Look Hard at Your Internal Stories

Dr. Lee Warren here, your favorite, hopefully favorite, internet brain surgeon.

Going to spend a little time with you today because it's Mind Change Monday, one of my

favorite days of the week. I hope you had a great weekend.

We went out to Virginia and did the 700 Club this week, and if you haven't seen that interview,

I'll post a link in the show notes.

It was good talk with our good friends out there at CBN and the great work that they're

doing around the world. Today, what if I told you, what if I told you that you are a storyteller?

You might say, wait a minute, I'm not a storyteller. I'm a veterinarian, or I'm a physicist,

or I'm a homemaker, I'm an insurance agent. I'm not a storyteller.

You're the guy telling stories. What if I told you, though, that you spend an incredible amount of time

telling yourself a set of stories that you have carried with you your entire life,

or since some massive thing occurred, or since somebody did something to you?

You are telling stories constantly. You have an internal narrative.

And so what if on Mind Change Monday, what if we looked at the internal stories

that we're telling ourselves and just became editors instead of storytellers for just today?

And we learned how over time to edit those internal stories to where that they were pointing us

towards something helpful and not something harmful.

What if we could do that? Well, today on Mind Change Monday,

we are gonna look at the internal stories that we tell ourselves and how to switch from our role

as writers and readers of our own story

to being editors of our own story, to be our own agent, to advocate for the best outcome

to this story that we can have.

And we're gonna learn how to do all of that on Mind Change Monday in just a few minutes.

But before we do 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.

Music.

All right, you ready to get after it? We're gonna talk about stories today.

Now this might surprise you.

I have an internal story that I tell myself.

I don't consciously think of it, but when I'm self-aware, when I pay attention to the thoughts

that float around in my head, I have some things that happen.

Lisa and I had a conversation in Virginia this week when we were traveling for the 700 Club,

and I don't know how it came up, but I shared some things with her that I had never shared with her before.

And one of those stories that I tell myself that I hear in my head is that I don't measure up,

that I'm not enough. I have an incredible sort of lifelong state of an imposter syndrome.

Imposter syndrome is where you feel sort of subconsciously or consciously

that you don't belong in a situation that you're in,

that you're the one in the room that doesn't really belong there.

And this happens a lot when people get promoted or people get drafted into the professional sports

or people get an opportunity to somehow become

part of something larger than themselves or a dream that they've chased for a long time

and somehow they don't feel like they should actually belong there.

They don't feel like they deserve to be there. Well, let me tell you with me.

I grew up in a very small town, a nobody town in Oklahoma.

I love my hometown, but if you grew up in New York City, you wouldn't think much of my little hometown.

2,000 people, Broken Bow, Oklahoma.

Just a little community of honest, hardworking people.

And that's where I came from, a long line of people who worked as ranchers and pipeliners

and cattlemen and great, hard-working, blue-collar people in my line.

Somehow I was called into science. I kept feeling that I was supposed to be a doctor, and somehow that became this identifying

thing for me as a young boy, that I was supposed to be a doctor.

My dad was a schoolteacher, storekeeper, owned a bunch of five and dime stores, and then

transitioned into life insurance and insurance.

My mother was a Mary Kay lady who drove a pink Cadillac. Imagine that, her great success as a Mary Kay agent

in this small town, and I was the kid that got dropped off to junior high in the pink Cadillac,

so I was kind of notorious for that.

Mom was very successful as a Mary Kay agent, really proud of that.

And my parents just worked hard and did great things, but we were just normal people

from a really small town, right? So then, due to our association with our church.

I didn't really have a choice in where I went to college and I never thought really much of it because I knew my whole life

where exactly where I was going to go to college. I was going to go to Oklahoma Christian College, which then while I was there became Oklahoma Christian University.

This is a small private Church of Christ school in Oklahoma and it turned out to be a great educational environment for me.

But it's a little school that nobody had ever heard of if you compare it to Harvard and Yale and Penn State and big schools like that.

Right again, coming from a small place to another small place and doing well in an environment

where I wasn't surrounded by a whole lot of competition.

I get to medical school and again, I go to a state school, the University of Oklahoma,

which turned out to be a great medical education. I did very well there.

