62: Wounds (Belief-Based Identity, 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 62 today we are looking at how wounds affect our identity.

Hello, Father.

[00:27] Marcus: Hello, Daughter. Hey, here we are again.

[00:31] Stephanie: Here we are again.

[00:32] Marcus: It’s getting to be a habit.

[00:34] Stephanie: It’s a good habit. Hey, today’s icebreaker is courtesy of a listener. “What is something you are curious about and actively learning about right now?”

[00:47] Marcus: Is that for me or you?

[00:48] Stephanie: It’s for both of us. Okay, I can go first if you need to think.

[00:51] Marcus: You are a much more naturally curious person I think. Go ahead.

[00:55] Stephanie: I don’t know about that. You have lots of things you’re curious about. That’s kind of part of how you built the ministry is you being curious in things and researching them.

[01:03] Marcus: Yeah, okay, I get it.

[01:07] Stephanie: I will say that one of the things that I have been curious about and doing some more research lately is bouldering. I was reminded recently of how much I loved climbing as a child. I always loved climbing monkey bars. I remember this big, at least in my child’s eyes, like a three story wall of galleons that I loved to climb, and I just got so much joy in it. And I’m still in a transition phase right now as I move back to Indiana from Kentucky. I’m looking for things that I can add to my rhythm that would get me active and get me in community, and bring joy in another area of my life.

And I was just recently reminded that oh, I loved climbing and I still love the idea of that. Oh, also in the novel that I’m working on people also have to climb a lot. And so it would be good research for me to be better at climbing. So I don’t know how serious I’m going to get into it, but I’m looking forward to learning some more.

[02:16] Marcus: That’s very cool. That’s very cool. As I think about it on my own time, what have I been studying and looking into? The answer is a little crazy, but it’s kind of like Nephilim and the story of Enoch and the Watchers and all this stuff. I’ve been reading Michael Heiser books, reading some novels that were inspired by the books. So I’ve been curious to see how people put a lot of these things together.

[02:52] Stephanie: Yes, that has definitely been something that you’ve been interested in. And I have loved talking to you about that, too.

[02:59] Marcus: Yeah, there’s like, I think, Chronicles of the Watchers, Chronicles of the Nephilims. I forget the exact name of the series.

[03:05] Stephanie: Oh yeah, the novels. I haven’t actually read them yet, but I know that you get a kick out of them and you enjoy them, and that’s cool. Nice.

[03:14] Marcus: Yeah. I’m not like, thumbs up and the theology’s right, but they’re a fun read.

[03:17] Stephanie: Yes, very good. All right, well, last week we started talking about beliefs based identity in terms of kingdom versus Kosmos. And we looked at how the flesh identity can “SLAP” you, and how to take the mirror away from our face, and look to God and how he sees you. Today let’s look at how the world wounds us and how the pockets of pain in our lives affect our identity. So, opening comments Father, on pockets of pain.

[03:51] Marcus: Pockets of pain. So that term I first heard it from Dr. Alaine Pakkala, and she would use it in describing how she helped her clients. And her story is one of having endured horrendous abuse from a split personality from a member of the family, and from all this trauma in her life. And so she really understands pockets of pain really well. And the idea is that I may trust God when I am operating out of my core heart, but when my pocket of pain in my heart, the wounded part of my heart gets triggered that part of my heart doesn’t trust God.

I can literally become a completely different person when my pain gets triggered and that part of my heart comes out. Because that part of my heart doesn’t trust God, doesn’t have the same worldview, doesn’t have the same values, is very self protected, and is very flesh driven. And that’s why pockets of pain are so important because I can almost function as if I have a split personality, because I act so differently when my wounds get triggered than I do when they don’t. And so that’s the idea behind pockets of pain and why they’re so important to understand.

[05:16] Stephanie: Yeah. So let’s break down how you can be wounded.

[05:21] Marcus: How you can be wounded.

[05:22] Stephanie: So a happy topic.

[05:24] Marcus: You’re an author, give me a list. I list three primary ways that we get wounded in the book Understanding the Wounded Heart. And that is A, B and C, trauma. So A, is the absence of good stuff I need. And first of all, I would define trauma as anything that stunts my ability to grow. So you think about what keeps a plant from growing and what it doesn’t get.

