54: Pain Processing Pathway (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. Season 1, episode 54. Today we are continuing our discussion about the joy elevator and the pain processing pathway.

Hello, Father.

[00:32] Marcus: Hello, Daughter.

[00:33] Stephanie: It is Independence Day week in the United States of America and you know what people like to celebrate with, fireworks. Grace to the dogs. But I love how fireworks bring a community together. I was just reflecting on how so many holidays are things you do internally, even if you have a few friends over for a barbecue or something, which often happens for 4th of July. This is one of those unique holidays that really brings everybody together, your friends, family, and complete strangers, everybody comes out and it’s really cool.

It’s a call for a people-group to come together and remember who we are. It’s intergenerational and it’s scalable from intimate friends to complete strangers. Yeah, I’ve just been reflecting on that and being grateful for that sort of festivity. And I will also say on a more intimate level, one of the things I always think about when I think about the 4th of July, is how you always find a way to take mom to like one of the highest hills you can find in the area so she can see all the fireworks all around. And how much she loves that, it delights me.

[01:52] Marcus: Nobody enjoys fireworks quite as much as your mom.

[01:55] Stephanie: She loves them.

[01:56] Marcus: It’s an easy win on my part, let’s go see fireworks.

[02:00] Stephanie: Yes, she loves them and she loves sharing them. You do a really good job with that. So do you have a favorite firework style?

[02:11] Marcus: Style? Yeah, I tend to like the blue and gold ones that crackle as they fall down. I don’t know what they’re called, but yeah, those are my favorites. I remember as a kid liking the ones that fell down like a waterfall kind of thing.

[02:31] Stephanie: Yeah, it’s like the willow tree, the golden willow tree. Those are my favorite.

[02:34] Marcus: Yeah. And also remember we had a whole history where it felt like there was always a storm in the distance on the 4th of July.

[02:44] Stephanie: Oh yeah, they’re God’s fireworks, it’s tradition.

[02:47] Marcus: Yeah, God’s fireworks versus man’s fireworks. We’d have a little competition. There’s lightning flashing in the distance and there’s fireworks going off here. Those were the coolest ones.

[02:55] Stephanie: Yes, yes. Now that you mentioned that, it is a strong, core, fireworks, 4th of July memory for me is. Yeah, it did feel like every year.

[03:02] Marcus: Yeah, there was a string of years there where that happened.

[03:05] Stephanie: Yeah. I also remember going to the symphony on the prairie one time. They ended one of the songs with a ginormous. I was a child, so it probably wasn’t as big as I thought, but I felt like the fireworks took up the entire sky. It was crazy. But anyway, there we go.

[03:21] Marcus: Happy memories.

[03:22] Stephanie: Building some joy. So to turn back to our last episode, we started a very important and deep conversation about brain science and pain processing pathways. I’ve heard you and Jim Wilder make the profound statement that suffering becomes trauma when we feel alone in it. In order for suffering to keep from becoming traumatic, our brains need to process the pain at all five levels of the pain processing pathway. So level one, attachment. Level two, assessment. Level three, attunement. Level four, action. And level five, narrative. Or if you want another “A”,  I think you’ve said articulation. And in the last episode, we started talking about this pathway and how to meet someone’s pain at each level, and we made it through level one.

[04:16] Marcus: Huzzah!

[04:19] Stephanie: So let’s see how far we get in this episode.

[04:21] Marcus: I am a little relieved. When you said we were going to continue I thought we were going to talk more about the girl who dumped me. Okay. All right, good we are talking about the brain.

[04:30] Stephanie:  Do you need to go back and finish processing that pain?

[04:32] Marcus: I think we’re good.

[04:35] Stephanie: But yeah. Okay, so for real, is there anything else that you wanted to say on level one that we didn’t get to because we kind of had to just cut it off?

[04:42] Marcus: You know, it helps me to think that at the attachment level is where the addiction is forming. Because it also helps us understand that with addiction recovery, a large part of that has to do with forming attachments. Relationally joyful attachments to take the place of those other ones. And that’s why it’s so hard to just say no. You actually have to have a replacement attachment that’s bringing real joy as a significant part of whatever addiction recovery method you use. So that helps me think about it too.

