8: Pockets of Pain

[00:00] Stephanie: Season 3, episode 8. We are wrapping up our look at breakthrough engine number two: Unleashing Your Beliefs. Hello, Father.

[00:09] Marcus: Hello, Daughter.

[00:10] Stephanie: Good to be with you.

[00:11] Marcus: Good to be here.

[00:12] Stephanie: Very good. Happy December.

[00:14] Marcus: Yes, in the heart of the holidays.

[00:18] Stephanie: Oh, it’s good to be here. Well, today we are going to be carrying on from two episodes so far on unleashing your beliefs, and today we’re going to continue with that topic and we’re going to press deeper into this idea of pockets of pain and what that has to do with our beliefs. So, I’m just going to pass this over to you right now.

[00:44] Marcus: All right, so pockets of pain. That’s a very good holiday topic.

[00:51] Stephanie: We’re going to get there actually.

[00:52] Marcus: Well, it’s true. So how to explain this? Like, right now, you and I, probably in a pretty good mood, feeling fine. Nothing’s getting triggered. So I’ve often used the analogy that all of us have this powder keg down in our gut, and that’s where we keep all of our issues stored. And as long as nobody pushes our buttons, they stay nicely tucked away down in there.

And it’s easy to feel like, you know what, I’m fine. I don’t really have anything wrong. Everything’s going all right. But what it really means is that nobody’s pushing my buttons. So when we’re talking about pockets of pain, we’re essentially saying that down in that powder keg, there’s stuff down there, and it just takes pressing our buttons to get it to come out.

And so, for example, whenever I overreact or whenever you overreact, and we can have an overreaction in a big way — like, I’m way too angry right now for what just happened, or I am way too scared for what just happened. That’s an overreaction. Or I could, in a negative way, overreact — I’ve just shut down completely. I’ve just lost all interest in this. I just want to quit. You know, that’s an overreaction in another way.

You see whenever you have an overreaction, it is a sign that a button has gotten pushed. Something down in that powder keg has gotten stirred up. And another term for that is I have just touched a pocket of pain. Somewhere down inside me in my heart — it’s not my whole heart that’s in pain — there is a pocket in my heart that is in pain. And what we mean by that is that it is in unresolved pain, like something is still getting triggered on a fairly regular basis.

So that expression, pocket of pain, I first heard from Lydia Discipleship Ministries, from Daryl Anderson and Alaine Pakkala, and both of them would talk about this on a regular basis. And I just love the picture and the imagery there, because it’s not my whole heart that is in pain. I’m actually doing okay right now, but there is a pocket of pain in there. And if you push the wrong button or you touch the wrong thing, it will come out, and I will get triggered and I will overreact, either in way too big of emotion or just having all the energy deflated from me.

[03:21] Stephanie: And sometimes this can be shocking. You’ll talk about button dances in marriages or whatever where people learn, ah, when I touch that something happens, and I’m just learning not to touch that. And that can happen in a variety of relationships, too, where you notice other people’s pockets of pain.

[03:41] Marcus: Yeah, I’d go so far as to say it is going to happen in any relationship that you have. Sooner or later, you’re going to push somebody’s button, and they are going to overreact in a way that is going to be shocking to you, that you’re not going to understand why they’ve reacted so strongly or why they’ve shut down so completely or what happened, because it feels out of proportion.

And so this can happen in both directions. Sometimes it feels out of proportion because I’m the one with the pocket of pain, and I don’t realize how much damage I did to that person because of my pocket of pain. So it can be that. It can also be — I just really didn’t do that much, but because it hit that particular button, the reaction was much bigger than it would have been. And so just because I trigger somebody doesn’t mean that the problem is them or they’re the ones with the problem. It could be that I also, because of my own issues, don’t recognize when I’m wounding people. And that’s something that also needs to be looked at.

[04:42] Stephanie: I have witnessed many conversations from a variety of people where people are just talking left brain to left brain, and I’m like, you are both in your wounded place right now. Or when I am in my wounded place, I can tell, you know, and I need to get myself out of this.

