34: How Much Weight Can You Handle? (Building Bounce: Ch 2) | S4E34

(00:00) Stephanie Warner: Welcome back to Season 4, episode 34. And hello, Father, may the fourth be with you.

(00:07) Marcus Warner: May the fourth be with you, Daughter. That’s pretty funny.

(00:10) Stephanie Warner: That may be a controversial statement, but yeah.

(00:15) Marcus Warner: And tomorrow is Cinco de Mayo, so hey.

(00:18) Stephanie Warner: Just focusing on Star Wars here.

(00:21) Marcus Warner: Okay, that’s fine. Star Wars with a lisp. May the fourth be with you, yes.

(00:31) Stephanie Warner: May is here. It’s a good month. We love it.

(00:35) Marcus Warner: May is an important month in the Warner family because it’s your birthday and years ago, my mom’s birthday was in May, until she passed.

(00:48) Stephanie Warner: And it’s Mother’s Day. There was a family wedding that was in May, it’s a big happy month. It’s good stuff.

(01:03) Marcus Warner: Yep. Yep. I’ve got the Muppets in my head now. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep.

(01:11) Stephanie Warner: You know, this is the fun!  Last episode was all about joy and surprise! We will continue to talk about joy and hopefully we can show you how it’s done.We practice what we preach a little bit with some joy. Before we get started, I just wanted to pass the mic over to you real quick. We’re in the midst of our spring campaign and I was going to let you have a word.

(01:41) Marcus Warner: Sure. Every ministry does an end of year campaign. At Deeper Walk, we also do a spring campaign. The focus of our spring campaign this year is “Take a Step.” We need monthly donors, it is kind of what the ministry runs on. We have been gradually growing that base over the years. It really is so significant in helping us do what we do. And so the “Take a Step” campaign is intended to just encourage people to look, and see if this has been helpful to you, and you want to see it reach more people.

Would you be willing to take a step and become one of the monthly donors who makes all of this possible? Our goal is to add 25 new donors this spring and another 25 at the end of the year so that we can increase to 50 new donors. That would bring us to 300. And that’s been a target of ours for several years now, we have been wanting to see 300 monthly donors. And I believe that it’s possible. It really does make a big difference in how we plan and what we can see as possible. So if God’s speaking to you and putting it on your heart to take a step and become a monthly donor, this would be a great time to do that.

(02:58) Stephanie Warner: Yeah. And thank you. I know so many of our monthly donors are listeners. So if you are already a partner with us, thank you so, so much. Truly, we can offer this for free because of you. One of the things that you help provide is the podcast. So thank you for being here. And yeah, we are continuing on now with our Building Bounce book study.

(03:26) Marcus Warner: What I really want is to figure out a way to get a percentage of the Star Wars revenue, but we’ll figure that out. May the 4th, right?

(03:36) Stephanie Warner: Sir, sir.

(03:37) Marcus Warner: Never mind. I’m sorry. Back to joy.

(03:39)  Stephanie Warner: Reaching for the stars.

(03:41) Stephanie Warner: All right. As I was saying, we are looking at Building Bounce, How to Grow Emotional Resilience, a book co-authored by Marcus Warner and Stefanie Hinman. And once again, I am not Stefanie Hinman, I am Stephanie Warner. I am very happy to be talking more about this very good book. Today we are getting into “How Much Weight Can You Handle?”, which is Chapter 2,”How Much Weight Can You Handle?” The goal of the series is to help you grow your emotional resilience so you can thrive on your deeper walk with God. As Dad said, in the last episode, a lot of what we do is on repair, but this focus is really on building. Growing your skills, cultivating your skills.

So whether you didn’t have things that you needed and you’re building them, or you have a good base and want to go from good to great, and all of that, this is a series for you. And we also have a free resource for you along with this series. If you are wanting to host a book study or read the book with a book buddy or something, we’ve got a group guide for you. So you can find that free resource in the links in the description. Father, let us dig into Chapter 2, “How Much Weight Can You Handle?” I’m gonna say, you actually opened this chapter talking about Biosphere 2, which sounds very intense. Can you explain a little bit about it?

