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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.
Hey, my friend, Dr. Lee Warren coming at you here with the Dr.
Lee Warren podcast today where neuroscience and faith smash together to help
you change your mind and change your life. We're after three things.
We want to become healthier, feel better, and be happier.
And on the podcast today, I'm going to help you get that done.
If you're watching on YouTube, go ahead and hit that subscribe button.
I'd love for you to subscribe so you never miss an episode.
There are links down in the box below to my website where you can learn about
my books and all the other things that we're doing to help you change your mind and change your life.
Today on the podcast, I'm going
to give you a little information about processing grief and hardship.
I've been really transparent and open about the fact that we lost our son, Mitch, 10 years ago.
And because of that, started podcasting and writing.
And that's really why I'm in front of you today, learning how to communicate
the lessons we've learned and how to get back on our feet and find hope again
after such a traumatic loss has really given me purpose.
It's given me meaning, and helping other people find words to put on the things
that they're dealing with has been incredibly helpful to me in my life.
And so every once in a while, I get something in the mail or something in an
email that makes me realize that this work is resonating with people,
and it's really important.
And I just want to remind you that wherever you are in your journey through this life,
if you've been through hard things, if you haven't, if you're going to be anticipating
that there will be some difficulties in the future because Jesus promised us,
right, John 16, 33, then in this world, you're going to have trouble.
But he also promised us in John 10.10 that he came here that we could have an abundant life.
So we're going to live in this dual reality of hard things wrapped in a beautiful life.
And I'm going to give you some information today that might help reframe your thinking.
If you feel stuck in the trauma or tragedy or massive thing that you've been
through, if you don't exactly know what to do with it or why it's in your life
or what's happened, and you don't understand what can go next,
what got you here won't get you there.
You've got to change your mind about what you've been through so that can help
you get back on your feet and find hope again.
I'm going to give you two ideas that I got from books.
I'm going to give you two things that I got in the mail recently that we'll talk about a little bit.
And I'm going to give you one scripture to try to get your mind around maybe
a new way to look at the hard things you've been through. And that's what we're going to do today.
So it's time to get after it. But I have one question for you.
You ready for the question? Here it is.
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 love that intro music. Hey, today we're going to talk about two things I got in the mail.
Okay. The first one, somebody sent us a calendar.
We opened the mail up and somebody sent us a calendar that's got pictures of
Harvey and Lewis, our dearly recently departed super pups that you've heard
me talk about a million times.
Harvey and Lewis, of course, got into an unwinnable fight with a pack of coyotes
Sunday before last. And I had to put them down.
It was just devastating, and we miss them really like crazy.
But somebody made this incredible calendar and didn't put a note in the box,
and we don't know who it was.
And so if that was you, Lisa and I greatly appreciate it. It was very touching.
It means a lot to us, and we'd love to know who it was just so we can properly
thank you. If it was you, please send an email, lee at drleewarren.com.
Let us know it came from you.
It looks like somebody went through our Instagram or something and found some
nice pictures of Harvey and Lewis and created a calendar.
So that was really kind, and we appreciate it. So sometimes when you open the
mail, you get some kindness or some gift from somebody and it just really touches
you. And that was the day for us. So thank you.
Secondly, this is the focus of today's episode. I'm going to give you just a
piece of mail that I got yesterday.
I opened up the mail and there was a card in there. I don't know if you can
see this, but it says, you're the best.
And it's a thank you card. And I'm going to read part of it to you.
I did a little research. I don't know the lady who wrote this card,
but she lives in a really small town. And I'm sure that what she writes about
in the card is pretty notable in that small town.
And so to avoid any sort of violation of her privacy, because I don't know this
person and she didn't send me an email address or anything so I could reach out to her.
I'm not going to say her name or where she's from, and I'm not going to give
you the exact details of what she shared.
But I want to give you the gist of this because it's going to create the context
for what we're going to talk about today. day, okay?
So she says this, Dr. Warren, thank you for your book, Hope is the First Dose.
It was recently recommended to me.
My two children were tragically killed.
She lost two children on the same day. I can't even imagine.
My two children, teenage children
were tragically killed and I am desperately trying to find my way.
I have, this is hard, I have such a fear of being stuck in the hopelessness, like you mentioned.
Books and reading are my refuge or my numbing agent of choice.
Depends on the day and my perspective. And if I had the energy to do the work to continue living.
I'm not sure if I will find my way or ever have peace, but your journey helps me think maybe.
And I suppose some might call that hope.
