144 Hope Is What the Dr. Ordered

Lee: Remember that you can't change anybody else; but what you can do is show them that you are changing, and that you're willing to go through the hard stuff and be there with them. So community is important, right? So a parent sitting down and saying, “Hey, I know this is hard. I'd love for you to help me understand what you're feeling.”—like not trying to fix them but trying to understand them—I think would go a long way. I think what's probably true, most children, like most adults, want somebody who cares more than they want somebody who knows all the answers.

Ron: Welcome to the FamilyLife Blended podcast. I'm Ron Deal. We help blended families, and those who love them, pursue the relationships that matter most. And why in the world would we do that? Well, because there's great joy in loving God and loving others, and it makes the world a better place.

By the way, if you're not familiar with FamilyLife Blended, we're the largest blended family ministry in the world with dozens of industry leading books and videos, online/offline small group resources, and we support couples and equip church leaders.

One of the ways we do that, by the way, is by training leaders to help others. In fact, our next Summit on Stepfamily Ministry is coming up October 10 and 11, 2024. It's going to be in Dallas this year. This event equips couples and blended families, pastors, and leaders to minister to blended families in their church and community. It doesn't matter if you're just getting started or you've been at this a while. This is the premier event for you. Go to the show notes, or go straight to the website summitonstepfamilies.com, again, summitonstepfamilies.com for more information. I would love to see you there.

And one more thing before I introduce my guest. You know, the number one email question I get is, how do I find a qualified counselor for our marriage and our stepfamily situation? Well, I want you to know we have a growing list of smart stepfamily therapists and coaches who have invested time and energy in being helpful to blended families. They've gone through my advanced clinical training and they're ready to help. So check the show notes for a link to that list.

And if you're a coach or a counselor or if you know somebody who is, we've got 12 pre-approved continuing education hours waiting for you. We want to help you get connected to family and do a better job at the work that you do. So look us up. We'd love for you to be a part of our referral list.

Okay, my guest today is Dr. Lee Warren. Lee is an award-winning author. He's a brain surgeon. He's an Iraq War veteran. He's the author of three books, including the award-winning book Hope Is the First Dose. We're going to be talking about that today. In addition to being a neurosurgeon, Dr. Warren hosts an excellent podcast exploring faith and neuroscience. It's a great combination. I'm really loving this stuff each and every time.

He and his wife Lisa have a blended family themselves. They've got four adult children. They've got four grandchildren, and they live in North Platte, Nebraska. Did I get all that right, Dr. Warren?

Lee: You got it, Ron.

Ron: [Laughter] Thanks for being with me today. I appreciate it. Welcome to FamilyLife Blended.

By the way, I'm excited to tell our audience that we have three hard copies. I got one right here. We got three hard copies of your book that we're going to give away to a listener right now. And I know, I know you're not listening when we're recording this. That's okay. Here's what you got to do. Send an email blended at familylife.com and ask for the book. The first three emails we get are going to get a copy. Ready, set, go.

Alright, while they're doing that, Dr. Warren and I will keep talking. Hope Is the First Dose is about giving hope to people who have lived through really hard things. Blended families have lived through hard things, sometimes even traumatic things. So what becomes of those things—those big, massive things as you call them—what becomes of those things in our life if we don't apply hope to them?

Lee: Well, I think without hope, basically, I've said it many times, Ron, you know, I take care of people with brain tumors and the hardest things that people can go through medically, but brain cancer is not the worst thing that can happen to somebody. It's not the most fatal thing that—the most fatal thing that can happen is hopelessness. If you lose hope, really, you lose the ability to see a future beyond where you are now. You lose the ability to see how God could make the situation better. And so hopelessness really turns everything dark and keeps you stuck.

I think hope is the driving force to change, to healing, to refining purpose and happiness after these hard things happen. So I think hope is the engine that keeps us moving forward.

Ron: Yes, yes, absolutely, absolutely. Okay, so let's unpack some things. Neurologically what happens to us when we experience grief or tragedy or some significant attachment injury in our life?

Lee: Well, I think the first thing that happens is we get an unmooring from what we thought our future was going to be. Especially like you and I, we've lost children, and you had this notion before you lose a child that your kids will be around to bury you someday. Those things that we think we know turn out to be really important to us. And when we lose something that we thought we were sure of, then it can become an unanchoring.

And so your life, all of a sudden, doesn't look like what you thought it was going to look like. You find yourself asking big questions like, “How could God do this to me?” “How could my life not be what I thought it was going to be?” And all the things you've been working so hard for, all of a sudden, aren't those things anymore.

And so I think that neurologically what happens then is your brain starts to tell you things that will appear to be true: “This is always going to feel this way. It can never get better than it is now. All my good days are behind me.”—those kinds of things that we start to hear. Because what your brain does is it takes a feeling, a neurochemical event, a signal that you've in the past associated with a certain reality—danger, fear, anxiety, whatever—and it brings that previously attached memory and thought and attaches it to the chemical signal that you're getting that tells you you're supposed to feel a certain thing right now; and then projects that into your future as if it's always going to be that way.

