereffects of sexual and/or spiritual abuse.
For more about Christy and her counseling work with women, check out her website at www.christybauman.com
**IMPORTANT SCHEDULING UPDATE: Christy's "Her Rites" workshop in Charlotte will be held on Saturday, February 1, 2025 from 9:00 to 4:00, rather than the January date originally mentioned in the podcast, part 2. Additional info available at: www.christybauman.com/herrites
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Transcript
Introduction and Purpose of 'Surviving Saturday' Podcast
00:00:08
Speaker
Welcome to Surviving Saturday, a podcast about holding on to hope in the midst of life's difficulties, disappointments, and dark seasons. Times like that remind us of the agony and despair the followers of Jesus felt on the Saturday of Easter weekend, in between the Friday on which he was crucified and the Sunday on which he rose from the dead.
00:00:27
Speaker
That Sunday forever changed the way that humans can relate to God. But what does it look like to be honest about the very real pain we experience in the in-between? To fervently cling to hope in the God who promised us his peace and his presence at times when he feels distant or even cruel.
Hosts' Professional Background and Approach to Hope
00:00:44
Speaker
I'm Wendy Osborne, a licensed counselor in Charlotte, North Carolina. And I'm her husband, Chris, a marriage mediator, conflict resolution coach, and trauma-informed story work coach.
Introducing Dr. Christy Bauman and Her Work
00:00:55
Speaker
Join us each episode for authentic conversations about how life not turning out as we'd expected has created the contextual soil for the growth of a tenacious hope in the resurrection and in a God who is still making all things new. Hi, I am here today with Dr. Christy Bauman. Welcome, Christy. Oh, thank you, Wendy. Thanks for having me.
00:01:23
Speaker
I love having you here. um I have met you in other places and spaces, particularly retreats that you have um been a part of to make space for women who want to pursue their own healing.
00:01:40
Speaker
So today, um I want to spend some time letting my audience get to know you and also talking about your latest book, Her Rights. And I took the dust cover off of mine, the beautiful dust cover, and I've put it down somewhere.
Christy's Journey into Counseling Women
00:01:58
Speaker
But um this is a book that you put out earlier this year. Yes. Yes, it is. And it follows you know a lot of the conferences you and I have both been at and the retreats.
00:02:10
Speaker
the idea of working with women to come back to their bodies and to address places where they have either been harmed or haven't known how to navigate and this is an invitation. It's 20 years of doing therapy and I just put it in a book so that if you can't come and do therapy with me, you can do it with someone else with that book as a guide.
00:02:33
Speaker
Yes. So you mentioned you're a therapist. You're a therapist as well as an author. So um you're in Brevard, North Carolina, right? And you split your time between there and right outside Seattle. Is that right? Yes. Okay. So tell us about your practice. Well, my practice is just at 19 years old and I started um practicing in Seattle, Washington years ago before kids before I was married, all the things. I had gotten licensed and I was working on my PhD in Counseling Psychology at Seattle Pacific University and I was seeing clients. It took about two to three years before I started seeing
00:03:21
Speaker
my little niche, right? It was like the person that keeps coming back to you and the type of story you keep hearing and even the assessment and diagnosis code that you write again and again on insurance forms. Cause you're like, this is my clientele. Like it starts to be, and it was women who were working around spiritual and sexual health and something of redemption or taking back, uh, whether sexual trauma,
00:03:52
Speaker
are spiritual trauma and harm had been a part of their story.
Understanding and Recognizing Spiritual Trauma
00:03:56
Speaker
They were working themselves back to having advocacy and freedom in those spaces. Yes. So those are two types of women that show up in my office as well. And so I think I would love to hear a little bit about the first time that you realized this notion, even of spiritual trauma or harm.
00:04:22
Speaker
Maybe some of the first women that came to you. Right. So I think what you probably see too is sexual trauma is usually easier to name, right? Because it's in the physical and it also shows out in physiology in a similar way, but spiritual harm and spiritual trauma has a more covert experience to it. And and so I would say,
00:04:50
Speaker
The client I knew it was probably two, there's two women that are coming to mind, but there was a moment when they were talking about how they saw God and it was not through their own lens. It was through a lens that made me stop and say, Oh, that's not your own voice or your own heart talking about God. You are talking about God.
