The Psychobiology of Old Memories

Good morning my friend, I hope you're doing well. Dr. Lee Warren here with you for another episode of the Self Brain Surgery Podcast.

Listen, we're going to get after something today.

It's going to be Thursday and normally on Thursday I don't give you something new.

Normally I go back in the archive from the past and mine something that's helpful and

bring back something for throwback Thursday.

It gives me one day of the week where I don't have to be quite as busy, and I can create

something from the past that's helpful, that's already work that's already been done, and bring it to you.

But today, I have something just building up in my heart, a piece of information that

I think will be helpful to you.

I'm thinking about grieving, thinking about people that are hurting, people that are suffering,

or something that's happened in the past.

And I just feel like you need some information that I've got for you today.

And we're going to talk a little bit about an old John Prine song. We're going to talk about rheumatoid arthritis and inflammatory,

Cascades in your body. We're going to talk about gene expression the psychobiology of,

Behavior state related genes and how in the world are we going to tie all that together in a way?

That's going to help somebody who's grieving Well, to understand that, you're going to have to understand about time travel.

And an old john prine song called paradise and we're going to do all that in about 15 minutes,

But before we get started, I have one question for you.

Hey, are you ready to change your life if the answer is yes, there's only one rule,

You have to change your mind first and my friend there's a place for the neuroscience of how your mind works smashes together with faith,

And everything starts to make sense. Are you ready to change your life? Well, this is the place self-brain surgery school,

I'm 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.

I hope you're having a good day. Thursday we're going to be in the operating room today and I am excited about having the

opportunity to minister to and take care of some people in my practice as a neurosurgeon.

The whole team will be ready to go today, but I just have something on my heart.

I've been following along, Jill and Brad Sullivan have this incredible podcast that I was honored

to be a guest on recently called While We're Waiting.

They had lost a child to cancer and went through this horrifying thing of being bereaved parents

like Lisa and I know all too well, but they've built this incredible community of people

who have gone through the loss of a child.

Just reading some of those comments yesterday on one of Jill's posts and actually one of

Brad's posts yesterday on Facebook, and if you've been through something hard like that,

they'd be great people for you to follow.

They do these workshops and support groups all around the country, even around the world now.

Really leaders in the bereavement space and they've done a lot of beautiful work

to help people and I was reading a comment that somebody was just talking about how.

They just can't seem to stop thinking about what happened in the past, and thinking of

all the different ways that something could have been different than it was.

And then last night as we were going to bed, Lisa was looking at something on Instagram

and somebody posted this incredibly beautiful little girl, and she was playing, and you

could tell she didn't feel very well. And then the caption came up and it said, This is the day.

This was the chance that we could have had to save her, but the doctor missed something

And our child died of meningitis the next day and they took him to the doctor took her to the doctor three days in a row,

Doctors just couldn't figure out what was wrong with this little girl and then boom all of a sudden

She was so sick, and she didn't survive. It's just a beautiful little toddler died of meningitis

So don't forget check your kids for meningitis if they're acting sick Okay, especially if they have neck pain or fever make sure the doctor thinks about that diagnosis

But I saw this and it was just devastating and and what's gonna happen for the rest of those people's lives

If they're not careful is they're going to go back and they're going to find different ways to blame themselves for not figuring out what happened,

Before it was too late for their daughter. That's not reasonable I'll tell you why it's not reasonable in a minute

But but it's something that's going to happen

So when you when you lose somebody when he goes through something really hard

When you look back in the past and you can't stop thinking back in the past about what happened

Why didn't I think this thing? Why didn't I show up in this way?

Why didn't I why did I do this or why didn't I do that?

Almost inevitable That we beat ourselves up. I want to give you just some information today and some tools and some thought processes

And I think it might be helpful. There's an old song from John Prine,

Called paradise and in the song paradise. He had a line that he said when I was a child.

My family would travel down by the Green River where paradise lay in old town in Kentucky,

There's a backwards old talent that's often remembered.

Music.

And he thinks about this time in his life so often that the memories are worn, like

he can think of them as a rock that he pulls out of his pocket and just kind of tumbles

around and rubs on, and over time it affects the shape of the rock, right?

He wears down the memory by thinking about it. And that's an interesting thought picture and metaphor and beautiful old song that John

Prine sang.

But I want to give you that idea that it is actually possible to wear down and change

the structure of your memories if you think about them in the wrong way.

And what in the world does that mean? Well let's switch gears for a minute.

