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From Amazon.com:
The New York Times bestselling author of Get Out of Your Head provides a revolutionary path to embracing a healthy relationship with your emotions, one that leads to life-giving connection with God and others as well as to a richer understanding of yourself.
“This book is worth thousands of dollars of counseling.”—Jonathan Pokluda, bestselling author and host of the Becoming Something podcast
How often have you heard, “Don’t let your emotions get the best of you”? But what if instead of ignoring our feelings, we noticed them, named them, and let God use them to draw us closer to Himself and others?
Many of us need to unlearn damaging messages about our emotions. We’ve been taught, for example, that emotions are untrustworthy, when, in fact, God can use them to help us see where we need His healing.
In Untangle Your Emotions, Jennie Allen uses scientific research, biblical insight, and her own story to help you
● exchange stuffing, dismissing, or minimizing your emotions for a five-step process to know what you feel and what to do about it
● debunk the myth that feelings are sinful by learning how emotional maturity leads to deeper connection with God and others
● live emotionally healthy by applying biblical wisdom and therapeutic research that works whether you self-identify as “emotional” or not
● sit with feelings that are confusing and painful by discovering the depth of God’s love and compassion for you
When life gets hard, does what we think we believe hold us up, or does it crumble under the weight of doubt? I'm your host, Dr. Lee Warren- I'm a brain surgeon, author, and a person who's seen some stuff and wondered where God is in all this mess. This is The Spiritual Brain Surgery podcast, where we'll take a hard look at what we believe, why we believe it, and the neuroscience behind how our minds and our brains can smash together with faith to help us become healthier, feel better, and be happier so we can find the hope to withstand anything life throws at us. You've got questions, and we're going to do the hard work to find the answers, but you can't change your life until you change your mind, and it's gonna take some spiritual-brain surgery to get it done. So let's get after it.
Good morning, my friend. I'm Dr. Lee Warren, and I am so excited to be back
with you today for some spiritual brain surgery.
This episode, I'm really probably as excited or more excited about this one
than I have been about any episode I've ever done, because we've got New York
Times bestselling author Jenny Allen on the show today.
Jenny, if you have been paying attention, is a force of nature in Christian publishing.
She's got several New York Times bestsellers, and she's also the founder and
director of the If Gathering, which is a worldwide movement now helping women get closer to God.
And Jenny has written some books that have been real game changers in my life
and Lisa's life personally.
The first one, I'll tell you a story really about why we're here,
why I'm sitting on the banks of Moon River Ranch on the North Platte River in
Nebraska really goes back to Jenny Allen.
And Lisa and I were in Auburn, Alabama, where we raised our kids and running
our private practice, this business that we started together after we got married.
And I've told you that long story before of how we both came out of some brokenness
and we blended our families and
we moved to Alabama and we started our practice and we ran our business.
And we're just having a great and successful career after I'd come home from
the war and gone through PTSD and a divorce and all the brokenness.
God put us back together and we were on the path of what seemed like.
Really stable and exciting future. And then in 2010, the Affordable Care Act,
which is commonly known as Obamacare, was passed, which changed the healthcare
industry in the United States significantly.
And this is not a political podcast, so good or bad, the ultimate result of
the Affordable Care Act and one of the intentions of that act was to make it
very hard for doctors to to be in private practice.
One of their goals was to streamline and make a smaller number of payers that
the government would have to interact with.
So they were trying to change it to where it would be harder for people to be
in private practice and they would be more likely to become hospital employees
so that then you could have a fewer number of people to write checks to.
And then therefore the government would have more control over how much money
they spent on health care. So whether that's good or bad is not the point here.
The point is we were in private practice and I was in solo practice,
which means our business was only funded by the work of one physician.
So what happened after the Affordable Care Act passed is it just about tripled our overhead.
There was so much more regulation and so many more rules and malpractice insurance
went up and everything got more expensive.
And the only thing I could leverage was my time.
So here we we were in Auburn, Alabama, relatively small market with 10 employees.
And if basically, if I wanted to make the same amount of money,
I had to do a lot more work.
And so the equation just started becoming more and more clear that I was not
going to be able to generate the same kind of revenue and keep our business
running the same way and make the same amount of income while we were raising our children.
And I don't know about you, but if you found out that you were were going to
take a 30% pay cut or have to work 30 or 40% more when you were already working 100 hours a week.
There's not a lot of ways that that can work out. So it became progressively
more clear that we were going to have to do something.
At some point to make it. And we weren't sure what that was.
I had always said I wanted to be independent.
I didn't want to work for a hospital because I wanted to be able to take care
of whoever I wanted to take care of. And if you couldn't pay me, that was okay.
We did a lot of charity work and I didn't want somebody else telling me that
I couldn't see this patient or had to see that patient.
We wanted to be in charge of our own practice.
And so I'd said all these things that I had drawn lines in the sand about them.
We never wanted to leave Alabama.
We loved living in Auburn, big War Eagle, Auburn fans, and three of our kids
went to college there and all that.
Never wanted to be not in private practice, never wanted to work for a hospital,
never wanted to sell or move away from the house that we had built together
as our new lives came together in the blended family.
And we had the house and built the pool and just had this ideal environment to raise our kids in.
And we loved it. So we had all these places and things that we had said,
boy, I'm never going to change that.
And then Affordable Care Act came along, and it became progressively harder
to do the things we needed to do.
And then, worse, in 2013, our son Mitch died.
