30: Pain Processing Pathway (Series Compilation)

[00:00] Stephanie: Welcome to the On the Trail podcast. For this week’s compilation episode, we are revisiting the pain processing pathway series. The pain processing pathway has five levels which contain the four levels of the joy elevator, right? So remind us, what is the joy elevator?

[00:16] Marcus:  So the joy elevator basically, is the right side of your brain. So real simply, it’s the right hemisphere of my brain. That right hemisphere operates at four levels of function. So if anything goes wrong at level one, it will affect level two, three, and four, and level five on the other side. If something goes wrong at level two, it’ll affect three and four. Defining it by levels is partly the point of the joy elevator.

It’s also the idea that It goes sequentially. It will always start at level one, then always go to level two, then always go to level three. You don’t skip around levels. It always goes in sequence. And so our goal as people, to be our relational selves, to act like ourselves, and to not turn to somebody else, is that we want to be living from the fourth floor of that joy elevator.

That fourth floor we call the action center. That’s the identity center, the joy center, the action center, or it’s the captain. There are a whole lot of terms that we’ve used for it but it’s the part of our brain that we want to be in charge of. Because that’s the part of our brain that remembers who we are, how it’s like us to act, what our core values are, what our character is like, and it just shows up automatically.

So problems happen if my Joy elevator gets stuck at the first floor and I’m operating in huge attachment pain, then I may not be able to operate from that top floor. And so part of maturity is about developing the capacity to experience some disturbance at these lower levels, without it getting me offline at the higher level where I act like myself. So in a nutshell, the joy elevator is the four levels of brain function on the right hemisphere of the brain.

Also, your brain always goes not only from bottom up, so 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th floor, it will also always go from right to left. So it has to go through the joy elevator first before it ever gets to what we call the narrative engine. It gets to that part of my brain on the left hemisphere that starts doing problem solving, making decisions, analyzing, putting things into words, and all that other stuff. And that’s why we regularly talk about things happening faster than conscious thought.

And the reason they’re happening faster than conscious thought is they’re happening on this right hemisphere of the brain. It’s this joy elevator process that’s taking place. And if something breaks down there, I can be offline and have everything messed up before I ever get to what something means to me. Before I ever get to this idea of, okay this is what I have learned to think about this, right?

In other words, I can be offline before I ever even get to that part of my brain function. So this was really a revelation to me because I had grown up being taught that all emotions are rooted in what I believed. And so belief was the starting point for everything that I was doing in terms of resolving emotions, only to find out there’s a whole other half of the brain over here that is dealing with stuff before I ever get to my beliefs.

And so bringing these things together creates the pain processing pathway. The pain processing pathway in a nutshell, is I have to deal with all four floors of the joy elevator, and I have to deal with the narrative engine on the left side of my brain. This is why simply telling somebody to change the way you think, or don’t believe that, doesn’t always help. Because it’s only addressing this fifth level, if you will. It’s addressing the left brain side of it and bypassing everything going on on the right side of the brain.

[03:53] Stephanie:  Yeah. So could you talk a little bit more about the pain processing pathway? And it was Karl Lehman who coined the term “pain processing pathway,” correct?

[04:02] Marcus: I believe so. It was his book where I read the term.

[04:05] Stephanie: Okay.

[04:06] Marcus: So the pain processing pathway is that if we start in the left side of the brain with beliefs, then I should just be able to correct your thinking on something and that should resolve the problem. If I say to you, oh, well, look at it this way, look at it from this perspective, and that works, that means I had a level five problem. My problem was at the interpretive part of things and just looking at it from a different perspective actually took care of things, and I’m okay now. So that lets me know where my problem was.

But if I give you a new perspective and I say, well, the Bible says this, and this is what God wants you to think about it. And if that doesn’t resolve it then that means we have to move now, and start going backwards down the joy elevator.

I go to the action center of the brain, my identity center. And at this point I’m needing somebody to show me what this looks like so my mirror neurons can watch you do it, and go, okay, I think I see it now. I can imitate you. I can do what I’m seeing you do and learn at that level. If that doesn’t fix things then we go to the next level, and that’s number three of the joy elevator.

And that is where my goal is to stay attuned to the world around me. Where I say, let’s do this together, tune into me, stay focused on me, let’s do this together. And that can sometimes take care of that. If I’ve spoken to you and that didn’t fix it, if I’m showing you and that doesn’t fix it, and if I’m saying let’s do this together, and it doesn’t fix it. Now I’ve probably got an amygdala, fight or flight issue going on.

In which case I need to soothe that before we can do anything else. So maybe we’ll take some deep breaths together or go through some of the soothing exercises together. But we’re trying to calm down that amygdala. And then if I get all the way down to level one, it means I’ve got an attachment pain problem. And at the attachment pain problem, my goal is to sit with you and to be present with you, so that you know that you are not alone in this, no matter how dark and deep it gets. I can think of these all with “S” words. You know, obviously, it’s shocking to everybody that there are “S” words to all of this.

[06:23] Stephanie: Yeah, you don’t have an acrostic for all of that.

[06:25] Marcus: Yeah.

[06:25] Stephanie:Yeah, you don’t have an acrostic for all of that, you’re going more pastoral where you have the same letter for every point.

[06:29] Marcus: Yeah, exactly. So this will preach. Right? If I have a narrative issue then I speak to you and give you a new narrative, if it’s level four of the joy elevator then I show you. So that’s the word, I “show” you at that point what to do. If it’s at level three of the joy elevator, now I’m going to share it with you, we’re going to do it together. If it’s at the amygdala, level two assessment level, then I’m going to soothe, help you soothe from where you’re at. And then at level one, I stay present with you. I’m going to sit and stay present with you because this is an attachment issue.

So I can give you a couple of examples of this because this is pretty heady, hard to picture stuff. Chris Coursey explained it to me this way. He and Jen were walking up the stairs in a lighthouse, they live in Michigan. They are walking up this lighthouse together and part of the way up Jen remembers that she has a fear of heights and begins to shut down.

And so his first thing was to talk to her, Oh, it’s going to be okay, we’re going to get through this, but it didn’t help, right? So that told him, all right, this is not a level five issue. Then he’s like, let’s just take a step, it’s just like this. And that didn’t help. And then it was, okay, let’s do this together, let me hold your hand. That still didn’t help, right? So he’s just going down the list, okay, let’s just take a minute to breathe together and to be together.

Finally, they just sat next to each other and they began doing it in the opposite order. He sat there for a while and then they went to soothing for a bit. And by the time they got back up to level five she was the one saying, well, this is the perspective I need, this is what’s going on. They were able to make it all the way to the top. But when we talk about pain processing, if on this pathway I get stuck at some point then my pain remains unprocessed.

And to the extent that my pain remains unprocessed,  I’ll be stuck and I won’t be able to function the way that I want to function. And so it’s helpful to think in these terms because you can kind of tell where somebody is stuck and the way in which they are stuck, and which intervention is needed. And so I found this an incredibly helpful thing. I think I said, I’d tell two stories?

[09:05] Stephanie: If you have the second in mind.

[09:07] Marcus: Yeah. So when I was speaking one time a story I told triggered somebody. I try not to tell stories that are too triggering, but sometimes you can’t help it, because you just don’t know. Well, this guy was hyperventilating and couldn’t function and couldn’t talk. It wasn’t going to do any good for us to have a conversation, he couldn’t do that. So first I just sat there, and then I asked, “Is it okay if I touch your arm?” Because you know, you get permission to just be together.

And then I said, “Can I help you?” We had to quickly get to the point of let’s practice breathing together. And this helped him get his breathing under control. And then I tried to go back up and found that he still can’t talk.

Okay, so let’s go do some more breathing. I got my hand on your shoulder, so you know,  I’m here with you, it’s okay, and you’re not alone. And then finally, he got the bright idea to text. He couldn’t talk but he started texting me what was going on in his head and found out what triggered him. I was able to actually do a spiritual warfare prayer with him. To which he agreed, yes, because he’s like, yes, I agree with what you just did. And then he took another deep breath and after that he could talk. And so now we walked through this whole process.

By the time we were done he had processed this pain. It had gone all the way through the pain processing pathway. And that meant he was functional again. He could take off and do whatever he needed to do. It didn’t mean he was totally better, but he was functional again because he was now back within his window of tolerance. So that’s an example of how understanding those five levels of function, of the pain processing pathway, can help you know what kind of intervention is needed.

[10:58] Stephanie:  Yeah, it’s so helpful. And so you went through the “S’s”, there are also some “A’s”.  And I thought we could start slowing down maybe a little bit on each level and look at the task of each level. Because the “S’s” that you shared are the solution to the problem. And it’s also helpful to understand that at each level this is the task involved. So, for instance, level one is attachment, and you are to stay securely connected as a situation unfolds. Could you talk to us more about level one?

