51: Taming the Amygdala (Part 2)

[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 51. We are continuing our series on joy. Today we are looking at how to deal with our low level emotions.

Hello, Father.

[00:31] Marcus: Hello, Daughter.

[00:33] Stephanie: Always good to be with you.

[00:34] Marcus: It is good to be together.

[00:36] Stephanie: How are you doing today?

[00:38] Marcus: I am honestly tired. We’re recording this on a Friday night at the end of a long week and it feels good.

[00:47] Stephanie: The pros and cons of doing this with your daughter, sometimes we do it not during the normal work hours. Well, hey, I have an icebreaker for you.

[00:56] Marcus: Oh, okay.

[00:57] Stephanie: Yeah. Okay. So we live in the United States of America and I am thinking in traveling tourist terms. If you could visit any state that you have not visited yet or at least that you haven’t spent much time there, where would you go?

[01:13] Marcus: Maine. I’ve never been to Maine.

[01:15] Stephanie: That was literally gonna be my answer.

[01:17] Marcus: Really? We need to go. There’s something about that, maybe it’s because we were listening to sea shanties earlier. I feel like let’s go to Maine and watch whales, I don’t know.

[01:29] Stephanie: That was literally my answer.

[01:31] Marcus: We must be related.

[01:33] Stephanie: We must be. I’ve never been to Maine, I don’t think. It looks beautiful and I like cold. I like the cold. I like the beach and oceans and stuff, but I prefer cold.

[01:49] Marcus: I know it’s a joke in our family, right? If it’s a cold, rainy, overcast day, we’re like, this is Stephanie weather. So, yeah, it’s pretty fun.

[01:58] Stephanie: So anyway, that’s great. I’m glad we’re related. Build a little joy. So, last episode, we talked about how to tame our amygdala. Starting with how we handle our high level emotions. Do you want to go back and just give a quick review of what are the high energy emotions and how do we handle them?

02:20] Marcus: Yes. The amygdala can give us good, bad, or scary. And if it gives us the assessment that this is scary, it will trigger fear or anger. So those are the two high energy levels, high energy emotions. And what those do is it shoots adrenaline through our body. It triggers a physical reaction that either makes us want to fight or flee, hence the fight or flight reaction.

If it goes the other direction it can trigger low energy emotions that can suck the life out of us, and that’s shame, disgust, sadness, and despair. So last week we looked at anger and fear. This week we’re going to be looking at those other four.

[02:59] Stephanie: And I know we’ve been taking it more from the storytelling perspective, but could you give some pointers on how you handle high energy emotion? Because with high energy emotions, it literally makes your body shake.

How do you go about handling those from maybe a body standpoint?

[03:17] Marcus: So one of the things I’m trying to do is soothe my body. So there’s a variety of things that I can do. We call them best practices. There’s breathing which we call, “breathe in a box.” The idea is fully filling up your lungs and then fully getting all the air out of your lungs and holding it for a four count.

You can actually change the numbers, it doesn’t always have to be four. We’re just trying to give people a basic model to get started. And you can do that as many times as you need to. I know people who have done it ten times before they finally started to feel a little control.

The other is you exaggerate your emotion and then you try to calm it. And so if I was going to put this in order it would be to exaggerate the emotion, and then take a deep breath. Then you can rub your hands down your arms as if you’re just rubbing that emotion right out of your body. And then you just repeat.

Exaggerate and then rub down the emotion as you breathe deeply. So that would be to breathe in a box, exaggerate, soothe, and then go to the “T”.  We’ve actually got two different ways we do this in our new book. The “T” is about our thought life.

Jim Wilder has a Shalom Your Body exercise on YouTube that you can watch and he actually incorporates all four of these things in that. He exaggerates the emotion, then he’s rubbing it out, and then taking a deep breath. And sometimes you can say words that are true like, “When I’m afraid I will trust in you oh, God.” In some cases just to distract myself I’ve actually sung “Happy Birthday to me, Happy birthday to me.” It always makes me smile a little bit and so that helps.

So those are the best practices for kind of calming my body. The other thing I can do that is similar and related to soothing is before I just go straight to trying to soothe my body, I actually surprise it and exaggerate a little bit. Like splashing cold water on the face or a cold shower, just doing something to change your body chemistry can help too.

[05:22] Stephanie: So what does it look like to exaggerate anger? And also, how do you do that in an appropriate manner?