Thank you again for sharing a part of your journey. I am very sorry for the
loss of your son, Mitch. May your peace continue.
Listen, it was devastating to me because I remember being in those early days after we lost Mitch.
And I can't imagine, I don't know what the multiplier is if you lose more than
one child, if it's double or infinitely worse.
I don't know how that math works.
I've been around a lot of bereaved parents, and nobody can tell me.
I mean, I don't think there's a way you can put a number on how much pain a
human can have. But I just can't imagine.
We lost one child. I just can't imagine losing more than one.
But this person did, and she writes about very beautifully how you're using
reading and books as a way to numb yourself sometimes, as a way to find hope,
to claw out some way to find meaning and purpose again. And she's really honest
about it, which is important.
We need to be honest about how these massive things affect us.
She's super honest about the fact that I'm not sure if I'm going to land on hope.
I'm not sure if I'm going to find faith or peace again. I'm not sure.
And you know what? That's okay.
It's okay to feel that. I felt that and still do some days, 10 years later.
But I just want to share a couple of things with you today for that person and
for you, friend, whatever you're going through, especially if you're in relatively
early days of your journey after these massive things have happened in your
life or if you're still in the midst of it.
Early on, it can be really hard to find your way. And that grief process can
feel just so murky and so unnavigable.
It just doesn't feel like you can make it sometimes. And it's okay.
In fact, I think it's healthy to express that, to say it out loud,
to talk about the fact that your life has given you a blow.
And you're not even sure that God's there with you anymore or that he even exists anymore sometimes.
And so I want to give you some ideas from a book by a friend of mine named Gordon Livingston.
Gordon died a few years ago, but he was a psychiatrist who lived in Baltimore.
He wrote a number of books. One of them was called Too Soon Old,
Too Late Smart, 30 True Things You Need to Know Now.
And Gordon's book was based out of his experience of losing his two sons.
And it sounds horrible to say you lost two sons, and it is horrible,
But Gordon's particular story was incredibly difficult and horrible.
His first son committed suicide, his older son.
And his younger son, who was eight, I think, died 13 months later of complications from leukemia.
And the story even gets worse because the reason the boy died wasn't necessarily
directly related to the leukemia, but he had to have a bone marrow transplant,
and Gordon was the donor.
And his son had an allergic reaction to the bone marrow transplant and died
as a result of the allergy to the bone marrow that his father,
my friend Gordon, had donated. That's just.
I don't even know how you survive that. Imagine the guilt and the difficulty.
It's just overwhelming.
But Gordon wrote in his book of his older son who died, I received a phone call
telling me that my precious son Andrew, age 22, had ended his three-year struggle
with bipolar illness by killing himself.
Even now, years later, words cannot contain the grief that has been my companion
since that awful day, Gordon writes. It is an offense to the natural order of
life for parents to bury their children.
In a just world, it would never happen. In this world, it does.
I'm going to pause there for a second. Friend, the lady who wrote this card,
and you maybe, I've been there, and you say things like that.
God, how can this happen?
How can there be justice? How can this be happening?
And it just can't. It's not just. It's not right. It's not fair.
And all those things are true.
And so how can you then hold on to anything that looks like faith in the midst
of all these really hard things happening?
Listen to what Gordon said. Now, Gordon was an atheist, okay?
He was an atheist, morphed into an agnostic. And then later in his life,
when I got to know him, he was on my podcast years ago.
When I got to know him, he would almost say that he had faith.
He was searching for something to let him believe that he would get to see his
sons again. And here's what he wrote.
I imagine that his final desperate moments were eased with some anticipation
of release from the anguish he had endured.
I pray, notice he uses the word pray.
I pray that he found at last the peace that he sought.
Only this hope has allowed me to bear my own pain and go on.
What allows you to bear pain and go on? Hope.
Hope does. It's the only way. Hope is the first dose of the thing that will
get you moving towards a treatment plan that will help you find your way again.
It's hope. It starts with hope. And Gordon wrote it exactly beautifully.
His illness, he's talking about his younger son now, his illness proved a cold
wind that none of us could shield him from, his little boy. In the end, it swept him away.
So he's lost one son 13 months before. Now he's writing of his younger son.
When you think about it, it's remarkable that instead of being hopelessly discouraged.
By such a state of affairs, we persist in trying to extract happiness from our brief time on earth.
Gordon is aware of this notion that all of us, no matter how much trouble we're
going through, no matter how much hardship, we have something inside us that
tells us that we're supposed to be able to be hopeful and happy.