And so what happens is you begin to believe that how you feel now about the situation is the truth about how you're always going to have to feel about it. I think that's the first thing.

Ron: And that sounds like hopelessness right there. Okay, so there's some chemical things that are happening. There's some wiring of the neurons within the brain and whatever fires together, wires together. And so all of a sudden, those things are connected and if you're not careful, you can find yourself just casting a negative future and being stuck.

What's fascinating about that is that, you know, sort of spiritually speaking, we've talked about things like that within the Christian community for a long time. People have experienced it. You just have people telling stories about that sort of thing. But now, when we have this ability to look inside the brain and go, “Yes, and there's something physiological that's actually going on that's connected to that experience,” I don't know. What that says to me is that it's more ingrained than we realize. Is that a fair assessment?

Lee: It is. You know, I think your body is a big feedback loop; the way that God built our minds and our brains. It's necessary probably at some point in this conversation to separate mind and brain. I think a lot of people don't spend much time recognizing that they're different things.

But body, mind, brain, gut, all those things are connected, and they feed back on each other. So when you have a big trauma or a big event that changes that thing that you thought you knew, and all the things we already discussed, then you begin to sort of get physiological signals that are telling brain that your body is hurting in different ways.
And so you then begin to think about the feelings that you're feeling, and you start to then focus on them.

Cortisol is a good example, like, you start thinking about the way that you're feeling bad, and your brain brings back up how that in the past has felt bad and you start to focus on feeling bad. You start to release stress chemicals and biochemical events happen in your body that begin to then make that bad feeling become part of your body.

That’s why I had a shingles outbreak right after we lost our son and every time I think about my son now, I have pain in my right scapula. That's where the shingles happened. That's a brain-body connection that my brain made that says when I hurt over losing my son, my body's going to hurt in my right scapula. I think that's a long, sort of short answer to your complex question.

Ron: Yes, yes; but the reason that's relevant for everybody who's listening right now is things that you've experienced that are hard and difficult—you lose a spouse to death and now you find yourself doing life by yourself as a single parent, whatever that journey was for you, or you went through a divorce and never saw that one coming—and you feel the weight of that, the pain of it. You see your kids suffering. You see them struggling and you're trying to figure out what God's doing in all this, what life holds for you, what's this new future, and if you're not careful, what can happen is you end up sort of digging your own rut. Is that a fair way of saying it?

You know, neurologically there's a rut going on inside your brain, and emotionally there's a rut going on in your life, where you're looking at and constantly seeing that negative future or forecasting negative things into what's good.

One of the things we talk about on this podcast from time to time is what we call the ghost of marriage past; those little notions of things that you learned—unfortunately, you learned in a difficult relationship and now you're in a new relationship and if you're not careful, you bring all that stuff with you.

Lee: Yes.

Ron: And that's easy to do. It's easy for that to happen and you don't even realize it's happening, right?

Lee: That’s right. Yes, so you're referring to this idea of what the neuroscientists call synapses. Basically the neurons in your brain or the cells is where the business of brain activity happens, but the magic of how the brain works is in networks, and so cells connect to other cells. There's a hundred billion or so cells in your brain. Nobody really knows the total number, but they make trillions of connections. And so there's literally more connections between cells in your brain than there are stars in the universe. There’re just trillions of them.

And what happens is when you think about something enough times, you create a synapse to automate that set of feelings and chemical events and whole experience idea that you don't have to then purposefully think about again to experience the same sort of emotional response anytime you're in a situation that kind of reminds your brain of that having happened.

So you're in a bad marriage, you have abuse, you had something that happened to you, and you wired into your brain that when somebody looks at you a certain way, your body's going to respond as if it's in danger because you were in danger then, right?
Now, you're in a new marriage and your husband looks at you a certain way, and that's what you feel; like, “That thing is about to happen again. I'm in danger again,” even though you're not.

And so that's why I always say on my show, feelings are not facts. Feelings are chemical events. And what happens with a feeling, your body, your brain, your body, your gut releases some sort of hormone or neurotransmitter. And the meaning behind what that chemical means depends on your memory and your current mood and your current experience. But if you're not aware of that, then you sort of reattach the previous meaning the last time you felt that thing or the common times that you felt that thing.

And so what happens then is we begin to believe that every time I feel a certain set of physiological things, that means the situation I'm currently in is the same as it was the first time I felt that. So the thing your uncle did to you when you were nine made you feel a certain set of things, and now when you feel that your skin rises, you feel a chill on your neck, or whatever, that means somebody's about to hurt you, even though they might not be about to hurt you.

We have to learn then to discern. That's what 2 Corinthians, in the Bible, 10 verse 5 says to take every thought captive; that this idea of, I feel something, but I don't have to believe that that is currently happening, and I can think about it and then decide how to appropriately respond to it. That's the beginning of learning how to sort of take charge of our thoughts and feelings.