And always along the way, somehow found myself at or near the top of my class, right?

But while doing that, I constantly had this sense, yeah, I might have made the A here,

but boy, I did it by the skin of my teeth.

And yeah, there were only six other people in that physical chemistry class, and I just barely made it.

And then I get accepted to medical school, and I'm like, man, I must have been the last kid they chose.

Like, I don't know how I got in. Like, all these other kids are coming out of, you know, bigger schools and bigger towns,

and they've done better on the MCATs than I did, and all this stuff.

And I constantly had this idea running in my head that I don't know how I managed to get to this place.

Somebody's going to come along and say, oh, we made a mistake, we weren't supposed to

let you in, you're not supposed to be here. I constantly had that fear.

I'm just sharing this with you. I'm not trying to make excuses for it, I'm not trying to say I can understand it, I'm

just telling you the truth. that if it resonates with you, maybe you've got some stories like this in your heart too.

Well, then I get through medical school and somehow get accepted to neurosurgery training,

which is at the time was the hardest program to get into over 400 applicants for the one

spot in Pittsburgh that I got.

And I still the day I get there, I'm convinced that they made some kind of terrible mistake.

And I'm the one who's there that doesn't belong and doesn't deserve to be there.

All the other people, literally everybody else in my training program did undergrad

at some Ivy League school, did med school at some place like USC or Duke or Stanford

or some big known place.

And here I am from Broken Bow High School and Oklahoma Christian University and the

University of Oklahoma College of Medicine. I'm on scholarship from the Air Force because I really couldn't afford to pay for medical

school by myself.

So I'm military from a state school, from a private small Christian school, from a very

small town in a Midwestern state.

I'm a nobody compared to these guys who are Ivy League, big time people, right?

One of my senior residents who has gone on to be notorious for some of the things that

he's done in his life used to call me state school, like we would be making rounds and

when he was the chief resident, he would point me out and say, what do you think state school?

And what he meant by that was just to remind me that I was the one in the room who didn't

and have the pedigree, the Ivy League, the blue chip, the big famous program that I came from.

I was the one from the stable in a manger somewhere, from the small town, the inauspicious beginning.

And I had that narrative.

Now, later in my life, had the opportunity to look back and say, you know what?

It might've been a gift God gave me to come from such seemingly humble beginnings

because I constantly had this fear that I wasn't gonna make it.

And that made me work harder.

And if you look underneath the layer of why I thought I wasn't going to make it, I've

shared with you before, I had this internal narrative of label that I put on myself of

being dumb that I picked up somewhere that somehow I thought I wasn't very smart.

And yet I continued to succeed. Why?

Because I worked so hard and the reason I worked so hard is because I was so afraid

of failure and somehow I thought if I failed it would prove all those people right.

And so I had this narrative, this story. And that story has carried with me all the way through, even writing books, I've realized

now Lisa and I and my agent were talking about it one time at dinner and I realized that

I think part of the reason that I chose to write memoir, besides the fact that I had

these stories that were amazing, impactful stories of my time in the military and my

time dealing with brain tumors and all that, I had a natural gift of storytelling that,

I worked really hard to learn how to write so I could share with you.

But the reason I chose memoir is because when you're writing memoir and not self-help, you're

coming from a place of, hey, this happened to me, and maybe you can learn some things from it.

And when you're writing self-help or personal development, you're positioned as an expert

who's telling somebody else how they can do something.

And so when you write memoir, you're coming from this humble place of, hey, here's a story

and perhaps you can find some help in it.

When you're right, self-help, you're coming from this place of authority.

And I never felt comfortable with that. And Lisa said, with Hope is the First Dose, she said, now's the time that you need to

teach people how to do these things that can change their lives.

And that's why, if you read Hope is the First Dose, it starts out and it sounds kind of

like memoir, but right from the first page, I'm telling you, this is going to, by the

end here, I'm going to transition and I'm going to teach you some stuff that's going to help you.

