Dr Roger Bretherton – flourishing through character strengths

In this episode we dive deep into the heart of Character Strengths and Virtues with our special guest, Dr. Roger Bretherton — clinical psychologist, psychotherapist, coach, and a thoughtful Christian voice in the field of wellbeing and positive psychology.

Together, we explore:

•   What are character strengths and virtues?
•  How can we recognise, strengthen, and heal the weaker parts of our character?
•  How can we reframe adversity and suffering through the lens of character development?
•  Where does faith fit in — is it a master character strength?
•  How does this all connect to holistic health, and our new LiFT and Spiritual Intelligence courses?

Roger also shares his own journey into this work, the thinkers who’ve influenced him, and a practical tips you can try to strengthen your own character.

Links:
Roger Bretherton – Bio | VIA Institute
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Gillian Straine:  Welcome to the GoHealth Podcast. I am Gillian Straine, chief exec of GoHealth, an organisation with a vision to enable churches and individual Christians to be a healing presence in the world. And the GoHealth Podcast is for people who want to connect health and faith and make a difference in the world. And today we’re doing what we love most, bringing you rich grounded conversations at the meeting point of science and deep Christian wisdom.

And we are delighted to be joined by Dr. Roger Bretherton, a leading voice in the field of character, strength and virtues. Those qualities of heart and mind that support psychological well-being and affected living. Roger is a clinical psychologist, a psychotherapist, a coach, and he’s also a Christian. So as we launch new courses this year exploring holistic health, wellbeing and spiritual intelligence, Roger is exactly the kind of person we want to sit down with. So let’s get into it. Roger, it’s great to see you. What is a character strength?

Dr Roger Bretherton: So straight in Gillian, I love it…

Gillian: Yeah, straight in…

Roger:  Straight in with the questions…

Gillian: I ask you how you are later. 

[Laughter]

Roger: So psychologically speaking, so when you talk to psychologists who are studying character strengths, the main way they would describe it was they go with three things:

So they firstly say it’s a trait like quality. So it’s part of our personality. It’s generally viewed as positive, so it’s positively valence. We view it as sort of uplifting or morally good, perhaps on some level. And thirdly, it contributes to positive outcomes for ourselves, for other people, for society in general. So they are the three things that people would say, that’s what a positive strength is. It’s a trait like quality. It’s good and it does good things. 

Gillian: Okay, so give us an example. 

Roger: So an example would be love, I guess, would be, you know, in the Christian tradition, love would be, I think what we would say, the sort of the perfect virtue, the highest virtue. So something like love, believe it or not, we can be measured on the level to which we tend to be loving people in various different ways. It’s viewed as good. It’s fairly consistent in the way it’s expressed through people. And we know that it ripples through communities way beyond the individual, the loving person. It ripples through everybody we meet and has health benefits for us and everybody else, too. 

Gillian: Okay, I’d love to know more of the character strengths, but just sticking with love, you can measure it?  Tell me more.

Roger: In many different ways. So this is where things get really, really interesting and complicated because as you know, for every two psychologists, there are three opinions. And if you pick up the Routledge Handbook of Love, you’ll find probably 20 different research teams all over the world thinking about love and operationalising love in completely different ways. So keep in mind that this is one of the big differences between psychology and theology, that psychologists love to operationalise things. They like to say, let’s take this thing and make that love. So some people, it’s attachment. For other people, it’s a cognitive state. For other people, it’s a social thing, for other people, it’s a form of intelligence. For other people, it’s different types that can be measured. So whether love itself can be measured, I’m not sure. But what is true is we can operationalise elements of love that psychologists can then go: “I can measure the extent, for example, with which I would identify with you. I can measure the endorphins that are going through my system when I encounter someone I love. I can measure the cognitive components I have in my relationship to other people.” So love itself, I think ultimately is a mystery but we can measure different ways in which it manifests in human beings. 

Gillian: I love that – I love I just said it – it’s so interesting. You said, you know something and then you study it and it gets more complicated. So love’s the character strength. Just list off a few others just to help us get into understanding what you’re talking about. 

