33: The Secret to Emotional Resilience (Building Bounce: Ch 1) | S4E33

(00:00) Stephanie Warner: Welcome everyone, to Season 4, episode 33. Hello, Father.

(00:05) Marcus Warner: Hello, Daughter.

(00:07) Stephanie Warner: Good to be with you. Welcome to a new series.

(00:12) Marcus Warner: Yeah. We’re doing “Building Bounce” now.

(00:16) Stephanie Warner: We are. I’m very excited.

(00:18) Marcus Warner: I like that one of our reviewers said it was the best book I ever wrote.

(00:23) Stephanie Warner: Hey, I think he’s the same one who talked about the profundity of how good it was.

(00:27) Marcus Warner: Profundity. I am sure that was it. And I say, “I wrote.” Obviously it was a team effort with Stefanie Hinman.

(00:35) Stephanie Warner: It is. And let’s just clear this up right off the bat. Alright, I am not Stefanie Hinman. This book, Building Bounce: How to Grow Emotional Resilience, was written, and co-authored by Marcus Warner and Stefanie Hinman. I clarify that because I frequently have people reach out to me thinking that I am Stefanie Hinman, and I am not. Different Stephanie’s. Also, for the record she spells her name with an F. I spelled my name with a PH. I was editor on this book and I actually one time misspelled my own name because I was being so intent on making sure her name was spelled correctly. So that’s a little bit of lore on the book.

Stefanie is absolutely lovely and absolutely wonderful, she brings so much good to this book, and I am not her. I’m going to be helping facilitate the conversation here and I’m sure we’ll still manage to be a little confusing, so I’m sorry in advance. The goal of this series is to help you grow your emotional resilience so you can thrive on your deeper walk with God. For this series, we want to direct you to another DIY book club kit for this book. If you want to read it with a book buddy or go through it in a small group or with a book club, or however you like to read books. Or if you just want to be intentional about your own study and you have something to work through, it’s an all-purpose, all-purpose free book club kit is what I’m calling it.

You can use it how you will and the link is in the description. So, Father on that note, let’s continue just looking at the framework for why you and Stefanie wrote this book. I guess, first go into a little bit more about who Stefanie is and then what is the purpose of the book? What’s the idea?

(02:36) Marcus Warner: Yeah, without Stefanie, this book would not exist. She was the one who approached us at Deeper Walk and said, hey, I’ve developed this training system to help children who have come from high trauma situations to learn the basic skills that help them grow their resilience, and I would love for you to take a look at it. If it’s going to be of any use to you that would be wonderful.

She’s a licensed professional and does therapy, especially with children, and was working in the Kansas City area and is still working in that area. She’s written another book complimentary to this called, Building Bounce with Kids. And so she even brought the name Building Bounce with her. That was kind of her trademark kind of thing. And so I was like, hey, this could be a cool opportunity to bring together all the stuff I’ve been learning from Jim Wilder and the Life Model, and the Thrive people, and the great exercises and perspectives that Stefanie Hinman brought to the table.

What if we could bring all of this together and put it into a form that was really simple to understand, and really simple to remember, and then very practical in terms of how you worked it out? So that was our goal. It’s like, okay, everybody needs resilience and we all face stuff we have to bounce back from. Everybody needs this. Let’s take all this new information that we’ve been collecting for the last several years and put it into one book, and let’s make it as transferable as possible. So that’s why we wrote it.

(04:16) Stephanie Warner: Awesome. And I’m going to make a note right here to make sure to put in the description the ways that you can follow up with Stefanie Hinman if you want more training, or more understanding with her ministry and what she does. So let’s dig into Chapter one, “The Secret of Emotional Resilience.” We’re getting into the ABCs of Building Bounce. I will forewarn you, this is a robust book.

And with every chapter, I’m probably going to have to just claim that this is meant to be a help alongside the book, but read the chapter. It’ll be a fire hose of information, but we’ll try not to fire hose you too badly. We’re going to cover a lot of good content here. And here we go. So this is the overview and I have one more caveat, we’re going to go into appreciation, beliefs and connections. That’s our ABCs, but there will be a chapter dedicated to each of those. So we’re just giving an overview to start and we’ll circle back around to it later. There we go. Father, big picture takeaway of chapter one.

(05:19) Marcus Warner: So there’s a reason it’s called the secret of resilience. Because I will admit when I first was learning this stuff, resilience was not a term that I was even familiar with. I’m like, what is resilience exactly? And why is that important? And the idea of bouncing back made sense to me. And it was this idea of a ball, and the secret was that you have to keep the ball inflated.

