The Shepherd Kings Nervous System (Excerpt)

What anandamide-The Bliss Molecule- reveals about David, and why the Psalms read like a regulation record

Originally published on Substack — read the full piece here

There's a comparison I hear often from clients who've walked with Christ for years and still find their bodies reacting to safety as though it's danger. It usually comes out something like this: "I just have such a hard time reading Scripture. I understand the stories but I don’t sense and know what seems to be just out of reach. David went through worse than I have, and he still trusted God. Why can't I just get there?"

The Problem

The problem isn't that they trust less than David did. It's that David's nervous system, like theirs, was built by years of chronic threat before it ever produced a single verse of trust. Some can say the same that sit across from me. Sometimes it’s so disturbing that Scripture seems to shout at them a different way and evoke things that are not what was intended because their inner worlds and protectors are constantly watching and waiting for the next lie or hurt to come their way. The Psalms we admire as spiritual triumph are, when read closely, ingested and connected with are a record of a system learning to regulate in real time, not evidence that he arrived somewhere they haven't.

Man our inner critics are so hard on us.

The System

David's system wasn't shaped in a palace. Air Conditioning was a passing storm. Bathing was in a mountain stream. Communication from others was an echo off the rock walls as he passed them by in narrow valleys. His system was shaped alone, outdoors, for years, doing the family's least prestigious job — watching sheep. Later Christ would note that he was doing the same to illustrate the peoples need for care, saving, and eventually a sacrificial Lamb that takes away the sins of the World. Prolonged solitude and direct exposure to real predatory threat — he killed a lion and a bear defending the flock — are exactly the conditions that shape a stress-response system early, and permanently. Before he ever entered Saul's court, he was already known as a skilled harpist. He didn't discover music's calming effect on Saul by accident. He'd already been using rhythmic, self-generated sound on himself — alone, with no one there to co-regulate him.

The Pattern

Years later, hunted and grieving at Ziklag, that same system produces the cave psalms — raw, unresolved complaint, written while the collapse is still happening. And the lament structure that runs through roughly a third of the Psalter isn't decoration. It's a pattern: voice the distress in full, then turn toward trust, before the crisis resolves. That's not spiritual bypass. It may be the most complete regulation practice available to a man with no other tools.

The full piece walks through David's formation as a shepherd, the chronic threat of his fugitive years, what the lament structure reveals about processing pain instead of avoiding it, and how to hold his failure with Bathsheba honestly — naming it for what Scripture itself calls it — without losing the deeper pattern underneath it.

Read the full piece on Substack →

If you recognize this pattern in your own life — a body that stays on alert long after the danger has passed, faith that feels like it should be further along than it is — this is the work I do every week from a neurotheological framework that takes both your nervous system and your faith seriously.