49: Joy House

[00:07] 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 49 we are continuing our series on joy, today we are looking at building our joy house.

Hello, Father.

[00:30] Marcus: Hello, Daughter.

[00:32] Stephanie: So good to be with you.

[00:34] Marcus: It is and congratulations on your recent graduation.

[00:37] Stephanie: Oh, thank you. Yes, the last episode came out on the Monday after graduation, but we are actually recording this on the Monday after graduation. So yes, I am graduated.

[00:49] Marcus: Very proud of her. She was summa cum laude, 3.9 something, something. So that’s really impressive, congratulations.

[00:57] Stephanie: You are too kind. And also my dear brother graduated this weekend as well from undergrad and we’re very proud of him.

[01:05] Marcus: He did.

[01:05] Stephanie: And we have had a whirlwind weekend.

[01:09] Marcus: We’ve had a whirlwind weekend. Yeah. Ben graduated from Taylor and so mom and I were there, picked him up, emptied his room and drove down to see you. And here we are with you down in Kentucky.

[01:21] Stephanie: Yes, all the family together, I love it when that happens. And speaking of school, some of our listeners may not know that Deeper Walk has a school. The Deeper Walk School of Ministry is currently, as of May 29, 2023, accepting applications for our certificate in Deeper Walk Prayer Ministry Certification. This is an intensive, interactive, hands on, heart focused discipleship training program in practical ministry. And the next cohort runs from August 2023 to May 2024. And I just wanted to make that known to our listeners.

[02:00] Marcus: It’s a nine month program. It takes from what I’ve been told, four to six hours of time a week, depending on the week. We get lots of breaks so it’s not constant every single week, but it’s good. I think there’s nine months of training with the summer off.

[02:17] Stephanie: Yeah, we have so many good testimonies and it’s a really wonderful thing. So I just wanted to let everybody know we are taking applications for that right now. There’s a lot more information at our website, https://deeperwalk.com/school-of-ministry  and you can check it out now and apply. You can even put your name on a list for interest in future cohorts if you don’t think you’re quite ready for August, but you want to know more later. So yeah, I invite you to check that out. Today for our episode we are talking about building a joy house. Before we get into that do you want to describe where that concept came from? What is building a joy house?

[02:59] Marcus: The idea of joy houses. It sounds like just a typical metaphor but through the years I’ve worked with a lot of folks who’ve had dissociative identities, or multiple personalities. And what I found is that most of them had inner worlds.

And there was a classic case where one person when we first met they were basically living in dungeons in their inner world. I mean all the “kids” were trapped in these dungeons and they were just living with constant torment. I would talk about a fear house and Jesus showed up, he unlocked the gates, he let them free, and they didn’t leave because they were so scared. He eventually helped them get out of there and to come to this beautiful place where he provided for them a different house.

And this house was like a castle, like an Irish or a Scottish castle and it was just gorgeous. It was a place where they could live. And from there now the “kids” could live a life of adventure and play, they all had pets, and they all did different things. I found that Jesus was interested in them having a positive, healthy, happy inner world in which to live.

And I have found to a larger extent essentially in working with people who have these really severe issues like this,  it’s often just a model of what all of us go through, just with more clarity and intensity. And so I realized that’s a pretty good metaphor for all of us. We all need to be careful of what our inner world turns into and that it’s a place that we like to spend time. And if it is, then it becomes the source of a lot of adventure and the source of intimacy with God. And if it’s not, then it’s something we want to avoid or someplace we feel trapped.

[04:47] Stephanie: Yeah, I love the imagery. So building a joy house in our terms can be thought of as building resilience. And we’ve talked a lot about resilience on this podcast but could you talk more about it from that perspective? And I know in the last episode I think we talked about your window of tolerance. So what is a window of tolerance? What does it look like to grow that?

[05:09] Marcus: So the window of tolerance is essentially the measure of how much upset emotion you can handle and absorb without it really affecting you or throwing you off. And you can begin to tell when it has affected you because you turn into a different person, it’s like you go from being friendly to being kind of surly. You go from being engaged to being shut down. Something changes very rapidly because you reach the edge of your window of capacity.

I think of this as like cups, and the water or liquid that you put into the cups represents how much stress I can handle, or how much emotional upset I can handle before that cup overflows. And so there’s a couple of problems.

One is that a lot of us live right on the edge of our window of tolerance all of the time. And because of that it just doesn’t take much to push us past the edge. And so there are two basic solutions here.

