13: FISH: The Other Half of Identity (Part 7)

[00:07] Stephanie: Welcome to Deeper Walk’s On the Trail podcast. You are on the trail with father- daughter duo, Marcus and Stephanie Warner. I’m Stephanie and I’ll be talking with my father, Dr. Marcus Warner, as we discuss topics that help you stay on the trail to a deeper walk with God. Alright, it’s episode 13 in the 7th part of our FISH series. We’ll continue looking at the “I” of FISH, Identity.

Father, I’m happy to be with you.

[00:32] Marcus: Yes I know, I’m happy to be with you too. It’s nice to be sitting at the same table, we can see each other’s eyes. I was really admiring the gold eyeshadow, the sun makes it glitter. It’s actually very muted and I don’t want to give people the wrong impression. It’s very pretty.

[00:51] Stephanie: I don’t have like crazy glitter on my eyes.

[00:53] Marcus: No, it’s not 13 year old glitter.

[01:00] Stephanie: Oh, man, it’s dangerous. We just recorded our prior episode where we were talking about childhood and storytelling. And so we were reminiscing about how you would tell stories to me versus Ben, and the difference of how he would want to take over.

[01:16] Marcus: Yeah it’s like you just never wanted me to stop. You would go tell me more, tell me more. And Ben would take over the story like, “What if this happens, let’s make that happen.”

[01:27] Stephanie: And I’d take the ideas and I’d be like, “Oh, I love this, now how can I do my own that’s just like it.” Anyway, yes.

[01:32] Marcus: Yeah, fun times.

[01:33] Marcus: Still happens. Okay.

[01:35] Stephanie: Indeed. Today we are still talking about identity and joy. And we’re going to look more from the brain science perspective. So from our brain’s perspective identity is always relational. Talk to us more about this.

[01:54] Marcus: So, you know, having the opportunity to write a couple of books with Dr. Wilder, I learned more about the brain than I ever dreamed I would. And one of the things I learned is that the identity center of your brain is located behind your right eye. It controls the left eye because the optic nerve flips over there. But that part of my brain can be thought of as both the Joy center and the identity center of my brain.

Which is really cool because this part of my brain grows with the experience of joy which means my identity is connected to joy. It is also in the relational part of my brain which means my identity from my brain’s perspective, is always connected to relationships. So in other words I see myself as part of a group, and then knowing who my people are helps me understand who I am.

So as an infant I bond and I attach to my mom first and then to others in my life, especially my dad. And I begin to take my identity from how they see me. So at a very nonverbal stage I am learning already, are people generally happy to see me? And so as an infant I am used to looking into people’s eyes and having them light up with joy to see me. That part of my brain gets all excited and I have joy, until it gets overwhelmed and I need a break. Then I come back and I get more, and it’s, “Hey, here we are again,” and then I need a break. So the more I get that as an infant the more capacity for joy that I grow, and the more stable sense of identity develops which says, people are happy to see me.

So if I experience sadness and I look for your eyes, are you still happy to see me when I’m sad? Or I’m angry and I look for your eyes, are you still happy to see me when I’m angry? That also fuels my emotional stability to know that I can have these different emotions, and still be the kind of person that people are happy to be around. And that helps grow my capacity to regulate those emotions and all the rest of it. So there’s a whole lot there and we unpack that in some of my other books.

But when it comes to the identity, we call this “The Other Half of Identity”, because there is the Bible side that says, “This is who you are, believe it, it’s true and build your life on this.” Now we’re talking more about the side of identity that I build through attachment, and  how I do that well, and what kind of gets in the way.

[04:18] Stephanie: So when you’re talking about seeing people and mirror neurons, is this  when you see the look in somebody else’s eye and then you interpret it about yourself? Is that connected to mirror neurons?

[04:34] Marcus: Yeah, mirror neurons are way more powerful than the others. Those mirror neurons can be defined as the neurons in our brain that do not learn from words. You know, they don’t learn from information, they are reading what’s going on. So if I stare you down with anger in my eyes and say, “I love you so much, nothing is better than me.” You are going to believe my eyes and you are not going to believe my words. Because your mirror neurons are going, “Wait a second, that is not the message I’m getting.”

