3: Maturity & the Brain

[00:00] Stephanie: Season 3, Episode 3. Today we are looking at maturity and the brain. Hello, Father.

[00:06] Marcus: Hello, Daughter.

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

[00:09] Marcus: So here we are once again in the new studio. It’s nice to take a dive into — you said that we’re on the brain and maturity?

[00:18] Stephanie: We are.

[00:18] Marcus: Okay, okay.

[00:19] Stephanie: We are.

[00:20] Marcus: That’s good.

[00:21] Stephanie: And since you mentioned being in the new studio, I know we’ve talked about this, but the majority of our listeners are still audio only, so they don’t actually see it. But for those of you who have found us on YouTube, hello. And yes, we are still in our new studio and enjoying it very much.

[00:40] Marcus: It’s really nice. We used to do this, you know, her in Lexington and me in Indiana, and we could wear our pajamas. But now we have to look presentable.

[00:48] Stephanie: Season one was a lot of virtual recording. Season two, we actually got to be in person and now we’re new. All right. But yes, maturity and the brain. This episode has the potential to pack a punch covering lots and lots of stuff.

So I’m going to just say upfront, we have a whole series on joy and the brain. And so if you really want to unpack this, we’re going to direct you there. We are going to look at three key facts about the brain and joy, but then we’re going to dig into some maturity development issues.

So firstly, Father, what would you like? How would you like to set us up here?

[01:34] Marcus: So, yeah, it’s kind of interesting because when you talk about the brain, there’s some people who love brain science, and there are people who are increasingly skeptical of some of the things going on.

And I would just say that specifically related to this idea of does your brain create your identity or does God give you your identity — the answer is clearly God gives us our identity. He gives us a spirit. We have a heart, and we have a soul.

We have all these things, but to me, it’s self evident that your brain development is going to set some limits on your ability to reflect that identity. For example, I’ve got several friends with autistic kids whose brain development is such that they aren’t free to be themselves as much as somebody who didn’t have those limitations would be. I know people who’ve been in car accidents or things like that, and they’ve had brain damage that has changed their personality, limiting their ability to be themselves.

We also know, just from what scientists have learned about brain development, that an important part of brain development is growing my capacity to act like myself. And so it doesn’t give me my identity, but it creates my sense of identity, and it creates my ability to be that person. And that’s what we’re after.

We want to help people understand that brain development does have a role in helping us act like ourselves, and the ability to act like ourselves is the very definition of maturity. Now, where acting like yourself and enduring hardship will come together is that maturity is tested when you’re enduring hardship.

And everybody suffers, so if just suffering was a sign of greatness, everybody would be great, but some people suffer way more than other people. And so maturity is marked by my ability to remain myself, to act like myself, to stay my relational self even when I am going through hard things. And so that’s what we’re really after.

So the two things are directly related. And that is how do I remain my relational self when I’m going through hard things? And that’s probably the simplest definition of maturity I know.

[03:50] Stephanie: Awesome. So let’s look at how joy affects our identity from three key facts. So the brain craves the fuel of joy.

[04:03] Marcus: Yeah, the brain craves the fuel of joy. At the deepest part of the brain, in the attachment part of our brain is this craving to bond to something that is relational. I want to be happy to be with somebody, and there’s nothing else that will quite fill that craving.

And so what happens is if I have a craving to be with someone who’s happy to be with me, and I want to enjoy that feeling of relational joy, sometimes I can do it simply by accessing my memories and remembering that and feeling it. Sometimes I can feel that by planning a time to get together with friends and go, oh, this is going to be so much fun. And I can feel the joy just from the anticipation.

But there’s also this sense — when that’s not available to me, I don’t know how to get it — that I will find a substitute. And this is how addictions are created. Addictions are essentially substitutes for the relational joy that I am craving. And so if I can’t find that relational joy in my past and my future, in my present — if I can’t find it — then my brain will find a substitute.

And that substitute is a nonrelational kind of joy. It’s a nonrelational joy substitute. And so I can form a bond or an attachment, for example, to cocaine. I could form a bond or an attachment to pornography. I can form a bond or an attachment to carbohydrates and sugar.

Anything that I find — I turn to this for comfort because what I’m really looking for isn’t available to me. And so that’s why this is so important, understanding that what my brain is actually craving is relational joy, and the other things are the substitutes that it turns to when I can’t get it.

[05:50] Stephanie: Yeah, that is so important. Another important thing we touched on last episode is that brain activity flows from right to left. And can you explain why that’s important as we unpack maturity in the brain?

[06:03] Marcus: Yeah. So there is a distinction in the primary functions of the right and left side of the brain. I was just going over this again with Dr. Wilder recently. And part of the idea is that there is sort of an electrical flow, and it only goes one direction.