(05:18) Marcus Warner: It sounds like another movie franchise.

(05:19) Stephanie Warner: Right? I think that’s really the theme of today. Tell us about Biosphere 2.

(05:26) Marcus Warner: This was an attempt to create a perfect ecosystem inside of a dome that had all of the elements and can we recreate a perfect ecosystem where we can study things in their environment? The trees that they grew in this the first time were kind of rubbery and weak. You could push them and they weren’t strong and rigid. And you’re like, what’s going on? And that’s when somebody realized that we didn’t put wind into our system and there were no storms. We were trying to create this perfect, peaceful thing. And there’s just so many sermon illustrations there. You can’t get strong without storms bringing wind that you have to stand up against.

And that’s kind of what resilience is all about. Resilience is the strength that we grow by facing hard things and bouncing back from them, facing hard things and bouncing back from them. That’s the rhythm. I face a hard thing, I bounce back. And if life is too easy, I’m not going to grow that strength. I’m not going to grow resilience. And so how much weight can you carry? What is your capacity to handle the hard things that happen in life? And so that was the illustration I heard years and years ago that has always stuck with me. We need a certain amount of wind and storms if we’re going to get the strength that we need.

(07:08) Stephanie Warner: Yeah, so you talk about in this chapter that our emotional capacity is determined by how much emotional weight we can handle. And you also have a picture that I cannot neglect to have us talk about. It is a meme that you saw one time of a donkey that was hauling a cart that’s just overflowing, except the donkey isn’t really carrying the cart. The cart has kind of tipped the poor donkey up….

(07:34) Marcus Warner: Yeah, it’s got the donkey with all four legs up in the air. He’s not pulling anything. The cart was so heavy it tipped back on its side and the donkey is now just flailing in midair, just hanging there like, oh I don’t know. I often think that it’s not going to do any good to give that donkey a pep talk like, come on, you can do it! Try a little harder! Because literally there is just more weight then that donkey has the capacity to handle. And there is only one solution there. You’ve got to remove some of the weight.

And that’s important for us to realize, we’re not always supposed to push into every hard thing that comes our way. There’s a time to unload some weight from our lives. And it is the core principle of Sabbath in the Bible. There’s a time for saying no to work. There is a time for resting and to sometimes offload things. So while we’re talking about growing our capacity to handle weight, it’s important to acknowledge upfront that everybody’s got a limit on how much weight they can handle. That’s going to be different for different people. And we’re going to talk a little bit about the five stages of maturity development.

Those five stages are really related to capacity. It’s infant, child, adult, parent, and elder. You don’t expect an infant to have any capacity. We don’t expect an infant to be able to handle any emotion, we know that we need to do that for the baby and help them recover. As a child we’re starting to teach them, okay, now as a child you need to start learning how to handle some of this weight, so I’m going to teach you how to do it. Then as an adult you expect people as adults to be able to handle weight, to handle emotional weight and recover and not be overwhelmed by the emotional weight. And so you begin to see that maturity and capacity are directly related.

So we talk about infant level maturity as somebody who still has no ability or capacity to handle an emotion. And the child level is still learning how to do this, but needs a lot of help to get through it. An adult is learning how to handle these emotions for themselves. Still needs help now and then, but not in the sense of somebody teaching them how to do it, just somebody doing it with them as they do it. And then you get to be, pardon?

(10:06) Stephanie Warner: Let’s linger there. You jumped into the five stages of maturity. We have talked about that a lot on the podcast, but in case this is somebody’s first introduction, what are we talking about here?

(10:22) Marcus Warner: Emotional capacity, when you’re talking about an infant, they just don’t have any emotional capacity.

(10:28) Stephanie Warner: I mean, the Life Model five stages of maturity, the model itself.