And the real secret was the air that keeps the ball filled, is joy. And so if you’re looking at like, what is the secret ingredient that allows for resilience? The answer is joy. And that’s troubling to some people. It’s because they’re like, wait a second, joy feels like it’s out of my control. Joy feels like a reaction that I have to good things that happen to me in life and if bad things are happening, then I don’t have any joy.

(06:19) Stephanie Warner: And that’s the time when you need your resilience.

(06:20) Marcus Warner: Yeah, that’s the time when I need resilience. So it feels like, well, thanks for nothing. That’s exactly what I’m trying to figure out, how do I experience some joy when I’m overwhelmed by something. The more I create a lifestyle of joy, the more air there’s going to be in my ball, and the easier it’s going to be to bounce back from things. But if I don’t have a lifestyle of joy, then I’m just going to live partially underinflated.

And if you’ve ever played with a ball that’s even just a little bit underinflated, it just isn’t that much fun. Because you have to work too hard on making it do the stuff you want it to do. And then for some people it’s been punctured and beat up and it’s flat, and it doesn’t bounce at all. It just goes “splat” on the ground. And so I love the idea of how you bounce back from things as a definition of resilience and this picture of a ball. The key thing here is the air in the ball that allows it to bounce is joy. So we’ll talk about, what is this joy? How do you do it? What does that actually look like?

Because that was new to me too. If you had talked to me 30 years ago about Christianity, joy would not have been on my top 10 list of things that were most important to Christianity. Now I understand that joy is actually foundational. It’s one of the core elements of our walk with God. And it might be an opportunity to explain also the connection between brain science and the Bible. The way I look at it is that brain science, like a lot of things in life, shines spotlights on certain things to say, pay attention to this, look at this.

And if it wasn’t for brain science shining a light on resilience and shining a light on the role of joy in resilience, I probably would have missed what the Bible has to say about it. But once the brain science said, hey, joy is really what makes resilience possible then we go back to the Bible. Is that true, does the Bible say anything about this? You’re like well, lo and behold! You find this all over the place in the Bible, but I would have missed it without the spotlight being shined on it.

I think that happens to us a lot on our journeys, we miss things in the Bible. In fact Deeper Walk back when it was started as ICBC, was that way. Mark Bubeck had an encounter with God in which a light was shined on spiritual warfare and he went back to the Bible and said, well, what do you know? There’s a whole lot more about spiritual warfare here than I saw before. We all have a tendency to filter things out when we read the Bible. And so sometimes God will bring things like brain science to kind of challenge that filter and get us to look at things through a little bit different lens.

And so I just wanted to say that upfront. What we’ve tried to do in Building Bounce is bring the Bible and brain science together. And with the assumption that the God who designed the brain is also the God who inspired the Bible, and that they’re not going to contradict one another.

(09:37) Stephanie Warner: Exactly. Because God designed the brain. As we learn more about how he designed things, we learn more about him and we can use that as a lens to help us uncover things. So yes, I’m glad you brought that up. That’s really, really good. So let’s get into the ABCs. What are the ABCs and why do they matter so much?

(10:01) Marcus Warner: The ABCs are the things that help us create joy as a lifestyle. If you want more joy in your life, you have to practice the ABCs. So “A”’ is appreciation. And you can think of appreciation as a two-sided coin. Appreciation on one side is about thinking of things that bring you joy and being in a place of appreciation about the things that bring you joy in life. That’s side one. That’s like the high energy, happy to see you, twinkle in the eye excitement that we get from joy.

The flip side of it is peace. And peace is that quiet, happy to be with you. I’m so glad we’re together and we don’t have to talk and we could just kind of be here in the same place. I feel better just being here because you’re here, which to our conversation before this, this feels like a cat. The cat just wants to be in the room where you’re at. We were thinking we should write a book where every illustration for every point we’re going to make is from a cat and what cats do. I’m sure that would be…

(11:14) Stephanie Warner: Yeah, cats are very instructive.

(11:17) Marcus Warner: Yeah, they’re very instructive, especially on resilience. They bounce back pretty well most times.

