Untouchable (Frontal Lobe Friday)

Hey, Lisa. Hey, Lee. It's good to see you today.

It's good to see you too. Will you help me with something? Of course.

I can't remember what day it is. It's Frontal Lobe Friday.

Hey, friend. It's Frontal Lobe Friday, and I'm Dr. Lee Warren.

I'm so excited to be with you today.

Frontal Lobe Friday is the day of the week where we kind of focus on our ability

to selectively attend to one thing and not another thing.

It's our ability to switch from thinking about this to think about that.

And that's a gift that God gave humans that he didn't give to anything else that he created.

No other creature in all of creation has the gift of selective attention.

And that's because he made us in his image. And we have the ability to think

about one thing and not another thing.

There's a new book coming out by Dr. Josh Axe, who is a famous naturopath. He's an entrepreneur.

You've probably seen his supplements and his branded products in your natural

food store if you shop in one of those places.

He's going to be on the podcast soon, by the way. But his book is called Think

This, Not That. And that's the exact idea behind Frontal Lobe Friday.

It's like the idea that we can think about one thing and not another thing.

And when you do that, you're taking command of processes that your creator put

in place that you can do self-brain circuit. You can literally use your mind.

To make structural changes in your brain, to make your brain better.

And as we've talked about many times before, the Bible says that if you're saved,

if you have a relationship with Jesus, that you've been transformed.

You have a new mind, and you have the mind of Christ.

The problem is we often live as if our memories and feelings and experiences

and labels and stories and other people have given us a mind that we can't change.

And even though we have the mind of Christ, we're living like we don't.

And so part of my mission here is to help you move the needle where you live

closer to how your brain and your mind are designed to function so that you

can break free of the chains and limits that are holding you back.

Stories, labels, past experiences, traumas, tragedies, and massive things,

and give you the hope that you really can change your mind and you really can

change your life. That's what Frontal Lobe Friday is all about.

I'm so grateful that you're here today. day. I have incredible news to share with you today.

We're going to get into that in just a minute. I'm going to address one letter

that I got from a listener, and we're going to talk one more time just a little

bit about perspective and perception and how those two things are related,

but they're different, and how important it is to be able to shift from one to the other.

But before we do any of that today, my friend, here on Front of Lobe Friday, I have a question.

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

You have 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.

All right, you ready to get after it? And here we go. It's Frontal Lobe Friday,

my friend, and we are going to change our minds about one thing today.

First of all, let me tell you, yesterday I had two unbelievable conversations.

I didn't tell you that these were coming because I've learned as excited as

I get about potential guests on the podcast that I have often said to you that

somebody was coming up on the show.

So, and over time, I've learned that once in a while, an emergency will arise

or something will happen and a podcast interview falls through and it doesn't

come, it doesn't come to pass.

Like I had Dawson Church scheduled the other day and I had emergency surgery

to perform and he got canceled.

And I'm hoping that we get to reschedule that. There's been a couple of others, Andy, Andrew,

and then we've had one lady named Andrea Hertzler, who's written an incredible

book about chronic illness that we've, because Because of her issues and mine,

we've rescheduled that interview three times,

three different times. Crazy.

But one of these days, Lord willing, we'll get that interview rescheduled.

But so what I've learned is if there's somebody really big that you're going

to get excited about that's coming up, I try not to mention it now until after it's been recorded.

So that's a lesson I've learned in a thousand, almost a thousand podcast episodes.

You shouldn't talk about interviews that haven't yet been recorded.

So, I had a couple of weeks ago a pitch from a publisher for a guest that kind of blew my mind.

This podcast has grown and it's gotten to the place where now we get opportunities

to interview some people that I never would have thought in a million years

that I'd have a chance to talk to. We yesterday recorded an interview with Dr. Ben Carson.

Dr. Ben Carson, of course, is a famous neurosurgeon. He was the chief of pediatric

neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins, went on to become one of the most famous neurosurgeons

in the world, and he was featured in a book that turned into a movie called Gifted Hands.

