55: Pain Processing Pathway (Part 3)

[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 55. Today we are wrapping up our discussion about the joy elevator and the pain processing pathway.

Hello, Father.

[00:31] Marcus: Hello, Daughter. It’s going to be about pain today. No, actually we’re talking about processing pain, that’s a little bit different.

[00:39] Stephanie: The goal is to get our joy back, to get back to our true joy self. But hey, before we jump into that, do you know what day it is?

[00:50] Marcus: Remind me.

[00:53] Stephanie: I mean, I was a little vigorous with my exuberance over episode 55. This Monday, last year, we announced the podcast to the world. It is our one year anniversary.

[01:06] Marcus: That’s right. Because we released several of them at once so the numbers  aren’t exact, but podcast 55 is the one year anniversary. That’s pretty cool.

[01:18] Stephanie: It is.

[01:19] Marcus: This has been fun.

[01:20] Stephanie: It has been. I can’t believe it’s been a year in some ways and in other ways it’s like, wow, we’ve covered a lot. So yeah.

[01:27] Marcus: I’m probably out of things to say, but we’ll find out.

[01:31] Stephanie: How many times have we said, oh, well, we would need a different podcast to unpack that? Yeah, no, I think we’re okay.

[01:36] Marcus: I think we’re still scratching the surface on a lot of things.

[01:40] Stephanie: So today we are wrapping up an important topic. So we’re not going to spend a lot of time on the one year anniversary yet, but we have exciting plans for our listeners. We love hearing from you and we want our one year anniversary to be a celebration of the On the Trail community.

The theme of our 35th anniversary conference is going deeper together. That really is at the heart of our mission, to help heart focused discipleship become the norm for Christians everywhere. And we just wanted to draw on that community that is just so important to us. You are important to us.

So for our episode that comes out on July 24, 2023, if you’re listening to this we’ll celebrate with a Q & A session, and some gifts, so don’t miss it. I would love for you to contact me with your questions, and also with testimonies of how this podcast has helped you, so we can share with our whole community of listeners. It will be a fabulous celebration. I’m so excited for it. So I’ve created a Google form that you can find in my Monday emails if you are a Deeper Walk email subscriber. I will also have it linked on our Instagram and Facebook. If you would like for your question or your testimony to have a chance of us talking about it on the episode that releases on the 24th.

Fill out that Google form by the 18th if you want that chance. I look forward to hearing from you. All right, my Father, for the last two episodes we’ve been talking about how to get unstuck from various levels of pain. In order for suffering to keep from becoming traumatic, our brain needs to process the pain at all five levels of the pain processing pathway. So you have level one, attachment. Level two, assessment. Level three, attunement. Level four, action. Level five, narrative. So in this episode let’s review level four.

[03:43] Marcus: All right, I’m counting level four, right? I know I always have to start with attachment, assessment, attunement, action. So level four goes by so many different names, it’s confusing, right? Because it’s been called the command center. It’s been called the identity center. It’s been called the joy center. It’s been called the orbital prefrontal cortex, right? It’s been called the action center. We’ve called it a whole lot of things. You’ve probably thrown out some other terms for it too. So the idea is that a whole bunch of brain neuron kind of things connect right here at this point. It’s like the intersection of a whole lot of highways, if you will.

And so if we want our best self, our most relational self, our joy based self, to handle our problems, then we have to be functioning from this part of our brain. And so what happens is, if we don’t live out of this part of our brain that’s where we get what we call wearing a mask. Or being my false self or a pseudo self, or a poser, right? And again there’s a lot of different terms for these things but the idea is that I can be my true self or I can be a false self. My true self is always going to be who I am when I am living from this part of my brain. My false self, Dr. Wilder has come up with a new term for this recently, it’s called your “as if self.”

[05:15] Stephanie: Okay.

[05:15] Marcus: Right. So the “as if self” is the idea of how I live, as if I were somebody else that I’m not. In other words, I create a persona that I think I need in order to handle the problem that’s in front of me. And so when this takes place this can happen in a whole wide variety of ways. And it is a big and long topic, so we’ll try to unpack it a little bit today, okay. But we’re really talking about the true self versus the false self.

