59: Attachment-Based Identity (Part 1)

[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 59. Today we are talking about attachment-based identity.

Hello, Father.

[00:28] Marcus: Hello, Daughter.

[00:30] Stephanie: I have another icebreaker courtesy of a listener. Are you ready for this?

[00:35] Marcus: All right, let’s ice break away.

[00:37] Stephanie: All right, what kind of pizza do either of you like?

[00:42] Marcus: Well, you know what, for years it was ham and pineapple, the classic Hawaiian stuff. Lately, I’ve been back to basics. I just want meat. I want pepperoni, sausage, meat. How about you?

[00:53] Stephanie: Yeah. Hawaiian? Yeah, yeah. Ham and pineapple. I don’t like it. I don’t like the barbecue. Yeah, I’ve encountered that before and I’m like, whoa, there’s barbecue sauce on this instead of tomatoes or whatever, but just like, yeah, ham and pineapple. I have gone through phases where I’ve added black olives to that mix, but, you know, I like it.

[01:13] Marcus: There we go.

[01:14] Stephanie: So there, the more you know.

[01:17] Marcus: And obviously, if possible, Chicago deep dish.

[01:21] Stephanie: Yeah, I enjoy it, but I like a standard pizza. I’m boring, I guess.

[01:29] Marcus: I remember the first time I went to Gino’s East on State Street, downtown Chicago, got deep dish pizza. I was like, my life has changed. This is amazing. So. Yeah.

[01:42] Stephanie: Well, that sounds like the place to do it, too. That’s awesome. It’s a fun time. We’re up in Michigan still as we’re recording this, and there’s a pizza shop we always look forward to coming to here.

Well, are we ready to trek back into identity?

[02:01] Marcus: Yep. We’ll leave the leaning tower of pizza behind.

[02:04] Stephanie: Okay.

[02:06] Marcus: Sorry.

[02:06] Stephanie: Very good.

[02:07] Marcus: I had to get a dad joke in there. Okay.

[02:09] Stephanie: Yes. Well, I suppose I didn’t even mention the fact that apparently some people don’t like pineapple on pizza.

[02:14] Marcus: I’ve heard that, and I don’t understand.

[02:17] Stephanie: I don’t understand it either. I don’t know why this is controversial. I think it’s great. At least we are not divided on this issue.

[02:26] Marcus: No.

[02:27] Stephanie: All right. All right. Identity mushrooms.

[02:29] Marcus: On the other.

[02:33] Stephanie: Mother loves mushrooms on her pizza.

All right. The identity trail has two main paths that we’ll want to explore, and we are starting down the path that looks at attachment and maturity and brain science and how that all informs our identity. So as we go in, Father, do you want to actually set us up for the Biblical foundations for why we care about this brain science path?

[02:59] Marcus: Yes, if you’re thinking about you, why don’t we just go straight to what the Bible says is true about us? And it makes sense because most of us tend to think that. I was taught that all emotions were anchored in beliefs, and there’s just enough truth in that beliefs do play a huge role in a lot of our emotions. I just assumed it was true of all emotions. What I learned was that there are attachment-based emotions as well as belief-based emotions. If it wasn’t for the brain science, I wouldn’t have separated that out. Even though the Bible points us in both directions, I had a filter on the way that I would read the Bible that assumed I was only going to be looking for beliefs as the foundation of emotion. So that’s all I ever saw.

Once you get into it, you begin to see that there are a lot of attachment issues here. You get a story like Hagar and Isaac and Ishmael, and Hagar and Sarah and Abraham, and all the attachment dynamics going on there and not just the belief-based dynamics. And you can take that into Cain and Abel and all kinds of things, that there is a level there that is core. In fact, you can read the Bible with this kind of a filter in such a way that everything gets reduced to beliefs, and it just isn’t the way it is.

Like salvation itself Jesus describes as an attachment. It is me being grafted into a vine. That’s a pretty strong attachment term. Paul uses a similar kind of analogy in Romans 11: we’ve been grafted into this tree and so we are now attached. What God wants for us is he wants us to be bonded to him.

That’s why I think the word trust really gets to this idea. Trust is this idea of a bond with somebody, and love also. You can’t get away from this idea of that. And so what I look at is that there are a lot of terms in the Bible like trust and love, and even this idea of being glued together or grafted together, that are pointing us in an attachment direction.

It makes sense then that the God of the Bible is also the God who designed the brain, that these things would complement each other. Sure enough, when you go there, you learn that from a brain perspective there are all kinds of attachment things happening before our beliefs ever get involved. So it was helpful to me to kind of separate that out and change the filter with which I was reading the Bible.