Roger: Yeah, so so the the classification of strength that I use is called the VIA inventory of character strengths and virtues. If anyone wants to read the whole thing and all the details, they can go to the website viacharacter.org it’s all there. So all 24 are there. But if I, if I were to list…let’s…I’ll list and then we’ll see how far I get. So curiosity, creativity, wisdom, bravery, honesty, passion, love, fairness, leadership, humility, forgiveness. Have I said gratitude, hope, wonder, etc., etc.. So that’s the kind of thing we’re talking about. 

Gillian: Yeah. So all all good things. And are they all natural? Are we born with these things? All of us? Is that a good way to think about it? 

Roger: Yes. So I would say that life as a human being is unimaginable without them. So human living, as we understand it, is absolutely unimaginable without them. And there are always, always, always strengths, as long as we are conscious, we can be expressing character strengths in some way.

And most of us have a unique set of strengths that feel essentially part of who we are. They feel really easy to do, and when we do them, they bring us energy like we feel energy and sort of inspired. 

Gilian: I guess it’s very individual, is it? We’ve all got a set of things. I know I’m stronger at one thing and less good other things, right? So is it entangled, it’s entangled with our personality then it’s part of what makes us who we are, right? 

Roger: Yep. So some people call it our positive personality, but as you know, sort of more recent sort of theory in personality would say that we can lean into certain elements of our personality and enhance it, increase its expression or diminish certain aspects of personality. The way I like to look at it is we have seeds of character strength in us, and then we bring attention and practice in terms of growing them. 

Gillian: Okay, so tell me about attention and practice. If you are aware that you’ve got a character, a character that’s weak, how do you go about strengthening it, if that’s what you want to do?

Is it about identifying and then strengthening? How does it work? 

Roger: So it’s all of those things. So I suppose it would be difficult to say, to use the word weak with regard to character fullstops. The question I would usually be asking whether I’m coaching or psychotherapy or whatever, is what is the strength that’s most prominent in this person and how can we build on that to perhaps improve other areas of life?

And then the next question we ask is, of course we do have character flaws or character weaknesses that are a bit difficult. Weirdly, some of those flaws are overuse of strengths. Sometimes it’s actually… this is why, I mean, the example that springs to mind is this is why, for example, a psychotherapist who’s deeply loving and connects with people really well might accidentally stumble into an inappropriate relationship with someone because they’re overusing their ability to connect. So sometimes things that look like flaws in character are an overuse of something that in another context use in a different way would be a strength. 

Gillian: One thing I really hate when I think about character strengths is sometimes we’re very quick to see weaknesses in others, other people’s character. And one thing I particularly hate is somebody telling me to man up, right? As you can imagine, as a woman, I find that particularly difficult and I’m quite sensitive about it. But there’s sort of a line of thinking that’s getting more and more popular that people think about characteristics, particularly in a gendered role. And I’m thinking of people sort of like Jordan Peterson, for example, that’s got a very particular approach to character development, quite individualistic, quite gendered, quite strident as well. How would you respond to people like Jordan Peterson and that approach to character, strength, development? 

Roger: So I think the first thing I would say is I would say that there is a place for that sort of very strong, challenging way of pushing people to be more themselves. I think that’s what Jordan, in my opinion, that’s what Jordan Peterson does quite well in terms of he pushes really well in terms of strengthening up. Now, the difficulty with it is that what that approach does is that it kind of tells us where we’re wrong, but it doesn’t help us actually develop what we are. So it misses out on the fact that most of our character strengths actually in reality are fostered through attentiveness, through exploration, through curiosity, through kindness, that we actually need a sort of nurturing environment in order to develop it.

And then, then the other thing that you might get with Jordan Peterson and other people like it is that they tend to over-exaggerate certain strengths or over-emphasise certain strengths at the expense of others. So bravery is very strong. Self-regulation is really, really important and honesty is very strong. So these are very sort of forthright, quite often cognitive behavioural strengths.

These are the things you can do in the world that make an impact that then probably diminishes some of the more affective strengths like love and gratitude and hope diminishes also, some of the more what you would call the mediating strengths of the strengths of hold us back from excess, like forgiveness and humility, for example, wouldn’t feature very highly. So that’s the sort of dangerous – that you end up thinking that character just really means being strong. And when I’m talking about character strengths, for example, some of the people I know are deeply strong in kindness. You know their kindness is almost unbreakable no matter what it encounters. And I’d want to celebrate that rather than view that as a weakness.