[05:47] Stephanie: Awesome. Now, do you want to keep talking about the true self? We’ve been focusing a little bit on when you are feeling stuck at this level and what the solution is. Do you want to tackle that first? If you’re feeling stuck at this level, what’s the solution to getting unstuck?

[06:06] Marcus: Yeah, if I am stuck at this level sometimes you need to be reminded of who you are. And you need to be kind of shown again what it’s like you to do. My favorite kind of picture of this is from Lion King. And Simba has lost himself, he’s lost his true self. He is now off with his buddies in the jungle and they are living “hakuna matata.” He’s doing his best to avoid fulfilling his calling. And in the vision that he has the line is, “You’ve forgotten who you are.”  “Remember who you are.” And then he echoes it over and over and over again as Mufasa fades into the sky. One of the interventions at this point is to remind people who they are and say, you know what, you’re not really acting like yourself right now. I know you, this isn’t you.

So that’s one of the interventions here is just reminding people that it’s not really like you to handle it like this. I’ve had times when I’ve gotten overwhelmed and handled things with more anger than I wanted. Or I’ve handled things with more disgust than I wanted or something. And I’ve had to apologize later and said, I’m sorry, I wasn’t being my best self. That was not who I wanted to be, I apologize.

And so this can work both directions but the intervention there is usually the reminder. And then if you take it to the next level if somebody’s still trying to discover who they are, then you have to show them how to do it. For example, when I was ten, I remember I was known for my temper tantrums. I was the youngest in the family and I was famous for my temper tantrums. In fact, I remember my parents actually introducing me as the kid with the temper issues.

So right between age ten and twelve though I realized that they just stopped. I did not have this anymore. And I was trying to think back on what made the change. And part of what made the change was I remember my oldest sister who’s about eleven years older than me, actually walking me through taking a deep breath, and counting to ten. And changing the thoughts in my head, kind of walking me through it, and showing me how to do this. In a sense, what she was doing was showing me how to act like myself in a situation and not turn into a different person.

And so we practiced a few times, you know, let’s take a deep breath, okay, count to ten. And then ask yourself, how is it like me to handle this emotion as opposed to just giving into it? And so that’s kind of what we’re talking about. You can intervene by reminding people who they are. You can also help train this part of people by showing them what it looks like to act like themselves.

[09:15] Stephanie: Awesome. So what if somebody is in their “as if self”, what does that look like to intervene? Or is it just something you need to work on in yourself?

[09:24] Marcus: So that’s a little more tricky. If I’ve gone into my “as if self”, the first intervention is to try to remind people, is that really who you want to be in this situation? It may be doing it as a question as opposed to a confrontation, like, you are being your “as if self,” you are being a bad person. It is more of, is this really who you want to be right now? And it doesn’t feel like, or it doesn’t seem like you’re really acting like the person I’ve come to know right now. Like something has changed about you. What you’re doing though is you’re appealing to their identity.

And you’re not just saying, you’re misbehaving, you’re doing this badly, you’re a bad person, right? What you’re doing is reminding them of the person they want to be and the person that they usually are. And so that’s more of a reminder to help people move from their “as if self” or their false self, and back to their true self.

So to continue through this idea of the false self using myself as an example, there’s angry Marcus, and there’s scared Marcus. There’s disgusted Marcus. Living for my true self doesn’t mean that I don’t have those emotions. It means that I don’t adopt a totally different value system because I have those emotions. If I go from being relational me to disgusted me, and I give myself permission to treat you badly, then I am violating the core principles by which I usually live. That’s what I mean by I have turned into a different person. My whole value system has shifted and what I think is okay and what I think is appropriate.

So part of that means that my worldview has literally changed. The values that flow out of that have changed. And so I’m not acting like myself anymore. I may as well be a different person. And that’s what we’re trying to avoid. We don’t want to be the sort of person who others will have to walk on eggshells around because they never know when we’re going to adopt a completely different value system, and treat them totally differently.