That would be A trauma, not getting enough water. For me as a child, not getting somebody comforting me in my upsetting emotions. And what I don’t get traumatizes my growth and my development. So that’s A trauma. B trauma is bad stuff that happens to me. And that bad stuff that happens to me is more in the abuse form. So it confuses some people because they think A, abuse, but B, bad. And then the C is comparison.

And I added this one to what Life Model teaches simply because I noticed that I had met with a lot of people in which somebody didn’t do a bad thing to them, what was happening was they were simply comparing themselves to somebody else. That led to a wound. And I remember this hit twice in one week. Twins told me a story that one of them was the academic excellence twin and one of them was the social party twin. And they found out decades later that both of them had been jealous of each other. Like, I wish I could be smart like you.

I wish I could have been fun like you. And so what happened was they were actually wounded by the comparisons they were making of themselves with each other. And then I was preaching at a church and there was a line of people talking to me afterwards, and I turned and there was this young lady who was just kind of stunning. Every now and then it just like, almost surprises you how stunning someone else is.

And she said, I just want to thank you for talking about wounds of comparison. She went on to explain that when she was in high school she was apparently a late bloomer. And she said her sister was the pretty one that everybody wanted. And she got tired of everybody saying, I just wanted to get to know her to get to her sister. Nobody did anything bad to her, her sister didn’t do anything bad to her, but she was wounded by the comparison.

Like, I’m never going to be as good as her. And that led to all this inferiority, which led to a lot of bad decisions, which led to a lot of stuff. And she said she had never heard of wounds of comparison before and that it opened up a whole light on what she had been going through, and where her problems had started.

[08:01] Stephanie:  And that it fits perfectly in with what we just talked about last episode and the “SLAP.”

[08:07] Marcus: Yeah. You know it’s ironic how often like with eating disorders, it’s really attractive women who don’t think they’re attractive. And that comes from comparison. Let’s take looks out of it for a second because this happens in almost every area of life. I have found that one of the things I struggled with was there was this sort of artificial person I would create in my head who had every perfect attribute. And so they were sort of this amalgam of every person I had ever met and every strength that I could put together from all of them.

And so no matter what happened, I never measured up to that person. There was always somebody out there who was better. And as a result, you could never feel good about anything you did because, well, sure, I wrote a book and did this, but that person wrote a book and it did way better. You know, it’s like no matter what it is, there’s always something that knocks it down. And that’s what we’re talking about. That’s a comparison wound.

[09:11] Stephanie: And our flesh can make those tapes. And also the devil has to put his little birds on the shoulder and be like, oh, yeah, good job on that, but you really messed up on that one over there. And so you’re just constantly in a cycle of the inferiority and conceit that we talked about last time. Whatever the twin virtues or counterfeit virtues are that the devil will make you prone towards. But yeah, anyway, sorry, continue.

[09:41] Marcus: No, that was it. So there’s ABC. Now you can unpack things further. So some people talk about mother wounds or father wounds. I think in one of my books I talk about father wounds, mother wounds and religious wounds.

[09:53] Stephanie: That’s in A Deeper Walk.

[09:54] Marcus: In A Deeper Walk, thank you. I couldn’t remember where I wrote that. And one of the things I’ve been told is that father wounds tend to go to the identity as much as anything. And that is who I am whether I’m a guy or a girl. My sense of identity is often anchored in my attachment to my father. And so that can be very joyful or it can be fear bonded. The mother wound issues tend to go to my ability to be compassionate. And there’s some other things that come with it, but that’s just some of the things I’ve heard about how they affect us in different ways, I guess is the point.

And then there are religious wounds. So in my own life it was helpful to me to look in terms of that, I love my mom and my dad. I had a great relationship with both of them, but everybody was wounded. We wound each other without intending to. And so realizing what patterns got established in my life because of the father wound, mother wound, and religious wound.

