Jennie Allen: 2024 DLW Podcast Awards Rd. 1

Good morning, my friend. Dr. Lee Warren here with you. We're going to do a little

self-brain surgery today.

And I told you last week on Wednesday that we're going to pit the best interviews

that we've had of the year against each other for each quarter and let you choose

who's going to be the recipient of the inaugural Dr.

Lee Warren podcast award for 2024. So we had just based on downloads that the

clear winners of the first quarter were Maddie Jackson-Smith.

And Jenny Allen, the conversations I had with them.

So last Wednesday, I gave you back Maddie Jackson's interview,

so you had a chance to get re-familiar with that.

Today, we're going to go back and listen to the conversation that I had with

Jenny Allen back in late January and give you a chance to hear that.

And next week, we'll give you a chance to vote for who the champion of the first quarter will be.

And we're going to pit the first quarter champion against the second quarter

champion to determine the winner of the first half of the year.

We'll do the same thing in the next half of the year. And at the end of the

year, we'll have two finalists to go head-to-head for the inaugural 2024 Dr.

Lee Warren Podcast Award. We're going to give something back to these people

who have given us so much.

These guests that come on the show, they take their time, they lend their story,

they help us think about things in a new way, they help us change our minds

so we can change our lives.

They introduce us to beautiful new books and ideas and concepts,

and they just did a lot for us.

And so I want to give something back. So you're going to help me choose the

winner for 2024, the inaugural Dr. Lee Warren Podcast Award.

We got Maddie Jackson Smith last week. We got Jenny Allen this week.

Listen to this interview.

And next week, I'll give you the mechanism by which you can vote for the first

quarter champion for the first podcast award that we're going to do to give

something back to those people who have given us so much and say thanks to these

amazing guests that spend their time helping us change our minds and change our lives.

Without further ado, let's get after it with Jenny Allen today.

Good morning, my friend. I hope you're doing well. I'm Dr. Lee Warren.

And it's frontal lobe Friday. I'm so excited to be with you today.

I've got a special treat for you, for some of you anyway.

On Tuesday, on the brand new Spiritual Brain Surgery podcast,

we released an interview with Jenny Allen about her important new book,

Untangle Your Emotions.

And I think it's one of the probably most interesting and helpful interviews

I've ever had on the podcast and coming up on a thousand episodes.

I don't say that lightly. I've had a lot of amazing guests on the show.

But my two conversations with Jenny Allen are among my favorites.

I'm going to be on her show soon, and she was on mine on Tuesday.

But I keep track of downloads and trends, and since the Spiritual Brain Surgery is a new podcast.

It looks like there's probably at least 1,000 people who listen to this show

every day who have not yet heard the Jenny Allen interview.

And I think it's important that you hear that, because I think it's a good place

to start this idea that we need to kind of think about the difference between

our feelings and our thoughts and how they're related.

Now, Jenny and I talked about emotion mostly on this interview.

And in her conversation on her podcast that we had together,

we talked a lot about how to understand the difference between thinking and

feeling and how they're separate but connected issues within our mind and our brain.

And I just want to give you a little bit of context for that later today.

I'm interviewing a psychiatrist from Stanford University named David Carrion

about his incredible new book, The Opposite of Depression.

And David and I are going to talk about this too, how feelings and thoughts are kind of jumbled up.

We've talked a lot about Jeffrey Schwartz's work and his book,

The Mind and the Brain, and his other book, You Are Not Your Brain,

and his work with obsessive compulsive disorder.

There's a lot of discussion about the mind and the brain and feelings and emotion

and how they're connected neuroanatomically and neurobiologically.

And I want to just give you a little bit of that information today.

And then I'm going to play the Jenny Allen interview for you again with my setup

with a different ending.

So if you've already heard the Jenny Allen interview, this episode is still

going to be important to you because of what we're about to talk about and some

of the things we're going to discuss relating feeling and emotion and thought

and how that has to do with your brain and your mind and your faith and your

resilience and your hope and all those things.

But we're also going to have a different ending after the interview.

I want to just wrap it up with a couple of more ideas.

I may have clipped them out. I'm not sure if I did, but there's some references

in the interview to giving away some free copies of Jenny's book.

We've already given away all five of those copies.

If you received one, if you were drawn as one of the winners of that,

you'll be getting an email from me that you were one of the winners.

So the five copies have already been given away. So I'm sorry about that.

If you hear me say in the interview that there are some free copies,

they have already been spoken for.

So don't send me an email. They've already given away. way.

And so we're going to talk today about feeling and emotion, how to untangle

your emotions with Jenny Allen, and then a little bit more information on the

back end, because I want to make sure you hear this interview.

If you're not following the Spiritual Brain Surgery Podcast yet,

please go out to Apple or Spotify or wherever you listen and subscribe to that show.

It's very important, helps me get the message out to other people.

If you would go ahead and click on subscribe, that also makes sure that you

get notified when there's a new episode.

And if you have time to leave a rating and review.

I would really appreciate it on this show and on the Spiritual Brain Surgery Podcast.

That really helps other people find the show and helps the show grow.

So leave a rating and review. Make sure you're subscribed and check it out.

Today, we're going to talk about feelings, thoughts, emotions.

How to untangle them, what they're there for, what's the point of sadness,

a new way to look at why sadness might be so important, and all that kind of stuff.

And we're going to kind of untangle our emotions, emotions thoughts and

learn a reason for sadness with jenny allen on frontal

lobe friday but before we do i have one question for

you hey are you ready to change your

life if the answer is yes there's only one rule you have to change your mind

first and my friend there's a place for the neuroscience of how your mind works

smashes together with faith and everything starts to make sense are you ready

to change your life well this is the place self-brain surgery school i'm I'm Dr.

Lee Warren, and this is where we go deep into how we're wired,

take control of our thinking, and find real hope.

This is where we learn to become healthier, feel better, and be happier.

This is where we leave the past behind and transform our minds.

This is where we start today. Are you ready? This is your podcast.

This is your place. This is your time, my friend. Let's get after it.

All right, you ready to get after it? But, hey, I want you to imagine just for

a moment that you're relaxing, okay?

Maybe you got up, you're having a cup of coffee.

You're reading your Bible, you've listened to some worship music,

you played some Tommy Walker record, had some worship time, and now you've done

your abide practice, you've practiced your 10 minutes of meditation and prayer,

and now you're just relaxing.

You're just thinking, you're doing your Bible study, you're reading something,

getting ready to listen to a podcast, you're scrolling on Instagram,

you're journaling, whatever you're doing.

You're just relaxed, you're kind of calm, the day hasn't gotten off yet, and you're relaxed.

Okay and all of a sudden you get

this sort of anxiety you get

this sort of just disease just general sense that something's

wrong your orbital frontal cortex and and your

amygdala are sending you signals that that something's going on and you don't

know what it is and you kind of put it out of your mind you tell yourself not

to feel that not to not to worry about it don't be so concerned everything's

fine i'm just relaxing and you ignore it and then a few minutes later Later,

your significant other, your spouse,

your husband, your wife gets up and comes into the room and they've got a bouquet

of flowers and a fancy thing of chocolates and a card.

And you realize it's Valentine's Day and you didn't get him or her anything.

And now it's, oh, your brain was trying to tell you that you knew something

was wrong. You knew something was amiss.

You knew you had forgotten something. You knew that there was an issue that

you hadn't addressed and now it's thrust upon you and you had ignored that feeling

and maybe you realize now that you had it the last couple of days too.