Ron: A related concept I'd love to run by you. My wife and I in our forthcoming book called The Mindful Marriage, we talked about the story that you write that's connected to those experiences; and so not only is there is this physiological response within the brain, but there's a narrative that gets written over time especially if some of those experiences sort of happen over and over again. And the story of your pain then becomes the story you walk out, even if that's not necessarily what's actually happening in the moment that you're actually in.

Lee: That’s right.

Ron: And the next thing you know, you're stuck in the past now in the present, making the present more like the past, and that's one of the ironies of the ghost of marriage past is you end up creating a self-fulfilling prophecy in some ways by the way you respond to the current situation.

Lee: That's exactly right. There's the thing you referred to a while ago, the neurons that fire together, wire together, that's called Hebb's Law. And the guy, Hebb, was the one that figured out that this thing that we now call attention density. So the more you pay attention to something from a particular point of view, the more those neurons say, “Hey, you don't have to spend all this mental energy thinking about this. We'll just wire it so that it happens automatically, and you can think about something else.”

And so you basically create these ruts, as you call them, that the wagon of your thought is going to go into the wagon of your physiological response is going to go into. And that becomes a path you don't have to actively think about anymore. That's why I always say the things that we do, we're getting better at.

So you're doing this, past feelings maybe experienced a certain thing and now I'm bringing that into my current marriage and I’m causing trouble for myself today based on something that happened in the past. Then I'm going to become better at doing that. And so now all the little things about my spouse that remind me of something in the past, I'm going to start associating with those things in the past. And I'm going to start bringing attitudes and behaviors into my marriage now that aren't about my marriage now. They're about something that happened in the ghost of marriage past, as you just said.

Ron: I don't know if it's true, but a long time ago I was told that there's a sign somewhere in Alaska. This seems true. [Laughter] You know, it's conceivably true. And the sign apparently says, “Choose your rut carefully,” when you're driving down the road. “Choose your rut carefully; you're going to be in it the next 200 miles.”
You know, I just think that's sort of what we're seeing here but we don't choose. We sort of drift into ruts and don't even realize that we're in them. And then we're going to be stuck in that rut for a very long time.

My guess is this is where we need to bring in the difference between mind and brain. Because if we're going to talk about changing and getting out of our ruts, we've got to know the difference. Tell us about that.

Lee: That’s right; that’s exactly right. I'll give you 200 years, 400 years of cognitive neuroscience in about three minutes and that'll catch us up. [Laughter]

Ron: I love it. I love it; go for it.

Lee: So before Isaac Newton, right, most people in history kind of thought that their life had a meaning and a purpose and that God put them here, somehow, they got here, and they had a reason why they were on Earth. They were supposed to honor God with their life or do something notable with their life; that their life meant something.

Then Isaac Newton came along who has gotten a bad rap. He was a Christian and then the work that he did as a scientist was aimed at trying to explore what God did. So his intention was to use science to explain what we see in God, and thereby honor God and help other people see Him. And guys like Maxwell who discovered the equations that taught us about electromagnetism and all that, that led up to Einstein in the 20th century, developing quantum physics with all those smart guys from Austria and Germany. That basically Newton said we need to be able to examine things and figure them out with a process.

So he came up with the laws of thermodynamics and the laws of motion and all those things. And then after Newton, what everybody did is they got this idea that we could figure something out and break it down to its component parts and reduce it to the stuff that it was made out of. Newton called them atoms that he believed that it was hard physical structures that were little, tiny things that built up everything. I'm going somewhere with this, I promise.

Ron: Okay. I'm with you.

Lee: So Newton said basically, you break everything down to its smallest part. Then you can build it back up and understand what's going to happen to it and how it's going to behave. So you break it down, understand the making of it, and then you can understand what it's going to do. People took that and they created something called determinism. Which means basically, if you can reduce something down, you can reduce it to its component parts, then that will determine what those parts are going to do.

They began to believe then, over the course of evolution, after Charles Darwin came along and said you know, we all just got here from the primordial goo and that came out of a bunch of accidental things that happened in the universe for billions of years before that, that basically they decided that if we understand how the brain works, we can then predict how it's going to behave. And this idea of determinism came along, which means basically you don't have a purpose or a meaning. There's nothing real about you. You're just, you just are what you are, and you can't really change it.

And then once Watson and Crick came along and discovered how DNA works, then the doctrine of genetic determinism came along and that led people for the last 50 or so years to believe that pretty much, Ron, you are going to be what your parents gave you genetically; that's how you're going to think. It's whether you're going to drink or not. It's whether you're going to be abusive or not. It's how you're going to turn out to be as a person. That you're sort of stuck because of your genetics. You're stuck because of how your brain is formed. And they never really figured out how mind arose out of brain.

