The Brain Change | Dr. Alan Weissenbacher

The brain is not a fixed machine. New neurons are always being created. And these new neurons travel to the areas of highest activity to strengthen those areas. So hopefully it's traveling to an area of kindness and finding lots of great activity.

And so it joins everyone else, all the other neurons, and makes that area stronger. Welcome to Building Relationships with Dr. Gary Chapman, author of the New York Times bestseller, "The 5 Love Languages" . Well, how's your thought life? Do you struggle to control your emotions? Do negative thoughts intrude in your mind?

Are you plagued by a life controlling addiction? Today you're going to hear about a six step process that will help you make some transformational changes in your life. Our guest wants to help change your brain, not give you somebody else's, but to help you alter your thinking patterns. Dr. Alan Weissenbacher will join us today. He's the author of The Brain Change Program, six steps to renew your mind and transform your life.

You find out more at buildingrelationships.us. Gary, I think this is one of the biggest struggles I hear from people of all ages, negative thought patterns. They struggle with controlling their emotions, anger, for example. Have you dealt with this in your counseling or even in your own life? Well, you know, Chris, in my own life, I didn't have any problems with anger until I got married. And I didn't have a real problem with anger until I had a teenage son.

But, you know, you have to go through it to learn sometimes. And so I'm excited about our program today because I think that the topic we're going to be discussing is something that almost everyone can identify with. And so I'm eager to have this conversation.

I am right along with you. Let me introduce Dr. Alan Weissenbacher. He served many years at the Denver Rescue Mission as a chaplain to homeless addicts. One idea he had was to move them from an urban setting to a farm as they received counseling, spiritual care and job training. And that work inspired his research into neuroscience and spiritual formation.

So today he speaks around the country about these issues. He serves as the managing editor for the academic journal Theology and Science. And our featured resource is the book The Brain Change Program, Six Steps to Renew Your Mind and Transform Your Life. You can find out more at the website buildingrelationships.us. Well, Dr. Weissenbacher, welcome to Building Relationships.

Thank you very much for having me. Tell us a little of how you became interested in this topic. When you were young, did you know you wanted to work in this area that has to do with the brain or is this something that has come along the way for you? Well, it has come along the way, but there were seeds that have been planted even when I was young. I tend to be a worrier.

I tend to be negative. And I would read the Bible where it says to renew your mind and take every thought captive. And I'd look at that and say, how do I do that? It seems so much easier said than done to try to quiet my mind.

So there's always been in my head this desire to find specifics for how to do that. And then of course, when I began to work with homeless addicts, I'm working with people with very damaged brains who are coming to a Christian rehabilitation program, and we're trying to help their brains and their spirits and their bodies heal. So when you began working with people at the Mission in Denver, it sounds like you were innovative with your approach to helping them. Tell us more about that, how that developed in your own mind.

Well, I start the book itself with two contrasting stories. We had one client that did everything right that was involved in mentoring other people, involved in all the Bible studies and the service projects, doing everything he needed to do. And on his graduation day, he stood up in front of everybody and said, only chumps work when you can get social security. Crack, Jack Daniels in Las Vegas is calling me.

I'm out of here. This was devastating. It's like all this investment, it looked like he was going to go on to shining success and it was a crash and burn. Everyone was so disheartened, current clients and staff. What could we have done better? Lots of second guessing. And so we really began to think, okay, the change wasn't real. The change didn't stick. It was all a front.

How can we do better? And then I had this other client. He was known as the meth addict on the streets who would yell at the air. He came to us and it was a constant wrestle every day to handle things like basic hygiene or actually showing up for work.

He maintained his residency barely, but we wrestled every day. And then one day he comes running into my office, Chaplain, Chaplain, I have a certificate from the state that declares me free of all five mental illnesses. Wow. And now I have a certificate that says I am legally sane. Do you?

Well, no. But here there was real change and he's actually gone on. He now works in it, troubleshooting air traffic control computers.

Wow. And so there was real change there. And I wanted to know what is going on in someone's brain that makes a difference between whether they change for real or not. And then how can what I learned here be helpful to everyone?

The average person on the street who may not struggle with a deep drug addiction, but everyone has their own thought problems that they want to work on. Well, let's talk about the brain change program. What prompted you to write this book?

