The Root System, Part 4

Transcript of a Sage Hill Live Fully Podcast conversation with Dr. Chip Dodd. Lightly edited for readability; speaker labels omitted.

You're listening to the Sage Hill podcast with Dr. Chip Dodd. Sage Hill is a social impact organization that helps people see who they are made to be so they can do what they're made to do. The following podcast was recorded at this year's Sage Hill training, an in-depth experiential training that helps people bring their heart to what they are called to do. To learn more, you can visit sagehilltraining.com. People's lives work out because they lean into them. And any attempt to control it and I know we need control. I'm not talking I'm talking about any need to false control it will make you miss it because you're isolated from neediness. Neediness is the key that opens up the treasure trove of the lives we're made to live. It's it opens up the storehouse of God and the storehouses of the hearts of each other and the storehouse that I was implanted with at birth, where I came out working full of faith and tons of courage. And life over time, as I isolate from how I'm made, will rob me of my faith, keep it from growing into its sophisticated state that I'm made to have as a grown up. It will keep me from having the courage that says, help me so I can get to where I'm made to go when I'm discouraged. And it will keep me from being able to work because life becomes a series of laborious experiences Instead of something I can't stop doing, somebody needs to tell me to rest because I can't stop doing this thing I'm made to do. I'm not obsessive or compulsive, I'm compelled. See, everything that life becomes sick is just an impaired expression of something that was made to be. K? Everything in life it becomes sick. It's Todd and I were talking about achievement, man. You're made to achieve. You're made to go. I want everybody in this room to be so rich in whatever you're made to be wealthy with that you can't stand it. It's like it's so heavy that you've got to give it give it up. You gotta give it away. But it's not the richness that's gonna make you well, it's the craving for the life you're made to live that can't help but heal you and make you well and make you strong. So let's go to needs. The need to belong and the need to matter is the most powerful need of a human being. We're talking about making a shift from figuring to feeling. You don't get rid of figuring, but you start using it for its proper resource. We're gonna be moving from figuring to feeling. We don't need to work at all in becoming more knowledgeable. We need to work at becoming more surrendered so that we can become more knowledgeable about how life works and us able to live in it. The need to belong and the need to matter are the two primary needs of a human being. What is a need? A need is that thing that you have to have to be able to live. If you don't have that need fulfilled, you might can get by and survive, but you're not able to live as you were created. Geraniums during the wintertime, a lot of people in the old folks used to save geraniums. Now we just go buy new ones in the spring. But old folks used to save stuff. So they take the geraniums that had bloomed all summer, and they would put them in the cellar, or they put them in the attic, or they bring them in the house, okay, to to get by until they could get back out in the spring. And by the time they were were released to the spring, released into how they were made to live, their little, stems were like translucent almost. They were translucent like so light green because they had not met the sun. The affirmation and the confirmation had not met the rising of the neediness. See? They got by. So I want you to know there are a lot of people in this life who who are barely getting their needs met, barely getting their needs, but they're dead within. They're dead on the outside. There are a lot of walking coffins. There are a lot of people who are going through the motions of life but aren't living it. The walking dead. Now, the need to belong is the need to be accepted as I'm created. Now, how do we know we're created? We're created as emotional and spiritual creatures, created to do one thing in life and that's live fully. But you can't live fully unless you're living fully in relationship with yourselves, others, and God, which makes neediness the currency that has to be delivered to purchase what you're made to have. This is so practical. Every little kid knows that. Every little kid knows that, who has had a modicum of their needs met. That's how come they're still crying until they get over how they were made. But we don't. We just put a face over it, a cap over it, numbing, anesthesia, dissociation, denial, minimization, rationalization, a whole set of keywords to keep us in denial. We join the cult of the common, and we lose the normal. Once we lose contact with our neediness because our needs aren't met except through performance, you show up giving your presence to say, here, bless me. And finally, you learn, I'll do it. What do I gotta do? Who do I gotta become? What are you looking for? Who do you want me to like? Who do you want me to be? What do I need to do to make you care about me? So I will prostitute who God created for a payoff from the idols you create. You gotta do these things to get back. Okay? So you're now my idol. You're you're you're not introducing me to God, you become God yourself. And I perform for you so I can get my my bowl of rice, my soup. So the need to belong is the need to be accepted just as I am, which scares the heck out of a parent. Do you know what's gonna happen to a first grader who's crying in the first grade? Gonna get made fun of. And what do parents feel about that? Scared. And what do they do with their fear? Rage or hide it, or the best method of all, teach your child to toughen up. It's the simplest way. It's less threat to the parent. Okay. In