[11:35] Marcus: Yeah. Level one is the attachment level. It is anchored in the nucleus accumbens and the thalamus, right? Because that’ll clear everything up for everybody. The attachment is the part of our brain that craves things. And so what happens is that I have at this very deep level a craving for something. It could be everything from a craving for chocolate to craving for an experience, an addiction, for a person, or connection. And it can be from mild to intense.

So, for example, I’ll give you one you’ll appreciate. You bought us these really nice fountain pens for Christmas. I have now washed three fountain pens in the last six months. And every now and then I find myself missing my fountain pen. I’m looking everywhere. Where’s my fountain pen? That is a low level craving, if you will. It’s like, no other pen will do, I want that fountain pen. That’s an example of something that is happening at level one, attachment. It’s not a rational thing happening because I’m thinking about this. It’s just a craving that says, I want my fountain pen, nothing else will do.

We all have these experiences, right? Tacos are the only thing that’s going to work right now. It can’t be a burrito. And I have these very specific cravings and I can have generalized cravings too. So what happens is my attachment level wants to bond with another person in joy. I want to be with somebody who’s happy to be with me. So it’s at this level that addictions form.

Because at this level if I can’t have access to someone who’s happy to be with me, if I can’t form the kind of joy bond I’m actually looking for, I will find a non-relational substitute. That’s when I can find myself craving cocaine, craving heroin, craving alcohol, and craving carbohydrates. Craving whatever the non-relational substitute is. Craving sexual stimulation.

[13:37] Stephanie: To be clear, not you yourself.

[13:38] Marcus: Well, no, I mean, I’ve probably craved all those at some point. Although I’ve never done drugs, I know people who have. This is also the level at which we experience attachment pain, which was the source of your question. Because I have this craving, in a sense, is where the light bulbs come on. The light bulb coming on means a craving is arising, I want to be with you, I want to be with somebody. And what I’m looking for isn’t available to me. That will create attachment pain.

So I can literally have attachment pain for that fountain pen, right? It’s like it’s not here. So that’s a very low level attachment pain. I can have attachment pain wishing I could be at our home in Michigan right now, I wish I didn’t have to be here. And that’s a form of attachment pain. You can have attachment pain for the past and nostalgia. I wish I could be back in those good old days when I did this. You can have attachment pain for all kinds of things at all kinds of levels.

And so the issue is that there is no natural pathway back to joy from attachment pain in the same way that joy pathways or neural pathways can form back to joy. Either from sadness, shame, disgust, despair, anger, and fear. So with that in mind, attachment pain kind of falls into its own separate category. It can also be combined with all of those other emotions.

So when you think about grief for example, I am usually combining attachment pain with sadness because I’ve lost something I want. And with despair, like, I’m not going to get this ever again. With anger, this isn’t fair. With fear, what’s going to happen to me now, right? And so what happens is you go through something like grief, and literally all of the emotions are being triggered simultaneously.

Which is why they sometimes talk about it as stages. You deal with this, and then this, and this. That may be true, but I also know that at some level, what’s happening is that all of my emotional systems are getting triggered. So at different times I’m going to be dealing with different levels of those emotions. So attachment pain is kind of like that craving pain that says something I desperately want is not available to me. So it becomes the source of a lot of love songs. Right? Oh, you know, I’m in so much despair because I can’t have you right now. All I want is you.

[16:18] Stephanie: So when someone is stuck at level one attachment in a more mild case, from the fountain pen to a relationship with a person, but it doesn’t feel impossible, do you have suggestions for how to recover?

[16:47] Marcus: This is where you talk about things like being present, mindfulness if you will. It is being aware of my condition, recognizing it, and then saying, I’ve got a problem to solve here. Maybe I can find a healthier solution to this problem than an unhealthier solution to the problem.

So if it’s a mild one, I can usually think my way through to a better choice. If I’m feeling attachment pain and I suddenly realize I’m rummaging through the refrigerator and I don’t even know what I want, I can catch myself.  I can go, hey, Marcus, you’re just feeling attachment pain right now, you don’t really want ice cream. That sort of thing. At milder levels I can do that. At more extreme levels I need help doing that. I need somebody to be present with me.

[17:39] Stephanie:Even being able to recognize it. For instance, I think about how often I have been separated from you, mom, and Ben. I’m not usually very good at actually being on my phone, but when I am separated from you guys, you are my people, I will call one of you on the phone. I will reestablish a point of connection because I’m having attachment pain because we are not together. And that’s a way of, okay, yes, I’m able to be with my people even when we’re not actually able to be together.

[18:16] Marcus:Yeah. Well, and because it’s the deepest level of brain function it is also the deepest level of pain we can feel. And that just means sometimes we just have to feel it and try in the midst of feeling it, to get back to the relational part of my brain and act like myself anyway.

[18:39] Stephanie:Well, and maybe what I’m about to say could come into the next part of my question. But this is also where listening prayer and seeking God can come in. And there’s some really good Psalms, like “Oh my soul, seek the Lord.” And so talk to us about what happens if you’re having desperate attachment pain and the person you were attached to has died or you’re estranged, or for whatever reason you have no access to them. It feels impossible and you can’t solve it, what do you do?

[19:16] Marcus: Well, I use this example. I remember when I was in seminary. I had about a five month gap between the city where I grew up having a ton of friends and knowing everyone, to relocating to a different state and city. I was living with my parents and I really only had one relational connection at that point. There was a girl who asked me out and I said yes, and quickly fell in love because she became my whole world. All of my attachment was connected to her.

Well, my dad was in a car accident, Grandpa Warner, and almost died when a drunk driver hit him going like 90 miles an hour through a stoplight. He was unconscious for three months. We didn’t know if he was going to live. And then just as he’s getting out of the hospital she breaks up with me. And at the time I had never felt that kind of attachment pain. I had no category for that. And I had convinced myself that this was the future and I’d found the one.

And so I went into depression because the only solution to this is for her to want to be with me again. And so as I was in that, I started seminary. Right in this place of having just gone through the crisis with my dad and being in a deep place of attachment pain, I couldn’t focus, because I’m having level one issues in my brain. It’s making everything else above that struggle to stay online. That didn’t actually resolve until I met somebody else, and all of a sudden there was this hope of oh, maybe there’s a different solution to what I’m feeling right now, I couldn’t think my way there.

Once I experienced it even though it was actually just a fleeting relationship, it was the fact that, oh, there is hope in this world, that took away that attachment pain for me. It helped me get back to being myself and gave me some lessons. But in the middle of it, honestly, I had no tools for what I was going through. It was a pretty dark time.

[21:33] Stephanie: Yeah. Well, thank you for sharing. That’s a very good example I think.  Thank you for sharing.

[21:41] Marcus:  Well and honestly, Brenda, your mom, has similar stories of having painful breakups in her past that made her go into a very dark place. And it’s because you’re dealing with attachment pain that then triggers despair, that joy is now hopeless. It now triggers this belief. So there’s a despair, then a belief that goes with the despair, and then all these toxic thoughts that accumulate around it and it takes on a life of its own at that point.

[22:14] Stephanie: Yeah. So what are some steps to get out of it?

[22:19] Marcus: o some things you can do yourself and some things you need help. So one of the things that helped me was talking to a guy at seminary who’d gone through almost exactly the same thing, only worse. He had been engaged and on the verge of his wedding day, his fiance called it off.

And talking to him, talking to somebody who could be empathetic, and then realizing that he was currently married and had kids and was living a good life. It was helpful to have people tell me their stories and say, okay, maybe there is some hope here. To have somebody who could understand the depth of what was going on so I didn’t feel alone in it. Like, okay, there’s somebody who gets it.

And so all of those things had to happen. I needed people who could still be happy to be with me. I needed people who could kind of enter into what was going on. I could say, okay, other people have lived through this and could share it with me. And at some point, I realized too, that God actually gave me a way out of this early on. I remember I was sitting in a restaurant and this thought came into my head, ( and this is where you learn to recognize what are God thoughts and what are devil thoughts) give her to me, and if you’re supposed to have her, I’ll give her back. And I remember basically saying, no

[24:00] Stephanie: That’s one of those stop, listen, obey, watch things. (S L O W) And you choose not to obey and you still have to watch what happens.

[24:03] Marcus: A stop, listen, and obey moment where I stopped, I listened, I knew what God wanted me to do, and I said no. And literally, my depression kind of began there. And so there was a rebelliousness at the heart of some of this depression in my case. Because I was intentionally saying, I know what I need to be happy and you need to give me what I want.

And that’s really not uncommon either. There’s a lot of us who are convinced we know what we need in order to be happy, and so we are not going to be okay with God until he gives it to us. And that is a form of rebellion and it always gives ground to the enemy. And so I think a big part of my depression has some spiritual warfare to it that was anchored in that as well.