And so we went through the devastating loss of a child, and it got progressively
harder not only to make a living and to work, but to find meaning and purpose
in our work and also to even just be in the house where Mitch had been.
And it was just more and more difficult to be comfortable. bowl.
And then in 2015, Lisa was introduced to a book called Anything by Jenny Allen.
And she read part of it and she said, she came to me and said,
hey, I think you should do this Bible study with me.
And basically the point is you tell God, you want him to make it clear what
you're supposed to do, what your life is supposed to be about,
what you're supposed to do with the work of your hand and the places you live
and all the things that you find value and meaning and purpose and give Give
them to God and say, God, I'll do anything because I want to please you.
And so I said, okay, what's the worst that could happen? I'll do this Bible study with you.
And we did. We prayed the anything prayer. We basically told God,
we don't have clarity on our future. We're not sure what you want from us.
We're not sure where we're supposed to go, what we're supposed to do.
We know we're struggling.
It's hard to be in the house. It's hard to be in the office.
It's hard to make ends meet. We're struggling, and we need to know what to do.
We'll do anything. anything well a couple of days later literally
a couple of days later we got a flyer in
the mail now neurosurgery fortunately for me my
career is in high demand there's not a lot of neurosurgeons there's
a significant shortage of neurosurgeons in
the united states in fact for the several hundred
million people that live in this country there's only about 3 500
board certified neurosurgeons and so i'm
in relatively high demand if you're good at what you do there's
always a job job but we didn't want a job we wanted to stay there we wanted
to hold on to our house and hold on to our business and all of that but for
whatever reason right after we prayed the anything prayer we got this flyer
in the mail lisa brought it to me and it had the beautiful rocky mountains on
the on the flyer and it said exciting opportunity in the rocky mountains for neurosurgery.
And we said, hey, we told God we'll do anything. We love the mountains.
We always vacationed out in Boulder, and we love Colorado and the mountain states.
And so we decided to check it out. And it turned out that that practice was
in Casper, Wyoming, which neither of us had ever heard of Casper,
Wyoming, or been to Wyoming except Yellowstone as kids and vacation time and all that.
So had no idea what Wyoming was like. But before we knew it,
we found ourselves moving to Wyoming. and that was a direct result of the anything prayer.
And what happened in Wyoming is I had a resurgence of my professional life.
I had been in this small market for years, had been practicing mostly minimal
back surgery, small things, and had kind of narrowed my practice because we
had two major university programs close to us.
So if I had a big case, it was hard to justify doing it in a small hospital
and I would send those patients to Birmingham or Atlanta and I was doing a lot
of routine neurosurgery, delivered really good care there.
But in Wyoming, we were the big hospital.
And all of a sudden, for the next several years, I had to practice a tremendously
wider scope of the things that I know how to do. And I came alive professionally.
And it just reinvigorated me as a neurosurgeon. And we had a great time there.
And then something amazing happened. A few years later, we got invited to come
to Nebraska and look at the idea of starting a neurosurgery program.
So here, Here, you know, mid-career now, I found myself,
Lisa and I, moving from Wyoming to Nebraska to a place where they had never
had a neurosurgeon, where people had always had to be flown away from here,
where if somebody got hurt in this town, they had to go somewhere else to be cared for.
And so now, for the past almost four years, we've been sitting in this incredible
place that God gave us, right on the banks of the North Platte River,
bald eagles all over the a place right in the most diverse wildlife population
I could have imagined, and exactly the kind of place that we could see ourselves
growing older and practicing.
And all of that, long story short, was the result of the Anything Prayer.
Well, Jenny Allen went on to write a couple of other books, several other books,
but she wrote a book a few years ago about mindset and about thinking called
Get Out of Your Head that turns out, in my opinion, to be one of the best sort
of non-science-y looks at how we think that I've ever read. Really tremendous book.
New York Times bestseller, sold over a million copies.
And now she's looked at the other side of the coin, not thinking,
but feeling. And her new book is Untangle Your Emotions.
It's all about what we feel and about the Christian problem of not not thinking
we're supposed to feel, not thinking that we're supposed to listen to our feelings.
And I want to be careful as you listen to this conversation.
You always hear me say feelings aren't facts. Well, you'll hear Jenny and I
discuss that and parse it out and why it's important.
And the good news is we've got five copies of this book to give away.
So if you are interested in a copy of Jenny Allen's book, send me an email,
lee at drleewarren.com, with your name, your mailing address.
Don't forget your zip code. 48 hours after the episode
drops we're going to choose randomly five
listeners to receive a copy of Jenny's new book
Untangle Your Emotions we had a great talk I'm so grateful
to have Jenny on the show I got to be on her show
too we've already recorded that it'll be out in a few weeks and I'll share
that with you Jenny has a top 25 podcast it's tremendous
work that she's doing in the kingdom friend you can learn
a lot from Jenny Allen we had fun we had a great conversation about
how to untangle your emotions it's spiritual brain surgery surgery and i just
wanted to give you this long preamble to say how much jenny allen's work has
meant to me and lisa personally and it'll help you change your mind and it'll
help you change your life and if you're ready to do some spiritual brain surgery
the only thing left is to remember the good news you can start today.
When life gets hard, does what we think we believe hold us up,
or does it crumble under the weight of doubt? I'm your host, Dr. Lee Warren.
I'm a brain surgeon, author, and a person who's seen some stuff and wondered
where God is in all this mess.