That electrical flow in the brain primarily goes from right to left. And so what that means is before the problem solving part of my brain — before that left-side problem-solving part of my brain starts working on the problem solving — my right brain has already, at a speed faster than conscious thought, processed the whole thing, had emotions about it, pulled up what it thought was relevant data, and has already processed things before I ever begin to think about it.

And so the reason that the right to left is so important is that if we start our decision-making process simply with the problem-solving narrative, and we don’t recognize what’s going on underneath that at the faster, you know, first part of our brain, then we are missing out on half of the process that’s taking place to get us where we need to be.

And a lot of times, like if something is broken in that first part of the process that’s happening on the right side of the brain — something’s broken there— the solution is not generally going to be found on the left side of the brain. It’s going to be found in fixing something that’s going on and broken there.

[07:32] Stephanie: Well, that takes us — nice segue — right into the brain functions and levels. So what do you mean by this, of something being broken at a stage?

[07:43] Marcus: So there are four fundamental levels to the right hemisphere and five overall levels to brain function, and Dr. Wilder lays this out in his presentation on the brain science of The Life Model. And the core or base level is attachment. And that can be thought of as a light bulb that just lights up when I feel like being with somebody — I want to share joy with somebody — that’s the attachment light bulb kind of lighting up.

The second level is assessment. And so maybe I light up because I see somebody that I know. My assessment level is going to be well, is this good, bad or scary? Just because my brain lights up that I know you, the next thing that’s going to happen is I will immediately and instinctively have an “oh this is good,” or an “oh this is scary,” or “ooh, this is bad.”

So an “oh, this is scary,” triggers high-energy emotions of fight or flight. That’s that high energy fear and anger. If I had that immediate instinct of “ooh, this is bad” that brings low energy like “ooh, this is bad.” I feel shame around this person or I feel disgust for this person or you know, I feel despair about this person.

So all of these can be called fear bonds. Whenever I’m motivated by anything other than joy, I am into the arena of having a fear bond. Not because it’s that high energy fear that I’m feeling but because it’s in that realm of the negative emotions. So that’s the assessment. It happens almost immediately as soon as I recognize that there’s somebody to attach to.

And then the third one is what we call attunement. This is like the radar that’s constantly functioning in the background, and it is assessing important things like are there threats in the area I should be aware of? What is really important that’s going on right now? What is not deserving of my attention? Is there something good going on I should be paying attention to?

And it will send those signals over to the other part of my brain saying this is where your focus should be. So that attunement thing — as you can imagine — if I get triggered into fight or flight mode, it becomes harder to attune to the world around me. And I can misread things much more quickly. And what happens from that point on is, the lower down in the levels that I am going offline, the harder it is for anything above it to function.

And so my decision making gets out of kilter. When I am having a problem at a lower level of my brain function, it is much harder to make good decisions. And so, as one of our favorite movie quotes of all time, “I know that you are in distress and not doing your most magnificent thinking right now.”

Yeah, that’s part of the idea that we’ve all experienced of being in emotional distress at a lower level in our brain. And it affects our ability to think clearly and do the kind of problem solving we would normally do.

So the fourth level of the brain is action. This is the part of my brain that thinks of itself as me. And this is the part of the brain that we want in control and want making decisions. But if I go offline at a lower level, at the attachment level, assessment level, or the attunement level before I get there, then it’s going to be pseudo me handling decisions.

Then it’s going to be my false self handling this stuff. And that’s when I can go into enemy mode. It’s when I can act like a five-year old. It’s where I can act like cocky me or whatever, but my pseudo self will take over at that point if I am offline. And that’s why these are so important.

And then the fifth level is basically the left brain and the problem-solving part of the brain. So you put all those together. There you go, there’s your five-minute crash course.

[11:30] Stephanie: Woo! Well and as you were talking, I was just like, oh, this adds to the matrix, the breakthrough matrix of what level of breakthrough am I needing to find right now? And at which engine and also at which level of my brain?

[11:49] Marcus: Yes, that’s actually — now that you mention it — the graph that’s in the book. We have the five engines across one side, and we have the five levels of maturity down the other side. And what does this look like at each level of maturity?

[12:00] Stephanie: Well, let’s just dive right into that then, the five levels of maturity.

[12:05] Marcus: So, these are quite simply infant, child, adult, parent, elder. Now the first time I ran into this, I was like, wait, where is adolescent? You know, it goes infant, child, adult. ‘Is that really true?’ was my first thought. And what we realized is that in most cultures over the majority of human history, when you hit puberty, you were an adult.

