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Neurosurgeon and award-winning author Dr. W. Lee Warren, MD delivers daily prescriptions from neuroscience, faith, and common sense on how to lead a healthier, better, happier life. You can’t change your life until you change your mind, and Dr. Warren will teach you the art of self brain surgery to get it done. His new book, Hope Is the First Dose, is available everywhere books are sold.
Good morning, my friend. I hope you're doing well. This is Dr.
Lee Warren, and I'm excited to be with you today. This is an extra episode.
We have a Tuesdays with Tata episode coming out on the Spiritual Brain Surgery podcast today.
But I received an email yesterday, and I wanted to reach out with one of these
trauma rounds, one of these quick emergency episodes to just give you a different
way to think about something because the person that wrote in is struggling
with something they've been dealing with for a long time.
Time, and I know Lisa and I talk about it all the time, for every person that
we hear from, there's probably 10,000 people with the same issue that don't write in.
So I just want to make sure you hear me say it, your favorite brain surgeon,
hopefully. I want you to hear me say this today.
We're going to bring you back an old episode called Anthony Walker is Hammered. It's from season eight.
It's right before my book came out. It's a story from Hope is the First Dose
about a guy named Anthony that had a problem that made him unable to close his
eyes so that all he he could see was constant.
Everything in front of him, he could constantly see it because he couldn't close
his eye or blink away the debris or close his eye or divert it to stop looking
at the thing that was threatening his vision.
And over time, if you can't stop looking at something, then your cornea will scar.
And eventually you'll be only
able to see the image of the thing that you couldn't take your eye off of.
And that's relevant. And when we talk about trauma and tragedy and these massive
things that happen in our lives that can become so big.
We observe them so much from the same perspective. They become the only thing we can see,
which biblically, the definition of idolatry is if you see something that's
bigger to you than God, if it's so massive and so important and so powerful
that even God can't deal with it for you, then it becomes an idol effectively.
It becomes the only thing you can see, and that thing will become the truth in your life.
And I just want to remind you today, that if you're living in a truth that isn't
setting you free, then it's not the truth. Jesus said it clearly.
I am the way, the truth, and the life.
He says, if I set you free, you'll be free indeed. And so there's a way,
there is a way to be set free from whatever it is that's harming us.
There is a way to learn how to look away from the thing that we think is so big.
That is the only thing we can see. Lisa and I had to learn how to do that after we lost Mitch.
You'll have to do it too. If you want to stop living as if the thing that happened
to you or the thing that's going on or the thing that you're afraid of or the
thing that you're struggling with is bigger and impossible to move,
even more powerful than God,
then you've got to learn how to look away from it and look at something that is true.
If it's not setting you free, you need to learn how to look differently at it.
And the story about Anthony Walker is going to help you do that.
But I just want to remind you of one thing. I got an email yesterday from a
woman who's struggling for years with an eating disorder.
And she wrote in about the futility that she feels. She's listening to Susie
Larson and she's listening to me and she's listening to Tabitha Barber and she's
reading and she's studying and she's praying and she's doing all the things
that she just can't break free from it. She had another bad day yesterday.
And friend, if you're hearing me, if you're the one who sent me that message, this episode is for you.
I just want you to understand this one important thing. We talk all the time
about self-brain surgery.
We talk all the time about changing your mind before you can change your life.
We talk about taking your thoughts captive and doing thought biopsies and doing
all these self-brain surgery operations.
All of those things are necessary, okay?
But hear me say this compassionately. If what you're doing isn't working,
then you need professional help, okay?
Sometimes you need a pastor or a therapist or a doctor or you need to go to
the emergency room or you need a mental health professional.
You need to change the perspective of how you're viewing the thing.
And if you're unable to do it with self-help techniques or with my ideas or
with Susie Larson's ideas or with prayer or meditation or abiding or any of
the things that you're doing, if it's not working, you need help. Okay?
Because remember the principle, what you're doing, you're getting better at.
And so if every day it seems impossible to change that thing and your mindset
is fixed on this thing that is impossible to change.
Then your brain is getting structurally more wired to believe that that thing is unchangeable.
And it will become harder and harder and harder to believe that there could
ever be a time when that thing won't be the thing in your life.
