56: Pain Processing Pathway (Part 4)

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

Hello, Father.

[00:31] Marcus: Hello, Daughter.

[00:32] Stephanie:  Hey, you know, I should have known from the beginning that we needed more time on this. But there have been times when I have budgeted more time and then we flew through stuff, and I was like, oh, okay. And I’m really happy that we are taking the time to unpack this. I think it’s really practical and helpful and great. But before we dive into that I actually want to start with an icebreaker.

[00:53] Marcus: Oh, okay.

[00:53] Stephanie: Okay. So ice breaker time. What is your favorite sport to go watch in person?

[00:59] Marcus: I would say baseball. I like going to stadiums and the feel. When I was in seminary I used to go down to Wrigley Field now and then and watch games, I’d say probably baseball.

[01:12] Stephanie: Yeah. I snuck in that icebreaker to you on our walk the other night, and you were prepared, man.

[01:18] Marcus: Yeah. Well, you know, I like watching sports on TV, but if I’m going to be there in person, that’s number one. And then number two is anything involving a suite. My brother used to run the suite for NBC at a lot of sporting events in Indianapolis. So I got to go see the Colts play and eat good food and hang out with cool people. I got to see the Pacers play, I was always in a suite. I even went to the Brickyard 400 and got to hang out in the suite. So it’s like, if I’m in a suite, I’m good.

[01:56] Stephanie: So yeah, hanging out with your brother, eating good food in a nice place.

[02:01] Marcus: It’s not what you know, right. I know my brother, so he got me in.

[02:06] Stephanie: Awesome. Well, I’m not as much of a sports person as you. But honestly, I had a lot of friends who played soccer growing up, so I don’t know if that’s why, but I really enjoy watching soccer. It’s relaxing and I can understand things, and it’s fun. But I will say the times that I’ve gone to a baseball stadium, it had a very nice atmosphere where I felt like, hey, I could come back here and read a book.

[02:33] Marcus: That’s what baseball’s for, right?

[02:35] Stephanie: No, no. And then enjoy and be like, whoa, that was a fun hit and stuff. But in the downtime it’s just a nice atmosphere.

[02:42] Marcus: Makes sense. It took me so many years to figure out the rules of soccer. I was slower to get into it but it’s all good now.

[02:51] Stephanie: It’s fun. All right, next week is our one year anniversary episode where we will be sharing some of your questions and testimonies, our dear listeners. And there is still time to squeak in with your submissions. If you’re one of those people who listens as soon as the episode drops, huzzah for you! And I need those from you by the 18th to make sure that we have a chance at getting your question or testimony featured on the episode.

But please, anytime you have a question or testimony feel free to let me know. If it doesn’t make the one year anniversary it might come up in another episode. And I always love hearing from you. So if you want to submit a question or testimony, I’ve created a Google form that you can find in my Monday emails, if you’re a Deeper Walk email subscriber. And also, I’ll have it linked on Instagram and Facebook for a time. Thank you so much. All right, Father, today is the day we are actually finishing this topic. So level five. Give us the elevator pitch, no pun intended for level five.

[03:57] Marcus: So, level five basically means we’ve moved from the right side of our brain to the left side of our brain. And this is the part of my brain that is non-relational because it is focused on problem solving. So I’m analytical, logical, I’m putting words to things and so on.

On the left side of my brain is where I have narratives, it’s where I have beliefs, and it’s where we have a thing called the “VLE. That’s kind of a term that Dr. Lehman invented. It’s this idea that my brain wants to give a logical explanation to whatever it is that I’m going through. So that’s where we’re on that side of the brain now. That’s level five.

[04:41] Stephanie: Okay so, VLE, verbal logical explainer.

[04:44] Marcus: Yep.

[04:44] Stephanie: Very good. All right, so when we are feeling stuck at this level what does it feel like?