One is, I need to take a break and give myself a break to pull back from the edge. And that requires a rhythm. It requires some patterning in my life that gives me enough time off to pull away from the edge like that.

And the other is, I need to do things like calming, appreciating, and storytelling. And attacking the toxic thinking to begin to grow my window of tolerance so that it takes more and more to overwhelm me. So those are the two things. I want to grow it and I want to give myself adequate rest and adequate breaks so I’m not constantly on the edge of it.

[06:49] Stephanie:  And developing recovery skills which would be the rest and such.

So I was thinking that we started the year off talking about building bounce and the “ABC’s” of Building Bounce, that I think it’s really appropriate for right now. Could you give an overview of the “ABC’s” of Building Bounce?

[07:10] Marcus: Yeah. I was working with Stefanie Hinman who is an art therapist and  deals with a lot of children who are trying to rebuild their capacity that maybe they missed. In talking through it we landed on “ABC”  which is a real simple way to remember what it is.

And “A” is appreciation and quieting. And those two always go together, appreciation and quieting because after I’ve felt the joy of appreciation it’s easier to quiet. And sometimes it’s easier to appreciate once I have quieted. So those two things always go together and I look at them like flip sides of the same coin. That is, sometimes I quiet in order to appreciate and then when I’m done, it’s easy to quiet again. Sometimes I appreciate first, and then it’s easier to quiet afterwards.

So you’ll even see this in seminars and things where people will gather. They’ll tell funny stories to each other or happy stories and you can feel the energy in the room getting really light and happy. And then afterwards it’s just much easier for them to open up headspace because they are now further away from the edge of their window of tolerance than they were before. They’ve got a little more capacity. And so we’ve all felt that, where I had some joy and after the joy I had more quiet. So that’s the “A”, appreciation and  quieting, they always go together.

The “B” is beliefs. And this is the idea that I often rob myself of joy and rob myself of things because my mindset is in these dark places. It’s like the person living in a dungeon and I’m just always in darkness in my thoughts, or I’m always in fear anticipating the “what if’s” of life. So we need to deal with “B”, beliefs.

Then “C” is connections and the idea that I have to grow capacity relationally. I don’t just hold myself up in a room and do a whole bunch of emotional push ups. You know, come out and go, “Look at me, I am now an emotional Superman.” The only way you can do this is relationally.

And so you have to have connections with people just to practice a lot of these skills. Also being with people where we feel safe, calm, and connected. Those three words, safe, calm, and connected have a lot to do with how quickly I grow my emotional capacity. And then we put into that connecting with God. And there are a lot of us who don’t feel safe, calm, and connected with God, and that creates a lot of our emotional problems. So we have to find ways to overcome the fears we have with God so that we can have a stable relationship with him.

[09:44] Stephanie: Well, and that’s so key and going back to the dungeons versus castle metaphor, the point there isn’t just generic safety. Like, oh, you’re not in a scary place and now you’re in a happy place, but it’s also the happy places where you are spending time with Jesus. Part of building resilience and building your joy house is building a house with Jesus and spending time with him there. So, yes, thank you.

So with the “ABC’s” of Building Bounce, that was just a quick fire hose overview. We have several episodes that just go through each of those points but I wanted to make sure if you haven’t heard that before, you will know that it exists.

You can go back and listen to those or get the book Building Bounce and that will help you build your resilience even more. So the book that just came out, Dad, The Four Habits of Joy-Filled People, you wrote with Chris Coursey and you actually use the joy house as a central theme here. And your acrostic is the Spanish word Casa, which means house. So would you give us an overview of CASA? And I’ll just add that dad and Chris did a little mini podcast series that it’s not out yet, and we’ll let you know when it’s out. But it is going to take you step by step through CASA as well but we’re just going to do an overview here.

[11:10] Marcus: Yeah, absolutely. So, Chris and I got together at the Hobart property in February where Deeper Walk has acquired a building. Ben was there doing the production work and we recorded some podcasts. I think actually Moody is going to be distributing those. But the CASA acrostic is going to sound familiar with the “ABC” because there’s a lot of overlap. We said “A” is appreciation and quieting, “C” is calming. So that’s the foundation, there’s no way around it. So that’s always going to be the foundation of building resilience, calming or quieting, and appreciating.

Then the “S” is new and that is the idea of storytelling. And it was really inspired by the fact that when THRIVEtoday does their trainings they want to teach people how to bounce back from upsetting emotions. They realized that one of the ways that our brain builds resilience is that it collects stories of the times that we successfully navigated hard emotions.

