21: Emotional Healing in the Home (Ch 4: Below the Surface) | S4E21

(00:00) Stephanie Warner: Welcome back to Season 4, episode 21. Hello, Father.

(00:05) Marcus Warner: Hello, Daughter.

(00:07) Stephanie Warner: What an epic event we just had. The Heart-Focused Discipleship Conference was this weekend. And if you were there, let us know in the comments which session stuck with you the most or do you have any key takeaways? We were so excited to be able to put on that event. A name your own price online event with man, so many epic people. And if you missed it and are sad, you can catch the replay. So I will put that link back in the description. How are you doing, Father?

(00:39) Marcus Warner: I’m good. It’s been a busy couple of weeks and yeah, I’m feeling good. Glad to be talking all things spirit-filled home with you here in our podcast today.

(00:52) Stephanie Warner: Yes, we are. We’re continuing our book study of The Spirit-Filled Home by this Dr. Marcus Warner here. And also, we have a free do-it-yourself book club. A book study guide in the description that you can use whenever you feel like going through this series with your group, or a book buddy. Or even as an individual it might be helpful, but  it’s there. And last week we looked at maturity development and that was an epic fire hose and a treasure trove of information. It was so much fun.

And for this week, you can grab your book, and we are in chapter four titled “Below the Surface.” This is going to be looking at dealing with emotional pain and tackling some of the tough stuff in the home this week. I guess on that note, Father, anything you’d like to say as we enter this chapter?

(01:54) Marcus Warner: Sure. A lot of times when you do marriage events and I’ve been to various marriage events, that will usually start with a survey or something like that. Like what are the biggest problems in marriage? And usually the top three in some order are communication, sex, and money. And so what’ll happen then is those will become the topics for the event. How to do better with communication, how to fix things in your sex life, how to get in agreement on money. And I find that money is important because it reflects the values that people have and what is important to you.

What we find is that while these are presenting issues, like this is something that is clearly a problem, we need help with those. There is something deeper going on. There’s like an engine underneath it that is actually driving the problems in these areas and other areas that are often brought up as issues in marriage. So sometimes it’s helpful just to get a few new tools or a few new things, like some practices. But it’s also helpful to understand what’s going on underneath that’s driving all of this. And if I did something about that would it actually make the rest of this much easier?

(03:09) Stephanie Warner: Yeah, we often say, we’re not against fruit picking. We’re not against managing situations or developing skills for the day to day. But at the end of the day, you want to get to those root issues, and not just pick the fruit of them all the time. So, Father, we have a core model that we use at Deeper Walk to help us get to the root issues. Will you walk us through that tool?

(03:35) Marcus Warner: Yeah, some people call this “wolves”. And it’s like the word “wolves”, without the vowels. It’s WLVS. I’ve always thought of it as the “demonic radio network,” WLVS. The demonic radio network broadcasting all deception all the time, that kind of idea. However you remember it, WLVS stands for wounds, lies, vows, and strongholds. And the core image that we usually use is farming. If your heart is a field, then when your heart gets wounded, which is the W. When I get wounded, it’s like a plow goes through the field and it forms a row, it turns over the soil and that soil is now ready to receive seeds. On either side of the wound there are two farmers.

Farmer one is the Holy Spirit. He’s got a bag full of “truth seeds”, because he’s the Spirit of truth. The other farmer is the devil. He’s the father of lies. So he’s got a bag full of “lie seeds”.  They both want to plant their seeds in this freshly plowed wound in my life. And if the Holy Spirit’s truth gets planted in there, we get a John 15 experience. Jesus said, “If my word abides in you, you will bear much fruit.” But you can also get a counterfeit John 15 experience. And that is, what happens if it’s the devil’s word that’s abiding in you?

You get a different kind of fruit that grows. And so what happens is the world wounds us, the devil lies to us, and then our flesh jumps in. Our flesh makes vows to try to take control of the situation, because I don’t want to feel this pain anymore. I don’t want this to get worse. So I’m going to make vows about how I’m going to control my world from now on. And a vow usually takes the form of an “I will” statement. “I will never let this happen again.” “I will never go through something like this again”, and “I will do this.”