(10:32) Marcus Warner: Sure. So this model has to do with from conception to death, this is every phase of life and it can be broken into six parts. And the first part is actually in utero. From conception until birth. And the last stage is the elder stage as you go from being done raising your family until you pass away.

So at every stage, there is a death and a new birth. If you think about it, the fetus in the womb has to die to life in the womb in order to be born. And so that is a clear death and resurrection thing. As an infant, there comes a point where I have to die to being a baby in order to become a child. And that is usually associated with weaning or the beginning of eating solid food. I’m done being a baby and having somebody else provide everything I need. I’m starting to learn to feed myself.

(11:42) Stephanie Warner: What about memory? I’m sorry. I hear people talk sometimes about that you’re just sitting around one day and realize that I exist. You’re starting to have a conscious thought about yourself. Would that be similar, or?

(11:58) Marcus Warner: Well, yeah, there’s a lot of developmental things that are happening at each stage, but we’re talking about the definitive thing that moves you from one stage to the next. And the thing that moves you from one stage to the next that has been celebrated in cultures all over the world has been weaning. There’s even a Bible story about this. They have a party for Isaac when he goes from being a baby to being a child. There’s a kind of a weaning party, but it’s that you die to one, and you’re born to the next.

The other one’s a little more obvious to most of us and that’s puberty. When puberty hits, it’s like your childhood body goes away and your adult body comes in, but also your childhood brain goes away, and your adult brain comes in. There is a massive change that takes place where you die to one thing and you’re born to another. I always think of Peter Pan and Wendy Angela Moira Darling. Where they have to leave being in the children’s thing to go be in the adult world. It’s time for Wendy to leave being with the kids and go be an adult. Now it’s a little traumatic in that story, but this is something that’s been happening throughout human history. You hit puberty and it’s time to say goodbye to childhood and enter into the adult world. Now that your body has changed, at least theoretically, you could become a parent pretty soon if you’re not careful with what you do. So those are the adult years.

And at that level, I am fully practicing being able to take care of myself, being able to take care of my people, and who are my friends in my friend circle. I think in terms of “we” a lot more, like, my friends and I do this, “we” are this. And my sense of identity shifts from coming primarily from my parents to coming from “my people.” And then you get to the parent, and notice you skip past marriage. It’s not marriage that takes you into the next stage. It’s a parent becoming a parent because at that point, now you are responsible for passing on all of these skills to the next generation.

And so you’re now going to have to raise a baby. You’re now going to have to teach that baby when they get to the child years, the things that they need to learn as a child. You’re going to get them to the adult stage and so on. So you stay a parent for quite a while until you finally get to the elder stage when your youngest child has become an adult. When your youngest child hits puberty, technically at that point on, you enter into the adult stage of development. You should rightfully expect at each stage, a person to be able to handle more emotional weight than at the prior one. And so if I don’t develop the way that I’m supposed to develop during that stage, I can go through them physically, these transformations, but emotionally still be stuck back at an earlier stage. And so I am now an elder. My youngest child is married. And you are a full adult on your own.

I’m done raising kids and now that means I’m in my elder years. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t times in my life when I can act like a child, where I handle my emotions like an infant or a child. I call that falling into a maturity hole where sometimes I’m acting pretty mature, but when certain things get triggered I fall into this maturity hole, and I act like an infant or act like a child. And then there’s other people who just literally get stuck. They haven’t moved past that in their development. And when that happens, life gets really, really, really hard. Because if I am facing adult level problems and parent level problems and elder level problems with the emotional capacity of a child, then I’m going to just feel overwhelmed all of the time. I’m always on the edge of my capacity. As a result, I’m going to be very avoidant.

I’m not going to want to interact with very many things. My world’s going to get really small. And I’m going to have a lot more anxiety and a lot more anger. I’m going to be addicted to things because I need the addiction to comfort me from the constant state of being overwhelmed. So a lot of things get tied together to this and it’s why resilience is so important and why growing our capacity to handle emotional weight is so important. It is directly related to this idea of maturity.