[04:53] Marcus: Well, when I’m stuck at this level it can feel all kinds of ways because it can generate a wide range of emotions. So different beliefs tend to trigger specific emotions. If I’m feeling like something’s impossible, I’ll feel depressed. If I’m feeling like something is unjust, then I’ll be angry. If I’m feeling like something is scary, I’m going to be anxious. If my mind is full of “what if” thoughts. What if this happens? What if that happens? You know, I’m going to be full of anxiety as I think about that. It’s hard to say when I’m stuck in this side of my brain what it feels like because it can be almost any emotion.

[05:44] Stephanie: The intervention is accurate information or a new perspective, Right?

[05:50] Marcus: Yeah. So what happens with beliefs is what my dad used to say, people don’t always practice what they say they believe, but they always practice what they really believe. And what he meant was for example, my beliefs about God. I can believe that God is good, that God loves me, that God has a plan, and that he’s got everything under control. But there can be a part in my heart where I’m wounded that has a different belief system, and that wounded part in my heart can believe that God’s actually cruel, or God is untrustworthy, and you certainly can’t rely on him.

And what does it mean to trust God anyway? And so what happens then is when that gets triggered, I become double minded in the sense that I have two competing belief systems going in my head. When I have two competing belief systems going on in my thinking and I’m battling back and forth, that’s exhausting, right?

It makes me emotionally unstable and I can ping pong back and forth between multiple emotions. I can go from anger to sadness to despair to shame. Maybe get a little bit of joy in there and then go right back into some other things because I’m ping ponging all the way around, because my beliefs aren’t stable.

My beliefs are sometimes clear and sometimes not. I sometimes think it’s easier for an Atheist who is single minded about something, to have a greater sense of peace than a Christian who is double minded about something. And so if somebody is all in on what they believe, they’re going to tend to have a more stable kind of approach because they’re single minded. Whereas some of us our problem is that we flip back and forth between our perspective on things that can be radically different. And there’s this war going on inside. And that’s what makes it so hard.

[07:56] Stephanie: You got very deep and philosophical very quickly and I appreciate that. I love the epicness and the going deep. I will tell you where my brain was when I initially asked the question, which I’m very glad you answered because I think that was also great. Like, if you’re on a walk and you think, oh, the end of this walk is really far away and I just want it to be done.

You start having negative emotions, and then you find out, oh, actually it’s right there. And just having new information or your perspective shift calms all of that, because that was the only level you were stuck at. You weren’t thinking, oh, I’m so alone as I’m walking on this. If you’re just thinking, oh, it’s that far, and then you find out it’s not that far, that would just be a really simple version of being stuck.

[08:48] Marcus: It can be very simple. One of the biggest meltdowns I ever had was in high school. I was on the baseball team and we had a night game on the Saturday before Easter. So the next morning is Easter sunrise service. I’m supposed to sing in a group at  the church for the Sunday morning service.

We were out of town for this game about two hours from town, but it was going to be one game, done and go home. And so we played from seven to nine and all of a sudden the coach announced, we’re going to make this a double header. We’re playing till midnight and I’m not going to get home till three in the morning and have to turn right around. And I was mad. I mean, I was angry. And to make it worse, the last play of the first game I had totally messed something up, and the coach yelled at me and he made a bad problem bigger.

And I was just already at the edge of my capacity and I just lost it. It’s like how do you tell somebody, I have to sing in a choir at church tomorrow, I can’t be playing. It was really awkward. I was trying to figure it out, but I just remember believing that I was trapped. That there was no way out of this and this was unfair, they should have announced it. I just remember completely losing it. I was over in the corner literally sobbing by the time we heard because I’m like, I cannot. I ended up saying things to the coach and got so mad, I quit.

And it was just really bizarre because it was all over Easter and I needed to be at church in the morning, and I realized it had to be something else going on. But in the moment, those were the thoughts running through my head, they were all about that this is not fair. This is not right, you shouldn’t be doing this to me.

[11:05] Stephanie: So did you get a perspective change?

[11:09] Marcus: After a good cry because of quitting and being all shook up, I went back and  apologized. And I told him, I said, look, I was overwhelmed by the whole thing and it got too much, and I overreacted, I’m sorry. So he let me back on the team but he benched me for a few games. And really, it was kind of interesting because God uses all things together for good. Honestly, I was on pace to be all conference that year and I might have gotten a scholarship offer someplace.

