Where Shame Goes to Die

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

You for a wild card Wednesday episode of the Dr. Lee Warren Podcast.

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Spiritual Brain Surgery is the deeper dive into spiritual elements,

spiritual issues issues than we cover here on the main Dr. Lee Warren podcast.

Today, I've got a special episode for you.

This is a throwback to season five, because I feel like we need to talk about

the idea that when we feel shame or guilt or fear around something,

sometimes that feeling can drive us into isolation and we don't feel like it's

something we can talk about, which means it stays in the dark and in the dark,

fear grows, shame grows, pain grows.

It gets harder and harder This is a talk about what to do and where to take

your shame and your fear and your guilt and the place where they reliably die

and you can find hope again is covered in this episode.

I'm bringing it back because we had a friend, a person that we're very close

to, who went through something really hard for almost two years,

and she felt like she couldn't talk about it to anybody.

And so when it finally all came boiling out of her life and it became inevitable

that she had to share it, it was way harder for her.

And she's still, to this day, years later now, struggling with the fallout of

having kept that all to herself.

So not only did she not have help while it was happening, but now she's got

all these issues in her life related to secrecy and fear and all of that stuff.

And you don't have to live that way. I'm telling you, there's a place where

you can take your shame and your guilt and fear, where it will reliably die,

and you can find hope and health and healing and purpose and meaning and maybe even happiness again.

And we're going to talk about all of that right now.

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

You have to change your mind first. And my friend, there's a place where the

neuroscience of how your mind works smashes together with faith and everything

starts to make sense. Are you ready to change your life?

Well, this is the place, Self-Brain Surgery School.

I'm Dr. Lee Warren, and this is where we go deep into how we're wired,

take control of our thinking, and find real hope.

This is where we learn to become healthier, feel better, and be happier.

This is where we leave the past behind and transform our minds.

This is where we start today. Are you ready? This is your podcast.

This is your place. This is your time, my friend. Let's get after it.

Music.

Good morning, my friend. Hope you're doing well. It's getting ready to be sunrise.

It's about 5.30, a little bit later than I normally record, but I have just

been chewing on something this morning, and I want to just have a conversation with my friend here.

I hope that you're getting ready to have an amazing day. We're going to have

a big office today full of people.

We're finally all just about over this crud that we've had.

Lisa and Tata are still a few days behind. So I know July has been a lot of

old episodes and replays, but we were sick, y'all.

We had a really rough couple of weeks where I was sneezing and coughing and

just congested and my voice still isn't right.

But night before last, Lisa and I had a conversation with someone that we love very dearly.

And they're just going through something hard. And it was a difficult conversation.

And it broke my heart and the reason it broke my heart is what I want to talk to you about today.

It broke my heart because this person that we love so much has been dealing

with a situation in their life.

We just found out not before last but the

conversation revealed that this has been going on for over a year and so this

person that we dearly love has been grappling with a very limited amount of

support from a small number of people

for over a year with something just devastating, difficult and hard.

And there's a lot of fear and anxiety and shame and doubt wrapped up in this situation.

And the reason I'm bringing this up to you, friend,

is because it's the most human response that there is,

to hide things that we're dealing with, to not talk about them,

to keep them covered up, to keep them away from the light of public knowledge

or of family or friend or community knowledge.

It's the most natural instinct we have is to keep those things secret so we don't talk about them.

But that's a trick, and it's a trick of the enemy of your heart because community

is where light and fellowship and healing and hope happen.

Secrecy is a place where shame breeds and grows like a mushroom and when we keep things.

From the people we love or the people who love us or the community that can

help us, then oftentimes that can become a place where shame and fear and doubt

and anxiety get bigger and bigger and bigger.

And the outcome of that is generally more and more hopelessness.

And so I just, I want to share with you, I've been doing these radio spots for

MyBridgeRadio, MyBridgeRadio.net across Nebraska and the Midwestern part of

the United States. It's just 155,000 listeners every day on Drive Time Radio.

