The Neurobiology of Suffering (Part 2 for Theology Thursday)

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

and we are back with some more self-brain surgery.

It's Theology Thursday, and this is part two.

It's the first time I've ever done this, but it's part two of a two-part episode,

and I released the first part on the Spiritual Brain Surgery podcast earlier today.

So if you're interested in the topic of today, which is suffering, Why do we suffer?

What does it mean? What do we do about it? Where's God in it?

Then the theological side of that is addressed in the bigger theological side

of that is addressed in the Spiritual Brain Surgery podcast on part one,

where earlier today we talked about a hard look at handling hard things, suffering.

Okay, this episode, I want to take it deeper and look at the neurobiology of

suffering. I want to talk about what happens in your brain when you suffer.

What's the connection between your mind and your brain? And what does that have to do with suffering?

And we're going to address a listener's question about what do we do with chronic

illness, chronic pain syndromes, people that don't have any expectation that

this situation is ever going to go away or get better.

And I hope to show you that it is my belief that emotional pain and physical

pain are intricately tied to one another. other.

They represent similar things that happen in the mind and the brain.

And I want you to see that successful treatment paradigms for one type of chronic pain,

whether suffering because of physical illness or emotional injury,

trauma, tragedy, or other massive thing, that techniques that can be helpful

in one area are helpful in both areas.

And I hope to do that by helping you to answer 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 where 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.

Are you ready to get after it? So we're going to talk today about the neurobiology of suffering.

As some background, as I discussed on the Spiritual Brain Surgery podcast earlier

this morning, we get lots of emails.

And if you go out to the prayer wall for five seconds, you're going to see that

there are a lot of people suffering.

So even if you haven't gone through a trauma or tragedy or some kind of other

massive thing yet, I'm sorry to tell you, but you will.

It's a fact of life. Everybody goes through hard things, right?

That's why I wrote my book, Hope is the First Dose. I gave you a treatment plan

for what to do, how to be prepared,

what to do when life gets hard, and how to keep yourself, hopefully,

from being shipwrecked and having your faith wrecked and having yourself filled

with doubt and plunged into the pit of despair with the crashers who lose hope.

Because hopelessness is the worst thing that can happen to you, friend.

And that's why I gave you Hope is the First Dose. And I hope you've read it,

and I hope it's helpful to you.

If you haven't, check it out. It's a valuable resource. source,

I think it can be very, very helpful in your approach to suffering.

But we get out on the prayer wall, and you see all these things that people

are going through, and we see the promise of Scripture.

Jesus says in John 10, 10, the thief comes to steal and kill and destroy,

but I have come that you might have life and have it abundantly.

And so the question is, how do we live in a world where we keep getting things

stolen, and we keep getting killed, and we keep getting and destroyed,

at least in our spirits, and at the same time, find if we can believe and hold

on to the hope that Jesus' promise is true, that we can have abundance.

So how do we live in that world where we have suffering, steal,

kill, and destroy, hardship, difficulty, pain, loss, rejection.

Disease, all those things, and at the same time, abundance?

How can we live in both places? I shared with you earlier today on the Spiritual

Brain Surgery Podcast, if you haven't heard that, please go like,

subscribe, leave a review, follow that show, help it to get off to a good start.

We are really hopeful that spiritual brain surgery is going to help people around

the world in a little different way than the Dr. Lee Warren podcast does.

And I think they're going to be valuable and complimentary to each other.

And so sometimes we're going to do these dual episodes where one takes a hard

look on the spiritual side, one takes a little bit deeper look on the science

side, and they smash together to leave you in a place, hopefully,

where you can land on hope. Okay?

But I want you to go check it out if you haven't heard that yet.

The reason we did this episode is a friend and I had a conversation yesterday,

and he shared with me some stuff about how his wife has been through really

two dramatically difficult and dangerous situations lately,

both of which could have cost her her life or could have injured her significantly,

and both of which happened in places where she is supposed to be able to feel safe.