Gillian: Roger how does this rub up against things like trauma, which have an enormous impact on people’s bodies and minds? And how do they, how do people who’ve suffered trauma and live with deep wounds, can they lean into character strengths work for helping them live a flourishing life? 

Roger: Yes. So weirdly, that’s how I got into character strengths in my original job as a clinical psychologist, working with personality disorders and trauma, so that was the centre that I worked in. And the reason I landed on character strengths was because I found that I started asking a different question about the people I was seeing. So in some people I started asking the question, not what’s wrong with this person? Which is a legitimate question, perfectly fine, whole of clinical psychology, really, is about trying to answer that question. But I also started to ask the question, what’s good in them? You know, what are they carrying that’s really, really great. And actually, in the early days of a field called post-traumatic growth, I was one of the first people who was writing case studies of people who came through trauma and then out the other side, you suddenly saw their wisdom, their compassion, their creativity almost go to a different level following it.

So I think in trauma, there’s sort of two ways that character strengths can help people. One is firstly to remember that they’re still there. Even if you’re traumatised, some of those wonderful things are still there in people and they can be coping strategies for trauma. They can be used as a way of coping with it. And then secondly, if people get to the point where they’re able to reflect on what’s happened to them, to their trauma without any longer being activated or triggered or any of that kind of thing. Not everybody gets that, let’s acknowledge that. But if people can get to that point, they may find that in trauma there’s an enhancement of their character that can occur almost like it’s like the sort of grains of gold in the middle of all the pile of mud that they’ve been through that can be attended to and looked at intentionally. And that’s why occasionally you find these strange people who will say things like, “my trauma was the best thing that ever happened to me.” You know, occasionally meet those people, say, because it made me who I am now, you know, it’s made me brave and compassionate and grateful and wise. And I don’t think that’s a way of, that’s not trivialising trauma and saying it’s a good thing. But it’s saying that for a percentage of people, that can be one of the outcomes. 

Gillian: Tell me a little bit more. So, for example, somebody who suffered trauma that’s deeply wounding, wounding to their soul and and and really impacting on how they live day to day, what might make the difference from sticking with PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, stuck in that place. What’s the difference between what helps go from that place to a post-traumatic growth that you’re describing there? What are the kinds of things that make that, help that shift in that moment?

Roger: That, that’s a great, great question. Let me answer in two ways. Let me answer it experientially. And then then let me just cite the studies on it, because the studies are really clear about what helps us sort of make that move. So the first thing just to speak experientially and sort of therapeutically. So if you look at many of the major interventions for trauma, they know that they have to re-expose and sort of get the person to re-experiencing some of the terrible things that happened to them. And that’s very, very difficult. So most therapeutic interventions now will start with, so they call it different things, they might call it resourcing or they might call it grounding or they’d call it something else like that. And weirdly, what they’re doing is they’re starting with character strengths. They’re going, Where’s your bravery? Where’s your regulation, where’s your wisdom, where’s your creativity, where’s your hope? Let’s just get all that stuff online really, really powerfully so that you’re almost creating a bit of spaciousness around very often a sort of traumatic event or memory that people feel owns them in some way. The moment they have it, it takes over their entire experience. So character strengths weirdly allow us to create a sort of spaciousness around that a little bit so that it can be viewable and worked with and looked at. So character strengths in and of themselves, they may not always be named that, but they are part of the therapeutic process of dealing with trauma just because they give us the strength to face whatever it is that’s harmed us so badly. And then secondly, and interestingly, when you look at the meta analysis that’s been done on who experiences post-traumatic growth, you know, who are the people that, that occurs to, there’s a number of different things that come up. But if I just sort of hit three of them, one of them is a tendency to approach rather than to avoid. So the sense of deep breath, I’m actually going to bit by bit as much as I can manage, try and face what’s happened to me and come to terms with it on some level, so that’s usually there. Secondly, but weirdly, people generally who experience post-traumatic growth usually register quite high in some kind of religious or spiritual view of the world.

So they have a sense that even though this terrible thing has happened to me, there’s a much bigger picture to which I belong. And that then gives them the hope to think there might be something beyond the sort of living hell I’m currently going through. So it gives a sense of progress, a sense that there’s a benign reality behind all the evil that that they may have experience off.