Something is inside us. And I'm here to tell you, friend, that thing that's
inside you is your spirit that was created for you to live in abundance,
constantly telling you that it's possible to have both the hard and the beautiful.
The and is what gets us there. there. Gordon's writing about it from the perspective
of somebody that doesn't believe, and he's clawing, trying to find something
he can believe in because he's identified the thing that would really give him
hope, and that's to be able to see his sons again.
He says this, all of us, and of all the ways we pursue it, as Genesis suggests,
by cleaving to each other, that we come the closest.
What he's saying is you find hope mostly through cleaving to other people,
To Jesus, to your family, to people who are still here with you,
holding on tightly to them, holding on to community.
That's the rehab part of the treatment plan that I give you and hope is the first dose.
Now, listen to what Gordon says.
This is devastating. With time, the nature of these thoughts changes from the
lacerating images of illness and dying to softer memories of all that their lives contained.
That's true. Your memory evolves over time.
I go from thinking about Mitch being stabbed to death and thinking of all the
things we lost and him not growing older and getting married and having children
and all the things we would have done together.
It softens over time into things
of remembering who he was and moments that we
had together and and the hope for the future it softens that's a beautiful way
that gordon wrote that indeed it was the subject grief he says is a subject
i have come to know indeed it was the subject of my life for a long time that's
what this lady that wrote the card is saying grief is still the the subject of her life.
And Gordon says, I wrote a book about it, trying to find my way around it.
I've done that now three times, written books that grapple with these hard things.
Just trying to find your way through. Philip Yancey says when he has something
that's hard for him to understand, he starts writing a book to hack his way
through it until he finally comes out on the other side with some understanding
of what he's going through.
And that's why his books have been powerful for me and maybe you and millions of other people.
Because we help each other through through by processing what we're going through
and trying to put words around it so gordon says trying to find my way around
it what i learned is that there is no way around it you just have to go through
it in that journey i experienced hopelessness,
contemplated suicide and learned that i was not alone so.
Okay, full disclosure. It's been several hours since I recorded the first part of this episode.
It was this morning. It's Wednesday.
And I also realized that when I launched the Michael Gillen podcast this morning,
I said it was throwback Thursday and it was Wednesday, friend.
I somehow got my days confused. The Michael Gillen episode is up today,
which is Wednesday, September 20th.
And you're going to hear this episode on Thursday.
And it's not throwback Thursday, because this is a brand new episode.
So several hours have gone by. This morning I started recording that,
and then I ran out of time.
I had to do an interview with Addison Bevere for his podcast,
and we talked a lot about this theology of suffering and grief and all of that
on his show this morning.
And it got me thinking, and I came home, and my head was full of this note,
this incredible note that this woman wrote me who had lost her two children,
and Gordon Livingston's words
that you just heard me read that we're going to go back to in a moment.
And I decided to go out for a run. Sometimes that's good to clear my head and help me think.
And so I went for a run, and I was listening to an audio book, The Confessions of St.
Augustine. And right before that, I finished the book by James K.A. Smith.
On the Road with St. Augustine, which is where we started this month,
the episode about the road life.
Is the road life, really? Is that all there is? The road is life?
And James K.A. Smith's book and Augustine's Confessions got me thinking about
Kurt Thompson's book, The Deepest Place.
So I listened to that for a little bit. And it's about suffering.
And so I've spent this whole day thinking about grief and suffering.
And I just can't get this woman's note out of my head. So I hope you're hearing this, friend.
I hope you found the podcast. And if you haven't, I'm going to find a way to get this to you.
But whatever you're going through, my friend who's hearing this,
wherever you are, Luxembourg or Canada or any of the other hundred and twenty
six countries where people are hearing this.
Here's what I want you to get out of the rest of this episode today.
OK, Isaiah 48, 10 says, see, I have refined you not in the way silver is refined.
I have refined you in the furnace of suffering.
What Gordon's talking about, Gordon Livingston, in this passage that I just
read, I'm going to finish in a second.
He's talking about the fact that losing his two sons in 13 months put him in a furnace.
And he started realizing that he was going to burn up. He said,
I experienced hopelessness, contemplated suicide, learned that I was not alone.
Certain that there would be no comfort in words, I came to realize that words,
my own and those of others, were all that I had to frame my experience.
First my despair and finally a fragile belief that my life still had meaning.
13 years later, my sons, though frozen in time, remain a living presence for me.
I have largely forgiven myself for not being able to save them.
I have reconciled myself to growing old without them.
They will not, as I once confidently assumed, bury me.