This is the Spiritual Brain Surgery Podcast, where we'll take a hard look at
what we believe, why we believe it, and the neuroscience behind how our minds
and our brains can smash together with faith to help us become healthier,
feel better, and be happier, so we can find the hope to withstand anything life throws at us.
You've got questions, and we're going to do the hard work to find the answers.
But you can't change your life until you change your mind, and it's going to
take some spiritual brain surgery to get it done. So let's get after it.
Friend, we're back, and I'm so excited to be with you again today for another episode of the podcast.
And I'm just really grateful and honored that we've got Jenny Allen with us
here today. Jenny, welcome to the show.
Hey, it's great to be here. Thanks for having me. Yeah, so I'm excited to have
you and talk about your incredible new book, Untangle Your Emotions.
And before we get started, would you mind saying a prayer for us? Sure.
God, you know exactly what every person listening needs from this conversation,
and I just pray you'd lead us to it.
I pray for this very sensitive subject that we're going to discuss and just
all the emotions it brings out in both of us. And I know in everyone listening
as well, would you be near, be a comforter for all those who need it?
And we look forward to what happens.
You're going to do and the stories we'll tell about it in Jesus name.
Amen. Amen. Thank you, Jenny.
Hey, I want to tell you just a little bit of background before we get into this
conversation of this show.
I mentioned to you before we started that we lost it. We lost a child in 2013.
And that's really where my writing and podcasting and all that came out of.
And this show will be listened to by
a lot of people who have been through those big things like that
big we call them massive things these losses traumas divorces
bereaved parents will be hearing this and so
as we as we have a conversation about our emotions i
just want you to be aware and kind of maybe you can
touch on some of the ways that um major loss or major trauma can play into how
we handle and process and express our emotions so just if i give you that little
bit of background maybe it would be helpful but talk just a 30 000 foot view
about about where this book came from and your personal life and give people
a big overview of this before we get into the nuts and bolts.
Well, interestingly enough, and maybe a lot of people relate to this too.
I'm not a very emotional person.
I was raised in a home with a Midwestern mom and a military brat dad.
And they, you know, they, it's not like they were unhealthy about emotions necessarily.
They just didn't really feel a lot.
And I even asked him recently, did I, was I an emotional kid?
And they said, no, you were thinking kid. You were always thinking,
you had questions all the time, you were curious, but you didn't feel a lot
of feelings and emotions.
And so I came into this work and by work, I mean, first it was an internal work
in me. It wasn't the work of a project.
It was a, I was the project because I was realizing how needed it was.
Emotions are to heal from things that have happened in the past and things that are binding us.
And so I came to a point where I was just not enjoying work.
I was feeling numb and checked out. I was worried, this is after COVID.
And like a lot of people, I think you just go through the ringer for a little while.
And of course, many of us in our
personal lives, as well as the universal struggles we all went through.
And at some point you just check out because you just can't deal with everything.
And so I think that's where I was for a long time. And a friend invited me to
come into this little cohort of leaders to process life together.
And there was a counselor present.
And I knew this counselor. This counselor had gotten into my business before
and I knew what to expect.
And I wasn't sure I wanted to do that, but I also knew I needed it.
And so the two-year journey of me just really processing
my own emotions and untangling my own emotions led me
to realize how valuable this is and how helpful it is to really change our view
on emotions because we think of them as bad of something controlling us or derailing
what we want or maybe the idea that somebody would be too emotional would be
a really big negative in our mind.
And yet we're all emotional people and we all have these emotions.
And so figuring out and navigating what to do with them became that journey for me.
Is there, as far as being Christians, with both of us raised in Christian homes,
is there a sort of Christian overlay that makes us think that emotions are essentially bad?
Yeah, I mean, I hear it all the time. I see it on Instagram.
I hear it in sermons. I hear it on podcasts that things like emotions are real but not reliable.
Emotions are not our God. they're telling you lies and God is telling you truth.
And I mean, sure, there's some truth to that. But,
It's this constant demonization of them that it's like, okay,
great, but what do we do with them?
That has, I think, left the church really in an emotionally immature spot where we don't know.
We know they're bad and we know the world has made too big a deal of them.
And what's the right way?
And I would just say there is a third way. And it is that we were built by an
emotional God to be emotional creatures and that those are specifically given
to us as gifts to connect us to God and to connect us to navigate this really jacked up world.
I mean, all of us know this. We've walked through so much tragedy and,
and imagine facing the darkest moment of your life,
which I know is so clear for you and, and not having sadness to process it with like that. It's a gift.
And we don't think of it that way because we get in trouble with it and we don't
understand what it looks like to have emotional health or maturity.
But, but that was my goal was like, let's, let's take this huge subject that's
so big And let's break it down real small and just look at what God has to say
about it and what science has to say.
And let's see if there's a way through this that's really life-giving and healthy.
Yeah. Somebody might bump up
against what you said. We have an emotional God. What do you mean by that?
Oh, I mean, beginning in Genesis, he's delighted over his creation,
and then he's disappointed that they rebel. bell.
You see throughout the Old Testament, you see a God with wrath and anger.
You see a God who feels joy and delight.
I mean, you see a God who celebrates with his people, but also,
is grieved and sad and disappointed. You see the Holy Spirit.
That's Father God. You see the Holy Spirit.
Almost every passage about the Holy Spirit has emotional words about him.
I mean, And he's grieved over it.
We can grieve the Holy Spirit. And so there's these ideas that the Holy Spirit,
I mean, the Holy Spirit is petitioning to God when we can't even form words.
When can you not form words?
When you're in grief, when you're angry, when you're scared out of your mind.