But they believed that mind was just an epiphenomenon or sort of some sort of process that happened inside of neurons and the idea that you have a real life in your mind—that your mind can have a personality and that you are something more than the activity of a bunch of neurons in your brain—is just a figment of your imagination. Like you're in the matrix and you're one of those, you know meek computers that's just plugged in and generating energy.

And so really neuroscientists from the fifties after Crick, Francis Crick and Watson gave us DNA, they have really taught pretty much everybody in neuroscience, including a lot of therapists and psychiatrists and medical practitioners, that the human mind is a construct of the brain and it's nothing more than that.

And that's important. I'm spending a lot of time for this because it's important. That once the quantum physicist figured out that how you observe an experiment determines the outcome of the experiment. Okay, that's the gist of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and all the big things that led to things like computers and microwave ovens, and space travel and all the things, smart phones and all the stuff that we use now, all came out of quantum physics.

But what quantum physics teaches us is that you are not a passive participant in your life. That when you observe something from a particular point of view, it changes the outcome. Okay, there's a lot of math behind that, but the truth is, that's what the Bible has been saying all along.

Ron: That's right.
Lee: The Bible has been saying all along that God communicates with your mind and your mind tells your brain and your body what to do. And that means, so basically the long and the short of it is, mind is not a product of brain. Mind is something that God gave us, and it communicates to us and to the outside world through the mechanism of brain.

Okay? It's important to separate that out. So what it means then is that the way that you think changes the brain structurally. So these ruts that we've been talking about, for example, the bad news is that when you think about something enough times from a particular point of view, you create ruts and synapses in your brain that automates those and makes them easier to perpetuate.

That's the bad news. The good news is you can change them almost instantly by changing how you think about those things. So as we've been talking, your brain is making, breaking down and recreating synapses at an alarming rate, and since the first person clicked on this conversation and started to watch it, your brain is structurally different than it was at the start of the conversation.

The problem is if you allow that process to happen passively, then what happens is those synapses just get remade in the same way that they had been. And so if your behavior never gets consciously thought about and intentionally attempted to change, then what will happen is you will recreate the same behaviors and thought patterns.

That's why the Bible says so clearly in Romans chapter 12 that we need to renew our minds. We need to transform our thinking rather than conform our thinking. So the whole punchline of what I just said is to say that it's very clear from 20th and 21st century quantum physics that the brain and the mind are not the same thing. Mind is a metaphysical thing that's real, that has controlling power over brain, and brain and body feedback and make mind do certain things if we don't consciously intervene in it.

Jeffrey Schwartz is a famous psychiatrist from UCLA, who probably has made the most impact in the treatment of obsessive-compulsive disorder of anybody. If you haven't read him, if you have trouble with obsessive compulsive disorder, you should read his books. He's tremendous. But he wrote a book called The Mind and the Brain and basically broke this down in a pretty accessible way if somebody listening is interested in these things. But the most important thing that Schwartz talks about is that you can inspect your thinking, and he calls it revaluing, relabeling things that you think.

So like you just talked about something from your past marriage, Ron, pops up and you're not even aware of it, but you're giving your spouse a hard time about something and it's not their fault. You're actually arguing with your former spouse. You're actually afraid of something that happened in your former marriage. You're actually carrying out a program that you wrote, and you've been running for 20 years, even though the new partner has nothing to do with it. Your blended family, kids weren't responsible for that thought pattern or behavior that you're experiencing, but you're running that program.

So Schwartz says, time out, think about what you're thinking, biopsy it—I call it biopsy cause I'm a brain surgeon—like biopsy that thought and look at it and say, “Wait a minute, this feels like this thing that was happening in my former marriage but it's not that thing. I need to relabel that. I need to say, wait, this is an old thing that I'm responding to, and now I'm going to revalue it.” So it doesn't have to mean or feel the same now as it did then, because I can revalue it and recognize that I'm behaving, I'm running a program that's not appropriate for this current environment.

Ron: So essentially, I think the New Testament would call that the truth. You're running this thought by the truth. And you're examining it in light of what God says is true, not necessarily what you feel—

Lee: That’s right.

Ron: —is true or what experience, what your brain has come to believe as true. And that's a discipline. I mean, this is a hard thing to do. It takes a lot of self-reflection. I think it takes a certain humility to look in the mirror and say, “Is this about me?” because I really want it to be about you. I mean, that, from an interpersonal standpoint, that's one of the things we tackle in The Mindful Marriage, is when you get into that rut, and you don't even realize the program's running, number one, but number two, where that takes you is to the thought of, “Yes, and you're the one who's causing me pain, and so I've got to get you to change.” Now, I've got an agenda, and I'm trying to create change in you, rather than look in the mirror and create the change in me.

Lee: That’s right. This is important. It sounds like a hard teaching, what we're getting at here, but it's really important to know that some unalterable facts—I would call them universal laws of neurosciences—that you cannot change anybody else. You cannot change anybody else's habits or behaviors, and nobody can change yours either except God. I mean, obviously God can do that, but you have to give consent to it. Like I can take you to surgery and fix your back pain sometimes, but not without your consent. Like you've got to say, “Okay, let's do this thing.” and you've got to give me permission to operate on you in that way. But nobody else can change your mind for you.