And I'm doing these insight spots, and I played them for you before.

But the one that's out right now is actually just released yesterday,

and it's exactly about this. Let me play it for you.

This is neurosurgeon and author Dr. Lee Warren of the Dr. Lee Warren Podcast

on MyBridge Radio, helping keep you connected.

When you're going through a hard season in your life, whether in relationships,

work, finances, emotions, your health, spiritually, anything

else it's so easy to believe that your

circumstances control your emotional state that

can make you believe that what's happening to you will define

how you always feel but the truth is hopelessness can only grow if you give

in and stop moving forward the writer Eugene Peterson once said hope commits

us to actions that connect with God's promises I say it like this hope is a

verb an action word and its component parts are memory and movement.

We remember other times when it felt like we wouldn't make it and that somehow

God showed up and got us through anyway.

And then we just move a little. We start walking forward, taking actions to

nudge our brains and our spirits a little closer to believing that God will

get us through this time too.

When our hearts are hurting, we need the great physician. And he always delivers

what we need to help us press on in faith, tell a better story with our lives,

and hold on to his promises. But of all the ways Jesus doctors us, hope is the first dose.

Hope is a verb. Remember what God's always done and that he promises us he won't

ever stop and move toward that promise.

That's self-brain surgery, and it's the best cure for hopelessness. I'm Dr. Lee Warren.

Remember, you can't change your life until you change your mind.

But the good news is you can start today. day. It's funny that I've talked so

seriously about this situation that we're learning about and praying about and hurting over now.

And then I play that little cheery intro, right? Well, let me tell you why I do that.

So I've chosen for season five

of the podcast to have the intro and outro music almost every episode.

I've done that intermittently over the years. I've always struggled with whether

that's the best way to do this.

I want to always have this feel like a conversation.

I don't want you to ever feel like that this show is a show.

I want you to feel like we're having a conversation between friends because that's what it is.

I'm talking about stuff that's on my mind and on my heart and I know it'll be helpful to you as well.

And I'll tell you why I know that. I know it because we're all in this thing

together, this hard life.

So we have this constant tension between two promises that Jesus made.

In John 16, 33, he said, in this world world, you're going to have trouble.

And in John 10, 10, he said, the thief comes to steal and kill and destroy,

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

So Jesus in the same guy in the space of a few days said, life's hard,

but you can still have abundance.

You can still have joy. You can still have peace. You can still have happiness.

And so we got to have a conversation about how in the world is it possible for those things to happen?

Well, the reason that I play the theme music, the intro and outro,

the Tommy Walker music and all that, it's just because I want to make sure in

every episode you have a chance to hear the different ways to connect,

to connect to the newsletter.

Drleewarn.substack.com, to connect to the prayer wall, wleewarnmd.com slash

prayer, to just remind you that we're here to become healthier and feel better

and be happier and all that. And I just want to...

Also, have it always be that we can talk about hard things and there's still

a reason to tap your toes and have a little fun music playing in your mind and

to think about something happy.

Because the fact is that we can enjoy our lives and have hard lives at the same time.

The fact is we can have cancer and still find meaning and purpose.

The fact is we can still grieve over losing a child and still find hope again.

The fact is you can crash into a difficult spot in your marriage and still make

it through and still find a way forward.

And that's what I want to talk about today. This situation that we've learned

about that we're now going to be carrying and going through with our dear,

beloved person is something that is growing and has fostered in the darkness.

And I don't mean darkness of evil. I just mean in quiet.

And this what happens is you encounter something

hard and your first thought is what am i going

to do about that and your second thought is i don't want

anybody to know that i'm going through something hard and we have this

social media life right everything these days

that we look at is perfected there's filters

on all your photographs there's there's instagram posts

where everything is perfect and you work out 25 times a

day and you're always fit and you have two percent body fat and you're

making zillions of dollars from all your endorsements and all those things that that's

not real life though facebook and instagram and

twitter and all these things are when twitter is pretty close to real

life because people tell the truth twitter's your crazy uncle um that you're

a little embarrassed about but instagram and facebook are perfected idealized

places where people present a version of the world that's not reality right

in reality you have trouble your Your marriage isn't going great.