It was an autobiographical look at his life and just basically an incredible

story of being raised by a mom in inner city and poverty and had a dad that was not around.

And it's an incredible story of raised in a very humble way that ended up going

to Yale and then Johns Hopkins in Michigan and became this world-famous surgeon.

And then ended up in politics and ran for president and actually ended up serving

in the Trump administration as the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development.

And now he has a huge nonprofit that tries to help restore traditional American

values and has written a book that's coming out next month called The Perilous

Fight that's about the issues with the American family right now and how we

can restore our families.

Just an incredible opportunity to interview him, and it came to pass yesterday.

We had a great conversation, almost an hour.

Dr. Carson and I had a chance to talk, and you're going to love his book and his story.

I'm so excited about that. Yesterday,

I also recorded almost an hour-long conversation with Pete Gregg.

If you've been listening to the podcast for a while, you've heard me talk about

Pete Gregg numerous times.

He's the founder of the 24-7 Prayer Movement that's been providing nonstop prayer

coverage to the world for over 25 years now.

And Pete has written three of the best books I've ever read.

The first one I read was called God on Mute. It's a conversation about those times.

And it happens a lot in this community where we've gone through trauma or tragedy

or some kind of massive thing.

And you just feel like God's not listening, like He's not there.

You feel this absence of presence.

And it can be devastating, these dark nights of the soul, these times when we

can't feel God's presence.

And that's what God on Mute was about. And it was really transformative to me.

And way back in November of 2022, after I read God on Mute, I sent an email

to Rachel Hall, shout out to Rachel, who is Pete's assistant.

And it took almost two years, but we got it done.

Pete and I had a conversation yesterday. His other two books that I've read,

How to Hear God and How to Pray, both of them have the same subtitle,

A Simple Guide for Normal People.

And Pete and I had, I'm going to say it, I think my favorite conversation that

I've ever recorded. I've said many times that this is one of my favorite conversations.

I think the talk with Pete yesterday was actually my favorite talk that I've ever recorded.

It's going to be so encouraging and so helpful to you. And so those are recorded.

They're going to be out soon. I think I'm going to release Pete Gregg on Monday,

and Lord willing, he'll be back on the show another time, maybe more than one other time.

We've got a lot to talk about, and you're going to benefit from it,

how therapy and science and faith come together. We had an incredible conversation

about neuroscience and spirituality and faith, and it was just,

it was tremendous. I can't wait to share that with you.

But so basically, everything I did yesterday had to do with changing our minds about something.

Dr. Carson's interview was changing our mind about what family is and how important it is.

And if you've had brokenness in your family, how important it is to try to do

what you can to see that the next generation has better footing,

to make sure that our families are strong.

If our families are strong, then our neighborhoods are strong.

If our neighborhoods are strong, our communities are strong,

our cities, our counties, our states.

And then by default, our whole nation will get stronger if our families get stronger.

We've had a serial sort of assault on the family for the last 50 years. And Dr.

Carson points out different ways in which that's not an accident,

that there's an intentional assault on the traditional family.

And what that's done to our society is obvious when you start looking at the

statistics. And it's fascinating.

His book is important. It's timely. And I think you're going to benefit a lot from it.

But basically, it's all about changing your mind. Think about this thing and

not that thing, which is perfect for a frontal lobe variety.

Pete and I talked about that too. And Pete said something that really landed

with me because of an email that I got yesterday, too, from a woman named Becky.

Becky wrote in about how much she enjoys the podcast. She heard us first on Journey Table Talk,

and she was journaling as she listened to the podcast, and she heard me talk

about the four different type

of trauma responses that I described in my book, Hope is the First Dose.

And in Hope is the First Dose, of course, we talked about these four different

patterns that I saw as I observed people with glioblastoma and families going

through difficult things and people who had lost loved ones.

And then even in our family after we lost Mitch, I noticed that there's kind

of four patterns that people tend to fall into.

And one of them is what we call crashers, these people that would have seemed

like they had a pretty solid faith.