[05:27] Marcus: Uh, yeah, it’s probably not punching a wall. So what’s an appropriate exaggeration of anger? And the go to here is to do the Hulk pose. Right. You kind of flex your arms, make big fists, and you flare out your nostrils. I know one guy took a towel and twisted it really hard. And part of the idea here of exaggerating is you want to let that emotion crash like a wave on the shore, just let it crash over you and release.

[05:55] Stephanie: Right, and if you’ve ever had somebody say, ”Oh, just calm down.” You’re like, “Thanks, I’m so calm now.”

[06:01] Marcus: Makes you want to punch him. Yeah, I’m just kidding. Wait, no did I say that out loud? That’s true because it’s almost impossible just by sheer force of the will to calm yourself down, that’s not how it works.

[06:15] Stephanie: Yeah, and in reference to the guy with the towel, he went somewhere private to shake off the anger.

[06:23] Marcus: So for some of this stuff there are things you can do in the moment. There are other things you can do that are a little bit different, like “CAKE.” Which is you can break eye contact (Yeah, let’s go with that one.) with somebody and find some curiosity. Find something to appreciate about the person, find a way to be kind, and then restore eye contact.

So curiosity, appreciation, kindness, eye contact, that spells CAKE. And sometimes that’s enough just to get you back into the relational part of your brain. One is you are trying to regain control of your body and the other one is trying to get back to acting like yourself, and being relational.

[07:06] Stephanie: All right, thank you for that crash course. So in this episode we’re talking about our low level, low energy emotions. Could you remind us what are the low energy emotions?

[07:17] Marcus: So out of the SAD,SAD, you take out the two “A’s” and you get shame, sadness, disgust, and despair. So sadness is the loss of something I value and shame is the thing that didn’t bring you happiness. Like a little kid who is used to seeing Mommy and Daddy light up when they see them and then they look up, and mommy and daddy are not happy to see them. Like, what happened? They’re feeling, oh, you’re not happy to see me and the instinct is that my body wants to hang my head.

[07:47] Stephanie: Yeah, hang my head, don’t make eye contact.

[07:49] Marcus: Don’t make eye contact and I’m kind of hiding in plain sight there. And then sadness makes you want to pout, you hang out that bottom lip, and you get a little teary. It takes the energy out of you like I lost something that was important to me. Then disgust is that yuck feeling that I want to get out, I want it out of here. Yuck, get away from me.

And it’s actually meant to protect us from poisonous things. And so it might be poisonous people, situations, or actually poisonous foods, but it’s that yuck, I want to vomit this out. And then despair is, this is impossible. It’s the feeling that something I need in order to be okay is not possible.

[08:31] Stephanie: It’s hopeless.

[08:32] Marcus: It’s hopeless. And so I know Dr. Wilder has gotten very specific with this.

I cannot fix this problem with the time and resources that I have, it’s impossible. So the good news here is that God can meet us in every one of these emotions.

And one of the problems we sometimes have is that if I don’t handle a certain emotion well, I try to keep everybody else from feeling that emotion, because I don’t want to have to deal with it. And so a lot of us don’t allow people to be sad. We don’t allow them to feel their shame. We don’t allow them to feel despair or disgust.

And it’s probably because we don’t know how to get back to joy from that emotion. So we don’t want to see them going there because we assume they’re going to get stuck and I don’t know how to help them get back. And there’s a lot of us who cut people off instead of validating the emotion and being present with them in it.

And that’s an important lesson for us to learn that it’s okay for people to feel these things. And our response ought to be to meet them there and to be happy to be with them even as they’re feeling these things, to try and stay relationally present as they recover.

[09:39] Stephanie: Well, it reminds me of the very broadly used, make sure your mask is on in an airplane, your oxygen mask, make sure that’s on you first. If you don’t know how to handle it then you’re trying to shut it down in other people, you’ll be avoidant. So you learn, oh, that triggers that emotion in me and so I don’t do that. You might not think that cognizantly.

[10:05] Marcus: I even had this on radio interviews where the host would ask me a question and my answer was camping out on a low energy emotion a little too long. And they’re like, well, give us some hope here, you know?

[10:17] Stephanie: Yeah.

[10:18] Marcus: And I realize what’s happening is that we’ve got limited time and they don’t want to camp out on the negatives, you know, inject some hope. But I think a lot of us do that instinctively a lot. And we don’t realize that what we’re actually doing is not helping people recover, we’re just forcing them to shut down.

[10:37] Stephanie: And you are using a lot of lingo here that is from VCR. We’ve talked about this before but for people who might be joining us right now for the first time, do you want to remind us what VCR is?

