29: Joy vs. Fear House (Series Compilation)

[00:00] Stephanie: Welcome to the On the Trail podcast. For this week’s compilation episode, we are revisiting the joy and fear house series. Father, you were raised with a very voluntarist mindset. Please explain. What is voluntarism?

[00:12] Marcus: What is voluntarism? Well, I didn’t know I was a voluntarist, but all of us evangelicals were, we just didn’t know it. So volunteerism is a philosophical system that says “the will”. You can hear that latin word volae? What is the Latin word? Do you remember?

[00:27] Stephanie: Voluntas?

[00:29] Marcus:  Yeah, Voluntas. So you can kind of hear that latin word for “the will” in there. And it’s the idea that our life choices are at the foundation and heart of what it means to be human. Well, there’s obviously a lot of truth to that, right? Making choices forms a lot of the things that we do.

And so voluntarism basically says that believe the right things, make the right choices, and things will change, your life will be better. And so we are taught to preach the truth and encourage people to make choices based on that. But that was it, that was the whole system. It was kind of like here, you know, believe the right things, make the right choices, and everything will change.

So that’s essentially what volunteerism is and even my own father, we were all raised this way. You know he used to say all the time it would be nice to write a book called believe right, live right. Because he kind of had it in his mind, if we can just get people to believe the right things then everything else will flow from there. So we have a lot of evangelical literature on, you know, common lies people believe, this is a choice, and that is a choice, and salvation is a decision.

And while there’s elements of truth in all of that it misses a whole bunch of other things. And so that’s what we’re trying to correct. So I was a happy voluntarist, didn’t know it and just went along trying hard to make my Christianity work. And then I watched these videos by Jim Wilder called “Joy Bonds” and it just sort of blew my brain up. So I was like, what is going on here?

[02:01] Stephanie:  Mind blown!

[02:03] Marcus: Yeah.

[02:03] Stephanie:Yes. And I do think it’s important to circle back just to the fact that beliefs and choice are very important. We’re not discounting that, it’s just what role do you ask them to play in transformation?

02:14] Marcus: Yeah, the problem isn’t with right beliefs and right choices. The problem is asking them to do all of the heavy lifting. It’s like, if it’s all just this then we create too much of this impression especially for what’s been called the duty generation. I mean that was a very sensible thing, okay, I’ll do my duty. You just tell me what choice to make and I’ll go make it. And so we’re finding out that there’s actually something deeper going on even in the Bible and in the brain than just beliefs and choices.

[02:44] Stephanie: So joy bonds, the two words that blew up your old paradigm. How did you discover joy bonds?

[02:51] Marcus: So in 2005, 2006, I made the transition from being a pastor to starting Deeper Walk ministries as a discipleship organization, to seeing the ministry merge with ICBC and becoming the president of that organization. And through ICBC I got access to a whole lot of training curriculum. And one of them was a set of workshops that Dr. Wilder had done at a recent ICBC conference. And it was simply called “Joy Bonds.”

And it was one of those things, you talk about dense, right? It’s one of those things where you watch for three minutes, you pause it while you take notes and think, and then you watch for five minutes and you pause it while you take notes and think. It was just so packed with vocabulary that I’d never interacted with before, brain science I’d never heard of before, and with a paradigm shift that I was unfamiliar with. As it began to sink in I was like, this is gonna change everything, and it really has.

[03:52] Stephanie: So I guess we’re holding ourselves in suspense here. What are joy bonds?

[03:56] Marcus: Yeah, what are joy bonds? Okay, so the two words. Joy basically was not on my radar. My idea of Christianity was duty and intimacy. But the idea of intimacy with God was basically spiritual disciplines, do spiritual disciplines and form your intimacy with God. And there wasn’t really a category for joy in my thinking other than I know the joy of the Lord is my strength. And they talked about joy now and then but it felt like a minor theme in the Bible it was not a central idea.

And so just that shift to the idea of wait, joy is actually central and not just icing on the cake? And then the idea that the brain is actually wired for joy and wants to run on joy, this tells me something about God, right? So if God wired my brain to run on joy, that tells me that joy was God’s plan for my life. Well, that got my attention. And then you get the word bonds which has to do with attachment. And this is the idea that below the level of cognition, shall we say, below the level of my thinking, my analyzing, and my belief system, there is my attachment system.

What I find is that my attachment system will either bond to people in fear or bond to people in joy. And so all of a sudden just learning that there was a system called the attachment system, just learning that there was something deeper going on than just my thinking was revelatory.

And then understanding the power of these attachments and how so many of my beliefs were actually driven by my bonds or my attachments, even more so than what I realized. And then you put all this together, joy and bonds, those two things just kind of blew up my little voluntarist world. And I realized, all right, I’m going to have to rethink everything. Because it’s that kind of a paradigm shifting idea.

[05:52] Stephanie:  And we’re gonna just keep unpacking and keep unpacking and it’s going to be great. So while this series is about joy, we’re going to be talking a lot about attachment and maturity, because they’re pretty inseparable. Do you have anything up front that you want to say about attachment first?

[06:10] Marcus: Yeah. So the model I taught and I thought explained everything was a worldview model that said, at the heart of culture is the worldview. And then from the worldview come the values and from the values come behavior.

But what I began to realize is that deeper than even the worldview is the belonging in a culture. In my little subgroup of my people, I have a sense of belonging that these are my people. And whoever I feel that belonging to is going to influence which worldview I embrace.

So if my parents were missionaries in tribal Africa, if you’re a member of that tribe, then your worldview and your values will tend to be similar to one another. So what is this driving force that has everybody embracing the same worldview and has everybody embracing the same values, and living in the same basic way? And the answer is that they have such a strong attachment to each other.

And so I realized that attachment was actually a deeper driving force than even the worldview itself. And so that was like, wow, I’ve really got to think about that one. Especially when it comes to Christianity because we tend to think that we became Christians to embrace the worldview and that forms our belonging.

And there is some truth to that and  sometimes we create belonging around what we believe. But even if I’m creating belonging around what I believe, it’s the belonging that ultimately fuels what is going to follow. That’s why it becomes such a powerful, transformational force.

[07:45] Stephanie: So in that sense, attachment is not like a tool in the toolkit, but it is the toolkit.

[07:51] Marcus: When I was starting out in ministry that’s the way I looked at, I’m just here to collect tools to try to help people. And so we had spiritual warfare tools, inner healing tools, Bible meditation tools, biblical study tools, and community group tools. But when we get to this idea of attachment and maturity development all of a sudden you realize, okay, this is actually the purpose of all of the tools.

The purpose of all of these other tools is to help people grow their maturity by growing their emotional capacity, and all of these things work together to do that. And that even our intimacy with God is helping us grow our capacity and our maturity. And so I’m like, okay, this kind of ties everything together and gives the goal of what this is all about.

[08:44] Stephanie: Yeah, and on that note, talk more about maturity.

[08:46] Marcus: So maturity is kind of interchangeable with the idea of emotional capacity. Life Model basically talks about six levels of maturity and this is a system that Dr. Wilder and his co workers came up with at Shepherd’s House.  The first one is in utero which we sometimes skip, but there is emotional capacity actually developing in the womb before we’re born.

[09:10] Stephanie: That’s incredible.

[09:10] Marcus:  Yeah, there’s a lot of things developing there already. And then every time you move from one stage to another it’s like a death and resurrection. So you die to living in the womb and you are born into a new reality where all of a sudden everything has changed. You’ve got to grow into this new reality. And as an infant I can’t take care of anything. I need somebody else to recognize what’s going on, meet me in that problem and take care of me. At the infant level I just need somebody else to recognize it and to take care of it. Then I die to being an infant and I am born into the child level years.

That happens when I’m weaned. I’m actually getting to the point where I’m eating food and feeding myself and not taking a bottle, not on the breast kind of thing. So now I am moving to a stage where I need to learn how to take care of myself. I have to dress myself, I have to learn how to eat, I have to learn how to go potty and all those things. But also as I progress I have to learn how to take care of my own emotions. So just like I need help with potty training, with walking, eating, dressing, and all those other things, I’m going to need help with my learning emotional regulation. So those are all child level skills.

And then I hit puberty, I died of being a child and I am born into this world of adults. And what’s supposed to happen now, is that I am well practiced at taking care of my own emotional needs so now I am ready to take care of two people at the same time. I can not only make sure I’m okay, but I can make sure that we’re both okay. Like we can do something together and find a win,win together.

And my whole brain system goes through a major renovation at puberty where my core identity is no longer coming from my parents, but it’s coming from my peers. And that’s not just a cultural thing. That’s actually a brain thing that my brain is more wired to my group. And that brings us right back to belonging and attachment. Who I am attached to, who I see as my people will give me my identity.

So in classic high school terms, if I’m a nerd, these are my people and I see myself there. If I’m an athlete, those are my people, or if I’m in the drama group, or whatever group it is, these are my people? Well, as soon as you start thinking that I belong with them and  these are my people, you are now predisposed to embrace a worldview and a value system that goes with those people.

And so belonging leads to worldview, which leads to values, and creates the behavior, it drives things. The Bible warns us we have to be very, very careful who we bond to and who we attach to because it’s going to have such a powerful influence on the way we live.

The other two things just to touch on briefly, are parent level and elder level. It’s not when you get married. It’s when you have your first baby that you go from adult to parent, because now you’re taking care of not just two adults, but you’re actually passing on life. And again, you die of being an adult to become a parent and then you die to being a parent to becoming an elder.

And having gone through this recently myself I was a little surprised at how hard it was. Like there was a real sense of, this stage of life is over and there is a new calling on me, who I am and how to go through that. And I was a little surprised at how big of a transition that actually was.

[12:44] Stephanie: That was an excellent crash course in the maturity levels. We’ll keep talking and these things will keep coming up throughout our conversations I am sure, but where can people go if they want more right now?

[12:58] Marcus:  Well Life Model’s core book is Living From The Heart Jesus Gave You. And so if you want the core Life Model stuff, go there. If you want to get a summary of all this that Jim and I wrote together, Rare Leadership, that actually has the fullest explanation of everything that I just walked through. So I would recommend people go there.

[13:19] Stephanie:  Awesome. Thank you. We are kind of coming up to the end of the episode here. Before we get Dad’s final thoughts, I just want to remind everyone to check out the free joy building tool, 4habits.org. It is simple, it is fun and effective, and I hope you enjoy it. Father, do you have any final thoughts for this episode and maybe a vision for what you want to do with the series?

[13:42] Marcus: Well, one of the reasons I want to camp out here is because Joy Bonds sort of messed with my head and messed with my world. It’s like, okay, I’ve got to rethink everything. I sort of want to take people on that journey with me of what it was like to try to rethink all of this. How to re-envision not only how I tick, but how does Christianity work and how does this all come together? So that’s sort of the journey I’m hoping that we’ll go on and I am looking forward to it, it should be fun.

