Story Matters Podcast
In the Story Matters Podcast, Hosts Ryan and Emily Baker discuss the intersection between theology and psychology helping listeners to better grasp how their particular stories have shaped them.
Story Matters Podcast
31.Integrity: Finding Wholeness in a Fragmented World
What if integrity isn't about moral perfection, but about truthful living? This conversation explores integrity as the alignment between our inner and outer worlds – not a flawless character, but an honest one.
When we experience trauma or painful events, our minds often fragment as a protective mechanism. We compartmentalize, hide away vulnerable parts, and create false narratives to help us survive. Over time, these disconnected pieces create internal inconsistency that destabilize our wellbeing. The invitation is for listeners to examine their stories with radical honesty. Writing or sharing our difficult experiences becomes an act of integrity itself – seeking truth no matter how uncomfortable. Ryan and Emily challenges the common fear that facing painful emotions will break us further, revealing instead that grief actually mends fragmentation by reconnecting us to reality.
In this episode, Ryan and Emily weave together biblical insights about lament with a modern psychological understanding of how our brains process trauma. By facing our stories with integrity – naming what's real without pretending – we welcome back the banished parts of ourselves. This begins the journey of integration that leads to true strength.
What parts of your story might need honest examination? Join this conversation to discover how truthfulness leads to wholeness.
Integrity is not being put together. It's an honesty. It's an honesty about what is real. You must listen. This is the challenge. You have to look at your story.
Speaker 2:Yeah, when you integrate your inner world with your outer existence, there's a strength about you and we need more of that in the church.
Speaker 1:Welcome to the Story Matters Podcast. I'm Ryan Baker.
Speaker 2:And I'm Emily Baker.
Speaker 1:We believe people grow and heal through understanding how our stories are rooted in God's redemptive story.
Speaker 2:We hope our conversations encourage you to engage your story and the world around you with a new lens.
Speaker 1:We're glad you're here. In this episode we are going to look at a word that often gets brought up in story groups and it's important and it's the word integrity. But brought up in story groups and it's important and it's the word integrity, but I think when I began hearing it I thought of more of the colloquial like are you pure, are you good, are you honest, and those are great ways of understanding the word, but for some reason I've never loved the word because I have this like everyone's a sinner, everyone's and it's true, like who really has integrity, who has integrity Like perfection.
Speaker 1:I think it's taken some time to really grasp its fuller implications, and the idea of integrity is that really, you want truth in the inward being. We want the inside to match the outside, and we're going to talk more about that. But one of the things we know about writing a story is if you are going to sit down and take an episode of your life and seek to, as best as you know how, write what happened writing things that are hard to name, that may bring up emotions and feelings you are engaging your story with integrity. You're saying I'm after truth, no matter if it was 30 years ago or 50 years ago or six months ago or this morning. I want to know the truth of what happened. And so we're really seeking integrity when we do this work. We're wanting to be people that are the same or are let me say it this way we are becoming the same on the inside as we appear outwardly.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and we live in a world where there's a lot of fragmentation, where it's easy to look a certain way on the outside, while being quite different on the inside. And so I think you and I have been drawn to this word integrity, because what we have found is, when people are willing to write a story, we're being curious as to what are the parts in our lives, in our bodies, in our stories, memory, that are not consistent with how we would say we're living. Right, like you may hear someone's words, it's kind of like that hypocritical moment where people will say one thing but do another. We all have those moments, but do we have the integrity to name? Yes, I believe this to be true, but help my unbelief, because my body holds parts that are at war.
Speaker 1:So you're at a family gathering, you're talking to a cousin and you're hearing a story of a relative, maybe of an aunt, that you think is amazing because she gives you candy every time. You see her all growing up. But now you're hearing something not so great and it kind of shatters your version of her right and the temptation is often could be just ignore that, Like, just pretend that you didn't hear it. You know what I mean. Like I'm going to hold onto this view. But the truth is what we're actually doing when we look at our own lives and our own stories and we protect the people who've harmed us or were involved in certain ways. That trauma came to us is that we don't have integrity. We're not naming the truth. It would be like when you see porches that are being constructed and they have these pieces of wood holding them up until they're ready to put the real column in.
Speaker 1:Can you imagine handing a rotted piece and it's supposed to hold that up and then it just crumbles? That lacks integrity. It doesn't have the ability to do what it looks like it should do. And so when we come to these places in our story and we sort of falsify or ignore things, we're essentially putting in rotted pieces of wood into our story to hold ourselves up, and it will not work.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and those old structures. I think that are false narratives. We kind of told ourselves to survive certain parts of our childhood. They really do need to be replaced with strong, healthy beams so that we have integrity in our lives. So that we have integrity in our lives, I need to find the parts of my story in my life that I'm still trying to walk on kind of rotten wood. It's not that I'm changing my story, it's that I'm going to go and actually look for those places where I'm not naming the truth.
