Unstuck: All-In August #14

Good morning, my friend. Dr. Lee Warren here with you for a little self-brain surgery.

We're at the 14th day of all in August. We're almost halfway there.

Today, I'm going to give you back an episode that we did on the 14th or 15th

day of all in August last year about complex grief, how to get unstuck in any

area of your life, looking at some brain science.

And in the conversation, we talk about some pictures that I showed.

I had a video that was up for the paid subscribers and we talked about some of these pictures.

Turns out some of those are copyrighted. So I can't show them to you,

but you can easily Google and find these articles that I talk about.

And if you want to look at the pictures of the brain scans, that'll be useful to you.

But you'll hear me talk about imaging in the episode and just see them in your

mind, even if you can't see the pictures.

And if you want to see the pictures, you can find it online easily.

Mary Frances O'Connor's work is out there and the pictures are fascinating.

We are giving you an everyday podcast episode for the month of August, for all in August.

We're going every day. I'm working hard in the midst of writing my new book

and creating some digital content for you and working on a monthly video training

program for you and all the things that we're doing.

And my day job as a brain surgeon, Lisa and I, are working hard to bring you some new stuff.

We're giving you an episode every single day in August because we want you to

go all in. It's that important.

We want you to change your mind. We want you to fully commit to the mind down

paradigm of how God built our brains and our minds and our bodies to work together.

That's where you're going to find freedom. my friend. And if you're stuck in

some area, it's a performance issue.

You just can't break through to the next level in your job or your relationship.

If you're stuck as a parent, you don't know how to connect to your teenager.

If you're stuck with your finances, if you're stuck in grief,

if you're stuck in addiction,

if you're stuck in inactivity, if you're stuck with your weight or your body

image or whatever it is, I want you to know there is a path to get unstuck and

it's how your mind and your brain relate to one another.

It's how your mind and your spirit and your creator relate to one another.

It's how your epigenetics and your mind and your brain and your body relate to one another.

And neuroplasticity and directed mental force are the way that puts you in the driver's seat.

And that becomes a form of surgery. It's just as real as what I'm getting ready

to go do in the operating room today.

Self-brain surgery is real surgery. And it's how you get in charge of your own life and get unstuck.

We're going to talk about complex grief and some elements of getting unstuck today. Okay.

September, we're going to have a month off. I'm going to give you back weekly

recap episodes of some good stuff to prime you for where we're going.

The new material that we're going to is so deep and so rich and so tactical.

And the stuff that you've been

getting from me is just the tip of the iceberg, what we're gonna learn.

What I'm seeing is the deeper I dive into neuroplasticity and how God built

our minds and our brains to work together and our bodies to feedback and work

together is every time you get down to the bottom of it,

it's like you take one of those Russian nesting dolls and open it up and instead

of a smaller doll inside,

there's a whole universe of stuff inside there.

And when you finally get your hands around that and get down to what you think

is the bottom element and you finally think that's the last doll in the set

and you open that one up, there's a whole other universe in there.

The depth of what God has done, just in our ability to heal and our ability

to change and our ability to rewire our brain is unfathomable.

I can't talk this way. It's incredible what's gonna happen and what you're gonna

learn and the power to get unstuck that's already inside you.

When Peter said that his divine power has given us everything we need for life

I think we usually spiritualize that scripture, and we think he's talking about just spiritual stuff.

But he says right there on the page, he's given you everything you need for

your life, including how to

grow and change and overcome and get stronger and learn to move through,

not move past grief, not get over it, but to live with it as a part of the fiber

that's built into your body that makes you more resilient,

that shines your light brighter for other people to hold on to.

Hope and move forward and to know that the floor of your suffering is solid

and there's a way to do that.

And it's because of how God has wired your mind and your brain.

That's where we're going, friend, and it's going to be incredible.

We're going to take this deep dive together, and every week I'm going to give you new stuff to learn.

Your self-brain surgery practice is going to become richer and more powerful,

and you're going to become a force for the people around you and in your generations

to come, people who can go through anything and hold on to their faith and hold

on to their hope because they decided to start today, and that's where we're going.

So here's an episode about getting unstuck. I've got to go do some surgery,

some actual operating room surgery, But the surgery you're going to do is just

as real, and it's self-brain surgery, because you can't change your life until you change your mind.

And I'm so excited to be doing this with you.

Let's get after it. I found some research yesterday.

I was preparing for an interview that I'm going to be doing in an article that

I wrote for a website called The Christian Post.

And there's another interview that I'm going to be doing in regards to some

of the mental disorders that come out of concussion and head injuries for a

TV station in Connecticut that

led me down this rabbit hole of looking at functional brain imaging again.

And I found a fascinating article on this complex grief condition called complicated grief.

Complicated grief is where you get stuck in this yearning, this longing for

the person that you lost and how things used to be.