And nobody else can change enough to make you happy unless you change what makes you happy, right? Nobody can, and so you're going to have an endless series of heartaches and heartbreaks if you don't learn that nobody else can be responsible for your happiness except you.

Ron: That is so very profound because I think most of us spend our adult marriage life and our adult family life trying to get other people to change something about them, so our pain goes away, and we get more happy. And what you just said is you can't do that. They cannot change that part of you. It's something you have to—

And of course, the New Testament is replete with this notion. It's not just Romans 12; it’s Philippians 4. It’s Ephesians 4 and 5. It's Galatians 5 and 6, Colossians 3, take off this old self, put on the new self, stop thinking about those things, start thinking about these things. I mean, that is a pattern of the New Testament that's all about moving into the reality that God has already made us a new creation. We just now have to begin to live out of that new created spirit and it means actively looking at what is still lingering from the past within us.

Lee: That’s right. When you go back to that idea that we talked about a while ago of this determinism thing, it's so pervasive. I would challenge if there's counselors and therapists out there, I would challenge you to look really hard at your worldview and at the way that you were trained and any techniques that you use with your clients.

Like look really hard for places where that sort of idea of determinism might've snuck in there, where we are stuck with how we're born. It's not really our fault because our parents gave us these genes, or this thing happened to us and that changed us in a certain way and we can't really fix it, so people need to accommodate our, you know, frailties and those sorts of things. There's some truth to some of that but the truth of this is you can change just about any type of response that you have to trauma or tragedy or massive things or, or marital situations. You can change your response and that's where the hope lies, Ron.

I think it was Gabor Maté that said it first. I really like how he worded this, although I'm not a huge fan of his work. He said trauma's not the thing that happened to you. And that would be really bad news if it was, because if trauma is the thing that happened to you, it never stops being true that my son died, your son died, never stops being true, and you're broken by that, you always will be. It never stops being true if you were raped or abused or any of those things. You can't change the thing that happened.

But trauma is not that. Trauma is your set of mental and physiological responses to the things that happen to you. That's what trauma is and that can change. You can learn a new way of responding when somebody triggers you. You can learn a new way of responding when a memory flashes back, or you have PTSD, or something occurs. You can learn a new response and that's where the hope lies and that's what the Bible is talking about when it says, you know, renew your mind, change your thinking, transform your life, all those things.

And it even says we have the mind of Christ. Like if you accepted Jesus as your Savior, He's already changed your mind. The problem is we live in this fallen world and this brain that reminds us of things, and we don't recognize that we're repeating these thought patterns, and we don't have to live that way. Friend, you can change your mind.

Ron: I'll never forget the first time it dawned on me that neuroplasticity says that you can change your mind. And not just thoughts as in conscious thought, but you can change how your brain is actually wired when you, by practice, put into practice the things that are good and right and noble and praiseworthy, and begin to live based upon God's truth; that that actually begins to physiologically change the wiring of your brain. That just blows me away to think that God's prescription to renew your mind is not just ethereal, something above you; it's actually in you.

Lee: That's exactly right. We had an amazing experience, Lisa and I, when we lived in Alabama. Our office was on the top floor of the MRI Research Center at Auburn University, and they had one of the, at the time, only three or four what's called a 7-Tesla Magnetic Resonance Imaging Scanner. When you go get your back scanned or you hurt your knee and you go get an MRI, most of the commercial units in the country are 1.5 Tesla or weaker. Tesla is a measure of magnetic field strength and so the stronger the magnet, the more detailed the imaging they can do.

Ron: Okay.

Lee: At the time they had a 7-Tesla magnet, which could image things like the beating heart. And it was so powerful of a magnet that when they did small animal studies, it would levitate the birds or the rabbits off the field. It would pick their whole body up. But the first time we got to go down there and watch them do some functional imaging research.

So basically when you get an MRI of your knee or your brain, it's a static picture. It's just a picture of the organ, a picture of the thing, but functional imaging allows us to see what the organ is actually doing physiologically. So we got to go down and watch. They put these research subjects, these people, in the scanner, and they would inject them with a tracer and say, “Hey, Ron, think about the saddest thing you've ever been through. Think about the day you got the phone call when your son passed away, when you lost your child. Think about how you felt right then.”

And they can watch in real time the blood flow and chemical changes in the brain. The colors change on the screen of what's happening in your brain and the networks that are getting involved and things that are happening. And then they, a few minutes later, they can say, “Hey, think about the best thing that's ever happened. Think about the happiest moment you've ever had, when your wife said yes, or whatever. Think about the best feeling you've ever felt in your whole life.” And instantly in the screen, the colors change, and different parts of the brain begin to light up. And you can see functionally the fact that thinking can change the structural behavior of your brain.