other words, the parents fear becomes the child shame. That one sentence application has broad implications. That one sentence application has broad implications. The the parents fear becomes the child's shame. My mama gets really upset when I cry. I love my mama. I want my mama to love me. What should I do to make sure my mom is okay so my momma can keep loving me? Well, I need to quit crying getting tougher. Well, what, Chip, now wait a minute. You can't run around life crying all the time. You can't go crying all the time. Guys, I know that. The coaches handle that. The teachers handle that. Your job is to be the portable sanctuary place where they can come cry because the world's not going to let them. So you look, come on in home. Come on in here. Let's do your be hard. My job is to teach you how to live in the beatitudes, son. Daughter. I mean, it's a tough place. But you need a home to come too. When the game was over, they needed daddy. And daddy said, hey, if I could change anything, I'd never talk about the game after the game. I'm like, hey, that's a good one. That's a good one. That's a good one. I'm gonna do it. Now, so If you just They needed a soft place to come to. They they knew what failure felt like. And I couldn't fix failure. I could just be a dad. Being a dad didn't seem like it would cut it at all. What would it do for me? What would it do for my fear, my hurt, my my past, my my my my my my my my my my my The inability to be vulnerable and needy harm my sons in ways that I continue to coach after the coach had already done it. And so even if I did it on a two and they did it on a 10, a two is still two points removed from what they need. So they got it a lot, but not enough there was inevitable to come to them that I helped load on them. Thank God for forgiveness and confession, what I mentioned last night. Boy, it's my first time through life. Great mercy. Not an impetitor. You see? Oh, second chances. Don't do it as a grandparent. Do it as a parent. Take your second chance in your marriage, in your vocation, in your and it goes on and on. So belonging is you bring your feelings, your needs, your desire, your longings, and your hope to life, and those people you need, and they go, yes. That's belonging. Mattering, you bring that which you tend to kinda like lean into to your parents, to your people, to your caregivers. You you everybody leans a certain way. Your job is to go ahead and remain peculiar. Everybody in this room is is created identically, and everybody in this room kind of has a point o 1% uniqueness. That which can turn somebody into an engineer. Doesn't turn somebody musically inclined into an engineer. It turns them into a musician. You see? And And when a child gets older, they're not going to become a scientist when they're made to be an athlete. They're not going to become a musician when they're created to become a construction, form or somebody just loves the smell of dirt and loves to move dirt. And, wait, we have never had any farmers in the family. I don't know where they got that. Well, they got it from your permission to let them pursue who they were created to be. So you wind up with the first farmer generation. Turns out, you look back four generations, there was a farmer. And who knows? In other words, you're made to be able to bring the research of yourself, the risk of yourself, the attempt to try different things, look at different things, consider different options, not as you look into pick, oh, that's me, but as your ability to explore all that could be you while you're discovering you. I made to matter, and I made for you to keep telling me I matter. Don't tell me I could be anything I wanna be. Tell me I can become who I'm made to be. And it starts with you're made to be a feeling, needing, desiring, longing, hoping creature who has a brain that you use to talk about that. Now you've marked yourself as a minority. I got that. I got it. You're not gonna become common. I got it. I'm sorry. You're gonna wind up being peculiar. But peculiar means uniquely your own, unique to itself. Like Theodore Roosevelt, like Thomas Jefferson, like Thomas Edison, like Amelia Earhart, like Susan B Anthony, like and we go down the list on and on and on. The Red Cross, where did it come from? Florence, Nightingale. They told her to stay home. She said, I don't think that's the place I need to be. Thank God. Right? She faced her neediness. And somebody met her in a said, You belong. You matter. Go. Do this. She said, okay. And I know she didn't know what she was doing. You know, she didn't know what she was doing. She just knew she had to do it. I mean, look. Go look at the book of Jeremiah we were looking at. It's a really crazy story. Jeremiah's little bitty. He's full of faith. He's 12 or so. God says, I want you to be my guy. And Jeremiah says, I'm little bitty. I'm 12. I'm just a child. God says, don't you worry. I gotcha. I'll tell you what to say. Go say it. I'll take care of you. 20 chapters later, he's being tortured. Jeremiah is being tortured by his own people because he's saying something they don't like hearing at all. So he said, we don't like hearing this. So we're gonna torture you. Well, he's hanging or in stocks or he being he's being I'm talking about the man's in pain. He's being tortured. He's not like having to sit in a cell by himself and not talk to anybody. He's not quiet time or or time out. He's in the ocean of John Newton, that one. A place nobody wants to be. And he says, God, you've it translates according to Dan Allender, it translates into you seduced me and raped me. All I do all day long is cry out violence and destruction. And it's like I'm ridiculed. Everywhere I turn, it's like, you said. And then he says, but if I if I said I would no longer speak your name. If I said I'm gonna run away from this thing within me, who I'm created to be and who you told me I am. He said, it's like a fire in my bones. I'm even