[05:41] Stephanie: On that note, I would just also recommend people check out the Relational Skills in the Bible curriculum by Chris Coursey and Amy Brown. That’s a group curriculum. That is, you read through Bible stories and see how Bible characters displayed good relational skills or bad relational skills. But then you also learn more about the 19 relational brain skills that Thrive Today teaches. And, yeah, that’s a fun way.

[06:13] Marcus: You would know that book well, because you were the main editor on that book, weren’t you?

[06:17] Stephanie: Yeah, back in, was that in 2018?

[06:20] Marcus: A while ago.

[06:21] Stephanie: It was a while ago, but it was a good book.

So we learn our identity, or at least our perceived actionable identity, based on our relational experiences, not based on our beliefs. So can you explain more? Why is that? How does that work?

[06:38] Marcus: So, the origins of all this material go back to Dr. Allan Schore and some books he wrote about with complicated titles like Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self. And then Dr. Jim Wilder took that and actually simplified it in his book on the Life Model. And then what we’ve tried to do is try to simplify this even further.

The idea, in a nutshell, is that my brain has to learn to think of myself as a being in the world. It’s not automatically there. What happens is, you can think about it this way, that the brain is like a computer that is constantly growing and changing and developing. When I’m first born, there are hardware systems that are not in place. The hardware that allows me to have a sense of self is nothing fully developed. In fact, it’s barely developed when I am born. God does this on purpose.

You’re like, why would God do that? It shows you how important that God wants love to be the more foundational thing than truth. The loving relationships are meant to form our identity at a deeper level than our beliefs. I find that fascinating, because this hardware system in my brain can only develop through relational interaction with other people. And that relational interaction with other people is like a workout in the gym that causes this hardware in our brain to grow the same way that muscles grow when we work out and rest and work out and rest.

God made it this way on purpose. So Satan attacks that, and that’s where we get affect dysregulation.

[08:45] Stephanie: Affect dysregulation and disorders of the self.

[08:48] Marcus: There you go. So you get the problems, right? Where we get problems with our identity, we get problems with our bonding and attachments. We learn bad patterns. We learn bad foundations that lead to bad beliefs, making it much easier to believe wrong things later on because the hardware didn’t grow properly because our relationships were kind of messed up.

I think Satan understands this. He’s not only the father of lies who lies to us, but if you look at it, he’s a divider. He creates factions, envy, and jealousy. You look at the work of the flesh that is listed in Galatians 5. You see that Satan is constantly trying to break apart our attachments. He does not want that kind of bonding to take place. He doesn’t want loving attachments within our families. He doesn’t want loving attachments with God. So he goes after those things.

On the other hand, God wants them. That’s his core thing. That’s what he is after more than anything. He wants loving attachment, and then he wants that loving attachment to grow through knowledge and truth and things like that. But those are what build out the love and build out the attachment.

[10:04] Stephanie: Hence living from the heart Jesus gave you.

[10:06] Marcus: Hence, yes.

[10:09] Stephanie: So in our prior series on Joy and the Pain Processing Pathway, we talked about the brain’s identity center, also called the joy or action center. Can you remind us, what are some functions of the identity center as we are processing?

[10:25] Marcus: Yes, the identity center. We’ve described this a lot of different ways in a lot of different books. In Rare Leadership, it was called the fast track. There’s this four floor elevator system called the joy elevator. And at some level, the whole fast track system, the whole joy elevator, is an attachment system.

The driver at the peak of that is our identity center, or it was sometimes called the action center, the captain, the commander, all kinds of things, but the idea is that it is the top floor of this elevator. It is the part of my brain that, based on my relational interactions, has formed an understanding of who I am, who my people are, how it’s like us to live, what we value, what our perspective on things are. It predisposes us towards a worldview. It gives us a moral compass. It gives us values. That’s all very important stuff, right? That’s really foundational, important stuff.

So if I attempt to live my life with that part of my brain messed up, you can see all the problems it’s going to cause. Not only is my identity being off, my values will be off, my character will be off, my whole perspective on life is going to be off. And if it can be messed up, even if it’s formed in a relatively healthy way, if I lose access to it because my brain’s going into a cramp and the joy elevator is getting stuck part way up and I’m not able to access that part of my brain, then I’m going to have a whole lot of problems as well.

That’s why this is so important, that God designed us, that our true self is our relational self, and our true self is who we are when we live out of joy and not out of fear. The counter to that is that my false self is always anchored in fear, and my false self is that part of me that says, “I feel like I need to perform or put on a mask or be who you expect me to be, or you won’t like me, you won’t be happy to see me.”