(11:2)  Stephanie Warner: They do, they bounce back, they self-regulate…

(11:25) Marcus Warner: And not just Tigger. I think I must be punchy, but anyway. So ABC, appreciation and peace. Appreciating is the high energy, excited joy, peace is the low energy content, happy to be with you. They’re like the two sides of the same coin. And so what happens is that the more routinely I experience joy and peace, the combination of those is like a joy workout for the brain.

And that makes the brain grow in the same way that going to the gym and having a high energy workout followed by rest helps your muscles grow. High energy joy followed by low energy peace will literally have your brain grow. Things will wire together and things will expand and you can rewire your brain by the practice of appreciation. So that’s what we mean by the “A” is appreciation and quieting.

(12:26) Stephanie Warner: And I would just capitalize on the idea of a joy workout. Your brain has the capacity to grow the capacity for joy for as long as you live. And so that’s a huge hopeful thing coming into this if you’re just like, well…

(12:41) Marcus Warner: Too late for me now.

(12:43) Stephanie Warner: Yeah, I don’t have joy. Oh well! No, you can grow it and your brain will work with you on that.

(12:49) Marcus Warner: There’s some people who have no capacity for joy. They’ve really got to start at the very beginning. And then there’s other people who have capacity for joy, but they need to learn how to fan it into flame and they need to learn how to grow it. That’s always a little bit easier if you’ve already got some ability with these things and you just need to practice it more. Either way it can be done. So that’s the “A” of appreciation. And by appreciation, the appreciation coin has two sides. High energy joy, low energy peace. The second one is beliefs.

A lot of us have toxic thoughts that are constantly sabotaging our joy. And it’s very difficult to have joy if I’m constantly battling toxic thoughts of shame or toxic thoughts of fear or toxic thoughts of anger. It’s really hard if my beliefs are anchored in wounds in my past. If they’re anchored in comparison to other people. If they’re anchored in things like this. If my beliefs are off it can suck the joy out of my life. Whereas certain beliefs are going to encourage joy and help us build it because it’s a perspective that says, no, God actually likes me. God is delighted to be in relationship with me.

So beliefs are a very important part of this. So that’s the second. This is also where the Bible comes in. Because the Bible has to be the anchor for those beliefs. Then the “C” is connections. I want to have joy-based connections, not fear-based connections in my life. And that includes connections with people and connections with God. And honestly, part of what I learned in this whole journey was how fear-bonded to God I was for so much of my life.

It still creeps up and I have to watch it. What we mean by the difference between a fear bond and a joy bond is whether it’s with God or whether it’s with people, a fear connection or a joy connection, it has to do with motivation. What motivates my connection with this person? If we only ever motivate ourselves with fear or it’s a very strong fear bond with that person. I found that a lot of times in my walk with God I was much more motivated by fear than I was by joy.

And people get confused about this because it does say the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, but it’s a little bit different thing. It doesn’t say the fear of the Lord is the beginning of your relationship with God. It says, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. And it’s talking about your perspective on life. And that is, hey, as a starting point, let’s not do stupid stuff that’s going to get you in trouble. That’s the beginning of wisdom.

There are consequences, there’s an account that has to be given. So from that perspective that’s the starting point, but from a relational perspective, No, fear is not the relational starting point with God, joy is. He wants us just like in the Garden of Eden to have joy with him and the opposite of that is shame

And that is, I don’t feel like you’re happy to be with me,  I don’t feel like you’re happy to see me. I feel like you’re ashamed of me. And I think that there’s a lot of us who struggle in our walk with God with this underlying nagging thing that God is ashamed of me, that I’m a disappointment to him. He has to love me because that’s who he is, but underneath it he’s disappointed with me. And that kind of shame sucks the joy out. If I’m not joy-bounded with God, I’m going to be fear-bounded.

And so everything that I’m doing is an attempt to please Him and an attempt to try to get Him to be okay with me. And so from a fear-bound, I try to earn everything that I get from God instead of receiving what is already being freely given to me. It’s the same then in our everyday relationships with other people. We can motivate ourselves into those relationships like, I really ought to call that person. I really need to do that or I should do this. And if that’s the only reason I ever do these things, like, I ought to call this person, I ought to contact them, that’s not joy.

Grandparents understand this. They don’t go, I ought to be happy when the grandkids come over. I really ought to try to spend some time with my grandkids. That’s a fear motivation. But when you’re like, I can’t wait, that is going to be great. That’s a joy motivation.

(17:36) Stephanie Warner: And even just in terms of thinking. One way you recognize it, because you can have fear and joy bonds without the narration happening in your head, right? Just your instincts on things. We’ll get more into that as we unpack.

