160 | Hope Is the First Dose with W. Lee Warren, M.D.

"Trauma lies to you, and pain lies to you, and it makes you think:  This is always how I'm going to feel, and this is always how it's going to be.  And the truth is, if you're still alive, God has a plan for your life, and your life has purpose and meaning."   Encouraging words from Dr. W. Lee Warren, neurosurgeon and author of the new book "Hope Is the First Dose: A Treatment Plan for Recovering from Trauma, Tragedy, and Other Massive Things". 

When Dr. Warren's 19-year-old son Mitchell died of multiple stab wounds to his neck in August of 2013, he found himself "infinitely sad, hopeless, tormented, lost, and faithless for a while".  In our conversation today, Dr. Warren takes us down that dark mental staircase to the furnace of suffering, then leads us back up out of the pit.  He shares the path he took to find once again the abundant life promised by Jesus in John 10:10.  It involves a treatment plan that requires what he refers to as "self brain surgery" ... and the first dose is hope!

Click HERE to visit Dr. Warren's website, where you can order his books and sign up for his weekly newsletter, "Self Brain Surgery". 

Click HERE to subscribe to Dr. Warren's daily podcast, "The Dr. Lee Warren Podcast". 

Click HERE to connect with Dr. Warren on Substack.

Dr. Warren's books are also available on Amazon.  Click HERE to connect with his author page.  

 
 

All views expressed by guests on this podcast are theirs alone, and may not represent the Statement of Faith and Statement of Beliefs of the While We're Waiting ministry.

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Contact Jill by email at: jill@whilewerewaiting.org

Transcript

00:00:11 - Jill Sullivan
Hello, friends, and welcome back to the While We're Waiting hope After Child Loss Podcast. I'm Jill Sullivan, your host and one of the co founders of the While We're Waiting ministry. This is a podcast of stories ... stories of devastating loss and grief and heartbreak and struggle and stories of hope and healing and faith and, yes, even joy. Underlying every conversation is the hope we have in Jesus Christ, which makes it possible to not just survive the loss of a child, but to live well while we're waiting to see them again in heaven one day. You can learn more about our ministry and the free Bereaved parent retreats we host by visiting our website at www.whilewerewaiting.org. Welcome to episode number 160.

I'm so pleased to bring you a conversation today that I recently had the opportunity to record with Dr. W. Lee Warren, who is an award winning author, brain surgeon, patent holding inventor, and Iraq War veteran. He's the author of three books, "No Place to Hide", which details his experiences as a neurosurgeon in the Iraq War, "I've Seen the End of You", in which he grapples with issues of faith and doubt as a scientist and a Christian while treating patients with terminal brain cancer ... and his newest book, "Hope is The First Dose", which delves into issues of trauma and loss. He also hosts a daily podcast and has been featured on such news outlets as the CBS Evening News, the 700 Club, and Focus on the Family. He's married to his wife Lisa, and has four children and four grandchildren. Dr. Warren is also a bereaved dad, and he joins me today to talk about his son Mitch and how God is walking with him through his grief journey. He is warm and authentic, and I believe you will be blessed by listening to our conversation. Hello, Dr. Warren. Thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today.

00:02:02 - Dr. Warren
Thank you, Jill. It's an honor to be with you.

00:02:04 - Jill Sullivan
Thank you. You know, I have to be honest with you. I picked up your book "I've Seen the End of You" a couple of years ago when it first came out. I was intrigued by the title and the fact that the book was by a neurosurgeon. But I have to tell you, I only got into the fourth sentence of the prologue and discovered that the title "I've Seen the End of You" refers to what you thought or felt as a neurosurgeon looking at an MRI of someone who had a glioblastoma. And my daughter died from GBM back in 2009, and it was just a little too much for me. I just kind of had to take your book and put it away. But about six months ago or so, I picked it back up again and I began to read it, and it was really so helpful for me. There was this odd sort of comfort that I got from realizing that no matter what we would have done or what treatment plan we would have pursued, there would most likely not have been any different outcome in her situation. So I just want to thank you for that today.

00:03:07 - Dr. Warren
Thank you. I understand that sometimes when we write about specific things, it can be hard for people to process those things when they're dealing with them. And I think that's one of the things I learned as a bereaved father, too, is that you're not ready for certain things at certain times, and then they turn out to be blessings later. So I'm glad it was helpful to you.

00:03:25 - Jill Sullivan
Yeah. And the whole interplay of faith and doubt and dealing with that, when you know what the diagnosis could mean, and yet you still have faith and you trust. So all of those things ... just grappling through all those issues were helpful for me. But I also discovered, as I read farther into that book, that you were one of us, that you are a bereaved parent as well. And I know that every bereaved parent loves to talk about their child, and so take just a few minutes and help us get to know Mitch a little bit.

00:03:54 - Dr. Warren
Yeah. Mitch was a brilliant kid. He was really one of these people that always saw the best in other people and was really just energetic and fun and was a great runner, and he just loved people, and he loved humor and music. He was a really good musician, bass guitar player. He was also kind of uncomfortable in his own skin, I think, as a lot of creative people are. He said he struggled with feeling safe or feeling happy sometimes and that led him to make some bad choices from time to time. But he always had this passion for life and was just a really glue of our family, almost one of the ones that kind of held everybody together. So it was a really jarring thing for our family when we lost him.

00:04:39 - Jill Sullivan
Yeah. In your new book, Hope is the First Dose, that's just come out in the last week or so ... In the early chapters of this book, you really share a very intimate and detailed account of the moments that you first learned about Mitch's unexpected death and the days and months that follow. I've read a lot of books for bereaved parents, and this one, to me, is one of the most honest and maybe un-sugar-coated accounts of grief I think I've read. And I know you still don't know all the details, but what happened to Mitch, and what was the immediate aftermath of that for you?

