On today's podcast, how do you climb a mountain in flip flops? I would love to know. Welcome back. I'm Mike. I'm Lance. We got the psychologist. And we got the pastor from Grace Point Church in Wichita, Kansas with us today and every day. It is going to be a good one today because I got some thoughts. I got to hear him not to be negative, but I got some thoughts. And for those of you who have studied the book 12 to how to transform your mind, you get the joke. Exactly. Not to be negative.
So that's the whole idea for me. I thought of that this week. Do you know? I was starting to realize that being positive, which starts right here, it's in the mind, but being positive in a negative world is like climbing a mountain in flip flops. Oh my goodness. It is. It's a great analogy. Dude, it is a struggle. You walked in there with that question and I'm like, well, I want to know the answer to this question. I want to know what the question is all about.
How do you climb a mountain wearing flip flops? Yeah. You're lacking it to trying to be positive in a negative world. Oh my gosh. Because when the only thing you got to hold on to is between your big toe and your neighbor next door to, and it's a little strap of leather. It gets a little sweaty. Oh my gosh. But it is a challenge. That's why we're here. We're to help you with that challenge. That's why this podcast exists. So how to be positive in a negative world. What brought that up this week?
What brought it up was a few conversations that I've had with myself and a lot of the people around me. Some really close, some not so close, but just an observation really of how challenging it is to, to focus on being positive, focus on keeping your thoughts, uh, moving in the right direction, moving towards the top of the mountain. And how challenging it is when most people, I mean, most people are negative. Most people are. That's just the reality. I'm going to say 90%.
Yeah. And so I looked up a few quotes and it always really jumps out at me when I see these, but I just would love some of your insight on this. But so there's a philosopher, a Roman philosopher out there is named Seneca. I come across this. He was a part of the stoic movement. I believe is what it was called, which is all about self control, drop an education on us here. I guess so. But he said this, everything hangs on one's thinking. A man is as unhappy as he has convinced himself.
He is boom. Yeah. This whole idea of wisdom. We control this. I control what I think. I control how I respond to other people's negative thinking. Number one, I can't control that at all. So why would I even try? But I love this quote as well. It says the happiest people I know are evaluating and improving themselves. The unhappy people are usually evaluating and judging others.
Boom. I'm telling you right now, I've never met anyone who was a positive person who was a grateful person who was a happy person who was spending a lot of their time judging others. I've just never seen it. You want to talk about flip-flopping all the way down the mountain. You know, it's hard to go down the mountain to flip-flops. So we're miserable both ways. No, you're right.
Once you step through the looking glass, once you realize the difference between positivity and negativity, once you understand how your thinking works and you begin to notice it all around you, then suddenly you feel like you're in a different world. It's like waking up in Rome and looking around. Everything is foreign to you. Sure. And you just see the negativity jumping off the page everywhere.
And then it becomes so easy, if you're not careful, to start to think, well, when in Rome I'm just going to be negative with everybody else. And if we're not careful, we do that not even on purpose. We naturally get drug back down the mountain. And so yeah. Misery loves company. Misery does love company. And I'm very much not only aware, but more than ever just challenged not to go back. Sure. Not to go back. And I've got people, we all do.
We all have people really close to us who just simply, they don't want to change. Right. Well, and we can't do anything about that, but how do we live with it? Well, we talked about this months ago, the stages of change. Dementia and whoever, Prochesska, Dementia and Prochesska, that there are stages to change. And one of the first stages is pre-contemplation. There's nothing wrong with me. And those, and we are in that, everything in our life could change.
So there are different elements of our life where we look and like, why would I change? Why would I change my hairstyle? Why would I change my job? So we're in that pre-contemplation stage where we're not thinking about creating a change in that arena. And so if somebody were to say to us at that moment, Lance, you need a new job. You know, why? Why would I get a new job? It doesn't make any sense to us.
And so most people we encounter throughout our day don't realize they have the power over their thought processes. And they don't quite understand how they think is what is creating their emotional experience. So since they don't understand those two concepts, the idea of changing is absurd. And the reason for changing is absurd. I'm not causing the problem they are. Yeah, that's it. I'm miserable because of what they're doing. That's it.
