20: Build Your Plan for Breakthrough

[00:00] Stephanie: Season 3, episode 20. Today we are starting to pull this Breakthrough series all together.

Hello, Father.

[00:06] Marcus: Hello, Daughter.

[00:08] Stephanie: Good to be with you.

[00:09] Marcus: Here we are once again.

[00:12] Stephanie: We’re sporting our blue.

[00:13] Marcus:  I like it. We occasionally coordinate.

[00:15] Stephanie: Occasionally. I know I even have a blue mug.

[00:18] Marcus: You have your Asbury mug.

[00:20] Stephanie: Do you know, this was a hundred years.

[00:22] Marcus: A hundred years, and I said you weren’t actually there that long. It just felt like it.

[00:27] Stephanie: Right. Three years.

[00:30] Stephanie: And I’m good. Good stuff.

Well, we are today starting to bring the breakthrough. We have been talking about breakthrough since last year. We’ve been going through the BUILD model piece by piece and so today I want to start by having you give us, what is the BUILD model and what was the point?

Because we have been taking it slowly and I’ve been trying to keep us contextualized the whole time, but somebody might have popped in and been like, “You just did a series on demonization and Christians, so I’m here for that. And what is build and breakthrough?

[01:07] Marcus: No problem. Well, honestly, Breakthough! was a book written in response to talking to a lot of people who are working in addiction recovery or who are working with people who are looking for a breakthrough in some area of their lives where they just felt like they were stuck.

They were going through a program that was designed to help them get unstuck. Multiple conversations were leading to, Is there a better model? Is there a more holistic model? Is there something missing in our model?

And so this was an attempt to put together everything that I’ve learned through the years into a simple, five engine model. The idea is that there are three physical engines, two spiritual engines, and it’s meant to be a checklist to look at.

Have I addressed all of the engines? And could I be stuck because there is an engine that I haven’t done anything about at all. If not, then maybe that’s the one I need to be paying attention to. Or is there more that I should be doing in that engine because I just haven’t properly understood it.

This model is meant to be a holistic model for looking at, how does change happen in a human? What is a biblical worldview? What is the model that that points us to?

And that is, God created us with a body. He created us with beliefs. He created us with a brain that attaches to people and so bonding is an issue. And then the Holy Spirit and wicked spirits, they’re also part of the worldview of those scriptures.

So this is an attempt to try to lay out a simple, here are the five engines. And then adding to those five engines, the idea is that the goal isn’t just pain relief, and the goal isn’t just getting through this problem.

The goal is actually growing my maturity, and that real change isn’t just about getting past a particular problem, it’s about growing to another level of maturity in my life. And so we have to look at how these engines help us do that, as well as what that looks like and what that means.

[03:19] Stephanie: And I love that that concept is just baked into the acrostic that you have. You have the five engines where you’re like B, B, B, and then Holy Spirit, wicked spirit, but the acrostic is to…

[03:37] Marcus: Build maturity, right? So B. U. I. L. D. There are five letters in the word BUILD. It helps us remember the five engines. So multiple ways to remember the five engines: three Bs, which is Body, Beliefs and Bonding. And then the two spiritual engines, wicked spirits and Holy Spirit.

You can remember them, though, as, Be aware of your body, Unleash your beliefs, Increase the joy in your bonds, Listen to the Spirit and Defeat demons. So those are the engines, and those are the strategies. And what they lead to then is an increase in maturity.

[04:17] Stephanie: Very good. So we’ve been going through, breaking down each of those five engines and looking at them, so now we’re pulling it together. I guess I’m going to start off with looking at it from the individual perspective.

If you had an individual stop you and just be like, “Hey, you know…” You were a pastor for a while and you did a lot of pastoral counseling. Somebody comes into your office, how are you using this model to approach them?

[04:48] Marcus: When I was a pastor, someone would come in, and as a pastor, you have no idea necessarily why they’re coming in to see you or what things are about. So you always start with listening. You’re listening to their story and you asking them questions.

As I listen to their story, I’m always listening with a checklist. And as I’m listening to things, I’m like, do I hear trauma? Do I hear lies? Do I hear vows? Do I hear things that could open the door to demons? Do I hear clear physical problems that are in there?

The checklist comes largely from this BUILD acrostic or the five engines. And then within those five engines there’s a deeper checklist of, well, like SOUL:  Am I hearing Sin? Am I hearing Occult? Am I hearing Unforgiveness? Am I hearing wounds and Lies and vows?

All these things factor together in how you listen. And so you’re kind of taking notes and you’re making notes to yourself to say we’re probably going to have to push into this at some point in the conversation.