That's how you know mind and brain are separate by the way. It's impossible—it was easy in the 50s and 40s and 30s for people to say, “Oh, mind's an artifact of brain,” but now we can prove it. Now we can show you a picture of how you think changing the structure of your brain. That's why it's so important. It's kind of scary, but it's also very hopeful that you have co creative power with God to functionally change how your brain is working and your brain changes everything about how your body works.

Even another layer, which is fascinating, is that our brains and our minds and our brains affect the people around us electrochemically. And so, you know, this already in one level, it sounds funny to say it, but when Debbie Downer comes in the room, right? Somebody's in a really bad mood. Somebody's really angry or really upset. You instantly feel a bunch of physiological stuff from them way faster than could be explained by the activity of the chemical synapses and neurons. Like it happens instantly, and it happens instantly because it's electromagnetic. It happens at the speed of light. Like your emotional state resonates with mine.

The psychologists call that limbic resonance; how our systems align with one another. And you have this whole system in your brain of things called mirror neurons that basically mirror the facial expressions and the emotional output of another person and then trigger the same things in their brains to happen and that's how you have what we call empathy with other people, right? So you already know that your electromagnetic state affects those of people around you. That's why when your wife walks in the room you feel happier just because she's happy or you instantly know you did something wrong and you're in trouble and you start to feel all that.

But here's what you might not know. They've done some really fascinating research where they put people in rooms next to each other that they couldn't see each other. And one person's really mad and their heart rate goes up and the other person's heart rate will go up too because they're electromagnetically connected.

Ron: Wow.

Lee: And what we know now from quantum physics is that there's a thing called quantum entanglement where people or electrons or molecules that are connected with one another in certain ways can have the same responses even when they're separated by vast distances. And so that means that if you're careful with your emotional state, you are affecting the emotional state of those around you and it's important.

It's a responsibility for marriages, for husbands, for wives, for parents. You have a responsibility not just to say the right things and do the right things, but to think the right things too. That's why the psalmist says, May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be pleasing to you because the things you think about create realities around you for other people that have lasting impacts on their bodies.

Ron: Let's make a leap based on what you just said and let's think about parents and stepparents listening right now. They've heard me say before the most important thing for a dysregulated child is a self-regulating parent.

Lee: That's right.

Ron: And I think that's, you know, hitting on what you just talked about. Who I am and how I carry myself does have some impact. It doesn't change. It doesn't dictate, but it does have some impact on the people around me. Children, stepchildren, whoever it might be, former spouse, whatever that interaction is in your homes, take seriously. I think what I hear you saying is take seriously how you carry yourself and letting your mind be renewed in toward good things can make a difference in the mood and feelings of others in your home.
Lee: That's absolutely true. I want to make this crystal clear, like, it's just super important. This is not just self-help talk. It's not just therapy tricks that we're talking about. The things that we're discussing, the mindset that we carry, the things that we dwell on, the thoughts that we think, structurally change the anatomy of our brain and they chemically and electrochemically affect the bodies and behaviors of the people around us. And then on another level, which is even almost more terrifying, is that you can change the switching on and switching off of genes in your body and propagate those to generations after you by changing how you think.

Now, let me give you an example of that. In the Bible, there's something called generational curses, okay?

Ron: Yes.

Lee: There's a passage in Deuteronomy and I think another place in Chronicles maybe where it says that God visits the sins of the father on the third and fourth generation of the offspring. And that sounds horrible. It sounds like God's going to punish your great grandkids for something that you do, but that's not what he's saying. It's not a threat. It's a warning. It's a prophecy to say, “Hey, Ron, the things that you do in your life are going to predict the things that your great grandkids are going to do in their lives.” And that's why we see things like alcoholism and abuse perpetuate for several generations. What happens now, we understand the genetics of it. Your behavior doesn't change the genes that your kids inherit, but it changes whether they're switched on or switched off when they're born.

Ron: It creates a sensitivity or an activity, yes.

Lee: That’s right. That's the science of epigenetics. The things that happen around us change the expression of our genes. So you get the same set of DNA that you got from your great grandpa, but you might be born with a different set of them switched on or switched off.

Somebody, a pastor once joked, Jesus might be in your heart, but grandpa's in your bones. [Laughter] Like, you get, you inherit the things from your family, right? But it's not the bad news of genetic determinism that we thought from before, it's the very good news that those things can be changed with changing the way that we think and therefore how we live.

Here's an interesting bit of research. They did some studies in PTSD victims from Vietnam, and they did some similar research in Holocaust survivors from the second war. They found that up to four generations after people survived concentration camps and up to three generations of Vietnam PTSD survivors or patients, children are born with abnormal cortisol responses at baseline when they're born. Which means you are born sometimes being afraid of some stuff that happened to your great grandparents but didn't actually happen to you.

Ron: Wow.

Lee: That's powerful, right?

Ron: That is powerful.

Lee: The good news is those responses can be normalized within one generation by learning how to think differently; by cognitive behavioral therapy is the specific research they did there.