[04:55] Marcus: And when I’m in my wounded place, it’s much easier to go into what Dr. Wilder calls our enemy mode. When that is, I’m in the part of my brain that sees you as a problem that needs to be solved and not as a person to relate to. And that’s part of what happens when I get triggered, and I end up over there.

And so it happens a lot. And it can happen a lot, especially around the holidays, because I’m often around people who trigger me, and I’m often around people who push my buttons on a regular basis. So understanding how these things work will factor into a lot of our relational experiences.

[05:29] Stephanie: Yeah. So let’s tie this back into beliefs directly. What do beliefs have to do with our pockets of pain?

[05:37] Marcus: So the first thing that gets triggered when a button is pushed is pain, is emotion. And I don’t always realize that there are beliefs connected to those emotions. But let’s just say that it is your mother and me, and something comes up, right? And I push her buttons, and she gets, you know, really stern with me, or she pushes my buttons, and I either just shut down or I get upset with her.

But what happens when that takes place, basically, is the emotion is familiar and so when the emotion comes up, it’s like — I picture it this way — it unlocks a part of my heart or a part of my mind that has stored up everything that I believe that supports that emotion. And so when that emotion gets triggered, let’s say that she has triggered me and up pops my critical mindset.

Now, everything that’s ever made me feel critical, I just want to, you know, kind of put people in their place, in judgment. That comes up. And now I’ve got these beliefs that are reinforcing it, and that tends to be where you get those, “She always does this; she never does that. Why is it always this way?”

[06:59] Stephanie: If you ever find yourself thinking in absolutes —

[07:01] Marcus: It’s a good chance that you’ve been triggered if you are talking in absolutes.

[07:07] Stephanie: Yes.

[07:08] Marcus: And so that’s one of the signs that you’re looking for is what are the beliefs coming up right now? And are those beliefs supporting the fruit of the Spirit, or are those beliefs supporting me staying in enemy mode?

[07:22] Stephanie: Mm-hmm. It’s a good thing to watch for in your academic writing, too, you know.

[07:27] Marcus: True.

[07:28] Stephanie: No, I can totally relate. It’s very easy to remember, you know, your records of wrong or whatever when you are in that triggered emotion. And you remember every event, every fact that supports why you are justified to feel that emotion.

[07:49] Marcus: Yeah. And it’s easy to say, “I’m not actually even being emotional right now. I’m just stating facts.” But the point is you’re stating facts in a non-relational way, which means you’re not in the relational part of your brain, which means you’re in enemy mode. And so there’s almost no such thing as there’s no emotion to this, it’s just the facts. The facts are always supporting an emotion, one direction or another.

[08:12] Stephanie: Well, and that can then lead to what we talked about last episode, which is the kind of deception that strings the facts together, but it’s an illusion because you’re only focused on certain facts and not others. Yeah. Well, I think it might be an appropriate time to open up W.L.V.S. a little bit more and look at how beliefs factor in with our pain and our wound process.

[08:44] Marcus: Yeah.

[08:44] Stephanie: Yeah.

[08:45] Marcus: Well, so we started our talk about the powder keg and the buttons. And the way I’ve always taught this is I’ve asked people questions like, “So, do you recognize this pattern in your life where buttons get pushed, powder keg goes off, boom, and all of a sudden you are under the control of this big emotion, whether it’s anger or fear, or whether it’s shame, disgust, sadness, or despair. But I’m suddenly being controlled by this emotion now because something has exploded and erupted and what are you going to do about that?” And the number one answer I would get from people is, “Well, I’m going to make sure nobody ever pushes those buttons.”

[09:25] Stephanie: Mm-hmm.

[09:26] Marcus: And so that’s why we develop avoidant lifestyles. We just avoid people, we avoid situations. Sometimes that’s the right thing to do, but it can become a habit or a pattern where I now just avoid hard people and hard things all the time because I don’t know if I can go through that without getting triggered and creating a problem.

And sometimes that’s legitimate. Like if you know you’re going to get triggered and you know that’s going to create a huge problem, there are times to just avoid being in that situation, but there are other times when we’re doing it not because of the damage it’s going to do to other people; we’re just not sure we can get out of it. And it develops as a habit, a bad habit of being an avoidant person.