I want to talk to you for a moment about an enzyme in your body called prostaglandin endoperoxide synthase 2.

That's a big word. Prostaglandin endoperoxide synthase 2. It is often known as cyclooxygenase 2 or COX-2 for short, easier to say COX-2, COX-2.

This is an enzyme in humans that is encoded for by a gene, PTGS2, and that gene basically

is one of two cyclooxygenases in your body, and these are genes that relate to the expression

of a protein called prostaglandin H2, which is a precursor of a protein called prostacyclin.

Which triggers an inflammatory cascade in your body.

So prostacyclin turns out to be the chemical that erupts inflammatory processes in your

body and things like rheumatoid arthritis and osteoarthritis.

When you have a knee ache, the thing that gets inflamed, the reason that inflammation

happens is triggered by this protein called prostacyclin.

That protein's production is controlled by the enzyme COX-2, prostaglandin endoperoxide synthase 2.

When you take Advil, or Aleve, or Ibuprofen, or all these anti-inflammatory drugs, including

steroids. Their primary effect is to inhibit the COX-2 gene from being released.

Turned on from being triggered to from being activated cox-2 inhibitors Prevent inflammation or reduce inflammation. I prescribe them all the time. I take them all the time. I run my knee hurts

I take advil i'm inhibiting the expression of the cox-2 gene,

Well, let me tell you something interesting,

There is a whole system of genes in your body called behavior state,

Activated genes behavior state activated genes these are genes that get turned on and off get expressed or not by your,

Behavioral state by the things that you're feeling and thinking,

Then interesting there's been some interesting research in people with rheumatoid arthritis that have really gnarled up hands and,

When some of these people are put into meditative states and they get their thinking differently,

They can all of a sudden open and close their hand without pain during that session when

they get their brainwaves in the right order.

There's been research to suggest that they are actually able to modulate the expression

of the COX-2 gene by changing their thought processes and their behavioral state.

That's fascinating. That means that you can literally turn on and off gene expression that produces a response

in the bone and joint system in your body in real time that reduces pain and reduces

inflammation and improves function.

So now that sounds kind of crazy, right? Well, you've all you've heard of psychosomatic illnesses, right?

You have no doubt that there are some people and sometimes maybe even you, they can, for

example, make your stomach ache by worrying about something.

You can get your mind on a particular thing and you can have changes in your body in real

time. about something, your heart rate speeds up, right?

Those are psychosomatic, that basically, soma refers to the body, psycho refers to the brain.

So these are things that happen in your body as the result of your brain.

So if you already understand and widely accept the idea that what you think about can make you sick,

then why wouldn't you also accept the opposite idea that what you think about can make you well.

Or make you better. You can. You can change by psychobiology. You can change behavioral

state-related gene expression. It's been shown clearly now with COX-2. That's just one example.

So why am I talking about all that stuff? Well, I'm talking about it because I want you to have

some compassion for yourself as it relates to grief and bereavement. And one of our 10

commandments of self-brain surgery, okay, we'll do a recap episode. Go back and hear the 10

Ten Commandments to Self-Prayer and Service if you haven't listened to it,

but we'll do a recap soon.

The very first one, relentlessly refuse to participate in your own demise.

Relentlessly refuse to participate in your own demise.

And one of the corollaries of the Ten Commandments is this idea that what we are doing,

we are getting better at.

What we're doing, we're getting better at. We don't think about that very often.

We think about, obviously, if I go to the gym and I work out,

I'm getting stronger, I'm getting better at working out. If I run, I'm getting faster.

If I practice something, I'm getting better at it.

We don't apply that to our thought life very much because the negative side of that is also true

and we need to acknowledge it and think about it.

When I ruminate, when I over-focus on something in the past,

when I make those memories wear, like John Prine's memory of paradise.

That he thinks of so many times that the memories are worn, when we do that, we are actually becoming better at

remembering that thing in that particular way, okay?

So if we want to relentlessly refuse to participate in our own demise, and we want to understand

that what we do, we're getting better at,

and if we know that it's inevitable that when we've lost someone,

or when we've gone through something really hard in the past, that we're going to have some habits

of going back to think about it, that's inevitable.

Then we want to make sure that when we go back and think about those things,

that we do it in a way that is accurate and compassionate and helps us.

Now, let me bring up Mary Frances O'Connor's incredible book, The Grieving Brain.