(17:50) Marcus Warner: Yeah, we’ll get into that in another topic, but it’s why connections is on this list. So it’s appreciation and quieting, the coin of appreciation is beliefs. And really having a battle plan for the toxic beliefs in our head and building a tower of truth in there that we can kind of count on. And then we want to look at our connections, especially our motivations in our connections. And develop some skills that maybe we missed out on that would help us to create greater joy in our connections with both God and people. That’s ABC.

(18:28) Stephanie Warner: Mm-hmm. That’s ABC.

(18:30) Marcus Warner: Appreciation, beliefs, connections.

(18:33) Stephanie Warner: That’s really good. I’m just looking at.. also in this chapter you cover VCR, SAD-SAD, and Joy Workouts, which we already briefly talked about Joy Workouts. I am going to add a link to more episodes that we’ve done before on VCR and Taming the Amygdala and different things like that, but for the sake of the chapter by chapter analysis…

(18:57) Marcus Warner: I’m just wondering if we should do two episodes on this chapter, because really what I’m trying to do with all that stuff is define what resilience is. Like, okay, we’re going to build resilience. Well, what is that?  And for some people like, well, what is joy? So one of the reasons there’s so much data in this opening chapter is that I’m trying to lay out those two things. What is resilience and why is joy? What is joy and why are they so interrelated? So we’ve introduced the fact that they are, but now unpacking a little bit of why that is.

(19:33) Stephanie Warner: That is fine. I was just trying to look ahead to see how much more we talk about it in another place.

(19:43) Marcus Warner: If not, we can do it right now. I can probably cover that in five minutes. If we have time, I’ll do it now.

(19:49) Stephanie Warner: Let’s go for it.

(19:51) Marcus Warner: So let’s start with SAD-SAD. People are like, what’s SAD-SAD? I have like a switch on the side of my head, like there’s a switch inside my brain. When I get overwhelmed, the switch goes off. This switch is called the amygdala. And the amygdala can only give one of three evaluations of everything that it experiences. This is good, in which case your brain functions just fine. Or it can say this is bad, in which case you get low energy emotions. It sends chemicals into your body that kind of suck the life out of your energy level. Or it can say this is scary, which is going to send high energy signals into your body. So you can think of it this way, the low energy is a counterfeit of peace and the high energy is a counterfeit of joy, that is what’s happening.

And so from that we get six core upsetting emotions that we all have to deal with and learn how to bounce back from. And so we call those SAD-SAD, just to remember them. So SAD- SAD just helps me remember. So this is the way I think about it, you know how Frankenstein has the two bolts on the side of his neck? I just picture, what if I have six bolts coming out of my neck. And for each of those bolts there’s an S, an A, and a D. An S, an A, and a D, SAD- SAD. Those are the six bolts.

And then on the front of my head is a joy center. And this is where my brain experiences joy. And so I go to the front of my head when I’m experiencing joy, and I go to the back part of my brain when I’m stuck in these emotions. And what resilience is, is I need a pathway that gets me from back here, up to the front.

So resilience is building several strong pathways. And here’s the key, I need a separate pathway back to the joy center of my brain from each one of these emotions. And so this is what SAD- SAD stands for. So like bolt number one is shame. I don’t feel like you’re happy to be with me. Number two is anger. I feel like you’re angry at me. I’m angry. I’m stuck in my anger and I can’t get out. “D” is disgust. It’s like, yuck, get away from me. That’s the emotion.

The second “S” is sadness. And honestly, it doesn’t matter which order you put the SAD-SAD stuff in. For me, the second “S” is sadness.

Then the third one is…and I use anxiety, which is actually cheating. It should be fear. Anxiety is technically anchored in my beliefs, but we’ll worry about that later. Anxiety helps me remember that it’s the fear/ anxiety one, and I need a pathway back to joy from there. And then the last one is despair. And despair is the idea of hopelessness and no matter what, I can’t fix this. There is no solution. It just is the way that it is. We can all feel varying degrees of these emotions. And we have different words and vocabularies for how intense that emotion is. I can be slightly agitated in the anger sphere or I can be just flat out in rage.

We’ve got this whole spectrum. And so what happens is that each of us can handle a certain amount of those emotions and recover just fine, but that varies for everybody. It’s like, how much shame can you handle before you have no pathway back to joy? And so this is what resilience is. Resilience is growing strong pathways back to joy from each of these big six negative emotions. And that’s why we spell them out here and what they are. Because from a brain perspective, this is what’s going on. I need two things to have resilience. I need a strong joy center and I need really strong pathways back to joy from each of these big SAD-SAD emotions.

