442. You Don't Need to Try Harder. The Shift You Need in Order to Finally Change.

Do you ever wonder why you feel stuck in the same things again and again. The things that you so desperately want to change about yourself that you want to stop doing day after day, month after month, you keep seeing yourself do them, and you don't know how to change it, and you don't know where it's coming from. We are going to be unpacking the theology of what is going on today, which is going to lead us to help us know how to change it. Are you ready? Let's go. Something inside you knows there is supposed to be more than this. More than going through the motions, more than the patterns you keep repeating no matter how hard you try. Hey, you're not broken. There's a root beneath it all, and there's a path through it. Welcome to the Made Whole podcast, where biblical wisdom and psychology meet to finally get you unstuck. Hi, I'm Brittany, a former therapist, and someone who has sat in the same place you're sitting right now. You don't have to stay there. This is where you're made whole. The broken places become beautiful and you finally come alive. Hey, friends. I'm so excited to dive in with you today. I have a baby on my chest again. She is not sleeping at the moment, so she might make some interesting noises if you hear anything in the background. That is what is going on, but she's just staring up at me. Maybe to sit in to take a little nap, we'll see. I'm so proud of myself for this newborn season, because I have been just rolling with the punches here. Usually I'm like, everything must stop and all attention focus on the baby, but we're still doing life around here, and it's been amazing. Obviously she gets all the love in the middle of it, but we're still recording podcasts. She's just snapping on me. I'm so excited to dive in today. We're going to be continuing this conversation about feeling inadequate, but this is going to touch a little bit on just any of the lies that we feel and any of the behaviors that we feel stuck in. We're going to slow down, go backwards, and really look at the theology of when this began, why we feel this way, and how we got to this place, and therefore what do we do with it? We'll be talking about that today, but I do want to pause and make sure you know that if you're ready to just make a greater change, that podcasts are great, and I love podcasts, and they can be so inspiring, and it can even give me some great ideas to change, but usually it's not the overhaul that I need. I want to invite you to do essentially an overhaul in your life, to really get those old lies silenced finally, and begin walking in the new behaviors, the new ways that you want to be acting and showing up for yourself, for your family, for the people around you. So I want to invite you into the Made Whole Academy. This is a 10 week live program where we do group coaching with small groups every week, and then in between you are meeting with God and learning a bunch of things, and doing exercises to really bring healing to every part of your life. So if you know that it's time for something to shift, and you're so sick of being stuck with where you're at now, the only way to get unstuck is to do something different, and I believe that one of the best ways to get unstuck is to use the resources that we're surrounded by. It's such an advocate of that I do that in my own life all the time, and so I want to invite you into the Made Whole Academy that is launching September 10th, starting so soon, and it's a limited number of spots to make sure you sign up. Also, if you sign up before August 17th, you get a free one on one 30 minute session with me so that we can help you just prepare for this time and make sure you are as set as possible. You also get immediate access to the pre-work, so you can begin just getting unstuck with where you're at, you get free access to the unstuck workshop as well, and you can really prepare your heart and mind for what God is going to do in your life. And I can tell you the stories that come out of the Academy are just unbelievable. God just changes so much when we just are faithful to show up and say, yes, God, whatever you have for me, I'm going to do everything I can, and then he does the work and it's just incredible. So I hope to see you over there, I hope to get to know you, I love getting to know people, so I hope you're one of them. But I hope you're able to catch the last episode as we kind of dove into this feeling of an adequacy that so many of us experience and kind of just talked about how prevalent this is, that it is not just us, that not just you, that feels this way, but as I kind of took away from this conference, it's just all of us that experience this, and so I want to spend some time unpacking this and trying to get us untangled from all of the lies that are keeping us bound and stuck. And so today, I want to go back to the beginning, the very beginning to Genesis to really unpack how this happened, what is going on? So I talked in the last episode, just briefly about how inadequacy stems from an identity wound. There's two kinds of wounds, safety wound, an identity wound, a safety wound, answers the question. So I want you to imagine that we are born with two empty spindles, one of those spindles, meaning like a yarn spindle, you know, where it's thread spindle, and there's your empty one we're born, and one of those spindles represents trustworthiness, and