[10:47] Marcus: Yeah. So VCR stands for validate, comfort, and recover. And so validate is what my right brain does. I connect with you and your emotion, I nonverbally connect with you and I’m in sync with what you’re feeling. I verbally give it a correct name and then I verbally identify correctly how big this is for you. Now, when I validate I don’t have to agree that you should be feeling this way. I don’t have to tell you you’re right to feel this way. I just have to recognize that this is in fact, how you feel. That’s validation.

And then comforting, it sounds like a right brain thing but it’s actually a left brain exercise. Because what you’re doing when you comfort is you’re making the problems more manageable. So it’s a problem solving function. And so the mistake most of us make is we problem solve first and we skip the validation.

And so the order is extremely important because right brain things have to happen before the left brain things. It’s just the order of the way the brain works. So we validate first and then we comfort. And if we do those things well then the person recovers. And we can even do this for ourselves. We can validate our own emotions and comfort ourselves so that we recover.

[11:54] Stephanie: What does it mean to recover?

[11:55] Marcus: So to recover means that I’m back within my window of tolerance which is a technical term, but it’s from Daniel Siegel. But the idea is I’m back within my capacity to handle the emotion, feel like myself, and do the next thing.

[12:08] Stephanie: So thank you for that. And going back to our low energy emotions. We talked about high energy and needing to soothe, quiet and calm. So how do you help yourself in low energy?

[12:27] Marcus: So with low energy emotions it’s almost the opposite. I’m trying to get some energy from what’s been sucked out of me. And so it helps me to think in these terms. I’m trying to get from the back of my brain to the front of my brain. I’m trying to get from the part of my brain that is sucking the life out of me back to the part of my brain that is my relational self.

And so it can help to practice some appreciation and it can help to connect to somebody. If they’re not available, if somebody’s not there to connect with you and help get back into the relational part of your brain, then practicing appreciation is important. And I will say that quieting can also be a part of this in the sense that I need a rhythm to this.

I’ve got to have some up and some down. I’ve got to establish some kind of a rhythm to this. So I would say the key in this one more than anything is the appreciation part. And something we haven’t talked much about either is the role of prayer. We’ve been focusing on the brain science. But I find that sometimes when we pray it’s a lot like storytelling and we are telling a story in our prayer.

And sometimes I find that my praying is deepening my anxiety because I’m telling God I’m scared about this or I don’t know. Or in my depression and I don’t know how I’m going to get out of this. I don’t see a solution to this and it’s okay. I could start there and pour out my heart to God. And I pour out my heart to God by being completely honest about how deep this goes for me and how much I’m feeling.

The problem comes when I just stop there. I don’t want to stop there unless it’s just all I got, in which case, God would rather have that than not. But then the next thing I want to do is change my focus. And that’s where I get into the, “Why so downcast Oh, my soul. I will yet put my hope in you.”

And so you move from there into reminding yourself of who God is, what God’s capable of and what’s true about God. The other tool in prayer is, again, what we call the Immanuel prayer process. But before there was such a thing as Immanuel prayer, people have been doing this for centuries – which is just listening prayer. Which is forming an attachment with God where the goal here really, in brain science terms, is to share a mutual mind state with him.

So talking to God and pouring out my heart and then changing my focus to, but I will yet put my trust in you. I will yet choose to believe that you’re going to work this out. I remember your grandfather, for example, when his first wife died he’d been married for one year and she got sick and just never recovered. They never were able to celebrate their first anniversary. He then moved to New York City from the midwest and he didn’t know anybody there. He was in seminary and he was all by himself.

He was all alone and he told me he used to pace his apartment every night and just say to himself again and again, I will choose to believe that God is good. I will choose to believe that God is good. And partly what he was doing was trying to keep his mind from going into the darkness and just staying there. So that story has always stuck with me. When you’re all alone and there isn’t anybody else to connect to it’s okay to pour out my heart to God. But at some point, I want to make that pivot and begin focusing on what’s true.

[16:02] Stephanie: Excellent. And yeah, a very meaningful story. I love my grandpa. Okay. now pulling myself out of grandpa’s story.

[16:10] Marcus: Yeah, that was a dark one, but yes.

[16:14] Stephanie: So we’ve talked about the fact that sometimes we call these the big six negative emotions, and sometimes we call them the big six protector emotions. So could you give us some examples for how some of these could be productive?