And what I want is, I want people to be happy to see me. I want people to accept me. I want that kind of acceptance. So to get it, I perform. That’s always fear based, which is like, if I don’t, then I’m not going to get this. And so my fear of being rejected actually drives me to a false self. That’s why my true self is always going to be anchored in joy. And I think God did that on purpose. He created us to live out of joy, not out of fear. And the brain just emphasizes that and makes it crystal clear.

[13:14] Stephanie: That’s one of the reasons why we are starting with the attachment-based identity before we move to the beliefs-based identity, because the brain functions by building all of this up before we can even think about it in a conscious thought way. And so it’s really important to learn how to develop it and repair it and understand it from the right to the left.

[13:39] Marcus: If people really want to take the deep dive into the brain science attachment theory, that’s where you go to Life Model, you go to Thrive Today. You go places where they unpack some more of this in some of their materials. What we’re trying to do is introduce people to it and help them understand that this really is important. It’s worth learning.

[13:57] Stephanie: Okay. But on that note, I think I’m going to just pull directly from one of Dr. Wilder’s OG books. Jim Wilder talks about something fascinating. Shocker. He mentions it in the book Living with Men, which is what I’m going about to read. The Complete Guide to Living with Men, correct.

Also in his book with Michael Hendricks, The Other Half of the Church, I think he mentions it there, but that is the idea of the three faces. So I’m just going to read this section, and if you want to pause me and be like, “Okay, let’s talk about that,” then  feel free. For those who have their own book, on page 16, in The Complete Guide to Living with Men:

At two to three months of age, a region of the brain which was not developed at birth begins its growth. This area, called the right prefrontal cortex, will become the top of the command center in the brain. It has the last word on control of all the body and mind systems and will grow to become about one 6th of the adult brain.

[15:05] Marcus: Let’s pause there. He’s talking about the identity center. He’s talking about the top of the joy elevator, that it’s unformed at birth, but that by two to three months of age, it is beginning to be formed. It’s beginning to take shape. And as it takes shape, this is getting to the idea of the origin of a self. We were beginning to develop the capacity to have a self.

[15:29] Stephanie:

It is the first to know everything from inside or outside the body. But this region is not an it. In fact, these circuits are built as an image of three joyful faces looking at each other: mother, baby, and father. The strongest bond is usually between the mother and child face, with the father looking at them both. This relational image of the self with joyful parents, is stored as our identity at the top of the four level control center of the brain.

[15:59] Marcus: Very good. So the four level control center of the brain: joy elevator, right hemisphere of the brain, fast track. All that’s the same stuff he’s saying. At the top of this, in our identity center, there are these three faces, which is a really kind of strange thing to think about, but what’s happening is, what establishes us with a secure, emotionally stable identity is a baby and a mother gazing into each other’s eyes with adoration. “I love you. You’re the most amazing person ever,” just adoration, with a father watching this with joy. It’s bringing him pleasure. It’s bringing him delight that this is all happening.

The idea is that this is the way God designed it and that when this happens, when mother and baby are bonding and cooing in googly eyes with each other and dad is taking delight in the whole thing, that the brain is learning, “This is normal,” and the brain is learning, “I am the source of delight. I am a source of delight in this world.”

That core emotional anchor is going to predispose us to later in life what we’re going to believe about ourselves. So just change one of those things. If mommy’s looking at the baby and there’s no joy, mommy’s disgusted with baby, mommy’s unhappy, or maybe mommy is ignoring the baby and is angry and fighting with daddy all the time. And so the faces that are formed in our brains is, “Here’s mommy and daddy fighting all of the time and this must be about me. I must be horrible.” In other words, it leads to beliefs. What gets formed in my mind is now going to be a dysfunctional self view, because God’s design and intent of adoring mom, delighting dad, happy baby, all in there together, is going to get distorted. When it gets distorted, it lays the foundation for a lifetime of repair.

[18:12] Stephanie: Do you want me to continue?

[18:13] Marcus: Yes, go ahead.

[18:13] Stephanie: Okay.

Our primary identity at the apex of the neurological control structure of the brain is a relational one. For the moment, we will call this relational identity  “they”.  If they are oriented by love, we can bear all things, endure all things, and return to joy. Joy is our strength. If they are oriented to fear, then our identity readily becomes unstable and disorganized. Isn’t it like God to design a brain that only knows itself in relationship, and then only when that relationship is one of love? It is love that rejoices in knowing us, that makes us know ourselves. This entire region is developed without words because the baby has no vocabulary. Its growth is nearly half over by the time he can say, “Mama.”

