31: Identity: Part 1, Attachment (Compilation Series)

[00:00] Stephanie: Welcome to the On the Trail Podcast. In this week’s compilation episode, we are revisiting Part 1 of the Identity Series with an emphasis on attachment. We’re setting up the topic for understanding our identity in Christ, and then we’ll take a nice hike, digging deeper into both the brain science of identity and the new covenant biblical realities of identity.

Identity is indisputably important, whether we’re considering individual identity, group identity, cultural identity, and beyond. We’ve talked about identity before during our FISH Series last year, and I’m really excited to come back for a deeper dive. So let us start with the 300,000 foot view.

[00:43] Marcus: That’s really high.

[00:44] Stephanie: That’s really high.

[00:45] Marcus: Just halfway to the moon, I think.

[00:47] Stephanie: Yeah, yeah. Will you take a moment to explain FISH as a broader context for identity?

[00:53] Marcus: Yes. The idea behind FISH is gospel-based discipleship. And the idea here is that we, most of us, were taught the gospel as something like, this is your ticket to heaven. All you’ve gotta do is stamp this ticket, you get into heaven. It’s often preached that way. Like, here’s the gospel message Jesus died for: you say this prayer – that’s punching your ticket- and now you get to go to heaven. Congratulations! And it’s almost like whatever you do from now on doesn’t matter because you did this one thing, and that’s not really what the gospel’s supposed to be. The gospel is supposed to be the foundation on which we build our lives. There is an element of eternal life, getting into heaven, all that, but there’s a lot of misconceptions there.

The foundational idea of the gospel is laid out in baptism, and that is that we are buried with Christ in baptism, showing that we have died with him. So just ask the question, why? Why did we have to die with Christ? What is the benefit to us? And the answer comes down to one word, and that’s Freedom. And that by dying with Christ, I am set free from everything that enslaves me. Now, that happens instantaneously, right at the moment I become a Christian, the legal work is done in the courtroom of heaven. The covenant is made. I’m entered into, and I am legally free from sin. I am legally free from death. I’m legally free from the world.

But foundationally, what discipleship means, I now need to learn how to live out of that freedom. How do I experience that freedom that has been given to me?

So then we go to the next thing, once I’ve died with Christ, I’m raised with Christ. And again, you’ve got to ask why. What is the real benefit of rising with Christ? First and foremost, is eternal life, that I am raised with him to eternal life, but right connected to that is I am raised to a new Identity and that I am brought into the new covenant with Christ. And that says that you died to this world so that you could be born into the kingdom. You died to sin so that you could be brought into righteousness. You died as a slave so that you could be a son or a daughter. So you look at these things and you’re like, okay, identity is instantly ours as soon as we become Christians, but learning to grow in our identity, learning to live out of that identity, let that be the foundation that drives the way that we live. That’s discipleship.

And so we just keep going through it. So the “S” is Spirit. I’m born of the Spirit so that I can learn to live in the Spirit. So I’m born of the Spirit. As soon as that happens, it’s a fairly quick thing right then, but learning to walk into Spirit is a lifelong process.

Same thing, I’m brought into Heart-focused community. But how do I put that into practice? What does it look like to live in heart-focused community? So those are the foundations. And then those four foundations lead into mission, which I like to think of as kingdom impact. And so that is the FISH model. That’s our heart-focused discipleship model, and that’s why we wanted to take this series and really camp out on the idea of identity and look at that from a couple of different aspects as we go through that.

[04:19] Stephanie: Excellent. Okay, we can move down to 30,000.

[04:22] Marcus: There you go.

[04:23] Stephanie: Explain to us why you find this topic of identity so crucial.

[04:30] Marcus: So, I think one of the first times I realized how important identity in Christ was, honestly, was reading Bob George’s book, Classic Christianity, back in the early nineties. I did not grow up with this part of my theology. I don’t remember ever having a lesson on my identity in Christ in church through college. But when I got to seminary, my dad was discovering it, and Neil Anderson wrote Victory Over the Darkness, where he laid out this wonderful collection of “Who I am in Christ” statements.

And then I came across Bob George’s book, and I thought his stories and his illustrations really brought it to life for me in a way that kind of made everything click. I like the way he talked about two halves of the gospel. He would say, “The first half of the gospel is you’re saved by faith and the second half is your identity.” Now, I think the FISH version is a little more complete way of looking at that.

For example, there’s one story he told about a beggar who was dumpster diving and eating trash. The dumpster was in back of a nice restaurant. And the owner of the restaurant saw this one day, said, “Oh, this is horrible! It just breaks my heart to see this guy living like this!”

And so he invited him in and showed him there was a buffet, every kind of food he could possibly want. And the guy goes, “This is all yours. It’s free. It’s my gift to you. You can eat whatever you want. Just keep coming back to the buffet every day, on me.”

And the guy goes, “I can have anything I want. Really?”

He goes, “Yeah, anything. It’s all free. It’s all yours.”

He goes, “Anything? Really? My anything?”

He said, “Yeah.”

He goes, “Can I have the garbage?”

It kind of hit me: we’ve been given this new identity in Christ, we’ve been given all these wonderful things in Christ, yet how many of us are like, “Yeah, but I’m really going to miss the garbage, you know, I’m really going to miss all that worldly stuff.”

I really like the way Neil Anderson put it – to get a little philosophical, Aristotle said that who we are is derived by what we do – but Neil and others have flipped it the other way, and that is, what we do comes out of who we are. I think that’s the more accurate statement, that a lot of this gets back to the way that I see myself.

If I see myself as a loser, I’m going to tend to live like a loser. If I see myself as someone who is special, I’m going to tend to live out of that. If I see myself as somebody that nobody could possibly love, it’s going to affect the way I live. So all of these things. Why is identity important? Because the way that I see myself is such a powerful driver of the way that I live.

[07:35] Stephanie: Yes. Can you pull that into everyday living a little bit?

[07:44] Marcus: For example, I did an overseas Zoom meeting this morning with a group of medical professionals, and somebody was praying for me, and they just texted me beforehand and said, “I feel like the Father just wanted me to remind you that you’re a child of the mighty King. Don’t be intimidated. Don’t worry about this. You have nothing to prove. Just go be who you are.”

And so that was something just today that came as a quick reminder. You don’t have to earn everything you get. Just go be yourself. God loves you the way you are. So on a daily basis, there are reasons to remember and remind yourself of these things.

[08:33] Stephanie: That’s a really good one.

[08:34] Marcus: So did you have something in mind when you asked that? I’m curious.

[08:37] Stephanie: I do have a book quote that I was thinking about reading from your book, but I was curious what would come to mind for you, and that was awesome. I pulled a book quote from A Deeper Walk. Heard of it? I love that book. You wrote, “The foundation of the Christian life is our identity in Christ. Bad things happen when that foundation collapses. In the same way, when we do not understand our identity in Christ, or if the devil’s lies rob us of that solid foundation, it can impede the flow of the Spirit within and keep us stuck.”