00:05:16 - Dr. Warren
Well, as a preamble to that, I appreciate what you said about the honesty part of it. The reason I chose to do that is I'm going to write a book to try to give other people who have been through really hard things a plan for how our family sort of found our feet again. I felt like I needed to start with the bona fides of here's what we felt and here's what we did, because that's going to be part of your healing journey. No matter what started your trauma or your tragedy or your massive thing or whatever happened that hurt you, you're going to have to walk through those early days. And so I wanted you to know that it gets really dark and that you can find your feet again. I just wanted to tell the truth about that. For us, it was also important, because anytime you say something shocking like, my 19 year old son was stabbed to death, then if you stop there, somebody's going to get on the Internet, and they're going to Google and try to find out what happened if you didn't give them enough detail. And so we've had this ten years now of this reality that my son and his best friend since childhood were in a house together, and both of them died of stab wounds to their neck. Mitchell had eight stab wounds to his neck, and the other boy had one. And there were three knives in the house that had blood on them. And my son had had a car accident a couple of weeks prior to his death, and he had a cast on his dominant hand, a really bulky cast on his right hand. And the town that he lived in with his mom is a really small town in Alabama, and they don't like scandal in that town. They just want things to clean things up and move on. And so these two 19 year old boys died in my son's mother's house. And the police literally walked in the house and saw the two bodies and saw that Mitchell was close to one of the knives, and there was a knife in the kitchen and another knife in another room. And he said, oh, well, that boy is closer to the knife. He must have killed the other kid and then killed himself. And that's what they decided. And then they literally cleaned the crime scene and removed the bodies. And they did not call, in violation of state law, did not call the investigative authorities or the FBI or the State Bureau of Investigation or any detectives. They just declared it to be so, and they left it at that. And they had a press conference the next day in which the mayor and the police chief said, Mitchell Warren killed his best friend and then took his own life. And that was the story. And so for us, especially as the details came and the autopsies and the drug screens were negative and there was no alcohol, and neither boy had ever been violent, and they were best friends, and Mitch was super passive, kind of polite kid who never did anything. So I think it was important for us to just tell the truth about what we know and what we don't know. And we don't believe that that's the narrative, but that's the official narrative. And so we're left there to just not know.

00:08:17 - Jill Sullivan
Yeah. Wow. It must be incredibly difficult to live with those unknowns, to not really know. And then to have that narrative out there that really doesn't feel accurate.

00:08:31 - Dr. Warren
Yeah, it is. And it was a challenge for us in the healing process, too, because most of the time, you have some sort of answer. I mean, you all knew what happened, and there's a car wreck, there's a tumor, there's something. And here we have this situation that's so far from anything that Mitch would have done in his lifetime unless he had some sort of extreme mental break. And then plus past that, there's this question of how do you, with your casted dominant hand, how do you have the skill to murder your friend with one blow and then it takes eight blows to kill yourself? And I've been doing trauma surgery long enough to know that nobody stabs themselves in the neck nine times or eight times. You can't do that. And so it was just this big question, and we had to come to this decision point, this branch point. We see a lot of people who something big happens in their life, and it becomes the defining thing, and they're like, we're going to find all the answers, and we're going to pick at the police, and we're going to file lawsuits and all this stuff. And we had people advising us that stuff, Jill ... Saying things like, we know they violated state law and they should have called the FBI and they should have done all these X, Y and Z and you could sue them. And we were like, none of that stuff would bring Mitch back, and it would drag us through all these years. And at the end of the day, unless a third party comes forward and says, I was there and I saw this happen or I did it, then we'll never really know. And so it doesn't bring them back, it doesn't solve the grief process, and it doesn't let us move forward in our lives. And so we just said, God gave us a wound that we'll never understand why it happened, and we just have to learn to move forward.

00:10:09 - Jill Sullivan
Yeah. In your book, you use the acronym TMT that stands for The Massive Thing. And this certainly was a massive thing in your life.

00:10:21 - Dr. Warren
It was. It's the most devastating thing that's ever happened to me or to any of us. And I think a big part of how grief affects us is this idea that we have, and all of us have it before we go through the massive thing, this idea that it won't happen to us. Right. Like, you hear about kids with pediatric cancer, it's not going to happen in our family. You hear about kids who were murdered or whatever, it's not going to happen to us. We're good people. It never happens to people like us, but then it does happen. And part of your problem is, how in the world could God have let that happen to us? We go to church and we tithe and we pray and we do all the right stuff. How could this happen to us? And what I realized is, as a doctor, that was unbelievably naive of me to ever think that it couldn't happen to me. The better question is, why hasn't it happened to somebody like me before? Because stuff like this happens to everybody. And so I think one of the reasons I wanted to write this book was to say, we prepare for all kinds of things in our lives that aren't likely to happen. How many times in grade school do they tell you to stop, drop and roll if you catch on fire? Right. Like, I'm 54. I've never caught on fire before. But I know exactly what I'm going to do if I burst into flames. In a few minutes, when we get off of this call, I'm going to stop, drop and roll, because I got a plan. We teach people CPR. Like, if somebody collapses in front of you, here's what you do. You give them first aid, and you compress their chest and breathe in their mouth. We teach people how to change flat tires and all that stuff, but we don't prepare for these massive wounds that happen. We don't have a plan. And so I thought, as a doctor, I need to give people a plan. That's how it worked for me.

00:12:05 - Jill Sullivan
Yeah, absolutely. Well, and your book does that very clearly. It really spells out a plan, and that's really helpful, and we'll talk about that in just a little bit. I did want to ask you, your TMT had some really profound effects on you physically. What were some of those effects?