[10:13] Stephanie: Mm-hmm. I’ve also seen it where it could be almost the flip side of things where it turns into self-fulfilling prophecy, where this is inevitably going to happen, so you just trigger it before it gets triggered.

[10:26] Marcus: Yes, that happens quite a bit. There’s almost always extremes. So one extreme is avoidance, and the other extreme, I suppose, is you do it before they do it. And so you just go ahead and give into it.

[10:42] Stephanie: Yeah, and there are endless, endless avenues. We could go there.

[10:47] Marcus: I know you asked me about W.L.V.S., so let’s go back to the powder keg thing. So we said, as opposed to just avoiding things and making sure nobody ever pushes your buttons, the solution here is that you open the lid and you take a look inside the powder keg. And that when you open the lid and you look inside the powder keg, what you’re going to find is you’re going to find wounds, lies, vows, and strongholds. And so that’s W.L.V.S.: wounds, lies, vows, and strongholds. So, yeah, that’s something we talk about a lot here at Deeper Walk.

[11:18] Stephanie: And we’re on video now, so we can actually do the hand motion.

[11:25] Marcus: All right, so now we’ll do the hand motion. So W.L.V.S starts with the idea of the pocket of pain. And that is how do I get a pocket of pain in my heart? It’s because I’m wounded. So if this is my heart and my heart gets wounded, it’s like it breaks open. And so right now I’ve got my hands in a fist, and they break apart like this, where something has just wounded my heart and opened it up, and it is now ready to receive seeds. It’s now ready to receive thoughts or ideas.

And so what happens is my woundedness, my pain, has to be interpreted. What is the meaning of this? What has this taught me about life? And it’s not something I often sit around and think about directly. It’s just in a reactionary way, I begin to feel like something is true that didn’t used to feel true before that wound happened. And so when my heart gets wounded, there’s like a plow going through the field and opening it up, and there are farmers on either side. One is the Holy Spirit, and one is the wicked spirits.

And the Holy Spirit, you know, he’s got a bag full of truth seeds because you know the truth will set you free. We are sanctified by truth. And so God wants to get truth into that wounded place in my life, and that has a healing effect if truth gets in there. It also keeps the wound from turning into a stronghold, but what if a lie gets planted in there instead. I’ve got the devil over here. He’s got his bag of lie seeds, right? If he gets his lie seeds into this wounded place in my life, then my life is going to start being lived as if that lie is the truth.

And so the reason we call it a pocket of pain here is that, again, that lie doesn’t always feel true to me. That lie feels true to me when I get triggered. So when somebody pushes a button then that part of my powder keg goes off, because there is still something unresolved in there. So I have a wounded place in my heart might be another way of thinking about it. Part of my heart is okay, but there’s another part of my heart that is not. It is wounded. And when I’m in that wounded place, lies feel true to me. And because those lies feel true to me when that wounded place gets triggered, I go into protection mode.

And that’s what vows are all about. How am I going to protect myself? And what goes into that is, clearly I can’t trust God to protect me, so I’m going to have to take charge of this. And since we’re on camera, and we can show people, part of the way this works is — I heard a long time ago — just hold out your hand. Picture holding out your hand like this. Picture your other hand has a knife, and you’ve got to cut right across. What’s your immediate reaction if a knife cuts across your hand? You close it up, right? You did it automatically. You close it up and you pull it back.

And so what happens for most of us is we close up these pockets of pain. That part of my heart that’s been wounded, I close it up, and I pull it back because I don’t want it to get hurt again. And then I create kind of a radar. And that’s what the vows are for. The vow, the closing up, the pulling back, and the radar are all about the vows that I make of how I’m going to protect myself.

So the purpose of the radar is I can see it coming. Ah, I know that tone of voice. I’m going to shut down before that tone of voice escalates into something else, or I see that body language. I can see what’s going on. So my radar sees it coming. I pull back, and I can turn into somebody I wouldn’t normally be much quicker because of this radar that I have developed.