00:05:19
Speaker
through someone else's words, through someone else's lens. And it was okay for women who were using other people's lenses that were healthy lenses. But once it was an unhealthy lens that someone had taught them to look through and not taught them to see through their own story about God, that's when I started to see that impact where their relationship with God was hindered because they were using someone else's flawed lens to see him. Yes. Yes. Now when you're working with somebody, Chrissy, how do you determine if the lens that they are viewing God through is more of a flawed lens? You know, that's a, that is also a great question. And I think part of it is I started to notice it in their actual body. So if they didn't have freedom,
00:06:17
Speaker
relationally or in their own calling or standing up and using their voice with what they felt God was telling them. There was a check in my spirit like oh so God is telling you something or you're feeling conviction around something but then you get quiet in spaces where that should be invited to the table. And so where women weren't invited to bring what they were learning with within their relationship with God was where I started to notice there's a flaw there. There's an abnormality that it is not normal for you to have time with God, feel like you have a revelation or some sense of knowing, and then not being able to bring it either to fruition through speaking it out loud, walking in it in some way in your life, or having even the freedom within your own relationship with God about that.
00:07:16
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, thank you. I know in my own life, so I was raised in the church and I was raised in the deep, deep South and the culture was pretty misogynistic, um highly patriarchal.
00:07:35
Speaker
And then I went to a women's college. And so that was sort of whiplash in one direction. And then I got married and was part of a a more conservative denomination than I had been as a child. And that was whiplash in another direction. But through all those decades,
00:07:56
Speaker
um I was desperate for Jesus to be very personal to me and I was begging him and yet I was really interpreting who he was through the lenses of other people um because i was I was trained to do that, partly as a good girl, but partly to honor the training of seminarians and of pastors that I deeply loved and trusted.
00:08:23
Speaker
and that were present in my own life. And so it has taken into my fifties for me to recognize that if I'm going to go only through other people to listen to God and to find out who he is, then he's going to be proportionately that removed from me.
00:08:46
Speaker
Not because he wants that, but because my voice, my ears rather were changed more to hear what other people told me that he said and thought than for me to believe that I could hear him myself. And that's a big shift. It doesn't sound that big, but in my own life it was huge. That's really well said. I i don't know that that has been articulated that clearly in a lot of my circles. So I love,
00:09:13
Speaker
that you put those words to it. That feels really true. The amount in which I'm letting someone else um be the lens or what I'm using to understand God is going to keep me from the intimacy of God between he and
Reconnecting Women with Body and Spirit
00:09:30
Speaker
I. So that feels so well said. Thank you.
00:09:33
Speaker
Yeah, and I think I was so afraid, and I hear this in my counseling offices, well, I was so afraid afraid of getting it wrong and presuming he said something that he didn't say, um that I think in essence I allowed myself to be the stronger force in my life than he was. And what I mean by that is I thought I could really thwart um him. I thought I could interpret him wrong and something very bad would happen versus trusting he could speak to me um in any way he wanted and I could understand him because I bear the imago de. Yes, totally. That makes, that makes a lot of sense.
00:10:22
Speaker
Yeah. And I agree with you your comment earlier that oftentimes it's easier to name sexual abuse than it is spiritual harm. um And even sexual abuse is really tricky to name. There's so much shame that covers and such a sense of personal complicity. um And so I wonder how you hold space for these precious women that do find their way to you and they might have endured harm in one or both of those categories. What's that like for you?
00:11:01
Speaker
Well, that's what I love is about having been in the work so long. Having been so long, you start to see where women have a pattern, where they started turning off that connection between their own body and their spirit, where they stopped doing something that they were doing before. And so there does seem to be a bit of a pattern. Now, because I was in psychology, I was using lifespan theory as a way to look at things. That was the lens I was looking through psychologically. And so I started to notice that somewhere with story work, you could start at zero to 18 years old and um that's how I was trained. Start looking at story in that more childhood era and then look for the theme that happens.
00:11:55
Speaker
But I started taking it to the actual rites of passage, like your birth story. What happens in your birth story? Then what happens when you're initiated? Then what happens the first time you are exiled or you're left and betrayed somehow? And so I started to notice over the years that there was a pattern where women had specific stories that had impacted their bodies and started to separate their spirit and their bodies from how they were living out. And so maybe my client could understand something in her mind and she could even get to her heart and we could find the tears and that heart connection. But then when we tried to talk through her gut, she couldn't get to her gut um and and she definitely couldn't talk from her toes where she's rooted in what she knows.