[24:48] Stephanie: I’ve heard you and Jim Wilder make the profound statement that suffering becomes trauma when we feel alone in it. In order for suffering to keep from becoming traumatic, our brains need to process the pain at all five levels of the pain processing pathway. So level one, attachment. Level two, assessment. Level three, attunement. Level four, action. And level five, narrative. Or if you want another “A”,  I think you’ve said articulation. And in the last episode, we started talking about this pathway and how to meet someone’s pain at each level, and we made it through level one.

[25:28] Marcus: Huzzah!

[25:30] Stephanie: So let’s see how far we get in this episode.

[25:33] Marcus: I am a little relieved. When you said we were going to continue I thought we were going to talk more about the girl who dumped me. Okay. All right, good we are talking about the brain.

[25:42] Stephanie: Do you need to go back and finish processing that pain?

[25:44] Marcus:  I think we’re good.

[25:47] Stephanie: But yeah. Okay, so for real, is there anything else that you wanted to say on level one that we didn’t get to because we kind of had to just cut it off?

[25:54] Marcus: You know, it helps me to think that at the attachment level is where the addiction is forming. Because it also helps us understand that with addiction recovery, a large part of that has to do with forming attachments. Relationally joyful attachments to take the place of those other ones. And that’s why it’s so hard to just say no. You actually have to have a replacement attachment that’s bringing real joy as a significant part of whatever addiction recovery method you use. So that helps me think about it too.

[26:25] Stephanie: Yeah, no, that’s key. All right, level two, the assessment. We spent some time talking about this just a few episodes ago. Level two is our amygdala. The task of level two is assessment. It’s to evaluate the safety of a situation. So do you want to talk to us a little bit more about that?

[26:47] Marcus: Yeah. So this is really the level that controls our joy switch, as Chris Corsi would call it. And so we talk about having a switch on the side of our brain that allows us access to our high level emotions. If our switch goes off it is almost always because of what happens here. We did a conference on DID several years ago and Jim Wilder was a presenter, and I was a presenter. We had Alaine Pakkala and some others. Dan Rumberger was there. But I remember Jim saying that one of the differences between a buried memory and one that we can recall is how deep down in the brain I got triggered. And how deep down the triggering was, that shut things off. And so if it makes it up to level three I can usually recall the memory. If it got buried below, down at levels one and two, then oftentimes I won’t remember it.

So that can apply to all kinds of things because there’s people who don’t remember traumatic things that happened to them. And it’s usually because in the pain processing pathway, part of that got shut down right at level two and did make it up to level three.

That’s more of a curiosity to me. I don’t know how relevant it is to everyday life, but for some people it’s extremely relevant, and it helped me to think about that. And we’ve already talked quite a bit about taming the amygdala and the soothing things we can do to help with that. But again, that is our fight and flight center. That’s largely what’s happening there.

[28:20] Stephanie: Mm hmm. So will you give just quickly, what is the solution?

[28:25] Marcus: Yeah, the word we use here is soothe. So the intervention is, I want to do something to soothe that. That’s where we use the best practices for calming or quieting. And so it’s breathing, deep breathing, and getting control of my central nervous system. And it’s exaggerating emotions and then quieting them again. It’s soothing by kind of rubbing out the tension from different muscle groups, tightening them and relaxing them. And all those things that we do.

It can also be things that you do to shock your body, like take a cold shower or splash cold water on your face. Take a hot bath and have candles. Some people like a weighted blanket. That just is soothing to them and helps them to be quiet or calm. It can even be like, for us, we use a fan in the background when going to sleep. Sometimes just having that sound is enough to trigger something for us, it’s time to quiet and sleep.

[29:25] Stephanie: Thank you. All right, level three. Moving on up the elevator. The task of level three is attunement. It’s seeking to understand each other’s feelings. And when we are stuck feeling and being overwhelmed with emotions, maybe I just want to be understood. Not on a narrative level, but on an attunement level.

[29:48] Marcus: , at level three, let me describe this one and camp out here for just a little bit. In our book, Rare Leadership in the Workplace, Dr. Wilder and I describe this as the brain’s radar. It is something that’s constantly running in the background. It will alert your brain on what it should focus on. So, a big part of leadership is that intuitive sense of this is what needs our focus right now. And you can’t really put it into words why that needs our focus. It’s not always metric driven. Sometimes it’s just kind of this gut feeling that this needs our attention.

And so there are obvious things that happen with this. When I’m in a room and because my radar is going, all of a sudden I see something flash on the side. I realize, oh, a mouse just ran along the side of the wall, maybe it’s time to go get a cat? That’s happened before. What’s happening is my focus wasn’t there, but because the radar was running in the background it had got my attention, and said, no, give that your focus right now. And this happens a lot so you can think about this part of my brain as that radar system. There’s a really good YouTube video on this. I’m trying to remember the guy’s name. I think it’s Iain McGilchrist, he is a Scottish neuroscientist. He’s got this delightful Scottish accent.

And he’s teaching behind one of those cartoon things that draws itself out while he’s talking. So there’s constantly something new coming onto the screen. But one of the stories he tells in this presentation is of a bird that is trying to be very focused on pecking seeds from among pebbles. And so that’s a high focus job.

Well, the left hemisphere of the brain is what excels at focus. The right hemisphere of the brain, particularly this level three, is what is telling my left brain where to focus. Now, if you’ve ever watched a bird do this, you’ll notice that birds will peck, peck, peck, and then they’ll look. They’ll peck and then lift their heads and look around from right to left, and then they go back to pecking. And then they’re up and looking around.

So a bird brain, right, is stereotypically, because it is tiny. They can’t do both processes simultaneously as easily as us. So you actually get to watch them shifting from being right brain oriented, looking around to being left brain oriented focusing. But when you think about it, he’s got to have a high level of focus to make sure he’s getting seeds and not pebbles at the same time.

And he has to be aware of the surroundings. Like, do I have family members nearby who need my help? Is there a predator nearby that may want to eat me? You know, that radar has to be constantly going in the background. So this part of my system is also the part that allows me to read body language. So leaving aside this bird analogy for a second, the other thing that happens at this level that you may have heard in Life Model circles is mutual mind. So a mutual mind is happening when my level three and your level three are attuning to each other.

And so as I look at you right now and you look at me, right? We’re reading each other’s body language. It’s not at the level of conscious thought. I’m not putting it into words. I’m not trying to analyze what’s going on, but I will have feelings. I will have intuition about where this is going.

And I can either read you correctly or I can misread you. You can read me correctly or misread me. I might look at you and go, oh, she’s mad at me. It’s like, oh, no, she’s just hungry. Or maybe you can misread people, but you can actually carry on full conversations this way, right? Just by my singular level three and your level three being in sync, we can have full conversations. If there’s a third person in the room, we can communicate a whole lot to one another about what we think about that third person.

And so that’s what we mean by mutual mind. We are at this moment in sync with one another. We are attuned with one another. We are on the same page and we can communicate. I might even be able to communicate to you nonverbally this way. Leave the room right now or go shut that door, or go do something.

There’s a whole lot you can communicate. So one of the things they do at Thrive training, for example, ThriveToday, is nonverbal stories. And one of the reasons they do the nonverbal stories is they are strengthening this part of the brain and its ability to read people, to sync with people and to enter into that mutual mind state.

[34:37] Stephanie:  You know what this reminds me of is that I had a friend in Undergrad and we were really good at mutual mind. We spent lots of time together and she was just delighted that I seemed to be able to read her mind. And we would be sitting in a group of people talking and she literally would stop every now and then so that I could finish her sentence, or add to the story, or whatever. Because we could just tell that we both knew what was going on. We both were on the same page, we were in sync, and we knew what the other person was probably thinking. We could read each other’s body language, and we knew the context.

And what was interesting was because of studying abroad and different things we spent almost a year apart. I noticed a distinct difference where we hadn’t been in that close relationship anymore and doing all this. And there was one time when she stopped expecting me to jump right in, and I was like, I’m not there. I didn’t have that same attunement anymore because we hadn’t been spending all that time together where we could read each other really well anymore. But there’s an intimacy and a friendship that can happen too with mutual mind.

[35:56] Marcus: No, it’s a very important function in our human experience because you hear people all the time say, 90% of communication is nonverbal. Well, that’s largely happening here at this level three attunement level. This is also where we start getting into the idea of listening prayer. And so in my book, A Deeper Walk, when we talk about listening prayers, there’s two kinds.

There’s right brain listening prayer and left brain listening prayer. So the left brain part is kind of easy because God sort of overrides the system and just talks to you. And it’s mostly at that point it is a matter of recognizing that these words in my head are coming from God, although he can make it clearer than that. He can give visions, dreams, send angels, and all kinds of stuff that happens like that in the Bible.