And at that point, not recognizing that their actual misery or frustration is being caused by how they perceive and view the world, then it doesn't make any sense to try to consider making a change because essentially what you're saying to somebody in that moment is it's all your fault. There's nothing wrong with everybody else. You're the one making a big deal out of nothing. And they hear it because they think negatively. They hear it negatively.
Yeah. So if you go to somebody in a moment like that and say, hey, they're going to take it as criticism. Yeah, you can put it as positive as you can possibly put it, but that's just not how they're going to perceive it. And that is fundamental. Number one, I can't control what they think. Yeah. So I can try to put it as positively as possible, but ultimately how they perceive it. That part's up to them. And that's the part they're not on board with.
They don't recognize that how they're hearing this is being generated by the brain. Well. Well, I had a couple of years ago and we were working on these concepts and spoiler alert, they got there. But in the beginning and they harken back to these moments and kind of laugh about it now.
But in the beginning, he would say, I think you could parent your children with a little more discipline and she would become very upset, start to cry and say out loud, so what you're saying is I'm a horrible mother. So what he said versus how she perceived it in this instance were two very different things. But in that case, she did not see that she was perceiving what he said in a way that created that emotional reaction.
And it took a long while for both of them to get to the point where somebody could say something and they recognize that is their opinion and has absolutely nothing to do with and then process the information from a new perceptual process. That's called we have a failure to communicate. So your question was how do you climb a mountain in flip flops? How do you live in a world of negativity and remain positive if I'm guessing correctly was the ultimate question you were driving towards.
That's the ultimate question. And I would like to hear your answers. Jesus. What's furry and how do you not? Jesus. Whatever the question is, the answer is always there's just something about that name. Preflow Dollar said he shouted out in the audience one day a question and some guy said, oh Jesus. He was laughing because the guy had been asleep the whole time. He woke up hearing a question being fired out and he just, you're right. You're right. Whatever it is, the answer is Jesus.
That's right. And in part it is Jesus. Because if we were just to follow his teaching, we would figure out things like, you know, I don't have to. I don't have to struggle with my enemy. I could just love my enemy. I can love him from a distance, but I can still love him because I'm not letting them in. I'm not letting my enemy in an unfortified city. You've used the analogy of the well, the scripture that talks about it. Sitting without walls. So just again, focus on what you can control.
Gotta let that negative person or that negativity kind of slide off your back. Don't let the shoulds happen because should happens. And then just really focus on continuing to climb up the mountain. Put some hiking boots on. Now a year ago, you were in kindergarten. A year ago, you were just beginning to learn and grasp the concepts and we kept everything pretty simple and straightforward to lay down these Lego bricks so you could start building on them. And this is how insidious it is.
Everything you just said was negative. That's why you were smiling. And at a graduate level, now I can point that out to you. Don't let them get to you. Gotcha. Yeah. And so it brings up your guard. You put a wall between you and them. Don't let them get to you as a negative statement. Do remain calm. Do remain in control. Do listen to what is being said. Do choose how you're going to perceive things even if they're perceiving it differently. What do you do?
That's where you pour your energy into. Gotta keep out of the negative. Gotta should must have to need to gotta. And as you said it, your eyes widened and your body stiffened. I gotta stay out of that negative. You're anticipating and so you're creating the anticipatory stress because I gotta do this or I'm right or wrong. And if I'm wrong, then that I'm failing. I let them get to me. I can't let them get to me. Can't. Negative. I can't let them get to me. Haven't gotten the knots out.
And so that's ultimately what you're saying in terms of the Bible says a man without a city, a man without self-control is like a city whose walls have been torn down. We are vulnerable to attack when we're not in control of ourselves. And so that self-control is that constant, Paul said, take captive every thought.