[18:59] Marcus: He puts it well, right? And that is, God values love so highly that our core identity, and this is why we’re starting with attachment, our core identity is more shaped by who we love than it is by what we believe. But I will say this, that what happens at this attachment level will strongly predispose us towards what we end up believing. It is fascinating, though, that God wired us this way, that he wanted strong, secure attachment to be the foundation of life and not just a solid worldview in theology.

I think I grew up, again, being taught that theology was the foundation of the Christian faith. When theology is the foundation, there’s nothing wrong with theology, it’s good to have good theology, but attachment is supposed to be the foundation. In the same way,  if those things get out of perspective, that’s where you end up with Christians in enemy mode with each other. We just got an email from Dr. Wilder yesterday about this. There’s a poll recently that said that a majority of Christians,

[20:17] Stephanie: I think it was like 76% of liberal Christians saw loving your enemy as being soft on injustice, as being complicit with injustice. And 78% of conservative Christians saw loving your enemy as being soft towards immorality.

[20:42] Marcus: Yes, so this idea is one of the things that happens. I haven’t seen this study, haven’t looked into the whole thing, but it gets this idea that when theology is the foundational thing, then what happens is, I excuse myself from love. I don’t have to love my enemies.

Now, that doesn’t mean I don’t take stands and I don’t form partnerships. There are certain things that I won’t do, but that’s different than not even talking to people, not even being willing to have a conversation, not being civil, not being kind. I go back to this whole idea that at the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus uses this example that there were, like today’s culture is scattered with all these identity groups? We tend to act like that’s a new thing, but that’s exactly what Jesus is addressing in this Sermon on the Mount.

This identity group of Pharisees see themselves a certain way, “We are the ones who take Moses seriously, and we are the ones who are focused on this. And so therefore, we won’t even talk to you tax collectors and sinners. We won’t even talk to you Samaritans. We’re certainly not talking to you Romans.”

What happens is that Jesus, he starts at the basics, he says, “You won’t even greet each other.” And that always struck me as odd when I was a kid reading that. But now I get it. There are people who literally won’t talk to each other because of the people group that they belong to. And that was going on in Jesus’ day. So when you talk about loving your enemies, he’s like, “Loving your enemies starts with, let’s greet one another.”

[22:16] Stephanie: I’m so glad you went there because, as I was reading through that article that Dr. Wilder sent, I was just wondering, how are we defining what loving your enemy looks like in that survey? How are people understanding that so many people can’t even agree on what love looks like? What does it mean to love your enemy? And so that’s a really solid example, where Jesus said, “Let’s start basic. Say hi.”

[22:41] Marcus: Yeah. Well, and then he talks about doing good. He says, “What credit is it to you if you do good to the people who love you?” Like, if you know you’re going to do good to somebody and you know they’re going to be good back to you, what’s the big deal there? He said, “But if you’re going to do good to somebody who has been bad to you and you are doing good to somebody who from whom you expect bad in the future, now he said, “Now that is acting like your heavenly Father.” And so if you just start with those two basics, greet them and be good to them, and it kind of grows out from there.

[23:13] Stephanie: Do you want to talk more about the idea of unstable identity and stable identity or do you want to save that for next episode?

[23:20] Marcus: If we’ve got time, I can address it now for a little bit. So a stable identity based on what we’ve been talking about so far, a stable identity comes from this idea of having these three faces that are all joyful. And so if I am raised in such a way that I have an inner sense that I am a delight, that people find me delightful, I’m not thinking that way but the faces that I see in my head tell me that, then I am going to have a certain level of emotional stability in place before I ever get to my beliefs. If that gets messed up, if one of those faces is off, if two of those faces are off, I am going to have a very hard time believing good things about myself. It is setting me up for an emotionally unstable life to come.

This is why repair has to address more than just my beliefs. Repair has to go back to relearning how to form attachments, getting practice and forming some new attachments, so my brain can learn a new set of faces and a different perspective on things. And I can’t just talk myself into that. I’ve got to experience it relationally.

[24:39] Stephanie: Well, and I think that’s really important for hope, whether you are somebody who’s thinking, “Yeah, I did not get that growing up,” or whether you’re a parent who’s thinking, “Oh, shoot, my children. I know that things might not have gone that way.” There is hope.