On the other hand, if I’m like, “I hate you, you’re the worst thing ever.” But my eyes are like, this is totally sarcastic, this is a joke. You read that and your mirror neurons are figuring that out, that oh, this person really likes me. So it’s hugely important. Part of our development is our brain’s capacity to read people and see what they think of us. That is also why when it comes to God, having an idea that God is happy to see me even when I have negative emotions, is hard for some people. Because when they were little and they had negative emotions people weren’t happy to see them. And so it’s hard for them to believe that God is.

[05:43] Stephanie: So, in regard to identity and comparison, Grandpa gave you advice that I think about a lot, actually. He drew a graph and the bottom represents identity from self, where one end of the spectrum is inferiority and at the other end of the spectrum is conceit. And then at the top of the graph it represents identity from God, where at one end is humility and the other end is confidence. And having this graph all in one picture is helpful to highlight the contrast between humility and inferiority. For instance, I feel like I hear people confuse humility and inferiority or things like that a lot. Like, “Oh well, I’m just being humble.” Or “Oh, they’re so humble.” Would you talk more about that?

[06:27] Marcus: Yeah, absolutely. I remember I was a senior in high school and I was just struggling and I came to talk to “Grandpa,” my dad. He had a radio broadcast called Keeping your Balance. He was in the middle of writing a script so he’s probably thinking about this already, but he said, “The devil always introduces his lies in pairs. One of those is inferiority and the other is conceit. And he really doesn’t care which extreme he gets you to go to because he’s got you in bondage either way.” And one of the things I’ve learned is that when my eyes are on myself, I call it “living with a mirror in front of my face.”

So I’m looking at myself all the time and then I compare myself to other people. If I look in the mirror and I compare myself to some people I go, “Well, I think I’m better than them.” That is conceit. And if I look at myself in the mirror and go, “I don’t think I’m as good as them.” That’s inferiority. And it always reminds me of my favorite inferiority jokes. And that is the person who had a t-shirt on the front that said, “I have an inferiority complex.” And on the back it said, “But it’s not a very good one.”

With inferiority and conceit, I find that most people find themselves actually kind of “ping ponging” back and forth between the two. And the reason that they’re ping ponging back and forth is that their eyes are on themselves and they’re practicing comparison. And so it makes perfect sense that I would ping pong back and forth because sometimes I look at myself and compare, and feel pretty good about myself. And other times I look at myself and compare, and I feel like I’m worthless. And so that’s why God says we need to throw away that mirror and take our identity from what he says. And my dad was very clear, he’s like, “We’re humble because God remembers that we’re just dust.”

And he looked at me and said, “You know you’re an athlete but what if God took away your athletic ability, what if you couldn’t do that anymore, would that change your identity?” “You are smart and you are at the top of the honor roll, what if God took away your intellect and you couldn’t think like that, and you couldn’t remember facts. Would that change your identity, would it change who you are?” And so it was really embedded into me early on that I have nothing to be arrogant about, right? That even when I succeed it’s because God gave me gifts. And even allowed me the opportunity to get the kind of training to develop those gifts.

And then on the other hand he said, “Besides the humility is this idea that you are of great value, or so much value that the father decided to sacrifice his “good” son, if you will, to save me.” The one who was perfect and did everything right and never let him down. He said, “I’m going to sacrifice him for you, that’s how much I value you.” That’s why Paul says, “How will he not also with him freely give you all things?”

[09:19] Stephanie:  I’ll just throw in there also that Jesus willingly did that, his Father didn’t force him to do that.

[09:26] Marcus: It wasn’t child abuse as some people have tried to say.

[09:29] Stephanie:  Jesus sacrificed himself for us.

[09:31] Marcus: Yes.

[09:34] Marcus: So we’re at the point here where in my own life I do remember the impact that this had. In high school I had this burden of feeling like I had to be a witness because I was the “lone Christian,” among a lot of non- christians at my public high school. And so I tended to not want to interact with people unless I was absolutely confident I could present myself well. I let that turn into just a general struggle with inferiority. I remember especially at that age doing this with girls because at the locker right next to me was this really pretty cheerleader, and I would never talk to her. And all of a sudden for the first time the next day, instead of looking at her and saying, “I wonder what she thinks of me”, I threw the mirror away. I looked at her and said, “That’s an actual human being, I wonder what her needs are, and I wonder what’s going on in her life?”.