And then the third thing interesting is wisdom. So some of the research says this fascinating finding that people who experience post-traumatic growth generally, their wisdom goes up as a result of the trauma. So some people say, I feel sadder, but I feel wiser as a result of what I’ve gone through. But then also, when you look at pre trauma measures of wisdom, in other words, to what extent is this a person who’s trying to learn from life all the time?

You will notice that actually generally these are people are sort of almost ready for…ready to gain wisdom before they reach it. So this is a very common finding and lots of character strengths is that quite often we sort of prepare ourselves for something terrible happening because we’re already practicing bravery or forgiveness or wisdom and with post-traumatic growth, wisdom seems to be one of those things that really makes a difference for us.

Gillian: Roger, Last year we did some work with a pain psychologist called Amy Wachholtz and she talked about the overlap between emotional, physical and spiritual pain. And she spoke about pain coming to the surface when the time is right, when you’re ready to cope with it. You know, if you’re in a burning house, you’ll run out. Then you’ll feel the pain. It’s the same with psychological and emotional pain. Timing seems to be important in this. It’s almost like our body knows when we’re able to face these things. Is that something you seen in your work too? 

Roger: I’ve certainly seen that. I’d almost completely agree with what you’ve just said really, almost to the extent I can’t really add much more to it, other than to say I think quite often we think that we gather information so that we can make a decision about our lives.

Whereas I almost seem to think it works the other way round, that we start to see what’s relevant to us. Because on some level, deeper than we’ve realised, we’ve decided that the moment to make the decision has come. 

Gillian: Yeah…

Roger: And certainly with trauma. The reason I’m sometimes hesitant about talking about post-traumatic growth is because you can trivialise it, whereas I know people who 20 years after their trauma has occurred that was the moment when the growth started to happen. And so it’s always just an invitation and a possibility. It’s never something you can impose on something, they have to be ready for it. 

Gillian: I’ve looked at this myself, so I am a cancer survivor as well and looked at post-traumatic growth as a way to look at that particular trauma. And I was really interested in some of the research around post-traumatic growth with those who are able to share their experience, tell their stories, and the storytelling aspect of post-traumatic growth, but also the physicality of some of this. I’d love to hear you on this as well. In the famous book, we often reference it, ‘The body keeps the score’ for trauma, but somehow, maybe the body seems to know when it’s time to do some healing around this.

Roger: Yeah. Yeah. So so the approach that I use, which often combines sort of contemplative and mindful practices with an awareness of character strengths, very deeply has that sort of mind body connection in mind and wants to look at those things. And I sort of have this sense that our bodies speak a language that isn’t in words, that somehow if we can learn to interpret it and become really sensitised to it, our bodies always know who we are. They always know who we are and what we need to do. And if we can follow those, we do quite well. And what often happens to people in trauma and this is the thing that Bessel Van der Kolk called out in ‘The body keeps the Score’ is that we get trapped in a defensive mechanism we wanted to perform in the moment of the trauma but were never able to complete. And so a lot of sort of therapeutic responses will involve allowing people to complete whatever it is their body wanted to do. Did it want to shake? Did it want to defend itself? You know there’s some kind of competence or skill we wanted to perform in that moment, which we couldn’t. And sometimes therapy for trauma is about allowing the body to complete whatever that is.

Gillian: Can you give us some more examples of that? Because that’s fascinating. I think so often we think of character and trauma recovery, it’s all about the mind. All…we’ve got to just sort out our thinking. I’d love to know more about these signals the body gives and how to listen to them deeply. 

Roger: Let me give you a really sort of concrete example. So one client I saw had been in a motorcycle accident they couldn’t remember. So he had a head injury in the accident itself. So he couldn’t actually remember any of the accident. But he knew from what he’d been told that he’d landed on his shoulder and he’d been lying in the middle of the road before the police and ambulance and everybody arrived.

