Apr 15, 2020
My conversation this week could not
have come at a better time. I want to continue to bring encouraging
and inspiring content to you during these unprecedented times. We
are meant to live in community, and while we are social distancing
right now, it can feel strange as many of us are wondering how we
will communicate with our friends, family, and coworkers in new
ways. If you’re married, your marriage could feel strained because
you and your spouse are in closer proximity with each other all the
time. It’s important to be focusing on those relationships and what
matters most while we’re navigating this new and uncharted way of
staying connected. My guest this week is Nicole
Zasowski, a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist,
writer, and speaker. She lives in a small town just outside New
York City with her husband Jimmy and her two sons. With the
vulnerability of your closest friends, and the wisdom of your most
trusted resource, Nicole reveals her own story of how challenges
such as unwanted transition, multiple miscarriages, and crippling
anxiety gave her empty hands to receive everything she had been
looking for in the presence and person of Jesus Christ. She’s also
the author of the new book, From
Lost to Found: Giving Up What You Think You Want for What Will Set
You Free. I loved this conversation and listening
back to it over the last week or so has really ministered to my
heart, and I know it will to you too.
5:36 - The Nicole 101
- Nicole is a Marriage and Family
Therapist who has a private practice in Connecticut, and is also on
staff with an organization called The Hideaway
Experience, a marriage intensive that works with four to
five couples for four days.
- Nicole just published her first
book, From Lost to Found, that weaves her personal story
with her professional therapy experience and faith journey. It
wasn’t until she started writing the book that she realized she’d
been missing out on the freedom she helped her clients
find.
- Nicole specializes in working with
couples and sees individual clients of all ages. She is careful to
hear their stories in the context of the family people grew up in
or the systems they’re a part of currently.
- She studied abroad her entire
sophomore year of college, living with 50 other college students
and a faculty family from her school in one house. The experience
fostered many unique conversations with young people asking, “Who
am I?”, and “What is my purpose in life?”
- Nicole has always enjoyed
one-on-one, deep conversations with people and her classmates
turned to her as “the house therapist.” She became someone whom
many classmates trusted with their struggles.
- The faculty member who went with
the students happened to be the head of the psychology department
at Nicole’s college. She took Nicole out for coffee at the end of
the year and asked Nicole “Are you sure you don’t want to be a
therapist?” It became clear to Nicole right away that it was
exactly what she wanted to do.
- After that, Nicole changed all her
courses and went straight into a graduate program in Marriage and
Family Therapy after completing her undergraduate
degree.
- Nicole admits that therapy is a
challenging fit for her personality type. She struggles with
performance and wants to know that she can conquer a given task.
But often therapy is messy, often with no clear-cut answers. That’s
what tethers her to the hope of Christ and His
strength.
12:03 – Counseling, Transitions,
and Maintenance
- Nicole and her husband experienced
a big transition when they moved from California to Connecticut,
where Nicole built a successful private practice.
- For her own marriage, Nicole’s
attitude is that everyone is learning and growing. While she’s
learned a lot in school and through her clients, it’s an entirely
different thing to apply those lessons to her own relationships.
She recognizes that as soon as she loses touch with the fact that
she needs to learn and grow too is when she’s in
trouble.
- Nicole’s husband is familiar with
the model of therapy she uses, called Restoration Therapy, and they
work on their relationship together; they use the same model Nicole
uses for her clients.
- Many people view therapy as
something to start when things are hard. The more we can
de-stigmatize counseling and marriage counseling, the more people
will realize that grief is much more manageable when it’s something
we add to our lives as a regular habit.
- For many, starting counseling
feels like admitting that there’s a problem, but that doesn’t have
to be the case. It helps anyone in any type of relationship
navigate communication so that you’re not suddenly blindsided by a
problem in your most important relationships or in your own
personal growth.
22:51 – The Tapestry from
Loss
- In her book, Nicole shares about a
season of life where she experienced much change and loss,
including having five miscarriages. She believes wholeheartedly
that God is not the author of our suffering but loves us too much
to waste our suffering.
- Nicole was left empty-handed from
her experience, and it took idols away that she’d relied on for too
long to feel safe and secure. It was very painful, losing five
precious babies, being unsure of where her identity came from and
what would make her feel safe. She learned that “only empty hands
are open.”
- Nicole’s open hands were ready to
receive a totally different picture of who God really is. It
allowed for a deeper intimacy between Nicole and God that has
transformed loss and change into different and new blessings. It
isn’t calling tragedy good. The Bible makes a clear distinction
between something good and something being worked for
good.
- God does not want to punish us
with suffering. Our world is broken, and God’s word says we will
have trouble. He also says He’s overcome that trouble. Our hope is
not in what God can do for us but in us; that he will not waste any
of it, but use it to bring us closer to Him.
- We have a choice to run away from
God or draw close to Him. We all have different ways of running,
and Nicole’s was to perform for God. She thought she could show Him
that she’d learned her lesson, but that is exactly what kept her
from being honest with God and asking Him what He had for her in
her pain.
- God wants us to invite Him into
our feelings and the places we’ve been taught to keep closed off.
Through our pain, we can get to know God’s character. The Bible
lets us see the ways Jesus grieved during his time on Earth, even
when He knew the reason for it, or that the outcome would
eventually be victorious.
- God came into our full human
experience and gave us the gift of being allowed to grieve. We see
in Jesus’ moments of grief that He turns to God. Even when Jesus
knew he’d bring Lazarus back from death, He still paused to grieve
the pain of loss.
- The way of empathy for others is
not bearing the responsibility of fixing their grief, but rather
sitting with them while they experience it.
43:25 - Getting to Know Our
Guest
- Learn some funny and interesting
things about Nicole like what part of a kid’s movie has completely
scarred her, what one thing she’d do differently if she knew no one
would judge her, and something we’d never guess about her. Stay
tuned to hear what it means to Nicole to run a business with
purpose.
You can order Nicole’s new book
from her
website and on
Amazon!
Connect with Nicole here:
Memorable Quotes:
6:51 - “I did not realize that I was
personally missing out on the freedom that I was so passionate
about helping my clients find for many years, and it wasn’t until I
confronted my own painful season that I realized that I actually
had not been practicing any of the things that I encourage my
clients to practice.”
19:52 - “I’m more human than
therapist. I’m not sitting here with perfection and nothing to work
on myself. We are all in this journey together, and if I can use
what I’ve learned through my training and my work with couples to
help you along, just know that I need that too in my own
life.”
24:26 – “What He did through a
season of a log of change and a lot of loss in my life, was took my
hands off of false securities that were promising way more than
they could deliver but had always ‘worked’ for me in terms of
feeling valued and safe.”
25:45 - “Would I have preferred to
carry on with my comfortable way of living in my false and small
idea of who God was and with the relationship I had with Him at the
time? I thought was really good, but what I know now is so much
more of His character, and there’s such a deeper intimacy between
the two of us, and that has been the biggest gift to
me.”