And all of a sudden I realized that with most of the people at school I wasn’t even interacting with them like they were human beings. I was interacting with them like they were there to judge me or they were people I had to find a way to impress. It just flipped everything for me. It gave me a tremendous amount of freedom to kind of be myself like, “I’m going to be okay because God’s got me.” So I’m free to look at these other people for what’s really going on in their life and how to help them.

[11:07] Stephanie: I’m so glad you went there because I was going to lead you there next. How does throwing away the mirror help us interact with other people? It’s not just all about us.

[11:19] Marcus: That made the big difference because I had never talked to her before because I was so intimidated, but that day we actually had a really good conversation. I mention the fact that she was a pretty cheerleader on purpose because immature people have a tendency to need to sexualize all of their relationships. And so as an immature young man you can only see girls like that as potential sexual partners. It’s really just kind of the way we’re wired. But the more mature you are the more you’re able to see them as a human being, and have a human being relationship with this person. I think the freedom to see her as a human was something that surprised me.

[12:04] Stephanie: When I read nonfiction I love to highlight and annotate. I just have to say that in this chapter of A Deeper Walk, chapter seven titled “The Other Half of Identity,” I have two hearts and a star in the margin. I have two different colors of underlines and brackets and a penciled note that says,”One of the most important paragraphs in the book.” So maybe I liked it.

[12:24] Marcus: I guess so. I’m curious now.

[12:30] Stephanie: It’s where you put it all together at the end of the chapter and so I’m just going to read part of it. “The question of our identity is, at its core, a worldview question. It is about who gets to define reality. Do we let our reality be defined by the world, the flesh, and the devil? Or do we turn to God for the definitive answer to what is real? If I define myself by comparison to others or based on how I feel, I am using the world’s system. When I look to God and say about myself what he says, I am dealing with reality as it actually is, from God’s perspective. The good news here is that God thinks I am incredibly special. Identity is the foundation on which we must build our lives. In Christ we have a secure identity.

[13:17] Marcus: Whoo, that’s the summary isn’t? I think that this was something that hit me early on.  My dad, your grandpa, was known for teaching worldview and teaching culture. He taught missions so he taught missionary anthropology. And his explanation of how culture operated was that every culture at its core has a worldview. The worldview creates the values, the values create the behavior. And that part of our worldview is, is there a God, what is he like? You know, what’s my relationship to him, who am I, where do I come from, and what’s my destiny? What’s my future, who are my people, and what do we value? What do we think, and how do we explain the way life operates?

I grew up around all these culture questions and worldview issues, and I realized that there is a kingdom reality, there’s a kingdom worldview. And that kingdom worldview needs to drive the way that we see reality. Every culture has a pecking order and that pecking order is based on comparison and that is, how I compare to you determines where I am in the pecking order. And so if I’m good looking generally in our culture that’s all I need to do and I’m going to be toward the top of the pecking order. I just show up and I am good looking and everybody’s like, “Okay, they’re accepted.”

If I’m not so good looking then I learn to perform, I want to be funny and I want to be witty. I want to get people’s attention in some other way so I can be accepted, because I want to be up toward the top of that pecking order. And if I can’t do those things then maybe I want to be a high achiever. I’m going to work really hard and I’m going to get the best grades, and I’m going to be number one because I want to be accepted. And if people have all three, looks, personality, and achievement, now it’s like, “Okay, you’re just number one, you’re up at the top of all this.”

Well in the kingdom pecking order Jesus teaches the opposite. He says, “Don’t strive to be number one in the world’s pecking order, instead be a servant of everybody.” That means we need to be looking out for those people who get trampled on in this world and are not at the top of the pecking order. We need to have the kind of secure identity that allows us to see people and to help them, and not feel threatened by those who may be better than us. To not feel superior and almost even disgusted by people who are under us.

But to realize that my job is to help, and my job is to look out for those in need and take care of them. That was partly what was going on in my high school experience. I was getting out of the pecking order mentality and going, “Let’s just see people as people and treat them this way and let’s be a servant to others”.

[16:04] Stephanie: That’s so good. So you were talking about the infant and child level stages. Can you talk more about what identity looks like at the various five stages of maturity?

[16:18] Marcus: Sure. As an infant I have no ability to act like myself when I change emotions. With every emotion I feel I turn into somebody else. So at the child level I am learning how to name the emotions that I’m feeling and stay myself anyway. As an adult I may experience all kinds of emotions throughout the course of a day, but by the end of the day I’m back to being myself. At the parent level I’ve been living as an adult for so long  I’m now ready to help somebody else with their emotions. I can come alongside this infant who needs to know that they’re loved, accepted and special with every emotion that they feel, and pass that on to the next generation.