But there is something like a mutual mind state with God in which it is a nonverbal communication in which we are simply in sync with his spirit. And so whereas we can’t read God’s body language because he’s invisible, there is still this inner sense that you get that we’re on the same page here.

That is reflected largely in the sense of peace, that I have a sense of peace about what’s going on here. That I feel like, yeah, this is right. I may have a sense that something hard is correct, but there’s still a sense of peace that this is what God is asking me to do. And so in that mutual mind state with God, it is often after I’ve been in that mutual mind state that I can then put into words what was going on. But they’re not words at the time that it happens.

Same thing like you and I if we share mutual mind together. Afterwards I could put into words kind of what was going on, but at the time you’re just experiencing it. And that’s kind of what walking with God is like at that level. You’re experiencing a mutual mind with him and you’re just sort of experiencing a sense of where he’s taking you with things,s and what is bringing you a sense of clarity and peace.

And then later you can often put it into words. That’s what we mean by mutual mind and all of that is happening at level three. And it’s why the things that we do to build this part of our brain helps us to be more relationally engaged with other people.

[38:20] Stephanie: Mm hmm. If I am feeling stuck or somebody else is feeling stuck at this level, what are the interventions here?

[38:28] Marcus: So there are some exercise interventions that you can do. I think we called this the share level.

[38:39] Stephanie: Support.

[38:39] Marcus: Share, support. In Building Bounce we call it support. So the idea is to let me support you in doing this. Let me come alongside you and help you do this as opposed to let me show you how to do it, or just tell you how to do it. And so one of the things that we do for example, is you can grow this through charades.

These nonverbal stories and things like this as a way of growing your ability to get in sync with people. You can do this through eye contact. And you’re specifically trying to be left eye to left eye. Brilliant. Yeah, exactly.

[39:17] Stephanie: We’re not in video right now.

[39:19] Marcus:  But it’s like, if you’re going left eye to left eye, what’s happening is the most intimate thing. Because the right hemisphere of my brain that remembers who I am is controlling my left eye because it flips like that. And so that is where we have the greatest connection. And so if I can share joy at that level with somebody then that helps us strengthen a whole lot of things that are functioning in my brain. Again, I go back to the Thrive Training because they actually have developed exercises to help strengthen this part of brain function.

But in general what we’re talking about is that I do this by supporting you and sharing experiences with you that help this part of my brain to grow. I don’t think this part of the brain can grow apart from relational experience. I need to have somebody else there practicing, for this part of my brain to grow. Which is why you can’t just go to a counselor all the time and get it.

[40:21] Stephanie: All right, so are we moving up the elevator?

[40:23] Marcus: Let’s move up the elevator.

[40:23] Stephanie: Level four.

[40:24] Marcus: Yeah, level four. Level four is that right orbital prefrontal cortex. I just like saying that. I practiced a long time to be able to rattle that off. But it’s the right hemisphere. Orbital means behind the eye. Eye is orb. Prefrontal is in the front part of the brain. And it’s the cortex, it’s this outer layer. So the idea here is that this part of my brain right behind my right ear is what we call the joy center. It’s also my identity center. I’ve always loved the fact that joy and identity are so intimately connected the way God designed our brain.

Again, this is the part of the brain that we want to be in control of things. Because when I’m functioning from this level of my brain I will act the most like myself. I’ll be the most relational. I’ll be the most engaged. I’m gonna do my best thinking, my best problem solving. I’m gonna do my best analysis work.

And when this part of my brain is in charge you get my best self. And so that’s the goal, to regulate our emotions in such a way that I keep this part of my brain engaged. So the stronger that this part of my brain develops through joy, through all kinds of joyful connections, through the years, and through a collection of memories that tell me this is who I am.

The more consistent and organized my identity is then this part of my brain can actually regulate things that are sent up to me from the amygdala. So in other words the amygdala can get triggered and send scary messages up the line. But if I have a strong enough and well developed fourth floor here that floor can say, you know what, that’s okay. I know how it’s like for me to act when this happens. This doesn’t have to be overwhelming. Let’s all calm down. Let’s do some soothing and some breathing. We’ll be fine. And now this is what we’re going to do.

And so it’s possible for this part of my brain to stay in charge even when it gets these signals. And that’s kind of what we mean by maturity, right? I know that I have developed my maturity when I am able to keep this part of my brain in control, and in charge even when I’m getting these impulse things sent up from my amygdala, and telling me that I’m in a bad situation or in a scary situation.

So one of the ways we do this is that we have to grow this through joy workouts, which are always relational. As I am developing the ability to learn and my brain is learning, how is it like me to act when this happens? How do I not turn into somebody else when this happens? How do I grow such a strong core identity that I’m not constantly flipping, becoming a different person every time I feel an upsetting emotion?

[43:28] Stephanie:  On a basic level I’m thinking about a chart that is in the Journey groups curriculum, but I think it’s based off of a chart in Chris Coursey’s book, Transforming Fellowship. It just goes through each task of the levels and then what you’re feeling if you’re stuck at each. And then what the solution is or the intervention. And here, the task of level four is action or responding to a situation. And when you’re feeling stuck you might be feeling inadequate or like, I don’t know what to do. Which solution would be engaging the mirror neurons and having an example showing you what to do. So could you talk more about the intervention there?

[44:22] Marcus:  Yeah. If I’m not acting like myself or if I’m with somebody who isn’t acting like themselves, then what I kind of want to do is hold a little bit of a mirror up to them. So try to activate their mirror neurons and get a picture of what they’re actually doing. And so this is where a healthy shame message comes in. Like, hey, it doesn’t feel like you’re acting like yourself right now. It seems like this doesn’t feel like you.

And so when I say a healthy shame message, I’m not trying to generate a toxic reaction from them. I’m trying to call their attention to the fact that they are not acting like themselves right now. So how I do that could look a lot of different ways. Like dads are famous for being able to just give a look. That look is communicating, hey, you’re not really acting like yourself right now. And we handle this in a more relational way. Moms are famous for looks like that too. But I think that we have this idea that that is what I’m ultimately trying to do.

[45:27] Stephanie: I’m gonna say that description is a little bit of attunement.

[45:30] Marcus: It is attunement. But it is attunement in the sense of it’s not stopping at me attuning to you. It’s me taking it to the next step and showing you what this looks like. And so I may be reminding you of what it would look like to act like yourself here. And so I might do that by modeling it. I might do that by reminding you of it. But at some level,  I am trying to help you get back to functioning at that level of your operating system. So that is a key part of the solution.

[46:05] Stephanie: All right, so we could go up to level five right now, or we could take one more episode to do level five and wrap things up.

[46:13] Marcus: Yeah, there’s some more things we probably should hit on this one anyway.

[46:20] Stephanie: So do you want to give some final thoughts for this episode and go on and continue the discussion next time? That sounds good.

[46:26] Marcus: I just had a final thought and I lost it.

[46:28] Stephanie: Okay, well, let me pause then by just saying if people want to find out more about joy elevators and the pain processing pathway, you talk about them in Rare Leadership and Building Bounce. And again, I recommend Journey groups curriculum, it’s written by Amy Hamilton Brown. It’s an excellent small group curriculum that not only teaches a wealth of information that draws from Deeper Walk, Life Model Works, Thrive Today and more.

It really encourages practice, which is how transformation happens. And there are two levels, two books, and both talk about the joy elevator. But Journey group level two has a whole unit that goes through each stage of the joy elevator and explains the task, its feeling, and its need. So I really encourage people to check that out. So, any final thoughts, Father?

[47:18] Marcus: Yeah, I think Dr. Wilder calls this level the Captain a lot of the time and for good reason. Like I’ve said many times, this is the part of the brain that I want in charge because part of my brain can grow for as long as I live. And it grows with the experience of joy. It collects all the memories of how it’s like me to act when these things happen. And so the encouraging thing here is that this is a part of my brain that grows with appreciation. It grows with relational interaction. It’s constantly updating and constantly expanding. And so the good news here is that wherever you’re at right now, that has the ability to grow.

One last thing too, as I think about this, what’s really helped me to think about this is the idea of the ring in the brain of the infant. And when an infant is born they have no ability to act like themselves with the various emotions that they feel. And so an infant will literally, the brain will act like a totally different person with every emotion that they feel.

But there is like this ring around their identity center that is gradually connecting to each emotion that they can feel, and then connecting it to their identity center. And it helps me to think about how an infant has to learn how to feel all the various emotions without turning into a different person. The more successful the infants and toddlers are in doing this, the more organized a personality they’re going to have, more integrated and fully functional.

