How Do You Handle Trauma?

Good morning my friend, I hope you're doing well. Dr. Lee Warren here with you for a little bit of self brain surgery today.

It's Tuesday but it's not Tuesdays with Tata.

I had an emergency surgery on Sunday afternoon so we normally record Tuesdays with Tata on

Sunday afternoons and this week it did not happen.

So today I'm going to bring you back and part of an episode from late in season seven.

So it's been quite a while. This is way before the book came out,

before I recorded the audio book.

And I did kind of covered some of the ground that we cover in my new book, Hope is the First Dose,

to talk about the four different ways that I've discerned that people handle trauma and tragedy

and other massive things in your life.

The question is not whether you're going to encounter something hard. You're going to.

That's not the question. You're gonna have something hard happen in your life,

probably for most of us, unfortunately, many things. Jesus promised us, John 16, 33,

in this world you will have trouble. So there's trouble coming.

So that's not the question.

The question is what will happen to you when you face trouble and trials and trauma and tragedy?

What's gonna happen? Is it random? Is it just it happens to you and it's random how you respond

and the people that seem to be resilient and manage to make it are just lucky?

Or is it something you can choose? Is it chance or is it choice?

And I would suggest to you that having a plan in place will increase the odds that you can have a resilience

to how the hard things hit you in your life, and whether they knock you completely out

or whether you're able to land on your feet.

We got an incredible email from a very difficult, a family going through a very difficult situation.

They lost a child who took her own life not long ago. Friend, we're praying for you.

And if you're listening to this, I just wanna give you this episode as kind of an encouragement.

There's a way that you can retool and re-engineer your trauma response.

And if something's happened, friends, out there, whatever you're going through,

if something's happened and you find yourself

in the midst of a response that seems to be unhealthy, you're struggling in your marriage,

it's knocked your faith out, then there's an opportunity today for you to listen to this

and just see if you can find somebody else's response, another way that other people have handled.

And maybe you can try modeling.

Pursuing a different way to process your grief or your pain or your trauma that you're going through so by understanding,

For me at least as a scientist by looking at how people respond to finding out they have glial blastoma did learning that their child died

to dealing with an unfaithful spouse whatever the trauma is that you've gone through for me looking at other people's responses and,

Seeing what they are and seeing how they turned out over time,

Gave me an opportunity to say wait a minute Maybe the way I'm handling things isn't the healthiest way.

Maybe I can start to model and emulate something else that works better.

Like Dr. Phil's always say, how's that working for you?

So if it's not, maybe we can learn from the way other people handle trauma.

And maybe then we can retool our trauma response to the massive things that happen in life.

And maybe next time something happens, we can be a little bit more ready

so that we can handle it with a little bit more resilience

and find ourself not falling all the way back down into that pit of despair.

Is it choice? Is it chance?

How do you handle trauma? What can you learn from other people's trauma response?

Today, we're gonna look at that and get after it. But really, other than that, there's only one question.

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 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.

Starting today to some of the concepts that are going to be in the book not to give anything away

But I want to prepare you with some things to think about because I want you to be thinking about these things in your own life

As you read the book and get to know it so that you can really I think Maximize the benefit of the treatment plan that I'm going to offer you and my other books have been.

Memoir really no place to hide a memoir a story of what I went through in the Iraq war in the aftermath and

and how I dealt with post-traumatic stress and control issues and all that stuff.

And I've seen the interview was a look at how can I doctor people and how can I have faith

and encourage people to hang in there and fight and pray in a disease like glioblastoma

when I already think I know the outcome.

And then while I was writing that book, we lost our son and I went from being this sort of guy

who thought he was writing a book to help other people handle their hard things.

And I was in the middle of my own hardest thing. That's a story, a memoir, of what happened and what we did.

This book, Hope is the First Dose, picks up from there, but it's not a sequel to Have Seen the End of You.

It is not a memoir. I use storytelling as a way to prepare you to receive some teaching from the hands of

a trusted physician, the way I look at it, so that I can teach you a treatment plan for

recovering from trauma and tragedy and these other massive things that life brings along.