I have forsaken any belief in an orderly universe and a just God, Gordon says.
But I have not relinquished my love for them, nor my longing that against all
reason I will see them again. This is where he starts believing.
He starts believing that he's going to see his sons again somehow.
And he finishes with this.
This is what passes for hope.
This is what passes for hope. Hope, Gordon Livingston writes,
those we have lost evoked in us feelings of love that we didn't know we were capable of.
These permanent changes are their legacies, their gifts to us.
It is our task to transfer that love to those who still need us.
In this way, we remain faithful to their memories. Gordon found some truth here.
He was searching desperately for something. He didn't have faith.
He was trying to find it, but he found his way to say this is what passes for hope.
I get to see my sons again, and my job now is to take their legacy and redeem
it and make it worth something by passing some love on to somebody else.
I'm going to share 2 Corinthians 1 here with you in a moment as the scripture for today.
But I want to just spend a second in Isaiah 48, 10, when he said,
See, I have refined you, not like silver is refined.
Rather, I have refined you in the furnace of suffering. And I'm just going to
tell you, friend, this is the hard truth that I've learned after 10 years as a bereaved father.
You only have two choices. choices you didn't
choose to have life pull that yellow handle and eject
you into the furnace of suffering you didn't choose that
okay you didn't choose to lose your son or find
out your husband has glioblastoma or find out you have malignant metastatic
melanoma you didn't choose to get that phone call and find out your son's dead
you didn't choose that but it happened and now you're launched out into that
pit and you're in the furnace of suffering and there are two choices there's only There's only two,
and you have to make one of them. And it's not fair.
It's not good. It's not right. But there you are, and you have two choices.
You can be refined in the furnace of suffering, or you can be consumed by the furnace of suffering.
I came to that choice. I was saying, God, I see this scripture.
I don't know how it's refining me. I'm getting burned up here.
Gordon got to that place. He became suicidal. He experienced hopelessness.
He learned finally, though, that he wasn't alone.
And he figured out that he had a job to do if he wanted to live again.
And that was to learn how to take that love that was so crushed and so hurt
and so bruised and learn to transfer it to someone else.
This is a key, my friend. I want to read you this note again that this dear
lady who I've never met and don't know wrote about losing her two children.
Like you mentioned, books and reading are my refuge or my numbing agent of choice.
Depends on the day, the perspective, and if I have the energy to do the work to continue living.
That is, it's beautiful. It's powerful. It's devastating.
She goes on to say, I'm not even sure if I will find my way or ever have peace.
But your journey helps me think maybe, and I suppose some might call that hope.
Gordon Livingston said, this is what passes for hope.
You just wrote, this lady just wrote, some might call that hope.
I remember another email I got last year. I did a podcast episode about it at
a quiet time where a woman lost her husband and her son, who died in a boating
accident, with the whole family drowned right in front of them.
It was devastating. And she said, so here we are with broken hearts we never expected.
Here we are with broken hearts we never expected.
That's the tone, that's the feeling that you have when you're in the furnace
of suffering. I've got this broken heart.
Somebody pulled this yellow handle. This thing happened. That person died.
I've lost my two children. I didn't want that.
I've got a broken heart and I don't want it.
But my friend, I'm just here to tell you, there's a path forward and it's called
hope. And that hope is how you're going to find a way someday to be refined
by the furnace and not defined by it or consumed by it.
Only two choices. It's going to consume you or it's going to refine you.
And if it consumes you, then that turns out to be the thing that defined your
life, that your life was about having been consumed in the furnace.
And I would just submit to you that's not what your children would want.
Now, this person is only a year into it. And I'm at one year,
wasn't ready for this. So it's not time yet, maybe.
But I'm just putting this out there. The beautiful thing about podcasting and
writing books and all of that is this content goes out and it stays out.
When God says, I'll send my word out and it doesn't come back to me empty,
it's going to do some work.
There's somebody somewhere that's at the point in time in their journey of whatever
their massive thing was, that today's the day that this landed on you and you
need to hear Dr. Warren. You need to hear your friend here.
Say, it's time to decide, are you going to be refined or are you going to be consumed?
It's time. Now, Lisa and I were watching TV the other night,
and there was a show about firefighters, and there was a landslide,
and there was a bunch of rocks that fell up against the entrance to this mine
shaft or something, and there were some kids strapped in there.
And they basically had to, the first firefighter on the scene,
had to go start picking those heavy rocks up, leaning down on the ground and
lifting those heavy rocks and carrying them up the hill to get them to a place
where they would be safe and wouldn't fall back down. And the firefighter did that over.