Speaker 2:Psalm 26 comes to life for me for this and tell me if you think it connects. King David says Vindicate me, o Lord, for I've walked in my integrity. He says he's trusted in the Lord without wavering. And then he says to God prove me, o Lord, and try me, test my heart and my mind. And in that particular word heart could be replaced with kidneys, which I always find fascinating. But I think that he's actually saying to God I've got kind of two things going on in my life I've got my heart, or what they used to call the kidneys, you know, the epicenter of my being, and I've got my mind, and in my mind I've kind of told myself, like you were just saying. You know, this ant was amazing. Actually, a type of integrity is to name the truth in order to get healing.
Speaker 1:One of the things that pops when you read Psalm 26, and this is more of an early version of me, but it clings still is David says I have walked in my integrity and I'm like, oh my gosh, like who does that? It's pretty boastful. You know, like David, we kind of know some things about you. Was this before that? And then, of course, if I'm honest, I just carry that sense of shame. I could never say that, and here's the point that I really want to get across. Having integrity is not not having sin, it's the opposite. Having integrity is pointing out and naming the areas that need healing. That's the whole point.
Speaker 1:My favorite illustration I've used is the space shuttle Challenger. I don't know why. That just captivated our entire world when this happened back in 1985. I think you watched it on TV my class wasn't allowed, thankfully, I guess, but as an adult looking at documentaries and stuff, there are these O-rings that were made of rubber, that go around the engine or something and like a gasket, and apparently in freezing weather they freeze and become brittle, and they knew this. Well, that day was too cold for them. But with everything in place and all the crowd and all the astronauts are ready and the challengers on the launch pad, somebody I don't know who and when and how, but somebody said all right, we're going to go for it, you know, and it exploded and it killed the lives of the astronauts.
Speaker 1:But integrity is going back and being honest and saying what went wrong. Why did this happen? Can we be honest? Can we name the truth? And this is true of a company? There's a Japanese concept called Kaizen, but it's like let's keep improving, let's look for the breaks, let's look for the fractures. It's true in family and story. It's true in sports. You know why do I keep throwing interceptions? Let me watch game film. I love that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and so as you're talking about that, I'm thinking about how you and I have made the connection that integrity is a truthfulness, it's a single heartedness, but then there's the word integration, and that's the process of reengaging every domain. So they play together. If we think about those two words earlier, when I was saying that our world is fragmented, we use integration a lot in our work.
Speaker 1:Yeah, kurt Thompson talks about seeing the brain, as there's two illustrations One's an orchestra and one's a company, but using the company, since it's pretty simple, you have the executive function of the prefrontal cortex, but you have the marketing department you have the research and development.
Speaker 1:You have these parts of our mind and brain that work best when they communicate, when they're integrated, when they work with each other. And what you've already said is when we face trauma, when anything comes our way, that is, of a traumatic situation, and even that word may seem to some people like a really strong word, but a fear, a fright harshness, harm any of this. Our brains often cut off that communication, mostly because there's a survival instinct of sort of a tunnel vision. We have to get through this moment, right now. But that dysregulation that can happen often comes even when we're not actually in a traumatic event and yet we still have that fracturing. And so it's like all of a sudden instruments are playing the wrong, wrong tune and no one's watching the conductor or parts of the company are operating incorrectly and no one's paying attention to the executive team.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so integration is becoming whole. You've got to go find the fragmentation or the brokenness, those particular places, and without story work we can appear to have integrity but we can remain disintegrated.
Speaker 1:Yes, dan Siegel uses domains right and left, brain, the head and the body, but he also uses autobiography as a domain, and that means that healing, as we're saying, is having a cohesive understanding of our story.
Speaker 2:So this is kind of a side story, but I think it fits, because I'm just coming off of a conversation I had with a friend and she was just saying that her husband really wants to start going to Sunday school again and she just had everything in her body go ugh. And I said what's that ugh? And she said, oh, just Sunday school and Bible study. It just feels like whatever's being talked about is just a lot. And then I kind of pushed in and said what do you mean? A lot?