That's the idea.

Hope is the First Dose is a treatment plan for recovering from trauma, tragedy,

and other massive things.

It's a book about how we deal with the hardest things in life

and still find our way back to hopefulness,

faith, peace, and happiness, even if that happiness might look different from what we knew before.

Because here's the thing, friend, massive things are coming in your life.

You're gonna deal with some really hard stuff. You already know that experientially, but you're going to.

And if you don't, somebody around you is going to. If you have somebody in your life

going through a massive thing. How do you help them? How do you provide some

comfort and some help for them. Don on me the other day.

We teach people CPR because somebody else might need to be saved from a cardiac arrest.

We teach people how to inject epinephrine with an EpiPen in case somebody has an allergic reaction.

We teach people how to change flat tires because we anticipate that you're going to have some

roadside emergencies. We teach people basic first aid because it's awful hard.

You need somebody else to be able to render first aid. Sometimes the person can't bandage their own wound and you've got to be able to do it for

them.

Stuff, but we don't teach how we're going to be ready to handle something emotionally when it occurs to us, when these massive things come along. We don't

teach people to have a plan in place, and that's what I hope to do with this book,

to give you that plan so you're ready when massive things come along, because

they are coming in your life. Jesus promised in this world you'll have trouble, but he also promised that you can have an abundant life, and that's why

I wrote Hope is the First Step. So today we're gonna do something. As I wrote the.

Book, I described four different responses to massive things that happen in people's lives.

And they're based on the lessons I learned from the four main characters and I've seen

the interviews. So I brought those characters and their stories into a data form and looked at what I learned

about how they handled those massive things and it turned out to be four very different trauma responses.

And I want to teach you that today. We're just going to talk a little bit about the four responses to the massive things that

happen in life because it's going to help us clarify and understand what we're going

through and prepare in advance for going through those things just as we learn CPR so we can help other people.

We learn how to handle these things because we know we're going to face our own massive

thing. We want to be good self-brain surgeons. We're going to talk about some data that I figured out, that I discovered as I started

to write the book Hope is the First Dose. So here's the thing.

Over the course of writing, I've seen the interview, I went back in time and I tried

to remember patients with glioblastoma and some other big things that I had encountered over the years.

And I wanted to tell their stories because there were four patients that I remember particularly Thank you.

That kind of came at the disease, diagnosis, treatment, recovery or death from different perspectives and backgrounds and they handled it differently.

So I saw pretty clearly as I was writing, as I was choosing who I was going to write about in that book,

that there were people that just handled it differently and I wanted to illustrate that.

And the funny thing about me and the way I've written books so far is I didn't come at the writing from the perspective of,

of, hey, I'm a writer and I just want to tell some stories and encourage people and help people.

I didn't come at it that way.

I came at it every time with, until this book, I came at it with, I had something hard happen to me

and I was trying to figure it out,

and so I wrote about it as a process trying to figure out what I was experiencing,

and then maybe through the figuring out process,

as Philip Yancey has said, be able to help other people figure some stuff out, too.

And that's how it came about for me.

So I've seen the interview was really this question that I had about.

I see a patient with a brain tumor or some big problem and because of my medical experience,

I think I already know what's gonna happen to them.

And then because I'm a person of faith, I believe that prayer can change the arc of something.

I believe that God can heal diseases and all that stuff, but I had this one problem.

So I had this, I believe things from science that I think I know and I believe things from faith

that I think are always true.

And the problem with glioblastoma, it was just always not true that God would intervene and save them.

It just always turned out not to be the case. So I kept looking over and over to try to find an example

of somebody that I'd prayed for and that had gotten better and I couldn't find it.

And then I realized maybe I wasn't asking the right question.

So I decided to write this book and try to help people handle hard things and I thought I had a bunch of stuff

figured out and boom, that's right when Mitch died.

Right as I was starting to put pen to paper to put those thoughts together about my book

about how I can help people in hardship.

I was thrust into my own, and when we lost Mitch.