So those were significant in my own journey. I’ve talked about this in a few different places, but my early religious wounds started when I was young. When you grow up in church, every now and then you’re introduced to ideas too young. So I can remember Carl Layman talking about hearing oh, you got to sell everything, give it to the poor. As this little kid I’m picturing I’ve got to go around naked and poor and not protect myself. And I need to give everybody anything they ask for from me. When you’re like an intelligent, sensitive child listening to adult themes in church, though people can do nothing wrong, it creates in you this sense of fear.

I remember as a young kid, that although most people have this thing where God is scary but Jesus comforts them. For me, it was flipped. The Father made sense to me but Jesus felt fickle, like I never knew what he was going to do next. And so there is this religious trauma that comes. And so sometimes it happens because the church is doing bad things to you or people do bad things to you in the name of God, or in the name of Christ. And sometimes you’ve just got a really toxic church environment, but sometimes you get religious trauma just because you’re introduced to things too young, and you can’t process it. And so it processes in your head in a way that it makes you not like God.. And I had to deal with a lot of that in my life.

[12:41] Stephanie: Yeah. Or maybe there is something true that gets stated, but it’s not presented within context.

[12:48] Marcus: Yeah, there were a lot of those for me. You know, whether it was, if somebody asks you for something, you can’t say no. Like when I listened to the sermon on the mount, that’s what I was hearing as a little kid, that I’m a bad person if I tell someone no. And to this day as a leader, I tend to be predisposed to try to say yes to people. And I’m realizing that I can’t. You just end up disappointing everybody by saying yes too many times, you’ve got to say no. And that’s not what Jesus was talking about. But as a little kid that’s sure what it sounded like.

[13:21] Stephanie: So I’m trying to decide which direction to go here. There are different ways of addressing A trauma versus B trauma, versus C trauma. Do you want to cast a vision for each of those?

[13:36] Marcus: Yeah, certainly. A trauma is primarily about learning skills that you missed. So if you didn’t get comforted, you didn’t have people help you quiet, you didn’t learn how to return to joy and share joy. Those are skills. So A trauma has to be resolved with skill training. And that means I have to experience those things now. And again, that’s where I promote Thrive Today because that’s what their training is all about. It’s helping you learn skills that you missed through A trauma. B trauma is largely about inner healing, spiritual warfare.

So if I were going to put it together, A trauma is about Building Bounce and The Four Habits of Joy Filled People, Thrive Today, all that. So the B trauma is about understanding the wounded heart and spiritual warfare. Wounds, lies, vows and strongholds, and getting those things addressed. And then C trauma, honestly tends to fall under the category with the same solution as B trauma. And so you could think of it as a subcategory of B trauma because something bad happened to you. But the bad thing that happened was that you compared yourself to somebody.

[14:55] Stephanie: Yeah, I keep thinking about T- bar charts, too. Thinking about lies and truth and figuring out how you see yourself? How’s the devil trying to get you to see yourself? Versus how is God trying to get you to see yourself?

[15:10] Marcus: There’s no question about it. People look at me and have some interesting ideas about me that I hear through the years. And some people looked at me and thought I just had life handed to me on a silver platter because my dad was Dr. Timothy Warner. I grew up in an intact family. I got to go to Bible college for free, got a great education and got all this. And at some level, they’re absolutely right. I have had life handed to me on a silver platter. One of the things that went with that was, and again, this goes back to early childhood religious trauma, I would hear as a little kid the story of the five talents and think to myself, well, I’m a five talent person because of everything that I’ve been given. It turned into a fear thing. It’s like I have to excel, I have no excuses.

And what that led into was the constant feeling that I was a disappointment. That no matter what I did it didn’t measure up to what I should have done or could have done, based on all the advantages that I had. That’s an example of how that goes right at your identity. The devil’s good at even taking blessings and turning them into curses if we look at it wrong, and we get our beliefs about it turned around. And a lot of times we’re predisposed to those beliefs because our attachments aren’t strong enough surrounding them. So I could go on, but this isn’t just “a me counseling session.”

[16:53] Stephanie: I can identify with a lot of that. Also, in the last episode and in this episode, I keep thinking about super sheep. One of Satan’s tactics is to try to separate us and make us think that, hey, we are strong enough on our own, or we can do it on our own. Maybe we’ll talk about that more next episode.