And so, our vows tend to either make us very passive, like I’m going to stay out of this. I don’t want to ruffle any feathers, I just want to be a wallflower. Or they’ll make us very aggressive. I’m going to get big and strong and intimidate people. It can make us retreat into our intellect where we just kind of withdraw into an ivory tower. We can disappear into addiction, and all kinds of things. But it’s like our vows are the flesh response to try to take control of the situation. So you get the world, the devil, and the flesh all involved in this. And so I sometimes think of the vows as the vines that grow up out of the seeds that get planted in those wounded places in our hearts. And those vines then are going to bear fruit.

And it’s either going to be Holy Spirit fruit, if the truth gets planted there. Or it’s going to be the unholy spirits burying the fruit, in which case we get strongholds. And the strongholds are the things that we don’t want in our lives. The emotions we can’t handle, behaviors that are compulsive, things we tend to go to counseling for. Everything from addiction to anger, to anxiety and depression. All the other things that are the fruit that come from having lies under the surface.

So you can imagine if you’ve got these things going on, how that might affect your marriage. Because what happens is I get triggered when the wounded part in my heart gets touched. It’s like it triggers something that comes out and I stop acting like myself. I turn into a different person and the wounded version of me comes to the forefront. And the wounded version of me doesn’t have as much capacity. Isn’t as gentle, and it has its own set of baggage that comes out and into the marriage. So anything that we can do to help resolve this process is going to help us in our marriage.

(07:36) Stephanie Warner: And beyond. It’s gonna help you in your parenting, it’s gonna help you in your relationships. As somebody who, again, is unmarried and has no kids, I can see how this helps even in roommate situations, and beyond relationships. But if we’re speaking specifically in the home, any of this is going to come out with…

(08:00) Marcus Warner: Yeah, it’ll affect every aspect of your life. Since we are talking fundamentally about the home, and how to have a spirit-filled home, children can benefit from this. Parents can benefit from it, husbands and wives, every member of the family. If you can deal with what’s going on below the surface, that’ll help. And so thinking about, what is going on below the surface? It’s this “wlvs”, WLVS model that we use to try to help people get a handle on it.

(08:30) Stephanie Warner: Mm-hmm. So what does that look like? I understand, okay, so wounds, lies, vows, and strongholds. But how does that help me get a handle on it?

(08:39) Marcus Warner: Well, it tells me what I need to look for in my life. So I look back in my life, and what are the wounds, and what did they cause me to believe? How have I responded to those things that have created flesh patterns in my life now, that are sabotaging what I’m actually after in my marriage? And in my parenting and the things going on in my family. And so this is a way of looking at the negative side of it. And then we present tools for, well, what do I do about this? But before the tools are helpful, you’ve got to actually identify what the problem is that you’re trying to fix. It can be like, I grew up with an alcoholic father, or I grew up with a very religious father who was one way in public, and another way behind the scenes.

Or I grew up with a mother who was domineering or a father who was passive; I can have all kinds of wounds and they can come from all sorts of things. And so one of the things we encourage people to do is pray. To ask God to show me, is there a particular wound that has led to a particular set of beliefs, that I have responded to in the flesh? That are sabotaging the way that I want to be in my marriage? Sometimes, just a simple prayer of God, is there a wound back there somewhere, that has had such an impact on me that it is sabotaging what I’m trying to be, and what I’m trying to accomplish in my family today.

(10:14) Stephanie Warner: Yeah, that’s really good. And we’re going to continue on  unpacking this idea of prayer and how this can help with our WLVS model. And I will also just say, if you’re wanting more about WLVS, Understanding the Wounded Heart is the core book that you can walk through. And so if this is striking a chord, and you’re like, yes, I can see that wound. I can see that lie and I want help dealing with it. That’s another good place to start.

(10:45) Marcus Warner: Yeah. And also we have the Freedom Course, a companion to the Understanding the Wounded Heart book, that you can go through at your own pace. There’s videos to it, there’s exercises, there’s journaling, and things to do. So if you want to go on that journey to deal with these things, we have a lot of tools to help with that.

(11:01) Stephanie Warner: We do, we do. And you mentioned four tools. Usually you unpack those as listening prayer, spiritual warfare, forgiveness,  growing joy, or taking thoughts captive, I paraphrased some of that. Building joy, all of that. And so in this chapter, in The Spirit-Filled Home book, you really dig into listening prayer. So why is listening prayer such an important tool for this?