(16:54) Stephanie Warner: Let’s talk more about high joy versus low joy and how that interacts with capacity.

(17:02) Marcus Warner: So let’s go to the infant years. In the infant years, a baby needs up to eight hours a day of smiles and Yay! It’s you! You’re so cute. One of the first things that their eyes learn to do is to look for other eyes. And what they’re looking for are eyes that twinkle and that light up with joy. Like, it’s you! Yay, you’re adorable. They need a lot of that because before they can even form words they’re already forming a picture in their brain of like two faces. If both faces are happy to see them they’re going to grow up with a joy foundation for life and are predisposed to think that people generally like me.

But if they have one face that is happy to see them and one that isn’t they’re going to be a bit unstable. And if they have two faces that are not happy to see them, they’re going to have some severe dysfunctions. And so a lot of people who are older in life, but living with these severe dysfunctions, it goes back to things that did not happen and did not develop properly. Capacity and maturity are supposed to happen naturally by having the normal experiences of life, but when that doesn’t happen, it’s traumatic to our maturity development. Anything that interferes with the development of our maturity can be called trauma. That’s where Life Model and Jim Wilder talk about A and B trauma.

A trauma is the trauma that comes from missing out on something that I really needed; I didn’t get the eight hours a day of smiles. Nobody was beating me. Nobody was being abusive to me, but I just didn’t get those smiles. I didn’t get people responding to me with joy. I missed out on that.

That will affect my development. It will have a traumatizing impact on my development. So that’s A trauma, it’s the absence of the good stuff that I need.

B trauma is the bad stuff that happens to me. That’s what we usually think of when we think of trauma. People abused me and they did bad things to me. I have found that everybody I know who has B trauma also has A trauma. I believe that A trauma can actually be harder to repair than B trauma because A trauma means I missed out on experiences that would have taught me skills that would have grown my capacity. And it’s going to take more than “an experience” to fix that. I’m actually going to have to build disciplines and grow habits that I didn’t have before.

That’s a lot more work in some ways than healing the sorts of things that took place with B trauma. So it’s not to minimize B trauma, but it’s to say that A trauma is also that important. A trauma is really that significant. So I look back at somebody like you or me where we didn’t have a ton of B trauma in our lives. It wasn’t like I was beating you every night before you went to bed. Let’s make that clear right now.

(20:14) Stephanie Warner: Yeah, all good. All good.

(21:16) Marcus Warner:  I’m the same way. I didn’t grow up in a family where there was a lot of abuse going on. And so it’s easy to think that I have no trauma in my life. I had a good life, but it doesn’t mean that you got everything that you needed from your parents, or everything that you needed from your family. Because no family is perfect and no family has all of this stuff. We all miss out on things along the way. It can have a traumatizing impact on our development. That’s what this chapter is about.

This chapter is about, what is capacity and why is that so important? And just like the donkey was just beyond his capacity and needed to offload some things, there are two solutions when it comes to capacity. One is that sometimes we have to offload things. The other is we have to do some of the workouts it’s going to take to grow our capacity so that we can handle more, and then it takes more weight than it used to in order to overwhelm us. And that’s what this chapter is about, capacity.

(21:24) Stephanie Warner: Well, you and Stefanie both have good examples of different things. You tell kind of a capacity parable of a high joy child and a low joy child, both experiencing the same thing and what that does to them. And Stefanie talks about wanting to bubble wrap her kids and thinking about building bounce is a lot like building your body’s immune system and stuff. So could you talk a little bit more about capacity from those angles?

(21:54) Marcus Warner: Yeah. So let’s start with the immune system one, right? When she was a young mom and her kids were just starting school bad things would sometimes happen to her kids at school. She just wanted to protect them and keep them from ever experiencing bad things. As she was praying about it the Holy Spirit said, you know, it’s actually better to build their immune system, rather than protecting them from every germ they could possibly run into. Wouldn’t it be better that it didn’t matter which germs they ran into because their immune system was so strong that they were going to be fine?