Who knows how that might have changed my life? But by getting benched, I basically still made second team all conference that year. But I missed six games and probably missed my chance at college baseball. So there’s a lot of meltdown around that. Some of that was attachments, but a lot of it was also just the things I was believing that were driving my emotions. I didn’t have the emotional capacity developed to handle that well. So I realize now I could have taken a breather, taken a deep breath, and gone off and collected myself first. My problem was that I didn’t have any of these skills, I didn’t know how to do it. I tried to handle it all right in the moment and just vented everything I was feeling. So there you go. That’s my cathartic story for the day.

[12:32] Stephanie: Oh, I’m sure people can relate. So, the narrative engine on the left side of the brain is separate from the joy center. Could you explain how the pathway of going from right to left, and how our beliefs and our pain interact with each other, based off of that flow?

[12:52] Marcus: Yeah. So what will happen is that my beliefs can affect my ability to be happy and my ability to have joy. So it will trigger things in a different part of my brain. But what happens for example, in anticipation of being with somebody, I can get very excited and very happy about something that never happens. I can have the belief that I am going to see this person, it’s going to be this way, this is all going to be amazing, and have real joy based on that belief.

But the reason that belief is creating joy is because I already have an attachment with that person. In other words, If it was somebody that I didn’t have an attachment with, it wouldn’t have the same kind of impact. My beliefs have a lot to do with whether I’m happy or not. If I am thinking to myself, this is going to be terrible, this is going to be awful. I’m going to go see this person and they don’t really want to see me. I don’t know why I’m wasting my time.

There’s a lot of things I can tell myself that will just suck the joy out of things that otherwise would be fun. And so learning to recognize common patterns that I have that suck the joy out of things, so that I can put a stop to that and say, no, wait a second, I recognize this pattern. I don’t want to go down that thought trail again. What should I be putting my thoughts on instead? How do I replace my beliefs with something else? That’s really a key part of what we’re talking about here.

We just sabotage so much of our joy by getting into these mental holes that we fall into and everything that we’re telling ourselves is just reinforcing negative emotions. So all of this emphasis on attachment is not to negate the idea that beliefs don’t have a very powerful role in driving the way that we feel. It is to say that there is something else going on that tends to get overlooked. So we spend a lot of time over there on the attachment. But if you can get your beliefs changed, an awful lot of your emotions will resolve.

[15:09] Stephanie: So whatever is good and true and noble.

[15:12] Marcus: Yeah, whatever is good and true and noble and right, whatever is lovely, think on these things. Even praising God and focusing on what’s good and wonderful about God. Getting my mind in a good space makes a big difference. Talking about athletics, I was a pitcher for a while in little league. My dad taught me to picture myself doing everything perfect before I threw the ball.

So when I would stand on the pitching mound I would look and I knew exactly whether it’s a fastball or change up curveball, and exactly where it was going to go. I could picture the catcher, and is this going to be high right, inside left? Everything about it, I knew exactly what it was. So he was like, get it completely sure so you’re not guessing, you’re not just throwing it up there and hoping for the best. You know exactly what you’re trying to do.

He said, just take like one to two seconds before you throw the ball and picture it perfectly. So what I found was that the better I got at that the more confident I was. And so getting your beliefs clear and trusting that can really help your performance. So in a lot of performance things, getting your beliefs right clears your head. So what you have done on the right engine side about building habits and building skills, it can just flow. And that’s why sometimes we have got to get out of the way.

Especially when we’re talking about performance things. Whether it’s art or music or sports or something like that, if I’m thinking about what I’m doing, I can’t do it properly. I’ve got to get that part of my brain out of the way and just enjoy what I’m doing and it makes sense.

[17:07] Stephanie: That was a word from the Lord to you at one point, too.

[17:11] Marcus: It was. Even when I preach, I remember the first time I was going to preach in front of about 2,000 people. And it was the biggest crowd at that time I’d ever spoken to. I was getting nervous and was praying about it and what I felt like God said was, just enjoy this. And I’ve learned ever since then that if I enjoy it, chances are other people are going to enjoy it. If I’m thinking about it, then it’s probably not going to go well, right?

