28: Resilience: Emotional Capacity

[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. Episode 28, we’re beginning 2023 with a series on Emotional Resilience.

Hello, Father, and Happy New Year.

[00:30] Marcus: Hello, Daughter. Happy New Year to you.

[00:32] Stephanie: Oh, it’s so good to be together. Christmas break was lovely. I always want to fit a month into one week, two weeks or however long it is. I got to rest, I got to hang out some, and I got to enjoy a fire and a white Christmas.

[00:48] Marcus: We did. We had a white Christmas thanks to the blizzard.

[00:51] Stephanie: Yes, I know.

[00:52] Marcus: And it’s all gone already. That’s amazing though.

[00:55] Stephanie: Yeah. Some people maybe weren’t as happy about that white Christmas as we were, but it was so fun to have. My poor roommates lost power in Kentucky after I left but luckily they had a wood burning stove.

[01:10] Marcus: Yes. We just got a wood burning stove. We’ve been having fun playing with that and figuring out how to get it to actually warm the house, and not just look pretty. So it’s been a fun little journey.

[01:22] Stephanie: I’m very grateful for it. Well, this new series going into a New Year, we’re talking about emotional resilience. I was thinking of this episode’s topic and then the series topic with twofold inspiration. But first, we have a free conference coming up at the end of the month. You father are being joined by the man, the myth, the legend, John Eldridge of Wild at Heart, to talk about resilience. How epic is that?

[01:52] Marcus: Yeah, it’s pretty epic isn’t it? John’s material really inspired me when I first discovered it. In fact I remember reading the preamble of Wild At Heart, and it suggested going out in nature someplace to read it. So I went down to the local park and I started to read the book. I had this strange thought when I went to open the book which was, “I dare you to touch me.” And I’m like, “Where did that come from?” It was like something inside of me was not happy that I was reading this book. And I swear within three pages I was crying, and  began to realize that it was touching on something I needed at a heart level – realizing how important it is to take care of our hearts and to make sure that our hearts are connected with Jesus.

Ever since then I’ve been sort of an “Eldridge fan” and I like connecting with him. So this will be the third time I think he’s spoken with us, but this will be a little different. He’s going to be the featured speaker for this conference, January 27th and 28th. And last year we had a free warfare conference. This year we have a free resilience conference. He has a new book out called Resilient. And his approach to resilience is a little bit different than the one I’ve been teaching because his is focused almost entirely on our connection with God, which is good. That’s just one of the four things that we focus on. But it’s really important because as Christians it’s the one thing we can do that other people can’t do.

So in this conference I’m going to be teaching on some things that we’re going to cover in the podcast, like neuroscience and what is emotional capacity. What is available to people who aren’t Christians and what is available to us as christians that we need to take full advantage of. So I’m excited about it. It’s going to be Friday night and then Saturday afternoon eastern time, January 27th and 28th.

[03:50] Stephanie: Yeah, it’ll be a nice well rounded conference. I’m looking forward to it. And building bounce has also been on my mind. So some people like to choose a focus word for the year and I do it sometimes, it can be fun. Last year my word was hope, and boy did I need it, 2022 was rough on me in a lot of ways. I determined months ago that my word for 2023 was going to be margin. And Jesus has just been lovingly whispering to me for a long time about my need for this. I have just stubbornly plowed ahead, constantly overcommitting, and feeling like I have too much going on to cut things out. Part of why 2022 was so rough is that I just really maxed out on a lot of things.

[04:38] Marcus: So this isn’t your full time job?

[04:40] Stephanie: No, I’m a full time graduate student, also Deeper Walk, and other things because I’m a crazy person. It’s okay because God’s got me. I’ve been dwelling on this and trying to process and validate myself, wanting to figure out word pictures for how I’ve been feeling. Okay, can I submit my two word pictures?

[05:12] Marcus: Sure.