But most of the people who are coming are coming because they’re looking for a breakthrough with some problem that they’re facing in their life. So you start with listening and then…

[06:01] Stephanie: And I’ll pause you right there on the listening. Part of listening isn’t just the left brain checklist listening, which is very important, but there’s also the listening for emotions, and that they would feel seen as they’re talking. So could you…

[06:16] Marcus: I’m probably in my left brain right now a little bit. Yes, it’s true that as well as listening with the checklist, I am trying to listen empathetically and listening for emotion, to validate those emotions. Always start with listening and then validating the emotion that I’m hearing.

There’s almost always a narrative that people are sharing with you too, and a lot of people just want you to agree with their narrative. And so I have to be careful not to just say, “Oh, yeah, yeah, that’s absolutely right.”

[06:52] Stephanie: Validating isn’t affirmation. Validating is that you’re accurately naming the emotion that they are feeling. And they feel understood that you understand them accurately.

[07:03] Marcus: I want them to feel seen, want them to feel heard, but then ultimately they’re there to get some help. So after we do the validating, the listening and the validating, then we could look into, what are the things that we can do?

And I usually would tell them, in the time that we have here, the two most effective things I can do with you are probably going to be related to listening prayer and spiritual warfare. So those were the two things that I did most with people as a pastor.

One, I’m not that qualified to talk into their physical problems. So we didn’t deal with the body much, but I would encourage them to go get that checked on. And along the way we would push into what the wounds were and what then the lies would come up.

And that’s all part of what we did under the Holy Spirit, let’s pray and ask God. Bring to mind the wounds, bring to mind the lies, bring to mind the vows. I’d be writing these things down, and then pressing into that and then asking them to pray, and say, after you pray, what changes?

What do you see now? What do you hear now? What emotions are different? And then you take another set of notes, and if something demonic gets triggered then you deal with that. And so that was largely what I did as a pastor.

[08:22] Stephanie: And then you’ve also described a final step there being, okay, what is your plan of attack here? What is your strategy going to be? Keeping it simple, not overwhelming. What’s your next step?

[08:37] Marcus: So the goal was, once we’d done whatever it was we were going to do, you want to give them something to follow up so they have a way to reinforce what they just did. And so you tell them things like share this experience that you had here with somebody else.

I learned later that it’s a really good idea to have people share these personal experiences with Jesus with at least two other people, and then it actually helps to reinforce it and make it better.

So I would usually have them share it with somebody, and I would also give them either a book or something that they could read to follow up on and to reinforce some of the things that we had been doing.

A lot of times that was like Understanding the Wounded Heart or a book like that, which I hadn’t written yet, but I had some of that content available in various forms.

[09:26] Stephanie: So that’s good. As we’re talking about strategy, making a plan, I did put together a little PDF that people can download as a tool to help you get started with thinking through. You could pray through those five engines and be like, “Okay, God, what is my simple next step?” And kind of fill it out.

Then if you want to, you’ve done that, or you want to tweak it, it’s free. You can just keep using it however you need. So I’m going to put a link to that in the description for helping you build your plan for breakthrough, getting some first steps there.

And so then, and let’s kind of look at an example rubric of going through the Five: body, beliefs, bonding, listening to the Spirit, and not listening to wicked spirits. There was a comma there. And dealing with…You were going to say something.

[10:30] Marcus: I was just saying I had a conversation the other day with someone who said that they were working with a person with high anxiety. They just asked, “If somebody with high anxiety came to see you, would you just assume that that’s a demon?” That was their question.

I’m going to assume that there might be something demonic involved, but I explained to them the five engines, and I said I’m going to want to know, is there something physical that’s causing this anxiety?

They were coming from a location where I knew there were a lot of people where meth was a big problem. And so are they doing meth? Are they doing something that would create anxiety in their body physically? And the guy’s nodding “Yeah, that’s a distinct possibility. Hadn’t thought about that.”

We looked at beliefs, and I said anxiety is always related to beliefs because it’s anchored in our imagination, and when we imagine a world that we don’t think we could handle, and that the thing that we’re most afraid of handling is an emotion we can’t handle.

And so I can picture a world where I’ve got to deal with emotions I don’t think I could handle, and that causes anxiety. And then we get into bonding and the idea that some of these people that you meet with who have anxiety, they were forced to bond with somebody who was scary.

As a kid, they may have loved their parents, but their mom or their dad was actually also kind of scary. And so they’ve never felt safe and secure with anybody.That also can cause them to become clingy with you if you become the first really safe, secure person they’ve ever known. Now all of a sudden, you’re it, and they come to you with everything.

[12:11] Stephanie: Which is why it is important to have two people, have multiple people.

[12:16] Marcus: This is why it’s good to have two or three people engaged with these things whenever possible. And so we just walk through those first three engines, and you could see them nodding like, “Okay, yeah, I’ve seen that in the anxious person. I’ve seen that in the anxious person. I’ve seen that.”

