32: Resilience: Beliefs

[00:05] Stephanie: Welcome to Deeper Walk’s On the Trail podcast. You are on the trail with father-daughter duo, Marcus and Stephanie Warner. I’m Stephanie, and I’ll be talking with my father, Dr. Marcus Warner, as we discuss topics that help you stay on the trail to a deeper walk with God. Episode 32. We are continuing our Resilience series with a look at the ABC’s of Bounce. Today we’re talking about beliefs.

Hello, Father.

[00:32] Marcus: Hello, Daughter.

[00:33] Stephanie: Aw. So good to be with you. We just wrapped up our Resilience conference this weekend and alas, we’re recording this before it happens. I’m sure it was wonderful. But hey, in the present time if you want to come find us on social media, Instagram, and on Facebook especially, Deeper Walk international, come tell us how the conference was. Or just connect with us there that would be great.

[01:02] Marcus: It is cool. As we’re recording this ahead of time it is exciting to be able to do something with John Eldridge and connect with his newest book, Resilient. It connects so well with not only Building Bounce, which I wrote with Stefanie Hinman, but a book I’ve got coming out with Chris Coursey in May. It is called the Four Habits of Joy- Filled People. I’m sure we’ll circle back around a little bit when that comes out and talk about that.

[01:29] Stephanie: Huzzah, get excited. Let’s start with a story, I like stories. I like the story that you tell from Bill Gillham with the bear chasing you. It actually helped me when I was a child and was afraid of storms. It reframed my perspective on storms so much that I adore storms now. So why don’t you tell us that story?

[01:51] Marcus: Yeah, all the credit goes to this story. Bill Gillham wrote a book called Lifetime Guarantee. I saw some videos that he had done that were really helpful in getting me thinking about the difference between walking in the spirit and walking in the flesh. He tells a story about fear and beliefs which basically goes like this, imagine I’m running through the woods because I’m being chased by a bear. The bear is just about to get me when I notice that there is a cabin ahead. I sprint to the cabin slamming the door shut just in time to hear the bear bounce off and bang, the whole cabin shaking.

I locked the door and I am in this cabin now, and the reality is I am safe. The bear cannot get to me. So at this point I have options, right? I can literally pop popcorn, put on some nice music, read a book, and have a good time. Or I could sit there and worry about every possible way that the bear might be able to break in and literally die of a heart attack from the stress that I put myself under.

It really all comes down to beliefs, where I set my mind and what I’m filling my mind with. And so the idea here is that it’s always possible to imagine a scenario I can’t handle, right? It’s always possible to imagine how something could go wrong. And it’s not that we never go there but we don’t want to camp out there.

We want to get ourselves back to a place of what I can control and what is possible. So learning how to attack the toxic thinking is really what we’re talking about here. And a lot of times the best way to attack toxic thinking is to replace it.

Let me tell one more story. This is a Karl Payne story. So, Karl Payne was talking about the idea of replacing thoughts versus just saying, “I’m not going to think about this. I’m not going to think about this.” He says, “Suppose that you are thinking about pink elephants with green booties and giant sunglasses. It does no good to say, “Stop thinking about pink elephants with giant sunglasses and green booties.” You know, “stop it, stop,” – that doesn’t really help it.

[03:56] Stephanie: That just reinforces the image in your head. You’re like, “Well, now I’m definitely thinking about them.”

[04:00] Marcus: Yeah, exactly. And so that happens to  us a lot where we’re like, “Stop thinking about this thing that’s making you afraid.” That doesn’t help. You have to replace it. So he’s like, if I don’t want to think about the pink elephants, the sunglasses, and green booties, maybe I should think about an iceberg floating out in the middle of the Atlantic, with two polar bears on it waltzing. When I think about an iceberg floating in the Atlantic with two polar bears on it waltzing and I think about that often enough, pretty soon I realize I’m not thinking about this pink elephant anymore.

So that’s the idea. It is a way more effective strategy when it comes to attacking our toxic thinking to replace thoughts, than it is to try not to think thoughts.