Those are moments that the Holy Spirit is taking what we're feeling and taking
it to God, even to the Father on our behalf.
And then Jesus, He was wonderfully emotional.
I mean, I've been watching The Chosen. I don't know if you've ever seen it,
but gosh, when I watched that, it was so moving.
And I think it has been for everybody that's watched it.
And I think the reason it is, is because rather than playing the stoic Jesus
that many of the other past representations of him have played.
The creators of The Chosen really showed his emotion in different settings,
in different situations.
And you see he was a God, obviously, who had great compassion.
He was a God on earth that was tender to those that were hurting and grieved with them at times.
And you see him being very emotionally aware and attuned to situations and then
feeling a lot of emotions himself.
Anger, for sure. We even see him fearful in the garden.
The Greek word for agony is agony, which is most often translated to fear or
anxiety. So, in the garden before he dies, you see Jesus fearful about what he's about to face.
So, he's felt all these emotions, and yet, so we know they can't be sin.
We know that in themselves, they can't be wrong and they can't be sin,
because God, Father, Son, Holy Spirit fills them all.
That's right. You know, one of the things that led to our healing,
really our beginning to heal after we lost Mitch, was this verse I kept bumping into, John 10.10.
It says, the thief came to steal, kill, and destroy, but I came that you might
have life and have it abundantly.
And I saw that two halves of that. And I was like, okay, you came here,
not just about us going to heaven, but so that we could live in this life now in an abundant way,
despite the fact that things are stolen and killed and destroyed and we lose.
And so that means there has to be a way back to finding something that looks
like hope or happiness, maybe even again, after these big things happen.
Which is all about emotion. Like you've got to be able to feel the positive
emotions too, to have an abundant life.
Yeah. Well, I always say it like this, that have you ever seen a really bad, boring documentary?
You know, largely that's probably a lot of information given to you with no
emotion versus like the most epic movie you've ever seen, right?
Like for me, it's Avenger Endgame and Lord of the Rings, these kinds of movies that are just so,
so emotional and, And you're so drawn in by the emotions of the characters that
fully developed and fully mature characters that are really well built are emotionally important.
They contain emotional tissue connecting them.
And then those emotions are connecting to us when we're watching it.
So I just think that's the most obvious sense of having no emotion versus having emotion.
But none of us want to live a bad documentary, a boring documentary.
We want to live in the epic movies.
And we want to live lives that are full and abundant and whole, like you said.
And so, you know, I can only imagine what you would have to say about this,
but to go through the death of your son and then to imagine an abundant life
after that had to be so hard.
And I'm sure wouldn't have been possible without grief, without an intense season of that.
If not, I mean, likely still daily with you.
Yeah. You feel joy and hope. That's right.
And I think the thing is, you said it exactly right. You said we think that
Jesus expects us to come and be all squared away to him, to get it together
and to get ourselves together.
But you're lying that you said we think Jesus is waiting for us to pull ourselves
together when he really wants us to come to him and fall apart. Yeah.
Yeah. You know, I think my relationship with Jesus is really close.
I feel really close to him. that hasn't been hard for me to be close to Him.
I don't feel the judgment maybe that some people feel from God.
And it certainly isn't because I haven't screwed up.
I screw up all the time. It's because I just feel like, I just feel close to Him.
And I think most of that is built on how much I've gone to Him and fallen apart.
Right? I mean, how many times, even weeks ago when I'm frustrated with my husband
and I'm just hurt and I'm mad and I go in my closet or in my bedroom and I cry,
you know, and I tell God about it.
And I think those moments of him being such a close to your friend,
that has made our relationship what it is.
And that's what really was so fun and fascinating about the research on this
topic is ultimately the goal is connection.
That's what emotions are for. They're to bring connection with you and God and with you and others.
And so if you stuff all that down, then you're missing out on so much connection
with people and with God.
And so I've found that to be very, very true, that in the darkest moments,
small and big of my life, that's where my relationship with God has really been built, I would say.
Wow. Is in that falling apart. Yeah.
So unpack this a little bit for us. You describe in the book this journey that
you took really of looking at your previous way of handling things before you
came to this understanding that you need to be in touch with your emotions.
And as you went through this research and got to know Dr.
Thompson, all the things that you described, now you present a recent situation
with your family while you're writing the book where you get in a fight with
your husband and how you handle it now.
Give us a little contrast, like pre-emotional intelligence and post-emotional intelligence.
Well, first of all, I feel the need since I'm telling two stories about fighting
with my husband that we are madly in love and he's really wonderful and doesn't
deserve for me to be too mad at him very often.
But yeah, so this situation happened when I was writing the book,
but I was driving home from running some errands in my workday and it was 4.30ish
and I was thinking about dinner.
And I noticed, because I was working on the book, I noticed my chest was tight.
I noticed my shoulders were tight.
And I noticed that I felt some anxiety. And I didn't know why.
Like a lot of us, right? I couldn't quite place it on that day.
The day had gone pretty well.
There wasn't a major fire that we needed to put out that was obvious in that moment.
But I, but I stopped and I did what I talk about in the book was,
which is just a simple little process of, of kind of thinking through what you feel.
So first you notice it, you notice what is the feeling.
And sometimes like for me that day, it, it, it even starts with your body.
You may not even know or have thoughts yet about why you're anxious,
but you feel your chest get tight or maybe it's your stomach is upset or,
um, people carry it in all different ways, but you begin to to notice what you feel.