Ron: We have said to this group, there's research that shows that children who grow up in strong, stable, healthy stepfamilies have a greater likelihood as adults of choosing one partner for life, breaking the generational cycle of divorce, and having a stronger mental health than kids who have been through an original biological family that by death or divorce was fractured, and then living in a difficult single parent and blended family situation that may have also added more fracturing to their heart and their life.
But a blended family done well is redemptive—

Lee: That's right.

Ron: —for the next generation. Wow. I mean, if there's not motivation for us to say, “Yes, I got to work on me.”

Lee: That's right.

Ron: “I got to work on me.” Whatever it is that brought you to the family that you're in now, listener/viewer, whatever that back story is, does not have to be the future.

Lee: That's exactly right. I mean, the most important part about that, I think that blended family success, is that you choose who your family is. I mean, you don't have to be born with DNA that's similar. In fact, I heard Tara-Leigh Cobble say on the Bible recap podcast, she said, “God's family is not made up of people with the same DNA. It's made up of people with redeemed hearts.”

And that's exactly what's true for a blended family. If you want to make your future good for your offspring and your future generations, you break the chain of that past trauma and cycle of abuse and repetitive programs that you run that aren't based on this current marriage. You decide that it's going to be better for you in the future, and you can make that come true.

Ron: Dr. Warren in your book, Hope is the First Dose, you say that we should relentlessly refuse to participate in our own demise.

Lee: That is a phrase that I learned from one of my patients who had a spinal cord injury. And he basically got to rehab and was going to have to learn how to walk and use his arms again and he was in so much pain that he didn't want to. He basically wanted to give up and just die.

But his family and his therapists and the group of people around him basically insisted “You get up out of that bed and you make yourself move,” and “You're going to work through this and break the cycle of pain and you're going to get better.” And he had to realize that it wasn't going to get better. It wasn't going to stop hurting long enough for him to get better. He had to recognize that it was going to continue to hurt, and he had to move despite the pain.

And I think that's what happens when you lose a child too, or when you lose a spouse. You've got to recognize that you can't wait for it to stop hurting because it's not ever going to stop hurting. You've got to start moving.

And so what he said is, “I realized that sitting still and accepting this pain that was immobilizing me was a form of self-trauma. I was keeping myself in a situation that was going to result in my muscles atrophying further, my bed sores happening. I was going to get pneumonia and blood clots, and I was going to lay here and die if I didn't do something about the situation. I had to relentlessly refuse to participate in my own demise. Like I was waiting for myself to die.” But he changed his mind, and he began to participate in rehab and eventually got stronger, learned how to walk again and all that.

I took that and said, “Wait a minute, we do that same thing with all of our thoughts and behaviors.” Like we frequently, we commit malpractice against ourselves, Ron. [Laughter] If you accept my premise that learning how to think differently, make structural changes in your brain, and that's the same as doing surgery on yourself. That's why I call it self-brain surgery. If you accept that premise, then you would say, “Okay, if I'm going to be a good doctor, what's the first thing they make you do in medical school?” And it's, take an oath that you're not going to harm your patient.

And so if I'm my own patient and I'm trying to live this life of redeeming, renewing my mind and changing things better for myself, then I've got to say “I got to stop doing stuff that's bad for my brain. I got to stop doing stuff that's bad for my mental health. I got to stop doing stuff that's bad for the people around me and refuse to participate in my own demise.”

So what does that look like functionally, right? So we look out for ways that we use numbing behaviors to avoid bad feelings. We stop drinking instead of healing. You can't anesthetize yourself from one little part of the things that hurt, because if you use anesthesia, you numb everything, you can't stop feeling one thing, you stop feeling everything. And we know what that looks like. You can drink yourself into a hole or whatever.

So you decide I'm going to relentlessly look out for ways that I've been hurting myself and instead find ways to let the Lord and let good application of neuroscience or good therapy or whatever you want to say make myself better instead of worse; not going to participate in my own demise.

Ron: Okay, I'm sitting here processing. Again, I'm thinking about a parent or a stepparent who's listening and they're going, “How do I help my kids with this? I got a 15-year-old who's just mad at the world because their parent died and then, you know, life changed and all these moves to different homes and transition nobody wanted and now, you know, stepparents in their life. That's not what the kid wants. They're just sort of mad at everybody and don't even know what they're mad at. And they're struggling with a lot of things, and they don't have a lot of hope, and they're really stuck in some ruts. What do we do as parents?”

Do you have any just general principles of how we can maybe help kids that are struggling?

Lee: Yes, I think several things. The first thing is, remember that you can't change anybody else, but what you can do is show them that you are changing and that you're willing to go through the hard stuff and be there with them. So community is important, right? So a parent sitting down and saying, “Hey, I know this is hard. I'd love for you to help me understand what you're feeling.” Like not trying to fix them but trying to understand them I think would go a long way. Let's say communicate with them, “I'm here for you.”