[04:43] Stephanie: And sometimes you can’t replace the thoughts. And then that might be a sign that there’s a spiritual warfare issue going on.

[04:47] Marcus: Yep. If you’re trying and you can’t replace the thought and that strategy isn’t working, then sometimes I have to take a thought captive with the authority that is mine in Christ. I would say, “In the name of Jesus, whatever spirit is behind this I command you to go.” That’s why I tell you sometimes it is appropriate to shoot the messenger. “You bringing me this message of doom, you get out of here in Jesus’ name.”

[05:10] Stephanie: Going back to the storms and the bear chasing story. There was definitely a lot of attachment there too because you were there with me telling me these stories. Then I’d get all my dolls and my stuffed animals and come get into bed with you and mom or on the couch, and we’d watch the lightning outside and say, “Ooh, ah.”

[05:33] Marcus: I remember we got to the point where you would ask, “Oh, is there a storm coming?” “Can we set up the couch, can we pop popcorn?”It became a thing.

That was pretty cool.

[05:41] Stephanie: I was also thinking as I was praying about this episode about a time in my life when I’ve had my beliefs changed about something. I went back to when we were at the house (we moved around a lot when I was younger) where I was in first through third grade, maybe. When we left that house I left behind a bunch of friends. I came back one time and there was a new girl who had moved into the neighborhood and I felt replaced. Everybody was so excited about this girl and telling me all these things and it was all about her and I just felt replaced. I was talking to you just a couple years ago and this came up again with some different wounds that were kind of along that same pattern.

And there wasn’t a “Jesus healing the memories” thing where like, “Oh, I know for a fact what the reality was,” but you kind of recast the frame for me. Maybe they were immature and maybe they did move on, but more likely they still considered you part of the group.

They were so excited to introduce you to this new part of the group it didn’t even cross their mind that you weren’t part of the group anymore. Obviously you were part of the group and look, we gotta catch you up on the new person and our group kind of thing. You just recast that for me. And I remember finding a step of healing in that just from having it recast. And so, again, who knows if that was true or not in that instance but it helped me a lot.

[07:22] Marcus: Yeah, beliefs are powerful things. My dad, your grandfather, used to say, “People don’t always practice what they say they believe, but people always practice what they really believe.” That was one of his standard teaching phrases. It gets to the idea that there is a real strong element of belief in everything that we feel. So it might be worth taking a moment here because at Deeper Walk we teach a lot about Life Model and we teach a lot about attachment.

To just clarify here it helps me to think, and this is obviously oversimplified, but it helps me to think about right brain and left brain. I picture that emotions generate on the right brain. They go from the bottom of the brain to the top and they’re going up the attachment pathway on the right side.

So they’re going from the bottom to the top. I will feel all kinds of emotions just out of the attachment and things happening before it ever gets to the left side of my brain where the beliefs kick in. But the beliefs can really turn those things toxic in a heartbeat. Dr. Karl Lehman, in his book Outsmarting Yourself, talks about the VLE, or the verbal logical explainer.

And basically, that’s the left brain getting a hold of incomplete facts and incomplete perspective based on what my right brain is feeling. And so my right brain is sending over data, my left brain is getting incomplete data, and it’s putting together together a storyline that is actually toxic. So even with your neighborhood thing, your VLA put things together and said, “Well this is true and this is true and this is true, therefore, my story must be true.” And we all do that.

And so on our left side, I picture our beliefs going from the top down. At the top I put a belief system in place with this and now that drives its own set of beliefs. And so it hits the amygdala on the way up, which is the fight, flight, or freeze, part of the brain. The amygdala can also be involved in giving us low energy emotions like shame, sadness and despair.

But our belief on the left side is going from the top down and it also passes through the amygdala, so we can trigger really strong beliefs. And because of that there’s an attachment element to believing.

So sometimes we feel the thing first and then our mind puts a narrative to it. And sometimes it’s the narrative that’s creating the problem in the first place. Either way, we usually have to address the narrative at some point.

[09:53] Stephanie: So in the chicken and the egg scenario, sometimes it is emotions that comes first and sometimes it is the beliefs that come first.