(11:36) Marcus Warner: Yeah, listening prayer is kind of the core process that we use for dealing with wounds. We start by asking God the question, can you bring to my mind one wound that you would like to heal? Well, that’s a listening prayer question. God, would you bring to my mind one wound that you would like to heal? And you pay attention. What is the first thought that comes to your mind? Is there a memory that pops up right away? So that’s where we start. The listening prayer process we teach is ‘real prayer.’ And so the first question that we ask God is, what do you want me to remember? So what do you want me to remember, God? And I’m asking for one memory at a time, because I don’t want to deal with more than that.

So “R” is remember. “E” is explore, and that’s the second question I ask God in prayer. I say, God, I’ve remembered that so what about that do you want to explore with me? What do I need to remember about the non-verbals in it? And as I explore it with you, what began to feel true after this event that didn’t feel true before it? And that’s a way of trying to expose what the lies were.

So the “E” of real prayer is, let’s explore that memory. And we’re particularly looking for what lies began to take root because of that. I like to, instead of just saying, God, what lies did I believe? I’ll just ask what started to feel true. And we’ll often measure on a scale of 1 to 10, just how true does that feel? And I’ll give you an example. Some of the most common lies that I’ve had people report have been things like, I am all alone in this world. Nobody cares about me. If God really loved me, this wouldn’t have happened. If I were a better person this wouldn’t have happened, there must be something wrong with me.

Those kinds of things begin to feel very true. For example, if I begin to believe that there’s something wrong with me, then my flesh is going to say, I need to hide that part of who I am. I need to make sure that nobody knows or ever discovers that. And I’ll come up with all kinds of flesh strategies to try to hide those parts of myself that I’m afraid will cause problems. This can take a lot of different directions, but it’s the core pattern that stays the same. So the listening prayer starts with, God, what do you want me to remember? And then let’s explore that, especially for the beliefs that began to feel true.

(14:21) Stephanie Warner: So how might listening prayer look in a home or family context? I also just want to say that what you’re specifically addressing here is ‘real’ prayer dealing with the WLVS issues, not just listening prayer in general.

(14:37) Marcus Warner: Right. I’m talking about the context of dealing with wounds, lies, vows, and strongholds. How do I use listening prayer to address that? Well, I do that by saying, well, what wound do I need to remember? What do I need to explore about that wound? Once I get to that point, I get to the “A” of real prayer, and that is ask. And it’s a simple ask. Jesus, I ask you to do whatever you need to do to heal this. And that’s somewhat unnatural because if you think of your heart like a hand, when your heart gets wounded.

You can think of it like your hand getting cut with a knife. It’s like before it got cut with a knife it might have been easy to reach out and hold on to something. In the same way, before your heart got wounded, it was easy to trust God. It was easy to be confident in life. But once it got damaged, once that blade came through and cut it, now you don’t want to grab anything. You don’t want to reach it out for anything, you want to pull it back.

You want to protect it, you want to hide it away? And so when we were saying, ask Jesus to touch it, that’s a big ask for some people, because it means they have to open up this fragile part of their heart. They have to open up this thing that they’ve been protecting and keeping away from people, and say, Jesus, I’m inviting you to touch this And then once you do that you get to the “L” of real prayer, and you revisit the memory. You look around, you listen, and see if anything about that has changed.

And you’re specifically looking to see, did anything about my memory change? Do I have new thoughts? Do I have new emotions? Do I see anything different? And all of these things can have an impact on us. And if we can find a measure of freedom from the control of this WLVS process in our lives, that freedom’s gonna show itself in our ability to act like ourselves in our marriage.

(16:32) Stephanie Warner: Well, I mean even in our own personal home. The amount of times that I will feel like, “Ah!” and we’re just in the living room, and you’re like, well?

(16:48) Marcus Warner:  It’s true. I go through it myself. Sometimes you can do this for yourself and sometimes you need some help. And so I encourage people that you can start by yourself. It helps to sometimes journal and write these things out and use it as a guide. You can write things with ink and paper or you can use a computer if you want.

(17:14) Stephanie Warner:  And you’re specifically going after ‘real.’ I will reiterate because usually we do, but I don’t know if we did this time. We’re not saying ‘real’ prayer like this is the only “real” kind of prayer. We’re saying ‘real’ prayer because that’s the acrostic that we’re using to remember the process.  I’ve heard in marriage seminars and stuff that you’ve done another form of listening prayer that people have found very helpful, which is, how does God want me to see this? How does the devil want me to see this? Will you talk about that a little bit?