They are less likely to turn into somebody else when they feel these upsetting emotions. So if I find that I am 62 and still turning into a different person when I feel an emotion, it means that those parts of my brain are still not developed. That means I’m going to need to do some work to focus on that.

So that’s where I practice appreciation. It’s where I do storytelling. It’s where I am actively working on collecting stories about how to act like myself when I feel that emotion and building those skills. So that ring picture kind of helped me. I picture it like a ring with strings attached to all the various different emotions. And that if I do this well, then no matter what emotion I feel, they’ll all have a pathway back to my core identity so that I keep acting like myself.

[49:52] Stephanie: In order for suffering to keep from becoming traumatic, our brain need to process the pain at all five levels of the pain processing pathway. So you have level one, attachment. Level two, assessment. Level three, attunement. Level four, action. Level five, narrative. So in this episode let’s review level four.

[50:11] Marcus: All right, I’m counting level four, right? I know I always have to start with attachment, assessment, attunement, action. So level four goes by so many different names, it’s confusing, right? Because it’s been called the command center. It’s been called the identity center. It’s been called the joy center. It’s been called the orbital prefrontal cortex, right? It’s been called the action center. We’ve called it a whole lot of things. You’ve probably thrown out some other terms for it too. So the idea is that a whole bunch of brain neuron kind of things connect right here at this point. It’s like the intersection of a whole lot of highways, if you will.

And so if we want our best self, our most relational self, our joy based self, to handle our problems, then we have to be functioning from this part of our brain. And so what happens is, if we don’t live out of this part of our brain that’s where we get what we call wearing a mask.

Or being my false self or a pseudo self, or a poser, right? And again there’s a lot of different terms for these things but the idea is that I can be my true self or I can be a false self. My true self is always going to be who I am when I am living from this part of my brain. My false self, Dr. Wilder has come up with a new term for this recently, it’s called your “as if self.”

[51:43] Stephanie: Okay.

[51:44] Marcus:  Right. So the “as if self” is the idea of how I live, as if I were somebody else that I’m not. In other words, I create a persona that I think I need in order to handle the problem that’s in front of me. And so when this takes place this can happen in a whole wide variety of ways. And it is a big and long topic, so we’ll try to unpack it a little bit today, okay. But we’re really talking about the true self versus the false self.

[52:15] Stephanie:  Awesome. Now, do you want to keep talking about the true self? We’ve been focusing a little bit on when you are feeling stuck at this level and what the solution is. Do you want to tackle that first? If you’re feeling stuck at this level, what’s the solution to getting unstuck?

[52:34] Marcus: Yeah, if I am stuck at this level sometimes you need to be reminded of who you are. And you need to be kind of shown again what it’s like you to do. My favorite kind of picture of this is from Lion King. And Simba has lost himself, he’s lost his true self. He is now off with his buddies in the jungle and they are living “hakuna matata.” He’s doing his best to avoid fulfilling his calling. And in the vision that he has the line is, “You’ve forgotten who you are.”  “Remember who you are.” And then he echoes it over and over and over again as Mufasa fades into the sky. One of the interventions at this point is to remind people who they are and say, you know what, you’re not really acting like yourself right now. I know you, this isn’t you.

So that’s one of the interventions here is just reminding people that it’s not really like you to handle it like this. I’ve had times when I’ve gotten overwhelmed and handled things with more anger than I wanted. Or I’ve handled things with more disgust than I wanted or something. And I’ve had to apologize later and said, I’m sorry, I wasn’t being my best self. That was not who I wanted to be, I apologize. And so this can work both directions but the intervention there is usually the reminder.

And then if you take it to the next level if somebody’s still trying to discover who they are, then you have to show them how to do it. For example, when I was ten, I remember I was known for my temper tantrums. I was the youngest in the family and I was famous for my temper tantrums. In fact, I remember my parents actually introducing me as the kid with the temper issues.

So right between age ten and twelve though I realized that they just stopped. I did not have this anymore. And I was trying to think back on what made the change. And part of what made the change was I remember my oldest sister who’s about eleven years older than me, actually walking me through taking a deep breath, and counting to ten. And changing the thoughts in my head, kind of walking me through it, and showing me how to do this. In a sense, what she was doing was showing me how to act like myself in a situation and not turn into a different person.

And so we practiced a few times, you know, let’s take a deep breath, okay, count to ten. And then ask yourself, how is it like me to handle this emotion as opposed to just giving into it? And so that’s kind of what we’re talking about. You can intervene by reminding people who they are. You can also help train this part of people by showing them what it looks like to act like themselves.

[55:43] Stephanie: Awesome. So what if somebody is in their “as if self”? What does that look like to intervene? Or is it just something you need to work on in yourself?

[55:53] Marcus: So that’s a little more tricky. If I’ve gone into my “as if self”, the first intervention is to try to remind people, is that really who you want to be in this situation? It may be doing it as a question as opposed to a confrontation, like, you are being your “as if self,” you are being a bad person. It is more of, is this really who you want to be right now?

And it doesn’t feel like, or it doesn’t seem like you’re really acting like the person I’ve come to know right now. Like something has changed about you. What you’re doing though is you’re appealing to their identity. And you’re not just saying, you’re misbehaving, you’re doing this badly, you’re a bad person, right? What you’re doing is reminding them of the person they want to be and the person that they usually are. And so that’s more of a reminder to help people move from their “as if self” or their false self, and back to their true self.

So to continue through this idea of the false self using myself as an example, there’s angry Marcus, and there’s scared Marcus. There’s disgusted Marcus. Living for my true self doesn’t mean that I don’t have those emotions. It means that I don’t adopt a totally different value system because I have those emotions. If I go from being relational me to disgusted me, and I give myself permission to treat you badly, then I am violating the core principles by which I usually live. That’s what I mean by I have turned into a different person.

My whole value system has shifted and what I think is okay and what I think is appropriate. So part of that means that my worldview has literally changed. The values that flow out of that have changed. And so I’m not acting like myself anymore. I may as well be a different person. And that’s what we’re trying to avoid. We don’t want to be the sort of person who others will have to walk on eggshells around because they never know when we’re going to adopt a completely different value system, and treat them totally differently.

[58:05] Stephanie: So what would be a good way to monitor that in your own self? You know, you’re not confronting somebody else and saying, hey, this isn’t how you should act. But if you notice and recognize you’re going there or that you are there, what’s a good way to get out of it?

[58:18] Marcus: So when I notice that I’m going into my alternate self, the first thing I do is  recognize the pattern. For instance, if I start to feel disgust towards somebody, I’ll recognize the thought patterns in my head. Because they’re always the same when I start going into that place in my head. Whereas in the past, I would go into a justification of my thoughts and how disgusted I was.

Now I catch myself going, wait a second, you are slipping into disgust right now. You have turned into this other person, so I need a break. And that break can be as little as breaking eye contact and looking away. I break eye contact and I look away to kind of shut down the relational part of my brain and go into the problem solving part of my brain.

I try to figure out, okay, what’s the problem I need to solve right now? Is it you or is it me? And I go, actually, I’m the problem that needs solved right now. So let me go in here and try to figure this out. And go, okay, the problem is that I’m going into my disgust mode and I recognize this pattern. Alright, what have I learned to do? Okay, I’ve got to find some curiosity.

I’ve got to find some appreciation. I’ve got to be kind. Once I can find that now I can go back to the relational side of my brain. I can go, okay, now we can resume eye contact. I remember what I appreciate about you. I can be kind, and I’ve restored my curiosity. So that’s kind of an example of how I would check myself if I find that I’ve gone into that.

[59:59] Stephanie: So it could be that the situation does warrant disgust but you’re still trying to make sure that you aren’t handling it in a bad way. And so it’s like putting the oxygen mask on yourself first, because you still have to deal with acting like yourself in a situation. So, yeah, there’s that. Oh, I was just gonna say what you just spelled off is C.A.K.E., and we’ve talked about that before.

[01:00:26] Marcus: Yeah, we’ve talked quite a bit.

[01:00:28] Stephanie: Yes. So you can find that in the Four Habits of Joy-Filled Marriages.

[01:00:32] Marcus: Yeah, it’s in several books right now. I will apologize because C.A.K.E. actually means different things in different books.

[01:00:39] Stephanie: Well, it’s eye contact or it’s envelope conversations.

[01:00:43] Marcus: Yeah. And so I separated out envelope conversations and made it its own thing. So in the first couple of books that’s what’s in there. And then from the second book on “E”, it is always eye contact. Because what happens is if I don’t catch myself doing this and if I’m starting to feel disgust with somebody, I am already feeling the disgust. The question here is, can I stay relational?