Your brain the whole time had been trying to tell you, hey, don't forget it's

Valentine's Day. Don't forget it's your anniversary.

Don't forget it's your birthday. Don't forget it's trash day.

Like your brain was trying to send you a signal that your frontal lobe never picked up.

And you never actually consciously said, what is it that I'm dealing with here?

Why am I feeling these things that I'm feeling?

And you didn't go down the pathway of trying to figure it out.

You just suppress the emotion because we've taught ourselves that,

you know, we're supposed to be in control of our emotions and we're not supposed

to react to them and all of that. And those are true things.

Remember the 10 commandments of self brain surgery, feelings aren't facts,

they're chemical events.

But what do I always tell you? I don't tell you to ignore feelings.

I tell you to investigate them, decide what they're trying to tell you,

decide what they mean. Don't ignore them.

Don't pretend like they're not there. just don't react to them reflexively as

if they're always true because they're not always true. They're signals, okay?

But I also want you to recognize that,

that feeling and thought are hopelessly jumbled up together.

They're stuck together. And

the reason they're stuck together is because of how your brain is wired.

There's an area of your brain called the corpus striatum. It's part of your

basal ganglia and has two parts.

The globus pallidus is the third part of the basal ganglia, but the striatum

is putamen and caudate nucleus.

And putamen and caudate nucleus are deep inside your brain, next to your thalamus,

right up against your ventricles. and they are involved in thinking and emotion.

And so you've got this area called the caudate nucleus that Jeffrey Schwartz

says is the center of reason and passion coming together,

the neuronal mosaic of reason and passion, the striatum and caudate nucleus especially,

are jumbled up with thinking and feeling.

And the reason that happens is because you've got these signals,

these inputs of neuronal projections coming into the striatum from the frontal lobe,

the seat of cognition and reason, right? The prefrontal cortex.

There's these connections from neurons called matrizomes.

And these are projections from the frontal lobe that are all about thinking

and reason and cognition and telling yourself not to worry about something.

You're going to think through this thing. But at the same time,

you've got this other set of connections called striazomes that come in from the limbic system,

amygdala, and all those areas involved with emotion and passion and fear and

anxiety and love and all that stuff.

The striazomes and the matriazomes come together into the corpus striatum.

And they basically mix up all their signals. And so you've got reason shot through with passion.

You've got thinking smashed up with feeling into an area of your brain that's

filled with these neurons that are called tonically active neurons.

Tonically active neurons. So these TANS or tonically active neurons are sitting

there and they're scanning.

They're always positioned to integrate information from the frontal lobe and

limbic system to jumble up feeling and thought.

And basically their job is to tell you what to do with all this information.

They're integrating emotion and thought. And they're involved in the reward pathway.

This is a part of the circuit that's abnormally active in people with obsessive

compulsive disorder. disorder, okay?

Tonically active neurons are involved in this. And there's a lot more to talk

about here that we'll talk about later.

But basically, tonically active neurons respond to visual or auditory stimuli

that are linked through behavioral conditioning to a reward of some sort.

Now, what does that mean?

It means your feelings are based on previous experiences,

and you've attached or assigned a meaning to them, and this is way simpler than

it really is, but in general terms, when you have a feeling.

It's often influenced by previous times when you experience something similar

to what you're currently experiencing

and the meaning that you attached or assigned to it at that time.

So fear comes back up when you experience a situation that is reminding you

of some previous situation in which you felt fear and you're assigning,

your brain is scanning whether or not it needs to assign a similar meaning to the current situation.

One of the problems we have sometimes is we decide that what we're feeling now

means what it meant the last time we felt it, even if it doesn't mean that now.

Okay, so the whole point of this is just to tell you that there is a tight integration

between emotion and thought in your brain, and you can't really separate them.

So when you listen to Jenny Allen a little bit, we're talking about how to untangle your emotions.

And it's an important thing to realize that Christians especially,

we're often taught just ignore your feelings. Just think, let God direct your thoughts.

And you can't. I told Jenny the way it feels to me is if you're thinking as

a gas tank and your emotions are an additive to the fuel, Once you pour that in there,

you can't separate the gas from the additive anymore, the cleaner or the booster

or whatever it is that you put in your fuel tank.

Once they're all in there together, you can't really separate them.

But the interesting thing about tonically active neurons is they can be retrained

to change the meaning, to change the reward pattern, to change what it means

when you feel the thing that you feel.

And that's what's important here is we have to learn that not every time we

feel something that makes us think that we need to be anxious,

does it mean that we're actually in danger?

That not every time we feel sad, does it mean that we're actually experiencing

loss or that we're getting ready to?

Right? That'll affect how we process our relationships. It'll affect how we

process our entire world, our worldview, including how we think and feel about God.

We're going to have a talk with Stanford psychiatrist, David Carrion later today,

and we're going to get into this stuff about what depression really is and what

weariness really is and what does it mean to have a flourishing life.

And part of that is understanding that emotion is placed in you by a God who feels emotions.

He created them, okay? So it's not wrong to feel emotions.

What you have to do is learn what that emotion means in the context of what

you're going through now and allow your frontal lobes to control what you do

with that emotion, okay?

They're shot through with one another. They're hopelessly integrated because

you got tonically active neurons in your corpus striatum that then tell your

brain what to do with the information it's receiving.

And it's either going to activate something or decrease the

activation of something and it's going to make you respond in

a particular way but you get to be in charge of that because you

can retrain your tonically active neurons to

learn what a particular feeling means in the context of what you're experiencing

now and it doesn't always mean what it meant the last time you felt it remember

we talked before about memory every time you access a memory you actually modify

it so that the next time you remember that thing,

it's influenced by the current situation that you're in. And that's why you

shouldn't be so hard on yourself.

When you remember things from your past, your childhood or previous relationships

or times that you screwed something up or times that you wish you had done something different,

you're looking back on that memory in the context of who you are now and what

you know now and what you're like now and how much you've matured now.

And you're judging your previous decision or experience and the memory that

you have of it by who you are right now.

And then you're modifying it. It's just like if you pulled up a computer program

and changed it a little bit and then saved it again, the next time somebody

uses that program, it's been influenced by how you used it the last time you touched it, right?

And that's how memories are. So emotion then is influenced by thinking and it's

over time gets revalued.

If you're wise and smart, It gets revalued over time to learn more about what

you're experiencing now and apply it appropriately to the context of where you

are. Now, one little thought about sadness.

Sometimes we don't want to feel sadness, right?

We think it's bad to feel sadness, that sadness is something we should avoid,

but it's normal part of the human experience.

In fact, David Carrion talks in his book about how if you lose a third cousin,

some distant relative that you haven't seen in a long time, and you find out

that they passed away and you want to honor your aunt or uncle or your parents

or whoever is more close with that person, then you decide to go to the funeral

of this cousin that you haven't seen in years.

And while you're there, you start to get really sad

because now you're remembering some interactions you had with

this person when you were children and you remember

some conversations that you had and you remember some context around

that and the time that you all had a family reunion at your grandma's house

or at a cabin at the lake with your uncle and aunt and you're remembering all

these things from the past and then what happens is you stop worrying so much

or you stop thinking actively about the stuff that you're dealing with in your normal life right now,

your job, your work, your finances, whatever.

And you start thinking about bigger things, more human things like family.

And gosh, I wish I lived closer to my cousins.

And I really did love them when we were kids and we were pretty close and I miss them.