[09:11] Marcus: That’s a good quote. I think that, again, I learned a lot of this from other people along the way. There’ve been a lot of people who’ve taught on grace, taught on exchange life, taught on identity in Christ in the past. It’s not an original idea to me, but it was understanding that when that foundation is shaky, everything else gets shaky.

I think of the story my dad, your grandfather told about meeting with a missionary, a young single missionary, who was ready to come home. And he walked her through this idea of, “Do you see God as an authority, that you have to be submissive to that authority, and if you’re good enough at doing that, he’ll give you affirmation and accept you? Or is it the other way around? Are you already accepted because of what Christ has done for you and it moves in exactly the opposite direction?”

She had never even thought of that before. She had such a performance-based approach to living, the reason she wanted to come home from the mission field was she felt like a fraud. She felt like a failure, like she didn’t really measure up. And for the first time in her life, she discovered that to be a daughter of God, if God is the King of the kingdom, then that makes her a princess. And she had literally never heard that before. Never thought of it that way before.

It changes the whole way you live. That’s why you see this in movies sometimes. “I’m knighting you. I’m giving you a title. Now that you’re a knight, go live like a knight. Go live like a knight of the realm” You see that even in Chronicles of Narnia, Aslan knights Peter first, “You’re (what, Sir Wolfsbane or something like that?) Peter Wolfsbane, Knight of Narnia,” and that title. Or you see it in a movie like Gladiator, where he turns around, he says his name, “Maximus, commander of the Felix legions,” all the things that he says with that. It’s like his identity is what drives everything else. That is the foundation out of which the life comes. We see that over and over again, that if we’re shaky on our identity, our life is going to be shaky.

[11:23] Stephanie: With this in mind, do you want to walk us through an overview of where we’re going on this trek into identity? We’re going to spend a lot of episodes on it.

[11:35] Marcus: We’re taking our time on this because we have the opportunity with the podcast to actually unpack some of these things and not always be at the 30,000 foot level. And so first, we want to take a few episodes to look at how God designed the brain and attachment, and how God designed us to learn identity, which is fascinating because I only knew identity as a set of beliefs that you learned to incorporate into your life. And that’s good. We’re going to spend a lot of sessions on those beliefs.

Understanding that God designed our brains to form an identity through attachment seems really important, so we’re going to take a few sessions to try to unpack that. I call that attachment-based identity. Then we’re going to go to the belief-based identity, and we’ll look at what does the world try to get us to believe? How does the world try to shape our identity?

And then how does the kingdom and the Spirit and Christ, what does a grace-based identity look like? The world tries to give us a performance-based identity, God gives us a grace-based identity, and our brains learn a relationally- based identity. So we’re going to take a look at the topic of identity from all three of those perspectives.

[12:59] Stephanie: Huzzah. I’m excited for every path. And we’re also going to get into, for instance, next episode, we’re going to take a little time to talk about the biblical reasons for why. Yes, the brain science is important and it’s amazing how God has designed us too. That attachment and relationship really is at the heart of our identities. And that’s a beautiful thing. I’m thinking about how when we talked about FISH in our initial series, it was in juxtaposition with the broken discipleship factory and that there’s so much, there are so many things that have been broken in the way that we approach discipleship. Could you maybe apply that sort of juxtaposition with identity, like ways that you have seen people’s approaches to identity be broken?

[13:56] Marcus: Let’s just start here. Some people have grown up in a theological system of what has often been called “miserable worm theology”. The idea here is that I am totally depraved, I’m a miserable worm and missing the fact that once I get saved that’s not who I am anymore. If you’re going to make a case, you might be able to make a case for that as somebody who is of the world. But if I am of the kingdom, then I need to get past that. A lot of us were raised with sermons, basically telling us what horrible sinners we were and to try to do a better job.

And so I remember in junior high, high school thinking to myself that the gospel basically said, “You are bad, try to be good, but I know you’ll fail.” So it was like Christianity is kind of a burden here. It’s like you’re a bad person, you’re fundamentally bad, no matter what you try to do, you’re gonna be bad. But your job is to be good. And so good luck with that, and that’s why Christ had to die for you, because you’re such a horrible loser. Nothing about that was appealing, and so that is partly what we’re trying to overcome here is.

Beyond that, there can just be all sorts of other aspects of identity that could be broken. For instance, it was  strongly emphasized in some circles that dying to yourself was important. Well, that is important if you have built up a really strong, worldly identity that needs to die. But if you have an undeveloped identity, like you’re a little kid and you’re hearing people in church say, “You need to die to yourself and you need to die to who you are.” You haven’t developed anything to die to yet.  That was a little traumatizing for me, too.

There’re a lot of little elements to this where people have gotten some distortions in the way the gospel was presented to them. It’s not that what they heard was completely wrong, but the way in which it was packaged and the way in which it was presented actually distorted the sense of how God must look at me.

So I remember growing up feeling very much like God is fundamentally disappointed with me all of the time because I never measure up to what I ought to be doing, and that even though it’s impossible for me to measure up, he’s still disappointed with me. If that’s your view of God, that’s your view of yourself. That kind of identity structure led me to, like, “You know what? I’m going to do enough Christianity to try to keep God happy, but I’m going to do enough other stuff to try to have fun.”

[16:52] Stephanie: Well, it led to a very duty mindset for you that your relationship with God was one of duty and not of love. And that’s something you’ve talked about before.

[17:00] Marcus: Yep. So, again, this is why identity is so important.

[17:04] Stephanie: Then there’s the flip side of things. So you had a lot of experience growing up with the judgmental identity. And I think what today we’re seeing, things are polarized as ever. So you still get people who are in an attempt to counteract some of the over tolerance that you see, and they’re getting really purist. There’s a lot of nuance that needs to be dealt with when we’re dealing with identity.

[17:38] Marcus: In today’s world, more than ever, identity has become a cultural issue. That aspect of it wasn’t nearly as strong when I was growing up, but today it’s at the heart of the divide in the church at some level. So it’s important to get some understanding on these things.

[18:04] Stephanie: Well, I’m going to take a moment here to bring some listener engagement directly into the podcast again. Last episode we had a lovely Q & A time celebrating our one year anniversary of doing the podcast together. And for our Q & A episode, there was a form to fill out for listener submissions, and I have replaced that form now with a general form you can use anytime. I’ll keep a button at the bottom of my Monday emails for you to access, as well as put it in the bio link of deeper walks Instagram profile and on that form you can share stories, feedback, questions, icebreakers, and you can choose to stay anonymous or not. So thank you to everyone who has already been sharing with us and we love. Forward to hearing more from you.