weary of holding it in. And then he says, I cannot not do it. I'm compelled. I can't get away from me. That's a surrendered person who's in great conflict with what he thought it was going to be like. K? Every little child believes exactly, I'm going to be with you. I'll tell you what to say. It means you're not going to have to hurt. That's what I'm saying. This love contract ends up turning into a really strange deal. So you better be getting your needs met to be able to stay in it, to be able to stay with who you're created to be, otherwise, you can't. So this needing to need is very vital. He who needs best is strongest. The most vulnerable is the greatest. It's kind of a paradoxical conflict. The need for security is the need of having a place to go to to struggle in. So it's paradoxical. Security, you would think, is the place you go to to not struggle. No. Security is the place where you can go and struggle out loud with people who aren't gonna run away from you while you're doing it. Because you belong in matter, you have a place to go to in relationship with God and others who can tolerate you falling apart without breaking to pieces. See, we are trying to believe that if we fall apart, people are going to think we're breaking to pieces. We're not breaking to pieces, we're falling apart so we stay together. Paradox, paradox, paradox. Just bam, bam, bam, bam. They don't stop. But in the surrender process, you can see how in the vulnerability, you become more than you ever thought you were going to be. I cannot even tell you. 1985, 1987, I wouldn't have been standing here any more than saying the things I'm saying to the man in the moon because it was all about mind, body, spirit. Strength. And strength meant whatever you gotta do to know what you're doing to make sure that nobody knows that you're vulnerable and have to ask too much because that means that you don't know what you're doing. But, okay. I got the rules. I just can't live them. And finally, I couldn't do it. I failed. Thank God. I mean, there it is again. Paradox upon paradox. So we had this deep fear within us. Right? Yeah. Because we know that life itself is tragic. We often lack the evidence to pursue the risks. We often are ashamed of our neediness. We often are birthed and raised I mean, we're raised to live with an ignorance disorder. I mean, if you don't know your heart, you have an ignorance disorder. Ignorance and stupidity isn't the same thing. An ignorance disorder means you've been raised to ignore what's happening within you. You become cultural instead of a person who can live in the crosses cross culturally. You see? So we're also raised to, deny the inner life. In other words, I don't see it. I don't feel it. I don't need. I don't talk about it. I mean, really appropriate societal connection means you don't ever tell anybody what you really see or what you really feel with them because it might upset them. And niceness really means do everything you can not to rock the boat, because every one of us on some level grew up who will became developed an ignorance disorder, the status quo was the goal. And so your job is to keep the status quo, which means keeping people from getting upset, which means solve their problems, which means not really be with them, but give to them out of a place that you're not wise enough to be able to do it. I remember this kid was raised to learn how to share, His mother would have birthday parties for him, people would bring presents, and then his job was to take all the presents that he was given and take them to the orphanage. He didn't get to keep any of them and was taught how to share that way. Let me ask you something very quickly. What does share mean? Most of us define share as to give. Right? Most of us, share means to give. Share doesn't mean to give. Share means to receive, so you can give. You got to be good at receiving to be able to share. You got to have it to give it. So share means to receive, so you can give. Okay? To be good at receiving. So this little six year old child taking his presence down to the orphanage was never learned how to receive. And when he came into treatment with a very significant, drug addiction, most of that was related to the shame, the toxic contempt of wanting something for himself, Became an incredible giver and finally ran right out of gas. The car stalled and he was basically face planted, barely breathing. Quite a sharer. He shared all the way, gave everything he had for somebody to care about him. Like, that's pretty wild. I heard a guy tell me last week, yeah, I need to raise I raise my children so that they need to learn how to put aside wanting what they want, when they want it. Because maturity means you no longer want what you want when you want it. That's called growing up. And addiction means wanting what you want when you want it because you were never allowed to have. And then, really, we're made to want what we want when we want it. Like I said last night, if you're able to hear the word no. The best cravers are the people who want what they want when they want it, but can hear the word no. Son used to say to me, you can't have your cake and eat it too. I was like, I do not believe that. I do not accept that, and I'm not gonna live like that. And then I tried to because it pleased her. And then, and finally, we were saying something even the other night. I said, you know, you can have your cake and eat it too. She goes, you really can't. Yeah. You can want what you want what you want what you want it if you can tolerate the grief of not getting. You don't have to stop wanting just because you you end up losing. This is Stephen James, the executive director of Sage Hill Counseling. Thanks for listening to the Sage Hill podcast with Dr. Chip Dodd. If you're interested in learning more about the power of our core eight emotions, I encourage you to check out Chip's book, The Voice of the Heart, A Call to Full Living.