00:12:23 - Dr. Warren
It was really weird. The first thing I noticed was the night we were standing out in the street in Prattville, Alabama, outside the home in which his body and his friend's body were. I was experiencing all these physiological things, and I had this weird running commentary as a physician of knowing what that was that I was feeling. So I would feel my heart rate go up, and I'd feel my mouth get dry, and I would say, oh, my sympathetic nervous system is doing this fear response to me. And I remembered a line. C. S. Lewis in his Grief Observed book, he said, Nobody ever told me that grief feels just like fear. And I was thinking that stuff like, I feel afraid, but nothing bad is happening. Nobody's attacking me. The danger was in that house. It had already happened, and whatever bad was going on. And so I had this physiological thing happening that I understood on an intellectual level, and that was almost distressing to me, like, to say, Wait, I know what's happening. Why can't I make it stop happening? So that was weird. And then a few months later, or a few weeks later, we were in San Antonio, and I woke up one morning and my back hurt, my right shoulder blade. In fact, people tell me sometimes I don't realize it, but I apparently do a lot of sort of stretching motions with my shoulders all the time. And you'll probably see me do it while we're talking here because my right shoulder hurts all the time. And the reason it hurts is because I developed a case of shingles. I was 43 years old when Mitch died, 44, and I woke up one morning and had raging case of shingles in my right scapula. And ever since then, I've got pain in that shoulder blade. And I've had patients tell me that over the years that this people that have shingles have this post herpetic pain neuralgia, they call it. And they say it's miserable. And it turns out it really is miserable.

00:14:05 - Jill Sullivan
They were right.

00:14:07 - Dr. Warren
But shingles is a known stress response that people that have that herpes Zoster virus from chickenpox when they were kids, it can be reactivated due to extreme mental stress and trauma. And I got it. And now, every day of my life, at some point, especially when I'm sad or stressed about something, I get this really bad interscapular pain. And so that happened, and then a few days later, a patch of hair on the side of my head. I had really brown, sandy blonde hair, and I had this baseball sized patch of gray hair that showed up one morning, like, literally overnight. And now you can see if you're listening to this audio, you can't see, but it's salt and pepper, like, mostly gray now. And that happened shortly after I lost Mitchell. My hair turned gray. And then another morning, I woke up and I felt like I had sand in my mouth. And it turned out I ground one of my fillings out and I'd broken two molars in half from grinding my teeth. And that reminds me of that passage in Lamentations where the guy says, "He has ground my teeth to dust and he has broken my back with grief." And that's what happens. He's trying to put words to stuff he didn't understand yet, that your body responds to the extreme mental stress of going through these massive things. And mine certainly did.

00:15:19 - Jill Sullivan
Yeah, that's something we talk about often at our retreats. It's just those physical manifestations of grief, and those are things that most people don't know, that grieving people very often deal with issues like that. The death of Mitch also profoundly impacted you spiritually. How was your faith impacted by his loss?

00:15:40 - Dr. Warren
The first thing was I got really mad at God. Jill, I'm a guy raised in the church. My parents were amazing at always pointing us to the Word, whatever you're going through, you can find something in the Word to help you manage it and learn from it and deal with it. So I had this lifetime of trying to be the guy that counted on God and believed it was going to be okay and believed that if you did the right stuff, God would protect you and all that. And again, really naive, but I did. And the week that Mitch died, we were in the final week of this biannual 21 days of prayer thing that we do at our church or did in our church in Alabama, where we would go to the church building at 06:00 a.m. Monday through Friday every day. And we have this corporate prayer event and we're fasting and praying. And the day that Mitch died was the day we were praying for the kids, for the children in the church. And the youth minister was leading the prayer service. And we went through this hour of prayer, like every aspect of your kids' life, and you're praying by name for them and writing things down that you specifically want God to do for your kids and begging Him and interceding for them to protect them and help them. And we really dug in prayer for our kids. And then later that day, Mitch called me, and we'd been a little bit estranged for the last year of his life. He was kind of making some bad decisions, and he decided he didn't want to go to college right then. He wanted to go work for a while and make some money. So he left Auburn University. You know how kids do that.

00:17:09 - Jill Sullivan
Oh, sure.

00:17:10 - Dr. Warren
He wasn't doing anything bad. He wasn't committing crimes or anything. He was headstrong. He wanted to do his own thing. And me being the Type A, controlled dad, like, you got to go to college. And he thought I was trying to control him. And we'd argued. We just had some time when things weren't great. And then all of a sudden, that morning, he calls me, I look down, and it's Mitch and I'm in between surgeries. And we had this amazing conversation ... a long conversation. We had a delay in my surgery schedule. We talked for an hour, and it was the best conversation we'd had in years, Jill, and he said, dad, you were right ... you and Lisa ... I need to come back to school, and I want to move back in with y'all for a while and go back to school in the fall and all this stuff. And he's got one more shift. He has to work at his job that he was working at a restaurant in Alabama. And so he wants to honor his commitment on the schedule. So he's going to wait a couple of days before he comes home, and then he says, I love you, dad. And I said, I love you too, Mitch. And the last thing I ever heard my son say was, I love you. And the last thing he ever heard me say was I love you. And then 6 hours later he died. And so I had all of that stuff like God, we're praying and you're telling me and then Mitch calls me and everything's going to be okay. And then now he's gone. And it just felt like a big dirty trick had been played and almost like, why would you do all that? And then on the day that he's going to die, you knew he was going to die today. And it made me really mad for a while, sure. And I found myself not wanting ... people say this all the time, I don't believe in a God that could do something like that, all of this sort of dirty trick stuff. But what I realized was I was really in trouble here because my worldview is built on believing that God keeps his promises and that there's a resurrection after you die. And there's this verse in the New Testament, I can't remember where it is right now, but Paul says if there's no resurrection, then we're to be pitied more than all men. If we believe all this stuff and live our lives according to this code that isn't true, we're just pitiful. And it came to me pretty clearly quickly after Mitch died, that I need him to still be out. I need to know that I can see Him again or I really am hosed as a hopeful parent. Like if I can't see Him again, then what am I to hope for, right? If it's just all over when we die, then I really have lost everything here. And so I said, well, God can't be this, it can't be this dirty, trickster, evil God. If he's also this God who's going to wipe away all of our tears someday. And if he's also loving and holding on to Mitch and taking care of Him and he's in the place where he was created to be and all that, I started, I said, I got to believe these promises are true. And if they are, then all of them have to be true. If one of them is a lie, then they're all lies. If you can't trust God, you can't trust Him in any of it. So then I decided, well, if the resurrection is true and mentions in that great cloud of witnesses and all that, then I can hope and I can start looking for other promises that will be helpful to me in the meantime. And one of those was Psalm 34:18 where he says the Lord is close to the broken hearted. And I started noticing that he was showing up in all kinds of ways. It would be at the worst moment. And you probably remember these hours after your daughter where you just don't think you can take another breath, you don't think you can get your pants on that day. And then somebody will send you a text message and it's just exactly the right moment. The verse or the thing they say moves you forward just a little bit. Or Lisa would come in the room right when I was breaking down and she would say, I love you. I just felt like I needed to come in here and see you, and I would do that for her. And so we just kept all these every day, God would show up in some kind way and then other promises started coming true too, that he was still out there and he was still loving on us and he was still caring for us. And so maybe he was really going to be there for us and get us through this. And that's kind of what started the engine up again of pursuing hope.