Today’s icebreaker came from Claudia and so I’m also going to pull a lovely note up that she shared here. She says,

I found Deeper Walk through Life Model. I have read a couple of Dr. Marcus’s books. Deeper walk was especially impactful since I came from a difficult church background. I am nearly 60 years old and have been a Christian since I was young but never had discipling. The FISH model was very eye opening recently. Learning about the pain levels and what I’m learning in Journey Group about joy is helping me with my adult children relationships greatly.

Yes, journey groups are great and I’m so glad this teaching has been helpful. Does that spur any thoughts for you, Father?

[19:37] Marcus: I can identify growing up. I don’t want to make it sound like my Christian experience growing up is horrible because I actually loved going to church. I had lots of friends at church. I had a lot of good experiences. But what I realized was there were booby traps in my Christianity that I needed to get past.

I think there are a lot of people like this listener who have had Christian experiences in their churches that weren’t all bad, but some of them were very toxic. Sometimes it’s more what I would call booby trapped. A lot of good things, but there are a few issues that have just twisted the whole thing for us, and that’s why we want to try to address those.

[20:25] Stephanie: I’m looking forward to continuing this whole series. It’s very important and I hope we can address a lot of those things. So as we are wrapping up this episode, do you have any closing thoughts or hopes for the future?

[20:43] Marcus: Yes, I’m looking forward to this series, partly because I find that I have to revisit this issue of identity on a regular basis. As much as I know it intellectually, as much as I have studied about it, it’s just good to keep coming back to the foundations of the faith and reviewing those. I’m hoping this will be helpful for our listeners, too, to take this little extended journey into the foundations of our faith and what Christ has done for us that has given us a foundation that we didn’t deserve but is completely free.

[21:18] Stephanie: The identity trail has two main paths that we’ll want to explore, and we are starting down the path that looks at attachment and maturity and brain science and how that all informs our identity. So as we go in, Father, do you want to actually set us up for the biblical foundations for why we care about this brain science path?

[21:39] Marcus: Yes, if you’re thinking about you, why don’t we just go straight to what the Bible says is true about us? And it makes sense because most of us tend to think that. I was taught that all emotions were anchored in beliefs, and there’s just enough truth in that beliefs do play a huge role in a lot of our emotions. I just assumed it was true of all emotions. What I learned was that there are attachment-based emotions as well as belief-based emotions. If it wasn’t for the brain science, I wouldn’t have separated that out. Even though the Bible points us in both directions, I had a filter on the way that I would read the Bible that assumed I was only going to be looking for beliefs as the foundation of emotion. So that’s all I ever saw.

Once you get into it, you begin to see that there are a lot of attachment issues here. You get a story like Hagar and Isaac and Ishmael, and Hagar and Sarah and Abraham, and all the attachment dynamics going on there and not just the belief-based dynamics. And you can take that into Cain and Abel and all kinds of things, that there is a level there that is core. In fact, you can read the Bible with this kind of a filter in such a way that everything gets reduced to beliefs, and it just isn’t the way it is.

Like salvation itself Jesus describes as an attachment. It is me being grafted into a vine. That’s a pretty strong attachment term. Paul uses a similar kind of analogy in Romans 11: we’ve been grafted into this tree and so we are now attached. What God wants for us is he wants us to be bonded to him.

That’s why I think the word trust really gets to this idea. Trust is this idea of a bond with somebody, and love also. You can’t get away from this idea of that. And so what I look at is that there are a lot of terms in the Bible like trust and love, and even this idea of being glued together or grafted together, that are pointing us in an attachment direction.

It makes sense then that the God of the Bible is also the God who designed the brain, that these things would complement each other. Sure enough, when you go there, you learn that from a brain perspective there are all kinds of attachment things happening before our beliefs ever get involved. So it was helpful to me to kind of separate that out and change the filter with which I was reading the Bible.

[24:23] Stephanie: On that note, I would just also recommend people check out the Relational Skills in the Bible curriculum by Chris Coursey and Amy Brown. That’s a group curriculum. That is, you read through Bible stories and see how Bible characters displayed good relational skills or bad relational skills. But then you also learn more about the 19 relational brain skills that Thrive Today teaches. And, yeah, that’s a fun way.

[24:54] Marcus: You would know that book well, because you were the main editor on that book, weren’t you?

[24:58] Stephanie: Yeah, back in, was that in 2018?

[25:01] Marcus: A while ago.

[25:01] Stephanie: It was a while ago, but it was a good book.

So we learn our identity, or at least our perceived actionable identity, based on our relational experiences, not based on our beliefs. So can you explain more? Why is that? How does that work?

[25:18] Marcus: So, the origins of all this material go back to Dr. Allan Schore and some books he wrote about with complicated titles like Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self. And then Dr. Jim Wilder took that and actually simplified it in his book on the Life Model. And then what we’ve tried to do is try to simplify this even further.

The idea, in a nutshell, is that my brain has to learn to think of myself as a being in the world. It’s not automatically there. What happens is, you can think about it this way, that the brain is like a computer that is constantly growing and changing and developing. When I’m first born, there are hardware systems that are not in place. The hardware that allows me to have a sense of self is nothing fully developed. In fact, it’s barely developed when I am born. God does this on purpose.

You’re like, why would God do that? It shows you how important that God wants love to be the more foundational thing than truth. The loving relationships are meant to form our identity at a deeper level than our beliefs. I find that fascinating, because this hardware system in my brain can only develop through relational interaction with other people. And that relational interaction with other people is like a workout in the gym that causes this hardware in our brain to grow the same way that muscles grow when we work out and rest and work out and rest.

God made it this way on purpose. So Satan attacks that, and that’s where we get affect dysregulation.

[27:26] Stephanie: Affect dysregulation and disorders of the self.

[27:29] Marcus: There you go. So you get the problems, right? Where we get problems with our identity, we get problems with our bonding and attachments. We learn bad patterns. We learn bad foundations that lead to bad beliefs, making it much easier to believe wrong things later on because the hardware didn’t grow properly because our relationships were kind of messed up.

I think Satan understands this. He’s not only the father of lies who lies to us, but if you look at it, he’s a divider. He creates factions, envy, and jealousy. You look at the work of the flesh that is listed in Galatians 5. You see that Satan is constantly trying to break apart our attachments. He does not want that kind of bonding to take place. He doesn’t want loving attachments within our families. He doesn’t want loving attachments with God. So he goes after those things.

On the other hand, God wants them. That’s his core thing. That’s what he is after more than anything. He wants loving attachment, and then he wants that loving attachment to grow through knowledge and truth and things like that. But those are what build out the love and build out the attachment.

[28:44] Stephanie: Hence living from the heart Jesus gave you.

[28:47] Marcus: Hence, yes.