Remember, if the truth isn't working, if it's not setting you free, it's not the truth.
And you need to change your perspective on it. And sometimes we need somebody
else to help us do that. Sometimes we need medication.
Sometimes we need therapy. Sometimes we need a doctor. Sometimes it's a medical
issue you that's keeping your brain stuck.
And so don't keep spinning your wheels. Don't keep swinging the ax if it's already
so dull that it's clearly not going to chop that tree down. You need help.
You need to change your perspective. If it's not working, get some help.
So I just want to remind you of that.
Don't ever forget that sometimes we need another person to help us deal with
the thing that we're struggling with.
But don't forget, don't be afraid. It's not a sign of weakness or failure to
reach out for professional help when you need it.
But I want to give you one thing to think about when you choose a person who's
going to be helpful to you or you hope is going to be helpful to you.
You need to know who they are and the worldview from which they're coming, okay?
We talked before about reductive physicalism. There's a group of therapists
and psychologists and psychiatrists and scientists who believe that your brain
and your mind are the same thing, that your mind is generated by physical processes is in your brain,
that you're reducible to a bunch of electrical activity inside your skull,
and that there's no such thing as your mind. There's no such thing as free will.
There's no such thing as spiritualism or anything outside of your physical body.
And so if you're a therapist or you're a psychologist or you're a psychiatrist
or your doctor is coming from a reductive physical place, you can never find
the truth that your creator wants you to have.
So you need to make sure that you're choosing a provider who has a belief system
that's that's compatible with your worldview.
If you're coming from different places and their place believes that you're
unchangeable and that everything inside your brain is just a bunch of electrical
processes and there's no mind outside of that that's changeable,
then how can you ever really change your mind if they don't even believe that
your mind is a real thing separate from your brain?
Understand who you're seeing. Ask good questions. Get second opinions.
And if you're trying and listening and doing all the things they say and you're
not making progress, change providers.
Sometimes I offer my patients a second opinion. If they're not understanding
what I'm trying to say or if they're not comfortable with my treatment plan,
I say, hey, go get a second opinion. Go see another doctor.
Don't be afraid to ask for a second opinion. I just want to remind you of all that.
If what you're doing isn't working, what you're doing, you're getting getting better at.
You're going to keep finding that it's not getting okay the longer you keep
trying the same thing that you've been trying, okay? So don't be afraid.
Ask for a second opinion. Get a provider. Reach out for outside help.
Don't stay stuck, okay, friend? Don't stay stuck.
That thing that you're dealing with, it is changeable. It is movable. You can heal.
You You can move past it, but sometimes you need outside help.
We're going to get after it. We're going to talk about Anthony Walker today
and how he had to learn to divert his gaze from the thing that was the only
thing that he could see. And before we do it, I have a question.
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.
I'm going to tell you one story today that comes out of Hope is the First Dose.
And one story because I think it illustrates a big thing that is important in
recovering from the massive things that come along in life.
If you've had something big happen, and if you haven't, you will,
so just follow this away for later.
But if you've gone through something big, then you basically come to a choice
in your life. And we're going to talk about that choice in a minute.
And then we're going to talk about a kid named Anthony Walker.
And I told his story in the book.
And I just want to give you a little preview of one of the stories that's in the book.
And we're going to do all that in an attempt to learn how to change our minds
so that we can change our lives.
Because Lisa's always telling us the good news. And that is...
We can start today. 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.
That place is called self-brain surgery. You can learn it and it will help you
become healthier, feel better and be happier.
And the good news is you can start today.
Thanks, Lisa. Lisa. Hey, so glad to have you listening today. I'm Dr.
Lee Warren and I live in Nebraska in the United States of America with my incredible
wife, Lisa, my father-in-law, Tata, and the super pups, Harvey and Lewis.
I'm a neurosurgeon and an author, and I'm here to help you harness neuroscience,
the power of your brain, faith, the power of your spirit, and good old common
sense to help you lead a healthier, better, happier life.
Listen, friend, you can't change your life until you change your mind.
And I'm here to help you learn the art of self-brain surgery to get it done.
If you'd like If you like the show, please subscribe so you never miss an episode
and tell your friends about it.