And so there were three or four thoughts there right in a row, bam, bam, bam, that if you take them captive, you can reframe them from a negative mindset to a positive mindset, giving you more control over those dynamics in a relationship. Gotcha. Well, I want to, that's the ultimate question. What do you want? I want to put some hiking boots on and head up the mountain.
And that's, you know, you said Jesus, but Martha Mary is a great parable now that I fully understand the parable, but he is juxtaposing two ways of thinking and showing us if you think in terms of needs and have tos and shoulds, you will be like Martha creating your own stress. Mary and this is, there's a two part or two it, and I don't think people ever really catch that second part, which is just phenomenal to think about. Mary has chosen what is better. So we need to set the table.
Mary chose what is better. I could set the table or I could sit down and listen to Jesus. She had a choice. She chose what is better. That is a preference for Mary. Yep. Mary. Oh, there's Jesus. I could go fix some dinner or I could sit down and talk to him. Why are they gonna sit down and talk to him? She chose what is better. So there's two ways of thinking. She chose what is better based on what she wanted. Boom. Yeah. But the next sentence, the next sentence is earth shattering.
The next sentence should make your toes curl. And flip flops, the toes should relax. She chose what is better and that will not be taken from her. And if you really stop and think about it as being said, when Mary chose what was better, she made a choice based on her preferences in that moment and God himself will not undo what she just chose. And on that have power. They say the power of the raised Jesus from the dead lives inside of you. Here's an example of Jesus turning power over to Mary.
You choose. What do you want? Yeah. If you say to this mountain, mountain move the mountain, move the faith of a must receive. If you believe, what do you want? Ask and you shall receive. Seek and you shall find knock in the door shall be open. What do you want? And here Jesus is telling us when you choose what you want. Yeah. I'm not gonna do that. I believe I'm developing an understanding of that scripture about, you know, say to this mountain move. Well, I think it's about perspective.
And I think that from God's perspective, that mountain is even smaller than a molehill. And so when you desire to have God's perspective, then all of a sudden that mountain becomes a molehill. Super easy to move. As a matter of fact, you can just kick it over. And so, you know, choose what is better. Along with that, I saw this the other day. Hate has four letters. So does love. Enemies has seven letters. So does friends. Lying has five letters. So does truth. Negativity has 10 letters.
So does positivity. So life has two sides. Choose what is better. Boom. Boom. The sad thing for me. Oh, I'll cheer to that. In about a year, we'll learn how to operate this panel. You guys got to understand, we only stand here and talk. We only turn on the cameras. We only mess with this board one hour per week. There's no dress rehearsal. There's no big show planning meetings or scripting stuff out. So you get what you pay for.
But what's sad to me is those people living in negativity, they don't like living there. They're searching for answers. They're searching for ways out of negativity. And I think it was last week I said, I guarantee you if you make these four changes, then in two weeks, life will look so much better. And they were very simple changes to make, but they require effort. They require discipline. And people are looking for quick solutions, easy answers.
They're living in negativity, not recognizing that much of their misery, much of their frustration, stress, much of their loneliness, unhappiness is being generated by how they perceive the world around them. We're still kids. Your children standing there in the middle of a thousand toys and they scream, "There's nothing to do!" And you're like, "I've got thousands of toys. There's a beautiful day outside. There's sticks. There's mud." And they're saying there's nothing to do.
From their perspective, there's nothing to do. And so because they say it and think it, they are miserable as opposed to changing their perspective and saying, "There's much that can be done here. What would be better? What might be enjoyable? What might help me pass the time? What can I find that might be entertaining? How do I..." They don't think that way. They think the negative way. It's like finding islands of despair in an ocean of joy.
Some people just have that knack and they don't even want to do it. And yet it's a habitual default. And we can all be renewed. That's that lack of recognition that I'm generating the majority of this misery. And to that end, where everybody seems to run to first is antidepressants.
And the question for me as a psychologist over the years has been, "How do I bring the most effective care and help to clients, to patients?" And in the beginning, coming right out of graduate school, I believed that multi-level approach was the best. Stop drinking, get in therapy, start working out your issues and get on a medication. Let's hit this from all angles. And hopefully the medications can be temporary. But even at that time, I was seeing people's perspective regarding medication.