I had her scheduled to be on the podcast and we had a power outage,

and now she's busy for the rest of the year.

So I pray that I get to have her on the podcast sometime. But The Grieving Brain is probably the best book

on grief I've ever read.

It talks about the neuroanatomy and neurophysiology of what happens in your brain.

Based on her long career using functional imaging and what's happening when people get stuck in grief.

In chapter eight of that book, she calls spending time in the past.

And this is where we're gonna go, just a short thought today that I want to give you.

Let me just read you a passage from Mary Frances O'Connor. Psychologists call our thoughts about what could have happened counterfactual thinking.

Counterfactual thinking often involves our real or imagined role in contributing to the

death or the suffering of our loved one.

It is the million what-ifs that roll through our mind. This is going to resonate with you.

It does with me as a bereaved father. Here's the million what-ifs.

If I had done this, he never would have died.

If I had not done that, he never would have died. If the doctor had done this, if the train had not been late, if he had not had that

last drink, the number of possible counterfactuals is infinite.

Their infinite nature gives us endless thoughts to focus on, to consider, and to reconsider,

turning the scene around and around in our mind.

Imagine you've got that rock in your pocket and you can pick it up and rub it with your

Every time you're thinking about something, over time you wear out the spot that you like

to rub and you smooth it out and it changes and wears over time like John Prine's memory.

And that, my friend, is what happens when you ruminate on something with all the what-ifs

of counterfactual thinking.

Here's what Mary Frances O'Connor says, The irony is that this type of thinking, creating the myriad situations that could have happened,

is both illogical and unhelpful in adapting to what has actually happened.

Our brain may be still doing it for a reason, however. Some would say, Mary Frances says, that the reason is to try to figure out how to avoid

avoid deaths in the future, but it may be simpler than that.

Our brain, by focusing constantly on the limitless number of alternatives to reality, is numbed

or distracted from the actual painful reality that the person is never coming back.

When you focus on all the what-ifs, what you're actually doing is you're substituting guilt

from grief. You're getting better at feeling guilty.

You're getting better at beating yourself up, you're getting better at the despair part

of the equation, and you're not getting better at healing, because you can't multitask.

Your brain can only do the one thing at a time, and you're creating synaptic pathways

that makes it easier for you to slip back into that well-worn memory pattern of counterfactual thinking.

And Mary Frances goes on to say, even when the counterfactual thinking involves the painful

experience of guilt or shame, like believing we killed our baby, our brain still seems

to prefer it over the terrifying, gut-wrenching truth that our loved one is no longer here.

In other words, I would rather think about all the different ways that I might have been

able to contribute to Mitch's not dying, or I might have thought something different,

or I might have done something wrong that led to him dying.

I would rather think about that than allow myself to think that he's not ever coming back.

That's hard to admit, isn't it? or mulling over these counterfactuals Mary Frances O'Connor says can become a habit a,

Knee-jerk way of responding to pangs of grief. Why because what you're doing you're getting better at you're making synapses

You're making it more automatic that you'll slip into that guilt mode,

So that you can avoid grief.

O'Connor goes on although we are trading painful guilt for equally painful grief at least guilt means

we had some control over the situation. Believing we had control even though we

failed to use it means the world is not completely unpredictable. It feels better

to have bad outcomes in a predictable world in which we failed than to have

bad outcomes for no discernible reason. Ultimately my friend when you lose a

child you will be left with the unavoidable truth or when your husband

dies or when your wife strays or when your world drops out or you lose your

dream, whatever it is this massive thing you're having, ultimately you have to

admit that sometimes things just happen. Then we're in a broken world and you

can't control everything. And so you turn from admitting that and having to accept

with faith that Jesus is gonna have to come along and bear this cross for you

because it's too much for you to bear yourself or you're gonna have to try to

to spin that memory around and take control of it and go through this counterfactual thing somehow.

And I just want you to understand that the psychobiology of what's happening is when

you ruminate and when you allow yourself to beat yourself up and when you allow yourself

to do synaptic creation that leads to this over and over rumination that drives you down

this path of taking control of something that you really can't control, inevitably you are

in engaging behavioral state-related genes that are going to hurt your body.

You're going to express things that are going to lead to inflammation and anxiety and acid

production in your gut and possibly heart disease and cancers and all kinds of other

things that go along with negative behavior-related gene expression in the body.

We know that hurts us.

You already know it. You already know that psychosomatic illnesses are real.