[10:01] Marcus: I was taught basically that all emotions come out of our beliefs. And that’s just true enough that people will believe it, so pun intended. It’s just true enough that people will build their whole ministry around that. I like the way Dr. Amen talks about this in the Amen clinics.

He talks about anteaters, and he talks about these automatic negative thoughts that we have. What triggers the automatic negative thought is the emotion we feel. So for example, I might see a redhead walk by and all of a sudden I feel something and I don’t even know why. Maybe when I was young I had a red haired older sister who I loved and so it creates warm feelings. Or maybe I was abused by a redhead and so now I am getting feelings of fear. I will have that reaction before I even think about it.

And then my brain might pick up on that and give me a completely right or wrong explanation for why I’m feeling the way I am. So the idea behind automatic negative thoughts is that I actually feel the emotion first, and then I fill that emotion with all the thoughts that reinforce it and make it bigger.

So part of taking our thoughts captive and part of attacking our toxic thinking, is learning to recognize the typical thought patterns I go through when I feel certain emotions. So when I feel anger, what do I always say to myself? When I feel shame, what am I always saying to myself? Let’s learn to identify those things so we can take them captive and replace them, right? And that’s ultimately the goal.

[11:39] Stephanie: Well I’m thinking as you’re talking about this, in Building Bounce you list out three principles, beliefs, drive, and emotions. Emotions can’t distinguish a true belief from a false one. Attachments influence beliefs and also drive emotions. So you kind of covered the beliefs driving emotions a little bit there. Do you want to talk about emotions not being distinguished from false ones?

[12:03] Marcus: Yeah beliefs drive emotions just like in that bear story, right? When I’m in the cabin, what I’m believing can drive me to peace or it can drive me to death. But then my beliefs can’t tell fact from fiction which is also illustrated in that same story.

I can believe with all my heart that I am in mortal danger when I’m not. I can believe that I am doomed when I am not. I can believe all kinds of things and it feels absolutely true but it doesn’t mean it is true, because my emotions can’t tell fact from fiction.

[12:38] Stephanie: So if we’re only listening to our emotions we can be very deceived because our emotions don’t know the true truth.

[12:46] Marcus: Yeah, exactly and this happens a lot. I look back to a time in my life when I was at my worst. I was in the most anxiety, the most distress, and nothing I was afraid of happened. It’s like none of it actually took place. And so I look at that and it’s a reminder that fear is a liar. That 90 something percent of what we’re afraid of never does happen.

And so it really is important to learn these things because if our thought life runs amok, we’re going to get taken with it. We do want to talk about strategies for how you do that and largely with emotions. People will also recognize this has to do with compulsions and behaviors, the things that I’m trying to go after, and they are related things because those are so often driven by emotions. So there was a third one, there were three things, right?

So beliefs often do drive emotions. Emotions can’t tell the difference between what’s a true and a false belief. And then the other one is that attachments also drive emotions. And so what happens is one of the deepest emotions we feel is attachment pain. You mentioned I think in the last podcast, that when you’re away from Kentucky there are some things there that you miss.

It can actually cause pain that it’s not available to you. Or when you were a freshman in college and you were away from all of your people and all of your family, there was attachment pain there. And we can feel this in everything from oh, I really feel like being with somebody right now but everyone’s out shopping, to someone has died and I have no more access to them. Or they’re out of my life.

[14:35] Stephanie: Then you get attachment pain plus hopeless despair.

[14:37] Marcus: Yes, exactly. And so what happens is that attachment pain can combine with these others. And I think part of what’s happening in the grief cycle is that attachment pain is connecting to various emotions, whether that is hopelessness, despair, anger, or shame, they can all factor in.

[14:57] Stephanie: So maybe coming out of this part of the conversation we could talk about the five engines that help us understand our emotions. You’ve got three physical and two spiritual.

[15:08] Marcus:  Yeah,  I mentioned this briefly in Building Bounce. There are three physical engines and two spiritual ones. With the three physical engines one is my body. The idea here is simply that if you don’t get enough sleep, it can make you more easily anxious and more easily depressed. If I have something in my brain that is actually not functioning correctly, it’ll affect me emotionally. So my body is a big engine that drives my emotions.