00:21:14 - Jill Sullivan
Yeah, exactly. Pursuing hope. That's what it's all about at our retreats. That's one of the things that we talk about. The name of our ministry, of course, and the podcast is While We're Waiting. And it's living well, seeking hope while we're waiting to see our children again one day. Let's kind of jump into a little bit of your book. Now, you've worked with a lot of patients through the years, and you've dealt with some devastating health situations with those patients, and you've identified four different types of trauma responses. What are those and what can we learn from them?

00:21:51 - Dr. Warren
This came out of me trying to be a good scientist and understand what I was feeling and to try to find a path forward for myself and my family. And I started observing people as they were going through their massive things, the traumas and tragedies and brain tumors and their husband dying and all that stuff. And I noticed that there's these patterns that people fall into. And the truth is, most of us move in and out of different patterns, and nobody's a perfect model here. But the first one, the most irritating one, frankly, because I'm not one of them, is this group that seemed to be untouchable. I call them Untouchable. Something happens and they say, I've always had faith and I believe God's going to hold me through this and it's going to be okay. And they just never waver. Their spiritual state, their hopefulness, their joy never fades at all, and they just plow through it and they seem to be able to handle anything. And so there's those guys and then there's this group that I call the Crashers, which is not as common. They're more common than Untouchables, but not the most common group. And these are people who seem pretty put together and they have a good story and a good faith, and they have all the right platitudes and all the right words, and then something happens and they just plummet on the hopefulness, peace of mind, joy, happiness scale, all that social stuff. And even if they recover from the medical problem and survive, they stay bitter and they stay broken and they stay angry. And, you know, people like this who they lose somebody and it becomes the defining thing of their life. And 20 years later, that's all they ever talk about. You'll call them up and say, hey, how are you doing today? Well, it's been 34 years and 17 days and 9 hours since my daughter died, and they just can't get back up again. And those people are crashers, and their life is over, even though they keep on living, right. And then there's a group that I think is the most common. I think you might be one. I'm certainly one. We call them Dippers. And these folks are pretty together. Something happens, they get kind of wiped out. They get kind of mad at God. They can't figure out for a little while what they're going to do, and something turns them around, and they find their way back to the things that they've always believed, and they hold on again. They find meaning and purpose. They find some other way to define what their life's going to look like, and they make it back to someplace that's different, but it's still meaningful. And they can say, yeah, I'm happy. I'm okay. I've got a meaning for my life. And we start podcasts and we write books, and we do things like you and I have done to try to give some context and meaning and help other people and make our person that we lost proud of us and redeem that loss in some way. Those are Dippers. And the most surprising group are the people who didn't have a faith and didn't have a hope and didn't have anything that they would say was happy or good about their lives before they had their massive thing. I told a story in my previous book. I've seen the interview of this guy named Joey who his dad left, abandoned him when he was a baby. His mother died at birth. He was a drug addict. He was imprisoned. He got arrested for cooking meth and got hit in the head by a drug agent. A DEA agent found out that he had a brain tumor when I was operating on him to try to save his life from this blood clot and found out he had brain cancer and was down and out. And he responded to learning that he had brain cancer by basically saying, of course I do. Why wouldn't I have brain cancer? Everything else in my life's terrible. I might as well have a brain tumor. And he was just down and out. And then as he began to die from his brain cancer, a chaplain befriended him and taught him about Jesus, and he reconnected with his family, and he went back to get his GED. He wanted to be the first person in his family to finish high school, so he went back to night school while he was dying of brain cancer and. Ultimately, he fell in love with a classmate and was going to get married. And he told me shortly before he died, this is the best year of my whole life. I'm alive even though I'm dying. And so that's a Climber. They're super surprising, but it turns out that sometimes these tragedies in our lives can be clarifying for us and they can turn out to be a blessing in some ways and kind of point us towards a life that we didn't even know we could.

00:26:02 - Jill Sullivan
Yeah, well, that's one of the things I enjoy most about your books, are the characters that you get to know as you read their stories, and Joey is one of them and know, I could relate to him with Hannah's story and people just have to read the book to get to know those folks. But yeah, it's very helpful to read those kinds of stories. One of the things you talk about in your book is that glioblastoma is not the deadliest thing. What is the deadliest thing that can happen to a person?