And any therapist will tell you, any counselor, any psychiatrist,

any psychologist, any pastor will tell you that

when you're in a place that's supposed to be safe and something unsafe

happens that can create real trauma this is why

childhood sexual abuse is so it's one of the reasons it's

so difficult because the the child is injured

and abused by a person that's supposed to be safe for them by a person that's

supposed to be trustworthy and protective of them and instead they're hurt by

that person which then creates all kinds of trust issues and lifetime time issues

of not feeling safe, right? That makes perfect sense.

Well, this woman, my friend's wife, has been through two of those situations

recently where she was in a place that's supposed to be safe and instead she was in a real danger.

And in one case, like physical danger of potentially being killed and somebody

else got really hurt and she not only had to go through that but had to help

take care of the person that got really hurt.

And it's just bad. It's a bad situation and and obviously leaves you shaking

your fist in the sky and saying, why, God?

Why? Why do these things happen? Well, we address that on the spiritual side,

in the episode this morning on spiritual brain surgery.

So go check that out. But on the physical side, the emotional side,

the mental side, what's happening in your mind and your brain,

I want to talk about the neurobiology.

Pain and suffering, okay? There's a beautiful paper in the Journal of Biological

Psychiatry from 2017 called Your System Has Been Hijacked, The Neurobiology

of Chronic Pain by Baylor and Ross.

It's a great paper, and they talk about a soldier, an Iraq War veteran,

who was admitted to the hospital with terrible pain in his left arm.

He had a crush injury, which are terrible injuries because they damage nerves

and they lead to all kinds of trouble.

He had a crush injury in in combat two years before they wrote the paper.

He'd undergone multiple surgeries, but still had this chronic and unrelenting pain.

And when he came into the hospital, he told the doctors, if you can't fix this,

if you can't cut my arm off and make this pain go away, I'm going to kill myself. I've bought a gun.

I'm going to end it all because I can't live like this.

In my book, Hope is the First Dose, I told you the story about Tina Tisdale,

who did kill herself self because she had brain surgery.

And even though the tumor was successfully removed, she felt like she still

had a tumor and she felt like it was coming back and she couldn't stop feeling

like she had something wrong with her and nobody could convince her that she

was actually okay and nobody could help her.

And she ultimately took her own life because she could not live with the feeling

that something was still wrong.

Okay. Now this soldier that they

describe in this This paper had a crush injury, a real physical injury.

And chronic pain as the result of it. And it was so bad that if he couldn't

see a way out of it, if he couldn't find a solution to it, he was gonna kill himself.

Now, sadly, I hear this in my practice a lot. People come to me in desperate

situations, their back's been hurting, they've got headaches,

whatever it is, and they say, you're my last stop. I've seen all the other doctors.

I've tried all the medicines. I've had all the shots. I've done all the therapy.

I've had these other surgeries. If you can't fix this, I'm going to kill myself.

And people put that in our labs. laps, and it's a big deal when it lands in your lap.

Like, the buck stops here, the hot potato has landed in your lap,

and the music has stopped playing, and it's musical chairs, and you're it.

And they're saying, if you don't fix this, doc, I'm out. I can't live like this anymore.

So, when we get to that place, there is a host of neurobiological things that

have happened to produce that chronic pain syndrome.

And that chronic pain syndrome not only is a pain syndrome, It is a psychological

syndrome as well that has created a sense of desperation and fear and hopelessness, ultimately.

And so let's talk for a minute about pain processing.

Okay? Pain processing, obviously important. It's a survival thing.

You need to be able to jerk your hand away from the hot stove.

You need to understand when you hear the bear in the woods that you're supposed to run away.

There's a reason why you react the way that you do to external stimuli.

Lie. And to painful ones, it's to survive.

It's to keep yourself from getting your hand back in the fire.

You learn not to do that. You learn to pull away from something that's harmful or hurtful.

And when everything's going well, you get immersed in your normal thoughts and

your normal life experiences.

You're unaware that a system for how you process pain even exists.

You don't think about the fact that you have a system in place that God has

given you and you have been and endowed with a system to deal with pain events in your life.