[05:13] Stephanie: Yeah, no, that’s key. All right, level two, the assessment. We spent some time talking about this just a few episodes ago. Level two is our amygdala. The task of level two is assessment. It’s to evaluate the safety of a situation. So do you want to talk to us a little bit more about that?

[05:35] Marcus: Yeah. So this is really the level that controls our joy switch, as Chris Coursey would call it. And so we talk about having a switch on the side of our brain that allows us access to our high level emotions. If our switch goes off it is almost always because of what happens here. We did a conference on DID several years ago and Jim Wilder was a presenter, and I was a presenter. We had Alaine Pakkala and some others. Dan Rumberger was there. But I remember Jim saying that one of the differences between a buried memory and one that we can recall is how deep down in the brain I got triggered. And how deep down the triggering was, that shut things off. And so if it makes it up to level three I can usually recall the memory. If it got buried below, down at levels one and two, then oftentimes I won’t remember it.

So that can apply to all kinds of things because there’s people who don’t remember traumatic things that happened to them. And it’s usually because in the pain processing pathway, part of that got shut down right at level two and did make it up to level three. That’s more of a curiosity to me.

I don’t know how relevant it is to everyday life, but for some people it’s extremely relevant, and it helped me to think about that. And we’ve already talked quite a bit about taming the amygdala and the soothing things we can do to help with that. But again, that is our fight and flight center. That’s largely what’s happening there.

[07:09] Stephanie: So will you give just quickly, what is the solution?

[07:13] Marcus: Yeah, the word we use here is soothe. So the intervention is, I want to do something to soothe that. That’s where we use the best practices for calming or quieting. And so it’s breathing, deep breathing, and getting control of my central nervous system. And it’s exaggerating emotions and then quieting them again. It’s soothing by kind of rubbing out the tension from different muscle groups, tightening them and relaxing them. And all those things that we do.

It can also be things that you do to shock your body, like take a cold shower or splash cold water on your face. Take a hot bath and have candles. Some people like a weighted blanket. That just is soothing to them and helps them to quiet or calm. It can even be like, for us, we use a fan in the background when going to sleep. Sometimes just having that sound is enough to trigger something for us, it’s time to quiet and sleep.

[08:13] Stephanie: Thank you. All right, level three. Moving on up the elevator. The task of level three is attunement. It’s seeking to understand each other’s feelings. And when we are stuck feeling and being overwhelmed with emotions, maybe I just want to be understood. Not on a narrative level, but on an attunement level.

[08:37] Marcus: So, at level three, let me describe this one and camp out here for just a little bit. In our book, Rare Leadership in the Workplace, Dr. Wilder and I describe this as the brain’s radar. It is something that’s constantly running in the background. It will alert your brain on what it should focus on. So, a big part of leadership is that intuitive sense of this is what needs our focus right now. And you can’t really put it into words why that needs our focus. It’s not always metric driven. Sometimes it’s just kind of this gut feeling that this needs our attention.

And so there are obvious things that happen with this. When I’m in a room and because my radar is going, all of a sudden I see something flash on the side. I realize, oh, a mouse just ran along the side of the wall, maybe it’s time to go get a cat? That’s happened before. What’s happening is my focus wasn’t there, but because the radar was running in the background it had got my attention, and said, no, give that your focus right now. And this happens a lot so you can think about this part of my brain as that radar system. There’s a really good YouTube video on this. I’m trying to remember the guy’s name. I think it’s Iain McGilchrist, he is a Scottish neuroscientist. He’s got this delightful Scottish accent.

And he’s teaching behind one of those cartoon things that draws itself out while he’s talking. So there’s constantly something new coming onto the screen. But one of the stories he tells in this presentation is of a bird that is trying to be very focused on pecking seeds from among pebbles. And so that’s a high focus job. Well, the left hemisphere of the brain is what excels at focus.

The right hemisphere of the brain, particularly this level three, is what is telling my left brain where to focus. Now, if you’ve ever watched a bird do this, you’ll notice that birds will peck, peck, peck, and then they’ll look. They’ll peck and then lift their heads and look around from right to left, and then they go back to pecking. And then they’re up and looking around.