If you tell two or three friends this podcast was helpful to you,
imagine how much good we can all do around the world together.
I'm Dr. Lee Warren, and I'm here to help you change your mind so you can change
your life. Let's get after it.
Okay, so after we lost Mitch and over the course of my career studying people
who have gone through hard things, such as glioblastomas, brain injuries,
spinal cord injuries, and then seeing people with non-medical massive things, divorce,
loss, just the things that happen in life, all these big things that happen.
I've discovered something, that the people who have a resilience about them,
one of the podcasts I'm going to be on later today is called Brilliantly Resilient,
and their show is all about resilience and why it's so important.
But one of the key factors I've noticed in resilience is our ability to understand
this quantum physics thing that I'm always telling you about,
that two things can be true at at the same time, and it doesn't make either of them less true.
And here's an example. I will go to my grave.
Being really sad about losing my son, Mitch.
There won't come a day in my life when that doesn't make me sad.
Just yesterday, I'm walking out of the hospital. I picked up my phone and opened
my contacts as I was going to call Lisa.
And somehow my thumb must have hit the wrong one. It pulled up Mitch's phone
number. I've never taken him out of my contacts.
And there was this picture and there was his phone number and there was the
last text message he sent me. And I just started crying on my walk back to the truck.
And it just, it comes out of nowhere, right? If you've lost someone or you've
lost something in your life that's real important to you, then you'll know that
those kinds of things never really stop.
So, so it's true that I'll die someday and I'll still be sad about losing my boy.
But at the same time, it's also true that I have an amazing life and an an incredible
wife and family and grandchildren and neurosurgery practice and this podcast
and all of you listening and all the readers and this just incredible life that
I'm extremely grateful for.
And I'm happy about that. And I've got a good life and I'm not sad.
I'm not only sad. And what I noticed in looking at people who are going through
hard things and what we had to decide for ourselves is this concept that both
of those things can be true at the same time, that it doesn't have to be but.
It doesn't have to be, I used to be happy, but my son died and now I can't be happy anymore.
It doesn't have to be, I used to be happy, but my husband got glioblastoma.
I used to be happy, but my wife cheated on me.
I used to be happy, but the economy crashed and I lost my business.
And I used to be happy, but, right?
Or I thought I could be happy if this happened, but it didn't happen.
Or I thought I would be happy as long as this set of things occurred, but they didn't.
And so now I can't be happy. If you can get rid of that but and substitute it for and...
I was happy and I lost my son and I found hope again and I found faith again
and I'm happy again. It's a different kind of happy, but I'm happy again.
I lost someone, but I still have an incredible life.
If you can get rid of the but and say, I've lost someone and I still have an
incredible life, then you can learn to find hope and happiness again.
There's a kid that I took care of in Wyoming a long time ago.
And in the book I call him Anthony Walker. That's not his real name.
But I got a call from the ER, my friend, Johnna Cuban, who's in the book.
And she said, this kid is hammered and drunk and he's hurt and I need you to come see him.
And as I was driving, as I was walking to the car, I realized most people say
hammered drunk, but she said drunk and hammered.
She didn't say hammered drunk. I think I said it incorrectly a while ago.
She didn't say he's hammered drunk. She said he's drunk and hammered.
And I thought she made a mistake.
And when I got to the hospital, I was going to ask her about it.
But it turned out he was drunk, but he had been assaulted by what he said were
two dudes who had hammers and they hit him in the head with a hammer.
And he had a whole bunch of little skull fractures that looked like little perfect
round hammerheads on the x-ray.
And he also was unable to move the
right side of his face and it turned out one of
the hammer blows that hit him right in front of the
right ear and crushed his facial nerve your
facial nerve is the nerve that gives you facial expression it lifts your eye
it closes your eye it lifts your forehead it allows you to smile all the little
amazing things that you can do with your face to show people the emotion and
feeling that you're feeling come from the facial nerve and And his had been
crushed on the right side,
so the right side was flaccid like he'd had a stroke.
And he couldn't close his eye because the seventh cranial nerve,
the facial nerve, is the nerve that closes your eyelid.
And the problem with that is, so Anthony had this injury that did not allow him to close his eye.