But when something happens, you feel pain. It invades your consciousness.

It goes above and beyond everything else, and all you can think about is what

you feel, the pain that you're perceiving, and that transcends everything else.

It gets past all other perceptions.

Pain means danger. Pain means trouble.

And when it's severe, it triggers a tremendous and highly coordinated biological

response that goes to escape over everything else. I need to get away from this

thing that is hurting me. I need to get out.

This is all taken from this paper about the psychobiology and neurobiology of

chronic pain that was in Journal of Biological Psychiatry in 2017.

They did a really nice job breaking down the pain systems and what happens in

our minds and in our brains when we have pain.

And when we're in this situation, no matter what else happens,

no matter what else we've seen on TV about people who can ignore pain or don't

feel any pain, The truth is you need it to survive. You need pain.

If you don't have pain, you can't live. Well, look at what happens in leprosy.

Look at what happens to people who are born with a congenital insensitivity to pain.

You get all this mutation of your body because you can't feel anything.

And so you end up with sores and amputations and infections and you die.

Like if you can't feel pain, you're in real trouble. So what happens then in

our brain where we start to believe that pain is a negative thing all the time

and that we aren't supposed to feel it at all.

And we get to a place where we start to value pain, meaning that there's something wrong in our life.

And I hope you can see that at least metaphorically, and I think actually physically,

that when I say pain, when I say suffering, I'm not just talking about the crush injury on your arm.

I'm talking about the crush injury of your heart when your wife dies,

when you get the phone call and your son's been stabbed to death,

when you find out that your husband has glioblastoma,

when you get to notice that your job is ended and you're not going to be able

to make the mortgage payment and you're going to have to move,

like that's pain too, okay?

And you get the same set of chemical triggers and stimuli in your brain when

you have emotional pain as you do when you have physical pain.

Normally, when you stub your toe or you burn your finger, you get a series of

physiological events happening in your body.

There's a perception of pain that starts with a signal

from peripheral receptors pain receptors nociceptors we call them on a delta

and c fibers in your peripheral sensory nerves and they go up and synapse they

make their first connection in an area of your spinal cord called the dorsal

horn this is the the back part of your spinal cord and from there there's what's

called the fast reflex response.

Basically helps you jerk your hand away. Okay.

But there's also another signal that goes up to your brain and makes a second

connection in the thalamus.

And we talked a lot on this show about the thalamus and all the things it does.

And that signal is then relayed to areas higher in your brain,

cortical areas like somatosensory cortex, cingulate gyrus, insula,

all those areas that we talk about involved in emotional regulation and processing of complex emotions.

And then there's a separate system that goes down and it's coordinated in the

periaqueductal gray matter in your midbrain. That's your brainstem.

There's an area called the periaqueductal gray.

And this is the area that releases serotonin and norepinephrine from an area

called the RAFE nucleus and the locus coeruleus.

And the locus coeruleus, by the way, has been implicated. It's being inappropriately

decreased in function in people with PTSD.

So all of these areas are are tied together in our trauma response, okay?

So you have this area that goes down from the periaqueductal gray in the midbrain

that's involved in reducing the perception of pain.

Serotonin and norepinephrine are supposed to go to the rescue of making you

not hurt as bad, making you not feel as much when something happens.

They block the pain signal at the spinal cord level with a chemical called enkephalin,

which is like an internal opiate, like a morphine that your body makes.

And so you get this pain stimulus that makes you simultaneously reflexively

jerk away and at the same time goes up to the thalamus and then up and then

back down to the periaqueductal grave mediated by norepinephrine and serotonin

to release through the rafinucleus and locus coeruleus to release enkephalin,

which is supposed to reduce your pain.

So you jerk your hand away and then you feel better because of your body's response.

But you're designed to experience pain in a response to a threat,

like getting your hand crushed or getting your heart wounded or getting bad

news from the doctor. And you experience this reflex.

You become aware of the pain as a sensory situation is happening.