And I hadn't thought about them in a long time. And then, well,

he was about my age and he's died.

So, you know, that means I'm getting closer to my own death.

And you start thinking about big questions of life. Like, am I squared away?

Do I need to update my will?

Like, if this could happen to her, it could happen to me. And all of a sudden,

your sadness has led you into thinking about some things that are bigger or

more important than your mundane day-to-day stuff that you were already thinking about.

And that's why Ecclesiastes chapter 7 verses 3 through 8 says this,

Sorrow is better than laughter, for when a face is sad, deep in thought,

the heart may be happy because it is growing in wisdom.

The heart of the wise learns when it is in the house of mourning.

But the heart of fools is senseless in the house of pleasure.

Another translation says it this way, sorrow is better than laughter,

for by a sad countenance, the heart is made better.

The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth.

So the idea is that fools don't want to think about anything that makes them unhappy.

All they want is to pursue happiness in the moment.

I just want to think about stuff that makes me happy. I want to experience things

that make me happy. I want to feel things that make me happy.

And remember yesterday on Theology Thursday on the Spiritual Brain Surgery Podcast,

we talked about the fact that in Ephesians 4, in the self-brain surgery chapter.

We learn that the problem with the untransformed mind is that it has futile

thinking that's all about seeking pleasure.

So what I want you to get from Jenny Allen's conversation is the idea that emotion

is placed in you for the purpose of making you perceptive to what's happening

in your life, what you need to be thinking about, who you need to be becoming, right?

And that's a great thing to think about in your abide practice and in your time

of Lent as we prepare for Easter coming up. Okay?

Sometimes sorrow is better than laughter. It's not always bad.

You shouldn't be afraid of feeling your feelings, but you should never just

blindly react to them. Okay?

Feelings are good barometers, but they're not good compasses most of the time.

Okay? They can tell you what's going on if you pay attention to them,

but they shouldn't lead you around. You should let your frontal lobe do that for the most part.

But don't make the mistake of thinking that they're completely separate entities.

If you're going to be an embodied, integrated, whole person living in the mind

of Christ, you're going to have to be in touch with your emotions and with your

thinking because they are connected in your brain, whether you like it or not.

So now we're going to get into Jenny Allen conversation. I hope this has been helpful to you.

I know it's a long preamble and setup, but I want you to have this conversation

with Jenny Allen because I want you to understand that there is a connection

between your feelings and your thoughts, emotions and thoughts,

and there's even a reason for you to have sadness.

And we're going to get into untangling those emotions with Jenny Allen right now.

Good morning, my friend. I'm Dr. Lee Warren, and I am so excited to be back

with you today for some spiritual brain surgery.

This episode, I'm really probably as excited or more excited about this one

than I have been about any episode I've ever done. because we've got New York

Times bestselling author Jenny Allen on the show today.

Jenny, if you have been paying attention, is a force of nature in Christian publishing.

She's got several New York Times bestsellers.

And she's also the founder and director of the If Gathering,

which is a worldwide movement now, helping women get closer to God.

And Jenny has written some books that have been real game changers in my life

and Lisa's life personally.

The first one, I'll tell you a story really about why we're here,

why I'm sitting on the banks of Moon River Ranch on the North Platte River in

Nebraska really goes back to Jenny Allen.

Lisa and I were in Auburn, Alabama, where we raised our kids.

Running our private practice, this business that we started together after we got married.

And I've told you that long story before of how we both came out of some brokenness

and we blended our families and we moved to Alabama and we started our practice

and we ran our business and we're just having a great and successful career.

And after I'd come home from the war and gone through PTSD and a divorce and

all the brokenness, God put us back together and we were on the path of what

would seem like really a stable and exciting future.

And then in 2010, the Affordable Care Act, which is commonly known as Obamacare,

was passed, which changed the healthcare industry in the United States significantly.

And this is not a political podcast, so good or bad, the ultimate result of

the Affordable Care Act and one of the intentions of that act was to make it

very hard for doctors to be in private practice.

One of their goals was to streamline and make a smaller number of payers that

the government would have to interact with.

So they were trying to change it to where it would be harder for people to be

in private practice and they would be more likely to become hospital employees.

So that then you could have a fewer number of people to write checks to and

then therefore the government would have more control over how much money they spent on health care.

So whether that's good or bad is not the point here. The point is,

we were in private practice and I was in solo practice, which means our business

was only funded by the work of one physician.

So what happened after the Affordable Care Act passed is it just about tripled our overhead.

There was so much more regulation and so many more rules and malpractice insurance

went up and everything got more expensive.

And the only thing I could leverage was my time. So here we were in Auburn,

Alabama, a relatively small market with 10 employees.

And basically, if I wanted to make the same amount of money,

I had to do a lot more work.

And so the equation just started becoming more and more clear that I was not

going to be able to generate the same kind of revenue and keep our business

running the same way and make the same amount of income while we were raising our children.

And I don't know about you, but if you found out that you were going to take

a 30% pay cut or have to work 30% or 40% more when you were already working

100 hours a week, there's not a lot of ways that that can work out.

So it became progressively more clear that we were going to have to do something.

At some point to make it. And we weren't sure what that was.

I had always said I wanted to be independent.

I didn't want to work for a hospital because I wanted to be able to take care

of whoever I wanted to take care of. And if you couldn't pay me, that was okay.

We did a lot of charity work and I didn't want somebody else telling me that

I couldn't see this patient or had to see that patient.

We wanted to be in charge of our own practice.

And so I had said all these things that I had drawn lines in the sand about them.

We never wanted to leave alabama we love living in

auburn big war eagle auburn fans and three

of our kids went to college there and all that never wanted to

be not in private practice never wanted to work for a hospital never wanted

to sell or move away from the house that we had built together as our you know

our new lives came together in the blended family and we we had the house and

built the pool and just had this ideal environment to raise our kids in and we loved it so we had

all these places and things that we had said, boy, I'm never going to change that.

And then Affordable Care Act came along and it became progressively harder to

do the things we needed to do.

And then worse in 2013, our son Mitch died.

And so we went through the devastating loss of a child and it got progressively

harder, not only to make a living and to work, but to find meaning and purpose

in our work and also to even just be in the house where Mitch had been.

And it was just more and more difficult to be comfortable.

And then in 2015, Lisa was introduced to a book called Anything by Jenny Allen.

And she read part of it and she said, she came to me and said,

hey, I think you should do this Bible study with me.

And basically the point is you tell God, you want him to make it clear what

you're supposed to do, what your life is supposed to be about,

what you're supposed to do with the work of your hand and the places you live

and all the things that you find value and meaning and purpose and give them

to God and say, God, I'll do anything because I want to please you.

And so I said, okay, what's the worst that could happen? I'll do this Bible

study with you. And we did. We prayed the anything prayer.

We basically told God, we don't have clarity on our future. We're not sure what you want from us.

We're not sure where we're supposed to go, what we're supposed to do.

We know we're struggling.

It's hard to be in the house. It's hard to be in the office.

It's hard to make ends meet. We're struggling, and we need to know what to do.

We'll do anything. Well, a couple of days later, literally a couple of days

later, We got a flyer in the mail.

Now, neurosurgery, fortunately for me, my career is in high demand.

There's not a lot of neurosurgeons. There's a significant shortage of neurosurgeons

in the United States. In fact, for the several hundred million people that live

in this country, there's only about 3,500 board-certified neurosurgeons.

And so in relatively high demand, if you're good at what you do, there's always a job.