the other one represents love. And so the goal is that our relationships and our experiences will fill up these spindles so that we would know that we're perfectly love, that we can trust, the love spindle answers the question, who am I? It informs our identity, and the trustworthiness spindle answers the question, am I safe or can I trust? And so all of our life we're searching for these answers, and well God intended things to be different, and his perfect love and perfect safety that he gives us fills those up. We live in a sinful and broken world, and the people in our life cannot perfectly fill those up. And so all of us are left wounded, and we all have some core wounds that we see again and again. But I want to kind of go back in Scripture to look at how this actually plays out, because I think sometimes we hear these theories and psychology, and we're like, "Okay, that sounds cool, it makes sense, but how does that connect to Scripture?" And so I think it's important to go back into Scripture to make sure to lines with God's Word, but also to help you understand what we're talking about and why you are struggling with feeling inadequate. So we're going to go back to the book of Genesis, okay, and I want to look at what happens to Adam and Eve, to really go back to the very first story, to understand how God made us, his intentions for us, and then what happened. So obviously we know, for most of us, if we've been in church for a minute, we know that God created Adam and Eve, and he intended for them to live on the earth in perfect peace, walking with him daily, literally walking through the garden with him. And he created this beautiful, perfect world for them to be in, and they were perfectly loved, and they were perfectly safe, and they did not have a need, right, they were completely cared for perfectly by God. And then comes the snake, and this is where we're going to pick up in Scripture, we're going to go to Genesis chapter 3, and I want to read a few verses for you to hang with me. But these are probably familiar to most of us, but I want to look at these with a different set of lenses, okay. So I want you, as we're reading, to look for where is an identity wound forming, where is a trustworthiness wound forming. So you can begin to see what we're talking about here, and I'll flesh it out for you afterwards. But starting in verse 1 chapter 3, it says, "Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord had made." He said to the woman, "Did God actually say that you shall not eat of the tree in the garden?" Right, so as most of us know, when God put them in the garden, he gave, there was two trees, right, the tree of life and the tree of death, and he told them, "The one rule of this garden is that you do not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil." And that was the one rule, right, so that was the tree of death. He said, "If you eat this, you will surely die." And so that was the one rule that they were given in the garden. So going back to the second part of verse 1, the snake said to the woman, "Did God actually say. " Right, he said, "Did God actually say you shall not eat of the tree in the garden?" And verse 2, it says, "And the woman said to the serpent, "We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God said you shall not eat of the fruit of the trees that is in the midst of the garden." "Neither shall you touch it, lest you die." But the serpent said to the woman, "You will not surely die." "And God knows that when you eat of it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil." So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired and to make one wise, she took of its fruits and ate, and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate. And the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked, and they sew big leaves together and made themselves loin cloths. So we can see here, this is the first moment when sin entered the world, okay? And this begins, the sin first began with a belief. Did you see, as we read, where the identity wound came in, and where the safety wound came in? I want you to look back, okay? So if you didn't catch it, this is what I see. Going to verse 1, it starts here in verse 1, the second part, it says, "Did God actually say that?" To paraphrase, "Did God actually say that?" Now, what is this doing? This is creating a belief in Eve that God cannot be trusted, right? There's a belief that's entering her mind, or a thought that's entering her mind. of can I trust God? So there's the trustworthiness, right? The safety that she wants experience where knowing that God is perfect and cared for her perfectly now is being questioned and a belief is birthed, okay? And then hopping down to verse four, the serpent goes on and says that, well, God knows, this is paraphrasing. God knows that if you eat of it, you're gonna be like him. You're gonna know everything, right? So now this is inserting a wound of identity, right? It's making her question, her identity, right? God had already told her that she was his. And now the snake is saying, well, actually, you're not quite good enough, right? You're not quite like God and you could be like God if you take this step, right? And so this thought comes in forms this belief that she is inadequate as she is and in order to be adequate, she needs to partake of the fruit, right? Can you see how this plays out, right? The snake inserts these thoughts that