It was very uncomfortable for me to ease myself into that authority space But the fact is when we have something that we know,

We can help other people with it if we come by saying hey Here's something I know and I know it will help you because it helped me. So I've had to learn

I'm just sharing this with you friend I'm sharing an internal narrative with you that just so you know

That you're not the only one that has a story in their head Let me show you another example with you, Kurt Thompson, who's a psychiatrist and a

writer of several amazing books, the most recent of which is called The Deepest Place.

He's this incredibly successful, well-known A-list podcast guest.

Everybody knows Kurt Thompson and he's an impact player in the mental health space right

now. and his books are successful, he's doing very well.

Yet in the deepest place he shares this narrative that he's carrying in his heart,

This internal story that he has I'm gonna read you some of his work here,

To put it simply a part of me believes that I am unwantable. This is Kurt Thompson,

This part does not just believe he is unwanted by others which puts the onus on someone else rather

He believes he is unwantable full, which in the way I tell the story means that even if people, especially those whom

I deeply desire to be close to, would want to want me, eventually they would see that

there is something inherently malignant about me.

I don't know all the details of exactly what that is or where it came from, although it's

some conflation of my being uninteresting and unattractive, but once others see this

cancer, I believe they will leave." Do you hear what he's saying? He has an internal

story that nobody would really want him if they could actually see him, that

nobody would really want to be his friend, that no one would really want to

love him, that no one would really want to come along inside him in life if they

really knew what he knew about himself because he believes he is unwantable. He.

Goes on to say, I worry at a primal level that to allow people to come too close

will inevitably lead to their leaving.

And it is the anticipated leaving that I sense in my abdomen and upper left chest that feels claustrophobic.

He talks about this sense that he gets where he's sure that people are gonna leave

and abandon him and he starts to get hyper, almost this painful sort of breathlessness in his chest

on the left side and in his abdomen, this feeling of anxiety that develops with him.

And he goes on to say, and so without even knowing that I am doing it,

I have developed ways to keep people at the very least at a slight distance.

Better for me never to allow people to become too close so that I can protect myself from,

the experience of being left.

You see what he's doing there? He's describing this beautifully.

I feel unwantable and if I let somebody get close to me, I'll start to get my hopes up

that they're going to love me and then they'll see who I really am and they'll leave me and

And that will hurt more than just not being with them in the first place, and therefore

I'm going to keep them away.

I'm going to sabotage any chance of relationship so that I avoid the inevitable hurting when

they figure out that I'm really unwantable.

That's my summation. He goes on to say this, the result of course is that this part of me remains alone, alone

and in the perpetual state of sensing that I am being left, which only reinforces that

part of my narrative that tells me I am unwantable.

He goes on to say this this storyline has been like a shard of broken glass in my soul

And I have developed a number of coping strategies idols if you will to numb that pain

Mind you it did not begin as a storyline,

It did not begin with me consciously thinking as a very young boy,

That I am unwantable as we have seen first we sense and then we make sense of what we sense it began rather as an

amalgam of my temperament, my parents' unhealed wounds that they passed on to me epigenetically,

and my attachment patterns that I formed with them.

I want you to get this friend. We're here on Mind Change Monday.

We've been talking a lot lately about interpersonal neurobiology and directed neuroplasticity

and epigenetics. Those three big words.

And what they mean is we have a biological reaction that happens when we get around other.

People. Our biology affects theirs. Our electromagnetic fields affects theirs. Our mood and our state

affects the other people around us. And you know this is true already because if you walk

into a room and somebody's in a really bad mood, you don't have to have them tell you

that they're in a bad mood because you can feel it. When somebody's anxious or scared,

your heart rate goes up. When somebody's obviously sad or very angry, you immediately develop.

A change in your emotional state because your state is affected by and affects the state of other people.

That is interpersonal neurobiology.

Epigenetics, as we talked about in my newsletter yesterday, and by the way, if you are not

getting my newsletter, please check out wlewarrenmd.com slash newsletter.

Every Sunday since 2014, shortly after we lost Mitch, I've written this letter to

try to make sense of the things that are going on in life, and it turns out to be pretty

helpful to people all over the world, so if you're not getting that, check it out and

I can send you the one from yesterday.

If you haven't gotten it, send me an email, lee at drleewarren.com, and I'll send you

a copy of yesterday's email.