00:12:51
Speaker
Right? um So she would have to stay safe in her mind. And a lot of times you didn't want to mess with that, right? you You wanted her to be safe. And if she had experienced needing her mind to get her out of things that were unsafe, you know, you didn't want to take her into her whole body just yet because sometimes that that embodiment piece is very tricky. to the integrated piece of our whole bodies.
Integrating Body and Spirit: A Personal Journey
00:13:20
Speaker
So I just noticed it in the female body and and the story work started to show a pattern. um And so that's how women would start with just telling me a story, because that was i i was how I was trained. And then I would ask them to tell me specific stories when I believed they were moving into a deeper part of themselves, like a rite of passage. So whether that was
00:13:47
Speaker
Tell me your birth story. Tell me your relationship with your mother. um you know Tell me the first time you bled or were kissed. right so i And that was initiation. How were you initiated? Because then it flowed through to how do I show up today present in my partnership, in my friendships, in my church? And those were what I wanted to get to, is get her whole body and her whole story to the present moment as an integrated being. Yes, thank you. And in a minute here, I want to dive into some of those rights, but I want to linger here for a second. I feel like you just put words to um a lot of how healing has unfolded for me. So I think it started very much in my head as a cognitive task.
00:14:39
Speaker
And we both, you and I both have a history with the Allender Center. And I would say that Dan has, through his work, brought me back to life multiple times. Just a parched spirit that really needed the tender love of God to infiltrate pain far deeper than I knew that I bore. But it started with years of naming, which was super helpful for me.
00:15:07
Speaker
And I would say that my mind was filled with a ton of wisdom, which did bring some degree of freedom. and Then I realized my body was in fact still very stuck that the stories that I had loved had divided my mind from my body and I had left my body behind and I you know because We serve an incarnational God. I couldn't fully get free from the things that kept me so
00:15:43
Speaker
tightly bound until I got my body on board. And so when you said, you know, sometimes the next step is getting to the tears, I kind of had a superpower of not crying. And so I went about 30 years without shedding a tear. And then one night in my kitchen after putting three little kids to bed, they all came exploding out of my throat.
00:16:08
Speaker
And I remember that as a really holy moment because my body was beginning to let go um of having to be held, having to hold the pain so tightly. And I would say in that moment, I didn't even know what all the pain was. I just knew that I was exhausted at the end of my own rope.
00:16:29
Speaker
And so then it was time for me to get my body on board.
Theological Significance of the Body and Beauty
00:16:35
Speaker
And before then, the way that I had kept my body at bay is because I've lived in the South my whole life and there is such a worship of beauty that I was at war with my body and believed it did not meet the standards that it needed to. And so that was just a justifiable, cognitive way.
00:16:59
Speaker
for me to keep trying to beat it and so into submission, so to speak. yeah And so this part about adding in the body has been huge for me. And I'm wondering for you personally, when you noticed, when you recall realizing you also needed to engage your body in order to move forward. I love that. And actually what you just shared made me realize that moment. And it's when you said, I looked at my body and it wasn't meeting up to the standards of the beauty culture of of of the South, whatever it was, um, that your body wasn't meeting the standards. And then, and so then you kind of like siphon yourself out of your body, right? You go up to your mind and you've, you figure out a way if you can't make your body be what it
00:17:57
Speaker
needs to be or what you believe culture is asking for you to have validity to stay visible. And when I knew was when I realized that my body had been bleeding for years, it had birthed babies. And somehow I was still discrediting my body because of its shape made me realize how superficial my definition of body image or my strength or my worth was because I had broken my body open. yeah right If I believed a theology of the womb, um I had bled and broken my body just like Christ did on the cross.
00:18:47
Speaker
and was showing salvation. And so I started to understand God in this sense of, wait a second, God made my body to bleed and into and and I'm bearing children. What more do I need to succeed in in meeting the body image? And now I have to be very careful because I'm not saying the standard is for women to have babies.