(17:49) Marcus Warner: Sure. I usually teach that as taking thoughts captive which is maybe why I didn’t pop up in my head right away, but I’d say it is related. So the ‘real’ prayer process is the first one that most directly goes after the wounds. The second one is really going after lies that we believe. We don’t actually interact with people as they are. We interact with people as we imagine them to be. For example, I have an image of my father and my mother in my head. I’m going to interact emotionally with the image of them that I have in my head, whether that’s actually true about them or not.

And so same thing, when I think about Brenda who I’m married to, I have an image in my mind that is going to drive certain emotions. And so there are images that make me go, oh yay, I’m married to Brenda. And there are images that if I focus on them, make me go, oh I have to be careful around her. I need to protect myself. And so you look at that and we all have these things. And so part of the listening prayer is asking God just a very direct question. Lord, in words or pictures, how is the devil trying to get me to see my wife?

You can also do this as a parent with your kids.  In words or pictures, God, how is the devil trying to get me to see this trouble making kid I’ve got? And you ask, what is the correct picture I should be having here? And so you start with what’s the lie. And I start there because it creates like that crushed black velvet background against which the pearls of truth will shine all the more brightly. But once you have that lie, then you go to the second part of the prayer. Which is God, in words or pictures, would you just show me what the truth is you want me to know about this child, or about my wife, about my husband, about this situation?

I remember one of the first times I ever did this we were actually doing a marriage retreat. Somebody shared later that the first image when they prayed, God, what is the lie that the devil wants me to believe about my wife? He saw in his mind like a circus clown. The devil wanted him to see his wife as a clown.  Well, what emotion does that bring up? No respect at all. A sense of disgust kind of about this. And maybe even shame about your wife with other people. And so guess what he struggled with? He struggled with feeling ashamed of his wife and feeling disgusted with her. And he struggled treating her with respect.

And it all came out of this image that the devil wanted him to be thinking about her. He then asked God, what is the truth you want me to know? And he saw like this beautiful princess in a gown that was a special gift just for him. He literally started to tear up and cry as he was explaining it to me, because he realized just how horribly he had been treating his wife for all these years. And it was because he was reacting to this image in his mind about her. So where do those images come from? Normally they come from wounding experiences that I’ve had with this person that led to a lie that I now believe about them, and vows that I have made about how I’m going to treat them or manage them or handle them.

And so that’s kind of what creates those strongholds in our lives. And so you have the real prayer process and you have this, God in words or pictures, would you help me to understand? And I say words or pictures because sometimes people hear the word clown and sometimes they see a picture of a clown.  I’ve had other images too that people have reported seeing when they’ve prayed prayers like this.

(21:46) Stephanie Warner: Yeah. So I think it’s really important when we talk about listening prayer to also talk about testing. When you’re saying, what’s the devil trying to get me to see? Or you’re going into memories. So would you briefly explain why it’s important to test?

(22:12) Marcus Warner: Sure. Whenever you’re dealing with the unseen realm, one of the challenges is that it’s unseen, right? So that’s one of the reasons you have to do some testing to find out, am I being led astray here or not? So the first test we do is if I follow this, will it produce the fruit of the Spirit? So if I treat my wife like a clown, that’s not going to produce the fruit of the Spirit. But if I treat my wife like a princess, that will.

So there’s a test like, okay, at the worst, maybe this isn’t God speaking, but that feels like a God thought. It feels like a thought God would want me to have. So if I act on that it’s going to produce good fruit. That’s the first test. The second one is, it’s not unscriptural to treat your wife like a princess.  And so you’re running it through, does it bear the fruit of the Spirit? Is it scriptural?

I think of it in terms of three S’s. The fruit of the Spirit, it’s scriptural, and it’s surprising, like I wasn’t expecting that. That caught me a little bit off guard. I find if you get all three of those things, then you can have a pretty good confidence that what you’re dealing with is coming from God. And again, it doesn’t mean God’s speaking to you in an audible voice or something like that, but He is prompting you to thoughts that are in sync with what he wants you to be thinking. If it goes beyond that, you can get into spiritual warfare and direct tests of things that are demonic. And we do that fundamentally through an ‘If’ prayer. An ‘if’ prayer says, God, if this is from you, thank you for it. May it lead to fruit and glory. But God, if I’ve been deceived, then I renounce it in Jesus’ name. I command this thing to leave. And would you just guide me into the truth? There are different ways of testing. And again, all of this is just introductory. If you want more we have a lot of resources at Deeper Walk to teach you more.