[14:08] Stephanie: Well my father, last episode we talked about joy bonds and we’re going to just keep continuing to talk about joy. But in this episode we’re going to look at the flip side. There are two fuels our brains can run on, joy and fear. So we’re going to be talking about the fear fuel today.

[14:28] Marcus: Yeah, the fuel of fear. There are a couple of things that really grabbed a hold of my mental thought life on this one. Joy is largely in the front of my brain and fear is largely in the back of the brain. I like the visual that when I am running on the fuel of joy then I stay in the front part of my brain. Well, the front part of my brain is where the command center of my brain is located that remembers who I am and how it’s like me to act. And so when I can be in that part of my brain not only do I live out of my joyful self, but I live out of my relational self, and my true self.

When I don’t live from that part of my brain I get stuck in the back. And when I get stuck in the back that means I’m living out of fear. When I live out of fear then I am in problem solving mode and I treat people like problems to solve, and I will shut down relationally or blow up relationally. I’m not my relational self and this made so much sense. It was really frustrating that as a pastor who’s supposed to be modeling spiritual maturity for people, I could go from being the kind of person who seemed to have it all together, to completely falling apart. And it happened so quickly that I would literally feel like a different person.

And you get done with something and you regret it and you’re going, who was that? You know what was happening there? So the brain picture of leaving the part of my brain that remembered who I was and I lost access to that part of my brain. And that I was functioning at the back of my brain, it was just revolutionary for me. It just made so much sense out of the whole mess. And I’m like, okay, I see what’s going on. I have a hole in my maturity development. When I fall into that hole I turn into a different person and I’m like well, that didn’t fix the problem. So it gave me something to work on and a completely different strategy for how to try to address those issues than I would have without it.

[16:40] Stephanie: Yeah. As we were talking about this series I just kept hearing this famous quote from the book Dune, “Fear is the mind killer.” That works really well actually. And I want you to talk more about the science of joy and fear. And I know you’ve said that joy builds brain cells and fear destroys brain cells. And I think it was the fear destroys brain cells part that I thought, yes, fear is the mind killer.

[17:08] Marcus:  Yes it is true at that level. So one of the things I learned from Dr. Wilder was that if I go to sleep in a state of anxiety, it’s like cortisol is going to pump through my brain all night long, and it’s going to kill all the new growth. And so it really does destroy brain cells. And one of the things we want to do here is to distinguish between fear and anxiety, then explain what a fear bond is versus what a joy bond is. So let me start with the difference between fear and anxiety. Anxiety is belief based and comes when I am thinking about the problems in my life and imagining what could happen.

And so beliefs that trigger anxiety almost always start with, “What if”? What if this happens? What if that happens? So I think of feeling like Peter stepping out of the boat into the storm. And then he looks around and he starts going well, wait a second, what’s going on here? I can actually start to have anxiety thinking about, “what if” I get caught in this situation? And so you think about the things that trigger it and it’s when we’re thinking about the future. And like, what if this relationship doesn’t work? What if I never find a relationship? What if the finances don’t come together? What if my finances are ruined?

And what happens is the more often my brain goes down that pattern of the “what if” anxiety, then that becomes a habit. And so habits are formed in the brain as neurons connect together and form chains. Every time I do something it’s like these neurons connect and form a chain. And the more often that I do it the stronger that chain gets.

Then that chain gets wrapped with white matter. And once that chain gets wrapped with white matter I start doing things almost automatically. That’s why we call it a habit. It’s now become an automatic reaction and I’m not thinking about it anymore. So that can happen with my thought life, where I have literally trained myself to go in a negative direction so much that I’m going to have to do something to break that.

And what we found is that the only way to break a bad habit is to build a new one. So I can’t just say, ”I’m going to stop that, I’m going to stop that, I’m going to stop that.” I actually have to build a new neuro highway, wrap that thing in white matter, and build new habits and new patterns in my life.

And that’s why we’re focusing on joy here, because I would have thought that the opposite of anxiety was faith. But what I realized is that the part of me that exercises faith and that trusts God is the command center in the front part of my brain. So in other words, to get to the part of myself that trusts God to believe and to have faith, I’ve got to get to that relational center. Which means I’ve got to find joy. And so that’s why joy is actually the antidote to fear at a more primal level than even faith.

[19:58] Stephanie: That’s so fascinating on so many levels. As you read the Bible and  look for all the places that joy will start popping out even more, I love it. Can you explain what a fear bond is?

[20:14] Marcus: Yeah. So a fear bond is where I have an attachment with somebody that is based on fear rather than joy. So this can look a lot of different ways. I think of it this way, that among your friends in school there are some people that when you see them you light up with energy and you’re not choosing to do it, like, oh, it’s them I’m going to choose to light up with energy.

There’s just this automatic joy because you’ve seen that friend. Now there are other people who walk up to you and you have a different reaction, and it actually can suck the life out of you a little bit because you know that your problems are about to get bigger. Or at least you believe your problems are about to get bigger. So you can even picture when your cell phone lights up, there are some names that pop up on the screen and it’s like, yay. And there’s others that pop up and part of you just sort of goes down.

So when I get in a fear bond with somebody what happens is I don’t believe they are going to be happy to see me. Or I don’t think they’re going to be happy to see me unless, unless I act a certain way, unless I wear a mask, or unless I pretend to be a certain way. In other words, I’m going to have to manage this person.

I can’t just relate to them and be myself around them. They’re going to have to be managed. And so a fear bond always leads me to want to manage people. So what happens is that if you find you’re managing everybody in your life, it means that your brain has just learned a fear bond. And one of the things we look at is how do we begin to transform these fear bonds into joy bonds

[21:48] Stephanie: Yeah. Well, and that pattern of fear bonding leads to fear mapping. And do you want to talk more about that? And maybe how your brain is like an amplifier?

[21:57] Marcus: Yeah. So if I’m fear bonded with a lot of people then what happens is my brain learns, oh, that’s what we’re looking for, we’re looking for things to be afraid of. And since my brain is a natural amplifier, it learns very quickly what it is you look for most naturally and says, “Okay, I can find that for you.” And so if your brain learns we’re supposed to look for things that make us afraid, it’ll get really good at finding things that make you afraid. But if your brain learns we’re supposed to look for things that we can be grateful for and appreciate, then your brain will learn oh, yeah, I can find those things, too.

And the story it always reminds me of is a friend of mine who years ago sold tractors. He said that when he started selling tractors the thing that amazed him the most was how many tractors he started to notice. He had driven by this place all of the time and never even noticed them before. But now that tractors was his business his brain began to amplify it and he started noticing tractors everywhere. So you’ve probably had an experience like that before.

[23:00] Stephanie: Yeah. Or even like we have a new car and it’s this color, and now all of a sudden I’m seeing that color car everywhere. We don’t actually get new cars, we get used cars, so it’s not like it’s just the new thing on the market.

[23:14] Marcus:And so what happens is your brain is learning what it’s supposed to amplify. Amplify means what is it supposed to make big? What is it supposed to bring into focus for you? And so if I have developed fear bonds as the habit in my life then my brain has learned I need to fear map the world. And mapping the world means I am scanning it for what there is to fear. If I am scanning my environment constantly for what there is to fear, I’m going to find it.

And if I don’t see it right away then my anxiety will kick in and I’m going, “Yeah, well, I can imagine it being here, I can imagine it coming there”.  I’m just waiting for the other shoe to drop and all these other things that are now coming. Before I know it I’m now living in a very dark place internally that can be very difficult to get out of because you can’t just choose your way out of that sometimes. .

[24:08] Stephanie: And the good news is you can also with your joy bonds, have joy mapping and appreciation mapping. And it’s also not an all or nothing experience. Our capacity affects this and our attachments affect that.. Can you talk more about fear and joy bonds, maybe from the angle of the window of tolerance?

[24:28] Marcus: Yeah. Daniel Siegel is one of the neuroscientists that informed the Life Model development talks about the window of tolerance. And what he means by that is how much emotional weight can I tolerate before things start falling apart? And so when I talk about emotional capacity, the window of tolerance is the same thing.

So the window of tolerance is how much emotional weight can I handle before I am outside of that window? And if I get outside of that window that’s when things start shutting down and things start blowing up. I start melting down, bad things start happening, and I turn into a different person. All those bad things happen when I get outside that window.

So maturity can be thought of as the process of growing the size of my window of tolerance so that I can handle more and more emotional weight. So when you go from 15 pounds to 20 pounds to 25 pounds, you are doing the same thing. You’re trying to grow that capacity. The other thing you’re trying to do is develop the skills that allow you to get back once you’ve gotten outside of that.

So there are some skills that seem obvious once you hear them but at first I didn’t even think about them. And that is one of the reasons why we need to take a break now and then and one of the reasons why we need a breather. We can’t just keep plowing on and plowing on, at some point we have to take breaks.

If we don’t then we’re going to find ourselves just constantly living outside of that window of tolerance. And if you’re constantly living on the edge of your emotional capacity or constantly living just beyond the edge of your emotional capacity, you’re going to be constantly in a state of emotional upset.

And when you’re right on the edge like that it doesn’t take as much to blow up at people. It doesn’t take as much to melt down in tears. It doesn’t take as much to get stuck in anxiety and fear because I am keeping myself on the edge of my capacity all of the time. So one of the things we have to do is not only grow that emotional capacity but we also have to learn when to take breaks.

[26:42] Stephanie: And it’s so biblical, it’s so biblical.

[26:45] Marcus: I mean, something like Sabbath, I don’t know?

[26:47] Stephanie:  Yeah, something like Sabbath and don’t cut the corners of your fields and like giving the land time to rest. All the different holidays and festivals. Yes, and again, Sabbath.

[27:02] Marcus: Yeah. And I think that sometimes we miss that rest biblically is actually an act of worship. Because when I rest, what I’m doing is I am saying with my actions that I’m trusting God to take care of me. I don’t have to do everything and that’s huge, right? Because all of us have that temptation that if I don’t trust God then it’s all on me, and I can’t afford to rest because it’s all on me. And so there is something to this idea of establishing a rhythm in our lives.

And so we talk about knowing when to take a break, knowing how to have this kind of a rhythm that allows me to keep going. So it’s like we tell the staff at Deeper Walk all the time, we want you to have a rhythm because we want you here for a long time. We don’t want to just chew you up and spit you out and burn you out fast. We want people to want to work here and to find a rhythm that they can maintain for a long time.

[27:56] Stephanie:  So before we have our closing thoughts I have another question that I want to make sure we get to. And that is, you have a subheading in The 4 Habits of Joy- Filled People that I love. You talk about tearing down the house of fear and I just love that imagery. Could you talk more about that imagery?