[28:49] Stephanie: So in our prior series on Joy and the Pain Processing Pathway, we talked about the brain’s identity center, also called the joy or action center. Can you remind us, what are some functions of the identity center as we are processing?

[29:05] Marcus: Yes, the identity center. We’ve described this a lot of different ways in a lot of different books. In Rare Leadership, it was called the fast track. There’s this four floor elevator system called the joy elevator. And at some level, the whole fast track system, the whole joy elevator, is an attachment system.

The driver at the peak of that is our identity center, or it was sometimes called the action center, the captain, the commander, all kinds of things, but the idea is that it is the top floor of this elevator. It is the part of my brain that, based on my relational interactions, has formed an understanding of who I am, who my people are, how it’s like us to live, what we value, what our perspective on things are. It predisposes us towards a worldview. It gives us a moral compass. It gives us values. That’s all very important stuff, right? That’s really foundational, important stuff.

So if I attempt to live my life with that part of my brain messed up, you can see all the problems it’s going to cause. Not only is my identity being off, my values will be off, my character will be off, my whole perspective on life is going to be off. And if it can be messed up, even if it’s formed in a relatively healthy way, if I lose access to it because my brain’s going into a cramp and the joy elevator is getting stuck part way up and I’m not able to access that part of my brain, then I’m going to have a whole lot of problems as well.

That’s why this is so important, that God designed us, that our true self is our relational self, and our true self is who we are when we live out of joy and not out of fear. The counter to that is that my false self is always anchored in fear, and my false self is that part of me that says, “I feel like I need to perform or put on a mask or be who you expect me to be, or you won’t like me, you won’t be happy to see me.”

And what I want is, I want people to be happy to see me. I want people to accept me. I want that kind of acceptance. So to get it, I perform. That’s always fear based, which is like, if I don’t, then I’m not going to get this. And so my fear of being rejected actually drives me to a false self. That’s why my true self is always going to be anchored in joy. And I think God did that on purpose. He created us to live out of joy, not out of fear. And the brain just emphasizes that and makes it crystal clear.

[31:54] Stephanie: That’s one of the reasons why we are starting with the attachment-based identity before we move to the beliefs-based identity, because the brain functions by building all of this up before we can even think about it in a conscious thought way. And so it’s really important to learn how to develop it and repair it and understand it from the right to the left.

[32:20] Marcus: If people really want to take the deep dive into the brain science attachment theory, that’s where you go to Life Model, you go to Thrive Today. You go places where they unpack some more of this in some of their materials. What we’re trying to do is introduce people to it and help them understand that this really is important. It’s worth learning.

[32:37] Stephanie: Okay. But on that note, I think I’m going to just pull directly from one of Dr. Wilder’s OG books. Jim Wilder talks about something fascinating. Shocker. He mentions it in the book Living with Men, which is what I’m going about to read.

[32:56] Marcus: The Complete Guide to Living with Men

[32:57] Stephanie: The Complete Guide to Living with Men, correct.

Also in his book with Michael Hendricks, The Other Half of the Church, I think he mentions it there, but that is the idea of the three faces. So I’m just going to read this section, and if you want to pause me and be like, “Okay, let’s talk about that,” then  feel free. For those who have their own book, on page 16, in The Complete Guide to Living with Men:

At two to three months of age, a region of the brain which was not developed at birth begins its growth. This area, called the right prefrontal cortex, will become the top of the command center in the brain. It has the last word on control of all the body and mind systems and will grow to become about one 6th of the adult brain.

[33:45] Marcus: Let’s pause there. He’s talking about the identity center. He’s talking about the top of the joy elevator, that it’s unformed at birth, but that by two to three months of age, it is beginning to be formed. It’s beginning to take shape. And as it takes shape, this is getting to the idea of the origin of a self. We were beginning to develop the capacity to have a self.

[34:09] Stephanie:

It is the first to know everything from inside or outside the body. But this region is not an it. In fact, these circuits are built as an image of three joyful faces looking at each other: mother, baby, and father. The strongest bond is usually between the mother and child face, with the father looking at them both. This relational image of the self with joyful parents, is stored as our identity at the top of the four level control center of the brain.

[34:39] Marcus: Very good. So the four level control center of the brain: joy elevator, right hemisphere of the brain, fast track. All that’s the same stuff he’s saying. At the top of this, in our identity center, there are these three faces, which is a really kind of strange thing to think about, but what’s happening is, what establishes us with a secure, emotionally stable identity is a baby and a mother gazing into each other’s eyes with adoration. “I love you. You’re the most amazing person ever,” just adoration, with a father watching this with joy. It’s bringing him pleasure. It’s bringing him delight that this is all happening.

The idea is that this is the way God designed it and that when this happens, when mother and baby are bonding and cooing in googly eyes with each other and dad is taking delight in the whole thing, that the brain is learning, “This is normal,” and the brain is learning, “I am the source of delight. I am a source of delight in this world.”

That core emotional anchor is going to predispose us to later in life what we’re going to believe about ourselves. So just change one of those things. If mommy’s looking at the baby and there’s no joy, mommy’s disgusted with baby, mommy’s unhappy, or maybe mommy is ignoring the baby and is angry and fighting with daddy all the time.

And so the faces that are formed in our brains is, “Here’s mommy and daddy fighting all of the time and this must be about me. I must be horrible.” In other words, it leads to beliefs. What gets formed in my mind is now going to be a dysfunctional self view, because God’s design and intent of adoring mom, delighting dad, happy baby, all in there together, is going to get distorted. When it gets distorted, it lays the foundation for a lifetime of repair.

[36:52] Stephanie: Do you want me to continue?

[36:53] Marcus: Yes, go ahead.

[36:53] Stephanie: Okay.

Our primary identity at the apex of the neurological control structure of the brain is a relational one. For the moment, we will call this relational identity  “they”.  If they are oriented by love, we can bear all things, endure all things, and return to joy. Joy is our strength. If they are oriented to fear, then our identity readily becomes unstable and disorganized. Isn’t it like God to design a brain that only knows itself in relationship, and then only when that relationship is one of love? It is love that rejoices in knowing us, that makes us know ourselves. This entire region is developed without words because the baby has no vocabulary. Its growth is nearly half over by the time he can say, “Mama.”

[37:39] Marcus: He puts it well, right? And that is, God values love so highly that our core identity, and this is why we’re starting with attachment, our core identity is more shaped by who we love than it is by what we believe. But I will say this, that what happens at this attachment level will strongly predispose us towards what we end up believing. It is fascinating, though, that God wired us this way, that he wanted strong, secure attachment to be the foundation of life and not just a solid worldview in theology.