00:26:35 - Dr. Warren
It's interesting, when I wrote that, first wrote that and I've seen the interview, I hadn't yet done the research to find this out, but it turns out that what I said is actually true and it's been researched a lot. The deadliest thing that can happen to you is hopelessness. And it's deadly because people who lose hope have worse outcomes in every measurable way case matched by diagnosis for age and sex and how bad off you are. People who aren't hopeful are sicker faster, they live shorter, they take more medicine, they spend more time in the hospital, they drink more alcohol, they get divorced more frequently. Hopelessness turns out to be way worse than just having cancer. And hopefulness, on the other hand, learning how to be hopeful and positive turns out to be the thing that makes the most impact in your overall quality of life. Of all the things that have ever been studied, a hopeful, positive attitude. And that's not the same as saying you need to be just generally optimistic. Okay? Optimism is wishful thinking, but hopefulness is believing in something that can't be taken from you. Okay? So it just turns out that hopelessness is the deadliest thing known to man, that if you become hopeless, nothing good can happen again in your life because you won't see it that way. It won't feel good to you if you're hopeless.

00:27:50 - Jill Sullivan
Right? Wow, that's so true. So what is Warren's Gap Theory? You talk about that in your book. What is your Gap Theory?

00:27:59 - Dr. Warren
So there's a passage, Romans 4:18, the apostle Paul is talking about this guy Abraham in the Old Testament, the father of the faithful they call him, and he's reminding us of the story of Abraham, who, when he was almost 100 years old, God promised him that he was going to have a child. They were childless. And in that society, in that era, being childless was a big shame. It was a big albatross around your neck. Most people thought that meant you were cursed if you didn't have children. And so he's 90 years old, and God comes to him and says, you're going to have a child, and that child is going to become the father of this massive nation, and the Savior of the world is going to come through your lineage and all that stuff. And it's a ridiculous story because he's 100 years old, right, by the time the baby comes. But then 2000 years later in the New Testament, Paul says, against all hope, Abraham believed in hope. So against all hope, Abraham believed in hope anyway. So he couldn't really cognitively experientially. He couldn't believe the story that God told him, you're going to have a child, and that child's going to become this great nation because of you and your faithfulness. He couldn't really believe that based on experience. So what he had to do then is he had to believe it based on trust in God in general, in the character of God and who God had always been. And then he had to just decide that if faith means that God can do the things that God says he can do, God could make this baby come and do all these things, then hope has to mean that God will do that for me. And so faith is, can God do the thing he says he can do? And hope is, will he do it for me? Not only can he do it, but will he actually do it for me? And so he says it's a hopeless situation. I'm 100 years old. Nobody ever has a baby when they're 100 years old. My wife is postmenopausal and all that stuff that would go into having a baby when you're 100. And he says if God says it, he can do it, and if he can do it, he'll do it for me because he said he would. And so I'm going to believe in hope even though it's hopeless. And so what I said about the Gap Theory is if you graph that out, if you look at that graph of those four personality types and how they end up, the Climbers, the Dippers, and the Untouchables end up back at some hopeful place at the top of that graph, and the Crashers end up at the bottom. The gap between them, the thing that separates the people who end up being hopeful despite massive things happening to them from the people that end up miserable and hopeless, is faith. Faith lives in the gap between against and hope. And so if you put it on paper and chart it out, it turns out to look just like the glioblastoma survival curve that the people who get hopeless don't survive five or ten years, they just don't. And the people who find their way back, they're okay no matter what happens with their medical or their ultimate diagnosis or situation, they end up being okay regardless of what happens to their bodies.

00:30:49 - Jill Sullivan
Right? Hope makes all the difference. It really, really does. You say you have to change your mind to change your life. How do you do that?