And then as an elder I’m kind of noticing where there are holes, and who needs a surrogate parent; and who could really use a father figure in their life or who could really use a mother figure in their life. And we talk about spiritual fathers and spiritual mothers. I think that is less of the passing on of information, and more of taking them under your wing and being a protector for those people. And you got to be just really secure in your own identity because I don’t need you to give me an identity. I’m secure enough of my own identity to take care of you and take care of myself at the same time. So that it’s huge for us to have adult parents and elders in our lives.

[17:53] Stephanie: Before we wrap up, could you talk about heart identity and heart values?

[17:58] Marcus: Yeah. This concept of a heart value came from “Thrive.” I don’t know who originated it but I’m familiar with it from Chris and Jen Corsi, and they’re teaching it at “Thrive Today.” And this idea that we have heart values that are unique to us. I kind of paired that with John Eldridge’s, “What makes your heart come alive?” I love his story in Wild at Heart where he said that he went to a bookstore and picked up a book, read one line, and it changed his life. Right. And that one sentence was, “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes your heart come alive, the world needs more people whose hearts are alive.”

[18:35] Stephanie: Amen.

[18:36] Marcus: Amen, so that was the thing. So the question is, “What makes your heart come alive, is a heart value.” For example, if I come into a room full of clutter and everything in me just wants to organize it, that means organization is a heart value for me. And I bless the world by helping to bring order to chaos. Well, that’s just like God, right? What did he do at creation, he brought order to what was chaotic. My love of organization is a reflection of the image of God. Maybe I am a person who is administrative and it’s like I see chaos among people, and I’m like, “Oh, I want to bring order to this.” “I want this to be more systematic. I want these people to have order rather than chaos.” Again, that’s being God like..

Maybe I have a strong need for justice and I see somebody being treated unfairly. I want to make that stop. I want to do something about this. Or maybe I have a strong sense of mercy and that is, I’m more concerned about hugging that person who’s having trouble, right? And so some of us are like, “Oh, I want to give them a hug.” And some of us are like,  “I want to stop these bad people.” So there’s all kinds of emotions. Now the devil recognizes our heart values and he wants to distort them. He wants to turn them into something negative.

So God sometimes has to redeem our heart values for us. Sometimes the devil wants to crush them in us and sometimes he wants to pervert them in us. God wants to combine them with joy and with the kingdom. Between the kingdom and joy he wants to bring out that unique thing that he’s put in each one of us that makes us, us, and makes us special in his eyes. So that’s a whole thing in itself.

[20:15] Stephanie: Thank you for that window. Any final thoughts?

[20:18] Marcus: So again as we’re talking about identity, I look at it as left brain and right brain. The left brain identity are these covenant things that are true about me. So it’s the PACT, it’s all the list that Neil Anderson put together. It’s like these things are legally true of me in Christ and that’s all the left brain stuff. It’s good for me to remind myself that this is reality and God has defined reality, and here it is. The right brain stuff is more of this attachment with God. Am I fear bonded to God? Am I joy bonded to God? Have I internalized at a heart level this is who I am? And have I done that by being connected to people who call it out of me? People who see that value and remind me who I am, and how it’s like me to act.

When it comes to identity, sometimes we’ve been pretty well trained in the left brain stuff, but we haven’t gotten trained in the right brain stuff. And that’s why we talk about “The Other Half of Identity.” I want people to understand that this is just as important. In fact, if you don’t get this part right, the other part is probably going to fall away at some point because it just hasn’t taken root. So that’s what we’re doing here. That’s why we have two chapters on identity to look at the left and on the right brain side of this. Both the legal identity and then kind of the way we live our identity with other people.

[21:42] Stephanie: Thank you. So we’ve been working through FISH backwards. So now we just finished “I” and now we’re going on to “F”. So our next two episodes are going to be looking at freedom and we will have that to look forward to. So thank you, Dad.

Thank you all for joining us on the trail today. If you want to keep going deeper with us on your walk with God, please subscribe to the Deeper Walk podcast and share with your friends. You can find more at our website, deeperwalk.com.

Thanks again. We’ll see you back next week.