[28:13] Marcus: So in our new book, The 4 Habits of Joy-Filled People, the core image that Chris and I use is that we all have an inner world. And in our inner world you could think of it as like, the house in which I live. It’s either going to be a fear house or a joy house or some kind of a hybrid in between. But to the extent that it is a fear house, I’m not going to want to spend much time there.

And so you think about it, if I have a fear house in my inner world then I’m probably going to develop a pretty avoidant lifestyle. I’m not going to want to be alone with my thoughts. I’m not going to want to be alone with myself. I’m not going to want to be quiet, I’m not going to want peace. I have to keep myself distracted, I have to keep myself busy and I have to keep things coming in because if I’m alone with myself, I’m stuck here in this house of fear. Well, who wants that, right?

And so one of the things that we find is a lot of people with a house of fear have never learned to rest, and they have never learned to be quiet or how to turn off the noise and to detach from things. And that’s why it can be a skill and it can become a habit that we have to learn to try to cope with that.

So what we want instead in our inner world is to have a joy house. To tear down that fear house and to build a joy house which is a place that we like being. And when that’s the case then we can develop much less avoidant lifestyles and learn to quiet, and be at peace much more readily.

[29:45] Stephanie: And that’s our goal as we’re exploring this on the trail. We are gonna be tearing down some houses of fear and  building up some houses of joy, I’m excited for it. So as we come up to the end of this episode and before we get dad’s final thoughts, I just want to remind you to check out the free joy building tool at 4habits.org, And I hope you have so much fun using it to build your joy capacity. So, mi papá, any final thoughts for this episode?

[30:14] Marcus:As I think about this there’s so many different directions it can go but one of the reasons is personal. For most of my life I didn’t think I had any issues.  I thought I was about as normal as a normal person could be.  And then what happened is as I got into parenting and then into leadership, I started adding more and more weight to my life. It’s like I got to handle the weight from all the expectations at church and handle the weight of all the expectations.

And what happens as you start adding more and more weight, your margin gets thinner and thinner. I started developing anxiety and I had never been an anxious person. And so now I’m like, okay, what’s going on here? And what I realized was I just maxed out my capacity. I’d maxed it out and I didn’t realize what was going on. I needed to kind of reinvent my approach to life. It wasn’t just about taking thoughts captive but that was part of it. There was going to be a whole new approach to life that I was going to have to come to understand. So that’s part of what I wanted to share with folks.

[31:22] Stephanie: Today for our episode we are talking about building a joy house. Before we get into that do you want to describe where that concept came from? What is building a joy house?

[31:34] Marcus: The idea of joy houses. It sounds like just a typical metaphor but through the years I’ve worked with a lot of folks who’ve had dissociative identities, or multiple personalities. And what I found is that most of them had inner worlds.

And there was a classic case where one person when we first met they were basically living in dungeons in their inner world. I mean all the “kids” were trapped in these dungeons and they were just living with constant torment. I would talk about a fear house and Jesus showed up, he unlocked the gates, he let them free, and they didn’t leave because they were so scared. He eventually helped them get out of there and to come to this beautiful place where he provided for them a different house.

And this house was like a castle, like an Irish or a Scottish castle and it was just gorgeous. It was a place where they could live. And from there now the “kids” could live a life of adventure and play, they all had pets, and they all did different things. I found that Jesus was interested in them having a positive, healthy, happy inner world in which to live.

And I have found to a larger extent essentially in working with people who have these really severe issues like this, it’s often just a model of what all of us go through, just with more clarity and intensity.

And so I realized that’s a pretty good metaphor for all of us. We all need to be careful of what our inner world turns into and that it’s a place that we like to spend time. And if it is, then it becomes the source of a lot of adventure and the source of intimacy with God. And if it’s not, then it’s something we want to avoid or someplace we feel trapped.

[33:21] Stephanie: Yeah, I love the imagery. So building a joy house in our terms can be thought of as building resilience. And we’ve talked a lot about resilience on this podcast but could you talk more about it from that perspective? And I know in the last episode I think we talked about your window of tolerance. So what is a window of tolerance? What does it look like to grow that?

[33:44] Marcus: So the window of tolerance is essentially the measure of how much upset emotion you can handle and absorb without it really affecting you or throwing you off. And you can begin to tell when it has affected you because you turn into a different person, it’s like you go from being friendly to being kind of surly. You go from being engaged to being shut down. Something changes very rapidly because you reach the edge of your window of capacity.

I think of this as like cups, and the water or liquid that you put into the cups represents how much stress I can handle, or how much emotional upset I can handle before that cup overflows. And so there’s a couple of problems.

One is that a lot of us live right on the edge of our window of tolerance all of the time. And because of that it just doesn’t take much to push us past the edge. And so there are two basic solutions here.

One is, I need to take a break and give myself a break to pull back from the edge. And that requires a rhythm. It requires some patterning in my life that gives me enough time off to pull away from the edge like that.

And the other is, I need to do things like calming, appreciating, and storytelling. And attacking the toxic thinking to begin to grow my window of tolerance so that it takes more and more to overwhelm me. So those are the two things. I want to grow it and I want to give myself adequate rest and adequate breaks so I’m not constantly on the edge of it.

[35:24] Stephanie: And developing recovery skills which would be the rest and such.

So I was thinking that we started the year off talking about building bounce and the “ABC’s” of Building Bounce, that I think it’s really appropriate for right now. Could you give an overview of the “ABC’s” of Building Bounce?

[35:44] Marcus:  Yeah. I was working with Stefanie Hinman who is an art therapist and  deals with a lot of children who are trying to rebuild their capacity that maybe they missed. In talking through it we landed on “ABC”  which is a real simple way to remember what it is.

And “A” is appreciation and quieting. And those two always go together, appreciation and quieting because after I’ve felt the joy of appreciation it’s easier to quiet. And sometimes it’s easier to appreciate once I have quieted. So those two things always go together and I look at them like flip sides of the same coin. That is, sometimes I quiet in order to appreciate and then when I’m done, it’s easy to quiet again. Sometimes I appreciate first, and then it’s easier to quiet afterwards.

So you’ll even see this in seminars and things where people will gather. They’ll tell funny stories to each other or happy stories and you can feel the energy in the room getting really light and happy. And then afterwards it’s just much easier for them to open up headspace because they are now further away from the edge of their window of tolerance than they were before. They’ve got a little more capacity. And so we’ve all felt that, where I had some joy and after the joy I had more quiet. So that’s the “A”, appreciation and  quieting, they always go together.

The “B” is beliefs. And this is the idea that I often rob myself of joy and rob myself of things because my mindset is in these dark places. It’s like the person living in a dungeon and I’m just always in darkness in my thoughts, or I’m always in fear anticipating the “what if’s” of life. So we need to deal with “B”, beliefs.

Then “C” is connections and the idea that I have to grow capacity relationally. I don’t just hold myself up in a room and do a whole bunch of emotional push ups. You know, come out and go, “Look at me, I am now an emotional Superman.” The only way you can do this is relationally.

And so you have to have connections with people just to practice a lot of these skills. Also being with people where we feel safe, calm, and connected. Those three words, safe, calm, and connected have a lot to do with how quickly I grow my emotional capacity. And then we put into that connecting with God.

And there are a lot of us who don’t feel safe, calm, and connected with God, and that creates a lot of our emotional problems. So we have to find ways to overcome the fears we have with God so that we can have a stable relationship with him.

[38:19] Stephanie: Well, and that’s so key and going back to the dungeons versus castle metaphor, the point there isn’t just generic safety. Like, oh, you’re not in a scary place and now you’re in a happy place, but it’s also the happy places where you are spending time with Jesus. Part of building resilience and building your joy house is building a house with Jesus and spending time with him there. So, yes, thank you.

So with the “ABC’s” of Building Bounce, that was just a quick fire hose overview. We have several episodes that just go through each of those points but I wanted to make sure if you haven’t heard that before, you will know that it exists.

You can go back and listen to those or get the book Building Bounce and that will help you build your resilience even more. So the book that just came out, Dad, The Four Habits of Joy-Filled People, you wrote with Chris Coursey and you actually use the joy house as a central theme here. And your acrostic is the Spanish word Casa, which means house. So would you give us an overview of CASA? And I’ll just add that dad and Chris did a little mini podcast series that it’s not out yet, and we’ll let you know when it’s out. But it is going to take you step by step through CASA as well but we’re just going to do an overview here.

[39:44] Marcus: Yeah, absolutely. So, Chris and I got together at the Hobart property in February where Deeper Walk has acquired a building. Ben was there doing the production work and we recorded some podcasts. I think actually Moody is going to be distributing those. But the CASA acrostic is going to sound familiar with the “ABC” because there’s a lot of overlap. We said “A” is appreciation and quieting, “C” is calming. So that’s the foundation, there’s no way around it. So that’s always going to be the foundation of building resilience, calming or quieting, and appreciating.

Then the “S” is new and that is the idea of storytelling. And it was really inspired by the fact that when THRIVEtoday does their trainings they want to teach people how to bounce back from upsetting emotions. They realized that one of the ways that our brain builds resilience is that it collects stories of the times that we successfully navigated hard emotions.

And so when I feel that emotion, if the only stories that pop up are stories of times that emotion overwhelmed me, then I’m in trouble. But if I feel an emotion and what pops up are memories of the times that I felt that emotion and I was still okay, and acted like myself, it didn’t overwhelm me and I was able to bounce back quickly. Then I’m less intimidated by the emotion. So the idea here is collecting stories. Now I am gonna camp out on storytelling.

[41:21] Stephanie: I was gonna ask you to, so thank you.

[41:24] Marcus:I was doing a leadership training event recently and I did a little experiment. I had the people go around in the group and tell a story and I assigned different emotions. Like, tell me a story about feeling disgust. Tell me one about feeling sadness. And what I found  interesting was that everyone in the room except for one person, their story went something like this.

So I experienced this really bad thing. It made me feel this really bad emotion and that’s why I am the way I am right now. That’s an interesting pattern to the story, right? I experienced this bad thing, I felt this bad emotion, and essentially that’s why I am messed up. Now, if that’s the conclusion of your story then your brain is telling yourself over and over again, you’re a messed up person and you will always be a messed up person.

Because every time you feel this emotion it’s a sign that you’re messed up. I was like, that’s not really the messages we want going on in our brains. So we teach a STEP method. It literally is the word STEP, an acrostic method on how to tell a helpful story.

And that is, what’s the setting of the story you’re going to tell? What’s the emotion that got triggered? And then what’s the point you want to make?  And we say the point should either be that this is how I handled it well or this is how I bounced back from it. Or I didn’t necessarily handle it well but this is the lesson that I’ve learned. What we don’t want to do is make the point of the story, that’s why I messed up or that’s why I don’t function well.

[43:00] Stephanie: You want the story to end in hope.

[43:01] Marcus: You want the story to end in hope. You want the story to end that you were able to get through that emotion and be okay.