I had this one gentleman right out of the gate in my career who came into therapy because his mother had said, "I don't want to see you on medications." And so to honor her, he came to therapy. And I quickly began to figure out that he was in therapy so he could say he did therapy. So then I would give him permission to go over to the doctor and try medication. And then he could tell his mother that the psychologist recommended it.
And he kind of kept circling the drain and kind of hounded me about it. So finally I said, "Look, if you want to give him a try, I'm not against trying something. But what I want you to recognize is that it's not a silver bullet, it's not a quick fix, and there's a real risk it becomes a crutch." And he's like, "Oh, no, I understand. I understand. I get it. I get it. I get it." And then I didn't see him. It's like, "Okay, we're going to close the case."
And six months later, he had gone to the physician, had that appointment, and then stopped coming to therapy. Six months later, he calls and sets an appointment, comes back in and says, "You were right. It became my crutch." And even though I was taking the antidepressant, I sat in my barclounger 18 hours a day. He said, "But here's what happened that made me realize you were right."
And what's that? And he goes, "As miserable as I was and as much as I could not get out of that chair to go to work, get out of that chair to go take a shower, brush my teeth, get out of that chair to even go eat, I could damn sure get out of that chair and go get a can of Copenhagen." And he said, "That's when it clicked, as he's driving to get a can of Copenhagen. I can get out of the chair. I'm choosing to stay in the chair." And that is not an antidepressant.
And so since then, part of my practice, part of my work, my research, studying, continuing education, is looking at the studies on antidepressants. And you have the commercials and they say, "Hey, FDA has approved this. It seems to work better than placebo." And they show smiling happy people. It's really misleading. I could go on for hours about this. I'll try to keep it short.
But the studies, when they say they're significantly more effective than a placebo, there's a significant difference in the outcome. That makes you think, "Hey, it's doing something, right?" But look at the numbers. Whatever the medication is, the numbers are all very similar. And so in the placebo group, and we won't even go into how they set up these studies to create these differences, because if you want to read about that, get a book called "The Depression Cure," chapter one.
Read it about antidepressants and then you'll know what I'm talking about. Because it breaks apart how studies are done and the problems with the studies. But anyway, let's say the studies are good. In the placebo group, 30% show improvement after 12 weeks. 20 weeks, 12 weeks, whatever their study time frame is. And in the antidepressant group, 33% show improvement after 12 or 20 weeks. So mathematically, that is statistically a significant difference.
These appear to be two different populations. What they really don't talk a lot about, you have to get the research article to dig in, is they're measuring your depression with a rating scale. And usually it's the Hamilton Depression rating scale, Hamdi. And the psychologist or the psychiatrist is doing the rating. And so he's rating your level of depression each week. And so you start out on the Hamilton D with a score. It's a pretest.
And maybe your score, I think it's a 75 point scale, maybe your score is 40. So you're mildly or moderately depressed. Well, at the end of 12 to 20 weeks, what they don't tell you is how much that score came down. So the score for the placebo group came down. The score for the depression group came down more. But what was done more? Sure. And so whereas they may be statistically significantly different, suggesting there isn't a drug effect, moving in the correct direction, how much did it move?
Now, to look at the television commercial, people are happy and shiny and jumping and running with their kids. But that's not what the Hamilton D rating scales are showing. They're not going from depressed to blissfully happy. They're dropping 10 or 15 points. So if you're severely depressed, you're dropping down into the moderate to mild range. If you're moderately depressed, you're dropping down into the mild range. If you're mildly depressed, then maybe you're dropping into the normal range.
But it's not this euphoria that suddenly hits you when you take an antidepressant. So, you know, always liking it to, you know, it's called informed consent. If you're going to go take an antidepressant and I'm your shrink, this is what I'm going to tell you. Understand that to give the drug a full trial to see if this is the drug for you or not, you're looking at 90 days. Because the first 30 days of taking the drug, it's building up in your system, working up to a clinically therapeutic level.