[11:36] Stephanie: So what would be a good way to monitor that in your own self? You know, you’re not confronting somebody else and saying, hey, this isn’t how you should act. But if you notice and recognize you’re going there or that you are there, what’s a good way to get out of it?

[11:50] Marcus: So when I notice that I’m going into my alternate self, the first thing I do is  recognize the pattern. For instance, if I start to feel disgust towards somebody, I’ll recognize the thought patterns in my head. Because they’re always the same when I start going into that place in my head. Whereas in the past, I would go into a justification of my thoughts and how disgusted I was.

Now I catch myself going, wait a second, you are slipping into disgust right now. You have turned into this other person, so I need a break. And that break can be as little as breaking eye contact and looking away. I break eye contact and I look away to kind of shut down the relational part of my brain and go into the problem solving part of my brain.

I try to figure out, okay, what’s the problem I need to solve right now? Is it you or is it me? And I go, actually, I’m the problem that needs solved right now. So let me go in here and try to figure this out. And go, okay, the problem is that I’m going into my disgust mode and I recognize this pattern.

Alright, what have I learned to do? Okay, I’ve got to find some curiosity. I got to find some appreciation. I got to be kind. Once I can find that now I can go back to the relational side of my brain. I can go, okay, now we can resume eye contact. I remember what I appreciate about you. I can be kind, and I’ve restored my curiosity. So that’s kind of an example of how I would check myself if I find that I’ve gone into that.

[13:30] Stephanie: So it could be that the situation does warrant disgust but you’re still trying to make sure that you aren’t handling it in a bad way. And so it’s like putting the oxygen mask on yourself first, because you still have to deal with acting like yourself in a situation. So, yeah, there’s that. Oh, I was just gonna say what you just spelled off is C.A.K.E., and we’ve talked about that before.

[13:58] Marcus: Yeah, we’ve talked quite a bit.

[14:00] Stephanie: Yes. So you can find that in the Four Habits of Joy-Filled Marriages.

[14:04] Marcus: Yeah, it’s in several books right now. I will apologize because C.A.K.E. actually means different things in different books.

[14:11] Stephanie: Well, it’s eye contact or it’s envelope conversations.

[14:15] Marcus: Yeah. And so I separated out envelope conversations and made it its own thing. So in the first couple of books that’s what’s in there. And then from the second book on “E”, it is always eye contact. Because what happens is if I don’t catch myself doing this and if I’m starting to feel disgust with somebody, I am already feeling the disgust. The question here is, can I stay relational?  This is like Rare Leadership.

Can I remain relational? And can I act like myself, can I return to joy? Can I help them return to joy, even though I have felt this disgust? If I can’t and my immaturity takes over then what happens is I don’t act like myself. I don’t remain relational. I don’t return to joy. I don’t help them return to joy. I just live in disgust. And so that’s what we’re talking about here. I don’t want to lose control of who I am simply because a big emotion comes up.

[15:12] Stephanie: Very good. All right, any more on level four or are you ready for level five?

[15:17] Marcus: Well, I did want to say a little bit about this false self idea. The false self is largely who I think I need to be in order to protect myself or who I need to be in order to win. And that’s what tends to be thought of as enemy mode, right? It’s what we tend to think of as I’m in the part of my brain that is now not treating you as a person, but treating you as a problem. And so the false self will always come out of that. Now, one of the problems with wearing a mask is that it works, right? And it does what I need to do or I wouldn’t do it all the time.

For example, have you ever pretended to be somebody you weren’t in order to get someone to like you? If I do and that works I actually have a problem because now the person they’re attracted to isn’t the real me. It’s somebody I’ve been pretending to be in order for them to like me.

So now they like the mask, they don’t like me. And that’s one of the reasons why this is a problem. And I go on all kinds of reasons why the false self gets us in trouble. And one of them is that it does work. And because it works, it can get us a short term win but it’s not going to get us a long term where we want to go. And in the end if we value relationships more than winning then that’s not a good solution.

[16:43] Stephanie: Indeed, indeed. Well, we probably will come back to that again at some point because it sounds like there’s lots to talk about there.