And so that’s what we mean by the vows. The vow is I have closed up, I pulled back, I’ve got a radar up, and it’s looking for potential pain coming my way because I don’t want to feel that pain anymore. The result of that, though, is I form bad habits, I now have strongholds in my life, and strongholds almost always have a component of hopelessness to them. And that hopelessness, what I mean, is a feeling that I can’t get past this. There is no solution to this. I’ve just got to find a way to deal with it.

[15:42] Stephanie: Manage it, deal with it. It’s what people tend to go to counseling for or a doctor for or whatever to fruit pick.

[15:48] Marcus: Yep. So if you think of it as a farm field, it’s been plowed. It’s now received the seeds. Those seeds took root. Out of those seeds have grown vines, the vines are the vows that we have made. Those vines produce fruit. The fruit are the particular strongholds that develop in our life.

And so I could have multiple strongholds, all coming from a single wounding event, or I could have multiple wounding events that are all fueling one big stronghold. And the stronghold is always an area where I am in bondage to lies that feel true to me because of pain that I’ve experienced in the past. And so all this connects, right? When a pocket of pain gets triggered because my buttons get pushed, then all this comes to the surface. So the good news here, right?

[16:36] Stephanie: I like good news.

[16:37] Marcus: The good news is that when I overreact, or I sometimes say when I underreact, like in the sense of if my low-energy emotions get triggered, I call that underreacting.

[16:52] Stephanie: If your reaction is not appropriate to what happened.

[16:55] Marcus: Yeah. So whether I overreact, like with fear and anger, or whether I underreact in a low energy way, if I notice it and go, hey, that’s an overreaction, it’s also now an invitation to invite Jesus to show me what just got triggered. “What is it that just got triggered Jesus? Would you show me? Is there a particular memory you want to bring to my mind right now that has not been completely resolved?” Because I’ll be honest, I’ve had a lot of memories in my life I thought were resolved and only to realize later that, no.

Sometimes painful things can be like diamonds in that there are facets to them, and you can look at them from different angles. So you often have to return to some of these painful moments from different angles and different perspectives because there’s more healing work Jesus wants to do. It just depends.

So, yeah I found that when I overreact, I do something I regret or I shut down, or I’m having not an appropriate emotional reaction or too big of an emotional reaction, then that’s a sign that something’s been triggered, a pocket of pain has been touched. And this is now an opportunity to say, “Jesus, what was the pocket of pain that just got touched? What is the memory you want to take me back to? And what do you want to do to heal that?”

[18:17] Stephanie: Yeah, this is really good. Can we lead this into almost like a homework assignment for people?

[18:24] Marcus: Sure.

[18:25] Stephanie: Where, you know, so we’ve been talking about beliefs for three episodes now, and pain and, you know, maybe even double mindedness, where you have that pocket of pain that is in conflict with the rest of your heart. You, for as long as I have been in tune to your teaching, you’ve used the T bar charts —

[18:44] Marcus: Yes.

[18:45] Stephanie: To help people go through things. So, let’s walk through, like, false beliefs on one side, true beliefs on another, and like, how you would have somebody do this homework.

[18:57] Marcus: So I’ve done this multiple times in different ways. But the key idea is that you ask — once you come to a memory — ask Jesus what began to feel true because of that memory. And you write that down on the left column of the T-bar. The whole idea of a T-bar chart is that you’ve got a line — it looks like a T — so it creates two columns, one on the left and one on the right. The column on the left is lies.

The problem with calling it lies is that a lot of times we don’t think they’re lies. And so I stopped doing that, let’s put lies over here and truth over here, because people are like, but that’s not a lie, that’s true. Okay, so let’s just say what began to feel true over here. And what does God want you to know is true over here? And so the left column is what began to feel true. And those are often things like, I’m worthless, I’m no good. If anybody really knew me, they wouldn’t like me. God has abandoned me. God can’t be trusted. I’m all alone in this world.

You just go down the list, right. These are things that began to feel true. And to me they were so obviously lies. When I’m listening to other people say them, I’m like, well, why can’t you just call that a lie? And it’s like they’ve lived as if it’s the truth for so long.

[20:12] Stephanie: Well, and again, if you can be double minded where like you might know that this is a lie, but it feels true.