So really in the first month, you can't know if it's working or not because there's not enough of the drug in you for it to start working. And then you have to give it, you know, 30, 60 days to see if it's going to make a difference and bring about a change. Before you can say this is an effective drug or not. So you're looking at three months, 90 days to give the drug a chance to see if it'll work. So imagine this, you have
back pain. And I say to you, I have a surgery that could help with that. It's helped 33% of the people I've used it on. It didn't help 67%. And for those 33% that it did help, after 90 days, their pain level decreased by 10%. I'm sorry, their pain level decreased by 10 to 20%. You want to do that? Probably not. And that's what's happening with antidepressants is the reality is, and I get it, they're marketing things and something's better than nothing.
And you want to help. And if somebody's going to, you know, any port in a storm, I'm not against antidepressants to help people start their journey in a different direction. There's a study that came out recently, and it was in on CNN's website where they compared three and it's a meta analysis. And what a meta analysis is, is they look at many studies that have been done. So if I do research on a subject, that's my findings. If you do research on a subject a year later, those are your findings.
A meta analysis would take both our studies, pull them together and look at the aggregate data and the aggregate outcomes of all the studies. And so this meta analysis compared therapy to medications alone to therapy and medications alone. And the conventional wisdom has always been the best approaches, therapy and medication. What the meta analysis of a, I think 146 studies found was therapy works better than antidepressants.
And surprisingly, the worst outcomes were in groups where therapy and antidepressants were combined. And I think that speaks to what that first client I ever had was talking about was that once he thought this medication is going to help me, he quit trying to do what he can do. He sat back waiting on the medication to take
care of him. So even though the person was in therapy, it's actually created a worse outcome because it's working against, you know, I'm sitting here waiting on the medication to kick in and blaming all my troubles on the medication not kicking in. But you keep telling me it's all my fault and I need to do this or I need to do that. And so it just furthers the frustration that nothing is working here.
And so therapy works better than medication and medication alone works better than therapy and medication. These are just kind of mind numbing results that for whatever reason, don't don't get out there. And when you when you phrase it that way, you know, hey, there's a 33 percent chance you might respond to my surgery and decrease your pain by 10 to 20 percent. And we won't know if it works for another 90 days. So you want to sign up for this?
You're like, no. It's like thinking that a mountain climbing flip flops is going to be easy. Right. Yeah, it's not going to work. Somebody says, hey, you can climb those mountain flip flops. Really? Yeah. It's that simple. I don't have to go to the store and buy the expensive boots and work out and get ready and prepare for this mountain journey. I can just put on some flip flops and go. And in many cases, I see people approach antidepressants that way. You know, their life is
falling apart. They're going through a divorce, drinking. You know, they're they're negative thinkers. They've got issues from the past and they turned singularly to a medication to fix themselves when all of this is going on. And it's you're right. How do you get somebody who is thinking negatively to recognize? And that's a huge challenge and it's a huge problem in many areas of life. As a boss, how do you get your employees to shift
how they think? Sure. You know, as a spouse, how do you get your spouse to climb on board with a new direction? These cause friction in many marriages and many work situations causes friction and in therapy. The client walks in thinking, you know, you can help me. And then I'm turning around and saying, you can help yourself. Well, that's not why they came in. You needed. Right. Why am I here with you? Yeah. And yet it's all
possible. And the way to approach it, because that question still lingers out there. How do you climb a mountain while wearing flip flops? How do you remain positive in a world of negativity? And that's where Paul's advice comes back is take captive every thought is you control you. That's it.
So if you're going to be positive throughout the day, if your guard is down, if you're not listening to your thoughts, if you're not taking captive every thought, then it is easy to stray and start kind of chiming into feeding into their negativity, letting their negativity get to you. Listen to your thoughts.
When these are the very advanced graduate level applications of the four fundamentals, because right now, as I'm speaking, what is happening in this room is I'm vibrating the air and that air is tickling your eardrums and your brain is now converting that vibration into a known language. And then you're defining those words and pulling the sentences together and giving the words meaning. So it is very easy if you're not on your guard to accept my premise about matters.