[16:49] Marcus: No, there is. I mean, I’ve got a whole session on this in our Foundations course. So you may recall Bill Gillam. Bill Gillam wrote Lifetime Guarantee, and he was an exchange life teacher. That was the first person who kind of made walking in the spirit make sense to me. And one of the things that he says is that we all have a flesh identity and we have a spirit identity. And my flesh identity is always like my false self. And my false self is going to be anchored in a couple of things. I just like the way he explains it that we learn in our society, particularly to take our identities from our looks, our personality or our achievement. So a lot of us learn that if we’re good looking enough, all we have to do is show up and people are going to accept us.

And I remember actually when you were little going to this church and we were there with another couple, and the lady weighed like 350 pounds. And you were this adorable little girl and you liked to twirl in your skirt and all, and Brenda and I were both young. And so the contrast between the couple we were with and us was pretty vivid. And we just noticed, (it was hard to miss) that everybody in the church wanted to talk to us and nobody wanted to talk to them.

Because we just looked like the kind of people they wanted in the church. Whereas this other couple they weren’t quite sure what to do because it was like, eh, you know, I don’t know if they’re our sort of people? So there’s a lot of folks out there who’ve lived with that kind of rejection all their life. They learned pretty early on that I can just show up, and because I’m so beautiful, people are going to say, oh, we want you to be part of our group.

And so when looks don’t work in American culture what we tend to turn to next is performance. And by performance we mean that I put on an act. I try to be funny. I try to be witty. A lot of comedians do this. They learned in school that it was a way to get people’s attention so people will let them be in the group, because that’s how they add value to the group. Oh, he’s funny. She’s funny, she’s witty. We like having them around, so they work on their personality.

The third way is achievement and that is, I’m the captain of the basketball team. I’m the captain of the cheerleading squad. I have achieved something really significant enough that gives me enough status that people will want me in the group. So in the world system, the way I look at it is that the devil gives us an identity using the world and the flesh. So the devil, the world, the flesh. So the devil says, here’s your identity, I’m going to use the world to give you an identity based on your flesh.

And that means most of us tend to think of our identity as our looks, our personality and our achievement. And that’s actually our worldly identity. It’s the false identity. It’s the devil’s identity. The true identity, our spiritual identity, is what God sees us as. And it’s not who we are when we’re pretending to be something. It’s who we are when we’re living with joy.

And so when you bring this living with joy component together with your identity in Christ component, you get this really powerful one two punch, that gives us a very stable, healthy identity out of which to live. So kind of wanted to wrap that in there  as we’re talking about this level four stuff.

[20:26] Stephanie: Oh, that’s so important and so good. And I also. I just wanted to jump in and say the Foundation course that you mentioned, people can find that for free. It’s eight sessions for free. It’s excellent. And that is at deeperwalk.com. I’m trying to think of the easiest way to get to it because you can get to it from multiple places.

[20:48] Marcus: You can get it through our app, you can get it through the website. It may even be on YouTube. But yeah, you can get to it in a variety of places.

[20:54] Stephanie: Yep. That’s very good. Well, how much do you have to say about level five? Or should we split that into another episode?

[21:01] Marcus: It probably needs its own episode. But level five, essentially, is where we move from the joy elevator on the right side of our brain over to the left side of our brain, and we finally get to beliefs. And I say finally get to beliefs because, you know I grew up thinking that beliefs were the source of all of our emotions. That handling our emotions was basically about changing what we believed. And if I just change what I believe then everything will fix itself.

What I have learned is that there’s a whole engine in the brain that we’ve spent the last several episodes talking about, that is affecting my emotions before my beliefs ever get activated. And so the narrative engine is very important. The cognitive engine and all the stuff going over here. Level five is what we mean by the thinking part of my brain that does the problem solving, does the analysis, puts things into words. It tries to come up with the simplest possible explanation for what’s going on. So there’s a whole lot that we can say about that, but honestly we…….

[21:57] Stephanie: Probably need another episode.

[21:59] Marcus: Another episode.