As I then started writing about, not only do I have this big faith conundrum

of how to help people deal with hard things, now I've got my own, and am I really gonna,

is it really gonna be true that I believe that faith matters that I believe that prayer matters, is it gonna be true?

So we wrote that story to try to share with you what our family did, the aftermath of losing a child

and the aftermath of taking care of all these people was.

And so then, that book came out and helped people seemed to be important and I started wondering about one thing.

Started wondering.

Not really wondering, but I started lamenting the idea that I hadn't done something particular with the book.

And the thing that I hadn't done is I had told you that we recovered,

I showed you what our family did in the aftermath of losing Mitch

and the aftermath of taking care of all these people.

But I didn't really break it down and give you something practical that you could take away.

It wasn't a self-help book.

It was just a memoir. And I don't mean to say just a memoir.

You can learn a lot from memoirs. I do all the time. Philip Yancey's memoir,

where the light fell, taught me a lot.

Now I learned from memoir, I love that storytelling, narrative, nonfiction, long form idea presentation.

But I realized that something was amiss because when people face hard things,

they need a treatment plan.

Like I said earlier in the episode, we teach people in advance how to handle common things

because we expect them to encounter them. We teach people what to do when somebody has a cardiac arrest.

We teach people how to use defibrillators.

We teach people how to change tires and perform basic roadside maintenance on their cars.

We teach people what to do if they catch on fire, stop, drop, and roll.

How many times have you actually had to use that training that you learned in school but you never forgot it?

We teach people to stop, drop, and roll, and I've never actually seen anybody catch on fire, right?

But we don't teach people what to do when the massive thing happens in their life.

And so, I always seem to write a book, and then while I'm preparing to give all the interviews

and talks about the book, I realized some stuff I wish I had written in the book, and

that's the genesis of my next book.

It's just this backwards kind of thing. If I was a better writer, like Max LoCato, maybe I would sit down and say, here's a

topic people would benefit from, and I'd just write a book going forward about that.

But instead, I write books that lead to other books, because I realized I left some stuff

out that would have been helpful.

So here's the thing with this one.

When I sat down to say, how could I put together a story about how you recover, a method,

a treatment plan for how you can recover and deal with these massive things

when life really hurts, what can you do?

And I wanted to write a personal development self-help book to give you a plan, something practical.

And to do that, I still told stories and Hope is the First is full of stories

and you're gonna meet some fascinating new characters and all that, but there's one thing that I did

as I was trying to sort out how I could turn the lessons from I've seen the interview into a treatment plan.

As I started looking.

Four the four main characters and I've seen the interview as data and I said

what was the deal with these people the four people Jack Phillips Joey Wallace

Sandy Andrews who was mr. Andrews wife who mr. Andrews was the patient but mrs. Andrews was really the character because the story was about her and then

Rupert change these four people that were and I've seen the interview that

have very different ways that they handled their massive thing of dealing with glioblastoma. They had vastly different stories. And so I sat down, it was in Wyoming,

and I was looking at what these people went through. And I realized that their experience

could be graphed scientifically, not really like scientific data, but I could make a chart

of what happened to them over time. And I look at glioblastoma data and the survivor

data and there's something called a Kaplan-Meier curve that's basically a graphic representation

of how many people survive over time from a disease.

So you have percentage of people alive on the x-axis on the left-hand side of the graph

and then you have time on the y-axis going forward over time and with glioblastoma you

start with 100% of people are alive when they get the diagnosis and then by about five years

the curve is down almost down to the bottom of the page almost to zero and by ten years

it's really touching the zero line because hardly anybody lives ten years with that disease.

So you see this sort of long curve that's sloping downward and to the right.

And I'll put an example of this in the show notes if you want to see it on paper.

But so I realized that there are some people who, when they face the massive thing,

you could chart out quality of life stuff on the x-axis instead of percentage of survival.

You could put like percentage of people who are happy or hopeful or faithful

or what they would say that their life is okay or that they have joy or that still have meaning and purpose and value,

all that kind of quality of life stuff.

If you put that on the x-axis, most people, most people start pretty okay.