The fiber synapses on the second neuron in the dorsal horn of your spinal cord

then goes up, crosses to the other side,

goes to the spinothalamic tract and into the thalamus and then gets relayed

to the brain and back down through the periaqueductal gray to release enkephalin

back to your spinal cord to reduce the pain perception.

Now, here's the problem. We talk on this show all the time about self-directed

neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity is a good thing.

Neuroplasticity is the way that God made us to be able to renew our minds,

to think about something different and change the way our brain is wired,

to create synapses in in response to directed mental effort, okay?

Jeffrey Schwartz has done a lot of that work, and we'll talk about him in a minute.

But neuroplasticity is a good thing, but it can also be a bad thing because

when you experience pain chronically over a long period of time,

you have some plasticity in your spinal cord too,

and it can cause rewiring and remodeling of your nervous system that can lead

to what we call a chronic pain syndrome.

When a pain fiber is damaged, there are growth factors that are released by

cells called macrophages at the site of the injury that then causes non-specific

sprouting of other types of axonal cells,

nerve cells that grow in response to an injury.

Your body's basically trying to repair itself immediately because you're designed

to heal, as we've talked about this on other episodes of the podcast.

The problem is some of those new neurons, those new new axons can connect incorrectly

to the same cell body in the spinal cord that they came from,

which can then create these loops of pain or loops of sort of nonspecific stimuli

that your brain can then begin to interpret as pain because it's traveling on the same circuit.

Circuit so you can have this generation of

new axonal fibers that connect back to the dorsal horn

of your spinal cord in response to an injury and when they fire your

brain says oh the last time that fired it was because i got hurt and you'll

perceive that as being painful even though there's not an ongoing pain stimulus

and at the level of the synapse you have these prolonged stimulation of c fibers

that leads to the release of a neurotransmitter before the synapse of the the

two neurons called glutamate.

After the synapse, something called AMPA receptors get depolarized,

and you end up with this situation where you had a receptor that was blocked

before that's now triggered,

and you end up with gene transcription that turns on this engine that results

in your brain thinking there's an ongoing pain issue when there's actually not.

And so you can have real trauma that creates the perception of ongoing trauma.

You can have real pain that creates the perception of ongoing pain.

So you have a real threat that passes and you get past it and you reflexively

pull away from it like you're supposed to and your periaqueductal gray sends

norepinephrine and serotonin to release enkephalin and you're relieving the pain and all of that,

but then some neuronal growth happens and you create a circuit that your brain

improperly values and you identify that as pain.

So in the peripheral nervous system, you have this neuroplasticity that can

dysregulate and create loops that can become identified in your brain and in your mind as painful.

So science and neurobiology is finally starting to noodle out how some of these

people can have a transition from an acute injury to a chronic pain syndrome,

even in the absence of an ongoing painful stimulus.

And neuroplasticity is sort of at the root of all that.

So peripherally, after you've had an acute injury. You get these cytokines that

trigger the release of cells called macrophages that are supposed to eat everything

up and clean it up and heal it and help it to heal.

But you get the release of these growth factors like brain-derived neurotropic

factor, which we've talked about before, which is a neurochemical that you get

when you move and exercise that makes you feel better.

But brain-derived neurotropic factor can help regrow damaged nerve fibers.

But if they don't connect properly, then you can end up with these circuits

that your brain doesn't know what to do with.

And you have non-pain or alpha-beta fibers that can grow alongside pain fibers

and help carry the signal that then can be misinterpreted in your brain.

And you have sympathetic nerve fibers that can grow and sprout in the dorsal

ganglia that can become responsive to catecholamines.

And you get these abnormal connections that can then develop between adjacent

axons so that pain, non-pain, and sympathetic fibers all synapse on the same

cell body that used to only respond to pain.

And this type of neuroplasticity can result in a non-painful stimulus like somebody just touching your arm,

like your wife or husband wanting to hold your hand or your pants brushing against

your skin that can trigger a pain syndrome called allodynia where something

that doesn't hurt is perceived as hurting.