(24:01) Stephanie Warner: Yeah, I think that was a really good presentation and don’t worry, we will be coming back to these concepts throughout the book. Chapter 3 itself is all about that brain model of the Joy Elevator and building all of that. So we’ll come back to it. Would you real quick go from SAD-SAD then into VCR, validating, converting and recovering?

(24:25) Marcus Warner: Yeah. The reason VCR is in this chapter is that people are like, well, how do I build a pathway? There is one core tool to building this pathway. It’s validate, comfort, recover. And validate is, let’s name the fact of which emotion I’m feeling here. Let’s name that emotion accurately. And let’s name how big that emotion is accurately. Let’s validate the emotion. Secondly, let’s comfort it, which means let’s make this emotion smaller. Let’s make the problem that is creating this emotion smaller so that I do have enough bandwidth to get back to joy from there.

That’s what comforting is. Comforting is actually problem solving or problem management so that something isn’t as big. Where people make mistakes here is that they skip validation and go straight to comfort. And there’s an order to this. We need to validate first and then comfort. And you can tell when it has worked because you recover. And what recovery means, is not that the emotion is all gone, but I am functional. The emotion is not controlling me. And despite that emotion, I can still experience joy relationally with another person or with God. And so that’s how I know that I have recovered. And so that’s why we put VCR here. VCR is the core tool by which we create those pathways back to joy.

(25:43) Stephanie Warner: Mm-hmm, and it’s really helpful. You can do it for yourself. You can do it with other people. Sometimes if we’re on a phone call or you’ve been on a radio spot before, and you just write VCR on the napkin next to you to remember, okay, I’m gonna listen for emotions here. I’m not gonna just jump straight in to try to fix problems. Because when you try to just jump in and fix a problem without validating first, a lot of times people can feel like you’re just trying to shut them up or you don’t really care.

People want to feel seen and heard. And again, this can be on yourself. Sometimes you need to get in tune with your own emotions and be like, okay, what am I actually feeling right now and how big is it?  Before you try to get into it.

(26:28) Marcus Warner: We’ll break all this down later, but the core big picture idea here is that the secret of resilience is joy. So here’s the thing, if joy is just something that randomly happens to you and you don’t know how it happens and you don’t know what creates that emotion, then you’re kind of stuck just waiting for it. And so one of the reasons that we break it down into steps and component parts and things, is because you’re trying to teach somebody who doesn’t know how to do these things, how to do it. You’re also trying to help somebody who’s good at it to have vocabulary to explain it to somebody else. Like, I do this regularly, but let me explain to you how you do it so that you can learn to do it too.

That’s what we’re doing. We are trying to take something that seems simple, like joy, have enough joy, and you’ll be able to bounce back from things, but a lot of us have never learned that. How do I actually do that? And what are the things that go into building that kind of joy? That’s what this whole book is about, it is making sure that joy is not a secret and that we know what it takes to build it in our lives.

(27:40) Stephanie Warner: Huzzah! Yes, we are so happy to be on the trail with you all. It’s so joyful to be on the trail with you all. Thank you to everyone who partners with us to help us stay here with you. I’m really looking forward to this series. It’s a really good book. So Father, before we call it for this episode, would you give us any final thoughts?

(28:03) Marcus Warner: Most of the books that I write, I’ve co-authored a lot of them. Most of them that I have written, whether they’re co-authored or by myself, started at some point because I needed it. It’s about something that I was working on in my own life. Or it was because there was some “aha” thing that I learned that I was like, oh, everybody needs to know this. And Building Bounce is kind of a combination of the two.

I realized that I really needed to learn how to be resilient and bounce back from things because I was getting overwhelmed way too much. I was also trying to collate together and curate all of these “aha” things I had been discovering in the last several years. And because of that, I think that this book is unique in that it’s also not a repair book. A lot of the books that I write are about, how do you repair a wounded heart? How do you repair a demonized situation? This is a “how I build something” book.

This is not a repair book. It’s a construction book, if you will. What are the skills that I’m missing out on? How do I build those skills? How do I grow something that wasn’t already there? And so I think it’s a nice compliment to all of those other things.

(29:26) Stephanie Warner: I love it. See you next week.