So a bird brain, right, is stereotypically, because it is tiny. They can’t do both processes simultaneously as easily as us. So you actually get to watch them shifting from being right brain oriented, looking around to being left brain oriented focusing. But when you think about it, he’s got to have a high level of focus to make sure he’s getting seeds and not pebbles at the same time. And he has to be aware of the surroundings. Like, do I have family members nearby who need my help? Is there a predator nearby that may want to eat me?

You know, that radar has to be constantly going in the background. So this part of my system is also the part that allows me to read body language. So leaving aside this bird analogy for a second, the other thing that happens at this level that you may have heard in Life Model circles is mutual mind. So a mutual mind is happening when my level three and your level three are attuning to each other.

And so as I look at you right now and you look at me, right? We’re reading each other’s body language. It’s not at the level of conscious thought. I’m not putting it into words. I’m not trying to analyze what’s going on, but I will have feelings. I will have intuition about where this is going. And I can either read you correctly or I can misread you. You can read me correctly or misread me.

I might look at you and go, oh, she’s mad at me. It’s like, oh, no, she’s just hungry. Or maybe you can misread people, but you can actually carry on full conversations this way, right? Just by my singular level three and your level three being in sync, we can have full conversations. If there’s a third person in the room, we can communicate a whole lot to one another about what we think about that third person.

And so that’s what we mean by mutual mind. We are at this moment in sync with one another. We are attuned with one another. We are on the same page and we can communicate. I might even be able to communicate to you nonverbally this way. Leave the room right now or go shut that door, or go do something. There’s a whole lot you can communicate. So one of the things they do at Thrive training, for example, ThriveToday, is nonverbal stories. And one of the reasons they do the nonverbal stories is they are strengthening this part of the brain and its ability to read people, to sync with people and to enter into that mutual mind state.

[13:26] Stephanie: You know what this reminds me of is that I had a friend in undergrad and we were really good at mutual mind. We spent lots of time together and she was just delighted that I seemed to be able to read her mind. And we would be sitting in a group of people talking and she literally would stop every now and then so that I could finish her sentence, or add to the story, or whatever. Because we could just tell that we both knew what was going on. We both were on the same page, we were in sync, and we knew what the other person was probably thinking. We could read each other’s body language, and we knew the context.

And what was interesting was because of studying abroad and different things we spent almost a year apart. I noticed a distinct difference where we hadn’t been in that close relationship anymore and doing all this. And there was one time when she stopped expecting me to jump right in, and I was like, I’m not there. I didn’t have that same attunement anymore because we hadn’t been spending all that time together where we could read each other really well anymore. But there’s an intimacy and a friendship that can happen too with mutual mind.

[14:44] Marcus: No, it’s a very important function in our human experience because you hear people all the time say, 90% of communication is nonverbal. Well, that’s largely happening here at this level three attunement level. This is also where we start getting into the idea of listening prayer. And so in my book, A Deeper Walk, when we talk about listening prayers, there’s two kinds.

There’s right brain listening prayer and left brain listening prayer. So the left brain part is kind of easy because God sort of overrides the system and just talks to you. And it’s mostly at that point it is a matter of recognizing that these words in my head are coming from God, although he can make it clearer than that. He can give visions, dreams, send angels, and all kinds of stuff that happens like that in the Bible.

But there is something like a mutual mind state with God in which it is a nonverbal communication in which we are simply in sync with his spirit. And so whereas we can’t read God’s body language because he’s invisible, there is still this inner sense that you get that we’re on the same page here. That is reflected largely in the sense of peace, that I have a sense of peace about what’s going on here. That I feel like, yeah, this is right.

I may have a sense that something hard is correct, but there’s still a sense of peace that this is what God is asking me to do. And so in that mutual mind state with God, it is often after I’ve been in that mutual mind state that I can then put into words what was going on. But they’re not words at the time that it happens.

Same thing like you and I if we share mutual mind together. Afterwards I could put into words kind of what was going on, but at the time you’re just experiencing it. And that’s kind of what walking with God is like at that level. You’re experiencing a mutual mind with him and you’re just sort of experiencing a sense of where he’s taking you with things, and what is bringing you a sense of clarity and peace. And then later you can often put it into words. That’s what we mean by mutual mind and all of that is happening at level three. And it’s why the things that we do to build this part of our brain helps us to be more relationally engaged with other people.