[17:38] Stephanie: Yes, that will literally preach.

[17:41] Marcus: Yeah, literally preach.

[17:44] Stephanie: All right, so I am going to zoom us out to the whole pathway again. But is there anything specifically on level five you want to make sure you cover before we do that?

[17:56] Marcus: Well, I will say Neil Anderson helped me understand this, not directly, it wasn’t a one on one conversation, but his books. He wrote ( I don’t remember now if it’s his Victory Over the Darkness or Bondage Breaker ) specifically about this idea of when I am depressed, it’s usually because I believe something is impossible that I feel is crucial to my happiness. So relationally, if I fall in love with somebody and they don’t love me back and this feels impossible, then that’s going to make me depressed.

Because I am convinced that only this person can make me happy and this is now impossible. Or if I think I can only be happy if I get out of debt and it’s just going to be impossible to get out of this debt load anytime soon. Maybe I feel like it’s impossible or I am never going to get out of this. Then things that I believe to be impossible tend to create despair. The things that I think are uncertain, or things I can imagine being catastrophic, like, what if this happens? What if they hate me? What if this is terrible? What if people are mean to me?

What if I feel pain? All the “what ifs” of life create anxiety. And then when I want something and something or someone gets in the way, I get angry. And the wording that he used was, it’s blocking your goal. And that makes a lot of sense. That’s what happens with road rage, right? Someone has blocked my goal. I was just cruising along fine, and all of a sudden they cut in and they literally blocked me from doing what I wanted to do. And  that makes me angry.

And now that I am angry I have to go to all of the things on the right side of my brain that I have learned for, how do I act like myself when I’m angry. So that I don’t turn into a road rage idiot. Sometimes it helps to escalate it a little bit in my thinking before I bring it back down. So all of those things. It was helpful to me to think about these big three specifically, despair, anger, and anxiety. They are all anchored in things that we believe.

[20:26] Stephanie: Your imagination is powerful stuff. I think sometimes about just sacred imagination. Sometimes when people dwell a lot on the anxiety side of imagination and where that’s bad, it almost counters to just not using your imagination. And anyway, that’s probably a different topic.

[20:49] Marcus: God gave us an imagination for a reason. I mean, you think about how much of the world is unseen to us? And based on what we know, we still have to use our imagination for an awful lot of things. And the average person throughout history didn’t travel more than 30 miles from where they were born their whole lives. And so how much of what was out there was imagination?

And so God wants us to use our imagination. He wants us to engage with that. What the Bible does is it gives us parameters. It gives us a foundation and parameters for our thought life. The foundation is the worldview. And then the parameters are the very specific things that it says are true, principles that are true. And so that gives us the foundation parameters. But within that, imagination is a gift God gave us.

[21:41] Stephanie: Huzzah! As someone who has just come from a writers conference this weekend, I hear to that. So let’s zoom back out to the pain processing pathway as a whole. Can you put all these steps together for us? Maybe with a story? I don’t know if it’s easier for you to tell a story of a pain elevator that is functioning properly or where it gets stuck along the way, but if you could tell us a story?

[22:13] Marcus: Yeah. When I’m stuck because of something I’m believing, if a person can just tell me what I need to be believing instead, it can help. So Biblical Counseling really focuses a lot on the belief part of this and then moves from belief to making choices, and accountability on those choices. And all that stuff can work if that’s where I’m stuck. But the deeper my “stuckness” is, the less helpful that is. So let me put it this way. I’ve had emotions that can make me feel like I’m 15. There’s emotions that can make me feel like I’m ten.

There’s things that can happen to me that make me feel like I’m seven. There’s things that can happen to make me feel like I’m three. So part of this depends on how deeply I am getting triggered here and how far down in this system am I going? Because the younger I feel the less anything is going to help except, sit with me, soothe, stay with me and help me soothe. Cause until that happens we aren’t going to get anywhere else. I remember Just battling anxiety. I’d had a panic attack and was trying to recover from this attack. I was trying to talk to somebody about it. I remember the first person I talked to was like, well, fear is a sin, so you should just stop it.