It goes back to wanting specifics on how can I renew my mind? And I eventually resigned to my position at the Denver Rescue Mission and went on to study more about the brain to know how can we do things better. And as I began to learn about how God designed the brain to learn and grow, I began to discover there are some specific things that I can do to renew my mind based on how God's designed us. And it even deepened scriptures like, wow, the science is now catching up to the Bible. The Bible has been telling us these things. And now the science is just giving it more depth. And then I took all my research and wrote a very practical book.

I don't want to get scientifically technical because I want all my former clients to be able to read and understand it, but just to talk about these specific things. So you described two approaches to personal change that can be found in the Bible. Explain to us what you call the Paul program and the Jacob program. Well, the Paul program is what everyone wants. We want to be knocked off our donkey and transformed into instant holiness, have our problems taken away overnight, the microwave into holiness approach.

It happens, but it's rare. If you're not on that program, you're on what I call the Jacob program. Jacob was a liar and a deceiver. And it took 14 plus years of him working for his uncle who was just as deceitful as he was to begin to change his character.

He was on the crockpot type of transformation, a little bit by little bit, day by day, until eventually his character was changed, which was symbolized by the wrestling match with the angel and his name being changed. There's, and we might all want to be zapped, but most of us are on this day by day discipline to change. To encourage people on that program, the Jacob one, I say, who would you rather have as a mentor? Someone that was changed instantly or someone that fought a long, hard fight and succeeded? There's a lot to be learned in this journey of slow change. The other thing, Dr. Weissenbacher, that I see is a lot of people who are friends of people who need the change, you know, and you talk about addicts, a lot of us want to pray a prayer and have everything, you know, instantaneous. And we get frustrated by the crockpot nature of that conforming to the image of Christ that happens inside of a person that is slow.

We get frustrated by that, don't we? I have two young boys and I want them to have perfect Christ-like character now, but that's not parenting. I have to guide them day by day. Tell us more about how the brain works. That is, how it creates new neurons and where they go and how they influence the thinking or our behavior.

Describe that more for us so that the average person can understand it. Well, the brain, no matter how old you are, is always learning. It's always growing. It's always changing on a physical level. The brain is not a fixed machine. New neurons are always being created and these new neurons travel to the areas of highest activity to strengthen those areas. So hopefully it's traveling to an area of kindness and finding lots of great activity and so it joins everyone else, all the other neurons, and makes that area stronger.

Or it could be traveling to negative areas and making that stronger. It depends on your own brain and what is most active. And not only are new neurons always being created, existing pathways in your brain are strengthening or weakening, just like a muscle, depending on how much you use it. So if it is anger that you're using all the time, you're taking this nerve pathway and making it into this giant superhighway that the brain is always going to take because that's the fastest, most convenient one to take, or whatever addiction you might be having.

And then other areas of your brain that you don't use are tiny little paths that it takes a lot of forced effort to get your brain to go down. So here's a person who is very, very defensive. It doesn't matter what his spouse brings up or says in terms of pointing out to him something that's hurting them or bothering them.

He's always defensive and it's just gone on year after year after year after year. I want to say first of all, is there hope? Because I can tell you the wife in that situation feels like there's no hope. He's never going to change. Well, someone needs to want to change to be able to begin to change. I always say there's hope, keep praying, but if you're spending more time on someone else for their change than they are spending on themselves, there's a problem. And sometimes someone needs to, well, they say hit rock bottom, but that's different for every person.

I'd prefer someone not have to hit rock bottom, but you never know what's going to prompt someone to change. We had one client that had a chip on his shoulder, didn't want to hear anything from anybody. So we asked him to please move an entire herd of cows from one end of the property to the other by himself.

And then we just sat back and watched the chaos of cows running everywhere. After several hours of this, he finally came up and said, can you help me? And that was a huge breakthrough for him and totally changed his program. But he had to face the struggle to get to that point. And so I say keep praying, keep trying, but sometimes you have to let someone feel the consequences of their actions so they can have that motivation to change. People need to want to change.

Can you give an example of how this might work? Let's say that someone who's trying to resist the temptation or deal with an addiction, how this might work. I'll just use alcohol as an example, or it can be anything from anger to pornography to wanting to eat peanut M&M's. You've created this giant highway for that in your brain.

