Come into His Fullness: Becoming a Whole-Brain Believer

Chapter 7
The Reality of the Development of the Human Belief System

God’s original intention was for humans to follow a specific developmental path from birth to old age. He intended for the development of the human identity to begin with the development of a belief system about self. This belief system develops first and from it develops a belief system about others, the environment and God.
The belief system about self is created first because at birth God created humans as completely self-absorbed creatures. For the first several months of life everything that enters a baby’s environment is interpreted as being there for the sole purpose of either meeting or thwarting personal needs. As babies interact with others and the environment, they learn more about self, not others. An infant begins to define self-based on the data being input into his or her brain by caretakers. And as babies, we accepted that we were whatever we were treated like and however others acted around us.
As a baby, God intended for you to be taught by your primary caretakers how to become you. They did not teach you by sitting you down at an infant sized student’s desk, handing you an infant primer and formally sharing information with you about how to become you. Instead, they interacted with you and with others in your presence. They talked and behaved and emoted in your presence. And you watched. And you learned.
All of the information from infancy onward was stored in our memory banks. As our brain processed incoming information it began to divide the information into separate beliefs. Those separate beliefs created our belief system, which then provided us with data about how to think, feel, behave, and interact with other humans and the environment. Unfortunately, because of the legacy of Adam the path that God originally intended for the development of the human belief system is either deliberately or unintentionally altered by the infliction of cognitive, emotional or relational wounding during one or all of the developmental phases. These soul wounds cause distortions in the belief system. The result is an attempt to get personal needs met using methods that are based on a distorted sense of reality ...

Chapter 8
Why Do We Have Emotions?

What is the truth about emotions? Why do we have them?
First, it is important to accept that the experience of an emotion is a physiological event. It is a neuron firing in your brain. A neuron is a nerve cell that transmits impulses and it is a basic functional unit of the nervous system. This physiological event is meant to signal necessary information about self, self in relationship with others, and self in relationship to the environment.
Second, emotional experience is functional. God created this internal mechanism in order to provide us with important information about ourselves and the world around us. This information is intended to assist us in the process of meeting our basic needs. It is also intended to assist us in attaining true intimacy with both God and others in our lives.
I would like to ask you to take a few minutes to contemplate a world completely devoid of emotional experience. A world filled with Spocks (the character from Star Trek). A world filled with individuals who are completely immersed in their left brain; analytical, methodical, systematic, rational, logical, concrete, and fact-based.
Now I would like to ask you to take a few moments to imagine a world where there was no experience of grief or sorrow, of apprehension or alarm, of annoyance or irritation, of loneliness or isolation, of embarrassment, remorse or culpability. Possibly your first response to this visualization is the question “Why would that be so bad?”
The reality of our human emotional experience is that we were given a range of emotion. Most of us have learned to refer to this range as moving from positive to negative feelings. We like the positive ones and try to avoid the negative ones as much as possible. Unfortunately, there is a fairly significant consequence to developing a pattern of avoiding negative emotional experience. Because all of our emotional experience originates from the same location in our brain, if we begin to shut down our experience of one type of feeling, eventually it diminishes our ability to fully experience other types of feelings. If we consciously or unconsciously begin to repress or ignore information that our brain is sending us about our emotional experience we will often be successful in numbing ourselves to those experiences, because we have caused our brains to stop giving us those signals ..

Chapter 9
The Reality of Soul Wounds

Because our brains are so powerful and “busy” and capable of being distracted by Satan, as we begin to work on understanding our personal belief systems, we will usually encounter difficulties that cause us to resist or interrupt this process. Try to keep in mind that it is God’s reality that throughout the human life span all things that occur either internally or externally have meaning, impact, and connectedness. All things from our past influence how we live in the present. This means that many of the difficulties we have experienced in our life, even after we become believers, have been caused by the adult effects of unrecognized and unacknowledged soul wounds which were sustained in childhood. These wounds are wounds of the soul.
As we continue to look at normal human development, it is important to understand what parts make up the whole of who we are. We have been created with three parts to self; spirit, soul and body. Paul prayed “…may your whole spirit, soul and body be preserved blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.” 1 Thessalonians 5:23.
The first part of self, our spirit is the part of self which, when alive, enables us to directly communicate with and experience intimacy with God. Remember that before salvation we were spiritually separated from God and at the instant of salvation our spirit awakens or is restored to life. The second part of self, our soul houses our mind (which contains our thoughts, our intellect, our belief system, and our perceptions of our inner and outer world), our emotions (which are our feelings), and our will (which is our ability to choose and to freely make whatever decisions we wish to make regarding our actions and/or behaviors). The third part of self, our physical body is the vehicle within which we exist in the environment and with which we express ourselves to and are recognized by the external world.
A powerful deterrent to recognition and acknowledgement of the connection between here-and-now difficulties and the soul wounds experienced in childhood is natural man’s tendency to turn the conscious mind away from the reality that there are any relevant connections between childhood and adulthood which need to be given attention in the here and now. While most people today can accept the fact that physical, sexual and extreme forms of verbal or emotional abuse do occur and that this abuse leaves soul wounds that can create adult effects, there are still many misconceptions regarding the very real soul wounds that occur from less extreme forms of human interaction ...