And then he started almost within a few weeks of having had the accident. He just started every now and then getting in the night, this sort of huge pain in his shoulder that would appear and disappear, would appear and disappear. And it’s almost like his mind couldn’t remember it. So he had no memory of it, but his body could remember it. So his body was basically trying to complete something. There’s no physical injury to his shoulder at that point, but he was trying to complete something. And so we worked with this sensation he had in his shoulder in the same way that we would with a flashback. So if you think about this, when does it come up, rate it in terms of how intense it is? Does it want to do something? Sometimes you’ll find that when pain is in your body there’s a movement that your body wants to make. So in his case, his arm actually wanted to go up and what you realised is when he went into the crash, he wanted to defend his head but hadn’t been able to complete it because of the way he landed. And so his body was just holding that sort of response over and over and over and over again. And for a while, this was the element of trauma that people didn’t think could be treated. You know, so for quite a while there was lots of things that said, yes, re-experiencing flashbacks, we can process that and that’s fine. But this embodied stuff where literally your body is trying to reenact some elements of the trauma. Some people…I’ve spoken to pilots who they’ve been in crashes and then leaping out of bed and piloting their plane in the night. And there was almost a view that these things can’t be changed. But actually what Bessel Van der Kolk and Pat Ogden who’s the person really who he got a lot of his ideas from, realised was that we can put people through something called sequencing, which is when you allow them to focus on their bodily sensations, they start to move and our bodies want to do things and thoughts come to mind and defences come up. And so you start almost like following whatever the person’s body wishes to do. And then in the process, weirdly, you sequence out this sort of trapped bit of trauma in their body. Now, having…let me just put a few caveats on that…doesn’t work for everybody. Obviously not everything is that, some things are more complicated than that. Some people are very body phobic, which means it’s very, very hard for them to use that kind of therapy. But it seems to me that what we can say is that trauma does get trapped in our musculature, in our defensive bodily postures, and sometimes in the right conditions that can be sequenced out in a way that alleviates some elements of the trauma. 

Gillian: That’s fascinating. On a more day to day level, how can…I’d love to know more about character strengths and virtues day to day, if we’re wanting to lean into this way of thinking, in what ways can we tune into our body on a day to day level in terms of tapping into this wisdom, you seem to be saying that our bodies get in the big moments of disaster and trauma. Is there a day to day approach to our bodies that we can employ with character strength work? 

Roger: So there’s a few of these, probably the most sort of popular one, both clinically and sort of popularly at the moment would be sort of various forms of mindful and contemplative practice, one of which is the body scan. And the body scan really is just sensing from within your body slowly working through it from your toes right up to your head, and just being aware of what’s going on in the parts of your body. And if like me, you’re someone who tends to be quite disembodied. So I tend to live in my head a lot and ignore my body, that would be my, sort of natural tendency. When you first encounter it, it seems like the most boring possible exercise you could do. So you’re almost treating your body as if your body is the kind of person you’d meet at a party who was really dull to talk to and have nothing to say, and you want to move on as fast as you possibly can. Whereas to be really aware of our body, we actually have to bring a sense of gratitude to it, which is a character strength, a sense of kindness to it, a sense of perspective that actually there may be things that the explains tensions, relaxation, warmth, etc. of my body are trying to communicate to me that there are times in life where it’s appropriate actually not to get your mind to make sense of something.

So when we wake up at 3 a.m. in the morning, very often what happens is, it’s something embodied that’s woken us up. And then our mind takes over and starts telling us what the problem is, what we’re worrying about, and it could just be indigestion or something. You never know. So allowing your body just to do its thing and sort that out and being kind to it and allowing it to be there is a really get good way of doing things.

My, my favorite sort of embodied practice though, would be something called focusing. I first encountered it by Eugene Gendling. Eugene Gendling was the philosopher who worked alongside Karl Rogers developing person centered psychotherapy, and Eugene Gendling’s idea is that we have a felt sense in our body, that any problem we have occurs as this sort of embodied sensation that carries a load of meaning. And if we can be kind and we can create space for that…his lovely phrase is, he says, “every moment of experience carries within it a library of books”. And his idea is the moment we find a way of articulating what a body is saying, and we kind of have to guess a little bit and work out. And then the moment we hit it and we’ve said the right thing, we feel almost like an ‘aha!’ in our body. In body psychotherapy they say it goes, ‘thunk’ in your body. You feel your body go ‘that’s it’. And then you find that it moves, it changes into something else. So these are just some of the ways in which our body and mind are just, it almost makes no sense to talk about them separately, really. You know, our brain is part of our body.

Our body is…houses our brain. You know, it’s all part of the same system really.

Gillian: And it’s very western, isn’t it, you know, to stay in the head. 

Roger: Yeah.