00:19:13
Speaker
Right. Some women are, aren't able to infertility, um, hysterectomies, all these things. There, there are many reasons, but just the act of bleeding. When I started to bleed God in my mind, it was saying, it works. It's good. This is the story of creation for you. And that's when I realized my body was actually an authority on understanding what it meant to create. And,
00:19:42
Speaker
I think it's actually a holy sacred space, but society or my mirror telling me that my shape wasn't adding up. Yeah. I mean that felt as dark as evil can get actually. Yes. Yes. Because for me it had a way of keeping me silent. Yes. Because to speak is to be exposed.
00:20:11
Speaker
And in my many stories of my life, ah particularly when I was young, to be exposed meant to be humiliated. But then if you speak out of turn in particular systems, you also are to be humiliated. And so then if you are doing this from a body that does not meet the standards you believe are in place, then it's as if you're asking to be mocked.
00:20:39
Speaker
Yes, yes. And we have authority, right, on deciding what humiliation is and what mockery is. At at least that's the spirituality I come from, right? Is that when when Christ suffered the cross, when he broke his body and bled, it was actually his most powerful moment. That's right. He is he is dying and defeating death.
00:21:08
Speaker
Yes. With his body. And that feels like the crucible that I've been given in my body. That's the standard I want to look at as far as body's worth or image. Yes.
Impact of Cultural Beauty Standards on Women
00:21:23
Speaker
Or am i and is my body doing the good work? um salvific work, if you will. And I think that's a standard. We're not teaching from the pulpit. And that breaks my heart because the louder standard is look a certain way so that you can be respected when you're heard, or they will keep staring at you. And I mean, that is such a setup. It's such a setup. And it is so anti
00:21:54
Speaker
who we know Jesus to be, right? Like scripture even tells us he had nothing that would draw us to look at him. You know, he would not have been on the cover of our magazines. Right.
00:22:08
Speaker
Right. And yet somehow I fall for this lie that to emulate him or to speak in a way that is credible. So as to get others to emulate him, I must look according to what my culture defines as beautiful.
Exploring Motherhood and Creative Roles
00:22:25
Speaker
Right. So, um, thank you for that. And just, yeah, when you said, you know, certainly you're not saying the standard is that women must birth children. I know you're not, I've read your book, but, um, I was just struck by, so a third of my clientele are children and quite a number of those have come through the foster system or have been adopted. And the mothers,
00:22:52
Speaker
who now care for these children have created in a very different way, right? They pour their lives out, their bodies are broken in ways that are still mothering, that are still incarnational. And they are doing it with children who bear the trauma of of relinquishment from a biological mother. And they they pour themselves out daily.
00:23:22
Speaker
And so I know you're not saying that. And also, I think we both can acknowledge it is hard work to mother no matter how you begin.
Rites of Passage and Life Transitions
00:23:34
Speaker
So I would love now to step into the book. um And I like the way that you have defined what a right is. And part of what I took away from it is it is a way of making meaning of the stages that we pass through in these female bodies. What else would you add to your definition?
00:24:00
Speaker
I actually think that is so perfectly said. So if you were in the world of academia, meaning making is a researched statement. That's the term that you use. Right of passage is a more archaic and native way of speaking. So if you were in the academic world, you are right on. You're making meaning of a moment. You're being intentional.
00:24:28
Speaker
Rite of passage is just saying there are only a few of those moments that are huge, impactful moments that say something about our story and it stays with us, right? Like when you are born, the first time you bleed. Those are one time where you go from some state to another state. There's a crossing over in that rite of passage and What I'm trying to apply is that academic understanding of can we make meaning with what a native culture would say are monumental moments?
Healing Through Nature and Divine Presence
00:25:08
Speaker
And can we put those two things together?
00:25:11
Speaker
Yes, yes. um So I, last February, I went out and spent time in Seattle with some mutual friends of ours. And Hayden Ortiz met me at a park.
00:25:30
Speaker
And I was grieving some things in life. I was moving from one place in life to another. My children were now having all left the home. Life was different.
00:25:43
Speaker
And I was grieving the change in how life looked for me. And Hayden met me at this beautiful park and we had actually never met before. Two other friends had connected us and this was a planned event, but we had not laid eyes on each other. We had texted and talked on the phone. And so she had created the most lovely picnic under a little grove of trees right by a tiny creek.