And people can get stuck in this place where their whole life is defined by

and thinking about the loss that they've had and how much they want things to

be the way they used to be.

And that creates this whole complex neurochemical problem and your life can really get stuck.

And in my book, Hope is the First Dose, we talk about these people that we call crashers.

And I realized that this is the neuroscience of what a crasher really is.

And whatever your crash was about, it doesn't have to be grief.

It doesn't have to be grief. It can be any kind of major massive thing,

trauma, tragedy, loss, the death of a dream.

It doesn't have to be the death of a child or a spouse or something like that.

But most of the time, it is something massive like that happened that creates

these crashers who people who even if they survive the problem,

they get stuck in this hole where their hopelessness is high and their hopefulness

and joy and peace and what they would call happiness are gone.

And they just don't recover, even if they survive the problem,

because they don't take their own life.

They just become these empty shell people. And I found this research yesterday

that shows some pictures of what's happening in the brain of people with complex

grief in this phase that they call yearning.

And you know what that is. Like I spent.

Months and years of my life since I lost Mitch in this yearning phase where

you just get down in this hole and in your brain, you just so badly want them

to be back and you yearn and you long for getting to see them again.

I used to pray that I would dream about Mitch and see him because I was missing him so much.

I just, I thought even having a dream would make it better.

And unfortunately I still, to this day, I haven't had a sweet,

happy memory dream about Mitch. And I know that's based in neuroscience and

based in my brain's deep wound around losing him.

But every dream I've ever had about Mitch since I lost him was painful in some way.

Sometimes really graphic views of what happened to him.

And sometimes conversations where I wish I had said something different than I did or whatever.

And I just haven't had that sweet dream that made me feel like he was happy

and everything was okay.

I haven't had that. And this article that I found yesterday led me down this

rabbit hole of a whole bunch of research,

and I found this neuroscience basically where they took pictures of what's happening

chemically in the brain in the yearning phase of complicated grief,

and there's a lesson to be learned in there for us.

And we're going to get into that today in this self-brain surgery of how to

go all in on getting unstuck.

And the truth is, as I've been saying for years, and as the Bible's been saying

for centuries, friend, you can't change your life until you change your mind.

And the good news is you can start today.

Today we're going to talk about science a little bit, okay?

Because we're talking about self-brain surgery Saturday and learning these operations

that can kind of change how your mind works. because we're always saying it

sounds like a corny line, but it's really not.

You can't change your life until you change your mind. And the fact is,

okay, from a science standpoint, you create synaptic connections.

You create these networks of cells that produce automated reactions,

and this can be thoughts or feelings or actions or physiological events or hormonal

changes, even DNA replication.

Now we know this is the basis of how generations of people can be born feeling

or being afraid of certain things because their parents were.

It's about the reason it happens is because of synapses that get made.

OK, it's really true that learning how, as Paul said in 2 Corinthians 10,

to take captive every thought.

Thought, that's how you start to get over the hump of changing how your mind

works in the baseline, in the default state, so that you don't have to do the

work again every day of learning to heal and process and think differently.

You can start to make those changes happen more automatically.

That's what self-brain surgery is. Now, I've been on a few podcasts since my book came out.

I hope it's the first dose. Of course, it was released, shoot,

almost three weeks ago now.

And this is everywhere books are sold you can find and if you haven't read it yet i hope that you will.

It's really my best attempt to give you a plan for what to do when life throws

these massive things at you, traumas and tragedies and loss and grief and pain

and even dreams that die and all those things.

It's the idea that we can get ahead of that devastation by learning how to change

the way we think about things and make some decisions about what we believe

and what we know to be true.

And preloading our brain with that prehab that we talk about,

putting thoughts and behavior loops in place for what we're going to do when something happens,

which is just like drilling for something in sports or running a plan to evacuate

a building if it catches on fire, learning how to stop, drop,

and roll if you burst into flames, or learning how to do CPR,

learning how to put an EpiPen in your purse in case your child has an allergic reaction.

These are things that we do all the time. We prepare for things,

even if they're not very likely to occur, But we don't spend much time preparing

for these massive things.

Today, I want to talk specifically about a problem called complex or complicated grief.

And these are people that get stuck when they crash after the massive thing happens.

They lose somebody, lose a child, lose a parent, lose a spouse, lose a best friend.

These are people who get stuck in that grief process and they can't move forward in their life.

They have a lot of rumination where they spend all their time thinking and yearning

and longing and wanting things to be the way they used to be, and they just aren't.

And then they have so much physiological pain, they have so much emotional turmoil

that they often turn to harmful behaviors.

Numbing behaviors, the ways to stop thinking about drinking or sex or shopping

or gambling or relationships or whatever.

They do something to try to turn their mind off of it so they won't think about

it anymore, but it doesn't work.

You know what happens when you try to numb yourself. So if you can't selectively

numb the one thing that hurts, so you numb everything and then the rest of your

relationship start to suffer or you start to pay these tomorrow taxes as we talk about.