And then something bad happens and their faith just sort of plummets.

They don't know what they believe. They get really mad at God or they give up

on him altogether and they just plummet.

And what's interesting about the crashers is even if the medical problem gets resolved,

even if the issue that they're facing works out and they don't die or the person

doesn't leave or the marriage comes back together, those people sometimes are

bitter and wrecked and their quality of life has gone,

their peace of mind, their faith, their hope, all those things are dashed and

they end up really miserable and sorrowful and just not okay. pay.

They're stuck for the rest of their lives, even if the problem that they were

concerned about seems to work out.

And we all know this person. Something happened 20 years ago.

Somebody died, or they had a head injury, or something happened.

And you meet them on the street today, and you say, hey, what's going on?

And they say, well, I'm just really still struggling with losing my mom 30 years ago.

The people that just seem to be stuck. And those are the crashers.

There's a group that we call climbers, really surprising people that seem down and out.

They don't seem like they have anything to believe in, or nobody loves them,

or they don't know about God.

Then something hard happens, and that hard thing turns out to be the thing that

switches their perspective.

They end up discovering faith and discovering peace and hope and a relationship

with the Lord and how important community is.

And this story about a guy named Joey in my book I've seen in the interview

is the prototypical climber that you can go and read if you haven't heard this before.

But the climbers are surprising because they start out with nothing,

and then hardship turns out to motivate them to turn their lives around.

And Joey told me during the year that he was dying from his glioblastoma that

he had met the Lord and fallen in love and reconnected with his family.

And he ended up telling me that his best year of his entire life was the last

year of his life while he was dying. And he knew he was dying.

So it's a surprising contrast between crashers and climbers.

And then most of us are what we call dippers.

They're people that have things pretty solid. We know what we believe.

We have a faith. And then something hard happens. And for a while,

we're confused and we're sort of wrecked and we're not sure where we are.

But we land on something solid. We went through that prehab process. us.

We have our hearts and minds full of scriptural promises and knowledge of who we are.

We've got a good community of people around us, and we find our ability to plant

our feet on something solid so we don't crash all the way down,

and we can climb back up to, even if it's a new and sort of redefined type of hope or happiness,

we find our way back again to a life that still has meaning and purpose,

and we don't get wiped out by the circumstances of our lives.

Then there's the fourth category, and I called them untouchables in the book, Hope is the First Dose.

These are the people that seem like nothing that happens ever destroys their

faith. Nothing ever really stumbles them.

Nothing really ever trips them up. They seem to be able to kind of manage through

whatever happens and hold on to their faith and hold on to their hope and never

seem to be wiped out by anything that happens.

And unfortunately, when I called them untouchables, this lady,

Becky, wrote in, and she said that she had journaled through that part,

and she said, I don't agree with the title untouchable.

I consider it to be closer to unwavering, because those of us who remain steadfast are not untouched.

In fact, we're deeply touched and broken in our trauma, but it's your faithfulness,

O Lord, that keeps us from stumbling.

So the idea is that I think the misperception here is Becky thinks that I meant

to say that untouchables don't hurt and that they don't cry and that they're

not affected. And that's not at all what I meant to say.

In fact, if you read Hope is the First Dose, I think you'll see that.

But the idea is that this is how those people are perceived from the outside.

If we look at what those people go through, it looks like they hold up a lot

better than anybody else does.

But that's not to say that life doesn't hurt them, that they're not injured or wounded.

And this is an interesting thing that we have to discuss that I wanted to bring

up here on Frontal Lobe Friday.

And that's the idea that you can be devastatingly heard and solid in your faith

and still filled with indescribable joy and hope and maybe even a type of happiness at the same time.

And that's what faith will do for you. That's the difference between a person

who has an understanding of how science works and how the neuroscience of how

your brain can create sort of feelings that are better,

different ways of thinking and patterns of behavior that will help you overcome

trauma and tragedy and all that.