And so when I feel that emotion, if the only stories that pop up are stories of times that emotion overwhelmed me, then I’m in trouble. But if I feel an emotion and what pops up are memories of the times that I felt that emotion and I was still okay, and acted like myself, it didn’t overwhelm me and I was able to bounce back quickly. Then I’m less intimidated by the emotion. So the idea here is collecting stories. Now I am gonna camp out on storytelling.

[12:47] Stephanie: I was gonna ask you to, so thank you.

[12:50] Marcus: I was doing a leadership training event recently and I did a little experiment. I had the people go around in the group and tell a story and I assigned different emotions. Like, tell me a story about feeling disgust. Tell me one about feeling sadness. And what I found  interesting was that everyone in the room except for one person, their story went something like this.

So I experienced this really bad thing. It made me feel this really bad emotion and that’s why I am the way I am right now. That’s an interesting pattern to the story, right? I experienced this bad thing, I felt this bad emotion, and essentially that’s why I am messed up. Now, if that’s the conclusion of your story then your brain is telling yourself over and over again, you’re a messed up person and you will always be a messed up person.

Because every time you feel this emotion it’s a sign that you’re messed up. I was like, that’s not really the messages we want going on in our brains. So we teach a STEP method. It literally is the word STEP, an acrostic method on how to tell a helpful story.

And that is, what’s the setting of the story you’re going to tell? What’s the emotion that got triggered? And then what’s the point you want to make?  And we say the point should either be that this is how I handled it well or this is how I bounced back from it. Or I didn’t necessarily handle it well but this is the lesson that I’ve learned. What we don’t want to do is make the point of the story, that’s why I messed up or that’s why I don’t function well.

[14:26] Stephanie: You want the story to end in hope.

[14:27] Marcus: You want the story to end in hope. You want the story to end that you were able to get through that emotion and be okay.

[14:34] Stephanie: Could you give us an example of a story?

[14:37] Marcus: Sure. So my go to illustration on this is being at a restaurant and it was a buffet and I noticed that they had chocolate mousse. I made a mental note that I wanted to go back and get this chocolate mousse for dessert. So the setting is, I was at a restaurant with some friends. The trigger was that I went back and got myself the chocolate mousse, took my first bite, and almost spit it out in front of everybody. Because it wasn’t chocolate mousse, it was liver pate.

I know, it was just greasy, the opposite of chocolate mousse. And it created the emotion of disgust. My whole body felt like retching a little bit because that’s what disgust is, it makes you want to vomit. So it’s like I was thinking, oh, yuck, I want to get this taste out of my mouth.  And then I noticed that everybody’s laughing and they’re all like, ah, that’s so funny.

So at this point what am I going to do? I can get mad at them, like why are you laughing at me? But I realized it is kind of funny, right? This is pretty funny. So I was able to laugh with them. I went to the bathroom, gargled a little bit and I went back and got a drink of something else and I found the actual chocolate mousse. All ended well.

But it was a time of feeling disgust but realizing I don’t have to let disgust take me to this thought of, oh, life is unfair. You know, why is everything like this? You could take a story like this and go in a direction of, you know, why does this always happen to me? Life isn’t fair and why are people laughing at me? And you could take it in a very negative direction. So that’s why I’m making the point that I was able to stay myself. I was able to laugh about it with them, go fix the situation, get what I wanted, and realize I was okay.

[16:39] Stephanie: Very good, thank you. All right any more on storytelling?

[16:43] Marcus: Well, it’s probably enough for now. There’s a lot like I said, THRIVEtoday does a lot of great stuff with storytelling.

[16:49] Stephanie: And to clarify, THRIVEtoday is Chris Coursey.

[16:51] Marcus: Yeah. Co-author Chris Coursey is the president of Thrive Today. So that’s kind of where that idea came from. So we have calming and appreciating, “C.A”, storytelling, which is the “S”, and then the next thing  is attacking toxic thinking. So you’re going to see the beliefs from the “ABC”model here. In some ways storytelling is about beliefs too, it’s like let’s get our story straight.

What is it that we want to tell ourselves? The idea of attacking toxic thinking really hit home for me. The first time I was intentionally trying to practice appreciation I wanted to not just sip down my coffee as fast as possible to get on with my day. I want to appreciate it, right? So I’m holding my cup of coffee and feeling the cool of the ceramic and smelling the aroma. This whole thing goes on about 2 seconds and the thought comes into my head, this is the stupidest thing you’ve ever done.