So then the next day feels terrible and now you're medicating how you feel the

next day because of what you did the previous day.

And I was just on Annie Grace's podcast, This Naked Mind podcast,

and we had a really good talk about the science of numbing behaviors and alcohol

use and ways to cover up pain and what that does to your brain.

And if you want to get into the weeds on understanding my perspective on how

important it is to let your brain feel what it feels so you can heal from what

you feel and then start moving forward,

that podcast, Annie Grace's podcast, is really helpful.

And I'll put a link in the show notes there. But there's another one.

Jill and Brad Sullivan are a

couple who lost a child, a teenager who took Leoblastoma a few years ago.

And they took that pain and they turned it into this ministry where they help

other grieving couples, other

grieving people who have lost children or lost somebody in their life.

And they had the podcast called While We're Waiting.

And that was one of my favorite conversations about grief that I've ever had.

Jill and I had a long talk.

I've been hearing from so many of her listeners who have connected to this idea

of changing your brain so you can change your life and changing the things you

think about so you can start to heal.

It was really a powerful conversation.

Jill and Brad, thank you for having me on your show, and I'll link into that one too.

Just yesterday, I got an email from a woman who heard me on the Jesus Calling

podcast. And another one, the Jesus Calling podcast, we had a really good talk

again about grief and loss and the science of what your brain is doing when

you're hurting and all these things that we talk about in Hope is the First Dose.

And while we need a treatment plan, this woman lost her fourth child shortly

after they were born three years ago.

And she just talked about the pain and how these ideas are starting to help

her kind of unlock that idea that she's stuck and how to move forward.

So I thought today might be a good day to just learn how to shift gears,

to talk about the process of taking ownership of the fact that you're stuck

and thinking about a new way to shift into gear and start moving forward again. Your car is in neutral.

It doesn't matter how long you press the gas. You're not going to go anywhere.

You can spend all your gasoline and all your energy and burn that engine up,

running that engine, and you're not going to go anywhere until you get it in

gear, until you shift into gear.

The good news is I found an article yesterday that led me down this rabbit hole

looking at functional brain imaging.

And there's a part of your brain that Daniel Lehman calls it the gear shift.

It's called the anterior cingulate cortex, anterior cingulate gyrus, some people call it.

And the cingulate is this area in the middle of your brain down under the corpus

callosum that basically is

involved in shifting the gear when it's time for you to make a decision.

Think about something differently or decide to pursue this and not,

that gear shift that you make that puts your brain into gear and moves in a

different direction is part of the brain's reward circuit.

It's part of this dopamine-serotonin axis, this reward system that helps you

identify certain behaviors that make you feel better and start moving towards them, okay?

Now, unfortunately, functional brain imaging studies have shown real clearly

now Now, that reward circuit is abnormal and doesn't behave properly in people

with major depression, people with post-traumatic stress.

People with obsessive compulsive disorder.

And now I just found a paper yesterday that was published back in 2008 that

people who are stuck in complex grief, in this yearning phase of complex grief,

have similar abnormal activities in their subgenual anterior cingulate cortex.

That's a long word. SGAC is easier. But

that subgenual anterior cingulate cortex turns out

to be highly abnormal in its behavior and blood flow and metabolic activity

in people who are dealing with major depression in that rumination phase of

major depression where they just can't stop mulling some things over and they

just can't do anything but think about this painful thing and they can't stop. They can't move.

They just get stuck, and they sit, and they don't shower, and they can't get

out of bed, and they just drink, or they eat, or they just sleep all the time.

They just can't get out of that phase, and there's been a few studies now that

have shown abnormal activity in that, specifically in that tiny little area

in the middle of your brain, the subgenual anterior cingulate cortex.

This paper that was published in 2018 that I found yesterday,

titled Yearning Predicts Subgenual Anterior Cingulate Activity in Bereaved Individuals.

That's a long title. Yearning Predicts...

Subgenual anterior cingulate activity in bereaved individuals.

I thought, that's an interesting title. Let me read about this.

It's a paper that was published in the journal Hellion in 2018 by McConnell, Kilgore, and O'Connor.

Now, Mary Frances O'Connor has published several papers in this sort of area

around major depression and complex grief and looking at what happens to the brain.

And she's published some interesting papers before about a little area called

the nucleus of humans. It's abnormal in grief response.

So I thought this paper might be interesting. I'm going to drink some coffee

because I'm having trouble clearing my throat. Hang on.

My Yeti coffee cup with my Folgers black silk coffee.

Not a paid endorsement. I just love it. If you work for Folgers or Yeti,

reach out to me. We'll put a commercial for you on the show. I'm just kidding.

Listen, this is a fascinating paper, okay? Several things culminated yesterday

in me thinking about all this. So I was writing an article, as I said earlier,

about grief and turning grief into an idol.