I said then we get to the Holy Spirit, who clearly is not causing anxiety, but he’s part of the cure, which is, we’re going to invite the Holy Spirit to speak into this situation. And then there’s the demonic, which is what he brought up.

And I said yes, absolutely, because demons can affect all of those other things. And you’re going to find different people who just dealing with the body is going to fix their anxiety, or just dealing with the beliefs will fix their anxiety, or just getting a secure attachment will fix the anxiety.

So all of these engines, the reason we have them there, is that in any given situation, any one of them might be the key to breakthrough. There are other times when all five of them are going to have to be resolved. And you could just see the light bulbs coming on, and he said “I’m definitely reading this book because, you know, now that I see this.”

You could tell the mind went from, “How do I help that person?” to, “I’ve got issues in my own life, and maybe this will help me sort through those.”

[13:27] Stephanie: And I would also just say, we’ve talked a little bit at some point about the breakthrough matrix of the five levels. There are the five engines, and then there are the five levels of maturity.

And each engine could address something at a different level of skill, whether that’s an emotional skill or a literal skill. Like, “Hey, if I need to go to the gym right now I am working on my stationary bike skills.” I’m enjoying that, and I’m going to level up at some point. But right now I’m working on my stationary bike skills.

But there is also that matrix of things to put through, whether you’re working on yourself or you’re working on somebody else or with somebody else. What is an appropriate level? What are they ready for right now? Can you speak to that a little bit?

[14:30] Marcus: When you’re dealing with addiction, you’re almost always dealing with someone who is either stuck at infant or child level maturity, or they have fallen into a hole of infant and child level maturity.

To understand, an infant means I need you to recognize what is wrong with me and I need you to do something to fix this. And I am not playing any active role in participating. For example, you take bonding and attachment and community.

An infant will believe it’s your responsibility to create a community for them, and to create the perfect community for them, and then invite them into that and make that as safe and easy as possible. That’s what you do with infants. With emotional infants, it’s the same way.

Whereas children, I still have to create the community for them, but I am beginning to teach them skills of how to participate in a healthy way in that community. So that’s where we say, “No, you don’t use those words here. We don’t hit like that. It’s a good thing to say please and thank you.”

That’s not infant level skills. Those are child level skills, and so now they’re actively learning the skills that help them live better with community. As an adult, what should be happening is that now I don’t need somebody to create a community for me wherever I go.

I’m not afraid to move to a new city. I’m not afraid to go to a new church. I’m not afraid of these things because I know that wherever I go I can build and enter into community. And then as you go up to parent and elder, just all the more so.

If I find myself at adult age or elder age and I still have this fear, like I don’t know if I could create community for myself wherever I go, it’s because there are infant and child level skills that were never learned. That all comes to bear on this.

So when you’re going through your matrix of the five engines and then the five levels at every one of these, and I have this matrix in the book, right? I have something like this in there, which is:

At the infant level, the person always needs somebody else to do it for them. At the child level, the other person has no idea what to do, but is open to the other person helping them learn how to do it. And then at the adult level is the first level at which I can actually choose to do things.

If we’re always telling people, well just choose to do this, just choose to do that, we need to understand that the ability to just choose to do something is pretty much an adult level skill, and so before that I’m learning to develop the capacity to make those kinds of choices.

Not that kids can’t make any choices, but they’re growing their capacity.

[17:25] Stephanie: Children are learning how to do things to take care of themselves. There are levels there.

[17:31] Marcus: And then you get to parent and now I am helping other people grow their capacity to begin leveling up from infant to child, child to adult and so on.

[17:40] Stephanie: So let’s go through just really quickly, what might be one or two things that would be a relatively simple starting place. If I need to work on body, what’s something simple that I could add in that wouldn’t be biting off more than most people can chew.

[17:58] Marcus: So working on my body can be as simple as breathing. That is I’m going to practice taking deep breaths, holding it, and practice breathing in a box skills. That’s working on my body.

It might be as simple as, I’m going to drink more water, or I’m going to make this one change. That’s where we get into what many people call tiny habits. I know Junie Felix introduced me to the concept, but she learned it from someone, BJ Fogg, I think is his name at Stanford, who came up with this tiny habits idea.

The idea behind tiny habits is to make one small change. And the small change you want to make, you probably need to make a smaller one than that. I need to drink more water. Well, maybe the change you actually have to make is to make sure that you always have a glass of water with you when you sit down.

And then if you do, celebrate it. Yay, I remembered to bring a glass of water! Good job! I’m making progress! And so that’s kind of the idea of tiny habits making changes with our body.