This is like Rare Leadership. Can I remain relational? And can I act like myself, can I return to joy? Can I help them return to joy, even though I have felt this disgust? If I can’t and my immaturity takes over then what happens is I don’t act like myself. I don’t remain relational. I don’t return to joy. I don’t help them return to joy. I just live in disgust. And so that’s what we’re talking about here. I don’t want to lose control of who I am simply because a big emotion comes up.

[01:01:41] Stephanie: Very good. All right, any more on level four or are you ready for level five?

[01:01:45] Marcus:  Well, I did want to say a little bit about this false self idea. The false self is largely who I think I need to be in order to protect myself or who I need to be in order to win. And that’s what tends to be thought of as enemy mode, right?

It’s what we tend to think of as I’m in the part of my brain that is now not treating you as a person, but treating you as a problem. And so the false self will always come out of that. Now, one of the problems with wearing a mask is that it works, right? And it does what I need to do or I wouldn’t do it all the time.

For example, have you ever pretended to be somebody you weren’t in order to get someone to like you? If I do and that works I actually have a problem because now the person they’re attracted to isn’t the real me. It’s somebody I’ve been pretending to be in order for them to like me.

So now they like the mask, they don’t like me. And that’s one of the reasons why this is a problem. And I go on all kinds of reasons why the false self gets us in trouble. And one of them is that it does work. And because it works, it can get us a short term win but it’s not going to get us a long term where we want to go. And in the end if we value relationships more than winning then that’s not a good solution.

[01:03:11] Stephanie: Indeed, indeed. Well, we probably will come back to that again at some point because it sounds like there’s lots to talk about there.

[01:03:18] Marcus: No, there is. I mean, I’ve got a whole session on this in our Foundations course. So you may recall Bill Gillam. Bill Gillam wrote Lifetime Guarantee, and he was an exchange life teacher. That was the first person who kind of made walking in the spirit make sense to me. And one of the things that he says is that we all have a flesh identity and we have a spirit identity.

And my flesh identity is always like my false self. And my false self is going to be anchored in a couple of things. I just like the way he explains it that we learn in our society, particularly to take our identities from our looks, our personality or our achievement. So a lot of us learn that if we’re good looking enough, all we have to do is show up and people are going to accept us.

And I remember actually when you were little going to this church and we were there with another couple, and the lady weighed like 350 pounds. And you were this adorable little girl and you liked to twirl in your skirt and all, and Brenda and I were both young. And so the contrast between the couple we were with and us was pretty vivid. And we just noticed, (it was hard to miss) that everybody in the church wanted to talk to us and nobody wanted to talk to them.

Because we just looked like the kind of people they wanted in the church. Whereas this other couple they weren’t quite sure what to do because it was like, eh, you know, I don’t know if they’re our sort of people? So there’s a lot of folks out there who’ve lived with that kind of rejection all their life. They learned pretty early on that I can just show up, and because I’m so beautiful, people are going to say, oh, we want you to be part of our group.

And so when looks don’t work in American culture what we tend to turn to next is performance. And by performance we mean that I put on an act. I try to be funny. I try to be witty. A lot of comedians do this. They learned in school that it was a way to get people’s attention so people will let them be in the group, because that’s how they add value to the group. Oh, he’s funny. She’s funny, she’s witty.

We like having them around, so they work on their personality. The third way is achievement and that is, I’m the captain of the basketball team. I’m the captain of the cheerleading squad. I have achieved something really significant enough that gives me enough status that people will want me in the group. So in the world system, the way I look at it is that the devil gives us an identity using the world and the flesh. So the devil, the world, the flesh. So the devil says, here’s your identity, I’m going to use the world to give you an identity based on your flesh.

And that means most of us tend to think of our identity as our looks, our personality and our achievement. And that’s actually our worldly identity. It’s the false identity. It’s the devil’s identity. The true identity, our spiritual identity, is what God sees us as.

And it’s not who we are when we’re pretending to be something. It’s who we are when we’re living with joy. And so when you bring this living with joy component together with your identity in Christ component, you get this really powerful one two punch, that gives us a very stable, healthy identity out of which to live. So kind of wanted to wrap that in there  as we’re talking about this level four stuff.

[01:06:55] Stephanie: Oh, that’s so important and so good. And I also. I just wanted to jump in and say the Foundation course that you mentioned, people can find that for free. It’s eight sessions for free. It’s excellent. And that is at deeperwalk.com. I’m trying to think of the easiest way to get to it because you can get to it from multiple places.

[01:07:16] Marcus: You can get it through our app, you can get it through the website. It may even be on YouTube. But yeah, you can get to it in a variety of places.

[01:07:23] Stephanie: Yep. That’s very good. Well, how much do you have to say about level five? Or should we split that into another episode?

[01:07:30] Marcus:  It probably needs its own episode. But level five, essentially, is where we move from the joy elevator on the right side of our brain over to the left side of our brain, and we finally get to beliefs. And I say finally get to beliefs because, you know I grew up thinking that beliefs were the source of all of our emotions. That handling our emotions was basically about changing what we believed. And if I just change what I believe then everything will fix itself.

What I have learned is that there’s a whole engine in the brain that we’ve spent the last several episodes talking about, that is affecting my emotions before my beliefs ever get activated. And so the narrative engine is very important. The cognitive engine and all the stuff going over here. Level five is what we mean by the thinking part of my brain that does the problem solving, does the analysis, puts things into words. It tries to come up with the simplest possible explanation for what’s going on. So there’s a whole lot that we can say about that, but honestly we…….

[01:08:26] Stephanie: Probably need another episode.

[01:08:28] Marcus: Another episode.

[01:08:28] Stephanie:  Perfect. We will do that then. So I think maybe it would be helpful if we come back around to the joy elevator and the pain processing pathway. And just what are their connections there, to clarify?

[01:08:46] Marcus: So, I would start here, our brains have two sides, right hemisphere and left hemisphere. The two mirror each other. There’s a singlet on both sides. There’s an amygdala on both sides. They parallel each other but they operate kind of like a Mac and a PC. So the right hemisphere is the part of our brain that we call the joy elevator and we call it that because it is an attachment system.

In his book, The Joy Switch, Chris Coursey calls it the relational circuit, not to be confused with relational circuits, plural. He’s talking about the fact that there is a loop here that is constantly looping six times per second in our brain. And that’s the joy elevator, it’s going up and down six times per second. And what’s happening with that joy elevator is that it is running in the background kind of like radar all of the time. And we don’t think about it the same way that we usually don’t think about our breathing.

We usually don’t think about how we’re walking or riding a bike, that sort of thing. This stuff just kind of runs in the background. And so we have to train it just like we train ourselves to ride a bike well. Or learning how to play ping pong really well. You’re not really thinking about what you’re doing, you’re just reacting. In the same way if I train this joy elevator well, then what happens is, I will handle a lot of my emotions quickly and instinctively before I ever get to the part of my brain that thinks about it.

And that’s our goal. We want to develop really strong habits on that joy elevator so that by the time the left brain gets there and starts thinking about things, I’ve already resolved a lot of my emotional issues. I’m well on the way to recovery already.

[01:10:37] Stephanie: Yes, well functioning joy elevator and pain processing pathways.

[01:10:42] Marcus: Yeah, and then the connection to the pain processing pathway is basically that just as there are four floors on the joy elevator, then the narrative engine on the left side of the brain, that’s the five levels. And those are the five levels of the pain processing pathway. And again, we’re not talking about physical pain here. I think I got an email somewhere saying, well, does this work for physical pain? The answer is no. This is all about emotional pain.

But physical pain can create emotional pain, right? My physical pain can make me angry. My physical pain can make me scared. My physical pain can make me depressed, because I’m like, is this ever going to end?

And so it’s the emotions that are caused by physical pain that needs to be managed, especially for people who struggle with chronic pain. It’s the emotions that it’s generated that is one of the bigger things that we have to deal with. So this helps.

And that’s why when we talk about the pain processing pathway, we’re talking about what is the proper intervention at all five levels. And it makes sense in the narrative top part there, that it’s speaking. It’s a narrative. It’s correcting our beliefs at some level, and then correcting our identity is the next level down and so on. We go on down to the very bottom where we just need somebody to be with us.

[01:11:56] Stephanie: Thank you. Thank you for explaining that all together. I think we did that in the first episode of this little series, but we are then at the end of our episode. And so before I get your final thoughts, I just want to remind everyone to get me your questions for our anniversary episode on the 24th.

I need your questions by July 18, 2023. I’ll post the Google form link on Deeper Walk’s Instagram, and Facebook, and I will include it in my Monday emails. If you are a Deeper Walk email subscriber you should get those. I’m excited to hear from you and Huzzah! All right, Father, final thoughts.

[01:12:35] Marcus: So, in talking about how we recover from emotions, I don’t want to make it sound like it’s just super easy to get over hard things. The main point I’m trying to make is that there is hardware in our brains that needs to be developed that will make this easier. The less developed this hardware in our brain is, the harder and slower and more painful it’s going to be to get through our emotions.