00:31:01 - Dr. Warren
This is another one of those things that I came up with and said as a way to try to explain how important it is to be hopeful. And then the years since I wrote that, now I've done all kinds of research. My next book is about self brain surgery and the neuroscience of all that stuff. And what I've learned is it's crystal clear now. It's absolutely certain on the science side, even if you took spirituality out of the conversation, which I never do, but if you did, it's crystal clear that the number one determinant of the quality of your life is the quality of your thinking. That the things that you think about turn into the neurotransmitter environment in your brain. And you have a tremendous amount of influence on how much dopamine and serotonin and other neurotransmitters you create based on how you think about things. And by the way, this is what the Bible is talking about in Romans 12:2, when it says don't be conformed to the world, we always take that. Christians always think that means don't follow the world's culture and don't do all the things that the world does and all that. It does mean that. But it also means don't let your grief, Jill, turn you into somebody that the world says people who grieve turn into, but rather the back half of that verse, but rather be transformed by the renewing of your mind. So what he's saying is you can't change your life until you change your mind. So I stole that from Paul. I stole it because it's self brain surgery. And the truth is, on the neuroscience side, when you think better thoughts, you make better neurotransmitters. And when you make better neurotransmitters, you make better hormones. And when you make better hormones, you control your cellular environment better. And now we know that this will blow your mind a little bit, unless you've already read it. But there was an amazing study done a few years ago in mice where they exposed these male mice to the smell of a chemical that smells like cherries, cherry blossoms. And apparently mice are really sensitive to smell and they'll twitch their nose hairs and they'll react, and you can tell that they're smelling the thing that you want them to smell. And when they would smell the cherries, they would shock them and punish them basically for reacting to the smell. And so they taught these mice to be afraid of the smell of cherry blossoms. Okay, then the remarkable thing that happened is these male mice had offspring that were separated from the parents and never met them. But the babies were also afraid of the smell of cherry blossoms, even though they had never been shocked when they smelled them. And that fear of cherry blossoms persisted through four generations. And then they did research on the DNA of what happened in the sperm cells of the male mice, and they found actual genetic markers that changed in response to that traumatic experience. Okay? And then they backed that study up with research in humans and PTSD from Vietnam, those people and Holocaust survivors. And they found that in the children of Holocaust survivors and Vietnam veterans with PTSD down to four generations, there are genetic changes in our predisposition to be afraid of things our parents were afraid of. Okay? So that's the bad news. You're scared of some things at baseline that your parents and grandparents and great grandparents were scared of. But what they found out is they could train that out of those mice, and they can train it out of the humans, and the DNA changes back, which is a long way of telling you that you literally change your DNA when you change the way you think. And so when I say you can't change your life until you change your mind, what I'm really saying is you have a tremendous amount of ability to control how your body behaves and how your cells divide and how your chemical environment in your brain makes you feel. If you decide to do what Paul says in II Corinthians 10:5, when he says, take captive every thought, don't let your thinking push you around. And that's important. It's relevant to this conversation because I'm certain that you've experienced this after you lost your daughter. When you experience a big loss like that, your brain starts telling you all kinds of stuff. I wasn't a good parent. I must have missed something. What did I do? Did I eat the wrong stuff? Did I take something that gave my kid this tumor? Was I in the wrong place and my son should have been with me and I did something wrong and it's my fault that he died? Your brain is going to tell you that stuff, friend, whoever is listening out there. Your brain tells you stuff after trauma. And what we've learned from the neuroscience is almost five to one, the thoughts that you think after trauma are false. They're not true. Most of the things that pop into your head are not true after trauma, because the trauma thinking process is happening in response to those chemicals that we talked about earlier that trigger all kinds of fight or flight and negative thinking that's based on ancient survival mechanisms that are hardwired into our brain. And if we learn to think about our thinking and say, wait a minute, if I know that trauma makes me think things that aren't true, then a healthier way to live is to learn to think about that thought that I had before. I react to it and give it power to move forward in my life. And that's when I came up with that idea of this self brain surgery. Let's biopsy your thinking. If you came in my office tomorrow and you said, I've been having headaches for the last few days, and I said, well, let's go to the operating room, and I'll look around and see if I can find something in there that's giving you headaches, you'd say, well, hang on a second. Shouldn't you get a scan or something, right? Shouldn't you get an X ray or something before we go to do surgery? You'd think I was crazy, but we do that all the time with our thinking. We have a thought that pops up, and we feel something, and we just run with it, and it turns into something real. And I've learned that thoughts become things. The things we think about turn into relationship problems in our lives. They turn into numbing behaviors to help us stop feeling the things that we don't like. We drink too much, or we eat the wrong stuff or we buy too much stuff. We try to do something not to feel those things that we're feeling, instead of making the feelings come under our submission. And you have the power you're a good enough self brain surgeon to change what you think about, and that will get you back in control after trauma tries to make you believe stuff that isn't true.

00:37:05 - Jill Sullivan
Yeah, absolutely. You talk in your book about the self brain surgery, and one of the statements that I just loved, it was kind of a two part statement. Number one, not every thought is true, and number two, feelings are not facts.

00:37:19 - Dr. Warren
Yes.

00:37:20 - Jill Sullivan
And I just thought that was so helpful, just spelled out that way. Because, like you said, I think we as bereaved parents, we relive these things over and over, and we wonder what we could have done differently. And we often talk about those should have, would have, could haves. And I think that's what you're talking about with the self brain surgery, right, is tackling those kinds of thoughts.

00:37:42 - Dr. Warren
That's exactly right. It's learning to think about your thinking and just not take it for granted, because trauma lies to you, and pain lies to you, and it makes you think, this is always how I'm going to feel, and this is always how it's going to be. And the truth is, if you're still alive, God has a plan for your life, and your life has purpose and meaning. And that's an important part of your healing process, is to find what that meaning is. Viktor Frankl said it is. Suffering stops feeling like suffering when you understand its purpose, when you find a way to give it meaning. And that's what we did with Mitch. It's what you're doing with teaching other helping other bereaved parents to try to redeem this pain in some way and make it mean something. Otherwise, it's just the furnace of suffering. God tells Isaiah, I have refined you, but not like silver is refined. I've refined you in the furnace of suffering. Right? And we came to this place where I said I literally said it one day to God. I was yelling at him. I was exercising my right to lament. And I said, I don't feel like I'm being refined. I feel like I'm being burned up. And I feel the furnace, but I don't feel the refining. And if you're going to make this mean something to me, you got to start showing me some way that this is going to matter, or I'm just going to burn up and it's not going to mean anything. And it wasn't long after that that another dad, a patient, called and said, hey, my brother in law has lost his son. He had liver failure, and he died, and he's just lost, and he doesn't know what to do, and maybe you could meet with him. And I was like, Dude, my son died six months ago. I don't know what to do. I don't know what to say to another dad. And he said, well, you survived six months. Maybe you could just tell him that. Just tell him that, hey, six months from now, you'll still be alive. So I met with that guy, and I don't know if I helped. I don't really think I helped him very much, but it gave me this notion that we have a responsibility to help people who are in this something like we're going through just to know that you can breathe tomorrow. There's a way that you can see light enough to make it through. And I started seeing this almost metaphorically, the word for hope in the Old Testament over and over it's over 50 times is this word qavah. It's Q-A-V-A-H that's translated either hope or wait, the same word numerous times. And the word in Hebrew ... I'm no Hebrew scholar, but it connotes a rope that's made of multiple cords that are winded together, and it's under tension. And so it's this notion that you're holding on tight to something out there that's going to be able to pull you a little bit forward, and you're not going to fall if the rope lost its tension and you would fall backwards. And the idea is that those who wait, those who qavah upon the Lord, will renew their strength. And so I started seeing this metaphor in my mind of if God's given me this rope that I can hold onto, that somebody behind me needs me to reach back there and grab them and pull them up so they can grab onto the rope, too. I can't really explain that, but I saw it really crystal clear that if I could find a way to help other people make it one more day like I did, then maybe Mitch's death would start to mean something other than just tragedy. And that started doing something to my so I said, well, maybe I need to write about that stuff and podcast about that stuff. And so there's this weird thing that happens shortly after you lose somebody. Christians come along and they try to tell you all these great things and try to cheer you up, but often those things hurt you, right? They don't mean to hurt you, but they say things like, God needed another angel or something like that. And that's terrible theology. First of all, listener, people don't become angels when they die, okay? So if you're going to try to encourage somebody with scripture or with theology, make sure it's sound that it's not something that's harmful. Because if God the creator of the universe who can speak and say fiat loose and photons are created, if that guy is out there and he needs another angel, he could create one. He wouldn't have to take my son, right?