You can't quit drinking alcohol.

You're not getting to the gym 25 times a day. You're overspending and you're worried about money.

And all those things are happening in real life to a lot of us all the time.

Well, let me just tell you something. I fully, I'm talking to you,

my friend, as a guy, not some neurosurgeon who writes books or somebody who's got it all figured out.

I'm telling you, as a person who has been through many hard things in my life,

and have every single time I've encountered one of them, I've wanted to keep

it secret and hide it and not talk about it.

That's my first instinct. Why? That's your first instinct too, by the way.

Your first instinct when you have a problem is not to make an Instagram post

about how much trouble you're having. Nobody does that.

They perfect and idealize those things and put filters on them and hide them

behind what looks like a perfect life, right? So the reason we do that is because the enemy.

And if you're not a spiritual person, don't be confused when I say enemy, okay?

Because in your heart of hearts, you know what I'm talking about.

Whether you believe that there's a devil who wants you to suffer and not be

effective in your witness, or whether you believe there's a devil who wants

to try to convince you not to follow Jesus,

even if you don't believe that, if you don't believe there's a real spiritual

enemy, you do know that you have an enemy in between your ears.

Because constantly we have this negative voice that's telling us,

you can't do that, they're going to reject you if you say that.

Don't let them know you're struggling because then you'll look weak.

Don't tell anybody that you're having a problem with this because you're weaker

than they are, and they'll make fun of you, or they won't respect you anymore.

You know, friend, that you hear that voice. You do.

If you're being honest with yourself, you do hear that voice sometimes.

And that's neurochemistry.

It's all these things that we talk about on this show all the time,

this daily conversation that we have.

So even if you don't believe that it's really a spiritual battle,

it's a battle in your spirit. it.

It's a battle in your heart. It's a battle in your mind. And so just hear me out for a minute.

When I went through the war, okay, I did a lot of combat surgery,

got murdered a bunch of times.

I saw some things that people should never see, like a guy that got his leg

blown off by a bomb and his leg bone impaled another guy in the chest.

And he came off the helicopter with the lower part of the leg sticking out of

his chest with the soldier's boots still attached to I saw that,

and all of us who saw that still see it sometimes.

When we talk about Memorial Day and Veterans Day and all that,

I see that guy who's got a gaping chest wound from another person's leg sticking out of it.

Like, I came home from the war with some things that I'll never forget,

and I still process and see and dream about.

And when I hit the wall in about 2010 with PTSD that came roaring out after

all those years, I felt shame about that.

Like it was a while before I told Lisa what was going on. Like I'm dreaming.

I'm waking up in cold sweats. I'm flashing back. I'm having all these issues.

It took a while for me to be able to talk about that. Why? Because it made me feel weak. Right.

So here you had a professional neuroscientist, neurosurgeon,

grown man in practice with lots of support and family who loved me and understanding

and training in psychiatry and mental health issues.

And I knew exactly what was happening chemically in my brain,

and I was still ashamed of it.

So imagine if you're a soldier, a private who's 17, 18 years old and doesn't have that support.

And you come home from the war and they discharge you from the Army and you

don't have any support around you. and you're feeling those things,

imagine how ashamed and afraid and scared you would be.

And that, my friend, might be why we're having an average of 20 to 22 veteran

suicides every day in the United States, which is a mental health crisis that

we're not talking about very much.

But soldiers and veterans are committing suicide because they don't have the right support.

So why am I saying that? This is not a veterans episode. So I'm saying it because of this.

This person that we dearly loved, who has people who definitely love them and

who will not reject or make them feel ashamed, felt ashamed and felt like they would be rejected.

And so they didn't want to talk about it for a long time.