[17:23] Marcus:  For those who don’t know the super sheep story.

[17:24] Stephanie:  Do you want to talk about it next episode? Because we can save it?

[17:27] Marcus: Yeah, it’s a core story in a couple of the books that I’ve written. It’s basically this idea, and we’ll expand on it next time. But it’s basically the idea that the devil tries to get us away from the shepherd because we’re easier prey. And his primary strategy is deception. So if he gets us to believe things about ourselves that says we’re a disappointment to the shepherd, for example, then I might not spend as much time in prayer with the shepherd, because I don’t think he’s all that happy to see me. Well, that just sets me up to be easier prey for the enemy. So all of these things keep coming back to this idea of slavery, right? The devil wants us in slavery and God wants to set us free.

[18:12] Stephanie: Hallelujah! So do you want to cover some WLVS at the very core? You’ve mentioned it before..

[18:21] Marcus: Well, yeah, we’re going to obviously talk about this a lot. It can come up in a lot of episodes because it’s such a core illustration. When I was a pastor people would block out two hour appointments and so I needed some tools to make these two hours as efficient as they could be. And one of the tools that developed pretty quickly was this idea of wounds, lies, and vows. The world wounds us, the devil lies to us, and our flesh makes vows. So you got the world, the devil, and the flesh. The world wounds us, the devil lies to us, the flesh makes vows, and the product is strongholds. And so as I would sit there and listen to people tell their stories and take notes, what jumps out at you is, oh, that’s a wounding story. Oh, I hear a lie there, oh, that’s a vow. That’s an “I will” statement, I will never let you….. And then you’re also noting the strongholds they’re dealing with. I’m depressed. I have an addiction. I hate myself. What are the things going on here?

So it affects even the way that I would take notes on listening to people tell their story. So you got an idea. This is what we need to push into now when we start praying through these issues. So we say, God, out of all these wounds that have been talked about, is there one in particular you want to heal while we’re together here? So we would just ask Jesus to bring to my mind one memory?

And we’d go to that one memory and we’d camp out there a little bit, process a little bit, and then dive in saying, Jesus, I now ask you to do something to heal it. And then I’d say, just pay attention to the first thing that comes into your mind. Go back and revisit it. Do you have new thoughts? Do you see new things? Do you have new feelings? Has anything changed because you just asked Jesus to come in? Let’s push into that and be sensitive to what those changes are. And now you evaluate those and say, so these new thoughts, these new things you’re seeing, these new feelings, are they bringing you a greater sense of peace?  A greater sense of, ah, I’m going to be okay.

Are they leading you to the truth of where we’re going, or are they increasing the bondage and the tension and the problem? And so what you find is that discerning whether this is God or not is not as hard as it at first seems, because this thing’s either setting them free or it’s not. And so that’s kind of where WLVS started. It’s the wounds, lies, vows and strongholds. And it’s the model that explains really how the devil uses wounds that happen to us to plant lies largely about our identity and God’s identity. So that’s our core model that I have been teaching ever since.

[21:08] Stephanie: Yeah. We have not only the book but a whole video course on Understanding the Wounded Heart that you can find at our website. And I think it’s under the get started….I don’t know. I should have double checked it.

[21:20] Marcus: Our website keeps changing, but it is on there. You can also find it at YouTube, Understanding the Wounded Heart.

[21:27] Stephanie: Huzzah!  Can you tell us any stories that show how wounds affect identity?

[21:34] Marcus: Well, the opening story in Understanding the Wounded Heart is about a teenage girl whose parents got divorced and the devil used the wound of this early childhood memory of her parents divorcing to plant a lie. And the lie he planted was they divorced because you’re not lovable. If you were really lovable then how could your dad have possibly left? The only obvious explanation is that you weren’t enough to keep him here. And so there’s this deep seated wound that led to a deep seated lie that led to vows. And the vows were, I’m never letting anybody close enough to me to find out that I’m unlovable. And in her case her presenting issue she came for help with was, why do I sabotage all my relationships? Well, it kind of laid out pretty clearly after that. And so I look at this and I think that’s super common, right?