00:41:45 - Jill Sullivan
Right.

00:41:45 - Dr. Warren
He wouldn't have to take your daughter if he needed another angel. And if he's out there doing that, then he's a bully, right? If he's going to say, I need another angel, so I'm going to make your son die so I can have another angel, he wouldn't do that. It's not consistent with scripture, and it's not good theology. So don't say that stuff to people. Another thing that people say is Romans 8:28, like, God's going to make some good out of this someday. You just hang in there. Something good is going to come out of this, and you just want to punch them. Like a good friend of ours. Her dad holding my hand in my house after my son dies praying. And he puts his arm around me and he says, God, I know you're going to work this out for good. You are going to make this good somehow. And I'm just telling you, I wanted to punch that guy out. I'm not a violent person, but I wanted to punch him because it makes you so angry to say it is not good, and it's not going to be good that my son died, right? But what happens is, over time, as time plays out, seeing different ways that these things can turn out to be good. And here's an example. I started writing and podcasting, and two times in the ten years since we've lost Mitch, somebody emailed me and said today I was going to kill myself. And something you wrote changed my mind. So two different times in the last ten years, words that I have spoken in my podcast or written in my newsletter have saved somebody's life. And I know that it's not good that Mitch died, but that it is good that those two people are alive. And I know that somehow that's that magic quantum physics thing where God worked something good out of something devastating, and it's never going to be good. But good things have come out of it anyway. That's what Romans 8:28 means. It doesn't mean that it's good that this happened. And don't tell people that right after they lose somebody. It does mean that if you hold on, if you qavah onto that rope, God is going to pull you up to a place someday where you can see things a little bit differently. And you can start to see with some clarity that there are good things that will come out of this that will redeem this pain, that will refine you in that furnace of suffering. And you'll land in a place someday that's going to give you the ability to say, yeah, God is still good, and God is still on my side. And yes, all this horrible stuff happened, but good things are coming out of it and I'm going to be able to make it through.

00:44:10 - Jill Sullivan
Yeah, I love that concept of qavah. I'm going to have to do some study on that, especially since waiting is part of the name of our ministry. Yeah, I'm going to have to look into that a little bit more. You talk in your book about doing a bad thought biopsy, and I think that's so important for bereaved parents because, man, we sure struggle with some bad thoughts sometimes, like we've been talking about today. And in your book, you actually take us through kind of step by step, a biopsy of a bad thought. And that thought is one that we as bereaved parents think all the time. The thought is, my son is dead, and I'm always going to be sad about that. Or My daughter is dead and I'm always going to be sad about that. Take us through a biopsy of that particular thought.

00:44:58 - Dr. Warren
Yeah. And this is a really important point because I told you earlier that trauma makes you hear thoughts that aren't true all the time and throws lies at you. But the important part, and this is kind of how the Devil works, too, sometimes the thoughts that you think are true. Yes, because that is sometimes they are true statement. One thing the Devil does is he takes a seed of truth and he kind of twists it around. And if you're not a believer, if you're listening to this, just take this metaphorically. Understand that sometimes the most harmful things that can happen to us is when we start to believe something that's only partially true. And you can twist that into something that's harmful in your life. So whether or not you believe there's really a devil ... I do. Then you could just hear this for what it is. Sometimes your thoughts that you have are true, but also harmful if you don't manage them properly. And so this is an example of that when you have this thought that pops into your head, my son is dead, I'm always going to be sad. That's true. You will always be sad. Unless you're a sociopath or something. You're never going to stop being sad that your child has passed away. There's not going to come a day I'll be an old man someday, and I'll be weeping at the fact that I'll recognize that my son won't be at my funeral. I'm just telling you, I can't walk through a Hallmark store. I see these willow tree statues. I got them behind me, a little guy with his son or a mom with her daughter. And I'll see one of those and I'll just burst into tears. It's just devastating ten years after this happened. But the trick is this I take that thought and I look at it and I say, you know what? That thought is true. My son is dead, and I will always be sad. But what happens next is the important part. Because what happens next is if you're not careful to manage it, the next thought will be, I need a drink, or I might as well just shoot myself, because I'm always going to be sad. What do I have to live for? Right? Your thoughts will go down that staircase or that spiral if you don't manage them. So what you have to do then is you have to say, wait a minute. I am always going to be sad, but I serve this God. Jesus came here and he said two things. He said, in this world, you're always going to have trouble. In John 16:33. And he also said in John 10:10, I came to this world so that you can have an abundant life. And this sounds really nerdy, but being a scientist, I think about things like quantum physics sometimes. And in quantum physics, the physicists describe this world where an electron and it's really true, an electron can actually be in two places at once. In the quantum realm, the rules aren't the same. You and I can't be in two places at once, but our electrons can. And what that means is when God says, Jill, you can have a hard life and you can have an abundant life, those two things can be true at the same time. Okay? So when you have the thought that says, I'm always going to be sad, the next thought needs to be, yes, but I can also learn to be happy again. Yes, but I can also learn to have value and hope in my life again because God said I could. John 10 says, the thief comes to steal and kill and destroy. And I'm telling you, if you lose a child, he steals and kills and destroys your heart, and you just don't think you can go forward anymore. But the back end of that verse is where we get our hope when he says, but I have come that you might have life and have it abundantly. So that means now he's saying, you can have this abundant, vibrant, joyful life even though you're hurt. And the most important part of all of that is to remember that when Jesus rose from the dead, he was not healed of his external wounds. He still had a hole in his side. He still had pierced palms. He was still wounded. And those wounds were important for other people to see and touch because they gave them hope that they could live in their wounded state, too. Okay? So if you want to know me, if you want to know who I am, you're going to have to touch my wounds. And my friend Jarrett Stevens, a pastor, he's written some great books, by the way. Jarrett Stevens said, scars tell better stories than trophies do. Like, we all want to wave our trophies and say, look what we've done. Look how great I am. But scars tell the better stories because I can tell you if you're hurting. I can say, look, man, my son died ten years ago and I'm still going and I'm still making it because God redeemed me and he's showing me different ways that Mitch's life meant something and his life is still helping people today, and you can do that too. That's how we have hope. We can move forward into the promise of holding onto that rope is going to pay off and not give up. So I think that's why the thought biopsy is so important, because you can take that even if it's true, what do you do next with it is what makes all the difference.