And what happens if you can't close your eye over time is the cornea will begin
to be abraded, and they'll start to scar down, and eventually you'll go blind
if you can't close your eye.
And so the metaphor that I realized is that that's a pretty good thing about
what happens to us after the massive thing occurs is we can't stop looking at it.
We can't stop focusing on the massive thing. It becomes the only thing we can see.
And I'm just here to tell you, friend, this short little episode this morning
is if you don't learn how to look away from the massive thing,
if you don't learn how to turn it into a but instead of an and instead of a
but, But if you don't learn how to close your eye and stop focusing on that
one thing, over time, your heart,
your mind, your eye will scar.
And the last thing you'll remember seeing in your life when you thought you
were still happy is that thing that you can't stop looking at.
And I've seen people who went to support groups for the rest of their lives
and never made any progress.
I've seen people who were broken by their spouse getting glioblastoma.
I've seen people who were so bitter and angry that they got cancer that even
when they were cured of it, they were still wrecked emotionally.
And they were never secure and comfortable and safe and happy again because
they realized that they were mortal.
I see it all the time when people have some kind of injury and it's the first
time they've ever been in the hospital.
And I see them three months later and they're depressed because they just realized
that they were humans, that they thought they would never be sick and now they
realize, hey, I'm getting older and someday I'm gonna die.
And I see it all the time in older people after back surgery,
they need a walker for a while and they're just so unable to accept that limitation
that they refuse to use it. And then guess what happens?
They fall and then they break their hip and then they really have trouble and
it becomes the beginning of the end because they can't accept the fact that
something's changed or has been taken away from them and they can't stop looking at it.
And over time, it becomes the only thing they can think about.
And so Anthony Walker's story, I'm not going to tell you how it turns out in the book,
but that's an example of this idea that I just want to give you today that you've
got to learn to turn the massive thing into something that happened to you,
but not the thing that happened to you.
It has to become a thing and not the thing if you're going to be happy again.
And that's the message for today. We're in season eight.
I told you it's going to be a hundred doses of hope. And it's been a couple
of days since I played Tommy's song, I Have a Hope. And I think it's time again.
I'm going to bring it back to you this morning because I want you to go out
today with I have a hope. I have a future.
I have a destiny that is yet prepared for me. So here's the thing, yet awaiting me.
Here's the thing, friend. And if you can't stop looking at the massive thing,
you won't be able to see the destiny that is yet awaiting you.
You won't be able to see all the other beautiful things that are still true in your life.
You've got to learn how to blink your eye and close your eye and turn your vision
and look on something else. Look on Jesus.
Look on the author and perfecter of your faith. and he'll give you this deal,
this peace, this hope, this happiness again that looks different than it used
to look before TMT came along, but it's still perfect and beautiful.
I'll be an old man someday, and I'll still be caught by surprise sometimes with memories of Mitch.
I'm looking at a picture of him right now. I'm not trying to cry on you,
but I'll never stop being sad about that.
But if Mitch was the only thing I could think about, then I wouldn't be able
to see Scarlett and George and Riker and Jace, my beautiful,
perfect grandchildren.
I wouldn't be able to see Josh and Katie and Kimber and Kaylin,
my four perfect living children and their families and all the amazing things.
I wouldn't be able to see Lisa and how much she loves me and how much she perfects me.
I wouldn't be able to see Moon River Ranch and the incredible river outside
my window because all I could see was that thing that was taken from me.
And friend, I want you to learn how to close your eye and change what you see
again and have that TMT not be the only thing that you can see.
Have it turn into a thing that happened to you.
Devastating, yes. Crushing, yes.
Perilous, yes. But not the only thing because you still have a lot of other
things to live for, my friend.
And the good news is you can change your mind about that and you can do some
self-brain surgery and you can learn how to think differently about the massive
thing because guess what?
It probably won't be the only massive thing that happens to you in your life.
So you better get ready and develop a treatment plan.
And that's what I hope is the first dose is gonna do for you.
I'm gonna go out now and I'm gonna go for a run and try to get my body in shape.
I've got five interviews today and I need to get loosened up a little bit.
And I just wanted to give you this idea.
Learn how to turn the massive thing into a thing that happened and not the thing
that happened because you can't change your life until you change your mind.
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.