[16:32] Marcus: Yeah. So when I think about this, one of the first things that pops into my mind is that I read Tony Dungy’s autobiography, and he had a daughter who had a central nervous system problem. In some places I think it’s called leprosy. And this central nervous thing means that she didn’t feel pain. And so what would happen is for example, she could reach her hand into an oven that was on because she wanted the cookie that she saw when she was little. She could reach in and she would burn herself quite badly and feel no pain.

And so if you don’t feel pain you can actually do tremendous damage to yourself. And so emotional pain is the alarm system that God has given to us that we are about to do damage. We need to stop something, we need to redirect something, or this is going to end very badly. So each of these emotions is meant to trigger an alarm for us to help us realize that there’s something off, and I need to find a way back to joy and peace from where this has taken me.

[17:35] Stephanie: And will telling a joy story featuring one of these emotions look the same as anger and fear?

[17:43] Marcus: It does in the fact that it follows the STEP process. You still tell the setting like my dad’s story. In the setting he just moved to New York City and he was all alone. The trigger was that his wife had just died. He was in seminary and he’s dealing with deep attachment pain, deep sadness, and despair. I’ve lost the person who made me happy. So grief is this complex, multifaceted emotion. And so he was in this. And then his point was to remind himself of what was true, that he couldn’t let himself go into the darkness. And so it still follows that step process of setting, trigger, emotion, and then the point.

[18:31] Stephanie: Well, and then the rest of that story is that he did meet your mom, my grandma.

[18:37] Marcus: And it is a remarkable thing because the rest of the story is that after seminary, he came back to Fort Wayne Bible College and he taught Greek and missions. He was the dean of men underneath the dean of students. Well, the dean of students was a man named Elmer Newnschwander, who was married and had a four year old daughter and a brand new baby boy. And he was tragically struck by lightning out on a golf course.

So all of a sudden there was a widow on campus and then my dad who was a widower. And because he was a widower, he was in a unique position to connect. Well, they ended up getting married. She became my mom and your grandma. And so for 50 some years they were together. And most people don’t know my dad was ever married before that. But he was with my mom Eleanor for over 50 years.

[19:37] Stephanie: It just makes me think of the mercy of God.

[19:41] Marcus: He brought something good out of the bad.

[19:45] Stephanie: I wanted to touch on this so I’m glad you brought it up in grandpa’s story, which is attachment pain. Which is not one of the big six. Can you explain why?

[19:54] Marcus: Yeah, attachment pain is the deepest pain a human being can feel because it’s the deepest part of our brain system. The limbic system, the nervous system and all that are connected to the brain at the very deep level of my cravings center. And so if I have a craving for attachment and that attachment is impossible, then that is an incredibly deep pain. We call that attachment pain.

It’s not just sadness, it is the inability to connect when I desperately need connection and it’s dark. And that’s why a lot of poetry, a lot of love songs, and a lot of movies kind of center around this idea of attachment pain. In fact, I’ve been told that middle eastern romantic poems are not about how wonderful you are, it’s about how deep my despair is if I can’t have you, if I can’t be with you. And they’re all about attachment pain.

[20:57] Stephanie: Yeah. It is deep. Well, hey, we are coming up to the end of this episode. Before we get Dad’s final thoughts, I want to remind you about the 28 days to Joy challenge. Deeper Walk and THRIVEtoday developed this fun, free tool to help you build your joy. Visit 4habits.org, where you can sign up for free. And I hope you accept the challenge and have so much fun using it to build your joy capacity. So, my Father, any closing thoughts?

[21:25] Marcus: Well, and I would say one of the things that inspired this book, The Four Habits of Joy-Filled People, was Chris’s own journey. And a lot of people may not know the story that Chris met his wife when they were at a recovery kind of place, and she was literally on disability for depression and anxiety. People who know her today would never guess that it was in her past, you would never know. She actually teaches joy training. And the encouragement is that she got there by practicing and by doing exercises. Building things in her brain that hadn’t been there before by doing the work and doing the exercises. And now I think it’s just such an encouragement, right?

That change really is possible, that this kind of transformation really is possible. The calming, the appreciating, the storytelling, attacking toxic thinking, the building a rhythm, all these things work together to help us. And I find it incredibly encouraging that 30 days is not that big of a time in the scope of my life. Three months is not that big of a time in the scope of my life. If I put in the work on these things real transformation is possible.

[22:42] Stephanie: Huzzah, Huzzah. Thank you. Thank you all for joining us on the trail today. Deeper Walk exists to make heart-focused discipleship the norm for Christians everywhere. If you’d like to support this cause, you can become a Deeper Walk Trailblazer with your monthly donation of $25 or more. In the meantime, 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.