And then you can end up as this person who all of a sudden had an injury that

happened a long time ago that now is causing non-injurious, normal things to hurt.

And there's neuroplasticity that happens because of Hebb's Law,

that neurons that fire together wire together.

So you've got these peripheral nerves that are firing. They're connecting to

the dorsal horn, and they're not coming from painful areas, but they're being perceived as pain.

And because of Hebb's Law, you're rewiring that then, and you're connecting

synapses in your brain that say, oh, this hurts, and you develop this syndrome

called hyperalgesia or dysesthesia, where even mild things produces pain,

that's way out of proportion to what it should.

And I see these people in the office when they say their back hurts.

And I say, let me examine you. And I just barely touch the skin or sometimes

even just the clothes on the back of them.

And they literally jump off the table and scream in dramatically exaggerated responses.

And it's because of this learned hyperalgesia that says if something touches me, it's going to hurt.

Even though the thing that's touching you isn't a painful stimulus.

Isn't that crazy? That's neuroplasticity in the wrong direction for the wrong purpose.

And you get this situation where mundane, non-threatening, non-dangerous,

even formally pleasurable things can become crippling.

And then you get central neuroplasticity back in the brain where you say,

okay, there's been this injury that's now sending signals and I'm in pain all

the time and everything hurts and you develop in your mesolimbic system a reward

circuit that starts to then recognize chronic pain as being a stimulus that

needs to be reinforced and rewarded.

And in your ventral tegmental area of your brainstem, there's a group of neurons

in your midbrain that contain these dopamine neurons that make dopamine that

are supposed to be involved in your reward circuit.

And now they get activated in response to chronic pain instead of pleasure-seeking.

And they used to think that this was a reward issue because these neurons were

there to reward the absence of pain.

So when you finally get relief of pain, it feels good, and you reinforce that

so you learn how to avoid pain.

But now they get rewired, and they start actually seeking the painful stimulus

as the thing that can release the dopamine,

and you develop this system that feeds back on itself and increases the stimulus

that feels painful to you, that your brain has learned to value as being painful.

Now, these are core neurobiological processes,

and pain is just a perfect example of

a not just biological but also psychosocial problem

because people become unable to distinguish between a signal that is painful

and means that something is dangerous or harmful to them and another signal

that they perceive as painful but actually is from just dysregulated learning

and abnormal connections.

Infections, and that can lead to this cascade that we see in chronic pain patients

and chronic illness patients of catastrophizing and scared thoughts and out-of-control

anxiety and avoidant behaviors because they don't want anything to touch them

because it's going to hurt.

They don't want to have intimacy with their partner because it's going to hurt.

They don't want to put their pants on because it's going to hurt.

They don't want to let the doctor touch them because it's going to hurt,

and everything is going to hurt, and that causes more and more and more profound found suffering.

So here we have neuroplasticity in the reverse direction in response to chronic

pain or chronic illness, and our brains begin to tell us that this is always

going to hurt and that in fact everything is always going to hurt.

And so we try medications and we try surgeries and we try injections and we

try all these things, but the problem really isn't that there's a painful stimulus.

The problem really is that the brain has learned to interpret everything in

the context of pain and suffering.

And so you have a guy like this Iraqi, Iraq war veteran, who's gonna kill himself

if he doesn't get an amputation because he thinks that's what it's gonna take to relieve his pain.

And they put him through cognitive behavioral therapy. And this is where it's fascinating.

And they teach him that you can take these common automatic thoughts around

the seriousness and the unending nature of your pain.

And that can lead to depression and anxiety and hopelessness and helplessness.

And you can take cognitive behavioral therapy and you can teach these people

to relabel and revalue what they're feeling.

And over time, this soldier starts to find some traction and some help and some hope again.

And he starts to maybe get out of bed instead of not and starts going back to

work instead of not and starts participating in things again that can bring

pressure and to bring some hope and joy back into his life.

Because cognitive behavioral therapy has taught him that he can move without

hurting and he can start to engage with the world again and he can start to

think differently about the pain syndrome,

about the signals that his arm is sending him and he can learn to relax even

when he doesn't feel good.