So giant alcohol highway. And whenever life throws you a curve ball, your brain is going to take that quickest widest path, which is the alcohol. Why do you keep doing what you don't want to do? Because you've created this giant path in your brain. So what it's going to do is you're going to have to deliberately force your brain off that highway every time it wants to take it onto a small path of sobriety. And you might have to do that 60 times a minute when you start. But every time you do that, you take one brick off the highway and put it on this new path.

And you're gradually weakening the highway and strengthening this little path. Then you might only have to do that 30 times a minute. And then once every five minutes, it gets easier the more you do this brain construction work.

So is it then only the will, you know, let's say stay with alcoholism, you know, I really want to drink, I really want to drink 60 times a minute. Is it, am I doing that in a thinking way? How does the spiritual get involved with all of that? You know, I can do all things through Christ. Is that part of the mechanism that we're doing inside? We're not doing this alone?

Definitely. You're not doing this alone. And God's given us good resources. I like that you brought up willpower. Because I tell people willpower doesn't work. Anyone who's tried it knows the struggle.

And there's a biological reason for it. If someone is telling themselves must not use alcohol must not use alcohol. What are they thinking about the alcohol?

What pathway are they strengthening the alcohol one. And so this person is actually making it harder on themselves. And so that's why I tell people, replace, don't resist.

So when you feel that struggle, redirect your brain to something positive, I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me, focusing on good things. Every year, we would take about 20 to 30 addicts to Juarez, Mexico to build orphanages. People thought we were crazy. You're going to come back with nobody taking addicts to Juarez. Yet there was never a problem though. Because they were focused on doing something good. So that their addiction was just faded to the background, while they were busy building these orphanages.

And it was always a great experience. So I hear you saying, it's not just saying, I shouldn't do that. I shouldn't do that.

It's turning your thoughts to something other than the problem and getting involved in that. Correct. Yeah.

Correct. And even say it could be something for serving others or memorizing a Bible verse, replacing with scripture. A lot of positive things you can use to redirect. Is that why you went to the farm then? Because it's really hard not to think about cows. It's hard to think about drinking when you have the stampede there. What was it about being in nature that helped?

There was a lot of things. One, they're away from the sources of their temptation. If they get a craving, it's a long hike.

So they might as well stay. Also being able to care for animals. That's a redirect into helping develop empathy and care. Clients would birth the cows, birth the pigs, raise them. And the change in nature, getting them out of the urban environment in which they're just really used to, is very positive.

To be in nature, to work with the land, to have things be more calm around them than the chaos of the urban atmosphere. All that contributed to changing their brain in a new and healthy way. So talk for a moment about the person, because I'm sure you've encountered this many times, and I've seen this as well. The person who has a temptation, whatever it happens to be, and they've done well for a little while. They're really trying to break this habit. And then they have a setback. Now, is that person back at square one and has to start all over?

Or was all their work trying to avoid the temptation in vain? How do you respond to that? I want to encourage people to go back to thinking about your brain construction project. You've been pulling bricks off this highway and putting them on to a different path. And you've been doing this for who knows how long, and then you have a fall and a setback. You don't go back to square one because you still have all the construction work that you've done in your brain is still there, provided you get right back up and continue to work on it. The more you stay in your failure, and it can be easy to do when you feel discouraged, but the more you stay there, the more the bricks start hopping back onto the highway and you start losing that construction work. But if you get right back up to doing what you need to, to doing good, getting away from the temptation, you haven't lost the work you've already done. That makes sense, because I think a lot of times people want to give up, you know, when that happens, rather than, as you say, get up and go back to the pattern that you have been working on.

So yeah, that makes sense. Well, can you briefly walk us through the six steps that you talk about in the book? Well, the first two steps, one and two, mostly deal with identifying those thoughts that you want to change, and then thinking through what all feeds into it. If it's a behavior that you want to change, to begin to analyze, okay, what lies behind the behavior? People with addiction, I would tell them the addiction is the weed, but it's the thoughts and the pains or the struggles or the traumas that they carry with them. That's the root.

You can keep cutting the leaves, but unless we get the root out, we're not going to get rid of the weed. And so they just need to think through, okay, what are the thoughts that need to be changed? What are the thoughts that lie behind the behaviors that I want to stop? And then once I figure that out, then I can take that into the brain change program. So I identify the thought, I evaluate it, I think through it. Step three goes right back to the willpower idea that we talked about.