you aren't enough as you are. He inserts these thoughts, you really can't trust God. And from this sin is birth, okay? Now I wanna point something out. So just because there is a wound, right? So, and I don't quite know theologically, the wound language at this stage. I don't know if the, as the snake spoke to them, this created, this wound in them, it's not quite the same as when we experienced trauma, but maybe it is. That one is a question mark for me, but say we're calling this a wound that does not mean that there's not, therefore sin. It does not mean that we are not culpable for the sin that comes after. So when the belief comes in, it does not render us powerless, right? When the thought comes in, the belief is formed that does not mean we are not then responsible for what comes after it. So I wanna make that really clear. Adam and Eve had a choice about what to do. Even though the snake was creating these questions in their mind, they had a choice about what happened next. And so as we're talking about this wounded language and talking about our core wounds and how these lead to the actions that we don't want to be taking, that doesn't mean that it's not sin. It doesn't mean that we're not responsible. We are fully responsible for the sin that we choose. Okay, so I wanna be very clear with that language. But the snake caused a feeling for Adam and Eve, maybe of inadequacy or being unsafe, or maybe like, it's trying to think of other words, I was trying to think, okay, what might they have felt, right? An adequacy, I can see that pretty clearly, that they are not good enough, right? That there's this other way of being where they can be better than they currently are. But then the unsafe part, right? There's entered that question of can I really trust God, right? If he, did he really say that for one? And then number two, if he's holding this thing back from me, that's good, maybe he's not a trustworthy person, right? And so it created this instability where there once was safety with God now, they feel unsafe or maybe they feel controlled, right? They feel like, wow, God didn't give me the best. And so I feel controlled, that he didn't even give me this information. Or maybe they feel helpless, like they want to be like God. And so therefore, they're gonna take control and figure out how to be that. Whatever feelings happened for them. And by the way, this goes to not just an adequacy, but all of our pain, right? There's an identity wound and a safety wound. And so any kind of our core pain can be traced back to these moments. But the feeling was created by the snake, okay? And the feeling was not sin, right? We're gonna have thoughts that come in. We're gonna have feelings that come in. And the sin is not itself in the thought or the feeling. It's in what we do with it. Now, if we have a bad thought that comes in and then we grab hold of that thought and we really perseverate on it and we, you know, that thought turns into hate or that thought turns into lust. We are responsible for that. It's not just that sin only happens with our hands or our mouths, like we can sin in our minds. That scripture is clear on that, right? But it's what that first thought, that first feeling, that first thing that comes, that is not a sin. And then we have a choice to what we do with that next. So what happened next for Adam and Eve was a choice. They had a choice to either believe what God had said, right, to believe that he, they were perfectly loved, they were perfectly safe or they could believe what the snake said, right? Snake is essentially saying that they are not safe and that they are not enough as they currently are. And so in deciding to believe the snake, they made the choice then as they believed the snake. They then acted out of that belief and made the choice to control. As I was trying to identify like what coping, if you will, if you're familiar with the pain in the piece of cycle, and I'll connect this more later for you that aren't. But what coping did they use in that moment? And I think a big one was control, that they wanted to control their future, right? Take it into their own hands, take control from God, and they wanted to become like God. And so out of that belief that they weren't enough and that they weren't safe, they took the step to control. And that control was the sin. And this is what I believe created the first pain cycle, right? You can see pain cycle is essentially where our feelings, or sometimes that you can call those lies, where our feelings lead to our destructive actions, okay? So let me give you an example before we go further, just in my own life, if you haven't heard me talk about this, just so you can have some handles to hold on to. So my pain cycle, which we have first are core wounds, or we can call them beliefs. We all have about three of these that we feel again, and again in different ways. And so we have those core wounds. So for example, for me, one of my core wounds is that I believe that I am inadequate. We'll go with that since that is one of my core ones, and that's what we're talking about today. But when I feel inadequate, I go to my coping. So I get dysregulated in that moment, and I'm trying to, my brain is trying to help me feel better. And so over time, I have chosen these different ways of coping with that, and this is where the sin comes in. And so when I feel inadequate, I might begin to control others in order to make me feel better. I