They've got their life figured out, they think things are going well and then something happens,

the massive thing occurs and they drop in that quality of life scale.

Their x-axis numbers start to deplete and over time after massive things occur, the

people go down on the graph towards a lower point, right?

I looked at somebody like Mrs. Andrews and if you don't, if you didn't read, I've seen

in the interview if you don't remember, she was a lady who her life was defined,

by her husband being alive. And when he got glioblastoma and got really sick,

her life was wrecked.

She dragged that poor man all around the country and had surgery after surgery and experimental treatment

after experimental treatment.

And he was skin and bones and couldn't talk and had a feeding tube and basically

was just a neurologic wreck when I met him.

And she kept him alive another year or two after that and had more and more surgeries done on him

until he finally died. And this guy was not living, he was wrecked.

But she was, in her worldview, if he wasn't alive, she didn't have anything to live for.

And so if you look at her quality of life, it plummeted and it looked just like

the glioblastoma curve. Like the longer he was sick and the less healthy he was,

the more miserable and unhappy and wrecked she was in her life.

And then after he died, she stayed down there. She was just an empty shell of a person.

And I can understand this.

And if I lost Lisa, that's what my heart would want to do, would just be to plummet and I would just be miserable.

But I also know that I have a relationship with my Savior and I have a living hope that I would get to see her again.

And I've been through hard things before. And so I pray that if I lost her,

that I wouldn't stay down there on that misery axis, that my curve wouldn't look like Mrs. Andrews did.

And I had some data to suggest that some people are able to do that.

There's another guy named Rupert Chang. And so I called that first group, crashers, by the way.

It's people that seem like their life's pretty good and then something happens and they crash

and they never get better.

And what was really interesting about that is I saw some people who the massive thing happened to them,

but it wasn't fatal and they got better.

They survived their medical problem and they survived their big issue in their life,

but their emotional state was still wrecked.

I've met lots of people who had a cancer scare and it rattled them to the core

and they were never okay again.

I've seen lots of people who went through some big thing, a divorce, somebody was unfaithful to them,

they had a business failure, a bankruptcy, and it just ruined their life and they were never okay again.

I can't be happy because this thing happened.

And so that thing becomes the only thing they can deal with in their whole life

and they become crashers.

And so you had this group of people and Mrs. Andrews was the prototype

where the massive thing wrecks your quality of life,

peace of mind, joy, happiness, faith, purpose, all that stuff, and you end up on the bottom of that curve

and it looks just like the glioblastoma survivor curve.

Gets close to zero over time.

It's just terrible, okay? Then you have people like Rupert Chang.

And Rupert Chang was this guy who got a version of glioblastoma where his entire brain basically turned into cancer all at once.

And he died as a complication of surgery during the biopsy.

But it turned out he had prepared his family. He had written letters and told them,

I don't want to be on life support.

I know where I'm going when I die. And if I have a fatal diagnosis that's going to wreck me neurologically,

I don't want you to do anything heroic to save me.

I'm good to go. And he did die.

And he died quickly and he left his family a letter and his family read that letter to me.

They prayed for me actually, because it was hard for me as a doctor to lose a patient.

This family prayed for me, it was amazing.

And the letter that he wrote to the family said, I don't want you to mourn the loss of my body.

I want you to celebrate the way I lived my life. I know what's gonna happen to me.

I'm comfortable with my mortality. My life is a story and I hope it's been a good one

and I pray that you remember all the good times. This guy was what I called an untouchable.

He knew that something bad was gonna happen in his life someday.

He knew there was gonna come a day when he developed some sort of disease

or he got old and died or something.

And he was already okay spiritually with that. And he prepared his family for his loss

so that they could carry on and tell a good story based on the memory of what he did

when he was faced with his massive thing.

So you had these contrasting data points where one person crashes and never gets better,

another person has the massive thing that they're not going to recover from,

but they still manage to hold on to all those quality of life things, hope,

faith, happiness, purpose, meaning all that stuff.

So their curve is a straight line almost. It's they start okay.