[19:05] Stephanie: So since you mentioned Juni, I’m just going to shout out her book, You are Worth the Work: Moving Forward from Trauma to Faith. She’s going to unpack all the how to do tiny habits. She’s very entertaining and has a lot of experience. So it’s very good.

So let’s work on beliefs. I’m just looking at the time we’ve got to press through.

[19:25] Marcus: It’s true. So the question here is beliefs at an infant level?

[19:29] Stephanie: Yes. What’s one simple thing, for instance, I could do one. I’m going to make a T bar chart. I’m just going to draw T on a page. And I’m going to start paying attention to my thoughts and tracking.

If I’m recognizing I’m having negative thoughts that are pretty consistent negative thoughts, I’m going to track that and I’m going to start seeing, can I replace that thought with something not negative?

[19:54] Marcus: What I would say is that at an infant level, I can’t do that. At an infant level, I need you to draw the T bar chart and show me how this works. And I need you to tell me what I’m believing instead of what I’m not believing.

And then at the child level, I need you to walk me through creating that chart for myself. So we’re going to collaborate on it. If I’m truly working with an emotional infant, what I’m going to say is, “All right, these are the beliefs I heard you say, and these are the things they said,” and I’m going to be creating this thing for them.

If I’m working with an emotional child, then I could begin asking them, “What beliefs did you hear yourself saying there? What did you do?” And it goes up from there because at one point, they don’t have the capacity to develop the skill, so I’m doing it for them.

At the next level, they have the capacity to begin learning this skill. But we’ve got to slowly help them grow in that ability. Even something like prayer or Bible stories or something like that.

With infants, they may just need to be around while somebody’s praying, and they just may need to be around while people are studying the Bible. And they kind of pick up on that.

In a child’s area, I’m teaching them now: here’s how you pray. Practice this. This is how you read. Let’s have you do some reading.

And then we get into the adult level. And now it’s where I am forming these habits where I pray instantly and automatically about things. This is just my habit now, and I study the Bible on a regular basis.

And then you get to the parent level and now I’m ready to train infants and children to grow up into those adult level skills.

[21:33] Stephanie: That’s very good. So bonding. One simple thing for bonding would be making a list of, I want to be intentional to share joy with three people this week, an intentional moment of a shared smile, something joyful.

[21:51] Marcus: Yep. So again, at the infant level, really what I’m doing is I’m trying to give them joy experiences. They’re not even aware that this is something that is happening.

And then at the child level, we begin doing what you just talked about. And that is, let’s teach them now how they begin looking for opportunities to build more joy in their life.

[22:12] Stephanie: Mmm. And then you just addressed Spirit and Scripture, a tip for practicing that. And then how about one quick…time is running out.

[22:27] Marcus: I understand. That’s fine. Spiritual warfare, the same thing. Basically, at an infant level, I’m doing it for you. So I am just recognizing what’s going on. As a parent, if I have a baby who’s got a problem, I’m just like, “In the name of Jesus, I renounce whatever is doing this,” and I’m doing it for them.

With a child, I’m like, “Explain to me what you’re experiencing here,” and I’ll use the same vocabulary and I’ll walk them through it. I’ll do some of it for them, and I’ll have them do what they’re capable of doing.

But then by the time we get to an adult level, I know how to do this for myself now. And that’s kind of how, even at the warfare level, those things matter.

[23:06] Stephanie: Thank you. Next week we’re going to continue this conversation. We’re going to continue wrapping up our Breakthrough series. And I just want to encourage you, if you’re interested in the Breakthrough tool I mentioned, you can look in the comments.

And also we are prepping to do a Q and A episode, so if you would like to submit a question for us or any sort of feedback or testimony, there’s also a link in the description that you can fill out.

We would love to hear from you and pull some of those questions for our Q and A episode.

And yeah, I’m going to ask you for final thoughts.

[23:43] Marcus: Final thoughts. Okay. What happens is, a lot of times I get asked, what’s the difference between Breakthrough! and A Deeper Walk? Or what’s the difference between the BUILD model and the FISH model?

I’ll often tell people the BUILD model is largely about how people change. It’s a model of transformation, and it is usually problem specific. So if someone’s coming, like, “I have a specific problem. I’m looking for breakthrough in this problem. What do I need to do?”

The Breakthrough model is meant to give them the checklist to go through to see what’s happening and then the specific strategies related to that checklist. The FISH model is a general path towards a deeper walk with God. It is just the general path to growth as a Christian. And so the two do intersect.

I think we’re going to talk more about that in the next episode. So just to let people know, that’s what this is about. If you’re looking for breakthrough in your life, if you’re looking for some area where I need to solve a problem, Breakthrough! is probably the book to start with.

[24:55] Stephanie: Awesome.

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, share with a friend.

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Thanks again. We’ll see you back on the trail next week.