I think I grew up, again, being taught that theology was the foundation of the Christian faith. When theology is the foundation, there’s nothing wrong with theology, it’s good to have good theology, but attachment is supposed to be the foundation. In the same way,  if those things get out of perspective, that’s where you end up with Christians in enemy mode with each other. We just got an email from Dr. Wilder yesterday about this. There’s a poll recently that said that a majority of Christians,

[38:58] Stephanie: I think it was like 76% of liberal Christians saw loving your enemy as being soft on injustice, as being complicit with injustice. And 78% of conservative Christians saw loving your enemy as being soft towards immorality.

[39:22] Marcus: Yes, so this idea is one of the things that happens. I haven’t seen this study, haven’t looked into the whole thing, but it gets this idea that when theology is the foundational thing, then what happens is, I excuse myself from love. I don’t have to love my enemies.

Now, that doesn’t mean I don’t take stands and I don’t form partnerships. There are certain things that I won’t do, but that’s different than not even talking to people, not even being willing to have a conversation, not being civil, not being kind. I go back to this whole idea that at the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus uses this example that there were, like today’s culture is scattered with all these identity groups? We tend to act like that’s a new thing, but that’s exactly what Jesus is addressing in this Sermon on the Mount.

This identity group of Pharisees see themselves a certain way, “We are the ones who take Moses seriously, and we are the ones who are focused on this. And so therefore, we won’t even talk to you tax collectors and sinners. We won’t even talk to you Samaritans. We’re certainly not talking to you Romans.”

What happens is that Jesus, he starts at the basics, he says, “You won’t even greet each other.” And that always struck me as odd when I was a kid reading that. But now I get it. There are people who literally won’t talk to each other because of the people group that they belong to. And that was going on in Jesus’ day. So when you talk about loving your enemies, he’s like, “Loving your enemies starts with, let’s greet one another.”

[40:57] Stephanie: I’m so glad you went there because, as I was reading through that article that Dr. Wilder sent, I was just wondering, how are we defining what loving your enemy looks like in that survey? How are people understanding that so many people can’t even agree on what love looks like? What does it mean to love your enemy? And so that’s a really solid example, where Jesus said, “Let’s start basic. Say hi.”

[41:22] Marcus: Yeah. Well, and then he talks about doing good. He says, “What credit is it to you if you do good to the people who love you?” Like, if you know you’re going to do good to somebody and you know they’re going to be good back to you, what’s the big deal there? He said, “But if you’re going to do good to somebody who has been bad to you and you are doing good to somebody who from whom you expect bad in the future, now he said, “Now that is acting like your heavenly Father.” And so if you just start with those two basics, greet them and be good to them, and it kind of grows out from there.

[41:54] Stephanie: Do you want to talk more about the idea of unstable identity and stable identity or do you want to save that for next episode?

[42:01] Marcus: If we’ve got time, I can address it now for a little bit. So a stable identity based on what we’ve been talking about so far, a stable identity comes from this idea of having these three faces that are all joyful. And so if I am raised in such a way that I have an inner sense that I am a delight, that people find me delightful, I’m not thinking that way but the faces that I see in my head tell me that, then I am going to have a certain level of emotional stability in place before I ever get to my beliefs. If that gets messed up, if one of those faces is off, if two of those faces are off, I am going to have a very hard time believing good things about myself. It is setting me up for an emotionally unstable life to come.

This is why repair has to address more than just my beliefs. Repair has to go back to relearning how to form attachments, getting practice and forming some new attachments, so my brain can learn a new set of faces and a different perspective on things. And I can’t just talk myself into that. I’ve got to experience it relationally.

[43:19] Stephanie: Well, and I think that’s really important for hope, whether you are somebody who’s thinking, “Yeah, I did not get that growing up,” or whether you’re a parent who’s thinking, “Oh, shoot, my children. I know that things might not have gone that way.” There is hope.

[43:36] Marcus: Yes and right now, honestly, the Thrive Training is the only system I’m aware of that tackles this head on and gives people a way to rebuild. I know people who’ve gone through track one of Thrive and said, “Oh, this is really basic,” I think for them it is because their brain was already wired pretty strongly. But for people whose brains were not wired properly, you need the kind of tools and skills that they go through in Thrive track one, to begin teaching your brain how to quiet in a place where somebody’s happy to be with you, how to be happy with somebody who’s happy to see you, how to share eye smiles with someone.

There are really basic things that if you didn’t get them at an early age, the good news is they can be learned later in life and it can make a difference. It’s part of the repair process that takes place. I just put a plug in for our partner ministry here. They’re the only ones I know who are tackling this head on.

[44:33] Stephanie: Yes, Thrive Today with Chris and Jen Coursey.

[44:36] Marcus: Yep, Chris and Jen Coursey.

[44:38] Stephanie: They’re fabulous.

[44:39] Marcus: That’s why I wrote three books with them.

[44:43] Stephanie: All right, I’m going to take a little time here to pull another question in from one of our listeners. This listener says,

I have been listening to the podcast of On the Trail and it seems you have many resources available to help with relational struggles. I need biblical based counsel but I don’t know what resources to start with. Can someone there give me direction as to what resources you offer to plug into? I would like to find biblical counseling where I live, but they either are not taking more clients or they don’t take Medicare / Blue Cross.

[45:15] Marcus: Yes, that’s a common issue, isn’t it? There’s a lot of people looking for help and there’s just not enough out there. In fact, one of the things we realize is there’s never going to be enough biblical counselors, there’s never going to be enough prayer ministers, there’s never going to be enough of all thi. We’ve got to do something about the culture in the church, but that’s a bigger topic for another day.

A couple of things. First of all, looking for a relational community because that’s so important, I would encourage checking out Journey Groups. Journey Groups is an online community, and it sounds like, “Ah, yeah, but it’s not in person.” We’ve had amazing testimonies of people who have felt isolated, like they didn’t have anybody, who got connected to a Journey Group and actually experienced some real joyful bonding through that. That’s one resource.

[46:06] Stephanie: Journey Groups of Alive and Well.

[46:09] Marcus: It’s run by the ministry, Alive and Well. But you can get to it through the Deeper Walk website (deeperwalk.com) and we’ll connect you over there to them.

You can go under the “more” tab on the Deeper Walk site, we have a referral network where you can go and look to see if there might be somebody that you can connect to. More and more people are doing this online too, where you can have that kind of prayer ministry and counseling online.

And then book resource-wise, you mentioned Relational Skills in the Bible, that’s sort of a small group study approach. But I’ve written a couple of books with Chris, so we got the Four Habits series: The Four Habits of Joy-Filled People, The Four Habits of Raising Joy-Filled Kids, The Four Habits of Joy-Filled Marriages. A lesser known book is The Spirit-Filled Home. And The Spirit-Filled Home book actually, I think, has the strongest collection of simple relational skills to help people get started on building up their relational skill sets.

[47:15] Stephanie: The Spirit-Filled Home is awesome. It has emotional healing, it has spiritual warfare, family and relations, parenting and marriage and everything. It’s highly underrated.