[43:08] Stephanie: Could you give us an example of a story?

[43:11] Marcus: Sure. So my go to illustration on this is being at a restaurant and it was a buffet and I noticed that they had chocolate mousse. I made a mental note that I wanted to go back and get this chocolate mousse for dessert. So the setting is, I was at a restaurant with some friends. The trigger was that I went back and got myself the chocolate mousse, took my first bite, and almost spit it out in front of everybody. Because it wasn’t chocolate mousse, it was liver pate.

I know, it was just greasy, the opposite of chocolate mousse. And it created the emotion of disgust. My whole body felt like retching a little bit because that’s what disgust is, it makes you want to vomit. So it’s like I was thinking, oh, yuck, I want to get this taste out of my mouth.  And then I noticed that everybody’s laughing and they’re all like, ah, that’s so funny.

So at this point what am I going to do? I can get mad at them, like why are you laughing at me? But I realized it is kind of funny, right? This is pretty funny. So I was able to laugh with them. I went to the bathroom, gargled a little bit and I went back and got a drink of something else and I found the actual chocolate mousse. All ended well.

But it was a time of feeling disgust but realizing I don’t have to let disgust take me to this thought of, oh, life is unfair. You know, why is everything like this? You could take a story like this and go in a direction of, you know, why does this always happen to me? Life isn’t fair and why are people laughing at me? And you could take it in a very negative direction. So that’s why I’m making the point that I was able to stay myself. I was able to laugh about it with them, go fix the situation, get what I wanted, and realize I was okay.

[45:13] Stephanie: Very good, thank you. All right any more on storytelling?

[45:17] Marcus: Well, it’s probably enough for now. There’s a lot like I said, THRIVEtoday does a lot of great stuff with storytelling.

[45:23] Stephanie: And to clarify, THRIVEtoday is Chris Coursey.

[45:26] Marcus: Yeah. Co-author Chris Coursey is the president of THRIVEToday. So that’s kind of where that idea came from. So we have calming and appreciating, “C.A”, storytelling, which is the “S”, and then the next thing  is attacking toxic thinking. So you’re going to see the beliefs from the “ABC”model here. In some ways storytelling is about beliefs too, it’s like let’s get our story straight.

What is it that we want to tell ourselves? The idea of attacking toxic thinking really hit home for me. The first time I was intentionally trying to practice appreciation I wanted to not just sip down my coffee as fast as possible to get on with my day. I want to appreciate it, right? So I’m holding my cup of coffee and feeling the cool of the ceramic and smelling the aroma. This whole thing goes on about 2 seconds and the thought comes into my head, this is the stupidest thing you’ve ever done.

Okay, so that’s what I mean by an attack. I was attacked by a toxic thought, this is the stupidest thing you’ve ever done. And I realized how much of the good things I try to do in life get sabotaged because I don’t recognize the toxic thinking. I don’t take those thoughts captive. I was thinking about this yesterday, when I was in little league playing baseball my dad gave me Maxwell Maltz, Psycho-Cybernetics. It had lots of stories in there of professional athletes who would picture themselves doing things perfectly over and over and over again. My dad encouraged me ( I was a pitcher ) before every pitch, just take 2 seconds to picture myself making the perfect pitch.

Now that wasn’t the same pitch every time, it wasn’t like, right down the middle. It was like, I want this one high, inside, and fast. I want this one low, outside, and slow. It’s like, what are you going to do? Picture yourself doing it perfectly, then do it. And what I found was when I struggled with my pitching I couldn’t actually do that. It was really, really hard for me to visualize myself doing it correctly.

And I found a very real connection here between the confidence with which I lived, the confidence with which I did these things, and the mental pictures that were driving the way it lives. So when we talk about attacking toxic thinking that’s kind of it. We’re talking about recognizing those mental images and those quick stabbing thoughts that suck the life out of us and replacing those as quickly as possible.

[48:00] Stephanie: Well, I’m excited to hear more about that in the future. For now I do want to ask where did these four come from? Did you just pick four that spell CASA?

[48:08] Marcus: Yeah, I really wanted CASA, it is kind of funny. The acrostic always comes last just so people understand how this works. You attack a subject, you come down with the principles, and then once you’ve written out all the principles I will literally put, what are four or five possible words that sum up that principle? And then I look to see if there’s a pattern among those words that I can make spell something. So it’s never like, oh, hey, let’s do this. These come from the fact that we try not to overwhelm people. We don’t want to say, “Here’s 17 principles for living a happier life,” when four is a good number.

We are also trying to make this a book that you could give to a non-Christian audience. So we left out what would normally be the fifth part here and that is our connection to God. People who have a joy bond with God, generally do much better with their emotional capacity than people who have a fear bond with God. And so if I could have put anything else in this book, that would have been in there, but it’s because of the audience.

[49:15] Stephanie: That’s really good to know and we are coming up to the end of the episode. Before we get Dad’s final thoughts it feels especially appropriate considering today’s topic, to remind everyone that we have a free tool for you that you can access today. It’s never too late to grow your capacity to feel joy because your brain has the capacity to grow joy as long as you live, it only takes 28 days to form a new habit.

THRIVEtoday and Deeper Walk have partnered to put together a 28 day joy challenge for you. You can sign up for free at 4habits.org. When you sign up you’ll receive 28 days of simple joy exercises straight to your inbox. Plus, you can choose your favorite printable calendar for a physical reminder about each day’s exercise. I hope you accept the challenge and have so much fun using it to build your joy capacity. So, my Father, any final thoughts for the episode?

[50:09] Marcus: All right, so you’re going to appreciate this. We’ve had a cat in the room the whole time we’ve been doing this. He’s a very busy, active cat. We used to have a cat and we’re about to get another one.

[50:20] Stephanie:  Yes, this is my roommate’s cat who’s in the room with us

[50:24] Marcus: Okay. So one of the things I’ve often noticed about animals and having a pet, and if you’ve had pets, you’ve probably noticed this. Cats act like cats, right? Dogs act like dogs. I never walk into a room and see a cat acting like a dog. I don’t run in and say, “Why is the dog suddenly acting like a leopard?” That doesn’t happen, they act like themselves. And I find that humans are the one group that has trouble sometimes acting like ourselves. When I have trouble acting like myself it’s a sign that I have an emotional capacity issue that needs addressed.

If I feel like I’ve got to wear a mask, if I have to pretend, if I just am not being myself, it is usually a sign that I have an emotional capacity issue that needs to be addressed. So I think the encouragement today is when you see animals, you say the animal acts like himself, maybe I should try acting like myself today and see how that goes. It’s a better game plan.

[51:23] Stephanie: When we were plotting out our episodes you called this one taming the amygdala, how very “sciency” of you. So what do you want to tell us about the amygdala and our emotions?

[51:35] Marcus:I remember watching Dr. Wilder doing a conference from the 1990s I think, and it was on joy bonds versus fear bonds. And he had so much brain science in there and I never heard any of it before. And so it was like, listen for two minutes, pause, take notes, think, listen for three minutes, pause. And he’s throwing around terms like amygdala and cortex.

And I’m like, I don’t know my cortex from my nucleus accumbens. I don’t know what’s going on with all these words. So that’s kind of where the whole journey started. Everything I know about the brain honestly has come just from studying Jim’s stuff.

And so what he’s told me is that the amygdala is basically level two of the joy elevator. So if you think about the joy elevator as having a first floor which would be attachment. I think of the first floor like a light bulb in the brain. It lights up when I feel like being with somebody or lights up when somebody or something becomes personal to me.

For example, you are walking through a crowded city and most people are just sort of background until all of a sudden, somebody starts walking towards you. And now all of a sudden they become personal to you. And so once they become personal to you it goes to level two which is the amygdala. That is what we tend to think of as our fight or flight center.

But the amygdala’s job is to give you a quick kind of triage on this thing that just became personal to you. And it can only do one of three assessments. This is either good, this is bad, or this is scary. And it will quickly make that assessment. It does it faster than you can think about it and then it sends it on up. And so it gets up to level three of this joy elevator and that’s where you’re reading people.

So let’s say that somebody’s walking towards you and it lights up as this is bad. Okay, it’s gonna send that signal up and now you’re going to start reading this person’s body language. And bad triggers low energy emotions in us like shame, disgust, sadness, or despair. So I might feel any of those emotions based on how I read this person coming at me. I could see someone coming and feel shame like, oh no, I can’t believe they saw me,  I’m not dressed right or whatever it is.

I could have the shame reaction at somebody coming. I could have a disgust reaction like, oh, I hope that person doesn’t get around here or I could have a sadness reaction. Maybe they remind me of somebody or maybe they trigger a memory that I’m not even conscious of what memory is getting triggered. I just know something about them coming is making me sad.

And so when you look at it that way it could also send a high energy emotion trigger which would be fear and anger. And so now my higher level brain functions have to deal with that based on what the amygdala is doing. And based on how well I can handle the signals from my amygdala depends on how well I’m going to stay myself. Acting like myself, remaining relational, and operating from those higher level brain functions. So there you go, there’s my brain science summary for the day.

[54:58] Stephanie:  Okay, awesome. Well, and so what you just described are what you call the SAD, SAD emotions. Sometimes people say the six big negative emotions or the protector emotions. Do you want to explain where that comes from?

[55:12] Marcus: Yeah. So they are directly related to the amygdala. So we sometimes talk about the brain having an on/ off switch. Chris Coursey calls it the joy switch. And when this switch is on it means the amygdala is sending a good signal, everything is okay. It can also be on even if the amygdala is sending a bad or scary signal, if I have enough capacity to keep it on and it doesn’t overwhelm me. That can be because I’m getting a very mild signal or it can be that I just have the capacity to deal with the signal that’s being sent.

Now, the question was, where does SAD, SAD come from? They come from the amygdala that when the amygdala triggers something as bad ( It can trigger good, bad, or scary. ) it gives us the four low energy emotions of these big six. If it triggers something as scary, that’s what gives us the two high energy emotions. So just to help myself remember those I came up with SAD, SAD.

Like, what are these big six again? And I start with the “S” is sadness, that’s low energy. “A” is anger, that’s high energy.  Disgust, that’s low energy. Shame, low energy. Then fear, afraid or anxiety, whatever word you want to use there. Then despair, which is low energy. And that spells SAD, SAD, and that’s how I remember them. That’s where it comes from.

[56:39] Stephanie: And if it triggers good, then that’s joy.

[56:42] Marcus: Yeah, it doesn’t create joy that’s more neutral, the brain can keep functioning without interruption.

[56:51] Stephanie: It passes up to the next level.

[56:52] Marcus: Passes up to the next level and it gives me an opportunity to get to my joy center. And so if I have a well developed joy center it’ll be a natural reaction to stay there.

[57:03] Stephanie: So I’ve heard you and Jim talk about the amygdala and once you get an impression it is just always there. And I always struggled with that a little bit. Like, wait, you can change your story or have a new first impression on something? So can you explain that a little bit?