And then all of a sudden, a second firefighter showed up.
And now the first one only had to go half as far, and he could hand the rock
to the other firefighter, and that firefighter would carry the load,
and he could go back and pick up another rock.
And then before long, a third and a fourth and a fifth, and finally the whole
crew came, and they had a long line of these firefighters that were passing
the rock from one to the other.
And it dawned on me that's a pretty good metaphor for what happens when you're bereaved.
At first, you're just dealing with this pile of rocks that you didn't want and
you don't know what to do with,
but you know that you're just going to be crushed by them if you don't pick
them up and start trying to move them to some other place in your life.
This metaphor is not perfect, okay, but just feel me for a second. second.
You've got this massive thing that's got to be moved somehow for you to continue living.
It's got to be dealt with. It has to be handled. And you start moving it.
And before long, something really crazy happens. You don't think you have the
strength to do it that day.
Like she said, there's days I don't even know if I'm ready to keep living or not.
And all of a sudden, somebody shows up. Somebody rings the doorbell.
Your wife comes in. Your husband shows up. the phone rings and it's an old friend
and somebody says hey let me help you carry that,
a little bit let me help you with that load and you
start sharing the load and then two or
three more people and all of a sudden it's not quite as heavy somehow it's still
the same rock but you're able to pass it with a little bit more energy because
you're doing it not alone and then here's the thing that's really crazy after
some period of time after some period of time something really really strange happens.
You turn around and all of a sudden you're not the one closest to the mine anymore.
There's somebody behind you that's having to lean all the way down to the ground
and pick that rock up and they turn around and they're completely surprised
to see you there. And you say, Hey, let me help you with that.
And you don't think you can, but somehow you have the juice,
the energy to help them pick that rock of theirs up and move it a little bit
to the next person in line and you realize somehow you're equipped for this
task of helping somebody else who's hurting like you are.
It doesn't seem to make sense. It's some sort of quantum physics,
mathematical conundrum that's over my head.
But somehow you do. You have the ability to turn around and help that person
offload some of the pain that they're feeling.
It just happens that way. Six months after Mitch died, my glioblastoma patient,
Eli Bailey, said, hey, he was doing great post-op.
And he said, hey, I wrote about this, and I've seen the interview,
and I wrote about it, and hope it's the first dose. He turned around and said,
hey, can you help my brother-in-law? He just lost his son.
My brother-in-law, Jack, just lost his son. And I literally said,
how can I help another bereaved father?
Like, I'm only six months into this. I have no idea how I can help somebody else.
And he said, you're wearing pants
and you're at work and you didn't kill yourself and you're making it.
And maybe that's all he needs to hear. Maybe just put your pants on and eventually
go back to work and don't kill yourself.
Maybe that's enough. And somehow, and I met with Jack, I didn't know if I could
help him or not, but somehow I had some words.
Somehow I had some empathy. Somehow I was able to convey to him something that
he found helpful enough that he called me another time down the road that I
told the story and hope is the first dose.
And so the point is this.
There is some magic, some grace that God gives us that says you won't get over this.
It won't stop hurting. Whatever this massive thing is in your life, friend, it won't stop.
It's not going to go away. Trauma isn't what happened to you, as Gabor Montes says.
Trauma is how you process it. It's what happens inside you.
You will always have had the massive thing. It's not going away.
But somehow, God has created this system where you can be in this furnace,
and it is burning you, but it's also making you better. is giving you some tools
and some skills that you didn't think you had. You didn't want them.
I started writing, and I started podcasting after we lost Mitch,
after that conversation with Jack.
And it was literally because I figured out that I had some words that I wanted to say.
I had been able to articulate some of the experiences that we were going through,
and there were other people who were going through similar things that didn't
have the ability to articulate that, and they needed it.
And it was the guy behind me in the line that didn't know what to do with that
big rock he was holding, and I was able to help him by talking about it and writing about it.
And the whole point of this entire episode is if you're in that place where
you're not sure you can find hope again, you can.
If you're in that place where you feel so broken and so beat up by the massive
thing and whatever's happened that you're not sure that you're going to make it through, you can.
But you have to make a decision. Is this going to consume me or is it going to refine me?
Is it going to become the thing of my life or a thing, a terrible thing,
a devastating thing, a hellish, nightmarish thing, but a thing and not the thing?
Let me take you to 2 Corinthians 1, starting in verse 3.
This will be the one place we're going to smash all this science of what our
brains are doing with trauma into some faith, okay?