[47:27] Marcus: Yeah, we don’t promote it that much, honestly, but I have a whole weekend marriage retreat that I’ve done over 20 times that’s largely based on that book.

[47:38] Stephanie: That’s really good. I also want to give a quick shout out that Thrive Today, Chris Coursey actually launched their own podcast recently that has ten minute talks about relational skills and stories and things. We love Thrive Today. We love Chris and Jen Coursey and highly encourage you to check them out if you’re wanting more relational skills training.

So we’re at the end of the episode. Any closing thoughts?

[48:07] Marcus: As we talk about attachment throughout this series, there’s a reason we’re starting with attachment, and then we’re going to go to beliefs, and then we’re going to add a ”C.” Attachment is an “A”. Beliefs is a “B.” So it makes sense there should be a “C” after that, right? It’s collectively as a community. That is, the role that my community plays in helping to reinforce identity.

So what we’re laying out here is helping people understand why attachment is so important in this issue. In the next one we’re going to talk a little bit more about how attachment actually works to create identity. The three faces thing is an important start to that, but there’s more.

I’m hoping that people will begin to understand that God loves us. He meant for us to have joy at the core of who we are. He meant for us to know that we’re loved, and he wants that to be the solid part of the identity that he has with us.

It may be a journey, and for some of us it will be a journey, but it is definitely a journey that’s worth it to begin transforming from a fear-based person into a joy-based person.

[49:15] Stephanie: Father, how identity forms in the brain, is there more you want to talk about?

[49:21] Marcus: Yes, how it forms in the brain. I thought this might actually be a good opportunity to review some of the things that Chris and I wrote in our book, The Four Habits of Raising Joy-Filled Kids, because that’s really the point. How does somebody form a healthy, stable, emotional identity in the next generation?

Because that book’s not about how do we raise kids who are happy all the time, it’s about how do we raise emotionally resilient kids. An emotionally resilient kid is somebody who’s going to have a stable identity and be really good at their affect regulation. We take the four habits there, and we use ABCD to explain them. It doesn’t spell a word like usually, but we have the ABCD, and it starts with the kids.

ABCD is fun for kids, but this is not a kid word. “A” is attunement. The idea behind attunement, I would put it this way, is that one mistake that a lot of parents make is that they expect their kids to attune to their emotions rather than being the grown up who’s attuning to the child’s emotion.

A classic example would be I come into a room and I’m upset, and I expect the child to notice how upset I am and adjust their behavior to reading me.  Or I come in and I’m craving attachment, and I want to be with them, and I expect them to notice how much I’m wanting to be lovey and huggy right now and to adjust to me.

One of the problems that we run into is that we don’t attune to the child’s emotional state. We expect the child to attune to our emotional state. So habit number one for building a strong identity is that we have to get really good attuning to the child.

This is especially true for babies. That is, you don’t build joy with babies on your schedule. You have to build it on their schedule. The idea here is that a healthy, stable identity is going to be a joy-based identity. So we’ve got to do joy workouts in order to help people grow this kind of an identity. Because you think about if the three faces are an adoring mother, a delighted baby, and a delighted father who’s watching all of this happening, then I need that experience to take place on a regular basis.

We call those joy workouts. When I have joy workouts and mommy and baby are doing this stuff all day long, and then when daddy comes home he gets to share in the joy, you have an identity that develops well. We can replicate that a little bit through joy workouts that we do. But it starts with attuning, and attuning has to do with noticing where the other person is at in their emotional state, meeting them there, as opposed to expecting them to read your emotional state and meet you where you are. This happens a lot. It doesn’t have to take a long time either. This is very similar to validating.

And I know we have a cat who just walked into the room and is now..

[52:30] Stephanie: He’s looking for ways that he can jump into Dad’s lap.

[52:32] Marcus: Yeah, I’m not sure what specifically…

[52:33] Stephanie: I think he wants in the window.

[52:35] Marcus: That would make sense. Okay.

[52:37] Stephanie: If we hear a thunk, that is why.

[52:38] Marcus: Yeah, if you hear cats in the background, you’ll know what’s going on.

So when we attune to people, what we’re doing is we’re reading their body language and we’re taking a moment to recognize the situation we’re walking into. And again, I go back to the parent who walks into a room and finds their child doing something that maybe they’re playing, or maybe they’re upset about something, or maybe they’re watching TV, and all I know is I’m angry because I told them to go do something else, and they’re not doing it. I still need to take a moment to attune to read the situation, see where they’re at, meet them there, and then move them to where I want them to go.

Attuning is a very important habit. It has to do with reading body language, has to do with getting in sync, so we need to practice attuning to each other. That’s one of the skills that helps us grow a stable identity.

The second one, the “B”, is building bounce. Stephanie Hinman and I obviously wrote a book by that title. The idea of building bounce is it’s a different kind of joy workout. It’s got two elements to it. One is me and you sharing, building joy together. The classic thing I always think of is peekaboo. “Peekaboo! Look, it’s you!” and getting the baby to giggle and you’re sharing joy smiles, and the baby gets bouncing and very happy, and then all of a sudden, we’ll just stop. That means they need a break.

What I’m doing, though, is I’m trying to attune to the baby to see when they’re ready to build some joy and the clue to that is they’re looking for eye contact. They’re looking at you. They’re looking for eye contact. So that’s your clue. “Okay, I see where you’re at. Let’s stop everything. Let’s build some joy together right now.”

Building joy together is step one of building bounce. Step two is me attuning to you and realizing that you’re not in the mood to build joy, that you were upset about something, you may be shut down and sad, or you’re overwhelmed and scared. So I want to attune to where you’re at emotionally, meet you there, and then Validate, Comfort, Recover, use the VCR process, to help you get back to a place of where you’re within your margin again, back within that window of tolerance we talked about in the last series.

So attuning leads directly to building bounce. And those two things work together to help people grow that joy foundation that creates a joyful identity.

[55:24] Stephanie: Do you want to mention self-regulation versus co-regulation?

[55:29] Marcus: Yes. At the infant level of this, babies can’t do any of this for themselves. They are completely dependent upon the parent to do the attuning because a baby has no ability to attune, and a baby can’t spontaneously create their own joy. They have to feed off of that. You can’t tell a baby to calm down or stop doing this, or change. We have to actually walk them through the process of doing it. We call that external regulation. I’ve forgotten the term, but it’s like I’ve got to regulate for the baby.

Then when I get to the child stage, now we do what’s called co-regulation, and that’s where we’re working on it together. I’m training you. I’m helping you. I’m walking you through it. So in the infant stage, I do it for you. At the child stage, we do it together. I help you practice it so that by the time I’m an adult, I can self regulate. I know how to get myself out of these moods and these states that I’m in because I’ve had lots of practice with it.