might get angry in order to, like, again, that's kind of part of the control aspect. I might people please in order to get people to like me, and I'm choosing this sin behavior in order to feel better about that wound inside of me, okay? And so that's what the pain cycle is. And then when we act out of that place of sin, we act out of that control. That's when it just increases our feelings, because most of the time when we're interacting with other people that when we respond out of pain, then it's going to cause them to respond out of pain. Now they have a choice, but most of the time it's gonna trigger other people to respond out of their pain cycle, and then therefore that's going to reinforce the lie that we believe, okay? So one example, I feel inadequate. Let's go with my marriage and I feel inadequate, and so then I get angry and I yell at my husband, and in that moment he is going to go into his pain cycle, and maybe he feels worthless, and then he is going to withdraw and pull away from me. And then I'm gonna feel even more inadequate, because now he's not right there with me, and he's not supporting me, and I've just created this distance, and I've seen myself do it, and so that's gonna reinforce that belief that I'm inadequate, okay? So this is what a pain cycle is. This is where why we're stuck in the same places, those same bad feelings and thoughts you have, those same actions that you wanna change, but feel powerless to do it. And by the way, this is all in the Made-Hole Academy, this is what we talk about the whole 10 weeks. We talk about this, and we flesh it out for you, and we help you figure out how to get out of this. There's a strategy I won't talk about today, but it's a way to get out of this. And so this is the premise for all of it, and if it sounds complicated today, I'm over complicating it, it's so simple, but I wanna just kinda go to the theology behind it. So this is the first pain cycle. So let's pretend we know what Adam and Eve felt, we don't know exactly, but let's pretend they in that moment felt inadequate and unsafe, and from that belief, they controlled the situation. And they took that apple, right? And ate that apple in order to control the situation. Now, we could even bring it further apart, and Eve might have had a different pain cycle than Adam, right, 'cause she was the first one to do, and so maybe she was kinda feeling inadequate, and she wanted to control, but then when she offered it to Adam, then maybe he was like feeling, wow, maybe he felt inadequate as a spouse, like he wanted to place his wife. And so in order to kind of please her, which if we're trying to please anyone but God, that can fall into a sin. And so in order to please her, he also took the apple, right? So different sin, same core belief in that example. Obviously, we're speculating here, we don't know fully what those feelings were in them, but you can, I hope you can see this idea of a pain cycle forming, okay? So essentially, these lies are what lead to sin. If you wanna oversimplify the pain cycle, lies lead to sin, right? The introduction of the lie, and Adam and Eve led to the sin. Now, when I say lead to, once again, I wanna be clear, that doesn't mean that it's inevitable. It doesn't mean that we don't have a choice, right? We always have a choice, but it does begin with the lie, okay? And in pain cycle language, we would say that pain that leads to our coping, okay? Lylides is in, pain leads to coping, either way, same thing. Now, the feelings are the things that happen to us, okay? So again, I'm just going back to that, that those first thoughts, those feelings that come in, that's what happens to us, but then we have a choice what we do with those feelings. I want to unpack this further, okay? When we believe those feelings, then we have to have, our brain needs some way to make things better. I won't go deep into this today, this is something we cover in the Pain to Peace Academy, or even in the unstuck workshop, if you just want to unpack this for yourself very simply, you can get it done in a day, go and get the unstuck workshop super low cost so that it's accessible to you, and you can begin to identify what your pain cycle is so that you can have a map to understand yourself in any situation, okay? But our brain does not like being in distress like that, and so we end up choosing something to make it better. We either can begin believing the truth, and then we can make ourselves feel better, or if we continue believing the lie, we cannot live in peace unless we have some kind of response to try and make it better. So that's where like the control comes in, right? That was their attempt to make that distress feel better. Still sin, but that's what was going on. Okay, I want to go back into the text for a minute, I want you to see this is going to happen again. So their eyes are open after this, and they now feel more inadequate, and more out of control, right? Because now their eyes were open, they're trying to cover themselves up because they feel naked and ashamed, right? So now they're feeling, right, you can see that, they're feeling more inadequate. They're feeling more out of control because they've realized what they've done. They've realized just the gravity of good and evil, and it realized that they have made the wrong choice. There's so much, I mean that's, that would've been a real intense moment of being in pain. Let me tell you. And this is