[24:56] Marcus: Yes and right now, honestly, the Thrive Training is the only system I’m aware of that tackles this head on and gives people a way to rebuild. I know people who’ve gone through track one of Thrive and said, “Oh, this is really basic,” I think for them it is because their brain was already wired pretty strongly. But for people whose brains were not wired properly, you need the kind of tools and skills that they go through in Thrive track one, to begin teaching your brain how to quiet in a place where somebody’s happy to be with you, how to be happy with somebody who’s happy to see you, how to share eye smiles with someone.

There are really basic things that if you didn’t get them at an early age, the good news is they can be learned later in life and it can make a difference. It’s part of the repair process that takes place. I just put a plug in for our partner ministry here. They’re the only ones I know who are tackling this head on.

[25:53] Stephanie: Yes, Thrive Today with Chris and Jen Coursey.

[25:56] Marcus: Yep, Chris and Jen Coursey.

[25:57] Stephanie: They’re fabulous.

[25:59] Marcus: That’s why I wrote three books with them.

[26:03] Stephanie: All right, I’m going to take a little time here to pull another question in from one of our listeners. This listener says,

I have been listening to the podcast of On the Trail and it seems you have many resources available to help with relational struggles. I need biblical based counsel but I don’t know what resources to start with. Can someone there give me direction as to what resources you offer to plug into? I would like to find biblical counseling where I live, but they either are not taking more clients or they don’t take Medicare / Blue Cross.

[26:34] Marcus: Yes, that’s a common issue, isn’t it? There’s a lot of people looking for help and there’s just not enough out there. In fact, one of the things we realize is there’s never going to be enough biblical counselors, there’s never going to be enough prayer ministers, there’s never going to be enough of all thi. We’ve got to do something about the culture in the church, but that’s a bigger topic for another day.

A couple of things. First of all, looking for a relational community because that’s so important, I would encourage checking out Journey Groups. Journey Groups is an online community, and it sounds like, “Ah, yeah, but it’s not in person.” We’ve had amazing testimonies of people who have felt isolated, like they didn’t have anybody, who got connected to a Journey Group and actually experienced some real joyful bonding through that. That’s one resource.

[27:26] Stephanie: Journey Groups of Alive and Well.

[27:29] Marcus: It’s run by the ministry, Alive and Well. But you can get to it through the Deeper Walk website (deeperwalk.com) and we’ll connect you over there to them.

You can go under the “more” tab on the Deeper Walk site, we have a referral network where you can go and look to see if there might be somebody that you can connect to. More and more people are doing this online too, where you can have that kind of prayer ministry and counseling online.

And then book resource-wise, you mentioned Relational Skills in the Bible, that’s sort of a small group study approach. But I’ve written a couple of books with Chris, so we got the Four Habits series: The Four Habits of Joy-Filled People, The Four Habits of Raising Joy-Filled Kids, The Four Habits of Joy-Filled Marriages. A lesser known book is The Spirit-Filled Home. And The Spirit-Filled Home book actually, I think, has the strongest collection of simple relational skills to help people get started on building up their relational skill sets.

[28:35] Stephanie: The Spirit-Filled Home is awesome. It has emotional healing, it has spiritual warfare, family and relations, parenting and marriage and everything. It’s highly underrated.

[28:46] Marcus: Yeah, we don’t promote it that much, honestly, but I have a whole weekend marriage retreat that I’ve done over 20 times that’s largely based on that book.

[28:58] Stephanie: That’s really good. I also want to give a quick shout out that Thrive Today, Chris Coursey actually launched their own podcast recently that has ten minute talks about relational skills and stories and things. We love Thrive Today. We love Chris and Jen Coursey and highly encourage you to check them out if you’re wanting more relational skills training.

So we’re at the end of the episode. Any closing thoughts?

[29:27] Marcus: As we talk about attachment throughout this series, there’s a reason we’re starting with attachment, and then we’re going to go to beliefs, and then we’re going to add a ”C”. Attachment is an “A”. Beliefs is a “B”. So it makes sense there should be a “C” after that, right? It’s collectively as a community. That is, the role that my community plays in helping to reinforce identity.

So what we’re laying out here is helping people understand why attachment is so important in this issue. In the next one we’re going to talk a little bit more about how attachment actually works to create identity. The three faces thing is an important start to that, but there’s more.

I’m hoping that people will begin to understand that God loves us. He meant for us to have joy at the core of who we are. He meant for us to know that we’re loved, and he wants that to be the solid part of the identity that he has with us.

It may be a journey, and for some of us it will be a journey, but it is definitely a journey that’s worth it to begin transforming from a fear-based person into a joy-based person.

[30:34] Stephanie: Hallelujah. All right.

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