I think what's probably true most children like most adults Want somebody who cares more than they want somebody who knows all the answers, right? And I think in that same vein, then we need to be careful about saying, “I don't know what to do with this kid. I'm taking him to a therapist,” and “I'm going to drop you off for this hour. You got to fix my kid.” Because what the kid is looking for is not somebody to fix all their problems, but somebody to prove that they're going to stick around and care and be part of the future for them, right?

So if you sort of abolish your role of sitting on the throne of leadership in your family and you say, “I don't have the answers.” the kid knows psychologically that the parent is supposed to have some answers and supposed to have some wisdom and if I just say, “I don't have anything for you; go see the psychiatrist.” that's going to abdicate this responsibility that you have of maybe not knowing everything to do but to be there in the fight with them.

And so I think the first thing is empathy. Tell them you're sorry, you know it's hard. “I don't necessarily have all the right answers, but I am not going anywhere and I’m going to be with you in this. Let's talk about it.” I think that would go a long way in helping these children.

Ron: I love it. And I want to toss in something to the stepparents who's listening right now because I know we talk a lot on this podcast: You got to connect before you correct. And we want you to let the biological parent be the one who handles punishment, discipline, consequence with children during the early stages of your blended family until you've had a chance to build enough equity in that child's heart so that you can take more of a parental role, if I could say it that way.

But in the meantime, I think what Dr. Warren just said, stepparents, you can do this. You don't have to live in fear of, “No, this is not my territory.” Actually, empathy, care, expressing “Tell me what is going on for you,” not trying to tell them how to get out of it, necessarily, but just joining them in that hard space is a fabulous way, ironically enough, of joining the child, of building a trusted relationship with this child. And you can do it. I mean, I realize some children are not going to allow you into that space, and so if they don't allow you, well, then that's not really an opportunity you have. But it's amazing how empathy opens the heart of somebody.
Like when you really sit and listen and take it in and try to get in their shoes and experience what they're experiencing and validate those feelings as a starting point to then begin to lead them into perhaps other places or other thoughts. I really think stepparents, you have an opportunity here so ponder that if that's your situation.
Lee: That's right.
Ron: Man, this has been so good. I don't want it to end, but we need to end. I want to ask you one final question. You say in your book, “Hope says even though it's dark, it'll be light again soon.” Talk about being willing. How do we get ourselves to be willing to trust God that it will again be light?
Lee: Well, I think the thing that worked as a metaphor for me, a mental picture for me, is that if you go outside in the middle of the darkest night you can imagine. It doesn't matter how much you scream into the void or yell or be mad it's not going to come dawn any sooner than the Earth's rotation is going to make it come dawn. But you also know that no matter how hard you wish that the day would not come, it's going to come. The sun is going to rise again in the east at a certain time every day. That's just how God made the world.

And so no matter what situation you're in, you know that there's a set of physiological things happening in you that grief defines and predicts and that are going to happen. And there's a process that your body and your mind are going to go through and nothing that you do can make that stuff not happen. And if you try to make it not happen, you're going to hurt yourself. If you try to abort your grief process temporarily or make it stop or make it go faster, you try to not feel it with alcohol or something else, it's going to hurt you. So you need to let that process unfold, but you can take confidence that your body will begin to send you signals that it's time to move forward.

And the Lord will send people; that's Psalm 34:18. It says, “The Lord is close to the brokenhearted.” And He will send people around you to gently nudge you at the right time to say, “Hey, it's time to start opening your eyes and to see that there's still light out there.” And you don't have to do anything in particular to make the daylight come. It's going to come. All you have to do is stay alive and it's going to happen. Dawn is going to occur, and the light will come back on.

And you just have to say, “I know that my mental processes are capable of handling this and I'm going to find whatever resources I need to get through this grieving process and I'm going to look for the light. I'm going to keep pressing until it comes.” And know it's going to come because it will. He will keep that promise and the dawn will come again, my friend.

Ron: Dr. Warren, thank you so much for being with me today.

Lee: It's been beautiful, Ron. Thank you so much.

Ron: To the listener or viewer, if you want to learn more about Dr. Warren and his podcast, check the show notes. We'll get you connected. Remember to rate or review our podcast, and if you haven't subscribed yet on your smartphone or on YouTube, feel free. You have your choice. You can subscribe to both.

Next time on FamilyLife Blended, Gayla Grace is going to be back with me in the studio, and we're going to be talking about sexual pitfalls to avoid in a blended family marriage. That's next time on FamilyLife Blended.

I'm Ron Deal; thanks for listening or watching. And thank you to our production team and donors who make this podcast possible.

FamilyLife Blended is part of the FamilyLife Podcast Network. Helping you pursue the relationships that matter most.

We are so happy to provide these transcripts to you. However, there is a cost to produce them for our website. If you’ve benefited from the broadcast transcripts, would you consider donating today to help defray the costs?

Copyright © 2024 FamilyLife. All rights reserved.

www.FamilyLife.com