The more we work on developing this joy elevator in our brains, the more we work on the skills that build that, that is going to make it easier. It doesn’t mean I’m not going to have the big emotions and it doesn’t mean I’m not going to have to go through it. But I will be in a better position to go through it if that is functioning well and that is well developed. So I just want to make sure that’s clear. I’m not saying, hey, do a few of these things and this will be easy.

[01:13:24] Stephanie: Right.

[01:13:25] Marcus: But if you don’t have this well done then this could drag on for a long time and it could be really painful.

[01:13:32] Stephanie: So level five. Give us the elevator pitch, no pun intended for level five.

[01:13:39] Marcus: So, level five basically means we’ve moved from the right side of our brain to the left side of our brain. And this is the part of my brain that is non relational because it is focused on problem solving. So I’m analytical, logical, I’m putting words to things and so on.

On the left side of my brain is where I have narratives, it’s where I have beliefs, and it’s where we have a thing called the “VLE. That’s kind of a term that Dr. Lehman invented. It’s this idea that my brain wants to give a logical explanation to whatever it is that I’m going through. So that’s where we’re on that side of the brain now. That’s level five.

[01:14:23] Stephanie: Okay so, (VLE), verbal logical explainer.

[01:14:25] Marcus: Yep.

[01:14:26] Stephanie: Very good. All right, so when we are feeling stuck at this level what does it feel like?

[01:14:35] Marcus: Well, when I’m stuck at this level it can feel all kinds of ways because it can generate a wide range of emotions. So different beliefs tend to trigger specific emotions. If I’m feeling like something’s impossible, I’ll feel depressed. If I’m feeling like something is unjust, then I’ll be angry. If I’m feeling like something is scary, I’m going to be anxious. If my mind is full of “what if” thoughts. What if this happens? What if that happens? You know, I’m going to be full of anxiety as I think about that. It’s hard to say when I’m stuck in this side of my brain what it feels like because it can be almost any emotion.

[01:15:25] Stephanie: The intervention is accurate information or a new perspective, Right?

[01:15:31] Marcus: Yeah. So what happens with beliefs is what my dad used to say, people don’t always practice what they say they believe, but they always practice what they really believe. And what he meant was for example, my beliefs about God. I can believe that God is good, that God loves me, that God has a plan, and that he’s got everything under control. But there can be a part in my heart where I’m wounded that has a different belief system, and that wounded part in my heart can believe that God’s actually cruel, or God is untrustworthy, and you certainly can’t rely on him.

And what does it mean to trust God anyway? And so what happens then is when that gets triggered, I become double minded in the sense that I have two competing belief systems going in my head. When I have two competing belief systems going on in my thinking and I’m battling back and forth, that’s exhausting, right?

It makes me emotionally unstable and I can ping pong back and forth between multiple emotions. I can go from anger to sadness to despair to shame. Maybe get a little bit of joy in there and then go right back into some other things because I’m ping ponging all the way around, because my beliefs aren’t stable. My beliefs are sometimes clear and sometimes not. I sometimes think it’s easier for an Atheist who is single minded about something, to have a greater sense of peace than a Christian who is double minded about something.

And so if somebody is all in on what they believe, they’re going to tend to have a more stable kind of approach because they’re single minded. Whereas some of us our problem is that we flip back and forth between our perspective on things that can be radically different. And there’s this war going on inside. And that’s what makes it so hard.

[01:17:38] Stephanie: You got very deep and philosophical very quickly and I appreciate that. I love the epicness and the going deep. I will tell you where my brain was when I initially asked the question, which I’m very glad you answered because I think that was also great. Like, if you’re on a walk and you think, oh, the end of this walk is really far away and I just want it to be done. You start having negative emotions, and then you find out, oh, actually it’s right there.

And just having new information or your perspective shift calms all of that, because that was the only level you were stuck at. You weren’t thinking, oh, I’m so alone as I’m walking on this. If you’re just thinking, oh, it’s that far, and then you find out it’s not that far, that would just be a really simple version of being stuck.

[01:18:26] Marcus: It can be very simple. One of the biggest meltdowns I ever had was in high school. I was on the baseball team and we had a night game on the Saturday before Easter. So the next morning is Easter sunrise service. I’m supposed to sing in a group at  the church for the Sunday morning service. We were out of town for this game about two hours from town, but it was going to be one game, done and go home.

And so we played from seven to nine and all of a sudden the coach announced, we’re going to make this a double header. We’re playing till midnight and I’m not going to get home till three in the morning and have to turn right around. And I was mad. I mean, I was angry. And to make it worse, the last play of the first game I had totally messed something up, and the coach yelled at me and he made a bad problem bigger.

And I was just already at the edge of my capacity and I just lost it. It’s like how do you tell somebody, I have to sing in a choir at church tomorrow, I can’t be playing. It was really awkward. I was trying to figure it out, but I just remember believing that I was trapped. That there was no way out of this and this was unfair, they should have announced it. I just remember completely losing it. I was over in the corner literally sobbing by the time we heard because I’m like, I cannot.

I ended up saying things to the coach and got so mad, I quit. And it was just really bizarre because it was all over Easter and I needed to be at church in the morning, and I realized it had to be something else going on. But in the moment, those were the thoughts running through my head, they were all about that this is not fair. This is not right, you shouldn’t be doing this to me.

[01:20:46] Stephanie: So did you get a perspective change?

[01:20:52] Marcus: After a good cry because of quitting and being all shook up, I went back and  apologized. And I told him, I said, look, I was overwhelmed by the whole thing and it got too much, and I overreacted, I’m sorry. So he let me back on the team but he benched me for a few games. And really, it was kind of interesting because God uses all things together for good. Honestly, I was on pace to be all conference that year and I might have gotten a scholarship offer someplace.

Who knows how that might have changed my life? But by getting benched, I basically still made second team all conference that year. But I missed six games and probably missed my chance at college baseball. So there’s a lot of meltdown around that. Some of that was attachments, but a lot of it was also just the things I was believing that were driving my emotions. I didn’t have the emotional capacity developed to handle that well. So I realize now I could have taken a breather, taken a deep breath, and gone off and collected myself first. My problem was that I didn’t have any of these skills, I didn’t know how to do it. I tried to handle it all right in the moment and just vented everything I was feeling. So there you go. That’s my cathartic story for the day.

[01:22:13] Stephanie: Oh, I’m sure people can relate. So, the narrative engine on the left side of the brain is separate from the joy center. Could you explain how the pathway of going from right to left, and how our beliefs and our pain interact with each other, based on that flow?

[01:22:34] Marcus: Yeah. So what will happen is that my beliefs can affect my ability to be happy and my ability to have joy. So it will trigger things in a different part of my brain. But what happens for example, in anticipation of being with somebody, I can get very excited and very happy about something that never happens. I can have the belief that I am going to see this person, it’s going to be this way, this is all going to be amazing, and have real joy based on that belief.

But the reason that belief is creating joy is because I already have an attachment with that person. In other words, If it was somebody that I didn’t have an attachment with, it wouldn’t have the same kind of impact. My beliefs have a lot to do with whether I’m happy or not. If I am thinking to myself, this is going to be terrible, this is going to be awful. I’m going to go see this person and they don’t really want to see me. I don’t know why I’m wasting my time.

There’s a lot of things I can tell myself that will just suck the joy out of things that otherwise would be fun. And so learning to recognize common patterns that I have that suck the joy out of things, so that I can put a stop to that and say, no, wait a second, I recognize this pattern. I don’t want to go down that thought trail again. What should I be putting my thoughts on instead? How do I replace my beliefs with something else? That’s really a key part of what we’re talking about here.

We just sabotage so much of our joy by getting into these mental holes that we fall into and everything that we’re telling ourselves is just reinforcing negative emotions. So all of this emphasis on attachment is not to negate the idea that beliefs don’t have a very powerful role in driving the way that we feel. It is to say that there is something else going on that tends to get overlooked. So we spend a lot of time over there on the attachment. But if you can get your beliefs changed, an awful lot of your emotions will resolve.

[01:24:51] Stephanie: So whatever is good and true and noble.

[01:24:53] Marcus: Yeah, whatever is good and true and noble and right, whatever is lovely, think on these things. Even praising God and focusing on what’s good and wonderful about God. Getting my mind in a good space makes a big difference. Talking about athletics, I was a pitcher for a while in little league. My dad taught me to picture myself doing everything perfect before I threw the ball.

o when I would stand on the pitching mound I would look and I knew exactly whether it’s a fastball or change up curveball, and exactly where it was going to go. I could picture the catcher, and is this going to be high right, inside left? Everything about it, I knew exactly what it was. So he was like, get it completely sure so you’re not guessing, you’re not just throwing it up there and hoping for the best. You know exactly what you’re trying to do.