00:26:13
Speaker
And so she met me when I parked and walked me under these trees. Like we had to duck and she had spread a beautiful blanket and had a thermos of tea and several homemade treats and some fruit. It was like,
00:26:37
Speaker
a table being set before me in the presence of my grief. I wasn't really surrounded by enemies, but the presence of grief was in me and she knew this. And so we sadly talked and she read poetry and then she sent me out on what she called a medicine walk.
00:27:01
Speaker
And it was really a way of asking God if he might layer some meaning over the places that I was currently walking. And so I remember she sent me out and she said, we're going to meet back here in an hour. Take your phone only if you cannot find me, but but turn it off. um And she said, I want you to wander with God through this beautiful park.
00:27:28
Speaker
And I don't want you, and this was what was so helpful. I don't want you, Wendy, to attempt to make meaning. Don't stop and look at a tree and try to come up with your best metaphor of how this is what God's doing. I want you to wander and jot things down as He tells you or He shows you. But don't feel like you need to come back with some great reveal.
00:27:55
Speaker
And so there was this lovely freedom to walk and to be, and to walk an unknown path that had not been in this park before. And I quickly got the lay of how I would get back to her.
00:28:11
Speaker
But there's the ocean and mountains on one side. There's a creek running through. There are you know downed trees. There's moss. And it was the most lovely experience to just wander and let him be with me.
00:28:34
Speaker
So don't know. Tell me what comes up as I say that. Well, one, the listeners would need to know that i Hayden is one of the most loveliest humans. And yes I know her deeply and well, and she has taught me so much of God. So just her very presence, I can feel what you're saying. And I love this idea of how she brought you to a table and to land and told you to go and listen. Yes.
00:29:10
Speaker
I just love that because just the faith that God is going to show up in these elements is so sweet to me. It's a coming back to what communion looks like and the breaking of bread and setting the table and also to being in nature and our creator inviting us to hear him in a way that we've sort of we've deferred from um in a lot of ways where we're hearing from other people or we're even hearing from our own selves, our own minds. And so everything about this story makes me so happy and so curious to say, oh I want to know what you learned on your medicine walk. And at the same time, what I hear is just you doing this act was good medicine for you.
00:30:05
Speaker
It was such good medicine because I think the main thing that lingered was he is holding me no matter what I am doing. If I if i see it, if I sense it, like i I believe I am wrapped up in his love. If I'm grieving, if I am lamenting out loud, if I'm rejoicing,
00:30:34
Speaker
if I'm proclaiming truth that I'm wrapped up in him and there's nothing I have to do to get him to do that and no one that needs to tell me he's doing that.
Wisdom, Legacy, and Embracing Aging
00:30:47
Speaker
And so I think that was the special thing, but also having Hayden in the flesh. And so when we came back together, she asked if I wanted to share and I shared a little, and then she sang over me and then we parted.
00:31:03
Speaker
And it it, I think was like meeting an angel in the wilderness, you know, of like, let me feed you. Let me sing over you. Let me listen and bear witness to what it's like for God to hold you in the unknown. Um, and yeah, it was, it was profound for me. So I, that takes me into, um, and I never go through books front to back.
00:31:34
Speaker
So know that about me. I tend to start in the middle and the end and the the beginning and somewhere else. But that takes me to the right of legacy and the idea of the crone or the wise woman. Yes. So I'd love to hear a little bit about what was storing in you as you wrote that part and start by telling us who the k crone is that which we need a better name for, by the way.
00:32:02
Speaker
Oh, yes. Does it does it not feel great to you? You don't love it. Sounds like old hag or something. Yeah, I feel like there should be something more glorious for this wise woman. I agree that that's good. Yeah, let's let's think of a new name, Wendy. Well, we'll think we'll think on that. um But the sage femme is also she is the wise one, right? She is the one who knows how to midwife life or death and So yes, the old crone and what we're talking about right now are archetypes, archetypes of different stages of life. Now, if you think about the female in our society right now, the old woman is more invisible than she was meant to be, than God intended her to be. We treat the female after she loses the shape of her body and she begins to wrinkle and she begins to age and
00:33:03
Speaker
we stop seeing her. We've been focused to see beauty and to stare at what is beautiful, but we don't know how to be with the wrinkled and the wise and what I would say the most sophisticated, right? The, the one who knows how to get through anything we're going to come up against because she's gone before us. So the old crone is,
00:33:28
Speaker
our great grandmothers, right? Our grandmothers and the wisdom that they hold in in the antidotes they know, the life they've lived. And the right of legacy is the last right in the book that I talk about. And it's because it is your, it's death dueling, which is maybe a new word for some of you and it's out there, but the idea of having a doula at your birth,
00:33:55
Speaker
this would be the idea of having a doula at your death. And truthfully, we are the only ones who are promised to be with ourselves in our last breath. And the right of legacy is about being intentional with your last breath. Now that might seem like a concept that you don't think about very often, but I would like for you for a moment,
00:34:22
Speaker
to think about the importance of it. And that God knew something was important about breath because it's told in the creation story. Right. And then it is the passageway into the salvation story. It's Jesus's last breath on the cross. Right. There's there's something about the first and last breath that God thinks is very important for us to consider.