And we have a whole chapter in the book about the way that you can get stuck.

And grief can become bigger and bigger and bigger.

And this loss can get so big that it becomes the only thing you can see.

And it becomes bigger than God.

And you start to believe that not even God can take it away.

That it's just something that you're just going to have to suffer with forever.

And you can begin to believe these lies that trauma puts into your head that

things are just never going to feel better.

And some people then will take that false idea and they will pursue that and

they end up becoming morbid, depressed, stuck, suicidal, alcoholic, whatever.

So those are the people in the book that I call the crashers,

the people that take that path where they just crash and their whole life becomes

defined by this one thing.

And in a spiritual term, you would say that's idolatry. Now,

I understand I'm parsing out the difference between a real mental disorder where

you are psychiatrically damaged and you need professional help.

Okay, there are some people who need medical treatment.

Some of those people turn out to have hormonal problems, thyroid issues,

or something that need medicine.

Okay, they need a doctor involved in their care. And some people need a psychiatrist.

Some people need medication for short periods of time.

Some people actually need medical help. So I just say that to say this.

Don't forget on this podcast that I am not talking about when I give you these ideas.

I'm not saying that there's no role for medicine. I'm a doctor for crying out loud.

I make my living delivering medicine and surgery to people.

So understand, if you are really stuck and you are trying your best and it's

not working and you can't get out of bed or you're drinking or you're doing

some sort of behavior that's harmful

to you or your relationships are crumbling, go get some help, okay?

Please, talk to a therapist. Talk

to your doctor. Talk to somebody you can trust and get some help, okay?

I'm talking about here. We're having a conversation about understanding how your brain works.

Understanding how trauma works, understanding how grief works,

so that you can make some changes yourself.

And some people can use this self-brain surgery concept, and they can make it all the way back.

I never had to take an SSRI or an antidepressant. I never had to go to treatment.

I never saw a professional therapist or counselor after I lost Mitch because

I had Lisa and I had Pastor John and I had Dennis and Patty.

I had family, mom and dad and other people, my children, to help me.

And I'm a mental health expert, okay?

So I understood what was happening. Even when I was hurting so bad that I couldn't

fix it myself, I understood what was happening.

So I made it through without having to seek that professional help.

But it's there for you, friend. And if you need it, go get it.

It's part of the healing process, okay?

Don't be afraid to ask for help. Be afraid of not asking for help, okay?

That's a long disclaimer, but I just want to make sure that you don't ever make

a mistake of thinking that I'm saying you can do all this on your own.

You can't. Sometimes you need help, okay?

And don't be afraid to ask for it. So that being said, this paper stopped me

in my tracks as I was preparing yesterday for these interviews that I have coming

up and this article I was writing.

And the paper says, Yearning Predicts Subgenual Anterior Cingulate Activity

in Bereaved Individuals. Remember, this is Self-Brain Surgery Saturday.

This is the day of the week that we go a little deeper on the science.

So forgive me for some of the big words and some of the things,

but I'm going to make a point. The other thing that happened yesterday was I

received an email from Mark Vrogepp, who I just was blown away that I got this email.

Mark Vrogepp wrote the book Dark Clouds, Deep Mercy.

It's about lament and learning how to pray through lament.

He uses the book of Lamentations as a template for learning how to voice our

concerns and our complaints and our frustrations to God when we're hurting and

how the Bible authorizes that and gives us numerous examples in Psalms and in

Lamentations and other places of what this prayer is.

Powerful prayer language does, of how lament helps us to articulate what we're

feeling and put it before God, and it helps us to move forward.

But another thing that Mark Roggep said in that book is going to come back to

the end of this episode and help us.

But when I saw that email from him yesterday, it was incredible.

I'm going to share more about that with you later.

But the email basically said his son and he had read the book and it was helpful.

And he gave me some really nice things to think about.

But when I saw his name, it triggered something I remembered about this paper

that I had read earlier in the day.

Yearning predicts subgenual anterior cingulate activity in bereaved individuals.

Let me just break this down for you, okay?

I'm going to read you the first part of this paper that O'Connor,

McConnell, and Kilgore wrote. It's incredible.

So there's a little science in here, but just listen to this.

Complicated grief or persistent complex bereavement disorder is a condition

that affects approximately 10% of bereaved individuals.

Okay, there's crashers or a small group, but they are real.

And there's about 10% of people that crash after they go through the massive

thing, okay? OK, this is correlating with what I wrote and hope is the first

dose, a condition that affects approximately 10 percent of bereaved individuals

and is marked by intense longing and yearning for the deceased.

Hey, I know you're resonating with me. If you've lost somebody,

you spend time just begging God to make it all be a dream to bring them back.

I have a million times. I said, God, can I just wake up tomorrow?

And Mitch is going to be in his room and everything's going to be back to normal.

And the last 10 years have just been this terrible nightmare and he's going

to be alive, yearned for him, longed for him.