[57:21] Marcus: So, that’s true. Once the amygdala learns something it’s permanent. What can change is my narrative about it and my capacity to deal with it. So for example, when I was a little kid our next door neighbor had a big dog. And I remember it got in my face and snarled and scared me. So to this day my initial internal reaction at a dog coming toward me is not good.

But if it isn’t triggering too much I can handle it and my capacity can handle it. Then I can go to my narrative part of it and give myself a narrative that says, this is going to be fine, this is okay. I can read the dog and see if it’s really scary or not. All that happens really fast and it takes me much longer to explain it than it actually happens. You know Jim had the same thing with dogs because he grew up in Colombia and their dogs could be deadly. I mean, they ran the streets. They were not pets for homes. So once your amygdala learns that it never forgets it and will trigger it. So what keeps it from being hopeless is that we can overcome that by growing our capacity and changing our narrative.

[58:37] Stephanie: : Okay, good to know. And so how would this factor in with the art of storytelling?

[58:45] Marcus: So, let me first of all explain why storytelling is one of these things. I wrote the book with Chris Coursey who is president of THRIVEtoday. THRIVEtoday’s origins were taking the brain science that Jim was learning and working together to develop exercises, to see if you could train somebody who had missed out on what they needed as an infant or a toddler? Could you as an adult now train them in such a way that they could still learn that skill and have that capacity, and not be trapped because of their childhood?

And so they began developing these exercises and developed the Thrive training out of this. When you get to level two of thrive training it’s mostly storytelling. And so that was what prompted me to say ,”Hey, I think storytelling needs to be one of these four habits” because that’s the primary tool you guys are using to do this. So storytelling does a couple of things.

Number one, storytelling builds relational connection, it engages. So if you tell me a story it gets my right brain engaged with your right brain. It helps grow and expand my capacity to share a mutual mind with you as I’m in the story with you. I’m building a world in my mind as you’re creating a world for me with your words.

And so we are sharing this as we’re both having this connection, there’s a relational connection part of it. Then there’s the narrative itself which has to do with my belief system. And what I’m trying to do is create a library in my head because the library in my head will pull up not only memories, but what those memories mean to me. And so changing our narrative, changing the way we tell stories could be hugely important to managing our emotions.

[01:00:55] Stephanie: So it’s the stories you tell yourself and it’s the stories you tell other people.

[01:00:59] Marcus: It’s both. It’s the stories we tell ourselves and it’s how we talk about our emotions to people. I actually did an experiment with this not too long ago when I was doing a corporate training event. It was a small, small group and I had them go around in a circle, gave them a few basic instructions, and said, “Tell us an emotion story.” And what I realized (and I hadn’t really expected this) was every one of them followed the same pattern. And the pattern was this bad thing happened to me, that made me feel this bad emotion, and that’s why I am the way I am.

And so what people were doing with their story was reinforcing why they were messed up. The story is this bad thing happened, it made me feel these negative emotions, and to this day that’s why I can’t handle this emotion. Well, if that’s what you’re telling yourself over and over and over again, that’s not good self-talk, that’s going to keep you stuck.

And two, when I am telling that story to other people it’s just reinforcing that this is my identity, I am a person who cannot handle this emotion. What we want to do is actually grow our capacity to handle those emotions. So part of that is going to be changing our stories and changing our narrative. So here in a minute, we’ll tell them how to do that.

[01:02:14] Stephanie:  Yeah, and I also think it’s been a while since we talked specifically about joy pathways which is key as we go through each of our emotions. One of the reasons why it’s important to have stories collected for each of the emotions is it helps build our joy pathways.

[01:02:30] Marcus: Yes, it’s connected.  The joy pathway idea is that pathways form in our brain as neurons connect with each other. The first and most fundamental way that those things connect is not our stories, it is our mirror neurons. The first way that it is connected is our mirror neurons watching other people handle emotions and go, oh, that’s what that looks like. So, I don’t have to blow up just because somebody gets angry at me or I don’t have to shut down just because someone gets angry at me, that’s what that looks like.

But the second way, (if my mirror neurons can’t watch somebody do it) I learn is by storytelling. I listen to someone tell me a story of how they handled it and my mind can imagine that. And so it functions at a slightly lower level but in a similar fashion it helps me to imagine what that would look like.

And then my brain learns, well, I think I could do that. As that happens neural pathways begin to form in the brain and it starts as this weak chain, then it gradually gets stronger as we do it more often. And then the more often we do it, it gets stronger and then finally it starts to develop white matter and becomes a habit.

[01:03:44] Stephanie: Yeah. So we want to start collecting stories about each of our emotions. And if we don’t have stories from our own experience that we can lean on right away, we can talk to other people and get their stories and that is also helpful.

[01:03:58] Marcus:Yes. For example, if I don’t handle shame well, but you do, telling me a story of a time you experienced shame and you didn’t have to deflect it and you didn’t have to put it on somebody else. You were actually able to remain yourself, that story is going to sound amazing to me. My mind’s going to think, you can do that? I mean, that’s not how I would have responded. And so listening to you tell stories of how you handled emotions well is not only good for you, but it’s good for other people.

[01:04:26] Stephanie: And then you can add it to your library to pull up when you need to practice and meditate on those kinds of stories. So we are going to talk about the high and low level emotions in this episode. And we’re going to talk about the high level or the high energy emotions and those are anger and fear. Now, first in SAD,SAD, the “A” is anxiety. And you talk about how fear and anxiety are a little bit different. Do you want to start off with explaining that?

[01:04:54] Marcus:When I did SAD, SAD, with “A” as anxiety, Jim corrected me. He goes, technically, anxiety and fear are not the same thing. So I’m like, duly noted, but it’s already in print so we’re going to go with this. And what he said was actually quite helpful in that anxiety is always rooted in my beliefs. So what happens is that the right side of my brain and the left side of my brain mirror each other.

So the thalamus is on the base of both sides, there’s an amygdala on both sides and there’s a cortex on both sides. All these things mirror each other. And so what happens is that some of our emotions are triggered because of what’s coming up through the right hemisphere of the brain.

We can have other emotions that are triggered by what’s coming down on the belief side, the left side, where my narratives and beliefs are. And so both can trigger my amygdala but on different sides of the brain. So when my right brain is triggering the amygdala that’s fear. When my left brain is triggering the amygdala because of what I believe, that’s anxiety. Jim was like, it’s helpful to clarify those and keep those separate.

I get that because as he says, “Anxiety is always anchored in imagination.” I can imagine a bad thing happening and I’m reacting in fear to what might happen. And so it’s always anchored in a “what if” kind of scenario. And then related to that he said, “The only thing we truly fear is an emotion we can’t handle.”

[01:06:30] Stephanie: That’s fascinating.

[01:06:31] Marcus: Yeah. Because I tend to think we fear pain. But he was like, no actually we fear the emotions that the pain’s going to make us feel. There’s plenty of people who actually look forward to a little bit of pain in a workout or something like that. And so I’m going to like that feeling afterwards because it means I’m making progress,  I’m not traumatized by it. There’s other kind of pain we feel and we’re like, I don’t think I ever want to experience that again. The emotional thing that happened with the pain was too great.

[01:06:59] Stephanie: That’s fascinating. So do you want to talk a little bit more about fear?  Since we also call these not just the big six negative emotions we call them the protector emotions. What’s protective about fear?

[01:07:12] Marcus: These things are meant to protect us from pain to a certain extent and to protect us from harm. And so if I see a snake and I have no fear that might not be good because I’ll just keep right on going. So I need a little shot of adrenaline to say to myself, hey you better get out of here. But that fear is not meant to last for more than like, 90 seconds.

And so our problem comes when I don’t have that joy pathway in my brain and I don’t have those neural pathways formed. Once that fear gets triggered I can’t get out of it. And that’s when it becomes a problem because now cortisol starts pumping through my brain. It starts eating brain cells and everything positive that it’s been trying to get built through joy gets shoved into reverse as fear takes over.

[01:08:06] Stephanie:  Yeah and it reminds me that when we talk about needing to tame the amygdala so often once you are in a negative emotion it’s even easier to just snowball into other emotions. Like, oh, I’m feeling fear, or anger, and now I’m feeling shame for feeling that and now it just snowballs.

[01:08:30] Marcus:  Part of what’s going on there is that once you’re already in the back of your brain and if you stay in the back of your brain, you’re in the neighborhood with all those other negative emotions. And so getting out of the back of your brain and back to the front of your brain, where your joy center is, is the whole point of joy pathways. How do we get out of here in 90 seconds or less like the way it’s supposed to be? But the reality is if I don’t have a big joy center and I don’t have those joy pathways, forget 90 seconds. It could be 90 days for some people where they just can’t get out of the back of their brain.

[01:09:02] Stephanie: All right let’s talk about the other high level emotion, anger. Anger is on the protector level. It’s that I want this injustice or this pain to stop. It can be a very positive thing.

[01:09:16] Marcus: So God gets angry.

[01:09:20] Stephanie: Exactly right.

[01:09:21] Marcus: God gets angry. And one of the reasons that he gets angry is that people are doing wrong things. They’re being unjust and they are hurting people and they are doing things that are wrong. And so anger is meant to give us that motivation that we need to make something stop. And that’s why there is such a thing as righteous indignation. But when anger gets triggered for a lot of us the problem is that we don’t always have a value system underneath for what we’re trying to make stop. That’s why God says, “Don’t let the sun go down on your anger.”  In other words it’s not meant to last that long, you’re not supposed to live there.

[01:10:06] Stephanie: Yeah. So can you remind us of your STEP acrostic for how to tell a joy story.

[01:10:15] Marcus: Yeah, have we told this before? I’m trying to remember.

[01:10:18] Stephanie: We did touch on it last episode, I think.

[01:10:19] Marcus: Okay, so again, going back to the Thrive training and they had what they call four plus stories for those people who are familiar with Thrive. That’s what they’re talking about. And so I was working with Chris and asking if we can turn this into something that’s easy to remember? And STEP stands for “S” as setting. So when I tell the story what’s the setting?

So you say, I was in an airport one night, I was at a grocery store, I was at home in bed, or whatever it is. But you give the setting of where this story starts. And then you tell the “T” which is the trigger. What was the triggering event that created an emotional reaction for you, because this is how to tell an emotion story. So I have a setting, and then I have the trigger. And then “E” is I that want to explain the emotion. And when I explain the emotion I want to show that emotion on my face and with my body. I want to give a name and words to that emotion and I want to describe the impact it had on my body.

So there’s really kind of three things connected to emotion and they’re all about explaining it. And that is, how did my body react when I felt that emotion? It’s very important to say for example, not just I got scared, but I got scared, my face got hot,and my ears got hot. My hair was standing up and I could feel my stomach going into a knot.