Replace, don't resist. Don't willpower yourself out of it, but try to think of what new things can I direct my brain to? If I'm an anxious person, you can memorize scripture that deal with God's faithfulness and do not worry. I have meditated so much on the verses where God says, okay, take care of the sparrows and the lilies of the field.

I'll take care of you. That whenever my brain starts to go down a worrying path, I get a picture of a sparrow and a lily just like right in front of my eyes that tells me stop because I've done that so much. And so I would tell people memorize verses, not just randomly, but that specifically deal with the thought that you want to change and use that to replace instead of resisting and then get involved in doing good stuff. That is something new.

Then there's step four. And this was a surprise for me as I began to study the brain. The brain cannot tell the difference between doing something for real or just imagining doing it in terms of how it changes your brain.

That brain construction project is affected the same way whether you imagine doing it or do it for real. And so people need to retrain their imagination. If you're always imagining temptation, then it's no surprise that your character begins to move in that direction. When the Bible says, if you entertain lust in your mind, it's like you're committing it. Well, now science is saying that's true. I had a client tell me it was easy to cheat on his wife because he had done it a thousand times in his imagination already.

It moved his character closer and closer to reality. And so I tell people you need to retrain in your imagination. Start imagining resisting temptation. Start imagining doing good.

A little story. I had a client who was worried about relapsing on a weekend pass. He was afraid he'd run into an ex-girlfriend and then relapse into alcohol. So we told him, start imagining the positive thing you will do if you happen to run into her. And what this will do is it'll start training your brain to do that action automatically when you're faced with the situation.

So you don't have to think, oh, what am I going to do when you're in the situation? You've already practiced it. Several weekend passes later, he runs in, Chaplain, Chaplain, guess what? I actually ran into my ex. I was on the streets of Denver.

She was in an open air cafe and she said, hi. And before I knew what was happening, my body had turned around and I had ran two blocks away. His body just responded to what he had trained his imagination for it to do. And he stayed sober. He graduated.

And as far as I know, he's still successful. Imagination can be a powerful thing. That's step four.

And then step five, I call it introduce a new element. Your brain can form knots. I call them brain knots. So when two things happen at the same time, they can link together. A good example of this is if someone hurts you, you think of them and you are angry. And then the anger can start to wire in to you imagining this person's face.

So now it's a knot. Or we found at the rehabilitation program, certain clients would have a craving every two weeks. Count it on your clock. Three, two, one.

Oh, there goes Charles. He's in the middle of his craving. And it's like, this is weird. Why just every two weeks? And we figured out these were the people that had held jobs and they would get their paycheck every two weeks. And so in their brain, they wired in their internal time clock to when they would go out and get drugs with their paycheck.

And so even though they were now in rehabilitation, the brain still had that link and they were thinking, it's been two weeks. You should be getting money. You should be going out and getting high.

You're going to have a craving now. And so we have these knots and we need to disentangle them. And the way to do that is to introduce a new element to go back to forgiveness. You think of this person, you're angry. Okay, forgiven them, but why am I still angry?

It's a biological knot in your head. What you're going to need to do is put a new emotion into that mix to loosen the old one. Bible says, pray for your enemies.

Good example. That's puts a completely new emotion into that mix of anger. And so that the anger begins to break off the knot or even counseling. A lot of times I tell people, okay, you're carrying a lot of pain. If you're in a counseling session and share your story, you're in a calm and safe atmosphere as you share it. And so the emotions of the calm and safe atmosphere begin to get into that knot where memories of the trauma come with pain and the pain begins to lessen as you tell your story in a safe place because those new emotions work their way into the knot. And so after you tell your story several times and you realize, I can tell it again and the pain is not as painful.

It has lost some of its sting. I can give my testimony and not freak out. Gary, I don't know about you, but I am really enjoying hearing what Dr. Weissenbacher is talking about because there are so many spiritual parallels to what's going on in our brain and what, what are, how our souls are being adapted and conformed by God himself.

And I'm interested in, in talking about, you know, overeating people who have a struggle with with potato chips when they watch a movie or popcorn or that kind of thing. But we're at the sixth step in the brain change. So what is step number six, doctor? Step number six is repeat, rehearse, repeat, and probably see a theme there. This is not a magic pill that makes things all better overnight.