And so that day I noticed, okay, something's not right and something's not okay.
And then, um, I, I began to just survey my life and go, okay,
I feel afraid. What am I afraid of?
I had a really good day. Why, why am I feeling afraid right now?
And my mind went to something that my husband and I had discussed earlier about,
um, about money and about his job.
And And I just left paying for things, a lot of things.
And so I had this little bit of insecurity of.
Are our finances in a good place? Because we'd had this conflict and been going
through this difficult situation with his work.
And I realized, okay, I'm kind of anxious about these little things that are adding up.
And so I could name it and I could see it. And so after I did that,
I turned that over to the Lord.
I was like, Lord, you know how we're going to make it. And you know what's going
to happen in the future. And I just leave it with you. I trust you with it.
And I'm just going to even like physically like leave this in my car.
And so I get out and of course what happens, you walk in and everybody's stressed
in their own right, right?
It's before dinner hour. My kids have all had bad days, my husband.
And so I knew, and I really played
out in the book, like this could go two ways when I walk in the car.
If I do what I just did in the car, I walk in, I'm aware that I'm feeling this. I can share it.
I can connect with my kids and my my husband over it, which we did.
Or I ignore it, but I'm short and I'm bugged and I can't handle their stress
because I can't even handle my own and I don't know what's wrong.
And so I snap at both of them and Zach comes downstairs and instead of hugging
him, which I did in that situation, I snap at him and he snaps back and we barely make it through dinner.
But that night, what happened was we all connected. And I asked Cooper,
I was like, did you have some things go go wrong at school?
You seem sad or angry. And he was like, yes. And he tells me about that.
And together we share our hard parts.
And it was the sweetest dinner, even though all of the, the emotions were hard,
the conversation was beautiful. And we got to go, you know what?
I didn't have a great day either. This, I was feeling so anxious in the car
and I could, I could just share with them.
And it, it is such a different way to live. And it's so freeing and And it's
so, so much more peaceful in a way,
because we think these big emotions are going to upset everything and,
and we're going to just, we can't face our sadness because it's going to overtake us.
But the reality is in facing our sadness, we find a lot of peace.
We find a lot of hope. It comes out of taking the moment to notice.
We call it the thought biopsy. I pitch everything in brain surgery terms.
Take a second to biopsy what you're feeling. Think about it.
Look at it under the microscope before you react to it.
And that gives you a chance to be in control of it instead of having your amygdala,
which is not very reliable, be in control of it.
You wrote a whole book about that in your book about thinking.
Yeah. But I think what you talk about is this process.
You just described a little bit of it, but break it down for us.
So you start with noticing what you're feeling and then you get into naming
it and just kind of break that little prescription down for us.
Well, I think the very first thing that we have to do before we even begin the
process is to notice if we're judging our emotions. Are we really hard on our emotions?
Are we, whenever we feel sadness, are we pushing it away? And that's largely
learned from the way we grew up.
If we grew up in a home that said, you shouldn't, you shouldn't feel sad.
Don't feel sad. You know, if we just learn, okay, I'm not supposed to feel sad
from a young age, then we never feel sad.
If we learn, don't act that way, don't get angry, you know, and again,
I'm not talking about never controlling our kids' behavior, but usually they,
in their world, there's a really just reason for them being upset.
So just honoring that feeling.
And so I think that's the first thing is we've just got to quiet down that little
part of us that learn to judge everything we feel.
And then the first thing is just to notice in your body, what are you feeling?
Are your shoulders tense?
Are your hands sweaty? What are you feeling? When you sense an emotion and you
notice it, start to just notice in your body what you're feeling.
And God built us body, mind, heart, soul, emotions, all of it.
And we're one package and they all bleed, as you know.
I will feel funny every time I talk about anything neurological with you because
you have studied this way more than me in my layperson way.
But what I know is all of that's connected. And so when we notice what we feel,
and I mean, in the book, it was as simple as me just saying,
asking the question, are you okay or are you not okay?
And sometimes that's as simple as...
As we can even conceive of, right? Because to go any deeper than that just feels really cumbersome.
So I start with that notice, are you okay? Are you not okay?
And then moving to naming it. And that's so hard for all of us, right?
And I kept the emotions to four basic emotions, sadness, fear, anger, and joy.
And under those though, there's a plethora of words, words, endless words,
really, of grief and disappointment, both being sadness, but very big,
different sides of the spectrum.
And so just the closer we can get to actually naming what we feel, the better.
And then to feel it, which just feels obvious, but take some time and focus, and then to share it.
Because in the sharing is where the connection happens.
And then to decide what we're going to do with it. Because like you said,
I mean, we can make a big mess giving all the energy to our amygdala,
But at the same time, we can make a big mess if we don't.
So there's got to be a moment of like, what do we feel and noticing that and bring it to light.
But then at the very end, we have to decide what we're going to do with that.
That's right. And I think it really needs to be said. You said it in your book
very well, but it needs to be said.
We are told as children, don't be angry. Don't be sad.
Christians don't feel that. But the truth is you do feel that.
Like everybody does feel this palette, as you said, of human emotion.
The problem is if we believe that it's wrong or sinful to feel those things,
then it creates this tension inside of us, this cognitive dissonance where I'm
not supposed to feel this, but I do.
And then we try to convince ourselves that we're not and we're living in this
place, right, that's not real.
And that's what I kept seeing. And that made me so sad.
And really one of the big reasons I wrote the book was so much of me and so
much of all of us is spent, the energy of our lives is spent trying not to feel something.