You can use a science-based approach, a sort of brain-up approach,

and you can actually learn how to process trauma and handle things pretty well.

But untouchables are those people that have the final element. month.

And frankly, dippers and climbers figure it out too,

but untouchables just had it figured out from the beginning that your faith

gives you this superpower of being able to discern that your circumstance and

your hope aren't directly connected to one.

You can go through hard circumstances and it doesn't redefine what you thought your life was about.

It doesn't redefine the trajectory of your heart.

And so when I say untouchables, you're right, Becky, maybe unwavering,

you know, unshatterables would have been a different way to look at that.

But what I mean to say is not that they're not touched or hurt by their trauma,

but that they don't waver. They don't crumble.

They don't stumble. They don't fall. And the reason they don't is because they separate.

In fact, I said this very clearly and talked about it ad nauseum in In the book,

the thing that separates these groups is their ability to untether circumstance

from emotional state, from hope, faith,

peace of mind, all that stuff that's on that y-axis of our quality of life scale if you graphed it out.

And so I want you to understand that the difference between a crasher, a climber, and a dipper,

and an untouchable ultimately comes down to how tightly tethered circumstance

is from our emotional life,

quality of life, peace, mind, faith, hope, all that stuff.

Does that make sense? So it's a perspective shift. We've been talking this week

all about perception and perspective.

Now, if you look up the definition for perspective and perception,

it almost seems a little opposite of how I'm using it, because perspective has

to do with the way that you're looking at something at a particular time, right?

Perception is the things that you're sensing, the things that you're feeling,

the things that are out there in the environment that are bringing in.

But I want you to understand when I'm trying to parse out here is that perception

is an in-the-moment type of thing that happens based on the filters and history

and past and relationships and mindset and genetics and everything else that you have.

The way that you perceive the things around you is tied up in all that stuff. of.

And perspective is the particular way that you're looking at things in this moment.

And the thing about perspective is you can shift it. If you can mentally break

in your mind that I'm seeing what I'm seeing here with the left side of my brain,

I'm focusing on an object or a thing, or I'm turning this into a two-dimensional situation.

And I want to rather shift that. I want to turn my perspective a little bit.

If you ever watch golf, I don't know if you've ever watched golf on television,

but yesterday we were, Tata's a big golf fan, and we were watching the Masters Tournament.

And you can watch these golfers when they get the ball up on the green,

and they're trying to figure out how to hit a putt.

They walk around the hole a long time.

They look at that putt from multiple angles. They stand over the ball.

They stand behind the ball. They walk around and look at it from behind the cup.

They look at it from the right side and the left side.

They get off the green and look at it. They change perspectives multiple times

before they decide which way that they're going to hit that putt. Why do they do that?

Because adding multiple perspectives rounds out your thought process.

It rounds out your ability to perceive what's happening.

And it changes your perception because it's not just like, holy cow,

that's a really long putt.

I'll never be able to make that. I missed the last time I tried to hit a putt like this.

Look at that green. It's horribly sloped. And when I hit this ball,

it's going to roll off into the pond and look at the five guys before me hit their ball in the pond.

That's what's going to happen to me. Those are perceptions. They're based on

experiences and feelings and all kinds of things that aren't necessarily objective.

We talked yesterday about trying to divide the subjective, squishy things from

the objective data-driven things.

And not to say that we live our lives in this objective, data-driven,

rational place and we can't ever have emotion or feeling.

That's not what I'm saying at all. I'm just saying we need to be able to operate

where both of those things are important and we make decisions based on things that are true.

And then when we finally hit the ball, when we finally take action,

we stop contemplating and start operating, we're doing it from a perspective

that we've built out of looking around at the whole picture,

using that right half of our brain to add a lot of context and nuance to the

situation so that we can then make an informed decision and not just an emotional one.

We can get closer to the truth that way.

Does that make sense? So yeah, untouchable is this idea that you've got an ability

in your mind to separate circumstance from your emotional state, your hope, happiness,

peace of mind, joy, all that stuff is not tied directly to the circumstance

that you're in right now.