There’s a lot of people who have patterns like that where something happened and they may have dismissed it. Like, in her case she dismissed it. She’s like, oh, everybody’s parents get divorced right? This happens to everybody. What kind of a wimp am I? That would be the core issue in my life. And we are often dismissive of things that happen to us. And I find that one of the reasons that we don’t deal with our wounds more often, the number one reason I run into is that people dismiss them.

The other end of the spectrum are people who have made those wounds so massive and so big and so monumental that they don’t think anything can be done about it, so they don’t try. And I find it goes one direction or the other, a kind of two extremes idea. And so we want to encourage people that Jesus has a solution.

[23:27] Stephanie:  It reminds me of, and I mean this is more niche, but the peacock versus skunk narcissism. Where you create your identity like a skunk narcissist, like, oh nobody’s problems are as special as mine. And so you almost glorify your wounds.

[23:42] Marcus:  And you run into that a lot. We call it a victim mindset or a victim spirit, which is very similar to what we would call skunk narcissism. And it’s the idea that what makes me special are my problems. Therefore my identity comes from all of my problems. We call that a victim mindset, a victim mentality. I am a victim and that is my identity. And I take that identity from the fact that my problems are what make me special. Well, that’s no way to live life.

And so what we want is to help people transition to having a victor mentality that Christ came to set us free to live as his sons and daughters. To be princes and princesses in the kingdom. And to live with the freedom that comes out of this. And so that isn’t just a switch you flip. There’s often a lot of wounds and a lot of lies and a lot of things that need to change. Sometimes there are key ones that can make a big difference but that’s what we’re trying to help people break free from.

[24:49] Stephanie: And you have to deal with that at the attachment level, at the beliefs level, and at the community level.

[24:54] Marcus: Exactly. Because people tend to gather around them in their community. They tend to gather people around them who will reinforce the narrative that in a sense, they need to be true in order to maintain their identity. And so that can happen as well. It’s not the only pattern but it’s a pattern that can happen.

[25:13] Stephanie: Well, I’m going to pause real quick here and I’m going to pull a Q & A question from one of our listeners. This person says, “Some of the more recent episodes and older ones gave me the thought of using some of these techniques, like calming and appreciation with our youngest adopted son. He is 15 years old and on the spectrum. I was wondering if you have ever utilized this with children or teens on the spectrum?”

[25:37] Marcus: That’s an excellent question. I’ve actually been asked that quite a bit. So I usually refer folks with this question to Stephanie Hinman, who co-authored the book Building Bounce with me. She does work with children and teens quite a bit. Also, I have zero experience personally with people on the spectrum and doing this stuff, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t people out there who haven’t done it. What I have been told by some of the people. Yeah, did I say that wrong?.

[26:06] Stephanie: There are those who have done it.

[26:07] Marcus: There are people out there who have used these tools with people on  the spectrum. And one feedback I got from somebody who did that said, the one exception is eye contact, that works differently. And so it can be triggering to some people on the spectrum to give them too much eye contact. So there’s some differences and I’m not really in a position to speak with authority on that, other than to say, yeah,  there’s people out there who do use these tools. Especially quieting and appreciation. They  are two really good ones.

[26:42] Stephanie: Thank you. So as we are coming up to the end of the episode, do you want to have any closing thoughts?

[26:51] Marcus: Well, you know, wounds is a big, big topic, and sometimes just talking about the idea of wounds opens things up for people. And they don’t always know how to  shut this back down and how to get on with life now that I’ve been triggered with all this? This is where you take a deep breath and say, Jesus, (the John Eldridge pause prayer.) I give everyone and everything to you. I don’t have to solve all of my problems today. I don’t have to solve all my problems in the next ten minutes.

I trust you that you’re going to take me on a journey that’s going to get me exactly where I need to be. I can trust you to be my good shepherd and my Father. And so sometimes we just have to remind ourselves of those things and that it’s going to be okay. Take a deep breath and realize that I don’t have to solve all my problems right now.

[27:45] Stephanie: Good word. Good word. Well, I am looking forward to continuing this conversation in the next episode. But for now, thank you everyone, 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. Well see you back next week.