Gillian: And not pay attention to the body. I feel this very strongly myself. I know I keep my stress in my shoulders and in my stomach. I pay almost no attention to my body, usually until it screams at me. So I’m learning to tune in a bit more. Does it go the other way? Does caring for our body on purpose take time to do that? To have have benefits, or rather that waiting until something has gone wrong in our bodies going, Oi! hang on a second, does directed care to the body help us too?

Roger: Yeah, absolutely. So this is one of the places where if you think about things like mindful eating and things like that or mindful alcohol or substance consumption, all those kind of things get far better. Just if we notice, like just the simple…like some of these practices are so ridiculously simple, like we eat much better if we just put down the utensil we’re eating with between bites…like that, that in itself seems to be quite an effective intervention for us listening about how full we are, how we’re feeling about what we’re eating, those kind of things.

The other thing to say as well is going back to the research on love. There’s a psychologist called Barbara Fredrickson who’s written a lot on love and how we practice love. And one of the things that she’s shown is that love as an emotion is very much an embodied state. And it has all kinds of health benefits, you know, so loving kindness, meditation, if I sit or pray in the morning in love for myself, for my family, for my neighbourhood, for the people I’m currently struggling with, that actually has incredible physiological benefits to me and not just to me, to probably the next person I meet and the next person they meet as well. So it ripples through situations and this is before we even think about anything supernatural or spooky. We’re just talking pure physiology to begin with. So yeah, there’s all these kind of embodied practices that lead to wellbeing of ourselves and others. 

Gillian: So you mentioned prayer there, Roger, and we’ve talked a lot about love. I wonder if we can turn to faith, faith, hope and love. Is faith a character strength? Is it, is it on your list? 

Roger: Now, this this is a controversial point you are raising. So the 24 strengths that were originally identified. So back in 2004, the big book of characters strengths, 700 pages –  it’s not called that, it’s what I call it! 700 pages by Chris Peterson and Martin Seligman was published and it very, very evidently draws on both Greek and Christian influences quite strongly like they’re just very obviously in there. And knowing many of the psychologists who contributed to that, I know that many of them actually are people of faith, they are Christians and other things as well. But the book was really, really unwilling to use the word faith, really. So you end up that one of the 24 character strengths, just as one of them is love, one of them is spirituality, and it’s one of the most debated of all the 24 character strengths.

Some people debate it because they say, surely spirituality is the thing that holds it all together. You know, our spirituality or religious belief, that’s the thing that holds the thing together. And the sort of the lovely article was written by a confucian scholar actually, who who described the scheme as the positive donut. So she said it’s lots, lots of nice sprinkles around the outside, but there’s nothing holding all this together. So there has been this debate about that. The other side of it, interestingly, is that behind the 24 character strengths, there are six virtue clusters that are talked about. So wisdom, courage…I’m losing my mind here…wisdom, courage, humanity, temperance, justice, and then transcendence is the sixth one. And if you were to look at those six circles, what you realise they’ve actually taken the four cardinal virtues of Aristotle, to which we know Aquinas added the three theological virtues of faith, hope and love. And they’ve collapsed faith and hope together and called it transcendence. So it’s all there, but there’s a sort of real unwillingness to use the word faith, I think, possibly because they want it to be universally applied. And also, if you read it, they clearly didn’t like Christianity very much. You sort of pick that up a little bit from the people who designed it.

Gillian: And in your approach to character strengths, where would you put faith? Is it on the list or is it the master strength?

Roger: When I study spirituality, faith is one of the key things that I look at in terms of spirituality. So that’s where I would put it. I also think that of the three theological virtues faith, hope and love, faith is the one that we most misunderstand in our culture.

So I think most people tend to think of faith, when I talk to them, as a sort of inferior form of knowledge. So it’s just like knowledge that we’re not that certain of. So faith ends up really, I think in most of our culture, meaning opinion, that’s kind of what it means. It almost means that. Whereas experientially as a Christian who practices prayer and is part of a faith community, that’s not at all what it is, in my view, that faith is that deep down embodied reliance upon God, that sense that there is a constant, faithful presence that never leaves us and is constantly there, and to which I am, I’m quite often faithless.

So if God is a sort of straight line, I’m a wiggly line, you know, I never go…I’m all over the place. You know, biblically he is who he is, but I’m not always who I am. And so there’s always this sort of sense of that’s the sort of the ground to which I’m constantly returning and contemplative practice, returning to that deeply attentive, utterly constant love of God.