And that's the superpower that gives us this ability to become more untouchable.

Okay, does that make sense? Okay. Okay, now Pete Gregg and I were talking yesterday

and he said something that just was devastatingly simple, but incredibly powerful

and beautiful. And I'll leave you with this today.

Talked about suffering and the things that we go through that are really hard

and how to pray through them. And we had this incredible conversation that I'll

share with you in a few days.

But he basically said the big mindset shift that can turn you around if you're

suffering, if you're plunging, if you're one of those dippers or crashers,

if you're having a hard time holding on during a hard time, here's the difference.

We want to pray. We always want to pray for a miracle.

We want to pray that God will just airlift us out of the problem,

that God will somehow, the plane will show up and we can jump in the plane and

God will fly us out of there and we'll land at some beautiful Hawaiian island

and everything will be perfect again.

That he will airlift us out, Pete said, of our problems.

But what usually happens, and this is scriptural, but Psalm 34,

18 said, God is close to the brokenhearted.

It doesn't say God removes the situation that is breaking your heart and makes

you, dries your tears and makes you happy again and makes everything perfect.

That's not what scripture says. Psalm 34, 18 said, that God is close to the brokenhearted.

And I can tell you after losing a son and after being devastated by war and

going through divorce and all the other hard things that I've been through in

my life, that's what usually happens.

God doesn't usually just pull the trigger and all of a sudden you're out of

there and the situation is gone and everything's fine again.

Usually he shows up next to you.

So instead of airlifting you out of the problem, Pete said he parachutes in

and joins you in the problem.

And that's the mindset shift. And we're praying for a miracle.

What we usually get, though, and what we actually need is a colleague,

a person to come alongside us to help us, a medic to show up on the battlefield

at just the right time so we don't bleed out.

And that's what God has promised us.

And that's what he does. He shows up.

In the midst of our pain, and walks alongside us, and helps us,

and carries us sometimes, and bandages us, and dries our tears,

and holds our hand, and helps us in those moments.

And then he has promised us, hey, you're in the middle of this fight right now,

but I've already won the war.

And there is a deliverance underway. There is a pathway, a process that's happening

that's going to result in all those Psalm 103 promises coming true. Remember Psalm 103.

This is a great place to start your prayer in the daytime, in the morning,

in your quiet time. It's a great place to start.

I look at the pictures of Jesus in my office. There's three of them.

One's a big, I guess it's four by six painting that Lisa bought of Jesus, and he's walking away.

He's looking over his shoulder, kind of like beckoning us to follow him.

And you can see that there's a nail hole still in his right hand.

So he's walking away, resurrected, but he still has his wounds.

Another picture is Jesus, this Akiani picture of the Prince of Peace,

where he's piercing, looking right in your eyes.

And I'll look at him sometimes, and I can't really bear his gaze very long because it's piercing.

When you look at him, the Prince of Peace, and you try to stand there,

you've got to start confessing.

You've got to start getting real with who you are if you're going to look at him for very long.

And I have another picture that shows Jesus laughing. My friend Jeff Nelson gave me 20 years ago.

And it's just so kind and loving. You can see his face, and you know he's probably

laughing at little children or something. He's just happy.

And I like to see Jesus being happy because I know that it makes him happy when

I come to him with my issues and I'm with him.

But what I remember in these moments is that Jesus doesn't airlift me out of my problems.

He didn't even airlift himself out of his own problems. He still has his wounds.

He parachutes in to join us on the battlefield.

But he's in the middle of a long process that is going to deliver us from our troubles.

And when I pray Psalm 103 in the mornings, I look at these three pictures of

Jesus just to kind of ground me and remember who I'm talking to and who's made

these promises. And the Psalm 103 says, Bless the Lord, O my soul,

let all that is within me bless His holy name.

Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all His benefits.

He forgives all my sins.

He heals all my diseases. Now, understand, He's not going to necessarily come

down and take the tumor off of your brain.

He's not necessarily going to come down and fix your colon cancer.