Speaker 2:And I think she was kind of describing what we're talking about here and it's like well, I actually told her your line that I love, where most Christians say teach me something but don't make me feel something. And then when I said it she was like oh, yes, I want to feel something, but all these you know offerings at my church is just teach me something. And I think that's because it's relegated to the left brain, like a little bit like your funny statement about if we had a door that said lectures on heaven and another door that says heaven, many of us would. You know, it's more comfortable to go. I want to hear lectures and there is a covering. She even was kind of saying I feel like a lot of Christians just kind of put on like they're more than just clothes to go to church. It's kind of like this whole figurative, like I'm getting dressed to go to church, like I'm looking my part, I'm checking a box.
Speaker 1:I'm putting on fig leaves.
Speaker 2:Oh well, yeah, for sure, and I think, as we were just talking about the idea and this is obviously not a bash on Sunday school or on Bible studies, we're all for those things I think she was just lamenting that it's just left brain.
Speaker 1:Well, and there's a lot of churches who do Sunday school really well and who do Bible studies really really well, and we've also seen the rise of small groups or house churches, you know, confessional communities. There's an influx of people saying I want to learn, but I also want to be known, I want to know others, I want a community, I want a place where we can feel and share. And yet we would agree 100% that we also need to study scripture. I mean, it's all in the mix. So what you're saying is we need an integration. Integration is not getting rid of the one part, it's bringing all the parts together. It's not I don't want to learn, I just want to feel. So let's get rid of learning. It's I want to learn and feel. I want my head and my body communicating again.
Speaker 2:Absolutely so. To recap, integrity is living truthfully in line with reality. So integration is the process of becoming whole, kind of bringing back together the fragmented parts of our lives or our culture, our bodies and our stories of harm that we're willing to write or share are the very places where this process begins.
Speaker 1:I find with I'm in conversations somewhat quite often where I have to remind both myself and maybe the other person why we want to come back to sad things and over and over we come to the fear that feeling sad will bottom us out, it will take us away. So it's sort of like a room in the house. We never want to open that door, which again is not being whole, it's not treating everyone. Room with integrity, right. But what we really believe is lament mostly when you read the Psalms ends with praise. It takes going through the you down into honest, integrity-filled complaint. Hurt. I'm saying these things.
Speaker 1:Psalm 44 is a psalm of lament. There's quite a few, but most laments are done in a way that's like I believe in you. You are good, I'm angry, but I trust you. We're moving through the hurt and into that trust and I think most of us, if we're honest, want to just skip over the lament and you cannot do it. So what we're really trying to say is to have integrity. Is not that your life has it all together and everyone's like, wow, look at him, look at her. To have integrity is I'm naming hard things in my life, in my story, in our world, and I'm not dissociating from them, I'm not escaping from them, I'm not ignoring them. I'm actually willing to go right toward them because I am covered in the shield that is God as a believer, and I can be honest with these things and cry out without answers.
Speaker 2:I think we're craving that honesty, kind of going back to the Sunday school or Bible study concept of like, oh, are we just going to be taught something? I think what you're saying about the Psalms is helping me see it clear that harm really does do the fragmenting. It's where our body gets dysregulated, it's where memory fades or, you know, dissociates. It's all of that right, the fragmentation. And I know we've talked about grief before in another podcast episode, but I think it's coming more clearly to me that grief or the lament, that actually is the reorienting. It brings our reality back. So when we have harm done to us and we don't lament or we don't grieve and we just shove it somewhere, we stay disintegrated, we stay fragmented. But when we grieve or lament or name this was hard, hard and we've got to go back, however many years it was to go back to those stories and do it it's actually the process that welcomes back cut off parts, yeah, it welcomes back, cut off parts, so let's unpack that slowly.
Speaker 1:There are places within us that have been banished Places that maybe could have been and are beautiful.
Speaker 1:Maybe when you were young you loved music or making beautiful things and curiosity, softness, and somewhere along the way that was scoffed and you kind of hid that. And so shame came and we shape and we mold and we don't allow those places to come back and a sense means those parts have been banished because there's a part of us that says those get us hurt, those get us in trouble. So that is called a disintegration, which we've been saying in this podcast. What I just heard you say and I just wanted to slow it down is when we can begin to see that through grief, like maybe you pick up a photograph and you go oh my gosh, I love that little girl, that little boy right there, and I'm remembering when I used to feel so much more tenderness or I would get excited when I saw so, and so there's a part you can recognize as missing, you can grieve and you can feel sadness for that and, as you just said, through that process that part is invited back.
Speaker 2:So grief doesn't fragment us. I think that's the lie of grief, like if you start crying, if you start naming something, you're going to get fragmented. It actually mends the fragmented part. Well said, I'd love to know, as you're listening to this, how do you feel about the word integrity?