[56:39] Stephanie: All right, helpful. So the ABC, correct?

[56:44] Marcus: Yes, we’re moving now, for the “A”, and the “B” are largely the right brain parts of this, and then we’re moving into the left brain. But you can’t do the left brain parts without the right brain included. So everything always starts with attunement, and then you go to building bounce, and then you go to “C”, correcting with care.

And the idea on correcting with care is that you have to do attunement and building bounds first before you do the correction. Again, too many times, as parents, we lead with correction. We lead with our upset about what you’re doing, and we get angry with the kid. And what our children learn is simply, they learn what makes us mad. They don’t actually get their behavior corrected and so they learn to hide things because they don’t want us to get mad. It trains them in a way that we actually don’t want to train them.

To correct with care means I start with attunement and I build bounce, and then I go to correcting behavior. A classic example of this would be the terrible twos. Around 18 months of age, for the first time, there are hormones going through the brain that can feel extreme emotion. So instead of just feeling anger, I can feel rage. That’s why your adorable little two year old can say, “I hate you. I wish you were dead.” And you’re like, where did that come from?

Well, they’re having huge emotions. And so if I say, “Well, we don’t talk like that here,” and I go straight to correcting them, and I don’t take the time to attune and read what’s going on with them, help them recover emotionally, and then go to correction, I’m probably gonna end up doing more harm than good, because most of what happens at the terrible twos is not really about behavior. It is about emotional regulation.

And so what we need to focus on at that stage is meeting them in their upsetting emotions, helping them return to joy from those upsetting emotions, and then following that up with whatever correction is still needed once they have recovered. What you realize is an awful lot of behavioral problems in children is happening because they can’t regulate their emotions. So if we can help them learn to regulate their emotions, it’s going to go a long way to helping them improve their behavior.

That’s why we got to keep the order. It goes “A”, and then “B”, and then “C”, and that has to stay that way throughout. So those are the ABCs.  We get to “D”, my “D” is about developing disciplines relationally. So, “relationally” is kind of the key word there. I would sometimes put it this way, that the key to success in life is discipline. You’ve got to develop a certain level of discipline in order to succeed. And so, as a parent, I have to teach my children discipline.

Now, the Bible talks about this in terms of wisdom. Wisdom is the ability to distinguish what’s good from what’s evil and the discipline to do the good. And so if I distinguish between what is good and what is evil, another way to put that is I’m going to distinguish between what’s good for me and what’s going to end well and what’s going to end badly. And that’s wisdom. It’s discernment. I can distinguish between those.

And the discipline that I’m trying to teach my child is related to this. So the Hebrew word for wisdom is “chokmah”, which can also be translated skill. And so in this sense, what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to teach our kids skills. Now, we all know this, right? We do potty training. That’s a skill. We teach them how to feed themselves as a skill, how to dress themselves, how to make their beds.

But there are emotional skills. We have to teach them how to validate and comfort and recover. There are a lot of different relational skills that we teach through modeling, through correcting, through all the rest. There’s also just life skills and how to enjoy working for things, how to learn how to work hard for and wait for things. Like, let’s work on this, and then let’s wait, and let’s plant these seeds and water it and then in a few months, we’re going to see it grow. I think that, and not even just sometimes, just in a couple of days to a couple of weeks, they can watch and gradually learn some patience.

So you look at all these things, and the more that I do that relationally, I am building memories now where there is joy in the attachment because they can look back and remember learning this skill and learning this thing and how much joy there was relationally in that process of learning the skill. Those are the ABCDs of how we build a joyful identity and how, as parents, we pass this down to our kids to give them the best chance to grow this kind of a stable, attachment based identity.

[01:01:32] Stephanie: So, good. So what happens if your kids are grown up? Or what happens if you yourself are grown up and you didn’t get these joy workouts? Is there hope? What does it look like to repair as an adult?

[01:01:44] Marcus: So what happens is, if I realize I did not raise my kids this way. I talked to a lot of grandparents who are like, “I’m buying this book for my grandkids because I did not raise my kids this way.” If I realize I didn’t do this with the kids the way I wanted to, or I didn’t get this or something in there, this is where, honestly, going through this book is about more than parenting. It helps us see some of the holes that we have and understand where we need to put some work.

Now, the book that’s going to help you do more of the work will either be the book Building Bounce, or it will be The Four Habits of Joy-Filled People. Building Bounce is probably where I would start with Christians. The Four Habits of Joy-Filled People is more meant to be something that you give to your non-Christian family member who doesn’t want the Bible in their face, whereas Building Bounce is for the Christian who wants to use all of the tools and resources available to the Christian.

We have listening prayer in there. We’ve got some spiritual warfare in there. But the ABCs of building bounce are “A” is practicing appreciation and quieting. And those are the two foundational skills on which all emotional regulation is based. If I want to learn to regulate my own emotions, that’s where I’m struggling, then I need to start disciplining myself in the areas of building the practices of quieting and appreciating.

We’ve got lots of exercises in there. We’ve had other podcasts on this. I think people understand quieting the body, getting my mind in a place of appreciation for five minutes at a time, then doing this multiple times a day as I begin to establish this habit and retraining my brain to live this way. So that’s the “A” of building bounce.

The “B” is beliefs. If the foundation of all emotional stability is the attachment, things of appreciation and quieting, then the next level is beliefs. And that is, the fastest way to lose my emotional stability is by what I believe. If I believe things about you that make me so mad, or I believe things about you that just have me so worked up, I just hate those people. I just don’t want anything to do with them.

I know people like that who, when they watch the evening news, you just watch them getting angrier and angrier, or more and more afraid. You watch people who will get the wrong idea, they get disgusted with certain people, and they just feel a level of disgust that they’re reacting to because their beliefs about the person are building those emotions.

And so we have to learn how to take our thoughts captive, how to do this battle for the mind. And so we have a lot of tools and resources about the battle for the mind and taking thoughts captive and replacing the thought, the toxic thoughts, with the thoughts that actually God wants us to be thinking. So lots of tools in the book about that.

Then “C” is connections. And the idea is, I can’t stay isolated and do this successfully. I have to have places where I can practice some of these skills. Some people are like, “Well, I quit right there because I’m so isolated. I don’t have anybody.” So one of the places to start is just make a list of everybody that you see in the course of a week and begin asking, who do I see every day? Who do I see every week? Who do I see at least this month? And then find a way to add a little bit of joy into that relationship and start there.

We have to begin building some connections, and so it’s connections with other people and our connection with God. And again, for a lot of us, God is not a safe person. He is more scary than he is comforting. And if that’s you, then I would recommend a book like Alaine Pakkala’s book, Taking Every Thought Captive book which is specifically addressing that issue of my life experiences have taught me not to trust God. So let’s start at ground zero and try to build a positive view of God from the bottom up. And that would be her book, Taking Every Thought Captive.