And so it's going to get talked about now and it's going to get brought out into the light.

And let me just tell you the reason I'm bringing this up, a very short episode, just to say this.

Your brain will always make you feel like

the things that you're dealing with are the worst

anybody's ever dealt with that they're more shameful

that they're not as fixable that

you are somehow broken for experiencing these things your brain is going to

make you think that and the longer you let that happen the more the problem

is going to grow and gain power and gain gain momentum and gain inertia and

actually become unfixable and become unsalvageable.

So the longer you keep it from somebody who loves you, some objective people

to be able to help you with it or even to be able to talk to God honestly about

it, the longer you keep it hidden.

Community is the longer you keep it hidden is the more power you're gonna give

it and the harder and harder it is gonna be to fix it.

1 John 1.9 talks about sin. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just

to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

So even if the thing that you're going through is not a sin issue,

as soon as you are willing to talk about it honestly with yourself,

to pray about it honestly with God, to bring some other people into your circle,

that's the time when somebody else is going to say, and I can tell you this

from having gone through PTSD.

Having gone through the shame of going through a divorce and having a marriage that didn't work out.

In my culture of Christianity growing up, it was like your marriage is supposed to always work.

Well, mine didn't. And when it didn't, it was a source of shame and anxiety and fear.

And we dealt with it for 16 years, and we never talked about it to anybody.

And so when our marriage came apart, it shocked everybody because we kept it

quiet for so long that we were having so much trouble.

Okay? So John says, when you confess your sins, God's faithful and just to forgive and to cleanse.

And that's exactly what happens with community when we talk about our issues

to people who we can trust.

I'm not talking about putting them on Facebook. I'm talking about opening up

the window and letting some light in so other people who you love and trust

can say, hey, you know what? I went through that too.

Or I understand that because I felt that before myself.

And here's some things that I did that helped me get through it. Or you know what?

I don't, that's really hard. And I'm sorry you're going through that.

Let me pray for you. Or do you need to come over? Are you safe?

Do you need some resources? Do you need some help? There's people who are going to help you.

Community solves the shame

and anxiety crisis most of the time anxiety and

fear and shame and doubt and hopelessness and all those things grow in secrecy

and they abate and improve in community and so i'm just offering this community

to you the prayer wall w1md.com slash prayer you can anonymously post hard things you're going through,

You can openly publish them with your name. And what will happen is people all

over the world will begin to pray for you about this.

And every time somebody clicks on that button that says, I prayed for this,

you're going to get an email.

And you won't know necessarily who it is, but you'll know that somebody out

there is praying for you.

Like Andre Crouch says, somebody somewhere is praying just for you.

And it's encouraging. And what happens is when you know people are praying for

you, when you know that people are in your corner, then you start thinking differently.

And you start seeing little bits of possibility and little light beams of hope

bouncing off the situation and all of a sudden it doesn't seem to feel so hopeless.

Psalm 34, four and five says, I sought the Lord and he answered me and delivered me from all my fears.

Those who look to him are radiant and their faces will never be ashamed.

And then look at Romans chapter eight. Let's just read a little bit of Romans

chapter eight, okay? And the reason we're going to read Romans chapter 8 is

because it addresses this idea of shame and condemnation.

In Romans chapter 8, therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.

So listen, friend, if you're saved, if you're a believer in Jesus,

no matter what you're going through in your marriage, in your home,

with your habits, your addictions, your financial situation,

your physical fitness, your financial issue, no matter what,

But Paul sums it up in Romans 8.

Therefore, there is now how much condemnation?

A little bit, a lot of condemnation? No.

Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who learn in Christ Jesus

because through Christ Jesus, the law of the Spirit who gives life has set you

free from the law of sin and death.

Listen, friend, there is no condemnation.

There is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. He says,

God didn't put us here and then he was surprised that we went through fear and

shame and doubt and hardship and all that.

He knew that we were going to have to deal with those things. He knew it.