When if we would just feel it, there's...
It's hard. It's not easy to feel sadness. I'm not acting like it is,
but gosh, it's easier than pushing it down for 10 years and it coming out sideways
and you pushing your child away.
I mean, there's a real consequence to us stuffing. In the book,
it's concealing, coping, and controlling.
Those are the three things we most often do with our emotions rather than connect.
And that's the goal. The goal is to use it for connection, but instead we control
it, we cope with it, and we conceal it.
And that way of life is we're getting through it, but we're not experiencing
joy and we're not experiencing the depth of relationships we want.
And in some ways, we will end up pushing away the people that we love because
we can't handle our own emotions. We can't handle theirs.
And so when we can't handle theirs, they're going to go somewhere else to find that need met.
And we want it to be us. We want our kids to want to come to us.
We want our husband or spouse to want to come to us.
We want our best friends to want to come to us.
But if we're always trying to fix their problem rather than feel their pain,
they're not going to come to us. That's powerful.
That's the line right there. We're also fixers, especially me. I'm a doctor.
I want to fix it. My family has a hard time telling me what they feel because
I try to fix it all the time. That's something we need to learn. Certainly.
One of the things, I think if I picked one line out of the book,
if I could pick one line and say, this is the one by the book because of this
line or memorize this one line, it's this one, Jenny.
Teach people to say, when did you first feel the feeling you're feeling right now?
There's so much neuroscience in that. And I'll have you unpack it in a second.
But my perspective is we teach people all the time.
Feelings aren't facts. Feelings are chemical events in your brain.
And they are there to remind you of previous situations that you've experienced or.
Or epigenetically inherited from your parents that you might need to be afraid
of or you might need to take some action on and compare that to the current
situation and attach meaning to it based on the chemical event that's happening.
And so they're not facts. They're barometers. They're telling you something's
going on and then you have to decide what's going on and what's real right now.
So that idea that you teach people, when did you first feel the thing that you're
you're feeling right now, there's so much juice and so much power in that,
that it's worth the purchase of the book,
friend, to hear that one line. Jenny, talk about that for a second.
Well, I mean, one of my friends said, this is thousands of dollars worth of therapy for you.
I can say that's true because a lot, you know, that line, as you well know, is not original.
It's not original thought by me. It's one that was forced upon me with counseling
where I was forced to look back and go, what is this fear? I think specifically of my daughter.
It's a story I tell in the book about she just got married and I'm at dinner
with them and she's telling me like some dreams and ideas of them traveling
and or moving out of the state and even out of the country.
And I started having a reaction. I mean, I couldn't breathe.
I hit it, But I about imploded.
I had to go to the bathroom and escape it because I was about to weep in front
of him. Just the idea and the thought sent me into a spiral.
And I didn't want... I mean, on a core level, a parent wants to be there for
their kid, especially their dreams and their hopes.
Of course, she just got married. Of course, they're dreaming about doing wonderful
and big, beautiful things with their life.
But I wanted to be there for her, but I couldn't for some reason.
And it wasn't a, it wasn't a, um, I could tell myself the right answers.
I could tell myself, Jenny, of course you want them to go.
Of course you can't control if they move. Of course you're going to be fine.
Like, what are you doing?
That didn't work. Every time she would bring it up, I would feel this way.
And so I went to my counselor with it and he said, you know,
do you remember as a child feeling this way? way.
And several things came up.
And even something recently came up, which was when Zach, my husband,
was in the hospital and about to die.
I mean, he was in a very fragile state.
It's a long story, but his blood pressure was like 200 and something over 180.
I mean, it wasn't even a human blood pressure. And he had had a mild stroke.
And so I'm sitting there thinking I could lose my husband any minute.
And it was that same feeling that I was having when Kate was talking about adventures.
Well, that doesn't make sense. You can judge me for it, but you have these things
too. Everybody has these things.
But what was happening was these triggers over my whole life,
beginning when I was seven years old and I was confronted with death for the first time.
And I'd gone to a funeral and I remember I couldn't stop crying and I was scared
of death and I was scared of dying alone. alone.
And so I would look back and I'd see that same panic and that same feeling come
out every time I would feel like I was going to be abandoned.
And so these, yes, these feelings mark us. And in fact, they largely,
you're right, are how we remember our lives.
I don't remember a lot from when I was seven, but I remember crying and looking out the window.
I remember every detail about my thought life and everything that was happening
around me because I was so sad and scared that night.
So those moments add up and I think they are still with us, right?
That seven-year-old scared of death is still here.
And when my daughter's going to move, everybody's going to leave me. That's the fear.
And so I think walking through those moments has really set me free.
And I wouldn't even say, it's so funny because sometimes I'm asking Dr.
Thompson, I'm like, what did you even just do?
He didn't teach me anything. He didn't fix any problems. problems,
but I leave and I don't panic anymore when Kate talks about that. How does that happen?
And it is literally not being alone in those moments and those fears,
that He is with me in those moments and fears.
And it changes something about my brain, which you could tell me way more about
what is actually changing.
But my understanding is that what can heal nerves.
And so that's an unbelievable feature of our brains that God gave us.
That's right. We're designed to be in community. We're not designed to be alone.
And I think the idea that we accept realities in our lives from things that
happened at a time in our life when nobody intended for that to become our reality.
And it hurts us later. There's a woman named Robin Long.
I don't know if you know her. She's a fitness Pilates instructor,
wrote a really, really good book that was on the podcast. And she talked about
how she had this body image problem into her 40s or late 30s.