(24:19) Stephanie Warner: Yeah, for sure. I have so many thoughts, but we’re running short on time. So I’m going to move us on to another aspect of this chapter. You talk about the importance of loving boundaries when you’re dealing with emotional pain in the house. And I know that’s also a large topic. But would you kind of tie some of this together with what boundaries are?

(24:45) Marcus Warner: Yeah. Henry Cloud and John Townsend wrote the book Boundaries decades ago now, right? And so it’s gotten into most of our vocabularies, but a boundary is basically a limit that you’re setting in a relationship. When I talk about loving boundaries the opposite of loving boundaries is a fear-based boundary. Are you going to have a love-based boundary or a fear-based boundary? Now a fear-based boundary is just stay away from me. I don’t feel safe and there’s a time and a place for that.

But a loving boundary is one where you say, I want to be happy to be with you. I want to be my best with you. And so to help that be possible, I need to know that there are some things I can expect in terms of looking forward to, and things that I can expect in terms of knowing that I’ve got some space. When you think about it we all do this all the time anyway. With just obvious things like, if I’m going to the bathroom I don’t want you walking in and doing things. That’s a boundary we just sort of assume.

And there’s other boundaries like that, that we take for granted. But the idea behind a boundary is I want you to know that you have my undivided attention, that you’ve got the best version of me. And so a loving boundary is putting up some limits and some expectations so that we can have a greater sense of knowing what to expect from each other.

(26:22) Stephanie Warner: Well, and I think that, again, it’s a big topic. But a sense of a goal or a desired end for some of these things. If you are dealing with emotional pain in the home and in conflict there’s usually going to be broken trust there. And so part of having healthy boundaries or loving boundaries does help to start rebuild and repair the trust, so that maybe some of those boundaries don’t have to be there anymore. Am I going too deep with this?

(26:57) Marcus Warner:  Yeah, like you said, it is a huge topic. So my main concern was to distinguish between a fear-based boundary and a love-based boundary. But when you get into all of this, what we’re after here is a way to keep the relationship bigger than the problem, while not denying the problem. And so we have to be honest that there is a problem and therefore there is a need for some things like rules or guidelines in how this interaction will take place. And sometimes they’re temporary.

I remember one of the first people I talked to about this. The wife was being verbally abusive to the husband and the husband had to put up a boundary where he said, as soon as you start swearing at me, I’m leaving the room. That was something he had to lay up there. I’m not going to sit here and just let you swear at me and tell me what a horrible person I am, I’m leaving. If we can have a civil conversation with productive things, then we can have that conversation.

So until he had left the room a couple of times, she really didn’t believe that there was going to be any consequence to it. What that did though is it paved the way for them to actually have some civil and positive conversations about things, because he put up boundaries about what he wasn’t going to put up with. So I say that because a lot of times people only think of this in terms of wives protecting themselves from husbands, but this can go both ways.

(28:31) Stephanie Warner: Mm-hmm. Yep. There’s so much to say. It’s such a big topic. I will make sure to put some links in the description for going deeper in some of these areas. I know that there’s a lot we’re covering here. I encourage you to read the book.

(28:50) Marcus Warner: We’ve often said that every chapter in this book could be its own book. There’s a lot there.

(28:54) Stephanie Warner: Yes, it’s very robust. The book is such a good overview to introduce you to really important concepts. Giving you enough that you can get the basics and then move on to deeper things in the areas you need. So thank you all for being on the trail with us. Father, would you give us any closing thoughts for this episode?

(29:17) Marcus Warner:  I would just say that everybody has wounds. And everybody needs boundaries. And everybody has lies that they believe from time to time. So this is like for everybody. One of the common things that people think is that I should be farther along than this. I should be a better Christian than this. I shouldn’t still be having this battle. I’m like, you guys just got to reject that thought because everybody has it. And this is something the devil doesn’t quit on. He’s going to keep coming after with these things.

(29:49) Stephanie Warner: But there is hope in Jesus.

(29:50) Marcus Warner: So learning some of the tools is important because it’s a battle you’re going to have to face. And that’s one of the reasons why it’s good to get to some of these tools in your belt.

(30:04) Stephanie Warner: Huzzah! All right, on to next week where we will be talking about strategies for strengthening your home. See you then.