[05:13] Stephanie: My first word picture that I came up with was a weightlifting word picture, which we will see is actually very apt for emotional capacity. I have been feeling especially through grad school that I have been weight lifting and pushing through each rep, it’s been hard, but I’ve been doing it. I felt recently over last summer break that I was able to put down the weights. I had the feeling of my muscles trembling like, “Wow that was a really hard rep and now I’m resting.” And then the school year started up again and I had to pick up the weights, and I wasn’t ready. My arms were still “trembling” (metaphorically speaking) and I had to do the next rep, but I wasn’t ready for it, but I had to do it anyway. And so I’ve just been feeling like that.

And then the other word picture is from this story. I helped with tea at a wedding right before Christmas break, and it was lovely. We had  loose leaf chai in large stew pots that we would ladle out for people but you would have to let the loose leaves sink to the bottom of the pot. There was all this wonderful chai and everybody wanted to come get some, but by the end of it, we were getting to the bottom where you’re getting all the loose leaves.

My roommate and I were both helping with this and we were just straining trying to get the chai out. There was still plenty of chai to be had but we had gotten to the dregs and it was really hard to get the good stuff out, because we were at the bottom of the bucket. And I’ve just been like, “Yep, that’s how I’ve been feeling in my life too.”  There’s still more to be had but I’m getting into the dregs and I don’t have the capacity for this. So my word for 2023 is margin. I’m taking strategic steps to build more of that and you can be on the trail with me, I’m on the trail with you.

[07:21] Marcus: Exactly, don’t we all need margin? Very few people are good at it, right? And some of my heroes are the people who are the best at margin. They seem to be really good at saying, “No.”  Which is still something I’m trying to master.

[07:36] Stephanie: I am not good at saying, “No.”

[07:39] Marcus: It reminds me of my favorite emotional capacity picture. A donkey is hauling a cart and the cart just has too much stuff on it and the donkey has been lifted up into midair, and is just hanging there. So you show people this picture of the donkey hanging in midair because he’s just carrying too much weight and saying, “Does this donkey need a pep talk, no, not really.” “Does this donkey need their emotions validated, no, not really.” They actually need to get rid of some things and get some weight off of them because it is more than they can handle. I think a lot of us are in a situation like that. We have more weight we are carrying than we know what to do with and sometimes we need help. We need more hands carrying the weight and we need to get rid of some of the weight. Because the answer isn’t always just growing more capacity, sometimes it’s getting help and sometimes it is getting rid of some of the weight.

[08:38] Stephanie: With that in mind, do you want to give us a quick definition of what emotional capacity is? When we talk about this, what do we even mean when we say that?

[08:46] Marcus: Let me give you a couple different pictures. First of all, the simple definition of emotional capacity is the ability to handle emotional weight. Some things are just hard, they’re heavy. I think of Back to the Future when they ask, “Is everything heavy in the future, is something wrong with the atmosphere?” Anyway, in our case we’re saying there are some things that are just hard because they’re weighty on us, and we can’t handle them anymore. So what happens when we can’t handle anymore is we either snap, shut down, blow up, or melt down. We don’t act like ourselves, we turn into a different person and we get overwhelmed. So when we talk about emotional capacity, it is this idea of how do I grow my ability to handle weight? So there’s a lot that goes into this. That’s just one definition, the ability to handle emotional weight.

From a technical perspective, Neuroscientist Daniel Siegel calls this, “Flipping the lid.” He talks about your window of tolerance. So a window of tolerance is that window of what you can handle emotionally. Now for some of us that’s a pretty small window. We can only handle a very tiny amount of emotional weight before it’s overwhelming to us. And so our goal is to grow that window of tolerance. To be even a little more technical, we’re talking about the ability to keep your higher level brain functions online, when the lower level brain functions get triggered. So for example, if the amygdala level of my brain gets triggered and the fight or flight reaction gets triggered, the question is, “Can that get triggered and I still act like myself, and remain relational?”