[23:49] Stephanie: Oh, thank you.

[23:50] Marcus: Yeah. So there was their narrative reaction, and whether they were right or not, it wasn’t going to help. But there was somebody else who came and they sat with me and they connected with me. And I found that just being in a place where I could be relational with people was soothing, and I began to relax. I had another time when I was experiencing a significant amount of depression because somebody had broken up with me in seminary.

And I met a guy who had almost exactly the same story, only his was worse. It’s like his fiance had left him at the altar. Everything that I was going through he had gone through, only worse. But here he was when I’m talking to him, married, had four kids, happy, and he was in seminary. He’s letting me know, look, God’s got this and you’re going to be okay. So in a setting like that, he was with me. We built some joy together, and then we got to the story and then we got to the narrative. And he helped me to shift my narrative and my way of thinking about that.

And so what happens then is that Satan counter attacks and says, are you sure you want to believe that narrative? Are you sure that’s the truth? And so I find myself in this battle for my mind. God just sent somebody who was able to sit down with me, identify completely with what I was going through, and tell me how his story ended all right. And now the enemy’s saying, yeah, but that doesn’t mean your story is going to be alright.

And so now you’re in this battle for your mind. Which one are you going to hold on to? And there does come a point where you just have to say to the enemy, get out of here right now and take your thoughts with you and leave. I am going to choose to trust God and put my faith in him, and my emotions will eventually follow if I do that consistently.

[25:56] Stephanie: Yes. Have you seen any “solutions” that people will often try that don’t work? Either because they’re targeting the wrong level of the brain function or because it just flat out doesn’t work. Like telling somebody who’s experiencing fear that it’s a sin.

[26:13] Marcus: Yeah. So classically people try to argue you into feeling better, like, oh, well, the Bible says this and the Bible says that. And this is true and that’s true. And they’re addressing everything at the belief level that if you just get your belief straight and here it is. And they get to the point that they’re actually arguing with you and mad at you because you are not believing the truth, because this truth will set you free like I’m free. And I’m like, well, you’re not really free right now.

That’s the first one that pops into my mind. It’s like people get so fixated on the truth that it will set you free, so here’s the truth and why won’t you just embrace the truth? They end up getting frustrated with you and angry with you. And they are like, I’ll skip it, this is never going to work. And they quit on you because they are only focused on the narrative and don’t see all the other elements that go into this. So that’s probably the most common one.

[27:08] Stephanie: All right, well, we are at the end of the episode here. I’m just going to remind everybody that next week, join us for our one year anniversary. And if you want to just squeak in some questions for that there is still a little bit of time. Or you can email me anytime. And if you’re a Deeper Walk email subscriber, you’ll get my Monday emails and you can respond to those if you want. I love hearing from you.

And there’s a Google form that’s going to be in the Monday emails. And I’ll also have it in the Deeper Walks Instagram and Facebook that you can fill out and give us your testimonies and your questions. Really excited to hear from you and to celebrate on the 24th. So, Father, any closing thoughts for this whole pain processing pathway series?

[28:03] Marcus: Well, one of the things as I think about all of this, is there’s a reason why I’ve just turned in a manuscript to Moody called Breakthrough! And this manuscript, we’re still in the editing phases of it, but it’s meant to get at this idea that there are multiple sources, multiple engines, if you will, that drive the way that we feel. And so we don’t want to be overly simplistic either, this one strategy will always make you feel better, or dealing with this one engine will always fix everything. Or even overly simplistic that this one strategy always fixes this engine.

So we do need to have an understanding of how all these things fit together especially when we’re dealing with big battles that don’t always have easy solutions. It can be helpful to understand why it’s big and why there’s so much going on. And why we might need to interact with more than just one person to get through whatever it is that we’re dealing with.

[29:07] Stephanie: I love talking to you all the time, my father. And hey, I am so glad that you all joined us. Thank you 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.