You already know that after I lost my son, I've been honest about it, I got gray hair,

I broke my molars, I developed shingles.

You already know that you can hurt yourself. Now let me give you the compassion piece of it, okay?

A neuroscience point of view.

We all think that we can go back in time and visit our loved one that we've lost,

or visit that situation that we regret, or visit that... What if I had told somebody that my uncle was doing that thing?

Maybe he would have stopped. What if I had said he was saying inappropriate things to me?

If I had said that, then maybe he wouldn't have gone on to do the thing he did that ruined my life.

Whatever it is that's in the past, we all think that we can go back there and deal with it,

and ration it out and reason with it and come to understand it and somehow manage it.

But the fact is, it's not true.

You can't, and here's why.

This is the piece I need you to have compassion about, and this is the reason we're doing this today on Thursday

instead of giving you something old. I just wanna give you this one idea

that I think will be compassionate for you, okay?

Because you're bearing a load that you're not meant to bear.

Jesus said, his yoke is easy and his burden is light and you need to cast your cares on him.

And here's one that I want you to cast today, okay?

When you go back in time, you really aren't going back in time, because you are in the present.

You are in the here and now. And what you're doing when you relive those old memories is you are bringing an old event,

into your current state of what you know and understand and believe and experience and

feel and can process now.

And you're not the same person that you were yesterday or 10 years ago or 30 years ago

or whenever it was that this happened.

Here's the truth. Now you've been listening to podcasts and now you've read a bunch of books and now you've

been through therapy and now you've gotten with your wife and you've learned how to have

a new life and now your kids are all grown and they've all come in different ways and

this has happened to us and they've all said, you know, we don't think that Mitch did this or that.

And we no longer think that this would have happened differently if we had changed.

You're not the same person now.

You're not in the same world now that you were then. And so it is not possible for you to go back and have an intellectually honest and accurate

thought process about what could have been, then?

By thinking about what you know and who you are now. Because you didn't have that experience and that insight

and that knowledge and all of that education and all those conversations and all those years to mull it over.

You didn't have that when you were back there, back then.

Okay? There's a woman who writes in who lost a son to drowning and she's now gone on to have this incredible impact

in her state of water safety and legislation has changed And all these things that she's done that have changed the way that state interacts

with people who are swimming and to make people aware of how easy it is to drown, even if

you're a good swimmer.

But you know what? If she goes back in time and blames herself for not having armed her child with that information

back then, that's not reasonable.

Because before her child died, she was not an expert on water safety.

Before her child died, she didn't know all those things.

She didn't know that the state hadn't made people aware and hadn't prepared and that

there was so much danger. She didn't know that then, so it wouldn't be reasonable then for her to go back in time

and blame herself now for something she could not possibly have known then.

So the piece of compassion that I'm giving you today, my friend, is don't take your current

self back in time and try to relate to your prior trauma or your prior loss or your prior

failure or your prior victimization in the context of who you are now and try

to think that you should have been that person then because it's impossible. It

is counterfactual thinking and it will lead to harmful behavioral state gene

expression and you will be participating in your own demise if you allow yourself

to get better at that thing that you should not try to be better at. Instead,

Compassionately, go back and allow yourself to grieve.

Trade that guilt for grief and let people like Jill and Brad Sullivan,

if you need a guide, go check out While We're Waiting and get into some healthy patterns

of learning how to grieve properly, okay?

Get into some therapy, get into some books, get into some scripture,

get into something that can help you get your head on straight

about the way that you need to try to move forward and eliminate.

Let's do a self brain surgery operation and sever the six synapse that leads us down

to the what ifs and the counterfactual thinking and wearing those memories out.

By mulling them over and over and over again so many times that the memories are worn.

Let's instead honor those memories of who those people were or what we were like before or what

we are like now and all the different ways that God has grown us and changed us and stretched us.

After these events have happened, these massive things. And let's praise God for the fact that

He does keep His promises and Romans 8.28 does turn out to be true. There are some good things

that come in our lives again, even after we've been through these massive things.

Let's don't forget. Let's be grateful.

And let's find a way to take that grief and learn to use it as we heal, but not go down

that pathway to guilt anymore.

Can we do that?

I think you need to change your mind about the past. I think you need to understand that you can turn genes on and off with your thinking.

And I think you can learn to be healthier and feel better and be happier again, in spite

of all those things that have happened.

But if you're going to do that, 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 wlewarrenmd.com slash prayer,

wlewarrenmd.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.