He said, just take like one to two seconds before you throw the ball and picture it perfectly. So what I found was that the better I got at that the more confident I was. And so getting your beliefs clear and trusting can really help your performance. So in a lot of performance things, getting your beliefs right clears your head.

So what you have done on the right engine side about building habits and building skills, it can just flow. And that’s why sometimes we have got to get out of the way. Especially when we’re talking about performance things. Whether it’s art or music or sports or something like that, if I’m thinking about what I’m doing, I can’t do it properly. I’ve got to get that part of my brain out of the way and just enjoy what I’m doing and it makes sense.

[01:26:49] Stephanie: That was a word from the Lord to you at one point, too.

[01:26:52] Marcus: It was. Even when I preach, I remember the first time I was going to preach in front of about 2,000 people. And it was the biggest crowd at that time I’d ever spoken to. I was getting nervous and was praying about it and what I felt like God said was, just enjoy this. And I’ve learned ever since then that if I enjoy it, chances are other people are going to enjoy it. If I’m thinking about it, then it’s probably not going to go well, right?

01:27:20] Stephanie: Yes, that will literally preach.

[01:27:23] Marcus: Yeah, literally preach.

[01:27:26] Stephanie: All right, so I am going to zoom out to the whole pathway again. But is there anything specifically on level five you want to make sure you cover before we do that?

[01:27:37] Marcus: : Well, I will say Neil Anderson helped me understand this, not directly, it wasn’t a one on one conversation, but his books. He wrote ( I don’t remember now if it’s  his Victory Over the Darkness or Bondage Breaker ) specifically about this idea of when I am depressed, it’s usually because I believe something is impossible that I feel is crucial to my happiness. So relationally, if I fall in love with somebody and they don’t love me back and this feels impossible, then that’s going to make me depressed. Because I am convinced that only this person can make me happy and this is now impossible.

Or if I think I can only be happy if I get out of debt and it’s just going to be impossible to get out of this debt load anytime soon. Maybe I feel like it’s impossible or I am never going to get out of this. Then things that I believe to be impossible tend to create despair. The things that I think are uncertain, or things I can imagine being catastrophic, like, what if this happens? What if they hate me? What if this is terrible? What if people are mean to me?

What if I feel pain? All the “what ifs” of life create anxiety. And then when I want something and something or someone gets in the way, I get angry. And the wording that he used was, it’s blocking your goal. And that makes a lot of sense. That’s what happens with road rage, right? Someone has blocked my goal. I was just cruising along fine, and all of a sudden they cut in and they literally blocked me from doing what I wanted to do. And  that makes me angry. And now that I am angry I have to go to all of the things on the right side of my brain that I have learned for, how do I act like myself when I’m angry. So that I don’t turn into a road rage idiot. Sometimes it helps to escalate it a little bit in my thinking before I bring it back down. So all of those things. It was helpful to me to think about these big three specifically, despair, anger, and anxiety. They are all anchored in things that we believe.

[01:30:06] Stephanie: Your imagination is powerful stuff. I think sometimes about just sacred imagination. Sometimes when people dwell a lot on the anxiety side of imagination and where that’s bad, it almost counters to just not using your imagination. And anyway, that’s probably a different topic.

[01:30:31] Marcus: God gave us an imagination for a reason. I mean, you think about how much of the world is unseen to us? And based on what we know, we still have to use our imagination for an awful lot of things. And the average person throughout history didn’t travel more than 30 miles from where they were born their whole lives. And so how much of what was out there was imagination?

And so God wants us to use our imagination. He wants us to engage with that. What the Bible does is it gives us parameters. It gives us a foundation and parameters for our thought life. The foundation is the worldview. And then the parameters are the very specific things that it says are true, principles that are true. And so that gives us the foundation parameters. But within that, imagination is a gift God gave us.

[01:31:23] Stephanie:  Huzzah! As someone who has just come from a writers conference this weekend, I hear to that. So let’s zoom back out to the pain processing pathway as a whole. Can you put all these steps together for us? Maybe with a story? I don’t know if it’s easier for you to tell a story of a pain elevator that is functioning properly or where it gets stuck along the way, but if you could tell us a story?

[01:31:54] Marcus: Yeah. When I’m stuck because of something I’m believing, if a person can just tell me what I need to be believing instead, it can help. So Biblical Counseling really focuses a lot on the belief part of this and then moves from belief to making choices, and accountability on those choices. And all that stuff can work if that’s where I’m stuck. But the deeper my “stuckness” is, the less helpful that is. So let me put it this way. I’ve had emotions that can make me feel like I’m 15.

There’s emotions that can make me feel like I’m ten. There’s things that can happen to me that make me feel like I’m seven. There’s things that can happen to make me feel like I’m three. So part of this depends on how deeply I am getting triggered here and how far down in this system am I going? Because the younger I feel the less anything is going to help except, sit with me, soothe, stay with me and help me soothe. Cause until that happens we aren’t going to get anywhere else. I remember Just battling anxiety. I’d had a panic attack and was trying to recover from this attack. I was trying to talk to somebody about it. I remember the first person I talked to was like, well, fear is a sin, so you should just stop it.

[01:33:30] Stephanie: Oh, thank you.

[01:33:31] Marcus: Yeah. When I’m stuck because of something I’m believing, if a person can just tell me what I need to be believing instead, it can help. So biblical counseling really focuses a lot on the belief part of this and then moves from belief to making choices, and accountability on those choices. And all that stuff can work if that’s where I’m stuck. But the deeper my “stuckness” is, the less helpful that is. So let me put it this way. I’ve had emotions that can make me feel like I’m 15. There’s emotions that can make me feel like I’m ten.

There’s things that can happen to me that make me feel like I’m seven. There’s things that can happen to make me feel like I’m three. So part of this depends on how deeply I am getting triggered here and how far down in this system am I going? Because the younger I feel the less anything is going to help except, sit with me, soothe, stay with me and help me soothe.

Cause until that happens we aren’t going to get anywhere else. I remember Just battling anxiety. I’d had a panic attack and was trying to recover from this attack. I was trying to talk to somebody about it. I remember the first person I talked to was like, well, fear is a sin, so you should just stop it.

[01:35:39] Stephanie: Yes. Have you seen any “solutions” that people will often try that don’t work? Either because they’re targeting the wrong level of the brain function or because it just flat out doesn’t work. Like telling somebody who’s experiencing fear that it’s a sin.

[01:35:55] Marcus: Yeah. So classically people try to argue you into feeling better, like, oh, well, the Bible says this and the Bible says that. And this is true and that’s true. And they’re addressing everything at the belief level that if you just get your belief straight and here it is. And they get to the point that they’re actually arguing with you and mad at you because you are not believing the truth, because this truth will set you free like I’m free. And I’m like, well, you’re not really free right now.

That’s the first one that pops into my mind. It’s like people get so fixated on the truth that it will set you free, so here’s the truth and why won’t you just embrace the truth? They end up getting frustrated with you and angry with you. And they are like, I’ll skip it, this is never going to work. And they quit on you because they are only focused on the narrative and don’t see all the other elements that go into this. So that’s probably the most common one.

[01:36:49] Stephanie: All right, well, we are at the end of the episode here. I’m just going to remind everybody that next week, join us for our one year anniversary. And if you want to just squeak in some questions for that there is still a little bit of time. Or you can email me anytime. And if you’re a Deeper Walk email subscriber, you’ll get my Monday emails and you can respond to those if you want.

I love hearing from you. And there’s a Google form that’s going to be in the Monday emails. And I’ll also have it in the Deeper Walks Instagram and Facebook that you can fill out and give us your testimonies and your questions. Really excited to hear from you and to celebrate on the 24th. So, Father, any closing thoughts for this whole pain processing pathway series?

[01:37:45] Marcus: Well, one of the things as I think about all of this, is there’s a reason why I’ve just turned in a manuscript to Moody called Breakthrough!. And this manuscript, we’re still in the editing phases of it, but it’s meant to get at this idea that there are multiple sources, multiple engines, if you will, that drive the way that we feel. And so we don’t want to be overly simplistic either, this one strategy will always make you feel better, or dealing with this one engine will always fix everything.

Or even overly simplistic that this one strategy always fixes this engine. So we do need to have an understanding of how all these things fit together especially when we’re dealing with big battles that don’t always have easy solutions. It can be helpful to understand why it’s big and why there’s so much going on. And why we might need to interact with more than just one person to get through whatever it is that we’re dealing with.

[01:38:48] Stephanie: 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. Do you love this channel? One of the best ways that you can support us is by becoming a Deeper Walk Trailblazer.

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