And she finally figured out through therapy that it was because she remembered
when she was a little girl, she was with her friend and her friend's dad made
an offhand comment that she heard that her friend has skinnier legs than she did.
And so here, 30 years later, she's got this body image problem.
But he never meant for that to be a label that she received for her life,
right? You said it like that, like we just, we receive and accept labels that
were never intended for us. Yeah.
Oh, I mean, I have so many that have, you know, it's funny.
Another thing I'm wrestling with is I've been in the same small group of friends
for many years and they laugh sometimes because I'll tell a different story.
Story, but the core lie or thing that I'm struggling with in it is the same
in every single story, right?
There's some core lie that I'm believing over and over again.
And I think this is the work of it.
What emotions do is they point us to these places that God wants to tend to,
that he wants us to pay attention to.
And we probably never would if, if we didn't feel.
Anxiety and some risk that we're going to hurt the people around us with our
reactions if we don't figure this out, right?
There's got to be some motivation for us to go pay attention to these things. That's right.
You talked about the work that the enemy does and what the enemy wants for us
is to accept this idea that we're not supposed to feel our lives.
Talk about that for a moment.
Well, yeah. I mean, it's very convenient to stuff it all in all our energy is
spent on and concealing and coping and controlling.
If we spend all, that takes energy, right?
And if we spend all our energy on that, that's a great waste of a life rather
than what God intends, which is mourn with those who mourn.
He talks about emotion and grief a lot.
You watch Jesus weep with Mary. He knew he was going to heal.
Lazarus, he said that a few verses up. He says, I'm going to go,
my friend is sleeping. I'm going to go wake him up. He knew he would heal him.
And yet on his way to do so, He sees his friend Mary crying,
and then it says he's out of great compassion for Mary, Jesus wept.
So that means that Jesus, in my fixer world, where I'm a fixer too,
my fixer world, I would go, Mary, don't cry. Watch.
Watch. I'm going to bring him back to life. I would go in with my magic wand,
and I would fix the problem.
That's not what he did. He stopped with Mary first, who was angry at him,
and he gave her hope and he was compassionate to her with her feeling, which was anger.
And then he goes to Mary and he cries with Mary and he spends time doing that.
He sees that as an important thing to do.
And I think that story specifically has just changed my mind on Jesus.
Emotions. It's really changed my life and how I interact with my family, right?
Because my son comes home a few weeks ago and it's homecoming dance in the fall.
And it's his first time to ask a girl to a function or to a date.
And the first girl he asks says no, and everybody hears about it.
And he's so embarrassed, right?
And he's so angry. And so he comes home and I'm just mad and I'm sad and I want to fix it.
And I want him to go find the next cute girl and ask her right right then. Let's make this better.
And I'm just going to, you're going to get anything you want to wear to this dance.
You're going to look so good. You're going to wear the cutest suit and you're
going to have the cutest new sneakers.
And we're going to do everything we can so that this doesn't feel bad.
But the reality is on that day, he just needed me to be sad with him.
He just needed his mom to be sad with him. Why?
Because God called us to mourn with
those who mourn because part of our brain just needs
to not feel alone in our sadness and our fear and our anger we were built to
experience these things together and when we do which is i love talking about
my little bit of science with you um but what happens you tell us you tell us what happens.
It's well i mean you you we i did research for most of my 20-year career on
this particular particular problem called glioblastoma, this malignant brain cancer.
That actually wrote my second book about this.
This brain cancer that's always fatal, right? Nobody survives.
A five-year survival rate is one in 10,000. Like nobody practically survives this disease.
And what I figured out, what I was trying to figure out is how do I be a good
doctor for somebody when I can't fix them with surgery?
How do I still be a good doctor for you? And so I started looking at what elements
of caretaking make a difference for people.
And what I figured out is this one thing, hopelessness is deadlier than cancer.
Cancer like people that lose hope even
if they don't die from their disease are
worse off than if they maintain hope and die from their
cancer right it's hope hope is the first dose that's why i wrote that that last
book hope gives you this ability to believe that you can that your life has
meaning and purpose no matter what you're going through right and so to have
hope you have to go through what you said you have to have perseverance and
perseverance produces character Character and character produce hope.
And all that comes from suffering, right? So if we can learn to put our emotions,
put ourselves in touch with our emotions and really figure out what's triggering
the things that we feel and then learn how to compare those to current events
and take the lessons that we've learned from the past and apply those emotions
appropriately so we can be in community with our family and be real people,
then we can inspire others to rewire their brains to and maintain hope no matter
what they're feeling, right? And your book is doing that for me.
Wow. That's so interesting. And I, yeah, I think my love of the research has
just grown and grown and grown as it's backed up what I know as a theologian
and Bible teacher, right?
I spent my years in the Bible and I had three years of seminary and that's what I...
And, you know, that's what I'm living. That's what I'm doing.
And to get to the science later in my life and to realize it all really supports
the ways God tells us to take care of each other. That's right.
It's so beautiful. It just gives me such an awe of God and how he built us.
Amen. Yeah. Give us this one little thought experiment tool that you gave us.
I just want you to talk through before we run out of time. pause permission
perspective and persist like that
that was perfect like it talked through that little process for us yeah i think
we all need handles i always picture what i'm asking people to do as this giant
dark abyss like i'm saying come up yeah stand on the edge with me.
And now come in this abyss. And it's hard, you know, and people are like,
I don't want to feel sad. Like that's not fun.