Second is my beliefs and then the third is my bonding, by bonding that is attachments. And so this is just looking at these from that same perspective.

When something isn’t going right with my emotions I need to look, see, is there something in my body that needs addressed? Is there something in my belief system that needs to be corrected? Are there attachments that are all anchored in fear and I need to find a way to get some joy in my attachments?

And then the two spiritual engines are the Holy Spirit and wicked spirits. And so what tends to happen is that people put all of their energy into one of these five engines, or maybe two of them. And I’m just saying it’s helpful to remember that there are these five that do exist. If we are looking for a breakthrough and we aren’t finding it, it might be because we’re not addressing one or two or even four of these engines that really need some attention.

[16:32] Stephanie: I really appreciate how you simplify and bring together all these different areas that are so important. So let’s segue off of that and talk about the battle for the mind in relation to emotional capacity.

[16:44] Marcus: What we usually teach is to believe the right things and then make good choices. But there is more to it when it comes to our emotions than just believing the right things and making good choices. And deeper than that is the idea of emotional capacity, do I even have the capacity to accept that truth? Some of us don’t and we have to build that over time.

So one of the reasons we start with appreciation and quieting is that  appreciation and quieting is what builds our capacity. It gives us the capacity to even embrace certain truths and certain things like yeah, I think I could believe that.

For example, there’s some people who have been so wounded that the idea that God exists angers them. So before you can just say, “Well, you need to believe that God exists,” something’s probably going to have to happen to radically change a paradigm for them. Or they have to grow some capacity to make that possible to even hold on to that.

We can do this in a lot of different areas. You meet with some people and you give them some advice and they just run with it, because they’ve got the emotional capacity already in place to do that.

So it was one of the things that I learned from Life Model that was really helpful right at the beginning. There is a concept of capacity versus choices. And that is, life is more than believing the right thing and making good choices. It’s also about growing my capacity that enables me to stay with a better train of thought, and then those choices more naturally flow out of it anyway.

[18:21] Stephanie: Well and sometimes you can make the right choice but you don’t have the capacity. I know sometimes when I know exactly what I need to do and how to do it, I can’t seem to do it because I’ve just run out of myself.

[18:35] Marcus: That’s why we need breathers and we need to take breaks. We need to learn rhythm.  All those things factor into it. And then just growing my brain’s ability to perform certain tasks has to be grown. Just like I have to grow my ability to throw a football or play the piano or whatever. I have to grow my brain’s capacity to do some of these things and then as that capacity grows, they get easier.

[19:00] Stephanie: Well, and it’s helpful even to just remember beliefs as like a tool in your pocket asking, “Do I have beliefs that I need to assess?” That’s good. Well, there’s always so much more we can say. Next week we’re going to continue with the ABC”s of bounce and look at connecting with people. But for now, are there any final thoughts for beliefs?

[19:26] Marcus:  I remember I got to a point in my life one time when I felt like my life was ruined or I felt like I was doomed to a story of ruin. And I began to study scripture and I realized that if I’m a Christian, my story is never a story of ruin, it is always a story of redemption.

[19:48] Stephanie: Yes.

[19:48] Marcus: So it doesn’t mean that there won’t be bad things in it, but in the end it’s going to be a story of redemption. We all love redemption stories in novels, right? You know bad things happen, things fall apart, but they come back together at some point. It may be in this life or maybe the next life. But it’s helpful for me to have an overarching narrative view that says, the overall narrative that I am in is never a story of ruin, is always a story of redemption. And that’s been something that’s been very helpful for me.

[20:19] Stephanie: Amen. Put it on a plaque on the wall and meditate on it. So good. Thank you, father. All right, thank you all for joining us on the trail today. Deeper Walk International is a nonprofit organization and we partner with people like you in order to do what we do. Some are on the trail with us as official Trailblazers who commit to donating $25.00 or more per month. Because of our Trailblazers we are able to provide free or discounted resources like this free podcast, or our video streaming the Learning Library Basic.

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