So let me just dive into brain science just a tad here because I think it will help. There are four levels of brain function that Jim Wilder teaches that I’ve helped to explain in a couple of our books. The first level is attachment. Second level is assessment. Third level is attunement. Fourth level is action. The higher levels of the brain are the action level and the attunement level. And so you think about this way, that attunement level is the level at which I am able to remain relational, because that’s the part of me that reads you. If I’m reading you properly I can tell when you’re overwhelmed and you need a break, or I can tell when you’re interested in continuing a conversation, but I can also misread. So level three is related to remain relational. Level four is the “act like yourself” part of your brain, right? That’s the part of my brain that remembers who I am, who my people are, and how it’s like me to act.

So when I say my higher level brain functions stay online then I’m able to remain relational and act like myself. This is a good way to summarize that. The lower level functions in attachment happen when I shut down and my attachment light shuts off, I just don’t bond to anybody. When it’s on all the time I’m afraid I’m going to miss out on something. When it’s irregular and going haywire or when at the assessment level I get stuck, because things are too bad or they’re too scary, it causes the higher level brain functions to not be as completely in charge of who I am. So that’s the very technical part, that’s the brain science part. That’s kind of what we’re doing. And I’m going to explain more of that at the conference. I’ll dive into the neuroscience of this a little bit more.

[12:16] Stephanie: Huzzah. So in your book Building Bounce, you and Stefanie Hinman talk about building emotional resilience in an analogy to building your body’s immune system. Instead of bubble wrapping our emotions or putting on a hazmat suit for our emotions, we need to learn how to experience the germs of life, the negative emotions, and then return to joy from them. And so that’s a little bit of what you were talking about with those four levels.

[12:45] Marcus: Stefanie Hinman, for those who don’t know her, she’s a certified Christian counselor from the Kansas City area. She teaches building bounce as a course for Deeper Walk on a regular basis. So usually about twice a year we offer a group course on building bounce that Stefanie teaches and she’s very good at it. The idea of building your emotional immune system actually came from Stefanie. It came not from her career as a professional counselor so much as it came from her job as a mother. And she was really worried about her daughter. And she tells the story in the book about being concerned and praying, “God, I don’t want my daughter to feel pain, I don’t want her to feel this.” God sort of corrects her a little bit saying, “Actually, isn’t it better to strengthen her emotional immune system so she doesn’t have to be afraid of what she runs into?”

When I don’t have emotional capacity the germs I am afraid of are actually my emotions. When I don’t have emotional capacity I’m afraid of emotions that are going to overwhelm me. In fact I’ve heard Dr. Wilder say, “The only thing anybody really fears is an emotion they can’t handle.”  We tend to think its pain, but in a sense attachment pain is an emotion. A lot of people go through pain and don’t get traumatized by it. It’s what the pain means to them and the emotions that come with it that are traumatizing. And that’s really kind of been eye opening for me to realize that most of us are spending our lives trying to avoid certain emotions. What we’re talking about here is what would it look like if instead we grew our capacity to deal with those emotions, so that it didn’t overwhelm us?

[14:27] Stephanie: That’s good. I have two thoughts which are very tangential. One was that I’ve been reading a book with Ben, my brother, and there are some soldier characters who are having to deal with lots of pain. And one of the things they say frequently is, “Pain is just a memory, we’ll get past it, and it will be in the past.” That’s not always true for people when the pain comes back to revisit them. And the other thing, talking about Stefanie Hinman, when I was editing Building Bounce (I’m the publishing coordinator at Deeper Walk) I literally started misspelling my own name, because I was so in tune to making sure Stefanie’s name was spelled correctly. Her name is with an “F” and mine is with a “Ph”. And I literally signed something once with an “F” and was like, “No, wait.”

[15:19] Marcus: She would appreciate that, Stefanie’s great. She does a great job not only teaching this but also her specialty really, was helping traumatized children who didn’t know how to live with joy. She began building this and created a curriculum. She’s written another book called Building Bounce with Kids, that is really focused on that. What she’s found especially when she’s taught this is that a lot of the adults actually prefer the Building Bounce with Kids, because they like doing the kids exercises and all that stuff. She’s very good with that.