always, this is an extreme example of what always happens when we act, when we believe the lie and act on it, it just increases the voice of the lie in our heads. Okay, and so this happens for Adam and Eve, and then they step into sin again, going to verse eight. It says, and they heard the sound of the Lord walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord among the trees of the garden, right? So you can see this. So now they're feeling that inadequacy, the out of control feeling, the unsafe feeling, whatever you wanna call it, and now they're hiding, right? They're withdrawing or escaping, or whatever word you wanna prescribe to that. They are, they're removing themselves from the one truly loving and trusted source. When we believe the lies, this is what we do. We do destructive things that actually make the situation worse, right? We know what would make it better, what makes everything better is going to God. And yet they do the opposite of that, because they're believing these lies, and whenever we're believing the lies, it's going to lead us to this destructive behavior. And then we're gonna see it again here in verse nine. It says, but the Lord God called to man, and said to him, where are you? In verse 10, it says, and he said, I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid this is Adam talking. I was afraid because I was naked, and I hid myself. God said, who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat? The man said, the woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me the food of the tree, and I ate. Then the Lord said to the woman, what is this that you have done in the woman? Said the serpent deceived me, and I ate. Okay, so once again, we see the pain cycle. We see them believing, so now there are face to face with God, and they've just sinned, so I can only imagine the beliefs of inadequacy, which some of them are based in reality, right? They are not, they are sinful. They did go against God, but they're also seeing themselves in the wrong way, right? They're now seeing themselves as not enough because they're not like God, and they're not seeing themselves through the redemption and love of God. They're only seeing themselves through eyes of condemnation. And so in that belief, once again, a feeling inadequate and probably out of control, and unsafe and all of that, they are now blaming, which is a big one a lot of us like to do. I'm raising my hand over here too, but they're blaming, right? They're trying to make themselves feel better by pointing the finger at someone else so that they aren't culpable, okay? So their Adam is blaming his wife, Eve is blaming the snake, and you can see the pain cycle again, okay? Another sin stemming from these false beliefs. Now, a sin has entered the world, and there is death, and there is real danger. And this is where it gets a little bit different. So I don't know exactly theologically or even biologically how this happens. So take this with a grain of salt, but I'm trying to understand how this all happened. So our fight or flight response is something that's given to us by God for when there is actual danger, okay? So if there's a bear in the forest, we need to be able to run. But now prior to this moment, there was no death, so the animals would not hurt them. So they didn't have to run from a bear, and so I don't know how our fight or flight response worked, like if it was already in Adam and Eve, just kind of waiting just in case, and then once there was real danger and real death in the world, that's when it kind of kicked in, or yeah, I don't know how it worked, but we don't have to know specifically, but I do know that because now we grow up in a world that's sinful and broken as we're kids, and we are facing these moments of these lies coming into us, these bad feelings. Our fight or flight response is what gets activated in those moments, and we learn as kids to kind of automatically cope with those. So for example, imagine a kid, his parents are arguing in the next room, and he feels unsafe, okay? So he's gonna automatically, his brain is gonna automatically do something, cope with that in some way, and that might look like going and hiding, and so as kids, that can work. Now, now there's also sin responses, so I'm not trying to say that as kids work completely innocent, but as he goes and hides from his parents, but then as an adult, now that pattern has been created, and he goes and hides when his wife raises her voice, a little bit, he goes and hides from his wife, and instead of actually dealing with the problem and confronting it and working through it, he hides away and distancing himself and sin, because he's trying to deal with that. So we are all born with sin responses, right? That none of us are born without sin, because of an Adam and Eve, but then as we grow an awareness, and we grow in self-control, we begin learning that in this, we have a choice, right? So that kid that would go and hide in his closet, as he gets old enough, he begins to learn that he has a choice, and maybe instead of hiding in his closet, he can sit on his bed confidently and pray, or as he becomes an older adult, he knows how to go and peacefully confront people and talk to them about what's going on, right? So we start to learn that we have a choice, however, most of the time when we don't stop and realize our patterns, we just keep repeating the same patterns again and again, okay? And that is how we