And I know Dennis lost his wife, Patty, my mother-in-law, five years ago now.

I know he longs for her, yearns for her. I know that woman that wrote me yesterday about losing her son.

I know she's yearning for him. So it's not wrong to yearn. But what happens

is some people get stuck in that intense yearning phase and they can't move past it.

The writers, again, little is known about the neurocognitive mechanisms contributing

to this syndrome, but previous research suggests that reward pathways in the brain.

Reward pathways in the brain may play a role. Listen, there's a whole set of systems in your brain.

There's circuits, there's networks, we call them. There's one called the default

mode, and that's what happens when you're not actively thinking about anything.

When you just relax and close your eyes and turn your mind off and make it quiet

in your room, there's a set of mental processes that are happening.

And when the default mode isn't working properly, when the default mode is excessively

negative or harmful, that can get you in a lot of trouble.

But there's other networks too. And there's this whole dopamine reward circuit

that's complex and it involves what happens when you anticipate a reward.

This is the neuroscience of addiction.

I anticipate if I get to a certain time of day and I put myself in a certain

place that there's going to be a glass of wine and that's going to help me relax

and I'm going to feel better and stop thinking about this thing that happened and then I'll be okay.

And you start building. It's not the actual substance.

It's not the alcohol or the gambling or the sex or the online shopping or whatever.

It's not that thing that produces the feeling that you want.

It's the anticipation of the reward that's related to the neurotransmitter release.

And so understanding that basically addiction is a reward-chasing behavior and

not that you actually need the substance to feel better, that's the beginning

of learning how to heal from addiction.

OK, is understanding that you can replace that reward with something healthier

and you can find that dopamine elsewhere.

That's the beginning of understanding how to unlock your brain and move forward in addiction.

OK, but it turns out that those same circuits look at my eyes.

This is I'm smiling right now because when I read this yesterday,

I actually started weeping. I had so much compassion for people who are stuck

in grief because I've been there.

And I think I already know what my next book is. I'm already writing and it's

about self-brain surgery.

And one of the chapters is going to be like, don't be so hard on yourself,

friend, if you're stuck in grief, because we're going to teach you how to shift

the gear and we're going to teach you how to drive out of that hole.

Okay. Because the brain science is so clear and the spirituality is so clear

that God wants you to move forward and the path is to change how your brain works.

And that's what this paper did for me yesterday. I had Mark Rogab's thought

in my mind, and I had this neuroscience article that I was writing,

and I had this little bit of research, and all these emails,

and all this stuff coalesced, and I found this picture of the functional magnetic

resonance imaging scans that these folks did.

I'm going to put it up on the screen now for the paid subscribers.

And it'll be in the show notes. Picture of the brain that shows increased metabolic

activity in the subgenual anterior cingulate cortex.

And people are focused on the yearning phase of their grief of the person they lost.

They showed them pictures, a bunch of pictures of their loved ones.

And they asked them to think about the thoughts that they think when they're missing them.

And they did a countdown timer, five, four, three.

The images, the numbers were flashing in their mind. And they would learn that

at the end of that countdown, they were going to see a picture of their loved one.

And they saw that anticipation, that yearning phase before the reward of seeing the picture.

They were seeing increased activity in the subgenual anterior cingulate cortex.

And this is the exact same area that lights up in the rumination phase of major depressive disorder.

Okay. So what they showed for the first time is that the problem is the area

of your brain that's involved in shifting the gear and driving,

making a decision to think about this and not that, to make a decision to feel

this and not that, to make a decision to get up out of bed or not.

Those decisions, the gear shifting that the cingulate does is abnormally behaving

in people with yearning, abnormal grief response,

just as it does in people with major depression disorder. Why is that so important?

It's important because understanding what parts of your brain aren't working

properly is the key to beginning to get them to work properly.

And we know from self-brain surgery and we know from the Bible that learning

to think differently is the secret to starting to change some of these things

because you can direct these mental processes.

Jeffrey Schwartz calls it mental force. You can direct mental force.

You can engage in directed neuroplasticity and you can begin to heal. I had a friend.

After we lost Mitch, who's another doctor who said, Lee, I don't know what to

say to you, but I know that Mitch wouldn't want his death to cause a 200 percent

mortality rate. He wouldn't want you to die, too.

He wouldn't want you to be a crasher. He wouldn't want your life to become just about his loss.

He would want you to take that pain and turn it into something good.

And that, my friend, is why I'm talking to you at 5 o'clock in the morning,

in the dark, in my room, looking like I do,

looking in the camera, not concerned about the lighting, drinking coffee with

you, because I want Mitch's life to be about something more than his death.

We're almost 10 years in. In fact, today's the 5th of August.

15 days from now is the 10th anniversary of us losing our son.

Okay? And I want his life to mean more to me than his death did.

And I want to use the power of that

to move me into a place where I can be helpful to you as an honor to him.