They end up okay.

And then you had people like Samuel Martin. Samuel was the first chapter in the book,

a guy that was happy and healthy and faithful and a great young family.

And he had a seizure on his way to work. Turned out to have glioblastoma,

diagnosed and operated on his birthday. He's one of the main characters in the book.

And he handled it by freaking out at first and getting discouraged and worrying and being afraid

and all that normal stuff.

So his curve, if you put it on paper, goes down a little bit from diagnosis.

From being a pretty happy guy down into being afraid and worried a little bit.

And then as time goes by, what happens? He remembers who he is.

He remembers what he believes. He remembers that he's got a great family.

And even though he knows his life is now going to be shorter, now he's got to get

after it because he wants to make sure his kids are okay.

He wants to make sure his wife has a good, solid footing in life.

He wants to make sure that he tells a good story.

And what ends up happening is he ends up back pretty high on that quality of life

scale. I called him a dipper and I think most of us are probably dippers. We hit this hard

thing and it knocks us off our balance a little bit and then we end up finding our way back

because we had some things. Remember I told you hope is a verb, it's a memory and movement.

There's some things that we know about ourselves and what we believe in. It takes us a little

while to rediscover them and once we do, we find our way back to the good place, right?

So there was dippers. And then the last group and the most surprising group was represented

by the character Joey Wallace in the book. Joey was this down and out guy who had never had a good life.

His dad abandoned him, his mom died at birth, her short one, he was a little kid.

He was a drug addict, he was a criminal, he was in and out of jail, he got injured by the DEA

running from a drug lab, he just had a bad life.

And when he found out he had brain cancer, his response was like, of course I do.

Like, why wouldn't I have brain cancer?

Everything in my life is terrible. It's always been terrible.

So his curve started low.

He started, he wasn't happy, he wasn't healthy, he wasn't faithful, he didn't have joy,

he didn't have peace, he didn't have what he would describe as a quality of life, that's why he was an addict.

He was searching for something. But then a remarkable thing happened.

While he was sick with glioblastoma, his grandmother rebuilt a relationship with him.

He got closer to his sister.

Pastor John, the chaplain, befriended him and ultimately led him to Jesus.

And he found hope and faith again, or not again, he found hope and faith for the first time in his life

while he was dying of brain cancer. He fell in love, he went back to school and got his GED.

Like he became a whole person with purpose and meaning while he was dying of glioblastoma.

And shortly before he died, he told me the last year of his life was the best year ever

he had ever had, because he knew that his life had some meaning.

He knew that other people cared about him. knew he had hope in his Savior that he had never understood before.

And so his curve goes the opposite, it's the climber curve. Starts low, ends high.

It's the inverse opposite of the glioblastoma curve.

It's the inverse opposite of Mrs. Andrews' crasher curve.

And so I'm telling you this just to say that you can do one of two things in your life, friend.

You're gonna have a massive thing.

You're gonna go through something hard. I'm sorry to tell you that.

John 16, 33, it's a promise from Jesus Christ, the Logos, the creator of the universe has promised us

in this world, you will have trouble.

You're gonna have some trouble, okay? It's coming.

It's appointed on the man wants to die. You're gonna die someday.

Somebody you love is gonna go through a massive thing. It's gonna happen.

But the good news is, he also said in John 10, 10, I came here that you can have abundant life.

You can have an abundant life in spite of the thief that comes to steal and kill and destroy,

in spite of the hard things, in spite of the massive things,

you can still have abundance.

So how do you do it? Here's your choice, friend.

You got a choice.

You can stumble into the massive thing and then find out which one of those four people you are.

And we can later look at the data and tell everybody that you were a crasher.

Or you can decide in advance that people have trauma responses

and you wanna get as tight and squared away

on yours as possible so that you can,

Instead of discovering what type of trauma response you're gonna have, you can make the one happen

that you want to happen.

You can build into your life some prehab, as I call it in the treatment plan,

some stuff that will help you guarantee that you'll be a dipper or possibly a climber

or maybe even an untouchable like Rupert Chang.