[20:18] Marcus: Right, exactly.

[20:19] Stephanie: So it’s like I hesitate to even put this over here because I know that it’s not true, but right now this is what is feeling true.

[20:26] Marcus: Yes, exactly. So the left-hand column, what began to feel true because of this. Now I said, find the memory. If you can’t find the memory, but you know you’re having the emotion, you can do it that way also. And that is if I am feeling shame right now, if I am feeling despair right now, if I’m feeling anger, whatever that emotion is, what are the beliefs that seem to automatically come to my mind when I am feeling this emotion? You can do that as well.

And so again you say, “What are the supporting beliefs? What are the things that feel true when I’m in this emotional state?” Let’s write those on the left side. So you can do this either with memories or you can do it just with the emotion. And either way you put down what those things trigger and make feel true on the left-hand side. Then you pray, right? You pray, you say “God, if that is not true, would you show me what the truth is you want me to believe instead?”

And on the right-hand side, you start writing down all the things that you think God wants you to believe instead. And oftentimes there’s a one-to-one correlation. Well, instead of believing this I now know God wants me to think this. Instead of thinking I’m worthless, I’m thinking God thought I was worth his own son dying on the cross for. So worthless  and worth my son’s death on the cross. Those are pretty contradictory things.

So you just go down like this next one. “Well, if you don’t want me to believe this, what do you want me to believe?” And you write that down on the right-hand side. So the left column is things that are keeping me stuck. The right-hand column are the things that are setting me free. So if you’re talking about the truth will set you free, that’s the goal of the right-hand column. So doing this in prayer helps because I’ve got this sense now of okay, this is what God wants me to believe.

Once I get to that point, I can take it the next step and I can bring in the warfare element of this and say, “I now renounce these as lies on the left-hand side, and I command any wicked spirits that have been telling me this stuff to get out of here in Jesus’ name.” And then I declare these other things to be true, and I ask the Holy Spirit to continue to make them feel true at a deeper level as I move forward.

[22:36] Stephanie: 100%. We’re running short on time now, but I just wanted to press in to say if you want more on this particular topic, Breakthrough has some of it, but the book Understanding the Wounded Heart and the Freedom Course will really help you walk through a lot of this.

[23:00] Marcus: Understanding the Wounded Heart has all this in there. The Freedom Course is basically built around Understanding the Wounded Heart so that it creates an experiential set of practices for you and not just information.

[23:11] Stephanie: It’s a 10-lesson, self-paced course with about three hours of total video content with Dr. Marcus Warner teaching.

[23:23] Marcus: There’s that much?

[23:23] Stephanie: Yeah.

[23:24] Marcus: Wow. Okay.

[23:24] Stephanie: It probably averages like 10 minutes per video, like per session and there’s reflections to go through and practical steps to take and prayer prompts.

[23:38] Marcus: Right. It’s designed to help people slow down, take their time and who really want to dive into this at a deeper level.

[23:44] Stephanie: Yep. So, yeah, any final thoughts for wrapping up not only this episode but maybe like the beliefs engine?

[23:52] Marcus: Yeah. So I think it’s easy to get enamored with one thing or another. I’ve talked to people who are like, oh, it’s all about supplements and just getting your body balanced. I’m like, that can really be helpful, but I’ve never seen somebody have a problem where there wasn’t a beliefs component to it.

In the same way I’ve almost never seen somebody have a problem where there wasn’t a bonding and attachment component to it. And so, you know, the Bible does tell us to renew our minds. And part of the renewal of our minds, I think, is recognizing these pockets of pain as places that have been closed off to the truth in our heart and saying, “Jesus, I am willing to open up this pocket of pain to you,” and invite Jesus in to show me the truth that can set me free. And that’s really what we’re after here when we talk about beliefs.

[24:41] Stephanie: Amen.

Thanks for joining us on the trail today. Did you like this episode? Would you like more people to see it? This is the part where I ask you to like, comment, subscribe, share with a friend.

And do you love this channel? One of the best ways that you can support us is by becoming a Deeper Walk Trailblazer. Thanks again. We’ll see you back on the trail next week.