It’s like what was going on in your body when you felt the fear. That completes the picture for people of that emotion. And then you go to, what is the point of the story?  Again, the way the folks at this event were telling it was… “and that’s why I messed up.” Well, that’s not the point we want to make.

So the point of this story is one of three things generally. How I acted like myself anyway and didn’t let this turn me into a different person. Or this is how I bounced back and recovered from that emotion. Maybe somebody helped me and somebody gave me another perspective but I wasn’t left alone here, and I found my way back.

Or thirdly, it’s that I totally messed this up and got completely taken out by that emotion. But here’s what I wish I would have done. And so I bring it back around to turn it into kind of a teaching lesson. So it’s the setting, the trigger, the emotion, and an explanation of the emotion and then the point of the story.

[01:12:31] Stephanie: Awesome. Well, hey, we’re coming up to the end of the episode and we are going to continue this discussion, especially looking at the low level emotions next week. But for now, any final thoughts?

[01:12:43] Marcus: Yeah, it’s a lot of material, right?  I realized as I was going through and learning this over the years that what amazed me is how completely my paradigm has flipped. From thinking that all I needed to do was think the right thoughts to realizing that there’s a whole other part of my brain that plays a huge role in my emotions and that I need to kind of do both.

I need to tame the amygdala on the right side of my brain as well as the amygdala on the left. And part of that is reclaiming control of my body through calming, building my capacity through appreciation, and then strengthening all that through storytelling. So that’s where these things come from. And hopefully this is helpful and giving some people further insight into why we feel the way we do.

[01:13:29] Stephanie:  Do you want to go back and just give a quick review of what are the high energy emotions and how do we handle them?

[01:13:36] Marcus: Yes. The amygdala can give us good, bad, or scary. And if it gives us the assessment that this is scary, it will trigger fear or anger. So those are the two high energy levels, high energy emotions. And what those do is it shoots adrenaline through our body. It triggers a physical reaction that either makes us want to fight or flee, hence the fight or flight reaction. If it goes the other direction it can trigger low energy emotions that can suck the life out of us, and that’s shame, disgust, sadness, and despair. So last week we looked at anger and fear. This week we’re going to be looking at those other four.

[01:14:15] Stephanie:  And I know we’ve been taking it more from the storytelling perspective, but could you give some pointers on how you handle high energy emotion? Because with high energy emotions, it literally makes your body shake. How do you go about handling those from maybe a body standpoint?

[01:14:33] Marcus: So one of the things I’m trying to do is soothe my body. So there’s a variety of things that I can do. We call them best practices. There’s breathing which we call, “breathe in a box.” The idea is fully filling up your lungs and then fully getting all the air out of your lungs and holding it for a four count. You can actually change the numbers, it doesn’t always have to be four. We’re just trying to give people a basic model to get started. And you can do that as many times as you need to. I know people who have done it ten times before they finally started to feel a little control.

The other is you exaggerate your emotion and then you try to calm it. And so if I was going to put this in order it would be to exaggerate the emotion, and then take a deep breath. Then you can rub your hands down your arms as if you’re just rubbing that emotion right out of your body. And then you just repeat. Exaggerate and then rub down the emotion as you breathe deeply. So that would be to breathe in a box, exaggerate, soothe, and then go to the “T”.  We’ve actually got two different ways we do this in our new book. The “T” is about our thought life.

Jim Wilder has a Shalom Your Body exercise on YouTube that you can watch and he actually incorporates all four of these things in that. He exaggerates the emotion, then he’s rubbing it out, and then taking a deep breath. And sometimes you can say words that are true like, “When I’m afraid I will trust in you oh, God.” In some cases just to distract myself I’ve actually sung “Happy Birthday to me, Happy birthday to me.” It always makes me smile a little bit and so that helps.

So those are the best practices for kind of calming my body. The other thing I can do that is similar and related to soothing is before I just go straight to trying to soothe my body, I actually surprise it and exaggerate a little bit. Like splashing cold water on the face or a cold shower, just doing something to change your body chemistry can help too.

[01:16:39] Stephanie: So what does it look like to exaggerate anger? And also, how do you do that in an appropriate manner?

[01:16:43] Marcus: Uh, yeah, it’s probably not punching a wall. So what’s an appropriate exaggeration of anger? And the go to here is to do the Hulk pose. Right. You kind of flex your arms, make big fists, and you flare out your nostrils. I know one guy took a towel and twisted it really hard. And part of the idea here of exaggerating is you want to let that emotion crash like a wave on the shore, just let it crash over you and release.

[01:17:11] Stephanie:  Right, and if you’ve ever had somebody say, ”Oh, just calm down.” You’re like, “Thanks, I’m so calm now.”

[01:17:17] Marcus: Makes you want to punch him. Yeah, I’m just kidding. Wait, no did I say that out loud? That’s true because it’s almost impossible just by sheer force of will to calm yourself down, that’s not how it works.

[01:17:31] Stephanie: Yeah, and in reference to the guy with the towel, he went somewhere private to shake off the anger.

[01:17:40] Marcus: So for some of this stuff there are things you can do in the moment. There are other things you can do that are a little bit different, like “CAKE.” Which is you can break eye contact (Yeah, let’s go with that one.) with somebody and find some curiosity. Find something to appreciate about the person, find a way to be kind, and then restore eye contact.

So curiosity, appreciation, kindness, eye contact, that spells CAKE. And sometimes that’s enough just to get you back into the relational part of your brain. One is you are trying to regain control of your body and the other one is trying to get back to acting like yourself, and being relational.

[01:18:22] Stephanie: All right, thank you for that crash course. So in this episode we’re talking about our low level, low energy emotions. Could you remind us what are the low energy emotions?

[01:18:34] Marcus:  So out of the SAD,SAD, you take out the two “A’s” and you get shame, sadness, disgust, and despair. So sadness is the loss of something I value and shame is the thing that didn’t bring you happiness. Like a little kid who is used to seeing mommy and daddy light up when they see them and then they look up, and mommy and daddy are not happy to see them. Like, what happened? They’re feeling, oh, you’re not happy to see me and the instinct is that my body wants to hang my head.

[01:19:03] Stephanie: Yeah, hang my head. Don’t make eye contact.

[01:19:05] Marcus: Don’t make eye contact and I’m kind of hiding in plain sight there. And then sadness makes you want to pout, you hang out that bottom lip, and you get a little teary. It takes the energy out of you like I lost something that was important to me. Then disgust is that yuck feeling that I want to get out, I want it out of here. Yuck, get away from me.

And it’s actually meant to protect us from poisonous things. And so it might be poisonous people, situations, or actually poisonous foods, but it’s that yuck, I want to vomit this out. And then despair is, this is impossible. It’s the feeling that something I need

[01:19:47] Stephanie: It’s hopeless.

[01:19:48] Marcus: It’s hopeless. And so I know Dr. Wilder has gotten very specific with this. I cannot fix this problem with the time and resources that I have, it’s impossible. So the good news here is that God can meet us in every one of these emotions. And one of the problems we sometimes have is that if I don’t handle a certain emotion well, I try to keep everybody else from feeling that emotion, because I don’t want to have to deal with it. And so a lot of us don’t allow people to be sad. We don’t allow them to feel their shame. We don’t allow them to feel despair or disgust.

And it’s probably because we don’t know how to get back to joy from that emotion. So we don’t want to see them going there because we assume they’re going to get stuck and I don’t know how to help them get back.

And there’s a lot of us who cut people off instead of validating the emotion and being present with them in it. And that’s an important lesson for us to learn that it’s okay for people to feel these things. And our response ought to be to meet them there and to be happy to be with them even as they’re feeling these things, to try and stay relationally present as they recover.

[01:20:55] Stephanie: Well, it reminds me of the very broadly used, make sure your mask is on in an airplane, your oxygen mask, make sure that’s on you first. If you don’t know how to handle it then you’re trying to shut it down in other people, you’ll be avoidant. So you learn, oh, that triggers that emotion in me and so I don’t do that. You might not think that cognizantly.

[01:21:21] Marcus:  I even had this on radio interviews where the host would ask me a question and my answer was camping out on a low energy emotion a little too long. And they’re like, well, give us some hope here, you know?And I realize what’s happening is that we’ve got limited time and they don’t want to camp out on the negatives, you know, inject some hope. But I think a lot of us do that instinctively a lot. And we don’t realize that what we’re actually doing is not helping people recover, we’re just forcing them to shut down.

[01:21:54] Stephanie: And you are using a lot of lingo here that is from VCR. We’ve talked about this before but for people who might be joining us right now for the first time, do you want to remind us what VCR is?

[01:22:03] Marcus: Yeah. So VCR stands for validate, comfort, and recover. And so validate is what my right brain does. I connect with you and your emotion, I nonverbally connect with you and I’m in sync with what you’re feeling. I verbally give it a correct name and then I verbally identify correctly how big this is for you. Now, when I validate I don’t have to agree that you should be feeling this way. I don’t have to tell you you’re right to feel this way. I just have to recognize that this is in fact, how you feel. That’s validation.

And then comforting, it sounds like a right brain thing but it’s actually a left brain exercise. Because what you’re doing when you comfort is you’re making the problems more manageable. So it’s a problem solving function. And so the mistake most of us make is we problem solve first and we skip the validation. And so the order is extremely important because right brain things have to happen before the left brain things. It’s just the order of the way the brain works. So we validate first and then we comfort. And if we do those things well then the person recovers. And we can even do this for ourselves. We can validate our own emotions and comfort ourselves so that we recover.

[01:23:10] Stephanie: What does it mean to recover?

[01:23:11] Marcus:  So to recover means that I’m back within my window of tolerance which is a technical term, but it’s from Daniel Siegel. But the idea is I’m back within my capacity to handle the emotion, feel like myself, and do the next thing.

[01:23:24] Stephanie: So thank you for that. And going back to our low energy emotions. We talked about high energy and needing to soothe, quiet and calm. So how do you help yourself in low energy?

[01:23:43] Marcus:  So with low energy emotions it’s almost the opposite. I’m trying to get some energy from what’s been sucked out of me. And so it helps me to think in these terms. I’m trying to get from the back of my brain to the front of my brain. I’m trying to get from the part of my brain that is sucking the life out of me back to the part of my brain that is my relational self.

And so it can help to practice some appreciation and it can help to connect to somebody. If they’re not available, if somebody’s not there to connect with you and help get back into the relational part of your brain, then practicing appreciation is important. And I will say that quieting can also be a part of this in the sense that I need a rhythm to this.

I’ve got to have some up and some down. I’ve got to establish some kind of a rhythm to this. So I would say the key in this one more than anything is the appreciation part. And something we haven’t talked much about either is the role of prayer. We’ve been focusing on the brain science. But I find that sometimes when we pray it’s a lot like storytelling and we are telling a story in our prayer.