But we didn't want a job. We wanted to stay there. We wanted to hold on to our

house and hold on to our business and all of that. But for whatever reason,

right after we prayed the anything prayer, we got this flyer in the mail.

Lisa brought it to me, and it had the beautiful Rocky Mountains on the flyer.

And it said, exciting opportunity in the Rocky Mountains for neurosurgery.

And we said, hey, we told God we'll do anything. We love the mountains.

We always vacationed out in Boulder, and we love Colorado and the mountain states.

And so we decided to check it out. And it turned out that that practice was

in Casper, Wyoming, which neither of us had ever heard of Casper, Wyoming.

Or been to Wyoming, except Yellowstone is kids and vacation time and all that.

So I had no idea what Wyoming was like. But before we knew it,

we found ourselves moving to Wyoming.

And that was a direct result of the Anything Prayer.

And what happened in Wyoming is I had a resurgence of my professional life.

I had been in this small market for years, had been practicing mostly minimal

back surgery, small things, and had kind of narrowed my practice because we

had two major university programs close to us.

So if I had a big case, it was hard to justify doing it in a small hospital,

and I would send those patients to Birmingham or Atlanta.

And I was doing a lot of routine neurosurgery, delivered really good care there.

But in Wyoming, we were the big hospital.

And all of a sudden, for the next several years, I had to practice a tremendously

wider scope of the things that I know how to do. And I came alive professionally.

And it just reinvigorated me as a neurosurgeon now. And we had a great time there.

And then something amazing happened. A few years later, we got invited to come

to Nebraska and look at the idea of starting a neurosurgery program.

So here, mid-career now, I found myself,

Lisa and I, moving from Wyoming to Nebraska to a place where they had never

had a neurosurgeon, where people had always had to be flown away from here,

where if somebody got hurt in this town, they had to go somewhere else to be cared for.

And so now, for the past almost four years, we've been sitting in this incredible

place that God gave us, right on the banks of the North Platte River,

bald eagles all over the place, right in the most diverse wildlife population

I could have imagined, and exactly the kind of place that we could see ourselves

growing older and practicing.

And all of that, long story short, was the result of the Anything Prayer.

Jenny Allen went on to write a couple of other books, several other books,

but she wrote a book a few years ago about mindset and about thinking called

Get Out of Your Head that turns out, in my opinion,

to be one of the best sort of non-science-y looks at how we think that I've ever read.

Really tremendous book. New York Times bestseller, sold over a million copies.

And now she's looked at the other side of the coin, not thinking,

but feeling. And her new book is Untangle Your Emotions.

It's all about what we feel and about the Christian problem of not thinking

we're supposed to feel, not thinking that we're supposed to listen to our feelings.

And I want to be careful as you listen to this conversation.

You always hear me say feelings aren't facts. Well, you'll hear Jenny and I

discuss that and parse it out and why it's important.

And the good news is we've got five copies of this book to give away.

So if you are interested in a copy of Jenny Allen's book, send me an email,

leigh at drleighwarren.com with your name, your mailing address.

Don't forget your zip code.

48 hours after the episode drops, we're going to choose randomly five listeners

to receive a copy of Jenny's new book, Untangle Your Emotions. We had a great talk.

I'm so grateful to have Jenny on the show.

I got to be on her show, too. We've already recorded that. It'll be out in a

few weeks, and I'll share that with you. Jenny has a top 25 podcast.

It's tremendous work that she's doing in the kingdom. Friend,

you can learn a lot from Jenny Allen.

We had fun. We had a great conversation about how to untangle your emotions.

It's spiritual brain surgery, and I just wanted to give you this long preamble

to say how much Jenny Allen's work has meant to me and Lisa personally,

and it'll help you change your mind, and it'll help you change your life.

And if you're ready to do some spiritual brain surgery, the only thing left

is to remember the good news.

You can start today. Prim, we're back, and I'm so excited to be with you again

today for another episode of the podcast, and I'm just really grateful and honored

that we've got Jenny Allen with us here today. Jenny, welcome to the show.

Hey, it's great to be here. Thanks for having me. Yeah, so I'm excited to have

you and talk about your incredible new book, Untangle Your Emotions.

And before we get started, would you mind saying a prayer for us? Sure.

God, you know exactly what every person listening needs from this conversation,

and I just pray you'd lead us to it.

I pray for this very sensitive subject that we're going to discuss and just

all the emotions it brings out in both of us. And I know in everyone listening

as well, would you be near, be a comforter for all those who need it?

And we look forward to what happens.

You're going to do and the stories we'll tell about it in Jesus name.

Amen. Amen. Thank you, Jenny.

Hey, I want to tell you just a little bit of background before we get into this

conversation of this show.

I mentioned to you before we started that we lost it. We lost a child in 2013.

And that's really where my writing and podcasting and all that came out of.

And this show will be listened to by

a lot of people who have been through those big things like that

big we call them massive things these losses traumas divorces

bereaved parents will be hearing this and so

as we as we have a conversation about our emotions i just want you to be aware

and kind of maybe you can touch on some of the ways that um major loss or major

trauma can play into how we handle and process and express our emotions so i

just if i give you that little bit of background maybe it would be helpful but

talk just a 30 000 foot view about

where this book came from and your personal life and give people a big overview

of this before we get into the nuts and bolts.

Well, interestingly enough, and maybe a lot of people relate to this too.

I'm not a very emotional person.

I was raised in a home with a Midwestern mom and a military brat dad.

And they, you know, they, it's not like they were unhealthy about emotions necessarily.

They just didn't really feel a lot.

And I even asked him recently, did I, was I an emotional kid?

And they said, no, you were thinking kid. You were always thinking,

you had questions all the time, you were curious, but you didn't feel a lot

of feelings and emotions.

And so I came into this work and by work, I mean, first, it was an internal work in me.

It wasn't the work of a project. It was a, I was the project because I was realizing how needed it was.

Emotions are to heal from things that have happened in the past and things that are binding us.

And so I came to a point where I was just not enjoying work.

I was feeling numb and checked out. I was worried, this is after COVID.

And like a lot of people, I think you just go through the ringer for a little while.

And of course, many of us in our

personal lives, as well as the universal struggles we all went through.

And at some point you just check out because you just can't deal with everything.

And so I think that's where I was for a long time. And a friend invited me to

come into this little cohort of leaders to process life together.

And there was a counselor present.

And I knew this counselor. This counselor had gotten into my business before.

And I knew what to expect. And I wasn't sure I wanted to do that.

But I also knew I needed it.

And so the two-year journey of me just really processing my own emotions and

untangling my own emotions led me to realize how valuable this is and how helpful

it is to really change our view on emotions because we think of them as bad

of something controlling us or derailing what we want or,

or maybe the idea that somebody would be too emotional would be a really big negative in our mind.

And yet we're all emotional people and we all have these emotions.

And so figuring out and navigating what to do with them became that journey for me.

Is there a, as far as being Christians, with both of us raised in Christian

homes, is there a sort of Christian overlay that makes us think that emotions are essentially bad?

Yeah, I mean, I hear it all the time. I see it on Instagram.

I hear it in sermons. I hear it on podcasts that things like emotions are real but not reliable.

Emotions are not our God. they're telling you lies and God is telling you truth.

And I mean, sure, there's some truth to that. But,

It's this constant demonization of them that is like, okay, great,

but what do we do with them?

That has, I think, left the church really in an emotionally immature spot where we don't know.