And so faith for me really is the deep, existential way of being that comes from knowing that there is an utterly faithful God. 

Gillian: So is it something a bit like…it gives us an orientation if we believe that we are created in our mother’s womb and known from before time. So not just that God had a great idea of the moment my…I was conceived, but I’ve always been known from forever into eternity that God is closer to me than I am to myself.

You know, there’s some kind of concrete being or relationship or love that I exist in, that I might mess up on a day to day level and not be perfect, but that’s the world we live in. But there’s something to which I can return to or be pointed towards in amongst this. Does that resonate? 

Roger: Yeah. So I don’t know how much I believe the idea that I’ve been known since before my mother’s womb. So I mean, that’s a theological debate, we can have…

Gillian: Another podcast… 

Roger: But what I definitely think is true is that if God is absoltutely all knowing and then the concept of Roger Bretherton as he is now, has always been an idea in God’s mind. That’s something that’s always been there. 

Gillian: Yeah. 

Roger: And then the other thing that comes with it is, so if we if we think faith is just an idea, then faith becomes a sort of concept in my head that I just have, you know, in evangelism, for example, I just have to get that idea into other people’s heads and that’s what evangelism is about. Whereas if we take faith in the way that you’re talking about it, which is this this sort of resting in the absolute stability of God, it means that faith therefore is really a form of perception. So what I’m trying to do, if I try to talk to people about..if I’m talking to people who have faith, we’re talking about a similar perception of the world that we have.

When I’m talking to people who would say, ‘I’m not a person of faith’, I’m really saying, look again, maybe the world isn’t quite the way you’ve seen it. Maybe there is a deeper dimension to this you haven’t encountered. And that deeper dimension is by definition embodied. You know, it’s not just an idea in our heads. It’s a, it’s the entire holistic being of who we are sits in that dimension.

Gillian: Roger we’re coming to the end, and I’ve got about a thousand more questions for you. But I don’t have time to ask them. You draw on so much. You have the academic study of psychology and character strength. You’ve got a faith orientation on the world that’s inspiring. What helps you day to day in this work of being Roger Bretherton, known and loved by God, carrying on…

Roger: The most consistent practice that I have, really is, and it’s start… I mean, it’s a long story about how it landed on me. It started with my father’s death, then went into COVID lockdown, then into a period at work when I was very unhappy. And what became established in me during that period of time was a deep immersion in the mystics, really. So when I look at the, the Western mystics of the Christian tradition, they’re my tribe, really, they’re my team. It’s like they’re the Premier League and I’m a kid playing football down the park. But nevertheless I identify with them when I’m doing it. And so my daily practice is that I’m always reading a mystical classic very, very slowly. So for a while it was The Cloud of Unknowing. Then it was de Caussade’s Abandonment to Divine Providence.

At the moment I’m reading through Aelred’s book on spiritual friendship, and I, I use it like a spiritual director. So it literally pours on almost every single word and go, if I was in spiritual direction and the person said this to me, where would it land with me? What would this mean to me? What sense would this make of the day that I’ve just been through?

And so I journal like that, probably for about 2 hours every morning. So I get up quite early in the morning and I just sit with that every single morning before the working day begins. And that then leads me into a sort of contemplative practice that’s probably quite close to something like centring prayer, in which effectively I lift my heart in love to God and I allow God’s love to meet me in that moment.

Gillian: Thank so much for being on the GoHealth Podcast and sharing so much from your experience, your life, but also your academic studies. 

As ever, the conversation doesn’t end here. We’re continuing to explore character strengths and what it means to truly flourish over in the GoHealth Community, which is a space for those who are committed to living faithfully, seeking wholeness and being a healing presence in the world.

Do take a moment to check out the show notes where you’ll find links to Rodger’s work and some upcoming workshops you might find inspiring.

Huge thanks to our brilliant producer, Rosie Dawson, and to Wendy Lloyd from the Go Health Team for her creativity and dedication to this podcast and the wider series. You know, if today’s episode has spoken to you, please share it with somebody who might need it, somebody who might need a bit of wisdom today and help us spread the word about the gorgeous health community where together we are learning how to flourish and bring a bit of healing into the world we share. So until next time, take good care and God Bless. Thanks so much, Roger.