And I hope my book has done that. I hope this podcast does that.

I hope you find a way to redeem your pain and use it for something powerful.

Use it for something meaningful so that your life, their life doesn't have,

their death doesn't have a 200% mortality rate. Does that make sense? So here's the thing.

Mark Vrogep's book, there's a line, our natural bias is to individualize suffering.

Our natural bias is to individualize suffering. When I read that,

I thought, yeah, that's right, man. People always make everything about themselves.

And I read Lamentations chapter 3, and the guy, we've talked about this before,

Lamentations, if you're new around here, Here, Lamentations is the textbook

for how you learn how to process grief and how you learn to find hope in the

midst of the hardest things.

It's where I figured out that hope is the first dose, and it's where I figured out that hope is a verb.

It's an action word. You can't sit around and wait for hope.

You have to make it because it's always available, and there's two parts of it.

One part is memory, and the other part is movement.

Scientifically, they say hope is about agency and pathways. So hope is about

having the possibility of doing something to try to move forward in your life

and a pathway, a realistic opportunity to do that.

Those two things. And hope is defined by some researchers as the ability to

think that you can have a way to see that you can get there from here.

So get there from here through agency and pathways.

Biblically, it's about memory and movement. In every example of the Bible where

somebody says they're hopeless, they start to remember.

That this isn't the first time that people they or other people they know have

been through hard things.

They start to look back in time and say, wait a minute. We were enslaved in

Egypt for 400 years and God got us out.

We were wandering around the desert for 40 years and God got us out.

We ran up against the Red Sea and God parted it.

We ran up against the Jordan River and God parted it. We couldn't win against

Jericho and the walls fell down.

We couldn't make it through the desert because we were starving and he provided

manna. We were thirsty and he put water out of the rock. We were hungry, and he gave us quail.

They started remembering all the times before that God did something impossible

to make a way, as he says in Isaiah, where there is no way, where he'll make

a stream in the wasteland where there wasn't one.

So remembering starts to create this burning ember of hope starts to come alive,

and then they have to do something.

They have to move. From a neuroscience perspective, we know that since you can't

really multitask like we talked about a few days ago, we know that beginning

to move will take your brain off the thing that you're stuck on and make you

think about something else.

And you'll start to feel some dopamine release and reward for movement.

And you'll start to make a mental bridge in your brain that says, if I move, I feel better.

I don't have to drink to feel better. I can exercise instead.

I can do this instead of that. I can find that reward somewhere else.

And you'll start to move. And when you move, you'll start to feel hopeful because it's possible.

You just proved to yourself that it's possible for you to get out of bed today.

It's possible for you to walk down the driveway and check the mail again.

It's possible for you to call your other children and talk to them after you

lost one. You don't have to be dead inside anymore.

It's possible. You can move.

So, all that stuff coalesced, and the third chapter of Lamentations,

where all these bad things were happening to the city and the king,

and people were being murdered, and women and children were starving to death,

and he says, I am the man who has tasted affliction, and has done the wrath

of the Lord. Like, he's the man who's been suffering.

He's making it about himself. We've really upset it. Our natural bias is to

individualize suffering.

Well, listen to what these researchers said. This is fascinating.

Fascinating. What they found when they looked at the comparison between major

depressive disorder and complex grief and the activity that they're seeing in

the subgenual anterior cingulate cortex,

they said symptoms of depressive rumination and abnormal yearning and complex grief share,

for one, both rumination and yearning in the context of grief are experienced as uncontrollable.

In other words, we don't think we can stop it.

We're just grieving and we're sad and we're broken and we're hurting and it

can't ever be better. Those are trauma lies.

Those are the automatic negative thoughts that trauma puts into your head.

I think it's the devil sometimes, the enemy.

And there's not much difference between devil and diagnosis when your brain isn't working right.

He can use that to your disadvantage as well. But the devil and the enemy and

your basic trauma response fills your head with this idea that the rumination, that the stuckness,

that the pain, the grief, the loss, the pit is uncontrollable and unavoidable.

So both rumination and yearning in the context of grief are experienced as uncontrollable.

They have a negative valence. What does that mean? A negative balance means

this idea of the feeling that you're feeling has to always be negative,

that it can't ever be positive.

That's important because if you can switch what we just talked about a while

ago when I said I want Mitch's life to have meant more than his death.

I want to learn to put a positive balance on the experience of losing Mitch

where I can say, yes, I've lost my son.

And it's devastating and it's terrible and it'll never be good. But his life was so good,

There was so much light in his life

And I'm so grateful that I got to experience and I'm so proud that I was his

dad And that some of those good parts of him were because of me and my relationship

with him I'm so glad that he got to know Lisa and that he was a good brother

and he would have been in such a good uncle and you start switching and.

From an automatic negative, every time you think about that person,

it puts you back in the hole of the grief, of the yearning, of the missing,

of the longing, of the suffering.