And sometimes I find that my praying is deepening my anxiety because I’m telling God I’m scared about this or I don’t know. Or in my depression and I don’t know how I’m going to get out of this. I don’t see a solution to this and it’s okay. I could start there and pour out my heart to God. And I pour out my heart to God by being completely honest about how deep this goes for me and how much I’m feeling.

The problem comes when I just stop there. I don’t want to stop there unless it’s just all I got, in which case, God would rather have that than not. But then the next thing I want to do is change my focus. And that’s where I get into the, “Why so downcast Oh, my soul. I will yet put my hope in you.” And so you move from there into reminding yourself of who God is, what God’s capable of and what’s true about God. The other tool in prayer is, again, what we call the Immanuel prayer process. But before there was such a thing as Immanuel prayer, people have been doing this for centuries which is just listening prayer. Which is forming an attachment with God where the goal here really, in brain science terms, is to share a mutual mind state with him.

So talking to God and pouring out my heart and then changing my focus to, but I will yet put my trust in you. I will yet choose to believe that you’re going to work this out. I remember your grandfather, for example, when his first wife died he’d been married for one year and she got sick and just never recovered. They never were able to celebrate their first anniversary. He then moved to New York City from the midwest and he didn’t know anybody there. He was in seminary and he was all by himself.

He was all alone and he told me he used to pace his apartment every night and just say to himself again and again, I will choose to believe that God is good. I will choose to believe that God is good. And partly what he was doing was trying to keep his mind from going into the darkness and just staying there. So that story has always stuck with me. When you’re all alone and there isn’t anybody else to connect to it’s okay to pour out my heart to God. But at some point, I want to make that pivot and begin focusing on what’s true.

[01:24:42] Stephanie: Yeah.

[01:27:18] Stephanie: Excellent. And yeah, a very meaningful story. I love my grandpa. Okay. now pulling myself out of grandpa’s story.

[01:27:26] Marcus: Yeah, that was a dark one, but yes.

[01:27:29] Stephanie: So we’ve talked about the fact that sometimes we call these the big six negative emotions, and sometimes we call them the big six protector emotions. So could you give us some examples for how some of these could be productive?

[01:27:48] Marcus: Yeah. So when I think about this one of the first things that pops into my mind is that I read Tony Dungy’s autobiography, and he had a daughter who had a central nervous system problem. In some places I think it’s called leprosy. And this central nervous thing means that she didn’t feel pain. And so what would happen is for example, she could reach her hand into an oven that was on because she wanted the cookie that she saw when she was little.

She could reach in and she would burn herself quite badly and feel no pain. And so if you don’t feel pain you can actually do tremendous damage to yourself. And so emotional pain is the alarm system that God has given to us that we are about to do damage. We need to stop something, we need to redirect something, or this is going to end very badly. So each of these emotions is meant to trigger an alarm for us to help us realize that there’s something off, and I need to find a way back to joy and peace from where this has taken me.

[01:28:51] Stephanie: And will telling a joy story featuring one of these emotions look the same as anger and fear?

[01:29:00] Marcus: It does in the fact that it follows the STEP process. You still tell the setting like my dad’s story. In the setting he just moved to New York City and he was all alone. The trigger was that his wife had just died. He was in seminary and he’s dealing with deep attachment pain, deep sadness, and despair. I’ve lost the person who made me happy.

So grief is this complex, multifaceted emotion. And so he was in this. And then his point was to remind himself of what was true, that he couldn’t let himself go into the darkness. And so it still follows that step process of setting, trigger, emotion, and then the point.

[01:29:48] Stephanie: Well, and then the rest of that story is that he did meet your mom, my grandma.

[01:29:53] Marcus: And it is a remarkable thing because the rest of the story is that after seminary, he came back to Fort Wayne Bible College and he taught Greek and missions. He was the dean of men underneath the dean of students. Well, the dean of students was a man named Elmer Newnschwander, who was married and had a four year old daughter and a brand new baby boy. And he was tragically struck by lightning out on a golf course.

So all of a sudden there was a widow on campus and then my dad who was a widower. And because he was a widower, he was in a unique position to connect. Well, they ended up getting married. She became my mom and your grandma. And so for 50 some years they were together. And most people don’t know my dad was ever married before that. But he was with my mom Eleanor for over 50 years.

[01:30:53] Stephanie: It always makes me think of the mercy of God

[01:30:57] Marcus: He brought something good out of the bad.

[01:31:01] Stephanie:  I wanted to touch on this so I’m glad you brought it up in grandpa’s story, which is attachment pain. Which is not one of the big six. Can you explain why?

[01:31:10] Marcus:  Yeah, attachment pain is the deepest pain a human being can feel because it’s the deepest part of our brain system. The limbic system, the nervous system and all that are connected to the brain at the very deep level of my cravings center. And so if I have a craving for attachment and that attachment is impossible, then that is an incredibly deep pain. We call that attachment pain.

It’s not just sadness, it is the inability to connect when I desperately need connection and it’s dark. And that’s why a lot of poetry, a lot of love songs, and a lot of movies kind of center around this idea of attachment pain. In fact, I’ve been told that middle eastern romantic poems are not about how wonderful you are, it’s about how deep my despair is if I can’t have you, if I can’t be with you. And they’re all about attachment pain.

[01:32:13] Stephanie: So part of tearing down the house of fear and building a house of joy, is learning to joy map instead of fear map our world. Toxic thoughts can affect our outlook on life. It can sow discord in our relationships with God and with others, and even affect our bodies. So Dad, let’s do a little bit more brain science. Can you explain for us the VLE, the verbal, logical explainer, and how it affects our thoughts?

[01:32:38] Marcus: All right. So, the VLE to my knowledge, was Dr. Karl Layman board certified psychiatrist and one of the founders of Immanuel prayer ministry, who coined that term VLE. It occurs in his book, Outsmarting Yourself. And in layman’s terms, the right side of your brain has an experience and the left side of your brain has to interpret it.

But if the right side of your brain goes into a cramp and shuts down so that you don’t get your higher level brain functions, then it shoots that interpretive process prematurely over the left side of the brain. Now it is trying to create a simple narrative to explain what you’re feeling without all the data.

[01:33:24] Stephanie: Very good. And also, I just have to clarify, we’re talking about layman’s terms.

[01:33:31] Marcus:  For people who are not board certified psychiatrists.  It’s a complicated word, right? Verbal and logical and explainer. The cognitive engine on the left side of our brain puts into words what we’re thinking and attaches a narrative to it. It tries to come up with a logical explanation for what we’re feeling. And the classic example I’ve heard used is, you’re walking down the street and somebody with red hair walks by and all of a sudden you feel incredible sadness, and you don’t know why.

So your verbal, logical explainer will create a narrative for you to explain why you’re feeling this way. And it could be dead wrong. It could say, ‘Well, you have some traumatic memory with red haired people”, but it just doesn’t know. It’s going to put together whatever data it does have and create a logical narrative out of it, no matter whether it’s true or not. One of the reasons that this is so important is because our emotions don’t really know fact from fiction, we can’t rely on our emotions. Just because something feels really true to us doesn’t mean that it’s true.

[01:34:53] Stephanie: I was just in a book club with some friends and somebody asked, “Have you ever noticed that what you’re reading affects your mood or whatever?” The book we were reading at that point had a husband who left his family. One of my friends was like, my husband is great but when he walked in the door I was mad at him. Yeah. And she was like, I had to walk myself back to no, I’m not mad at my husband right now, I was just very engrossed in that story. And then everybody was sharing that yep, I catch myself in that all the time. This was a sad book or this was a happy book or whatever.

[01:35:37] Marcus: Well, it’s the same with music. I remember when I was your age I was painting houses for a living. It was common to have the radio on in the background and some days we’d be listening to music, and most music are love songs. And so you would find yourself thinking about relationships and the girls you’ve known and all this other stuff because the music was just on that theme.

And other times, you’re listening to political commentary shows, and so your mind’s on all the stuff going on in the culture. Other times, you’re listening to a baseball game or something like that. And it just so radically affects the mood you’re in and the thoughts that are run through your head. Which is why the Bible tells us to meditate on the word of God in the morning and in the evening, and do this regularly. Keep your mind on things like this because it is so easy for us to get caught up in the world of emotions created by our narratives.

[01:36:28] Stephanie: Yeah. I often think about it in terms of what is discipling you and your emotions? Anyway, that made me think of that. What are some common sources for toxic thoughts? Are they always just triggered by amygdala?

[01:36:49] Marcus:  I’d say ultimately it all goes back to the devil because his title is the father of lies. So father means, I’m the fountainhead of something, I’m the source of all of it. So if there is a lie I’m believing, if there’s a false toxic belief, then ultimately the devil’s responsible for it. It doesn’t mean the devil’s talking to me and it doesn’t even mean that I have a demon.

But it means at some level it puts me in sync with that side of the equation. It puts me in step with what the father of lies is doing and not what the spirit of truth is doing. And so if I want to keep in step with the spirit, I’ve got to learn how to take thoughts captive and how to attack these toxic thoughts, so I can get myself back in step with God.

[01:37:34] Stephanie: So we’ll often talk about the world, the flesh, and the devil. You know, you might pass a billboard or you might have somebody stir up anger in you.

[01:37:51] Marcus:  Yeah. So the way Karl Payne explains this is that the world is anything external to me that is triggering something. The flesh is anything internal to me that is triggering something. And so the example I’ve heard him use many times is that if I go past a billboard and I see a picture of a doughnut, then all of a sudden I’m thinking about doughnuts. I wasn’t thinking about doughnuts until I saw the billboard sign. On the other hand, I could be home alone on my bed and start thinking about donuts. That’s my flesh that’s coming from inside of me.

[01:38:24] Stephanie:  And then in a very bizarre scenario the devil might whisper, “Donuts.”

[01:38:28] Marcus: Donuts. Yeah, I’m sure he has his favorites, too.

[01:38:37] Stephanie: I’m getting slap happy. Okay, so how do we handle toxic thoughts? Do we handle toxic thoughts differently depending on where they come from?

[01:38:48] Marcus: Yes. So again, referring back to Dr. Payne, with the things coming from the world the answer is to run. So flee sexual morality, flee the things of the world. He used the example of somebody who would drive home past a **** shop on his way home and too often he found himself pulling in. Dr. Payne’s solution was to drive a different way home.

The guy was like, “But that would take an extra half an hour.” And he was like, “Ask your wife which one she prefers.” So he’s like, “Run from that, don’t put yourself in that position, run away from it” Internally you can’t run away from yourself, it’s kind of with you so you have to replace the thought.

So you run from the one and you replace with the other. If you can’t run and you can’t replace, then you’re probably dealing with some attack from the enemy. So you resist the enemy and you make him run. You make him flee. And so those are the three core strategies.