[15:50] Stephanie:  It’s a good book. Every time I revisit it I’m like, “Oh wow, this is a great book, good job.” So on the topic of children, do you want to go into the five stages of maturity and how they interact with capacity?

[16:04] Marcus: Sure. So when we talk about emotional capacity they directly interact with the five stages that we learned from Life Model: infant, child, adult, parent, and elder. And the idea here is pretty straightforward. So an infant has almost zero emotional capacity. Right. How much stress does it take for an infant to lose it? The answer is not much. So the infant needs somebody else to take care of their emotions for them. We don’t say to a six month old kid, “Pull it together.” “Come on now, this is not that overwhelming, it’s going to be okay.” We have to actually hold them, hug them, connect with them and their emotions nonverbally. They are completely dependent upon us to recognize the emotional distress they’re in and to meet them, and to comfort them.

So the challenge here becomes, “What if I don’t get that when I’m an infant?”  If people are not recognizing where I’m at in my emotional need and they don’t help me grow, I can remain an emotional infant for as long as I live. And what that means is it doesn’t take much to overwhelm me for one, and two, I can’t get myself back to joy from there and I am stuck. Somebody else is going to have to recognize where I’m at and come rescue me. Well, that gets really old right? If you have to go rescue your 60 year old husband or your 40 year old wife constantly, it wears on you and creates compassion fatigue after a while.

So we have to take some steps to grow our emotional capacity. So that’s the infant stage. At the child stage I should be able to handle a little bit more weight before I lose it. I am also at the child stage learning how to name the emotion I’m feeling, how to recover from it, and how to bounce back from it. The goal is that by the time I’m like 13 years old, I’ve had a lot of practice bouncing back from upsetting emotions. And if everything goes perfectly I’m not afraid of these emotions. And when I’m not afraid of these emotions then life becomes an adventure, because I know I can go face anything and be okay.

But again if I get a trauma, the kind of trauma that comes from missing out on things, the absence of the good I need, I could get to age 13 and I’ve never actually gotten good at bouncing back from any of these emotions. Or maybe I’m good at some of them but not others. So if I’m good at a few but not at the others then I’m going to, without even realizing it, create an approach to life that avoids the emotions I don’t handle well. My world gets smaller. And so that’s what we’re talking about. Parents should be able to take care of babies and they should be able to teach their kids how to do this. And elders are stepping into the community level and saying, “Here’s an adult who missed out on this. I can step in and I can be a surrogate parent to this adult.” There’s a lot of other things that go into it. That’s the five stages of maturity in a nutshell.

[19:05] Stephanie: Thank you. I mentioned earlier about pain being just a memory, except for when it’s not. How does trauma affect capacity?

[19:17] Marcus: So “B” trauma is what we’re talking about here and that is the bad stuff that happens to us that still brings up pain. So we say there’s three things that go into building our emotional capacity. One is repairing the damage of the past. There is a place for emotional healing. And that’s why we teach understanding the wounded heart. It’s why we teach spiritual warfare. It’s why we teach the REAL prayer process. There’s some things that need to be repaired especially when it comes to “B” trauma. When we talk about resilience we tend to put the focus less on the repair.

So the idea of building bounce is like, how do I actually inflate this ball so that it bounces? How do I actually grow my capacity so that I am bouncing back from these emotions? So that’s a little bit different set of skills that we’re focusing on, rather than just patching the ball. So think of patching the ball is repair, and filling it with air is resilience. And those are really the two main things that we’re trying to do.

And then the third thing is rest and you mentioned this with your workout analogy. Muscles actually grow while you’re resting in between the weight lifting. So people who are constantly pushing and pushing, doing more and more weight, they break down their emotional capacity, they don’t grow it. They’re breaking down their physical capacity if they do that in the weight room, not actually growing it.

[20:42] Stephanie: And we’re going to talk more about that in the next episode. We are going to talk about rhythms.