[17:08] Stephanie: Mm hmm. If I am feeling stuck or somebody else is feeling stuck at this level, what are the interventions here?

[17:16] Marcus: So there are some exercise interventions that you can do. I think we called this the share level.

[17:27] Stephanie: Support.

[17:28] Marcus: Share, support. In Building Bounce we call it support. So the idea is to let me support you in doing this. Let me come alongside you and help you do this as opposed to let me show you how to do it, or just tell you how to do it. And so one of the things that we do for example, is you can grow this through charades. These nonverbal stories and things like this as a way of growing your ability to get in sync with people. You can do this through eye contact. And you’re specifically trying to be left eye to left eye. Brilliant. Yeah, exactly.

[18:05] Stephanie: We’re not in video right now.

[18:07] Marcus: But it’s like, if you’re going left eye to left eye, what’s happening is the most intimate thing. Because the right hemisphere of my brain that remembers who I am is controlling my left eye because it flips like that. And so that is where we have the greatest connection. And so if I can share joy at that level with somebody then that helps us strengthen a whole lot of things that are functioning in my brain.

Again, I go back to the Thrive Training because they actually have developed exercises to help strengthen this part of brain function. But in general what we’re talking about is that I do this by supporting you and sharing experiences with you that help this part of my brain to grow. I don’t think this part of the brain can grow apart from relational experience. I need to have somebody else there practicing, for this part of my brain to grow. Which is why you can’t just go to a counselor all the time and get it.

[19:09] Stephanie: All right, so are we moving up the elevator?

[19:11] Marcus: Let’s move up.

[19:12] Stephanie: Level four.

[19:13] Marcus: Yeah, level four. Level four is that right orbital prefrontal cortex. I just like saying that. I practiced a long time to be able to rattle that off. But it’s the right hemisphere. Orbital means behind the eye. Eye is orb. Prefrontal is in the front part of the brain. And it’s the cortex, it’s this outer layer. So the idea here is that this part of my brain right behind my right ear is what we call the joy center. It’s also my identity center. I’ve always loved the fact that joy and identity are so intimately connected the way God designed our brain.

Again, this is the part of the brain that we want to be in control of things. Because when I’m functioning from this level of my brain I will act the most like myself. I’ll be the most relational. I’ll be the most engaged. I’m gonna do my best thinking, my best problem solving. I’m gonna do my best analysis work.

And when this part of my brain is in charge you get my best self. And so that’s the goal, to regulate our emotions in such a way that I keep this part of my brain engaged. So the stronger that this part of my brain develops through joy, through all kinds of joyful connections, through the years, and through a collection of memories that tell me this is who I am. The more consistent and organized my identity is then this part of my brain can actually regulate things that are sent up to me from the amygdala.

So in other words the amygdala can get triggered and send scary messages up the line. But if I have a strong enough and well developed fourth floor here that floor can say, you know what, that’s okay. I know how it’s like me to act when this happens. This doesn’t have to be overwhelming. Let’s all calm down. Let’s do some soothing and some breathing. We’ll be fine. And now this is what we’re going to do.

And so it’s possible for this part of my brain to stay in charge even when it gets these signals. And that’s kind of what we mean by maturity, right? I know that I have developed my maturity when I am able to keep this part of my brain in control, and in charge even when I’m getting these impulse things sent up from my amygdala, and telling me that I’m in a bad situation or in a scary situation.

So one of the ways we do this is that we have to grow this through joy workouts, which are always relational. As I am developing the ability to learn and my brain is learning, how is it like me to act when this happens? How do I not turn into somebody else when this happens? How do I grow such a strong core identity that I’m not constantly flipping, becoming a different person every time I feel an upsetting emotion?

[22:16] Stephanie: On a basic level I’m thinking about a chart that is in the Journey groups curriculum, but I think it’s based off of a chart in Chris Coursey’s book, Transforming Fellowship. It just goes through each task of the levels and then what you’re feeling if you’re stuck at each. And then what the solution is or the intervention. And here, the task of level four is action or responding to a situation. And when you’re feeling stuck you might be feeling inadequate or like, I don’t know what to do. Which solution would be engaging the mirror neurons and having an example showing you what to do. So could you talk more about the intervention there?