00:49:46 - Jill Sullivan
Yeah, absolutely. I love how you take that John 16:33 and John 10:10 and put them together and say that we can have both. One of the things that you talk about is "but" and "and", talk about that just real quickly. I know we're getting close to running out of time.

00:50:08 - Dr. Warren
Well, it's the idea that your trauma, your massive thing can either be the thing that happens to you or can be a thing that happens to you. And for us, we got this devastating little side benefit of losing Mitch ... the day we buried him was the day that our first granddaughter was born. First grandchild was born in San Antonio. So not only were we burying a child, we were missing the birth of our first grandchild. And one of our kids was almost a thousand miles away. And instead of us being there celebrating with her, she was missing her brother's funeral and having her first child alone with just her and her husband instead of the whole family around her. So we had this horrible conundrum that day of getting all these texts of baby pictures and all this stuff and picking out the wreaths and dealing with all that funeral stuff at the same time. It was just terrible. But what it did for us was it gave us this crystal clear. I think it's a kindness that God, the timing of losing Mitch and the timing of Scarlett coming, I think, for us was helpful and a kindness that God. Did, because what it did is it forced us to see the "and". We had to say, we have lost our son, and we have a granddaughter, and we've plunged into darkness, and look at all this bundle of light over here in San Antonio that belongs to us. And we've lost everything, but we've got everything, and we just had this. And so I started seeing it. Everywhere I looked, I would see people who were miserable, and they say, I can't be happy unless this happens, or I was okay until this came along, and I was fine, but that happened, and I started saying, Wait a minute. That's what I was doing, too. I was saying I was a happy guy, but my son died, and now I've learned to say I was a happy guy and my son died and I have four other children and four grandchildren, and I still have a life and a purpose and all these things so button and are mortal enemies. And I think you got to learn how to land on the and.

00:52:00 - Jill Sullivan
Yeah, I agree. I think this is what I love so much about your books, at least the two that I've read. I have not read the first one about your time as a medic in the military. I've also enjoyed your podcast. And what I love is that you're not afraid to face these issues of faith and doubt and hope head on. And I'm sure that comes with being a neurosurgeon, but it also comes with being the mom of a 17 year old daughter who died from glioblastoma. We know that the nice, tidy endings don't always happen. In fact, they very often don't. Yet we know that we can also trust in a God who is sovereign, who is not caught by surprise by knife blades or brain cancer. And that's where we can find hope in the middle of our TMTS. And that's what I appreciate so much about what you have to share is you're not afraid to talk about those really difficult, dark, hard things, but always point people back to the hope that we have, and that's what we strive to do with while we're waiting as well. So how can people connect with you? Where can they get a copy of your books? How can they find your podcast? Tell us about that.

00:53:10 - Dr. Warren
So the book's out Tuesday, July 18, is probably out by the time this airs ... everywhere books are sold. We'd love for you to support your local booksellers, but any place online you can get the book. I recorded the audio version myself, and it's in hardback and digital and audio anywhere you can buy books in the world. You can order it or buy it. I write a weekly letter called Self Brain Surgery with Dr. Lee Warren, and we deal with this neuroscience and faith and all this stuff, and you can get that at my website, wleewarrenmd.com or at Substack. It's hosted by Substack, Dr. Lee Warren, Substack.com, and then my podcast. Anywhere you listen to podcasts, Spotify, Apple, any place you can get my podcast. I like my website the best because I always put detailed notes with links and all that like you do. And so, yeah, we'd love to have you jump on board and listen and join us and read the book and let me know how it's helping you and Jill, Just a pleasure to meet you. And again, I'm sorry for what you've been through, but boy, you're redeeming it in a beautiful way.

00:54:08 - Jill Sullivan
Thank you. When when you go through something like this, when you go through a TMT, you don't want it to go to waste. You want good to come from it. And that is our desire and we are just grateful for the opportunities that God gives us to do that. And I am thankful for the opportunity I had to talk with you today. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast and giving of your time today.

00:54:33 - Dr. Warren
Absolute pleasure. Thank you so much and God bless you.

00:54:38 - Jill Sullivan
Thank you so much for joining me for another episode of the While We're Waiting hope After Child Loss podcast. If this podcast has been a blessing to you, please take just a moment to leave a rating or a review and please feel free to share it with someone you know who might be helped by it. We're so grateful for all of you who come back and listen every week and those of you who may be listening for the very first time. I hope God has used it to encourage you today and to help you live well while you're waiting.