2 Corinthians 1, verse 3. Praise be to God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,
the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all
our troubles, so that...
Why does he comfort us in all our troubles? so that we can comfort those in
any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God.
He goes on down in verse 8 to say, We were under great pressure,
far beyond our ability to endure, so much that we despaired of life itself.
He was in the furnace, and he was like, God, just take me, burn me up.
I've been there. That's what this lady who wrote this incredible note is saying.
I'm despairing of life itself. It's burning me up. It's too much pressure.
And Paul says, God gave you comfort so that you can comfort other people.
And here's what happens. You start carrying that load for somebody else a little
bit. You start finding ways to be helpful to other people.
And all of a sudden, your burdens become a little bit lighter.
They become a little bit easier to bear. They become a little bit more tolerable.
And somehow, you start making it through.
It's and. It's not either or. It's both and.
You have the terrible thing that you're having to carry. and somehow it becomes
lighter when you start helping somebody else carry it, when you give it meaning and purpose.
Like Viktor Frankl said, suffering ceases to be suffering when it has purpose
behind it. It's a paraphrase of something he said.
Okay? What's the brain science have to do with it?
We talked yesterday, or the day before yesterday, Microtubule Tuesday,
about the fact that directed mental energy causes areas of your brain to get bigger.
When you focus, you do mindfulness meditation, Meditation, the areas of your
brain involved in emotional resilience and grief processing and all those things
get stronger and bigger and better.
And when you don't direct that mental energy, harmful areas of your brain, damaging,
hard synapses form that make it easier for you to ruminate and stay in it and
suffer over and over the same things.
So the bottom line is, friend, you're either building a brain that is helping
you suffer continually or you are directing your brain to become more resilient
and help you carry those rocks a little bit more efficiently.
OK, you have a choice. You can direct your brain to make you better at the suffering
that you don't want, but you've got and you're having to deal with.
Or your brain will take a default stance that will wire in the fact that you're
just here to suffer and it's never gonna feel better than that.
And so in a choice where you can take refuge in it or you can numb yourself
to it versus you can start letting it refine you and you can choose to press
in to this horrible situation and let God keep his word that he will comfort
you even when you despair of life itself.
That, my friend, is how you change your mind, no matter how hard it is.
And it's devastating. city.
It's interesting to me that all these people who aren't necessarily people of
faith have come to the same conclusion that there's a path forward when you're
really hurting and it involves learning somehow to take that pain and love other people with it.
Mary Frances O'Connor, I'm going to interview her on Friday for an upcoming
episode of the podcast. I think I'll play it on Saturday.
It's the second book I want to talk to you about. Her book, The Grieving Brain,
The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss. She finishes the
book. This is the last paragraph.
Here's what she said. I cannot tell anyone how their values and their beliefs
feed into what they should do with their life.
You are already in the newly restored life full of love and grief and suffering and wisdom.
Love and grief and suffering and wisdom all jumbled up together.
I can only encourage you to stay in the present.
And try to learn from what happens day to day and to learn what works for you.
I believe in your ability to solve your problems and live a meaningful life
after having experienced devastating loss.
And I do too, friend. I believe in you because God believes in you.
Here's the last paragraph of her book.
The last paragraph, Mary Frances O'Connor. It's just perfect.
Once you have experienced deep grieving, you walk through a doorway.
That's what I call the yellow handle. you get ejected, you walk through a doorway
to a whole community of people that you would otherwise never have understood and empathized with.
You probably would not choose this door. You certainly wouldn't choose it,
would you, friend? You probably, she says, would not choose this door if the choice were yours.
And yet here you are on the other side.
Here we are with broken Broken hearts we never expected, right?
Here you are on the other side with knowledge about yourself and a marvelous
brain that you can utilize to build and navigate a new world.
Friend, you have a marvelous, fearfully, and wonderfully created brain.
And you didn't want this. You didn't want to go through that door.
You didn't want that yellow handle to get pulled.
You didn't want to find yourself in the furnace of suffering.
But here you are. with a broken heart you never expected, and you're looking
for what passes for hope.
You're looking for what some might call hope.
And I'm just telling you, hope
can be found, and it is an intentional process of memory and movement.
And that's why there's a treatment plan, okay? There's a plan.
There's a path. And my friend, here's the bottom line.
That's how you change your life. That's how you become healthier and feel better and be happier.
I'm just saying this not as an expert, as a father who's been living it for 10 years.
That's how you change your mind, and that's how you change your life.
But you have to start today. Here we go.
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.