Speaker 1:I think what we're naming is the gospel frees us to have integrity, because integrity is not being put together. It's an honesty. It's an honesty about what is current and what is real. Yeah, and I will also add we can take steps of integrity, of integration, of being true to the things we believe. Yet when we break those, we fail. Whatever, we come back through repentance.
Speaker 2:We believe.
Speaker 1:yet when we break those, we fail whatever we come back through repentance. So integrity is really living a repentant life, saying I'm no longer willing to pretend or cart off parts of me as if they're not there. And when we do that and if we do that, you must listen.
Speaker 2:This is the challenge you have to look at your story. Well, how do I look at my story? Just listening to this episode? Have to look at your story Well, how do I look at my story Just listening to this episode? Here's a couple of examples that I think can help us kind of identify. Where is there some lack of integrity of our lives that maybe could kind of give us hints at where we should do some looking. Where might you be wanting success without really formation or a process, be wanting food without nourishment? You mentioned fast food. Maybe you want intimacy without covenant I mean, we see that with pornography all over the place. How about wisdom? You want wisdom, but you don't want to suffer. So what do you think about those? Do you have any others to add? Or what do you think, as I say, those?
Speaker 1:The essence of being a Christian is being in a relationship with the Trinity and in partnership and trusting the provision and the care of God, and that whatever has gone on in my life that's filled with harm is something that can be useful and that when I'm trying to forge a path forward, that's somewhat a forgery, like it's not the real thing. I'm not trusting the Lord, I'm choosing ways to get what I want. One example that came to mind when you were saying those was when we were in Japan. I wanted to drive right. We found a car. You can find used cars back in 98 for pretty cheap, because that culture at the time loved nicer cars, so the used ones were cheaper. And I went and took a driving test and failed. So I ordered an international driver's license. I forged my way and now again that's a funny little example I drove well, everything was fine, I learned, but what I'm getting at is that's sort of like almost how we are.
Speaker 1:It's like I know what I want. I'm going to get what I want. God, I hope you'll help me get what I want, whereas integrity is how have you made me? Who am I? What is my story? Where is my calling? What are you doing within my life and how do I seek these things with authenticity and integrity? And we're coming off a series of shame, but what we're really naming is shame is trying to keep us from doing that we're going to feel so much.
Speaker 2:We don't want to wait on the Lord for these things we may miss out. We need that fig leaf quick.
Speaker 1:This is the job for me, this is the person for me, this is the group for me, this is the promotion for me, this is the whatever and I'm going to have it and I'm hoping God's on my team here, you know. But integrity is having the right relationship to the architect of the bridge. Have we even used the bridge illustration? That was one of the things that stood out to me was, when I started looking into this a few years back, was you know, when you drive up to any kind of a bridge, even the kind, you don't even realize it is a bridge, it's like oh, there's a Creek under there, but there's often a sign that tells you the weight load right, and so the point is, if that bridge can hold that weight, it has integrity. But if you were to drive on that bridge and it can't hold that weight, then it does not have integrity.
Speaker 2:Right. Well, it's ironic to hear you say that about the bridge, because we've talked about how we're all broken. You know that's half the story. It's not just like oh, we're tore up from the floor, we're broken, have a great day. We're broken and we're being renewed. We're being made new, so we're being invited into gaining integrity. We're not going to be broken bridges, we're going to be strong, but we've got to go find every beam that's rotten, that's old.
Speaker 1:We will never have perfect integrity this side of heaven, but we can, with faith and repentance, move into the places of our story and again, whether that's yesterday's activities, this last week or when we were seven and name the places that were not shalom. And that is what integrity is. We're saying that is not okay, what I did or what they did.
Speaker 2:The litmus test to do you have integrity is are you doing any kind of heart work? Are you doing the kind of thing where you're inviting people, the Holy Spirit, any kind of wisdom, into your life to say where do I need help, I need fresh eyes right, or I have some things in my life that are not consistent with my outer world, or I've got some disintegration in my life.
Speaker 1:Yes, 100%. Every one of us has things that are not integrated, parts that have been set aside, banished. So, again, integrity is the goal and the process is integration, and the tool that we're advocating for is story, but there are others, but that's one where you can really look at places and see these areas where disintegration occurred.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so the spirit meets us in our stories of harm and our grief. That reconnects us to reality and leads us into integrity and integration, and that's basically what we're longing for is a wholeness in Christ.
Speaker 1:Thanks again for joining us today. If you have questions or thoughts about our conversation, we'd love to hear from you. We can be reached through our website at storymattersinitiativecom, and from there you can also find our Instagram and our Facebook. If you are interested in doing individual or group work, we'd love to discuss that with you as well. You.