You don't even have to sign up, I'll just send it to you, and then you can see if you like it.

But we talked about epigenetics and what epigenetics are.

This science that understands how it's not about the genes that you inherit that necessarily determines

How you turn out now you inherit genes for eye color and hair color and height and some things that are hardwired

That you can't change that you're going to have but there's a lot of a huge amount in fact the vast majority

Of what happens to us genetically in our life,

Depends on what we turn on and off what which genes get switched on and switched off and that happens in real time all the time

Based on our environment our thought life our experiences our relationships our diets toxins weather,

Sunlight sleep all that stuff affects what happens to us.

Epigenetically and that turns out to be way more important than the genetic baseline that we get

So what we've also learned is the thing that had the things that happened to our parents like Kurt Thompson just said.

This idea that the things that happens to our parents in their lives when he said that his sense of being

Being unwantable started as an amalgam of his temperament, his parents' unhealed wounds

that they passed on to him epigenetically.

That means, like we learned with the study of Holocaust survivors and Vietnam veterans

who had PTSD, when your parents are afraid of something, that changes their genetics

and those genetic changes get passed on to you.

And you're born being uncomfortable, nervous, excited by, interested in, or hurt by some

things even though you've never experienced them.

I heard a woman say it well the other day. She said genetics might load the gun, but our decisions often pull the trigger

So what she means by that is exactly what TD Jake said, which is really well summarized,

Statement that he said you were born looking like your parents, but you die looking like your decisions your decisions,

Determine what happens in your life not your parents in the genetics that you inherit to some degree now, obviously

Obviously, cystic fibrosis and some of those diseases are inherited and you can't do anything about them.

But whether or not you spend your life suffering at the hands of a story depends on whether

you ever take the time to understand that story and start to unwind it so you can tell

your own story and not just live in the shadow of your parents' story.

Let that sink in for a second.

Okay. Now, I want to go to you now. You've talked about me and my sense of not being enough, my great sense of imposter syndrome

that I've dealt with my whole life, that I still deal with.

Every time I get in front of this microphone, I say a little prayer, ask God to arm me to

say something that's going to be helpful to you, and I'm still shocked that anybody's

listening out there. Honestly, I don't understand why you'd want to listen to me, but I know I've got some

information that can help you.

At the same time, you have this quantum level disagreement with yourself where, why would

anybody listen to me and at the same time, man, I've learned some stuff that can be so helpful to people.

This could save lives, this could make an impact, this could change somebody's destiny,

this could unload the gun of some things that they've inherited.

And I have that constant tension between should I even bother to do this?

Is anybody listening out there?

Is anybody willing to share this episode with somebody else so we can get the information out to more people?

Or is this just going to fade away?

It doesn't even matter or that's constant tension. Why because we're always telling ourselves a story.

Now somebody I love hasn't in sort of inhabited this story that she tells herself,

That she's too much that she's too difficult that she's hard And the reason she tells herself that story is because somebody in her past or maybe multiple

Somebody's said that to her you are too difficult. You are too much I don't even know how to deal with you. And so even though she's been in a safe,

Emotional state for many years now,

That's where she still falls back when she's frustrated.

Is that the problem is not that the other people aren't behaving? Well, the problem is that she's just too difficult. She's too much

It's too she's too hard,

And that's a story that has limited and hurt her in many ways in her life Because somebody else put a label on her and as we talked about a few days ago

Labels lack the inherent power to change what's inside the labeled thing unless

you believe them. You decide, you assign the value and the meaning to the label

and whether or not you're gonna live as if that label is true. And we talked

about if you've got a jar full of flour and somebody puts a label on it that

says it's sugar, if you try to cook like that sugar but it's really flour, it's.

Not gonna work out very well for you, right? It's just not. So you got to learn

to live according to what's actually in the container and not what the label

says. So I just want to encourage you today friend to spend a little bit of

time looking at critically looking at your story. When I write a book a lot of

my time most of my time is spent in the writing mode right I sit down and I put

put pen to paper I don't really use a pen I use keyboard so I put my hands on

the keyboard and I clack out words and I write and I just start to build a story

that's a way to convey information so that it will help you believe something

true so that you can make some changes in your life right well in the same way

I spend a lot of my internal thought life writing and rereading and revisiting

a story that says I'm not enough I have an imposter syndrome that somehow everybody's gonna come along and say yep I knew it that guy's a fake like the

He doesn't belong here because I don't think I belong there, right?

