What Are You Reading?

By Philip K. Hardin, M.A., M. Div., LMFT, LPC

For more than twelve years, I have led a group of men out west for Men’s Coaching Adventure. We have ridden horses in the Canadian Rockies, kayaked alongside Orca Whales in Vancouver Sound, white water rafting down the Salmon River, and ridden horses on a working cattle ranch in Montana … just to name a few. It’s like summer camp for grown men. We play hard and work hard in pursuing connection to the Lord, Self, and other men. We build community through vulnerably and courageously sharing our stories and watching God care for men through one another.

This past summer we spent a week outside of Taos, New Mexico at an elevation of over 7000 feet. Twenty-Eight men hiked, rode horses, white water rafted, and enjoyed the beauty of the mountains of northeast New Mexico. The book we used for our morning sessions was “The Relational Soul: Moving from False Self to Deep Connection” by Richard Plass & James Cofield. Each morning after breakfast, we gathered to listen to God, journal, and study a book that will give us structure and insight for growth. We always study a book that is anchored in Scripture and will offer coaching and counseling principles for our journey. The Relational Soul was PERFECT!

Plass and Cofield serve as president and co-director, respectively, of CrossPoint Ministry in Jeffersonville, Indiana—a ministry of spiritual mentoring and counseling, particularly to Christian leaders. Since humans are uniquely created by a relational God, the authors insist that as male and female we are fashioned for relational connection and communion with spouses, others, and God.

The quality of our relationships determines whether life will prove fulfilling and fruitful. The authors state from Scripture and life experience that by virtue of the Fall, all human relationships are beset with brokenness and alienation.

Relationships are not epiphenomenal or added extras. They form the core of the soul. Plass and Cofield cite recent studies of the formation of the brain to suggest that the way we relate to our original others (parents especially) hardwire us in unique ways.

We are relational souls because we are “created in the image” of a relational God.

We are created with this relational likeness and we long for relational connection because God exists in a relationship of love. God designed us to enjoy giving and receiving. God designed us to be for another. God designed us to receive from another. We receive our understanding of our self in relation with another” (13).

From this Trinitarian anthropology, they develop a schema of four relational patterns that mainly have to do with the development of trust, or mistrust, between parent and child. They argue that an unconscious implicit memory of early relationships continues to affect our ways of relating throughout our lives. They diagnose various moral, psychological, and relationship problems by showing how they are expressions of a false self that arises from relational failures, failures of trust.

The authors ascribe flawed ways of relating to programming received early in life—specifically to trust or mistrust and patterns of attachment experienced from early caregivers. Four patterns of engaging and connecting are identified: avoidant, ambivalent, scattered and stable (pp. 26-30).

The avoidant attachment pattern, for example, is characterized by a lack of trust and a relational disconnect brought about by moms or dads who fail to nurture the child with positive affect. The child learns to compensate for this deficit by maintaining relational distance (being “aloof”) from other persons as well as from God Himself with accompanying lack of trust.

According to the ambivalent pattern, the child suffers a poorly defined sense of self leading to over-dependence on others (being “enmeshed”) for a sense of identity.

In each case, capacity for relational connection is compromised, accompanied by anxiety, fear, anger, and a lack of trust. As life unfolds, the “stuff” of the false self inevitably surfaces in close encounters with other persons.

The book explains that early patterns of mistrust, avoidance, enmeshment, etc., mostly lie buried in one’s “implicit memory” or subconscious. For trust and relational capacity to be reestablished in the permeable brain, events that occurred, emotions that were felt and the interpretation that was developed must be raised to conscious awareness. This is done primarily by Spirit-guided telling of our story to caring and empathic listeners, not least to God Himself. The false and reactive self-will controls our lives if our painful reality is not personally owned and revealed.

The more of our story we own and share, the more our true and receptive self is formed and the richer our communion with others and God becomes. As we tell our story with honesty and humility, the brokenness and alienation caused by early relational deficits are gathered into the story of God’s suffering in and through the rejection and passion of Jesus.

A helpful chapter highlights the importance of community and the local church for telling our story, for learning to trust, and for the receiving and giving of unconditional love through real people. The authors sound a warning to our individualistic, western culture—that renovation of the relational self is impossible without authentic Christ-centered community. Moreover, since humans learn to relate well to the extent that we trust and are immersed in God’s presence, a chapter is devoted to the practice of spiritual disciplines.

Four healthy spiritual habits unfold as essential for deepening communion with God: solitude, silence, contemplative reading of Scripture (lectio divina), and contemplative prayer. Surrender to the God we thereby engage transforms the fleshly, reactive self to the gracious receptive self where we and others are mutually blessed.

The pages of this superbly crafted book are certain to challenge and inform all who desire to move from the destructive false self to the true self as intended by God from the creation. This is a book that should not be read once and set on a shelf. Rather, it should be revisited often as a reliable guide to the challenging, lifelong process of relational transformation.

The gospel is at heart good news of restored communion between God and sinners, and between sinners and sinners, and the authors show how the gospel takes form in one’s self-understanding, in communities of confession and forgiveness, and through the practice of meditative reading and contemplative prayer.

The Relational Soul is a practical book on spirituality, counseling, community, the long, difficult road of personal transformation, all grounded in the Gospel. I believe in the book so much that I am taking a year to work through it in our weekly men’s group that I lead in Fairhope – Men’s Coaching Reel2Real. We meet from 6:30 to 7:45 AM @ Page & Palette Book Store. I wish every man could join us!

All men are Welcome! If you are in Fairhope, Come ON! If you can’t join us for Reel2Real, then read the book on your own. You will be better for it!

Phil Hardin works as a Licensed Professional Counselor and Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist with Hardin Life Resources practicing in both Jackson, MS and Fairhope, AL.

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Bridget CrowderOctober 27, 2019hardin, hardin life resources, hard in lfe, the relational soul, False Self, Real Self, combat the false self, book review