This teenage adolescent thing is a fairly modern phenomenon that has developed. You might be a young adult, but you are an adult, and you are expected to interact with adults at that point. So you would leave the nursery.

Even in Peter Pan, it’s time to leave the nursery behind, you must grow up. So it’s important for us to realize that’s part of this equation. So to break this down, at the infant level, what we’re talking about is I can grow up, but it doesn’t mean I’ve matured. I can grow up physically.

[13:15] Stephanie: Yeah. So you could be physically an adult.

[13:18] Marcus: What we’re talking about now is we could add the word emotional in front of each one of these. I’m an emotional infant. I’m an emotional child. I’m an emotional adult. What does that look like?

So an emotional infant can’t do anything for themselves emotionally. So just like an infant needs somebody else to change their diaper, change their clothes, feed them, you know, make sure that they’re doing what they need to do. The only thing the infant is really good at is making a fuss when something is wrong. And so emotional infants are the same way.

The one thing they’re really good at is letting you know that they are upset. But they expect now that I have let you know that I am upset, it’s your job now to read my mind. Yeah, read my mind, figure out what’s wrong, and fix this.

And so when you hear of, like husbands who want a mother for a wife, that’s what they mean. They’re talking about a husband who expects this person to read their mind, see what the problem is and do something about it, rather than understanding that it is their responsibility to use their words, articulate their needs, and spell things out. That’s actually child level maturity.

So a child, an emotional child, is able to use their words. to explain what they need and what’s going on. So they can identify this is the emotion I am feeling right now. And with your help, I can get through this emotion and I can be okay, but I’m going to need your help to do it because I’m still learning those skills. So that’s what’s going on for emotional children is that they are learning to use their words to identify their emotions. They are learning the skills, with help, that are going to help them overcome.

[14:59] Stephanie: To take care of one person, to take care of themselves.

[15:03] Marcus: Yeah. And their only expectation as a child is that they take care of themselves. There’s no expectation as a child that you should take care of everybody else. So when a child is asked to take care of everybody else, that is what we call upside-down maturity or reverse maturity. And that has happened to a lot of people.

I’m sure a lot of people listening, when they were children, their parents were absent or distant or emotionally uninvolved, and they felt like it was up to them to take care of their parents or it was up to them to take care of their parents emotionally or up to them to take care of their brothers and sisters emotionally. And so what happens? They learn how to take care of one person, but it wasn’t themselves.

They learned how to take care of everybody but themselves. And so as a result, they look very mature, but they really actually haven’t learned the skills that it takes to deal with their own emotions. So that’s child-level emotional maturity.

The adult-level emotional maturity, as you might guess now, is that I have actually mastered the skill of naming my own emotions and recovering. I can validate myself by naming the emotion correctly. I can comfort myself, and I can do it relationally, and I can return to joy from these emotions. And I have got those skills. And now that I have those skills, I also start doing this now with my friends.

I’m good at validating my friends’ emotions. I’m good at comforting them. I’m good at helping my friends return to joy as well. In fact, my own little group, you know, our group of friends — we at the adult level — are helping each other, validating, comforting and recovering from their emotions on a regular basis. And that’s the skill set we are now developing and getting really good at — how do I help other people do this as well as doing it for myself — which then leads naturally to the parent level.

Because now at the parent level I have to teach somebody who’s got zero skills. I gotta teach all of this to them and pass it on. Which is why — if I get to the parent level of life, but I’m not actually a parent-level maturity in emotional maturity — I don’t know what to do with this baby. I don’t know what to do with them to help them with their emotions.

And there’s too many people who are making horrendous mistakes in their parenting with these little ones that are actually traumatizing their children instead of helping them. And that’s why, you know, Chris Corsi and I wrote the book, The Four Habits of Raising Joy-Filled Kids, because there is a rhyme and a reason to how things work.

And then finally we get to the elder stage of maturity where we’re talking about emotional maturity of the elder level, and that is where I carry a lot of the weight for other people. And I can step in and become a spiritual father or mother to someone else who missed out on things, who has holes in their life.

[17:51] Stephanie: Or is parenting the community.

[17:53] Marcus: Or I’m parenting the community and not just my own family. And one of the things about this I heard Dr. Wilder say is that if I am at the infant stage, I can’t even envision what living like an adult is like. The only thing I can do is envision what a child level might be like. If I’m a child, I can envision what an adult level life would be like. It’s hard for me to even imagine what parenting is like. And we can pretty much only think one stage ahead in our own developmental process.

[18:21] Stephanie: Because that’s what we’re growing into.

[18:23] Marcus: Right. So I find that a lot of people have trouble envisioning elder stage, even if they are physically there, because at an emotional level, they’re not. And I wasn’t. I’m not sure I’m always there now.