If you can switch to where you put a positive spin and you say,

oh man, what a great kid he was.

And I really miss him. And I can't wait for the resurrection when I get to see him again.

And he's in this place now that he was created to be in. And Mitch doesn't have

to feel uncomfortable in his own skin anymore. more. He's happy now.

If you start spinning that, okay, the three things, they're uncontrollable,

they have a negative balance, and this is the most important thing.

This is a self-brain surgery.

I brought you here today to say they have a self-focus.

That stopped me on my track. They're doing brain imaging here, okay? This isn't Bible.

I'm not teaching you a Bible lesson right now. I'm reading you

a paper that was published in secular scientific literature

looking at what What parts of the brain are active or overactive when you have

complex grief in which you're stuck and you're stuck in that yearning phase

and you're one of the crashers or you have major depressive disorder and you're

ruminating and you're down in that pit with the crashers who can't seem to find

their way back up towards hope.

This is what they found. The symptoms are experienced as uncontrollable.

They have a negative balance and they are self.

Remember, Mark Roggep said our natural bias is to individualize suffering.

The lamenter in chapter 3 said, I am the man who has tasted affliction and seen

the wrath of the Lord. I'm the man.

All these other people are suffering, but he's the man who's hurting.

And, friend, that is the secret. Now, again, with the caveat that sometimes

you need professional help, understand this.

And this is not, I'm not taking a shot at you.

If you're stuck here, I'm with you. I've been there, okay? The thoughts that

you think when you are ruminating,

the thoughts that you think when you are stuck in the yearning phase,

the thoughts that you think when you've lost everything and you're down in that

hole and you can't stop thinking about it and you can't move forward in your

life, the thoughts that you're thinking are about you.

I'm sorry. They are. They're about what you feel.

They're about what you've lost. trust they're about

what you need they're about what you

want there's a story i told in my book

i hope it's the first dose about a guy who

the ceo of the hospital had made some changes and it negatively impacted this

one practice it saved the hospital saved hundreds of jobs made everything better

for the patients kept the place afloat in the business but it made this one

guy's practice a little bit less money and made it a little bit harder on him

and he was furious and he We were at this meeting,

and he was pounding the table, and he was yelling and cussing and screaming

and throwing a big tantrum about how bad this decision was for him and his purposes

and couldn't see that if they didn't make the change,

the hospital would eventually go out of business, and he would lose all of his practice.

He just couldn't see that. He couldn't see that there was a bigger picture here.

And the hospital CEO said, look, I really want to help you.

What can I do to help you? And he said, unwind it all.

Put it all back. back, give me back everything before you made the change,

put it exactly back the way it was, and then I'll be happy. And she said, that's impossible.

We've torn buildings down. We've built new buildings. We've let some people

go. We've hired hundreds of new people. We've changed business practices.

We've built new corporations.

It's impossible to go back to exactly the way it was. It's not possible. You can't have that.

And he left the meeting basically saying, I'm not happy unless I can have that.

I have to have that one thing. I'm just telling you, friend,

His problem was that he was stuck on how the situation affected him,

and he couldn't make himself think about the patients and the overall business

and the health of the community and all the other millions of positive things

that came out of that change.

He was stuck on the fact that he had lost this particular thing that he thought

he had to have, and that's where we get stuck in grief and major depression and loss and yearning.

We get stuck in the ways in which this affects us. I can promise you.

Now, I did have a lot of thoughts about Mitch's future and how it was so sad

that he would never get married and have kids.

And I would never get to see what his kids look like and what he did for a living

and how he grew up and got through all these things.

I did have some thoughts like that. But the most thoughts that I had,

the most common thought, was how bad it hurt me to lose my little boy.

I was self-focused. I was focused on what I felt, on how sad I was,

on how hard it was going to be for me to go through my life knowing my son wouldn't

be there to eulogize me or bury me someday.

I worried about how I lost my last living relative that has my last name.

I thought those things. I'm not proud of it, but I'm trying to be honest.

The rumination that I had was about me, about what I felt, about what I lost,

and not so much about Mitch.

It's hard to say it out loud, but that's really true.

And that's what they see in the research in the fMRI scanner,

that the symptoms, the activation, the feelings that these people are feeling are uncontrollable.

They have a negative balance, and they're self-focused.

And so what's the lesson for us here? The lesson is that we have to shift gears.

We have to learn how to say, wait a minute, Mitch wouldn't want me to be stuck

in that hole and if he were with me right now if he could come and sit down

and have a cup of coffee with me and say hey dad let's have a cup of coffee and talk for a minute,

what he would say is hey dad I'm okay,

I'm with Jesus I'm happy I'm where I'm supposed to be and I want you to use my life.

Even the end of it, to help other people. I want you to find purpose and meaning in your days.

I don't want you to be dead like I am. I don't want your life to be meaningless.

I don't want you to be stuck.