This is not the Paul program. This is a daily discipline of taking every thought captive and you need to repeat it continually. The brain construction project can take 30 days.

It can take 60 days. It can take a year or more depending on how strong those certain brain paths are. And you just need to keep repeating it and keep moving brick by brick until the good path is built up. And that becomes your automatic way of doing things. Let's say that someone is working their way through this, and I think our listeners can tell this is not an overnight thing.

As you said, it's not a Paul experience. It's a journey that they're taking. The whole role of prayer in this thing, I mean, you've mentioned earlier, yes, we're talking to God, we're praying to God. But why do you believe that for some people it can work to our disadvantage to pray for the removal or the discontinuation of this bad thought or bad habit? It goes back to willpower. And I recognize this in my own prayer life, I would finish prayer and I'd be more stressed than when I started. Well, I just gathered 16 problems. And even though I prayed them to God, I still now have 16 problems in my brain.

And there needed to be a switch. And I go back to the willpower idea. If you're trying to willpower your way out of something, you're making it worse. And so I related that to prayer. Okay, if I'm praying about something and I say, throw up alcohol against if I'm praying, Lord, free me from alcohol.

Again, I'm thinking only of I'm thinking of the alcohol. And it's actually making it worse because I'm strengthening the alcohol path. And I call that praying backward. When you're praying focused on the problem, but if you pray forward, you're praying focused on the solution. So instead of saying, Lord, help me be free from alcohol, you say, Lord, help me be sober. Instead of saying, Lord, don't let me get angry. You say, Lord, help me be a person of peace.

And that way I'm actually harnessing my own biology and moving it in the positive direction instead of the negative one. God can answer any prayer. God is God.

To make it easier on myself and maybe partner with God and help my biology work with what God is doing, let's pray focusing forward on the solution that you want God to provide, not the problem you're trying to run from. I think that makes a lot of sense as I hear you say that. I don't know that I've ever heard it put that way because I think most people just by nature are praying, Lord, help me to handle my anger, help me to not take the alcohol away, take this away, take that away. But you're saying if we're bringing to God the positive thing that we desire, which as you said, sobriety or rather than being controlled by anger, peace, we're asking God and verbalizing to Him the place we want to be rather than focusing on the thing we've been struggling with. Is that, am I understanding you correctly?

Correct. Lot's wife looked backward and saw what that did for her. And so I tell people, don't look backward to your problem. Look forward to where you want God to take you.

And that changes your biology. You know where this touches on what you have said through the years, Gary, and that is forgiveness. I mean, we all know if you're a Christian, you're supposed to forgive, you're supposed to forgive and you got that person in your life and you can't forgive and you can't forgive. And you have talked about releasing them, you know, releasing them from that, this negative feeling that we have rather than saying, here comes that negative thought and I'm not forgiven. I must not have forgiven them.

People beat themselves up. It's kind of the same thing you're talking about, Dr. Weissenbacher, that if you, if you release that person to God and not hold over them, whatever it is that they've done, you're moving in a positive direction. Does that make sense?

Definitely. And I've trained my own imagination with a picture of hands lifting something up and letting them go and God taking it. And I use that in a lot of ways. I used to always second guess myself when I'd preach, I'd find the most hostile audience member and did I win them over?

I didn't, I failed. But it's like, no, that wasn't a healthy way to approach preaching. And I just take this person and I just release, just picture myself releasing it up to God.

It can be the person you need to forgive, whatever it is. And that is a positive redirection of your brain that focuses on God and God's ability to take it and work with it. Now you say in the book that we can create and adopt negative stereotypes, the racist or other stereotypes. How do we combat those harmful patterns of thinking? I go back to, we have highways in our brain and a lot of these aren't created by ourselves.

They're created by what the world tells us our past experiences can create some of these highways in our brain. And if we're always hearing negative stereotypes and negative stories about a certain racial group, those are going to get into your brain almost whether you like it or not. You're going to start thinking in that respect whenever you encounter someone of that race, because that's why your brain has been trained because that's what you've been hearing or listening to. And the way to change that, the negative stereotype is a knot in your brain of a particular group and the negativity.