I've got that internal story, but when I write a book at some point I have to stop writing have to say the end

This is the story and I have to send it off to my agent Kathy Helmers had a good

conversation on the phone with Kathy last night. Shout out Kathy if you're listening.

And Kathy will read the story, and she'll say, you know, that needs a little editing.

There's some places where you're not as clear as you should be.

You're not conveying the truth as well as you could.

The story's not landing as effectively as it could because it needs some editing.

There's some places where you contradicted yourself, or there's some places where you left some things out that would have shed more light on what the truth is,

or there's some places where you're being too hard on the subject matter.

Subject matter, and you need some editing.

And then she'll call Susan Jaden, who's my editor at Waterbrook,

and Susan will get the manuscript, and she'll say, hey, let's take this manuscript

apart a little bit, and let's go into this story,

and let's dig around and see if we can make the truth a little more clear, and let's see if we can get rid

of some of the fluff and some places where you've worked

too hard to cover up, maybe you've put too many words on top of something and it's hard to find

what's really true, and let's make it better.

And Susan, with her great skill, like a surgeon with a knife,

will begin to carve into that story and will work back and forth for a few months.

And eventually what you get in your hands is a much more effective document.

Than where it started because it's been critically edited and some things have been removed.

And oftentimes, there's whole chapters of all three of my major books that have come out

that never got published, because a smart editor said, you know what, this piece of the document

does not advance the story.

It's great, you wrote it well, it's very well written, but it doesn't help you tell this story very well,

and you need to cut it.

And it's really hard, friend. It is so hard to cut pieces of your own story out

and discard them, because you believe they need to be in there.

It's really hard. But a good editor has the ability to keep their eye on the ball and see what the story really is about.

Help get rid of anything that's keeping the real story from coming out in a way that will be the most beneficial to the reader.

Right. I hope you can understand the metaphor. I'm trying to say here,

Inside you you've got some stories that you you have spent your entire life,

Carefully crafting that you believe about yourself and parts of those are precious to you,

This is gonna be hard to hear if you've been through some massive things some hard thing

And especially if it came at the hands of someone else, some abuse, or you've been victimized

in some way, or you've been hurt by someone else, there's a part of your story that you

wrote to explain your present behavior by placing blame on the people who did the thing to you.

That you're currently behaving the way that you are. You're currently living the way that you are with whatever limitations and powers and holdbacks

and holdups that you have.

You're currently living by placing blame on somebody for some part of your story in the past.

And if you look critically at the fact that what you do now...

Only defined by what you do now that your next move Can truly be your next move and it does not have to be filtered through that entire story and what somebody did or said to

You in the past somebody told you you were too much,

Somebody told you you weren't enough. Somebody told you that you were unwantable and what you're doing now,

if it's still being defined by and influenced by what those people did in the past or what that person said in the past or that person

who touched you that wasn't supposed to or that person that cheated on you or

left you or got cancer and died on you if that's still holding you back then.

Today it's time to get some editing skills and it's time to say wait a minute I feel this because of what happened I feel this because of what

those people did. I feel this because of losing my son 10 years ago, but the fact

is what I do today needs to be determined by what God is calling me to

today, needs to be determined by what the story needs to tell for me to make the

most impact in the world today, needs to be told in the context of how can I move

forward today. Now sometimes we're stuck. Sometimes we really get stuck in a part

of a story and there's a part of your brain called the cingulate gyrus and

And that anterior cingulate cortex, that little part in the very middle of the front of your

brain, we've talked about a few times, and it keeps coming back to me in different ways recently.

Daniel Lehman has described the cingulate as the gear shift.

All this information comes in from all these different parts of your brain, and there's

all this possibility of what you do next, and the cingulate is the gear shift.