That's what he would say. And that's what your loved one would say too, friend.

Your loved one would say, hey,

go find something to do to give meaning and purpose to your life again.

Move a little bit and you'll start feeling hope. Take hope and fly.

Like, hope returns, okay?

I'm going to play that song in a few minutes, Matthew West's song, Hope Returns.

Hold on, that's when hope returns. When your heart is breaking,

when your knees hit the ground, that's when hope returns, okay?

These people put these folks who were grieving and who were stuck in the fMRI

scanner, and they said, hey, think about your loved one, yearn for them,

and they saw activity light up in the same places that light up with major depressive

disorder in the rumination phase.

And the same places that light up in PTSD and all these other places,

major depression, where you're stuck and you just can't shift and move forward, okay?

There's a place called the dorsal attention network.

And it's part of this reward pathway. And it's part of the same circuit here

that we're talking about.

The dorsal attention network is like the aperture on the lens of a camera.

If you take a camera and you turn that aperture, It takes the whole big background

and it focuses it down where you can focus on that one flower or that one bird

or on the hand that you're trying to photograph.

It zooms in so everything else becomes blurred and all you can see is the thing you're focusing on.

That's what the dorsal attention network in your brain does.

Okay. And after you're stuck, when you're stuck in grief, it becomes self-focused.

And the dorsal attention network becomes lit up when you're thinking about all

the ways in which this major loss is affecting you.

And what we learned from the science is if you can learn how to zoom back out.

Start thinking about others. Start thinking about your life in a new context.

Start thinking about what your loved one would want you to feel instead of what you are feeling.

You'll start to feel some different things, and you'll start to feel some bubbles

of dopamine in that reward pathway, and you'll start to sniff out.

And it starts to feel true. I'm telling you, I went through this.

It started to feel true to me. After my friend said, hey, Mitch wouldn't want

you to have a 200% mortality rate here, that had a ring to it that felt true.

And I think probably there was a little bit of dopamine firing in me anticipating

beginning to write or beginning to podcast or beginning to try to help other

bereaved parents like Jill and Brad Sullivan have done with the While We're Waiting podcast.

They're helping people all over the world. They just got back from Uganda where

they're helping grieving parents over there.

They're taking this loss of their child, and they're not just ruminating on

it, but they're shifting into gear to drive towards something that has meaning and purpose. us.

And that, my friend, is how you find hope again.

That, my friend, is how you get out of the pit of despair.

That, my friend, is how you find yourself. As God said to Isaiah,

I have refined you in the furnace of suffering, because you will either do one

of two things in the furnace.

You will burn up and die yourself, or you will become refined,

and you'll burn away all the stuff that's not helpful,

all those coping mechanisms that aren't helpful, all the rumination and all

the yearning and all the things that are making you stuck and the ways in which

you're using substances or shopping or anything else to numb yourself,

you'll burn that away and you'll come out refined on the other side.

You're not ready to hear this in the acute phase. You're not ready to hear that Romans 8.28 is true.

You're not ready to hear that God will work that for good somehow.

You can't hear it early on, but it turns out 10 years later to be true.

And it starts to bubble up and you start to hear things like this.

When somebody says, hey, your cingulate is designed to put you in gear.

It's not designed to sit there and be stuck.

Your dorsal attention network is designed to allow you to focus on the good

things and not be stuck on focusing on the negative things.

All these parts of your brain that God made in this incredible research paper

pointed it out. Mark Roggep's words came back to me.

And I'm just here on self-brain surgery Saturday, friend. I don't have a catchy

phrase for this operation yet, but I'm going to come up with it before I write

that book. there's a way that you can start thinking differently about your loss.

And you can start turning your attention to focus on something positive,

not about the loss, but on something positive about the person that you've lost

or about the situation that you're in now that you have lost or the dream that died,

something about the opportunity that you had or that you've learned or that

you've grown through or remembering with gratitude the things that you used

to have or some other way to pivot.

Away from the negativity related with that loss and you'll begin to feel that

reward circuit bubbling and lighting up and you'll know there's some truth to it.

And if you can just get after it and pursue that, you'll start to find the way forward.

And that's what we're coming here every day on this podcast to try to help you

do is to find that way forward so you can use your brain the way it's designed

so you can come alive again after these hard things happen. There's a treatment plan.

OK, there's prehab and there's self brain. surgery and there's rehab and there's

community and there's all these things, but all of them depend first on you

being willing to believe that it's possible to get better, that you can get there from here.

And we call that, or we call it hope because there's a treatment plan and hope

is the first dose and you can't change your life until you change your mind.

I hope this was helpful to you, friend. Please take a second and share it with

someone and say, Hey, let's go all in together.

I want you to change your mind. I want you to change your life.

That's why we're doing all in August.

It's a joy and a privilege to do this type of self brain surgery with you,

my friend. And I just want you to remember the good news is you can start today.