And you can steel yourself against the massive thing to prevent yourself from becoming a crasher.

Okay, how do you do that? That's the story of Hope is the First Dose.

I've given you a treatment plan for how you can prevent yourself from being a crasher.

That we can't prevent the massive thing from happening most of the time,

but we can prevent the death of our soul, of our happiness, of our peace of mind,

of our faith, of the story that our life was trying to tell that the massive thing threatens to take from us.

And sometimes, yes, as I told you, Sometimes life redefines what we thought we were about.

I said, this is a book about how to deal with the hardest things in life

and still find your way back to hopefulness,

faith, peace, and happiness, even if it looks different from what you knew before.

Look, our life is different than it was before Mitch died. There's no doubt about it, it's different.

My definition of what I thought my life was gonna be is different because one of my kids is gone.

And I've got a really, it's brass tacks, right? Do I really believe that I have a hope of him rising again?

That I have a hope of getting to see him again? Yes, I do. And if I didn't, I would be really sad.

If I thought it was just over, I'd be really sad, but I believe it.

And that has helped me rebuild my life in the post-massive thing of losing Mitch,

onto something that's actually hopeful.

I have a high quality life because now I'm trying to help people to deal with their massive things.

So I honor him and say, hey, this big thing happened in our life

and God was graceful, gracious to us

and helped us manage it. And so I wanna make sure people are armed

with a treatment plan for how they can manage it too.

Here's the thing, friend. Self-brain surgery is the path to handling the massive thing.

And I'm not saying that in a hokey way. You literally have a choice of how you're gonna wire the neurons

that your brain makes every day.

And you can wire them into the same old patterns that you've always had, or you can wire them

into despair and catastrophe when the massive thing happens,

or you can learn to wire them in more hopeful ways that break bad synapses and generate better opportunities

for you to think more clearly and understand that a lot of your thoughts aren't true

and that your feelings aren't facts and that you're not stuck with the brain that you have.

You can learn to repair and restore and let God help you find your way back up that curve

and get up high on that happiness, hope, faith scale again, even if it feels and looks different

than it did before the massive thing happened, because it will.

And that's where we're going with this book, okay? Romans 12 says, don't forget to hold on.

Don't forget to rejoice, because hope is always just around the corner.

That's Romans 12, 2 in the voice.

Don't forget to rejoice, because hope is always just around the corner.

That's the verse that I used to sign, I've seen the interview.

If you have a signed copy from me of I've seen the interview,

that's almost certainly in there. I sign almost every verse, almost every copy of the book with Romans 12, 2.

Don't forget to rejoice, because hope is always just around the corner.

Guess what verse I've chosen to sign hope is the first dose with I've chosen to sign psalm 71 14

as for me I will always have hope why because hope my friend is the first dose of the treatment plan

hope is the thing that enables you to say this massive thing has occurred and it's not going to

be the end of me it's going to be the beginning of the new thing that God's doing in my life,

Because if he brings you to it, he will help you come through it.

He will carry you through it.

It's a promise in scripture. He will never abandon you. He will never forsaken you.

He'll never leave you alone. Even in the midst of your massive thing, friend, the bottom line is the massive thing is coming

and you're going to have a trauma response.

And I'm hopeful that my book will help you prepare and choose one that's more helpful

to you, healthy for you, than the crasher.

Don't wait to find out what your trauma response is, build the solid one that you want up front.

There is a treatment plan and hope is the first dose and you can't change your life

until you change your mind. Right here I'm going to remind you what the good news is my friend.

The good news is 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 book

if you're not already tired of hearing my voice.

Hey, the theme music for the show is Get Up by my friend Tommy Walker,

available for free at TommyWalkerMinistries.org.

They are supplying worship resources for worshipers all over the world to worship the Most High God,

and if you're interested in learning more, check out TommyWalkerMinistries.org.

If you need prayer, go to the prayer wall at wllewarrenmd.com slash prayer,

wllewarrenmd.com slash prayer,

and go to my website and sign up for the newsletter, 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.

Music.