And so if I say to you, you know, you should stand up straight. And you look at me with a cross look and look at your body posture and say, I don't have to do nothing. I won. I won. You are now operating from the same perspective as me because I said you should stand up straight, right or wrong, good or bad expectation law. And you accepted that premise, looked at how you're standing and said, I don't have to.
So now you're speaking my language and you are defensive because I've implied there's a wrong here and you're now arguing there's a right here. And so my words easily, deceptively have pulled you into thinking my way. Yeah, I'm offended. That's why we live such offended lives. So it's really hard when, you know, this is a simple example, but it's really hard when somebody's in there, you should stand up straight for you to think, wow, they have a lot of rules going on over there about life.
And they're so rule bound. They're concerned about my posture. I'm actually pretty comfortable standing like this. And hey, I appreciate the concern. Yeah, I'm actually pretty comfortable. Thank you, though. Thank you for thinking about me. I'm OK. It's hard to stay over here. Yeah. Which this is, you know, full circle when I was a kid. You've heard this phrase a million times. My mom used to say, if you ain't got nothing I say, don't say nothing at all. Sure. So when somebody's being negative.
Sometimes the best response is no response. Sure. Oh, yeah. Just pray for him. Yep. Sorry. Sorry you're struggling over there. See, you're frustrated. Look at the time I got something in the garage I meant to do, but is don't take their misery from them. Don't feed into what they're doing. And sometimes the only thing you can do is take care of yourself. Sure. Yeah, I gave that as a recommendation just last evening to someone who was telling me how somebody else was impacting them.
Pray for me. This person's being super. What was the word? They were being malicious or something. And I said, well, you'll never be able to control them. So just don't let them in. Focus on you. And it's one of the things I work with people, you know, whether it's anger management or stress management or relationships or whatever. But is assertive responses, being assertive, being appropriate, being true to yourself, being. And so people will hear what you just said and say, so I don't do
nothing. Sure. I just let them walk all over me. I let them get away with it. And it's like, no, you have self control. You maintain your peace. You maintain your boundaries. You just give them choices. If they're going to be appropriate with you, you can stay. If they're going to be inappropriate with you, they can leave. You can leave and you let the other person deal with the consequences of their life so they can learn and decide whether they maybe there's something here to change or not.
But my focus is 100 percent on you and how you're feeling, how your life is going and what your experience is like. And if you're going to focus on them, well, I'm going to step back because I can't do anything about you, let alone do anything about you doing anything about them. And so for anything to start to work here, one of us has to get in control. Sure. And that is a lot of
work. There's a lot of things to do in that department that takes work, that takes effort, that is beneficial for ourselves, beneficial for the other person in the long run. It is not I'm not doing nothing. It is I'm remaining mature. I'm remaining self controlled. I'm I'm I'm forgiving in the moment that is happening and I am turning the other cheek.
I am walking away. And this allows me to constantly choose what is better for me in this moment, what is better for me, what is better for our relationship. Because if you start cursing me out and I start firing back, we're both going to do damage to this relationship. Two peoed people trying to climb uphill in flip flops. In flip flops. We're going to. Because there's a you know, this is scriptural as well. You know, do not repay evil with evil instead, repay evil with kindness.
If you're in a song, we feed them. If he is thirsty, give them drink and people stop there. So you say that just a little walk on me. What's the next sentence? And in doing so, you keep burning coals on their head. You convict other people when you remain in control and don't take the bait. When you forgive them, even as they're hurting you, you convict them. And that is more powerful than firing back an insult. Yeah. Trying to fire back some condemnation. Let the conviction do its
work. Yep. Yep. Awesome. Good stuff today, Mike. Thank you for bringing it all in. Thank you. So go get those hiking boots. Put them on. Start climbing them out. If you think you've ever been to the mountain top, it was just a false summit. There's further to go. I'm Atlantic. And I'm Mike. I'm the psychologist. I'm the pastor. And we will see you next week. Have an awesome week.