We know they're bad and we know the world has made too big a deal of them.

And what's the right way?

And I would just say there is a third way. And it is that we were built by an

emotional God to be emotional creatures and that those are specifically given

to us as gifts to connect us to God and to connect to navigate this really jacked up world.

I mean, all of us know this. We've walked through so much tragedy and,

and imagine facing the darkest moment of your life,

which I know is so clear for you and, and not having sadness to process it with like that. It's a gift.

And we don't think of it that way because we get in trouble with it and we don't

understand what it looks like to have emotional health or maturity.

But, but that was my goal was like, let's, let's take this huge subject that's

so big And let's break it down real small and just look at what God has to say

about it and what science has to say.

And let's see if there's a way through this that's really life-giving and healthy.

Yeah, somebody might bump up

against what you said. We have an emotional God. What do you mean by that?

Oh, I mean, beginning in Genesis, he's delighted over his creation,

and then he's disappointed that they rebel.

You see throughout the Old Testament, you see a God with wrath and anger.

You see a God who feels joy and delight. I mean, you see a God who celebrates

with his people, but also is grieved and sad and disappointed. You see the Holy Spirit.

That's a father God. You see the Holy Spirit. He, I mean, almost every passage

about the Holy Spirit has emotional words about him.

I mean, he's grieved over. We can grieve the Holy Spirit.

And so there's these ideas that the Holy Spirit, I mean, the Holy Spirit is

petitioning to God when we can't even form words.

When can you not form words when you're in grief, when you're angry,

when you're scared out of your mind?

Those are moments that the Holy Spirit is taking what we're feeling and taking

it to God, even to the Father on our behalf.

And then Jesus, he was wonderfully emotional.

I mean, I've been watching The Chosen. I don't know if you've ever seen it,

but gosh, when I watched that, it was so moving.

And I think it has been for everybody that's watched it.

And I think the reason it is, is because rather than playing the stoic Jesus

that many of the other past representations of him have played,

the creators of the chosen really showed his emotion in different settings,

in different situations.

And you see he was a God, obviously, who had great compassion.

He was a God on earth that was tender to those that were hurting and grieved with them at times.

And you see him being very emotionally aware and attuned to situations and then

feeling a lot of emotions himself, anger for sure. We even see him fearful in the garden.

The Greek word for agony is agony, which is most often.

Translated to fear or anxiety so in

the garden before he dies you see jesus fearful

about what he's about to face so he's felt all these emotions and yet so we

know they can't be sent we know that in themselves they can't be wrong and they

can't be sinned because god father son holy spirit fills them all that's right

you know one of the things that that led to our healing really are beginning

to heal after we lost Mitch was this, this verse I kept bumping into John 10, 10.

This is the, the thief came to steal, kill and destroy, but I came that you

might have life and have it abundantly.

And I saw that two halves of that. And I was like, okay, you came here,

not just about us going to heaven, but so that we could live in this life now in an abundant way,

despite the fact that things are stolen and killed and destroyed and, and we lose.

And so that means there has to be a a way back to finding something that looks

like hope or happiness, maybe even again, after these big things happen,

which is all about emotion.

Like you've got to be able to feel the positive emotions too,

to have an abundant life.

Yeah. Well, I always say it like this, that have you ever seen a really bad, boring documentary?

You know, largely that's probably a lot of information given to you with no

emotion versus like the most epic movie you've ever seen, Right.

Like for me, it's Avenger Endgame and Lord of the Rings, these kind of movies

that are just so, so emotional.

And and you're so drawn in by the emotions of the characters that fully developed

and fully mature characters that are really well built are emotionally.

They contain emotional tissue connecting them.

And so and then those emotions are connecting to us when we're watching it.

So I just think that's the most obvious sense of having no emotion versus having emotion.

But we really, none of us want to live a bad documentary, you know, a boring documentary.

We want, we want to live in the epic, in the epic movies and,

and we want to live lives that are full and abundant and whole, like you said.

And so, you know, I can only imagine what you would have to say about this,

but to go through the death of

your son and then to imagine abundant life after that had to be so hard.

And I'm sure wouldn't have been possible without grief, without an intense season of that.

I mean, likely still daily with you.

Yeah, you feel joy and hope. That's right.

And I think the thing is, you said it exactly right. You said we think that

Jesus expects us to come and be all squared away to him, to get it together

and to get ourselves together.

But you're lying that you said we think Jesus is waiting for us to pull our

shows together when he really wants us to come to him and fall apart. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, you know, I think my relationship with Jesus is really close.

I feel really close to him. It hasn't been hard for me to be close to him.

I don't feel the judgment maybe that some people feel from God.

And it certainly isn't because I haven't screwed up.

I screw up all the time. It's because I just feel like I just feel close to him.

And I think most of that is built on how much I've gone to him and fallen apart.

Right. right? I mean, how many

times, even, even weeks ago when I'm frustrated with my husband and I'm,

I'm just hurt and I'm mad and I, I go in my closet or in my bedroom and I cry,

you know, and I tell God about it.

And I, I think those moments of him being such a close to your friend,

um, that has made our relationship what it is.

And that's what really was so fun and fascinating about the research on this

topic is ultimately the goal is connection.

That's what emotions are for. They're to bring connection with you and God and with you and others.

And so if you stuff all that down, then you're missing out on so much connection

with people and with God.

And so I've found that to be very, very true, that in the darkest moments, small and big of my life.

That's where my relationship with God has really been built,

I would say, is in that falling apart.

So unpack this a little bit for us. You describe in the book this journey that

you took really of looking at your previous way of handling things before you

came to this understanding that you need to be in touch with your emotions.

And as you went through this research and got to know Dr.

Thompson, all the things that you described, like now you present a recent situation

with your family while you're writing the book, where you get in a fight with

your husband and how you handle it now.

Like, give us a little contrast, like pre-emotional intelligence and post-emotional intelligence.

Well, first of all, I feel the need since I'm telling two stories about fighting

with my husband that we are madly in love and he's really wonderful and doesn't

deserve for me to be too mad at him very often.

But yeah, so this situation happened when I was writing the book,

but I was driving home from running some errands in my workday and it was 4.30ish

and I was thinking about dinner.

And I noticed, because I was working on the book, I noticed my chest was tight.

I noticed my shoulders were tight.

And I noticed that I felt some anxiety and I didn't know why.

Like a lot of us, right? I couldn't quite place it on that day.

The day had gone pretty well.

There wasn't a major fire that we needed to put out that was obvious in that moment.

But I stopped and I did what I talk about in the book, which is just a simple

little process of kind of thinking through what you feel.

So first you notice it, you notice what is the feeling.

And sometimes, like for me that day, it even starts with your body.

You may not even know or have thoughts yet about why you're anxious,

but you feel your chest get tight or maybe it's your stomach is upset or people

carry it in all different ways.

But you begin to notice what you feel. And so that day I noticed,

okay, something's not right and something's not okay.

And then I began to just survey my life and go, okay, I feel afraid. What am I afraid of?

I had a really good day. Why am I feeling afraid right now? And my mind went

to something that my husband and I had discussed earlier about money and about his job.

And I just left paying for things, a lot of things.

And so I had this little bit of insecurity of...

Our finances in a good place because we'd had this, this conflict and been going

through this difficult situation with his work.

And I realized, okay, I'm kind of anxious about, about these little things that are adding up.

And so I could, I could name it and I could see it. And so after I did that,

I turned that over to the Lord.