00:34:49
Speaker
So the right of legacy is how to be intentional about your last breath, truthfully. And the old crone or our grandmothers and great-grandmothers or our sage femme who is so wise is the woman who is not afraid of her last breath. And for the female who's growing more invisible and aging in our society,
00:35:13
Speaker
She actually is afraid of her death. She doesn't want to think about it. She spends most of her energy trying to keep her body looking like it's not aging. And therefore, she's not being intentional about how she will be a good doula to herself in her last breath. ah Does that make sense?
00:35:36
Speaker
it makes good sense. And that idea of mothering ourselves or doula-ing ourselves in our last breath was a really powerful concept for me.
00:35:50
Speaker
and yeah Having lost people that I love and just thinking about those last moments. And what is it like to tenderly be with ourselves? But ah but I think too of, you know, we're created for connection, to connect. And so as the crone in our society becomes more invisible, then it takes a lot more effort to stay with ourself because everyone else is leaving.
00:36:26
Speaker
o Because everyone else is leaving. That's such, that is the root, I think, of why we work so hard to stay visible is because of the feeling that comes just when you say that line, everyone else is leaving.
00:36:42
Speaker
Yes, yes.
Invitation to the Samson Society
00:36:45
Speaker
Hey folks, we're going to pause the conversation right there and, uh, divide this conversation into two different episodes. So be on the lookout for part two of this episode of the surviving Saturday podcast. I want to take a minute though, here in this interstitial space, uh, to extend an invitation, uh, particularly to any men out there who might be listening or ladies, maybe you can pass this invitation on. to your guy if you think it might be worthwhile. I am part of a nationwide organization, really an international organization called the Sampson Society. And the Sampson Society is a fellowship of Christian men who are serious about authentic relationship and authentic community.
00:37:25
Speaker
humility and recovery, particularly from various forms of addiction, brokenness in relationships, anything kind of, any kind of hidden struggles or difficulties that men may have had. If you want to find out more about what Samsung Society is about, you can check out the website SamsungSociety.com and also they have a fantastic podcast that is called the Pirate Monk Podcast. Pirate and then monk-like Monk in a monastery the name comes from a book that was written by a pastor named Nate Larkin back in early 2000s called Samson and the pirate monks calling mental authentic brotherhood and that's another way you could learn about the organization as well this man a
00:38:07
Speaker
real great blessing to me in finding some honest real down-to-earth brothers to walk with to share honestly about what's going on in our lives. It's really some of my favorite people that I've encountered have been through the same society. It's people who get this idea of being on a journey and doing work to understand why we are the way we are, why we react and operate the ways that we do, particularly when we're stressed and lonely and frustrated and all things like that and it's a great just fellowship and a positive just an alternative to to what you might find out there sometimes if you know a community in your church or in your normal circles of friends is not really coming out like you'd like it.
00:38:54
Speaker
Why I'm mentioning it now is because I am actually one of the co-chairs of the Charlotte Chapter, which now meets on Wednesday nights in Matthews. And so if you have any interest at all in just coming and checking out and meeting sometime and seeing what we're all about and meeting some of the other really great guys who are involved, please shoot me an email at chris at nurture counseling dot net and I'd be glad to give you some more information and let you find out when and where we meet and see if you want to come by and visit, pop in. You don't have to say anything, you don't have to do anything. and I can show you other ways to get involved in the organization as well. So again, just shoot me an email if you're interested and we'd love to have you come and visit sometime. Take care and we'll see you on the next episode of the Surviving Saturday Podcast.