You have to put a new element in there. And for that, you need to listen to different stories. You need to listen to stories that combat that. You need to do life with people from these different groups. I'm thankful for my church out here in California.

We have not only white, black, Hispanic, Asian, and no one's a majority. We're just one big family of God. And whenever I can hear a racial stereotype, it doesn't stick because, well, hey, I'm doing life with a whole bunch of people. I know we're all sinners in need of grace. We all carry our own pains.

We all need God. And by doing life with everyone in the family of God, no matter what their color, really combats negative stories that the world tells us that might be trying to stick in our heads. Yeah, I think that's the value of cross-cultural friendships. Whether it's in the church or the workplace or wherever, as we build friendships with someone of a different race, we begin to realize, oh, this is not what I've always been told about these people. We now see them as individuals and recognize that there are positives and negatives in all of us, and the stereotypes are basically always wrong. So yeah, that's a powerful truth in that area. Now, you studied John Wesley's theology. What did you learn from his approach to affections and tempers?

To put it in practical language, these terms have to do with emotions that just come up in a moment versus those emotions you hold onto so that it changes your brain and changes your character. Someone might cut me off in traffic. I feel angry. That's normal. But do I just let it go or do I sit with it so that it begins to change my brain more toward anger? And the more I do that, then all of a sudden I can be an angry personality because I've let anger hardwire into myself. I would rather practice love and let that hardwire into myself. It's like, what emotions are you holding onto?

Temptations will come up for everyone, but do you hold onto it or do you let it go? Like with my children, I'm trying to train them to think differently. So if someone cuts me off in traffic, I just ask them, can you think of some good reasons why they might have done that? Not they're bad people and I must punish them with a finger gesture, but rather maybe they're late for an appointment. Maybe there's a medical emergency. And so to train them to begin to think the best so they don't hold onto anger that just might come up. Or someone said something hurtful to you at school.

Well, what kind of emotions or big things might that person at your school be dealing with so that I can begin to help them be people of compassion and not judgment or anger? Dr. Weisenbacher, I really appreciated your sparrow and lilies idea a little earlier because I get this, you know, this worry, does God really care about me? Is he going to provide?

Does he see me? And I'm going to think about that passage in Matthew six about the lilies and the sparrow and, you know, knowing the hairs of your head, that is also what Jesus said. So God does care. God does want to provide.

And I got to believe that. But there's somebody listening today who's been listening to you and who says, I have a struggle with eating. It could be a disorder or it could just be overeating. Or what I see, if I sit down and watch a movie, it's like, I got to have a big plate of popcorn or a bucket of popcorn with a lot of butter on it.

And I get hungry for that every time. So I understand what you're saying about these neural pathways and how to break that. But what about the person who's overweight, has tried all kinds of diets and then nothing has worked?

Is there hope for them to change? Yes. I once ate a five pound bag of peanut M&Ms during the course of one movie. This was not healthy.

I felt ill and I realized I had to just get those snacks out of the house entirely. But there is hope, but it takes work because we have this large highway in our brain for food. And especially then if we have this large highway and life throws us a curve ball, our brain wants to take that large highway. So, okay, food will be my comfort and it'll take some work to dismantle this highway and build up the other path.

But there is hope as long as someone continues to redirect. But I want to throw out here, we need other people on our brain change program. One, because we need people to encourage us, to cheer us on when we make good choices, to help our brains rewire.

When someone praises us or cheers us, it releases happy chemicals, endorphins, and those actually help build new pathways. It's also why if someone starts to exercise, well, take it small, build up. You don't want to run a marathon right out the gate. You'll fail and just be discouraged, but do little bits of physical activity and do it with other people as a replacement and to begin to redirect your mind to other things. Sometimes it might be, well, my brain has a knot in it that if I sit in front of a movie, I need to eat. You're going to have to try to break that connection somehow. Maybe you'll need to do without movies for a little while.