So that’s the ABCs. I just covered two books in one podcast. There may be more than that, but you get the idea that there are ways to do these things, ways to pass them on, and there are ways to repair them if you didn’t get them. That’s the overview of how that works.

[01:06:15] Stephanie: There is hope. Do you want to tie some of this into the levels of maturity?

[01:06:24] Marcus: Sure. If you go back to the Life Model, there are six levels of maturity, actually, because the first one is in utero. There are developmental things that are happening from conception to birth. And then there is the infant stage. At the infant stage, essentially, I can’t do anything for myself. I need somebody else to do all of it. And so as a parent, what I give to my child in that infant stage is super important to their brain development, to their attachment development, to laying that emotionally stable foundation for life.

When we get to the child level, now the focus there is wisdom. I can sometimes think of infant level as the grace stage of life, and that is, I am going to get everything that I need without having to do anything to earn it. That’s Grace. And the other way of thinking about grace is I am special without having to do anything, I just show up, and I am special. That’s what’s supposed to happen for infants is they know that they are special just because they’ve shown up. They’re going to get all of their needs taken care of just because they exist. That’s Grace.

You get into the child stage and you’re starting to develop wisdom. And at this stage, I am learning to distinguish between: this is going to end well, and this is going to end badly; this is worth working for and waiting for, this isn’t so much; this is just temporarily pleasurable. I’m learning what is wise, that wisdom is the good life. This will lead to the good life, this won’t.

Biblically speaking, the fool is the one who argues with God about what the good life is and how to get there. So with our kids, we’re trying to help them not be fools. We’re trying to help them be wise and learn to stay on a path that actually is going to lead them to the good life that they’re looking for.

Then when we get to the adult years, my primary connections begin to change to my peers. What happens here is that if I have developmental holes in my infant and childhood development, then when I get to those teenage years, I am more likely to bond to the wrong people, because I’m going to bond with other people who have the same holes in their maturity. I don’t tend to bond to people who are farther along than I am. I tend to bond to people who are stuck in the same places as me.

This is one of the reasons why we want to try to help, at each stage, help kids become fully mature for their stage as they go to the next. And in the adult years, as a parent, I am less of a commanding presence, and I am more of a coach. I’m more of a listener and an advice giver. I’m trying to help them be the problem solver in their own life and not just solve all of their problems for them. And that continues on.

Beyond that, then it’s the parent stage, where that’s the role I’m now playing. And then I get to the elder stage, where my kids are the age where they could have families of their own. They can begin doing things at another level. But the point is they’re now independent. They’re all adults. They can handle life themselves. I’m there as a companion. I’m more of a friend at this stage of life, and we are interacting at that level. So those are the six stages, the in utero, the infant, the child, adult, parent and elder.

[01:09:51] Stephanie: Well, and keeping it really specific too, I was just thinking with the elder level, that’d be like the parent of the community stage.

[01:09:59] Marcus: Yes, at some level I’m parenting the whole community. Another point, what happens is I’m now in a position to help fill holes. When there are people who got missed and they really need to be reparented, I can kind of serve as a surrogate parent for some of those people, take them under my wing. Whereas if I do that too early on, and I’m taking too many people under my wing when I’m supposed to be raising my own kids , sometimes that can become a challenge. But in the elder years, I should have plenty of opportunity to do that.

[01:10:29] Stephanie: Well, and as you were talking, it reminded me, I think last episode you mentioned how sometimes people will go through track one at Thrive Today and think, “Oh, well, this is so basic.” And other people are like, “Oh, I really needed this!” And some of that is because if you have those holes at the infant level, then you are getting repaired, going all the way back, and then you build from there up.

[01:10:53] Marcus: Exactly. And that’s why there are repairs. Understanding what needs to be happening at each stage of maturity helps us know where the repairs need to be taking place on our journey. And again, still to this day, the best book I know on that is Living From the Heart Jesus Gave You.

[01:11:08] Stephanie: Mm hmm. That’s good.

All right, I’m going to pause and pull in a note of encouragement from one of our listeners. This is from Lois. She says,

I was a, quote unquote, dumb kid. Youngest, lol, and pretty gullible. Yes. My older brothers fooled me with the snipe hunt thing. So I’ve grown up to be kind of skeptical. At first I was suspicious of all the brain science stuff, but over and over now I see it being validated in my experiences. Just this last week, I was at an older ladies’ gathering and the video we watched never mentioned the pain processing pathway, it was on lamentational prayer, but it followed the same steps. 

And there was so much about this note of encouragement that I loved. One, Lois, I totally get the feeling of being gullible. I grew up wanting to believe the best in people, but when they don’t show you their best sometimes, yeah, skepticism and cynicism. I also love that you were doing a gathering on lamentational prayer. I want to know more about that. If you’re listening, email me. I want to know what that was. I’m currently studying some of that. That’s really cool.

[01:12:25] Marcus: I would just say, Jeremiah’s your favorite prophet, so yes, that would make sense.

[01:12:32] Stephanie: But, yes. Thank you. Thank you for sharing with us.

And for the rest of our listeners, if you want to share your thoughts or questions, feel free to email me. On my Monday emails, I have a button, even as a form that you can click on and it just lets you share. And you can share if you want, if you’re okay with me saying your name on the air or if you want to be anonymous or anything like that, you can share your feedback. And we love to hear from you.

So, Father, we’re kind of coming up to the end of the episode. We’ve been talking about attachment and brain science, and we are going to start moving into beliefs next episode. Is there anything else you want to make sure we cover on the brain science side of things?

[01:13:19] Marcus: I think back to my own childhood and my mind goes to my mom and to my dad and to how they connected to life and seeing the patterns that were established in my life early on, and how many of those things had nothing to do with beliefs. They had nothing to do with our theology. They had nothing to do with what we believed about God in Christ.

They had everything to do with how we had learned to interact with each other. And so what I realized is that I’m still filling holes from some of those things. I look at their lives and I realize the holes that they had because of the families they grew up in. And you begin to understand that for most of us, we’re going to spend our whole lives filling holes from things that we missed in our maturity development.

This isn’t like you take a class on it, you work on it for a week and I’m done, I’m back up to where I should be on my maturity. This is more of a lifelong journey, more of a lifelong process. It’s something we’re always looking at, working at, but what we want to do, I believe that God always has a growth edge in our lives at any given time, and what we want to pay attention to is God. Where’s the growth edge for me right now?

Not, how do I fix everything, how do I get all better all at once? It’s just, where’s my growth edge this week? Where do you want to be working? And let’s do this together, like you can be my dad. Let’s have a relational bond as we develop these new disciplines together and go from there. So ask God where is the growth edge you want to be working on for me right now?

[01:14:55] 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. And 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.