get trapped in these cycles. But the problem is we often think that in order to change these cycles, we just have to do differently. We have to act differently. But what we're missing in all of this, is that it doesn't start with our actions, it starts with our beliefs, okay? Adam and Eve, first believe they were unsafe, they first believe they weren't adequate, and then they acted on that sin, okay? And so if we want to actually change our actions and stop this sin, then we have to begin believing different things, okay? One quick example of this, okay? If we want to stop getting angry, in order to do this, we're like, okay, I just keep getting angry at my kids and I don't want to be like this. So you know what, I think the problem is I have too many expectations of them, I have too many rules. And so in order to stop getting angry, we just decide that we're going to let them do what they want, and that we're going to let them kind of not have those limitations on them, and maybe that's the problem, and we're essentially in that people pleasing them so that we don't get angry, right? We're just saying, okay, what your feelings are is gonna trump everything. Now, what's underneath the anger, okay? So if you look at this, if you roll back the curtain, let's say for this person, what's underneath the anger, is that they feel inadequate, and when they feel inadequate, and they don't know what to do as a parent, they just get angry. And so when they switch to people pleasing, right? That is no better than anger, because we're putting essentially people, or in this example, our children on the throne, instead of God on the throne, and fearing our children over God, which is sinning. And when we do that, it's not going to be any better. Maybe the anger transforms into something different, but the root of it will still be there, okay? To actually change, we have to change the belief. We have to believe that I am more than enough, because God has chosen me for this task. It doesn't mean that I'm gonna be perfect at it, but it means that He's chosen me for it. And therefore, I can peacefully communicate with my kids and uphold boundaries, right? And so this is what I teach you in the unstuck workshop, or in the Made Hole Academy, is how to actually begin rewiring your brain to believe God's truth, which is then going to create different actions. And by the way, scripture backs this up. First Samuel 167 says, "For the Lord sees not as man sees." Man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at you. at the heart. So this backs up this God. Doesn't care about our actions as much as he cares about our heart. What is the heart behind it? Okay? And so we've got to begin with our heart. We got to begin with the beliefs in order to then change our actions and get out of those old cycles that we're stuck in. So I hope that that helps you just begin to see things differently. And I know from me when I think about the fact that Adam and Eve also felt inadequate. Like it just, we've always struggled with this. We always have and it makes me feel less of that power over me. Just remembering that this is the effective sin. And it's not actually true about who I am. So I hope that does the same for you. And whatever beliefs you're experiencing, whether it's inadequacy or feeling unsafe or alone or whatever beliefs, I hope that this is removing some of that power for you. But I do have also some specific strategies I want to teach you. And I believe in the next episode or pretty soon we're going to be talking about those specific ones. But you can also get started on these some of these strategies, even more in depth. If you want to go to madewholepath.com and get the unstuck workshop or come and join me in the Academy. But let me, let me just pray for you real quick. God, I just thank you, Lord, for your goodness, God. I thank you that you created us, God, and gave us a choice, God, so that we can freely worship you, Lord. And I just pray, God, that in the midst of God, all of these things that we're facing, Lord, would you help your voice resound in our minds, God, that would you help us not to get stuck in what the enemy is saying, not to fall into that trap in that lie. And I pray that you would help us to see ourselves and see each other and see the world the way you intended us to see it, God. Help us God to get out of these old beliefs that are keeping us trapped, God, and walk in the freedom that we were made for. God, we love you and we worship you and Jesus and we pray. Amen. Love you. Hey, friend. I hope that God used today's episode to speak to you or encourage you in some way. And if you did, don't leave it just with you. There is someone else in your life that needs to hear the encouragement that you heard today. So be sure to share it. And maybe you're still feeling stuck and you're realizing that you're in the same place day after day and nothing is changing and you need to take it a step deeper. If that's you, then the unstuck workshop is your next step. You can finish the whole thing in a day and begin getting unstuck. You can find out all the details at madeholdpath.com. Lastly, if the show has meant something to you, I can't tell you how helpful it is for me if you believe a review. I am deeply encouraged and it also helps other women find the hope and tools that you found. I'm so very grateful for you, friend. I can't say it enough and I can't wait to see all that God has in store for you.