I was like, Lord, you know, like how we're going to make it and you know,

what's going to happen in the future. And I just, I just leave it with you. I trust you with it.

And I'm just going to even like physically like leave this in my car.

And so I get out and of course what happens, you walk in and everybody's stressed in their own right.

Right. It's before dinner hour, my kids have all had bad days, my husband.

And so I knew, and I really played

out in the book, like this could go two ways when I walk in the car.

If I do what I just did in the car, I walk in, I'm aware that I'm feeling this. I can share it.

I can connect with my kids and my husband over it, which we did.

Or I ignore it, but I'm short and I'm bugged and I can't handle their stress

because I can't even handle my own and I don't know what's wrong.

And so I snap at both of them and Zach comes downstairs and instead of hugging

him, which I did in that situation, I snap at him and he snaps back and we We

barely make it through dinner.

But that night, what happened was we all connected. And I asked Cooper,

I was like, did you have some things go wrong at school?

You seem sad or angry. And he was like, yes. And he tells me about that.

And together, we share our hard parts.

And it was the sweetest dinner. Even though all of the emotions were hard.

The conversation was beautiful. And we got to go, you know what?

I didn't have a great day either. I was feeling so anxious in the car and I

could just share with them.

And it is such a different way to live.

And it's so freeing and it's so much more peaceful in a way because we think

these big emotions are going to upset everything and we can't face our sadness

because it's going to overtake us.

But the reality is in facing our sadness, we find a lot of peace.

We find a lot of hope. It comes out of taking the moment to notice.

We call it the thought biopsy. I pitch everything in brain surgery terms.

We take a second to biopsy what you're feeling. Think about it.

Look at it under the microscope before you react to it.

And that gives you a chance to be in control of it instead of having your amygdala,

which is not very reliable, be in control of it.

And you wrote a whole book about that in your book about thinking.

Yeah. But I think what you talk about is this process.

You just described a little bit of it, but break it down for us.

So you start with noticing what you're feeling and then you get into naming

it and just kind of break that little prescription down for us.

Well, I think the very first thing that we have to do before we even begin the

process is to notice if we're judging our emotions. Are we really hard on our emotions?

Are we whenever we feel sadness, are we pushing it away? And that's largely

learned from the way we grew up. If we grew up in a home that said,

you shouldn't you shouldn't feel sad.

Don't feel sad that, you know, if we just learn, OK, I'm not supposed to feel

sad. from a young age, then we never feel sad.

If we learn, don't act that way, don't get angry, you know, and again,

I'm not talking about never controlling our kids' behavior, but,

but usually they, in their world, there's a really just reason for them being upset.

So just honoring that feeling. And so I think that's the first thing is we've

just got to quiet down that little part of us that learned to judge everything we feel.

And, and then the first thing is just to notice in your body, what are you feeling?

Are you, are your shoulders tense? Is your, um, are your hands sweaty?

What, what, what are you feeling when you sense an emotion and you notice it,

start to just notice in your body what you're feeling.

And God built us body, mind, heart, soul, emotions, all of it.

And we're one package and they all bleed. As you know, I will feel funny every

time I talk about anything, um, neurological with you, uh, because Because you

have studied this way more than me in my layperson way.

But what I know is all of that's connected.

And so when we notice what we feel, and I mean, in the book,

it was as simple as me just saying, asking the question, are you okay or are you not okay?

And sometimes that's as simple as...

As we can even conceive of, right? Because to go any deeper than that just feels really cumbersome.

So I start with that notice, are you okay? Are you not okay?

And then moving to naming it. And that's so hard for all of us, right?

And I kept the emotions to four basic emotions, sadness, fear, anger, and joy.

And under those though, there's a plethora of words, endless words,

really, of grief and disappointment, both being sadness, but very big,

different sides of the spectrum.

And so just the closer we can get to actually naming what we feel, the better.

And then to feel it, which just feels obvious, but take some time and focus

and then to share it because in the sharing is where the connection happens.

And then to decide what we're going to do with it. Because like you said,

I mean, we can make a big mess giving all the energy to our amygdala,

But at the same time, we can make a big mess if we don't.

So there's got to be a moment of like, what do we feel and noticing that and bring it to light.

But then at the very end, we have to decide what we're going to do with that.

That's right. And I think it really needs to be said. You said it in your book

very well, but it needs to be said.

We are told as children, don't be angry. Don't be sad.

Christians don't feel that. But the truth is you do feel that.

Like everybody does feel this palette as

you said of human emotion the problem is if

we believe that it's wrong or sinful to feel those

things then it creates this tension inside of

us this cognitive dissonance where i'm not supposed to feel this but i do and

then we try to convince ourselves that we're not and we're living in this place

right that's not real and that that's what i kept seeing and that made me so

sad and really one of the big reasons i wrote the book was Because so much of

me and so much of all of us is spent,

the energy of our lives is spent trying not to feel something.

When if we would just feel it, there's...

It's hard. It's not easy to feel sadness. I'm not acting like it is,

but gosh, it's easier than pushing it down for 10 years and it coming out sideways

and you pushing your child away.

I mean, there's a real consequence to us stuffing in the book.

It's concealing, coping, and controlling.

Those are the three things we most often do with our emotions rather than connect.

And that's, that's the goal. The goal is to use it for connection,

but instead we control it, we cope with it and we conceal it.

And, and that way of life is we're getting through it, but we're not experiencing

joy and we're not experiencing the depth of relationships we want.

And in some ways we will end up pushing away the people that we love because

we can't handle our own emotions. We can't handle theirs.

And so when we can't handle theirs, they're going to go somewhere else to find

that need met. And we want it to be us.

We want our kids to want to come to us. We want our husband or spouse to want

to come to us. We want our best friends to want to come to us.

But if we're always trying to fix their problem rather than feel their pain,

they're not going to come to us. That's powerful.

That's the line right there. We're also fixers, especially me. I'm a doctor.

I want to fix it. My family has a hard time telling me what they feel because

I try to fix it all the time.

That's something we need to learn. One of the things, I think if I picked one

line out of the book, if I could pick one line and say, this is the one by the

book because of this line or memorize this one line, it's this one, Jenny.

Teach people to say, when did you first feel the feeling you're feeling right now?

There's so much neuroscience in that. And I'll have you unpack it in a second.

But my perspective is we teach people all the time.

Feelings aren't facts. Feelings are chemical events in your brain.

And they are there to remind you of previous situations that you've experienced or.

Or epigenetically inherited from your parents that you might need to be afraid

of, or you might need to take some action on and compare that to the current

situation and attach meaning to it based on the chemical event that's happening.

And so they're not facts, they're barometers.

They're telling you something's going on and then you have to decide what's

going on and what's real right now.

Right? So that idea that you teach people, when did you first feel the thing

that you're feeling right now, there's so much juice and so much power in that,

that it's worth the purchase of the book,

friend, to hear that one line. Jenny, talk about that for a second.

Well, I mean, one of my friends said, this is thousands of dollars worth of therapy for you.

I can say that's true because a lot, you know, that line, as you well know, is not original.

It's not original thought by me. It's one that was forced upon me with counseling

where I was forced to look back and go, what is this fear? I think specifically of my daughter.

Um, it's a story I tell in the book about she, it was, she just got married

and I'm at dinner with them and she's telling me like some dreams and ideas

of them traveling and or moving out of the state and even out of the country.

And I started having a reaction. I mean, I couldn't breathe.