[22:00] Stephanie: Perfect. We will do that then. So I think maybe it would be helpful if we come back around to the joy elevator and the pain processing pathway. And just what are their connections there, to clarify?

[22:17] Marcus: So, I would start here, our brains have two sides, right hemisphere and left hemisphere. The two mirror each other. There’s a singlet on both sides. There’s an amygdala on both sides. They parallel each other but they operate kind of like a Mac and a PC. So the right hemisphere is the part of our brain that we call the joy elevator and we call it that because it is an attachment system. In his book, The Joy Switch, Chris Coursey calls it the relational circuit, not to be confused with relational circuits, plural. He’s talking about the fact that there is a loop here that is constantly looping six times per second in our brain.

And that’s the joy elevator, it’s going up and down six times per second. And what’s happening with that joy elevator is that it is running in the background kind of like radar all of the time. And we don’t think about it the same way that we usually don’t think about our breathing.

We usually don’t think about how we’re walking or riding a bike, that sort of thing. This stuff just kind of runs in the background. And so we have to train it just like we train ourselves to ride a bike well. Or learning how to play ping pong really well. You’re not really thinking about what you’re doing, you’re just reacting. In the same way if I train this joy elevator well, then what happens is, I will handle a lot of my emotions quickly and instinctively before I ever get to the part of my brain that thinks about it.

And that’s our goal. We want to develop really strong habits on that joy elevator so that by the time the left brain gets there and starts thinking about things, I’ve already resolved a lot of my emotional issues. I’m well on the way to recovery already.

[24:09] Stephanie: Yes, well functioning joy elevator and pain processing pathways.

[24:13] Marcus: Yeah, and then the connection to the pain processing pathway is basically that just as there are four floors on the joy elevator, then the narrative engine on the left side of the brain, that’s the five levels. And those are the five levels of the pain processing pathway.

And again, we’re not talking about physical pain here. I think I got an email somewhere saying, well, does this work for physical pain? The answer is no. This is all about emotional pain. But physical pain can create emotional pain, right? My physical pain can make me angry. My physical pain can make me scared. My physical pain can make me depressed, because I’m like, is this ever going to end?

And so it’s the emotions that are caused by physical pain that needs to be managed, especially for people who struggle with chronic pain. It’s the emotions that it’s generated that is one of the bigger things that we have to deal with. So this helps. And that’s why when we talk about the pain processing pathway, we’re talking about what is the proper intervention at all five levels.

And it makes sense in the narrative top part there, that it’s speaking. It’s a narrative. It’s correcting our beliefs at some level, and then correcting our identity is the next level down and so on. We go on down to the very bottom where we just need somebody to be with us.

[25:27] Stephanie: Thank you. Thank you for explaining that all together. I think we did that in the first episode of this little series, but we are then at the end of our episode. And so before I get your final thoughts, I just want to remind everyone to get me your questions for our anniversary episode on the 24th. I need your questions by July 18, 2023.

I’ll post the Google form link on Deeper Walk’s Instagram, and Facebook, and I will include it in my Monday emails. If you are a Deeper Walk email subscriber you should get those. I’m excited to hear from you and huzzah! All right, Father, final thoughts.

[26:07] Marcus: So, in talking about how we recover from emotions, I don’t want to make it sound like it’s just super easy to get over hard things. The main point I’m trying to make is that there is hardware in our brains that needs to be developed that will make this easier. The less developed this hardware in our brain is, the harder and slower and more painful it’s going to be to get through our emotions.

The more we work on developing this joy elevator in our brains, the more we work on the skills that build that, that is going to make it easier. It doesn’t mean I’m not going to have the big emotions and it doesn’t mean I’m not going to have to go through it. But I will be in a better position to go through it if that is functioning well and that is well developed. So I just want to make sure that’s clear. I’m not saying, hey, do a few of these things and this will be easy.

[26:56] Stephanie: Right.

[26:56] Marcus: But if you don’t have this well done then this could drag on for a long time and it could be really painful.

[27:03] Stephanie: Yeah. This is very practical and very helpful. So thank you for talking about it Dad. 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.

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