[18:37] Stephanie: That’s a good thing to address. Finish the thought, we’ll come back to it.

[18:39] Marcus: So it’s a …

[18:44] Stephanie: Well, yeah, so to press into that thought, I think that people have gaps. So you could be, you know, oh, I’m at adult level maturity, but in this area, if I’m triggered in this way or if I’m in this — in this area of life, I fall back into child-level maturity because I don’t have the skills or the capacity for that.

[19:09] Marcus: Yeah. Now we call those holes or gaps, depending on the context. And if I get triggered, I fall into a hole. And sometimes I have gaps, which means I just didn’t learn those skills.

So maybe I have some of the skills of an adult, but I don’t have all of them. Or maybe I have those skills when it comes to certain emotions, but I don’t have those skills when it comes to other emotions.

And so if I have gotten to be my age, for example, and I’m pretty good with sadness, and I’m pretty good with disgust, but I’m not good at all with anger, then what I will tend to do is avoid anger at all costs. And I will carefully build a life designed to avoid having to deal with anger. And if you force me to have to deal with anger, then I get upset because I don’t have the skills to deal with that emotion.

And so that would be a hole in my maturity development. I can handle some things, but I can’t handle those other ones. And that’s why sometimes people can be fairly mature, you know, very mature in certain circumstances, but if the wrong emotion gets triggered and that one’s undeveloped, they can fall into a hole and act like a little kid very quickly.

[20:16] Stephanie: Very quickly, I wanted to give credit to where this model comes from. Do you want to explain where this model comes from?

[20:27] Marcus: Yeah, this is Jim Wilder and Life Model, and Life Model Works. In fact, I believe that just this week he has a new three-part book series that just came out as of this recording. So he’s got a new three-part book series on this that I haven’t yet read, but I can’t wait.

[20:48] Stephanie: I remember reading early renditions of proposals and stuff that were really good. So I’m excited for this. This is good stuff. It’s the Becoming series.

[20:58] Marcus: Yeah. Jim is one of the most original thinkers in Christianity today.

[21:02] Stephanie: This is good. Well, goodness, You could just keep going and going and going. And I’m kind of feeling the need to maybe give like a rubric for people who want to go deeper into this. Not only can you find more about this in the book, Breakthrough, specifically chapters four and five, which talks a lot about the maturity in the brain and maturity development issues.

But also I would recommend Rare Leadership. R.A.R.E. is the acrostic for a mature person. And so that digs more into the brain science and into how to be a rare mature person. And then also any other quick book recommendations?

[21:49] Marcus: Well, so all of the books that I’ve written with either Jim Wilder, Chris Coursey or Stefanie Hinman on building bounce — all of these books are going to be very much resilience and maturity oriented. If you want to take a deeper dive, Building Bounce is another really great place to start on how do I begin building these skills?

Rare Leadership is with Jim Wilder. It’s got the most brain science spelled out in it. And Rare Leadership in the Workplace just takes these things and tries to be practical right from the first page on how do I apply this in the workplace?

So there’s a lot of different places you can start. It kind of depends on where you’re at. For some people, the parenting book is a great place to start. For some it’s the marriage book. For some it’s leadership, and for some it’s my own personal resilience. It kind of depends on where you’re at. There’s a lot of good starting and jumping off points to get into this.

[22:37] Stephanie: Yeah. So the point I want to push here now is if that was overwhelming to anybody, there is hope. And would you give maybe just like a word of hope as we’re wrapping up this episode.

[22:54] Marcus: I must be feeling ornery, but the first thing that came to my mind is that addiction is a result of the catastrophic failure to attain maturity.

[23:01] Stephanie: Yeah, that’s a Jim Wilderism.

[23:02] Marcus: That’s a Jim Wilderism. Again, we said that the B.U.I.L.D. maturity model, that breakthrough is built around and explaining, was originally designed to help with addiction recovery. And part of addiction recovery is understanding where do these cravings come from?

They come from that deep part of my brain that craves attachment. And so the more that I can build joyful attachments — joyful relational attachments in my life — the less strong those addictive cravings are going to be. And so that’s why that’s so important.

So I just encourage people, you know, if you’re looking for a place to start, just look for ways to add a little bit of joy into every relationship that you have and start there, and you’ll see it begin having a multiplying effect over time.

[23:52] Stephanie: Huzzah! That’s a great word. And I also just want to take the moment to remind everyone, if you want to get started reading Breakthrough, there is a free chapter one in the link of the description of this podcast that you can share with a friend or start reading for yourself. Thank you for being with us on the trail.

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