[23:10] Marcus: Yeah. If I’m not acting like myself or if I’m with somebody who isn’t acting like themselves, then what I kind of want to do is hold a little bit of a mirror up to them. So try to activate their mirror neurons and get a picture of what they’re actually doing. And so this is where a healthy shame message comes in. Like, hey, it doesn’t feel like you’re acting like yourself right now. It seems like this doesn’t feel like you. And so when I say a healthy shame message, I’m not trying to generate a toxic reaction from them.

I’m trying to call their attention to the fact that they are not acting like themselves right now. So how I do that could look a lot of different ways. Like dads are famous for being able to just give a look. That look is communicating, hey, you’re not really acting like yourself right now. And we handle this in a more relational way. Moms are famous for looks like that too. But I think that we have this idea that that is what I’m ultimately trying to do.

[24:15] Stephanie: I’m gonna say that description is a little bit of attunement.

[24:18] Marcus: It is attunement. But it is attunement in the sense of it’s not stopping at me attuning to you. It’s me taking it to the next step and showing you what this looks like. And so I may be reminding you of what it would look like to act like yourself here. And so I might do that by modeling it. I might do that by reminding you of it. But at some level,  I am trying to help you get back to functioning at that level of your operating system. So that is a key part of the solution.

[24:53] Stephanie: All right, so we could go up to level five right now, or we could take one more episode to do level five and wrap things up.

[25:01] Marcus: Yeah, there’s some more things we probably should hit on this one anyway.

[25:08] Stephanie: So do you want to give some final thoughts for this episode and go on and continue the discussion next time? That sounds good.

[25:15] Marcus: I had a final thought and I lost it.

[25:16] Stephanie: Okay, well, let me pause then by just saying if people want to find out more about joy elevators and the pain processing pathway, you talk about them in Rare Leadership and Building Bounce. And again, I recommend Journey groups curriculum, it’s written by Amy Hamilton Brown. It’s an excellent small group curriculum that not only teaches a wealth of information that draws from Deeper Walk, Life Model Works, Thrive Today and more.

It really encourages practice, which is how transformation happens. And there are two levels, two books, and both talk about the joy elevator. But Journey group level two has a whole unit that goes through each stage of the joy elevator and explains the task, its feeling, and its need. So I really encourage people to check that out. So, any final thoughts, Father?

[26:06] Marcus: Yeah, I think Dr. Wilder calls this level the Captain a lot of the time and for good reason. Like I’ve said many times, this is the part of the brain that I want in charge because part of my brain can grow for as long as I live. And it grows with the experience of joy. It collects all the memories of how it’s like me to act when these things happen. And so the encouraging thing here is that this is a part of my brain that grows with appreciation. It grows with relational interaction. It’s constantly updating and constantly expanding. And so the good news here is that wherever you’re at right now, that has the ability to grow.

One last thing too, as I think about this, what’s really helped me to think about this is the idea of the ring in the brain of the infant. And when an infant is born they have no ability to act like themselves with the various emotions that they feel. And so an infant will literally, the brain will act like a totally different person with every emotion that they feel.

But there is like this ring around their identity center that is gradually connecting to each emotion that they can feel, and then connecting it to their identity center. And it helps me to think about how an infant has to learn how to feel all the various emotions without turning into a different person. The more successful the infants and toddlers are in doing this, the more organized a personality they’re going to have, more integrated and fully functional.

They are less likely to turn into somebody else when they feel these upsetting emotions. So if I find that I am 62 and still turning into a different person when I feel an emotion, it means that those parts of my brain are still not developed. That means I’m going to need to do some work to focus on that.

So that’s where I practice appreciation. It’s where I do storytelling. It’s where I am actively working on collecting stories about how to act like myself when I feel that emotion and building those skills. So that ring picture kind of helped me. I picture it like a ring with strings attached to all the various different emotions. And that if I do this well, then no matter what emotion I feel, they’ll all have a pathway back to my core identity so that I keep acting like myself.

[28:41] Stephanie: Thank you. This is deep and helpful and wow. And it’s always a pleasure to talk to you. So thanks. And hey, 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.

And 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.