You look at the road ahead of you, and there's snow, and there's ice, and there's a ditch,

and you say, boy, I need to shift down into low gear, I need to put it in four-wheel drive.

You make a decision and you change gears on the truck so that you can get through what's coming next.

But if you keep the truck in neutral.

Then it doesn't matter how hard you push on the gas, that truck's not going anywhere

until you shift gears and put it in forward, into the proper gear.

Or if you put it in reverse, it doesn't matter how much you're looking ahead, you're

going to go backwards when you push on the gas, right? If you shift gears to the wrong place or fail to shift gears at all, you will never be able

to move forward to where you need to go.

And that's kind of what the cingulate does when it's not behaving properly.

When you're stuck in a story, it's like you put the gear shift in neutral.

That part of your brain isn't acting properly.

Now, interestingly, we learned from Mary Frances O'Connor and her brain imaging research that

people who are stuck in complex grief, people who have made their whole life be about this

thing that happened or the mourning or the yearning for that lost person or relationship

or dream or whatever it was that they lost, that those people have significant dysfunction

in the subgenual anterior cingulate cortex, a little tiny part of the cingulate, and they are stuck.

They can't get in gear.

And then just this last week, Andrew Huberman on his Huberman Lab podcast pointed to some

research that I actually read before from 2020 from a group that looked at the cingulate

and its role in willpower and resolve and grit and tenacity and things like that.

And it turns out that it's the cingulate that if you can learn to improve the function of

your cingulate gyrus, specifically the anterior mid-cingulate cortex, a little different part

of the cingulate, is involved in willpower, tenacity, grit, drive, things like that.

We have this belief that willpower is kind of a limited resource, but what Huberman talked

about and the research found that other people did is that willpower can actually be increased

by increasing the tenacity of the anterior mid-cingulate,

and that happens when you make hard decisions

of things that you specifically don't want to do.

That learning how to sort of embrace the difficulty or embrace trials, embrace suffering, embrace struggling,

by learning how to say yes to things that seem hard, your cingulate actually gets stronger.

And then you begin to be able to shift that gear even when it feels unnatural or feels scary or feels like you don't want to

And what they learn by studying people that can increase their tenacity or grit or willpower or whatever you want to call it ego,

Depletion avoid ego depletion all those things that the scientists say That the way you do that is you specifically make yourself engage in hard things

You don't feel like going to the gym you do it anyway. And you get to the gym and instead of just lollygagging around, you

don't skip leg day. Or you make that phone call that you've been avoiding because it's uncomfortable. Or you make yourself get up and take a walk after

you lose your son. For example, Lisa and I had many days when we did not feel

like getting up and putting on our clothes and getting out of bed and doing

anything. Most of the time we did them because we still had a child, Kaylin, living at home.

And we had to, we literally could not just evaporate in that grief because we had to

take care of Kaylin. Fortunately, she was there to sort of provide motion and emotional need for us to move, and we did.

But what it turns out, and the brain research side is, the more you engage in embracing

things that seem uncomfortable to you and you say yes anyway and do them, that your,

Your brain is very powerful, but it's not particularly specific, which means that if

you improve your resilience and your ability to say yes to hard things in one area, that

will spread and you will suddenly become more able to engage in hard things.

Across the board so for example if you are limited in your decision-making in terms of

Relationships by a story on the inside that you're too much or you're not enough or you're unwantable and you make yourself go

To that small group meeting you make yourself get on and engage with somebody and work you make yourself,

Date again after you've been alone for a long time. You make yourself try something that seems uncomfortable

Uncomfortable then all of a sudden you'll start finding it easier to engage that muscle the next time you'll find it easier to make

The decision to move the next day and by engaging that,

Embracing that discomfort and being able to move forward you actually improve the health of your singlet

You've improved the ability to shift gears and start moving forward and that's one of the secrets to getting unstuck.

In whatever area so this process of learning to look back and being willing to edit our stories and say You know what?

This is uncomfortable for me to go back in the past and look and ask questions about

Why I feel the way that I do and this is by the way This is where some people need therapy and some people need help,

Okay, because it can be a black box that's so scary for you to open to go back and look at the past and

And understand what Kurt Thompson said, but he said it beautifully.