And that’s what we need to do with our kids emotionally. Instead of saying, I don’t want them to ever feel this bad emotion, the answer is I want them to get that emotion, and to learn how to deal with all of the emotions so that they can bounce back from it. Now, as we’re teaching children that, you have to give it to them in doses. You’re not intentionally traumatizing your child so they learn how to deal with trauma.

(22:53) Stephanie Warner: Right, we’re not saying don’t protect your kids.

(22:55) Marcus Warner: We’re not saying don’t protect them from abusive things, but we’re saying you can’t be so protective that you don’t want them to ever experience certain emotions, because it’s kind of like that storm analogy. You’ve got to go through a certain amount of wind in order to build strength. You’ve got to have a certain amount of exposure to some of these germs in order to build up the antibodies and the resistance to them. And so that was kind of like God’s word picture for her about how you build bounce and why resilience is so important for our kids.

In the word picture that I was camping on came from the idea of, let’s say you’ve got two six-year-olds in kindergarten, or first grade, whatever it is, and they’re in school. And one of them has three ounces of capacity. They can handle three ounces of stress and then they’re done, they’re overwhelmed. And the other one can handle seven. They’ve had a lot of joy in their family, they’ve had a lot of practice facing difficult emotions and recovering. And so here’s the three ounce little child sitting next to seven ounce little child and they both have a five ounce stress experience. What happens?

Well, the one with seven ounces of capacity, they feel it. They’re going to feel the stress. They’re going to feel the emotion, but it’s not overwhelming and very quickly they can recover. They can bounce back and keep going on because they have the capacity to absorb five ounces of stress. The one with three ounces can’t. They experience the same thing and it completely overwhelms them.

And so now what happens is, I often say, this is where the devil shows up. Because now the little three ounce child is looking at the seven ounce child and going what is wrong with me? Why aren’t they falling apart? Why am I the one falling apart? And now you start comparing yourself and the lies come in there like, you’re just no good. You’re terrible. No wonder nobody likes you. All these things build around it, but a lot of times it’s starting with capacity And so that’s why this is so important. The more capacity that we have to handle those things, the more it’s going to take for us to get overwhelmed to the point where we can’t bounce back.

(25:25) Stephanie Warner: Yep, and this is all about building bounce. So we’re going to keep pressing in and again the hope here is that we actually can keep growing our joy capacity for our whole life. And so we’re gonna keep pressing into how we do that. And I also encourage you that in the book, I think every chapter ends with a joy workout so you can start practicing all of that. Again, see the free resource that we’ve got linked in the description for you. So yeah, thank you again to everybody.

(25:55) Marcus Warner: And people can also go to fourhabits.org if they want a whole list of exercises. We’ve got a whole bunch of them stored there from the book.

(26:03) Stephanie Warner: Yeah, the 28 Days to Joy Challenge is a really good joy building exercise tool. It’s also free. And there’s a calendar for you with joy exercises made by Chris Coursey who wrote all of the exercises. And I will also send you a daily email for 28 days to help you be like, okay, here’s my joy exercise today. And I know families who have done this together. Yeah, that’s a really good thought. So yeah, all right. Thank you everybody again for being on the trail with us. We really, really appreciate you and we are so glad you are here. Father, final thoughts for how much weight can you handle?

(26:43) Marcus Warner: Yeah, I think that one of the things that we have to understand is that resilience and value have nothing to do with each other. It’s like your value as a human being is not related to your maturity or your capacity. And just think about a baby. A baby has so much value and it has nothing to do with their capacity.

And so we’re not talking about what to do to feel more worth and to develop your sense of worth, because you have inestimable worth already just because you exist. You are created in the image and likeness of God. But the capacity is about just developing the maturity that all of us are looking for that allows us to treat life as an adventure, and not get so afraid of our emotions that we find ourselves just avoiding things that could actually make life a whole lot better.

(27:43) Stephanie Warner: Absolutely. We want you to live the abundant Christian life and to walk in the freedom that Jesus has for us. So that’s a good word. Thank you.