But I really go back to getting other people to help encourage you, start small and have people with you to help you. A good example is I had a client one time that was really angry and took a rock and was ready to smash it into another client's face. He didn't, thankfully, he dropped the rock, but he told me later, I feel so bad. I feel like less of a man because I didn't hit him with the rock. Well, he came to us from the prison system and in his mind, masculinity meant violence and he needed that completely changed. And so we had to cheer him excessively for how he dropped the rock so that his brain could begin to change and realize, no, dropping the rock was the right thing to do. I was a better man because I dropped that rock, but it took a lot of cheering him on. Yeah, I can see the power of that. Yeah. What would you say to the person who they've been working, they've been making progress in changing thought patterns and so forth, but they've kind of hit a plateau in their progress and they're not moving forward the way they'd like to be moving forward.

What would you say to them? So I tell people, if you're at a plateau, I'm doing everything I need to do. I don't feel the next stage of growth. Your brain needs a little time to catch up, to begin to consolidate those nerve pathways. If someone is recovering from a brain injury, scientists have discovered that, okay, you'll have a period of growth of getting certain functions back and then you'll plateau, but you need to keep doing what you're doing, keep doing the rehabilitation. And then that plateau will eventually turn into another stage of growth. Then there'll be a plateau, then another stage of growth. Your brain needs to catch up and consolidate the stuff that happened in the first phase of growth before you can hit a second.

And so I just encourage people, keep doing what you need to do, even if you don't feel there's any next leap of change because your body is preparing for it, as long as you keep doing what you need to do. Yeah. So I hear you saying that really the plateau is just a normal part of the process.

Yes. Why can sober culture, there's being sober, feel intimidating to someone who's coming from a culture of addiction? Culture shock is a real thing, and it's not just for missionaries who go to other countries. Culture shock is something that is experienced by anyone who is trying to make a change. So if you're trying to move from a culture of addiction to a culture of sobriety, when you're an addict, there's certain things that you know what's going to happen when you do certain things.

You know what to expect, you know how to act, you know the speech patterns. But when you try to get sober, everything is new. Our clients, when we would take them on a fun trip, they would all try to sign up to stay back and work because they were all deathly afraid. They didn't know how to have fun sober.

And so they all tried to stay away from going on that trip. So we had to make fun mandatory because you have to go here to learn how to be sober and have fun. And this is true for anyone making a change. There will be a cultural shift. You're so used to the old way of doing things that there is a culture shock when you're changing. And so you have to expect that and know, okay, if now I've started to get into more of an exercise culture, this is new. Okay, now I've started to move into a culture of not being angry.

And this is weird. And so just to name it, this is culture shock. And just like a missionary who moves to a new country, to be able to sit with the discomfort long enough so that your brain readjusts, you begin to see sober culture as the new normal.

And so you can live in it instead of being scared. Because a lot of people don't make a change because the change is scary. Even though they don't like where they're at, it's too scary to change.

Just name it, that's culture shock and it can be overcome. As we come to the end of our time today, what do you say to the person who is listening and wants to help a loved one, maybe who's suffering from addiction or negative thoughts or any of those patterns? What can they do to help someone else? Praise them for change. Also to realize that change will be gradual.

We want them to be completely renewed by tomorrow. I've had clients that have been through seven rehabs. They've become connoisseurs of fine rehabilitation programs. It's easy to be judgmental, but to realize, okay, no, each time did a little bit of brain construction and maybe the number seven time is what they need.

That brain change takes time. And so if you are working with someone, praise them for every small change, praise them for the progress. You look for progress, not perfection. Hopefully they'll get there, but to come alongside them, walk them through it, help them into the new culture of being a changed person, walk alongside them, and encourage them that even if they fall, their construction is not done. Just get back up and keep going forward.

So falling is not the end. We get up and take one more step in the right direction. Well, this has been a very helpful time. And I know that our listeners are going to find not only the program, but are going to find the book to be very, very helpful, whether it's something they're struggling with or whether they're trying to help a family member or friend who's struggling with this sort of thing. So thanks a lot for being with us today.

Thank you very much for having me. Again, Dr. Alan Weissenbacher's book is The Brain Change Program, Six Steps to Renew Your Mind and Transform Your Life. Just go to buildingrelationships.us. You'll see more about it right there. Again, go to buildingrelationships.us. And next week, how do you move forward in life after you've experienced a failure? Moving forward after messing up is our topic in one week. Our thanks to Janice Backing and Steve Wick for their work today. Building Relationships with Dr. Gary Chapman is a production of Moody Radio in association with Moody Publishers, a ministry of Moody Bible Institute. Thanks for listening.