[20:46] Marcus: So we talk about repair, we talk about resilience, and we talk about rest. Those are the three key things that are involved here.

[20:54] Stephanie: So what are one or two small things that I or one of our listeners could do or not do, to start building more capacity today?

[21:06] Marcus: Let me give you two things. Number one is five minute breaks. It’s a good idea just to take five minutes where you detach from everything else. Your problems will still be there when you get back. So take five minutes, close your eyes, and breathe deeply. “Breathe, in a box” where you inhale for 4 seconds, hold it for 4 seconds, and exhale for 4 seconds. You know, “breathe in a box” for a minute of that five minutes. Then find something happy that makes you smile and focus on that, whether it’s in your future, whether it’s in your past, or whether it’s in your present. And just take five minutes twice a day doing that, and you can begin growing your capacity just from that.

[21:48] Stephanie: Would the Wild at Heart Pause App be for this?.

[21:51] Marcus: Yeah, it does a lot of those things. So the Wild at Heart Pause App would be a good recommendation for a structured way to do that. The other thing I would recommend has to do with rhythm. (And we’ll talk about this I’m sure at some point.) And that is Dr. Wilder’s analogy of Joy camp and Joy Mountain. And the idea here is making sure that we set a rhythm to our lives where we stop working at a certain point in the day, and we quiet ourselves. We get some space and try to end the day at a place of relational joy if all possible.

Now, I know some of us live by ourselves and that’s not an option. Some of us have other issues there. But if at all possible you want to end your day in a space of relational joy. I know some people who can’t do that, and they look at videos of kitty cats that make them smile. It helps them like, “Oh, I’m feeling happy about this cute cat.” But that’s not bad, right? Because the goal here is to get some of that happy juice going in your brain before you go to sleep. Getting some rhythm into your life and making sure that you set some boundaries around when you get up and when you go to bed. And then also the idea of taking five minutes, those would be the two main things I’d suggest.

[23:13] Stephanie: All right, mission accepted. So next week we are going to be talking more about building capacity through rhythms of joy and rest. But for now, any final thoughts for this episode?

[23:25] Marcus:  I think sometimes we look at resilience as a bonus thing that would be nice if you could afford it. Maybe you can’t afford it, you know, I’ve got too many things to do, to work on this. What I found is that if I lose my resilience then everything else collapses pretty quickly after that, and I can’t afford to. It’s the classic sharpening your ax thing, right? It’s attributed to Abraham Lincoln I think, but  if I have 5 hours to chop down a tree, I’m going to spend the first four hours sharpening the ax. I’ve heard it said differently all the time, but you get the idea. Sharpening my “ax resilience” is really about keeping my capacity to deal with life fresh.

It’s like the difference between playing basketball with a ball that actually bounces, and playing basketball with a ball that only comes halfway up when you try to dribble it. If you’re going through life and your “emotional ball”  bounces halfway back up, that’s no fun. It’s exhausting and it’s like, “What’s the point?” So this is really crucial to who we are and how we live. Especially as we’re kicking off the new year, a lot of people are making commitments about what am I going to do? How am I going to get more margin, how am I going to get more resilience in my life? So that’s why we want to launch the podcast this way and help people get off to a good start.

[24:45] Stephanie: Excellent. I’m looking forward to this. As I stated at the beginning I need it. So thank you, and thank you all for joining us On the Trail today. Deeper Walk International is a nonprofit organization and we partner with people like you in order to do what we do. Some are on the trail with us as official Trailblazers who commit to donating  $25.00 or more per month. Because of our Trailblazers, we are able to provide free or discounted resources like this free podcast, or our video streaming platform the Learning Library Basic. Also the free January conference where John Eldridge from Wild at Heart will be joining dad to speak about emotional resilience.

So as we close out today, we invite you to consider becoming a Trailblazer. You can do this very simply by visiting our website, https://deeperwalk.com/trailblazers/. 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.

Thanks again and we’ll see you back next week. And Happy New Year!