And then this cognitive behavioral therapy starts to feed back and he starts

to understand that if he can break the cycle of negative reinforcement and how

he thinks and perceives this situation to be playing out and stop projecting

into the future this impossibility of improvement,

that maybe he can start to unwind all of this.

And they showed substantial improvement in his pain scores, his functional status,

his comprehensive treatment paradigm actually turned out to help him.

He did not commit suicide. He learned not to catastrophize. He

learned to get his thinking under control and ultimately

learned to reengage with his life again because he realized that the pain that

he was feeling wasn't from an ongoing stimulus and he could learn to revalue

it and not attach a permanent and catastrophic meaning to it.

But now let me just tell you, when your son is stabbed to death.

Pretty soon you start to wonder if the world is just not an unsafe place.

And you start to wonder if everything's actually just always going to hurt,

that if one of your kids is buried before you are, then maybe you're not a very

good parent, and maybe your relationship might fail, because why would anybody

trust you if you can't even keep one of your kids alive?

And before long, you can descend into your whole life being about how you feel

and what you think and what you perceive about that.

And after your husband dies, you can do that. You can spin down into this thing

where your entire life revolves around that trauma or that loss.

And people get stuck in what we call complex grief. And people get stuck in

the pain and the appreciation of their problem. And they can't see past it.

And from a neurobiological standpoint, there is hardly an ability to discern

what's happening between people that are stuck in deep grief and stuck in deep

trauma and stuck in chronic pain because the whole problem is how we learn to

relate to the things that hurt us.

And so I would just tell you, there is great hope for you, my friend,

if you're stuck in understanding this idea that we talked about earlier this

week in quantum physics, the quantum Zeno effect.

The more you observe a problem from a particular point of view,

you, the more real that problem becomes in the way that you view it.

And so if you start to say, wait a minute, yes, this hurts. I will always hurt.

My son died 11 birthdays ago.

Tomorrow's his birthday. He'd be 30 years old tomorrow.

And he was 19 when he died. And that's going to hurt. Some points of tomorrow are going to hurt.

And I can look at that and say, I'm always going to hurt like this.

My son's always going to be gone. Nothing's going to bring him back.

I've lost a a child, I'm never going to be okay again. My family's never going to be whole again.

I could observe that reality and I could observe it all the way into it becoming

a chronic pain syndrome in my life.

Or I can say, yes, this devastating thing has happened and it's always going

to hurt and I'm gonna feel that.

I want to feel, I need to feel that pain because if you don't hurt over your

son dying, if you don't hurt over your dad getting glioblastoma,

your mom having a cerebral aneurysm and dying in front of you,

a man that wrote in earlier a couple of weeks ago, his mother committed suicide in front of him.

Like if that doesn't hurt you, there's something wrong with you.

If you can't feel your feet when you step on something sharp,

if you have leprosy or diabetic peripheral neuropathy, If you can't feel that

pain, you're going to get sick from that, okay? You need to feel it.

But what you have to do is learn to revalue it.

You have to learn that the neurobiology of suffering can work in both directions,

and you can learn to identify that painful thing as something that happened,

and maybe there's a purpose to it.

And we talked earlier on the Spiritual Brain Surgery Podcast about that,

about how to assign purpose.

Viktor Frankl said that gas chambers at Auschwitz were built by people,

but also people could walk into them with the Shema Yisrael or the Lord's Prayer

on their lips that the difference between suffering and pain is your opinion of it,

your definition of it, how you value and label it in your mind and how you chew

on it and what you think about it and how you perceive the grand purpose and

design of what we're here for anyway.

And so in Jeffrey Schwartz's book, You Are Not Your Brain, he gives us four

tools that he uses in his obsessive-compulsive patients, and we can use them

for any type of thinking issue that we have.

We can use it for any type of chronic pain or grief or loss or stress or crush injuries or anything.

We can learn to take these four steps, and the first one is relabel.

When your brain tells you something that doesn't necessarily have to be true.