And so it's not a surprise to him when you're going through hard things.

What's surprising to him probably is your continued insistence that you can

do it all by yourself because you can't, and neither could I.

When I lost my son, it was a big part of my grief problem over time time was

trying to figure out why I couldn't get moved past the acute stage of the grief,

why it took me so long to get back on my feet.

And I started to feel shame about that, which is the craziest thing in the world.

When you lose your kid, you ought to feel grief and it ought to be devastating.

And you shouldn't have a voice in your head telling you that you need to get over it.

Because you're not going to, right? So my entire point of this rambling,

non-scripted, wandering conversation that we're having today, my friend, is just this.

When you're going through something hard, understand ahead of time.

Well, back up, back up. Before you go through something hard.

Remind yourself that you're going to go through something hard.

Life is full of these TMTs, I call them, the massive things and many massive

things and nearly massive things that life is full of them, right?

Because Jesus said it, in this world you'll have trouble.

So here's the thing. Knowing that you're going to encounter them and knowing

that your brain's first hardwired neuronal response is going to be that you

need to keep them secret and knowing that keeping things secret and keeping

things quiet and keeping things alone creates more isolation,

shame, guilt, fear, doubt, hopelessness, all of that, then make a decision.

Make a contract with yourself that you're going to choose a community of people

who will be on your side and helpful to you when you encounter those hard things

so that you can then go back and not feel like you have to hide and be ashamed.

Ashamed because when you do that, it will get worse.

And when you bring it into the light and bring it into community and bring it

into some, some trusting circle of people, then you will find light and hope and help again.

So I ask you to pray for us for the situation that this loved one of ours is struggling with.

I can't share details with you, but we need your prayers that there will be

healing and hope and a path forward for the situation.

And that's what we're praying for you, friend. We're praying that

you will find healing and hope and a path forward and that

you'll do that by understanding the power of community and that you have no

reason to be ashamed of anything because what you're going through is something

that other people have also gone through and something that you can get through

because you are going to become a master self-brain surgeon.

You're going to learn how to apply things that consistently produce hope hope,

and clarity of thought and help you make better decisions going forward.

You're gonna learn how to pray about it, to present those things to God in a

way that opens up possibility for you so he can help you and heal you with his great physician hands.

And it's gonna be okay as long as you're willing to start today.

My friend Tommy Walker has a song called Oh How I Need You.

I'm gonna play that for you now and we're gonna play that cheery go out music

just so you hear those opportunities to connect again. And I just want you to

know, friend, we are with you. We love you. We're praying for you.

What you're going through is not unique to you.

Now, it is. Don't hear me wrong. Your situation is your situation. It is unique to you.

But you're not alone in that all of us have gone through some devastating things.

And all of us who have come out of them on the other side and found hope again want you to as well.

And so we're never going to make you feel ashamed. shame. Those people who love

you aren't going to say, gosh, you know what?

You really should be ashamed of that. That's terrible. No, it's not that.

We want you to get better. We want you to have hope. We want you to find peace

and we want you to start today.

Music.

Hey, thanks for listening. The Dr. Lee Warren Podcast is brought to you by my

brand new book, Hope is the First Dose. It's a treatment plan for recovering

from trauma, tragedy, and other massive things.

It's available everywhere books are sold. And I narrated the audio books.

Hey, the theme music for the show is Get Up by my friend Tommy Walker,

available for free at TommyWalkerMinistries.org.

They are supplying worship resources for worshipers all over the world to worship

the Most High God. And if you're interested in learning more,

check out TommyWalkerMinistries.org.

If you need prayer, go to the prayer wall at WLeeWarrenMD.com slash prayer,

WLeeWarrenMD.com slash prayer, and go to my website and sign up for the newsletter,

Self-Brain Surgery, every Sunday since 2014,

helping people in all 50 states and 60 plus countries around the world.

I'm Dr. Lee Warren, and I'll talk to you soon.

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

And the good news is you can start today.

Music.