He didn't say, I need to go back and find out why I'm unwantable and it's because my parents screwed me up.

He didn't say that. He said he recognized with great compassion that his parents loved him and they took good care of him,

but he was born when they were in their mid 40s, in the 1960s, and they couldn't afford another child,

but suddenly they had one.

And his parents had some unhealed wounds from their childhood.

If you were born in the 60s, that means your parents were born probably in the 30s or early

40s. They were born to parents who had just gone through a Great Depression and two world wars.

Those parents, your parents, probably.

Were born to parents who had gone through some extraordinarily difficult times and they had some wounds

And at those time in those times they weren't taught,

To understand they didn't know about brain science They didn't know how to look at their wounds and their stories and to understand what they were passing on to their kids epigenetically

They were just like you are Doing the best they could,

With what they had so kurt thompson says go back and look at your parents and look at

Look at their parents and look at what wounds they might have had and how that can start

to then help you to unlock your story.

Because remember, remember as Gabbermonte said so beautifully, trauma my friend is not

what happened to you. Trauma is your response to what happened to you.

Trauma is not what happened because if you were injured in a war, if you were a prisoner

of a war, if you were abused by someone, if you've lost a child, if you had a car accident,

If you're a cancer survivor That trauma has happened and nothing that you do or say will make it ever true that it did not happen because it did

So if trauma then is what happened you would truly be hopeless because you can't unwind that clock

It's done it happened,

But trauma is not what happened trauma is the way that your body in your mind and your life

moves forward as a result of what happened. It's your response to what

happened and you can do something about that. So the point of today here on Mind

Change Monday is I want you to switch from writing that story mode to editing

mode and just like Susan Jaden and Kathy Helmers had this compassionate loving

heart they love my story and they want you to hear it and they want that story

to be the most effective and powerful story that it can be. They go back and

And they help me see the places where I need to say yes to something uncomfortable, which,

sometimes is being willing to edit out parts of my story that are not helpful to me or to you.

And by doing that, I end up with a story that's more helpful, that's more true, that's more

powerful, that's more effective.

And that can begin then to help me to live my story in a way that's more consistent with who I am.

And in order to do all that, you've got to be willing to bring some light into some dark places.

And that's the good news. The little bit of gospel news that I'll give you today comes from John chapter one in the

New Living Translation.

What happened when Jesus showed up? In the beginning, the Word, capital W Word, that's Jesus, in the beginning, the Word already

existed. The Word was with God, and the Word was God.

He existed in the beginning with God.

God created everything through him, and nothing was created except through him.

The Word gave life to everything that was created, and his life brought light to everyone.

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness can never extinguish it.

Listen, friend, Jesus will come as the editor of your story, and he will go into those dark

places with you, and he will turn a light on, and he will shine a light into those places

that need editing, and he will help you to bring light into those dark places, and he'll

help remind you that the reason he came was so that you could stop living that life that's

that's limited by the things that have happened to you

and start living a life that's empowered by the things that he wants to help you with.

Titus 3, 4 and 6, but when the kindness and love of God our Savior appeared,

he saved us not because of righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy.

He saved us through the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit.

Listen, friend, if you are born again, if you know him.

You're not the same person that you were. You're not living the same life that you were.

And so the stories and things that have happened to you in your past don't have to live in this new life.

You don't have to keep reading them to yourself over and over.

You can edit them and tell a better story because he came and he brought that light

into those dark places.

Friend, it's Mind Change Monday and it's time to get after understanding

how unlocking the way that your brain works

can help you live a more empowered life.

You don't have to conform anymore to these stories and events that have happened,

the way they're making you try to live.

But you can rather be transformed by the renewing of your mind.

You can do self-brain surgery.

And here on Mind Change Monday, I'm just gonna ask you to spend some time today,

and begin to do this every day, looking at the stories that you tell yourself,

and being kind enough to edit them so that you can live out a better story going forward.

And if you're willing to do that, my friend, then you can truly change your mind and you

can truly change your life and you can truly start today.

Hey, thanks for listening.

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It's a treatment plan for recovering from trauma, tragedy, and other massive things.

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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.