I, I hit it, but I, I about imploded.

I had to go to the bathroom and escape it because I was about to weep in front of him.

Just the idea and the thought sent me into a spiral.

And I, I, you know, I didn't want, I mean, on a core level, a parent wants to

be there for their kid, especially their dreams and their hopes.

Of course, she just got married. Of course, they're dreaming about doing wonderful

and big, beautiful things with their life.

But, But, but I, I wanted to be there for her, but I couldn't for some reason.

And it wasn't a, it wasn't a, um, I could tell myself the right answers.

I could tell myself, Jenny, of course you want them to go.

Of course you can't control if they move. Of course you're going to be fine.

Like, what are you doing?

That didn't work. Every time she would bring it up, I would feel this way.

And so I went to my counselor with it and he said, you know,

do you remember as a child feeling this way? away.

And several things came up.

And even something recently came up, which was when Zach, my husband,

was in the hospital and about to die.

I mean, he was in a very fragile state.

It's a long story, but his blood pressure was like 200 and something over 180.

I mean, it wasn't even a human blood pressure. And he had had a mild stroke.

And so I'm sitting there thinking I could lose my husband any minute.

And it was that same feeling that I was having when Kate was talking about adventures.

Well, that's not, that doesn't make sense. You can judge me for it,

but you have these things too. Everybody has these things.

But what was happening was these triggers of over my whole life,

beginning when I was seven years old and I was confronted with death for the

first time and I'd gone to a funeral and I remember I couldn't stop crying and

I was scared of death and I was scared of dying alone.

And so I would look back and I'd see that same panic and that same feeling come

out every time I would feel like I was going to be abandoned.

And so these, yes, these feelings mark us. And in fact, they largely,

you're right, are how we remember our lives.

I don't remember a lot from when I was seven, but I remember crying and looking out the window.

I remember every detail about my thought life and everything that was happening

around me because I was so sad and scared that night.

So those moments add up and I think they are still with us, right?

That seven-year-old scared of death is still here.

And when my daughter's going to move, everybody's going to leave me. That's the fear.

And so I think walking through those moments has really set me free.

And I wouldn't even say it's so funny because sometimes I'm asking Dr.

Thompson, like, what did you even just do?

Like, what did he didn't teach me anything. He didn't fix any any problems,

but I leave and I don't panic anymore.

When Kate talks about that, how does that happen?

And it, it is literally not being alone in those moments and those fears that

he is with me in those moments and fears.

And it changes something about my brain, which you could tell me way more about

what is actually changing.

But my understanding is that what can heal nerve and, and so that that's an

unbelievable feature of our brains that God gave us.

That's right. We're designed to be in community. We're not designed to be alone.

And I think the idea that we accept realities in our lives from things that

happened at a time in our life when

nobody intended for that to become our reality. And it hurts us later.

There's a woman named Robin Long. I don't know if you know her.

She's a fitness Pilates instructor, wrote a really, really good book that was

on the podcast. And she talked about how she had this body image problem into her 40s or late 30s.

And she finally figured out through therapy that it was because she remembered

when she was a little girl, she was with her friend and her friend's dad made

a comment, offhand comment that she heard that her friend has skinnier legs than she did.

And so here, 30 years later, she's got this body image problem.

But he never meant for that to be a label that she received for her life.

Right. You said it like that, like we just we receive and accept labels that

were never intended for us. Yeah.

Oh, I mean, I have so many that have, you know, it's funny.

Another thing I'm wrestling with is I've I've been in the same small group of

friends for many years and they laugh sometimes because I'll tell a different story.

But the core lie or thing that I'm struggling with in it is the same in every single story.

There's some core lie that I'm believing over and over again.

And I think this is the work of it.

What emotions do is they point us to these places that God wants to tend to,

that he wants us to pay attention to.

And we probably never would if we didn't feel.

Anxiety and some risk that we're going to hurt the people around us with our

reactions if we don't figure this out, right?

Like there's got to be some motivation for us to go pay attention to these things. That's right.

You talked about the work that the enemy does and what the enemy wants for us

is to accept this idea that we're not supposed to feel our lives.

Talk about that for a moment.

Well, yeah, I mean, it's very convenient to stuff it all in all our energy is

spent on unconcealing and coping and controlling.

If we spend all, that takes energy, right?

And if we spend all our energy on that, that's a great waste of a life rather

than what God intends, which is mourn with those who mourn.

He talks about emotion and grief a lot.

You watch Jesus weep with Mary.

He knew he was going to heal Lazarus. He said that a few verses up.

He says, I'm going to go, my friend is sleeping. I'm going to go wake him up.

He knew he would heal him.

And yet on his way to do so, He sees his friend Mary crying,

and then it says he's out of great compassion for Mary, Jesus wept.

So that means that Jesus, in my fixer world, where I'm a fixer too,

my fixer world, I would go, Mary, don't cry. Watch.

Watch. I'm going to bring him back to life. I would go in with my magic wand

and I would fix the problem.

That's not what he did. Then he stopped with Mary first, who was angry at him,

and he gave her hope and he was compassionate to her with her feeling, which was anger.

And then he goes to Mary and he cries with Mary and he spends time doing that.

He sees that as an important thing to do.

And I think that story specifically has just changed my mind on.

Emotions. It's really changed my life and how I interact with my family, right?

Because my son comes home a few weeks ago and it's homecoming dance in the fall.

And it's his first time to ask a girl to a function or to a date.

And the first girl he asked says no.

And everybody hears about it. And he's so embarrassed, right?

And he's so angry. And so he comes home and I'm just mad and I'm sad and I want to fix it.

And I want him to go find the next cute girl and ask her right then let's make this better.

And I'm just going to, you're going to get anything you want to wear to this dance.

You're going to look so good. You're going to wear the cutest suit and you're

going to have the cutest new sneakers.

And we're going to do everything we can so that this doesn't feel bad.

But the reality is on that day, he just needed me to be sad with him.

He just needed his mom to be sad with him. Why?

Because God called us to mourn with

those who mourn because part of of our brain just needs

to not feel alone in our sadness and our fear and our anger that's right we

were built to experience these things together and when we do which is i love

talking about my little bit of science with you um but what happens you tell

us you tell us what happens.

Well i mean you you we i did research for most of my 20-year career on this

particular problem called glioblastoma, this malignant brain cancer.

I actually wrote my second book about this.

This brain cancer that's always fatal, right? Nobody survives.

A five-year survival rate is one in 10,000. Nobody practically survives this disease.

And what I figured out, what I was trying to figure out is how do I be a good

doctor for somebody when I can't fix them with surgery?

How do I still be a good doctor for you? And so I started looking at what elements

of caretaking make a difference for people. And what I figured out is this one thing.

Hopelessness is deadlier than cancer. cancer like people that

lose hope even if they don't die

from their disease are worse off than if they maintain

hope and die from their cancer right it's hope

hope is the first dose that's why i wrote that the last book hope gives you

this ability to believe that you can that your life has meaning and purpose

no matter what you're going through right and so to have hope you have to go

through what you said you have to have perseverance and perseverance versus

character Character and character produce hope, and all that comes from suffering, right?

So if we can learn to put our emotions, put ourselves in touch with our emotions

and really figure out what's triggering the things that we feel and then learn

how to compare those to current events and take the lessons that we've learned

from the past and apply those emotions appropriately so we can be in community

with our family and be real people,

then we can inspire others to rewire their brains too and maintain hope no matter

what they're feeling, right? And your book is doing that for me.