And I would just say, you know, one thing that I just thought would help people
are really simple handles.
And I think that permission piece is huge. I think that might be the biggest thing.
If we have, if we can quiet that part of us that has worked so hard to not feel
and has judged and judged and judged what we're feeling, what other people are feeling,
if we can quiet that part and we can be with ourselves and not be so afraid
of these waves that feel like they might overtake us.
What I've found is God is in it, like down in the abyss.
Yeah, there's actually a little flashlight and there's some handles and there's
a lot of friends and God's there.
And you're not going to find it so scary once you do it. You'll actually find it freeing.
And so the whole book was just an attempt to give handles to something that
is so misunderstood and so hard to get our head around and our hands around.
But I like to try to help people do that because I think the enemy works in
confusion. The enemy of me works in chaos.
And what God does is He likes to bring clarity. He likes to bring security to our lives.
And so that was my hope, was just these are simple tools that God, that Jesus did.
I mean, that's what I did. I looked at Jesus' life. I'm like,
this is how He lived. He noticed people.
He noticed what they needed. He noticed what they felt.
He had people name things, the woman at the well, he wouldn't let her get out
of it. It's like, no, you're going to tell me what you did. Oh,
you're not going to tell me. Okay. I'm going to tell you.
Wouldn't that be a mean thing to do? Except that he was setting her free,
you know? And so he gets her to name it.
And when she can't, he names it for her. And then to feel it,
to feel what we are to feel and, and to, um, to share that with others.
I mean, this is, this is really living and it is the more epic way of life, I think.
Wow. So, Jenny, amazing to have a chance to talk with you today.
Before we go, somebody listening to this has just gotten the diagnosis back.
Somebody's just lost the husband. Somebody's just found out their child isn't
coming home. This is the group of people that are going to hear this.
So give us some just thoughts on what to do from your perspective the day that thing happens.
What happens next for you in a healthy way? What do you do now?
I think that pause, let's just start there.
And just wherever you are, and I would just say this, whether you have just
gotten tragic news or maybe you're having a fine day, it feels like a great Tuesday.
I would just say wherever you are, there's probably something that you're feeling.
And so just to give just a minute to notice it.
What are you feeling right now as you drive, as you walk, as you lay in your
bed? What do you feel right now?
And to give that feeling a word, to not only notice it, but to name it.
What is the best, most descriptive word you can think of to name that feeling that you're feeling?
And I'm going to guess that 95% of you said, I feel sad, angry, or scared, or worried.
And if that's you, I just want to say, of course you do. Of course you do.
Because this world is jacked up, and it is not as it should be,
and it is not as it will be. and I want you to imagine God with you right now.
And I want you to look at his face. How is he looking at you as you feel that emotion? Is he angry?
Is he disappointed or bugged that you feel sad or afraid or angry?
And I would say, I bet he feels a lot like I feel right now,
which is, I'm just so sorry. Yeah.
And I hate it even more than you hate it, the darkness.
Dark circumstances coming against us, I will make a way to make it right and to make it matter.
And so as you sit with God in that, that is the sweetest spot.
That is the place, the Holy Holies, that sacred place where God is and meets with us.
And I just pray, Pray, Lord, for anyone that feels like they can't face their
life, they can't face these feelings. God, would you just be so near to them?
Would you hold them and care for them and don't let go of them?
And would you shine your face upon them?
And would they experience your delight in them, in the way that you created
them to feel and to think and to know you and to walk with you? In Jesus' name, amen.
Amen. Wow. 900 episodes of this podcast. This is the third time somebody made
me cry, so congratulations. Congratulations.
Derwin Gray, Susie Larson, and Jenny Allen, bringing the tears to the podcast.
Listen, you did an amazing job with the book, and we're going to give some copies away.
Our mutual publicist, Bev Reichert over at Waterbrook, has given us a few copies to give away.
We'll touch on the instructions for that after we let Jenny go here in a moment, folks.
But Jenny, I didn't think you could write a better book than Get Out of My Head,
Get Out of Your Head, but you did it.
No way you did it you knocked it out of the park you didn't make us move to
wyoming this time i told that story before but um great job thank you for writing
it and i'm excited to have a chance to talk with you again in a couple of weeks.
Thanks. Thanks for having me. What a great conversation. I really enjoyed my
time with Jenny. I hope you did too.
Don't forget, we have five copies of Jenny Allen's new book,
Untangle Your Emotions.
It's out today everywhere books are sold all around the world.
You can find it. Don't forget to support your local booksellers.
But if you'd like to be considered for one of the free copies of Untangle Your
Emotions by Jenny Allen, send me an email to lee at drleewarren.com,
lee at drleewarren.com.
Don't forget your name, your mailing address, and your zip code.
I won't have time to write you back if you forget your address.
So please include all the information, name, address, and zip code.
We're going to choose five winners to receive a free copy of Jenny's book,
Untangle Your Emotions.
We'll get those out to you within a few days after we choose the names next week.
So please check out Jenny's work, JennyAllen.com. She's got a number of books that are game changers.
Anything still has a very special place in my heart and Lisa's heart,
because it really led to me sitting here talking to you every day.
It really ended up on the banks of the North Platte River and Moon River Ranch,
Nebraska because of Jenny Allen's work and God's hand has been on her.
She's helping people all over the world and she can help you too.
Friend, you can't change your life until you change your mind and learning how
to untangle your emotions is a key component of that.
Just don't forget the good news, my friend, is that you can start today.
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