[01:39:58] Stephanie: Cool. If our toxic thoughts are triggered by an upset emotion, what is a good strategy for attacking those thoughts?

[01:40:07] Marcus: Well, first of all, when it comes to emotions, our thought life runs two directions. One, our emotions can trigger thoughts. So sometimes because I’m feeling this emotion, it’s reminding me of all the things that I tend to think when I feel this way. On the other hand, my emotions can get triggered by what I’m thinking. So we’re very familiar with that one.

And that is what I believe triggers the way I feel but it can go the other way around too. What I’m feeling can trigger what I’m thinking about. So when we talk about resisting the devil and fleeing from the world and replacing toxic thoughts, those are all strategies that are related to this.

At its heart when it comes to my emotions triggering thoughts I got this idea and it really was crystallized for me by Dr. Daniel Amen, who was describing these as automatic negative thoughts or “ANTS”. And the automatic negative thoughts tend to swarm whenever we feel these emotions. He tells the story about an eight year old boy who was struggling with anxiety and depression.

And he taught this boy how to in “Christian terms” take his thoughts captive. How to turn his brain into an anteater by coming up with a game plan. Every time I feel these emotions the same thoughts keep coming up in my head, so why don’t I go ahead and come up with a game plan for what I’m going to do the next time this happens? And that game plan is, what are the new thoughts I’m going to replace those old thoughts with? So I think that’s hugely helpful.

[01:41:54] Stephanie:  And it’s helpful to make a “T” bar chart.

{01:41:57] Marcus: Yeah. So that’s the point of a “T” bar chart. On one side of the chart you have, this is what I currently believe when I feel upsetting things. And on the other side is, this is what God wants me to be thinking instead. So you can think of it that these are the lies and this is the truth of.

But honestly, that can be confusing for people because sometimes the beliefs that are coming don’t feel like lies, and sometimes they’re not total lies. And so we just say these are the beliefs, the toxic thinking that kind of robs me in my piece.

[01:42:28] Stephanie: These are the automatic negative thoughts.

[01:42:29] Marcus: These are the automatic negative thoughts on this side. These are the anteater thoughts on the other side. So I do find that helpful. The first time I saw this in person as an actual strategy was in my first week as a pastor. A lady in the church had lost her college age son in a tragic car accident. He was engaged to be married, he just graduated, and was about to go to med school in the fall.

I mean it goes on and on. But why I associate it with this is that I gave her the assignment to keep a journal. And I said, “Start your day every morning by asking God two questions. Number one, what lies does the devil want me to believe today? What is the devil’s attacking thought for me today?” Write it down and then say, “ God what is the thought you want me to hold on to instead?”

So you’re just going to replace that thought immediately and you’ve got your strategy and your start. So it’s like day by day building out your strategy against this. Well, several years later she emailed me and basically said, “Thank you for that exercise, it probably saved my life.” That’s how profound our thought life can be when it comes to this stuff.

[01:43:48] Stephanie: Well, and it makes so much sense because another paradigm that we talk about a lot is WLVS, wounds, lies, vows, strongholds. If you have been wounded and you are actively watching for the lies and replacing them with truth, seeking God in the midst of it, then hopefully you won’t carry out the rest of that pattern.

[01:44:08] Marcus:  And that’s where the real prayer pattern actually comes from. When we invite Jesus to meet us in the painful memories we get two things. One, we get an attachment with somebody who’s happy to be with us in that memory so that we’re not alone in it. And secondly, we get a new perspective on the memory. We get truth that replaces those lies.

So it uproots the lies, replaces it with truth, and it takes out the sense of being alone in what we’re going through because Jesus is there with us. So in that sense, it addresses both the right and the left brain issues that we have. Our right brain attachment needs and our left brain narrative.

[01:44:47] Stephanie: And we talked about REAL prayer several episodes ago if anybody is jumping in and new to the joy series.

[01:44:54] Marcus: REAL prayers. Remember the past wound, explore that wound, ask Jesus to heal it, and then listen to what he does. Then look around, revisit the memory, and see if anything changes. So that’s the super simple overview.

[01:45:09] Stephanie: So in the context of CASA, which is the acrostic that you use in your new book, The Four Habits of Joy-Filled People, attacking toxic thinking is the final “A”. You have calming, appreciating, storytelling, and attacking toxic thinking. And how do you envision this? Is this just an “a la carte” thing that you do these things when you need them? Or is there a generally best practice order?

[01:45:40] Marcus: If you think about it, the first two, calming and appreciating, are largely the right brain building activities and the storytelling. And attacking toxic thinking is the left brain and that’s dealing with our narrative. Appreciation kind of connects to both, but appreciation by its nature is relational, because I’m grateful to someone, right?

So what happens is that as a general pattern by practicing these things over time it creates a habit, which is where the title comes from. I want to develop the habit of calming quickly. I want to develop the habit of bouncing back. And I want to practice the habit of turning my brain into something that amplifies appreciation instead of fear.

And then I want to get in the habit of telling myself stories and sharing with other people these emotional stories that have a positive point to them. And then when I turn my brain into an anteater, after a while it starts attacking these toxic thoughts automatically. It’s no longer a laborious, conscious process that I’m going through. So to that extent all of these things can be thought of like learning to play the piano. You know, it’s going to go slow and maybe be awkward at first but the more we practice it, it gets to be second nature. Then we can start experiencing it instead of thinking our way through every step.

[01:47:05] Stephanie: Yeah. And on the relational note I know I made a joke at the beginning that we’re talking about attacking toxic thinking in ourselves and not others. If you have a loved one or somebody who you know is having toxic thoughts, could you give us maybe a tip or a strategy to help them, or to help yourself with them?

[01:47:29] Marcus: Well, yeah, this brings us back honestly to the VCR concept. And that is the main thing we want to do is to keep a relational bridge open. There’s an exception to this and we’ll get to in a second. What we want to do is keep the relational bridge open and focus on validating the emotions and making sure they know that we are happy to be with them, even if they don’t agree with us. And it’s all part of that loving your enemies thing that Jesus talks about.

So when I say there’s an exception to it I’m going to Matthew 23. Jesus is talking to the Pharisees and the teachers of the law and he’s calling them snakes and vipers, right? And saying that they’re sons of hell, that they’re going to hell, and that their destiny is deserved. What is up with that? And I’m like, that doesn’t sound like loving your enemies when you first look at it.

But when you think about it this way, those people were on their way to hell. They were blind guides who were going in a bad direction and Jesus knew they needed a jolt, right? They needed something to really wake them up from this. And there is a time for brutal honesty.

[01:48:41] Stephanie: I would also say that they were supposed to be the mouthpieces of God for that generation and they were not.

[01:48:49] Marcus:  No, they were the mouthpieces for satan. And so you look at that and sometimes getting in somebody’s face is the most loving thing you can do. It’s just that we’re so quick to justify our actions that we have to be really careful about. It’s one thing when Jesus is doing it because his motivations are right.

In our case we want to, as much as possible, make sure that we’re validating first and then comforting. And comforting is where we share truth. Part of comforting is giving people a new perspective. And sometimes we can do that with an intervention with somebody where it’s like, hey, you gotta wake up to what’s going on here. And the most loving thing you can do is have the intervention but you want to make sure that you’re doing it out of love. The danger comes when we are brutally honest with people for our own benefit and not theirs.

And that is, I just want this to go away. I don’t like having to deal with this. I don’t like how it makes me feel. And so what I’m really just trying to do is fix them quickly so that I don’t have to deal with this anymore. And that’s the flesh. That is not love.

[01:49:52] Stephanie: What about something that isn’t high energy toxic thinking, but I can tell this person is just constantly fear mapping the world. How do I protect myself from fear mapping like them? Or how do I help insert some joy? That could be too big of a topic right here.

[01:50:14] Marcus: It’s a pretty big topic. But I will say that there’s a temptation to take responsibility for them. Like it is now my job to fix the way they look at the world. So we do have to be spirit led in this because there’s not always a concrete principle of “do it this way, this is what you do.” It’s like, “God, how do you want me to handle this in the moment?”

[01:50:35] Stephanie: Amen.

[01:50:36] Marcus:  When I am going to talk to somebody about their thinking, part of this is finding out how open they are. Because there’s some people who are locked in their thinking and they don’t want any help. You’re just going to become their adversary by trying to help them.

[01:50:51] Stephanie:  I mean are there non-verbal things though?

[01:50:55] Marcus: You want to show in your body and  in your face that you understand how they’re feeling. You want to keep eye contact and present without staring them down and making them feel like, what are you crazy? You know you have to be careful with your non-verbals and stuff like this.

Because you can say all the right things but all your non-verbals are saying the opposite. So we are trying to connect with people in the emotion that they’re actually experiencing and then see how open they are to movement. And beyond that I’m not sure I have a clear principle in mind.

[01:51:33] Stephanie: Okay.

[01:51:34] Marcus: Do you have one in mind?

[01:51:35] Stephanie: I didn’t going into that, but as you were talking about it I was thinking about all the different levels of where you meet people. Like, if they’re at different levels of the brain and where you meet them in those levels. But that would be a whole different episode.

[01:51:53] Marcus: Yes. We actually have five “S’s”’s around that and I don’t know if I can pull them off the top of my head right now.

[01:51:58] Stephanie: No worries. There was a lot of good here. And we are coming up to the end of the episode. So do you have any closing thoughts to wrap up attacking toxic thinking?

[01:52:09] Marcus: I remember walking into a Starbucks one time and seeing an ad for an Alcoholics Anonymous on the bulletin board. I laughed when I got to the bottom of the brochure. It said, “Just ignore that committee in your head.”  I’m like, how many of us can kind of relate to that? What’s really hard is that sometimes I’ve got anxious thoughts, despairing thoughts, disgusting thoughts, angry thoughts, and fearful thoughts. And all of these thoughts are pulling me in different directions.

The Bible talks about a double minded man being unstable in all of his ways. If you think about what it means to be double minded, it means I’m being pulled in different directions internally by the narratives that are running through my head.

Part of this is trying to sort out the emotions and sort out the narratives that are connected to the emotions. And sometimes I just tell the devil, “Get out of here.” Or distract myself out of it and ask God to give me something true to focus on instead. And I found in my own journey that sometimes it’s not helpful to try to figure it all out.

Sometimes it’s not helpful in the moment to try to figure out why am I feeling this way?  Sometimes it’s okay just to distract yourself out of it, find something else to think about and just replace the thought. Long term, we may need some help with a counselor or prayer minister to get at some of those roots. So I think there’s a difference between in the moment and long term.

[01:53:40] Stephanie: Thanks for joining us on the trail today. Did you like this episode? Would you like more people to see it? This is the part where I ask you to like, comment, subscribe, and share with a friend. Do you love this channel? One of the best ways that you can support us is by becoming a Deeper Walk Trailblazer. Thanks again. We’ll see you back on the trail next week.