Wow. That's so interesting. And I, yeah, I think my, my love of the research

has just grown and grown and grown as it's backed up what I know as a theologian

and Bible teacher, right?

I spent my years in the Bible and I had three years of seminary and that's what I learned.

And, you know, that's what I'm living. That's what I'm doing.

And to get to the science later in my life and to realize it all really supports

the ways God tells us to take care of each other. That's right.

It's so beautiful. It just gives me such an awe of God and how he built us.

Amen. Yeah. Give us this one little thought experiment tool that you gave us.

I just want you to talk through before we run out of time. pause permission

perspective and persist like that

that was perfect like it talked through that little process for us yeah i think

we all need handles i always picture what i'm asking people to do as this giant

dark abyss like i'm saying come up yeah stand on the edge with me.

And now come in this abyss and it's, it's hard, you know, and people are like,

I don't want to feel sad. Like that's not fun.

And I would just say, you know, one thing that I just thought would help people

are really simple handles.

And, and I think that permission piece is huge. I think that might be the biggest thing.

If we have, if we can quiet that part of us that has has worked so hard to not

feel and has judged and judged and judged what we're feeling,

what other people are feeling.

If we can quiet that part and we can be with ourselves and not be so afraid

of these waves that feel like they might overtake us.

What I've found is God is in it, like down in the abyss.

Yeah, there's actually a little flashlight and there's some handles and there's

a lot lot of friends and God's there and, and you're not going to find it so scary.

Once you do it, you'll actually find it freeing.

And so that was the whole book was just an attempt to give handles to something

that is so misunderstood and so hard to get our head around and our hands around.

But I like to try to help people do that because I think the enemy works in

confusion. The enemy works in chaos.

And what God does is he likes to bring clarity. He likes to bring security to our lives.

And so that was my hope was just these are simple tools that God, that Jesus did.

I mean, that's what I did. I looked at Jesus' life. I'm like,

this is how he lived. He noticed people.

He noticed what they needed. He noticed what they felt.

He had people name things, the woman at the well, he wouldn't let her get out

of it. It's like, no, you're going to tell me what you did. Oh,

you're not going to tell me. Okay. I'm going to tell you.

Wouldn't that be a mean thing to do? Except that he was setting her free,

you know? And so he gets her to name it.

And when she can't, he names it for her. And then to feel it,

to feel what we are to fill and, and to, um, to share that with others.

I mean, this is, this is really living and it is the more Epic way of life, I think.

Wow jenny amazing to

have a chance to talk with you today before we go somebody listening

to this has just gotten the diagnosis back and

somebody's just lost the husband somebody's just found out their child isn't

coming home like this is the group of people that are going to hear this so

give us some some just thoughts on what to do from your perspective the day

that thing happens What happens next for you in a healthy way? What do you do now?

I think that pause, let's just start there and just wherever you are.

And I would just say this, whether you have just gotten tragic news or maybe

you're having a fine day, it feels like a great Tuesday.

I would just say wherever you are, there's probably something that you're feeling.

And so just to give just a minute to notice it.

What are you feeling right now? as you drive, as you walk, as you lay in your

bed, what do you feel right now?

And to give that feeling a word, to not only notice it, but to name it,

what is the best, most descriptive word you can think of to name that feeling that you're feeling?

And I'm going to guess that 95% of you said, I feel sad, angry, or scared or worried.

And if that's you, I just want to say, of course you do. Of course you do.

Because this world is jacked up and it is not as it should be and it is not as it will be.

And I want you to imagine God with you right now.

And I want you to look at his face. How is he looking at you as you feel that emotion?

Is he angry? is he disappointed or

bugged that that you feel sad or or afraid or angry and i would say i bet he

feels a lot like i feel right now which is i'm just so sorry yeah and i hate

it even more than you hate it the darkness.

The dark circumstances coming against us, I will make a way to make it right and to make it matter.

And so as you sit with God in that, that is the sweetest spot.

That is the place, the Holy Holies, that sacred place where God is and meets with us.

And I just pray, Pray, Lord, for anyone that feels like they can't face their

life, they can't face these feelings. God, would you just be so near to them?

Would you hold them and care for them and don't let go of them?

And would you shine your face upon them?

Would they experience your delight in them, them

in the way that you created them to feel

and to think and to

know you and to walk with you in jesus name amen amen wow 900 episodes of this

podcast this is the third time somebody made me cry so congratulations derwin

gray suzy larson and jenny allen bringing the tears to the podcast podcast.

Listen, you did an amazing job with the book and we're going to give some copies away.

Our mutual publicist, Bev Reichert over at Waterbrook has given us a few copies to give away.

We'll touch on the instructions for that after we let Jenny go here in a moment, folks.

But Jenny, I didn't think you could write a better book than Get Out of My Head,

Get Out of Your Head, but you did it.

No way. You did it. You knocked it out of the park.

You didn't make us move to Wyoming this time. I told that story before, but great job.

Thank you for writing it. And I'm excited to have a chance to talk with you

again in a couple of weeks. Thanks. Thanks for having me.

All right. What a great conversation with Jenny Allen and friend.

I'm so grateful here on frontal lobe Friday that we've had a chance to untangle our emotions.

Remember emotions and thoughts are connected in your brain.

They are not just two parts of your human experience.

They are physical inputs to your corpus striatum and to your tonically active

neurons that are involved in helping you decide whether you're okay,

whether there's a threat, and what you need to do about the decision that you're

making to move or to pick something up or to engage with a person or what to

do with the things that you're feeling.

And the things that you're experiencing, and how to live out your life.

If you want to be an embodied person, you have to remember that you have the

mind of Christ. We're not supposed to conform.

We're not supposed to let fear and anxiety and secular culture and the world

and our past and our traumas and tragedies and massive things,

we're not supposed to let them define us because we have the mind of Christ.

We're not supposed to be blown around by every time the wind changes or every

time our experience gets hard because Jesus says the thief comes to steal and

kill and destroy, But I came that you might have life and have it abundantly.

So we can have, we actually can have an abundant life even when it's hard.

And to do that, you can't have a

sterile, purely rational, unfeeling life because God is an emotional God.

And Jesus was an emotional person, an emotional human who was also God.

And you're created in his image and you have the mind of Christ.

Christ, if you've accepted him, if you love him and follow him and place your

faith in him as a savior and accepted his sacrifice on your behalf,

you have the mind of Christ. The Bible tells us that.

And so we have to understand, we do need to untangle our emotions.

We need to know what they're, what they mean, and we need to use them in an

appropriate context to help us live out our lives in the most abundant way possible.

And here on frontal lobe Friday, friend, I just want you to remember that you

can't change your life until you change your mind and untangling your emotions

is a critical part of that process.

And the good news is, my friend, you can start today.

Music.

Hey, thanks for listening. The Dr. Lee Warren podcast is brought to you by my

brand new book, Hope is the First Dose. It's a treatment plan for recovering

from trauma, tragedy, and other massive things.

It's available everywhere books are sold. And I narrated the audio books.

Hey, the theme music for the show is Get Up by my friend Tommy Walker,

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They are supplying worship resources for worshipers all over the world to worship the most high God.

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Self Brain Surgery every Sunday since 2014 helping people in all 50 states and

60 plus countries around the world. I'm Dr.

Lee Warren and I'll talk to you soon. Remember friend, you can't change your

life until you change your mind.

And the good news is you can start today. Thank you.

Music.