You have this thought that pops into your head about this. I'm always going to hurt.

It's never going to be better. or it's going to ruin my life.

The truth is most things that are deceptive have some characteristic of truth to them.

Some part of what the message is turns out to be true.

And it is true that you're always going to hurt if you have a terrible burn

injury that created scar tissue. There's always going to be some pain associated with that.

What's not true is that that has to become the only thing you can feel in your whole life.

It's always true that my son, having lost my son is going to hurt hurt me,

it doesn't have to be true that that's going to define my life and ruin my life

because I can learn to value him and value that situation in other ways.

So relabeling is taking these deceptive thoughts and putting a different label

on them and understanding that they're not always true.

And we're going to learn to identify them and be vigilant about them and be

careful when we go down the rabbit holes of thinking about them so we can pull

ourselves back to a different perspective.

We talked about the filmmaker moving around the set and looking at things from

a different perspective.

And now I can tell you that after 11 birthdays of having lost my son,

I can see some places where I have grown and learned and changed through that experience.

Is it good that I lost him? No. But have I redeemed it in some ways so that

I can use it to honor him instead of just being devastated all the time? Yes.

I believe I'm doing that right now with my my voice, as you're listening to

me, I'm honoring my son and I'm learning and growing from the experience of having lost him.

And he wants me to make his life mean something other than the.

And I'm going to do that for him. So I'm not just going to relabel the negative.

I'm going to reframe the second step, reframe it, and I'm going to change my

perception of the importance of it because that's how we reengage neuroplasticity to our own benefit.

When we reframe the situation and say, yes, this hurts, there's a purpose behind pain.

You need to feel pain, and pain can be a good thing. Not that the thing that

happened was good, but pain can keep me out of trouble in some ways.

Pain can point me towards healing in some ways. Pain can show me how to help

other people in some ways.

I'm going to reframe this experience and find a way to use it for my good.

And refocus is the third one. I'm going to direct my attention away from this

for a minute and towards something else.

Yes, I still want to be able to hold hands with my loved one and engage in intimacy

with her and have the ability for her to touch me without it being painful.

I've got to relabel that stimulus.

I've got to refocus my attention on what I'm feeling because deceptive brain

messages are basically just come in all the time, whether I think about them or not.

And I've got to grab them, take every thought captive. As the Bible says,

I've got to renew my mind. I've got to change the way I think about everything.

And I've got to relabel and reframe and refocus. And then I have to revalue

and I have to say, you know what?

My life still has meaning and value and purpose.

God is in me. The Holy Spirit is with me. He said, I'm here for a reason.

There's a purpose and a future path.

There's a path that leads to a future for me where he has redeemed me. He has rescued me.

He has healed me. He has allowed me to move past this.

And that's how you start using neuroplasticity to your own benefit.

Friend, neurobiology...

Is what it is. And when things happen that hurt us in our life,

our brains and our spinal cords and our peripheral nerves will rewire in different ways.

And if we don't value those rewirings in the right way, if we don't tell our

brains the right story about them, then they can become these loops of doom

and loops of despair and loops of hopelessness.

And we'll end up like the soldier who says, cut my arm off or I'm going to kill myself.

But fortunately, praise God,

he had good good team of therapists around him, a good team of doctors.

And he had a good group who were able to point him towards cognitive behavioral

therapy as the way that he finally managed to learn to revalue and reframe and

relabel and refocus all that so that he can learn to perceive his pain in a

different way and move on with his life.

And friend, I can't tell you that learning self-brain surgery will help you avoid pain.

It won't. I can't tell you that it'll help you avoid trauma and tragedy and

other massive things, it will not.

What I can tell you is having a treatment plan in place, learning how to manage

your mind is the way that you will be able to handle those hard things in a

way that lands on hope and gives you purpose and gives you meaning and gives you the ability,

to tell yourself that you can change your mind and you can change your life.

And that's good news because it also means, my friend, that 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,

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 WLeeWarrenMD.com slash prayer,

WLeeWarrenMD.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.