Okay, so that’s what I mean by an attack. I was attacked by a toxic thought, this is the stupidest thing you’ve ever done. And I realized how much of the good things I try to do in life get sabotaged because I don’t recognize the toxic thinking. I don’t take those thoughts captive. I was thinking about this yesterday, when I was in little league playing baseball my dad gave me Maxwell Maltz, Psycho-Cybernetics. It had lots of stories in there of professional athletes who would picture themselves doing things perfectly over and over and over again. My dad encouraged me ( I was a pitcher ) before every pitch, just take 2 seconds to picture myself making the perfect pitch.

Now that wasn’t the same pitch every time, it wasn’t like, right down the middle. It was like, I want this one high, inside, and fast. I want this one low, outside, and slow. It’s like, what are you going to do? Picture yourself doing it perfectly, then do it. And what I found was when I struggled with my pitching I couldn’t actually do that. It was really, really hard for me to visualize myself doing it correctly. And I found a very real connection here between the confidence with which I lived, the confidence with which I did these things, and the mental pictures that were driving the way it lives. So when we talk about attacking toxic thinking that’s kind of it. We’re talking about recognizing those mental images and those quick stabbing thoughts that suck the life out of us and replacing those as quickly as possible.

[19:26] Stephanie: Well, I’m excited to hear more about that in the future. For now I do want to ask where did these four come from? Did you just pick four that spell CASA?

[19:34] Marcus: Yeah, I really wanted CASA, it is kind of funny. The acrostic always comes last just so people understand how this works. You attack a subject, you come down with the principles, and then once you’ve written out all the principles I will literally put, what are four or five possible words that sum up that principle? And then I look to see if there’s a pattern among those words that I can make spell something. So it’s never like, oh, hey, let’s do this. These come from the fact that we try not to overwhelm people. We don’t want to say, “Here’s 17 principles for living a happier life,” when four is a good number.

We are also trying to make this a book that you could give to a non-Christian audience. So we left out what would normally be the fifth part here and that is our connection to God. People who have a joy bond with God, generally do much better with their emotional capacity than people who have a fear bond with God. And so if I could have put anything else in this book, that would have been in there, but it’s because of the audience.

[20:41] Stephanie: That’s really good to know and we are coming up to the end of the episode. Before we get Dad’s final thoughts it feels especially appropriate considering today’s topic, to remind everyone that we have a free tool for you that you can access today. It’s never too late to grow your capacity to feel joy because your brain has the capacity to grow joy as long as you live, it only takes 28 days to form a new habit.

THRIVEtoday and Deeper Walk have partnered to put together a 28 day joy challenge for you. You can sign up for free at 4habits.org. When you sign up you’ll receive 28 days of simple joy exercises straight to your inbox. Plus, you can choose your favorite printable calendar for a physical reminder about each day’s exercise. I hope you accept the challenge and have so much fun using it to build your joy capacity. So, my Father, any final thoughts for the episode?

[21:35] Marcus: All right, so you’re going to appreciate this. We’ve had a cat in the room the whole time we’ve been doing this. He’s a very busy, active cat. We used to have a cat and we’re about to get another one.

[21:47] Stephanie: Yes, this is my roommate’s cat who’s in the room with us.

[21:50] Marcus: Okay. So one of the things I’ve often noticed about animals and having a pet, and if you’ve had pets, you’ve probably noticed this. Cats act like cats, right? Dogs act like dogs. I never walk into a room and see a cat acting like a dog. I don’t run in and say, “Why is the dog suddenly acting like a leopard?” That doesn’t happen, they act like themselves. And I find that humans are the one group that has trouble sometimes acting like ourselves. When I have trouble acting like myself it’s a sign that I have an emotional capacity issue that needs addressed.

If I feel like I’ve got to wear a mask, if I have to pretend, if I just am not being myself, it is usually a sign that I have an emotional capacity issue that needs to be addressed. So I think the encouragement today is when you see animals, you say the animal acts like himself, maybe I should try acting like myself today and see how that goes. It’s a better game plan.

[22:48] Stephanie: So happy last word. Well, thank you, and I look forward to continuing this conversation next week. And 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 or more per month. We invite you to consider becoming a Trailblazer. You can do this very simply by visiting our website, https://deeperwalk.com/trailblazers/.

If you want to keep going deeper with us on your walk with God, please subscribe to the On the Trail podcast, leave a review, and share with your friends.

Thanks again. We’ll see you back next week.