He's not necessarily going to come down and touch your hands and make your rheumatoid

arthritis go away. But he has prepared a new body and a resurrected life and

a disease-free state for you. And that is coming.

It's coming. He's made a promise to you. He forgives your sins. He heals your diseases.

He redeems your life from the pit. He crowns you with love and compassion.

He satisfies your desires with good things so that your youth is restored like

the eagle. Those promises are going to come true for you.

They're going to. the matter is

how they come true and when they come true and

how you hold on in the interim while we're in this this already

and not yet state that christians live in that's why we have this hope that's

unbelievable and hard to imagine for people that don't have that hope that's

why there's such a tension between the secular worldview and the christian worldview

because they think you're supposed to do everything you can to make yourself

feel good and be happy right right now.

And we say, no, happiness isn't about the things that you have in your life.

Happiness is a relationship with the one person who can actually help you in this life.

And that's what creates this untouchability. You see, Becky,

untouchable, the reason I chose that word is that the Hebrew word for happy

that shows up all through the Old Testament is asher.

And it doesn't mean It doesn't mean blessedness. It doesn't mean this sort of

joyous state that we've created, this word picture that we've created in Christendom. It means happy.

And the word that shows up in the Beatitudes is makarios.

And makarios is best translated, not blessed, but happy.

But what the difference is, is that the secular worldview has hijacked the word

happy, and it's translated that word into, turned that word into meaning something

that Jesus didn't mean when he said that he wants us to be happy.

It means nowadays, happiness means that we get what we want,

that we get the thing that we feel like is going to make us feel good in the moment.

And that's what happiness means, that everything works out for us,

that our circumstances are good and all that.

That you can look around the world and you can see that people that pursue material

things and sexual pleasure and immediate release of dopamine and all that,

they don't turn out to be very happy for very long. Why?

Because if you pin your hopes on something that you could lose or that can decay

or be taken from you over time or on another person that might die or change

their mind about you or on money that might change or become less valuable because

of inflation or somebody might might steal it from you or you might lose it in a bad investment.

If you pin your hopes on something temporal, transient, temporary,

you can find your hope dashed when the things you think you knew turn out not to be true anymore.

And that's not what Jesus means at all in the Beatitudes when he said,

blessed are those that actually should be translated happy are those because makarios means happy.

But what happiness really means in God's economy is this inability to be touched

or or phased, or destroyed by circumstance, because you've got your hopes pinned

on something that can't be taken from you.

That's this happiness that Christians have, that this ability to have our eyes

up on the hills, and we know where our help is coming from.

We know that there's a parachute opening above us, and the guy who can actually

help us is about to land next to us because the Lord is close to the brokenhearted.

That's the perspective shift.

It's going to change you from being trapped in your perceptions and only able

to look at this problem or this issue one way, being able to change your position

a little bit and look at it a different way and know how you're going to hit

that putt and be confident that it's going to go in the hole.

Okay, that's what I wanted to give you today. day, this little perspective shift,

this final episode about perception and perspective.

And it's all about how you use your frontal lobe, but how

you use your frontal lobe was given to you by your

great physician creator who put that frontal lobe in place so that you could

use your mind to direct its ability to shift your perception and shift your

perspective and not be trapped in this pure two-dimensional left side and not

be trapped in this ethereal real context,

nuanced, driven right side, but to integrate them in your corpus closum so that

you can actually tie two halves of your brain together so that you can make

a good decision, you can shift your perspective when you need to, and you can find your way,

to being able to think this and not that and recognize that you have help even

in the midst of your troubles and you have victory that's already been guaranteed.

Guaranteed, and that's how you can have hope and peace and yes,

even happiness in the midst of your troubles, my friend.

That's what perspective and perception does. You shift out of the trap of perception

into the freedom of perspective, and you do that with your frontal lobe,

and 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 audiobooks hey the theme music

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Self-Brain Surgery, every Sunday since 2014, helping people in all 50 states

and 60 plus us in 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.