Giraffes on Ice, Part 2: Being Human

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. One thing I want us to remember, wouldn't you love just to have a list of the things to do, and then when you complete the list, you got a product called a child grown. Right? Oh, god. You know what I'm saying? But, guys, when it comes to relationship, I mean, I know you know it and I know it, but there's no list. And if there were a list, we couldn't do it. I mean, Leviticus, nobody could do it. Paul said Paul wrote Romans related to the list. You can't do it. I can't I I in fact, I showed you the list so you'd know you couldn't do it. You'd wind up in need instead of trying to believe in the list. But we want a list so we don't have to deal with life emotionally, and we don't have to deal with life even spiritually. So I want us to concentrate tonight on remembering that what we're talking about tonight is our insides and really not about our children. We're talking about parenting for parents. Parents being people who are parenting rather than parents learning how to raise their children. Because you can't raise a child unless you're a person who can identify be having been a child. Okay? So the thing is one of the things we want to talk about was that when when once you've been wounded in your life, has everybody in this room experienced an emotional wound? Right? And everybody in here knows it. Okay? Once you've experienced the wound, if there's nobody there to genuinely I'm talking about genuinely walk you through affirmation and confirmation, the need to step into being okay with yourself again, like, it's okay for me to risk saying I love you. It's okay for me to risk saying this hurts. It's okay for me to risk saying I'm sad or I'm sorry or I'm thrilled. I mean, we hide celebration just as much as we can. We do grief in a lot of ways. But if there's nobody around to help you know that you matter and that you belong like you're created, you're gonna have a tendency to start using your brain to hide your heart. This is as old as Adam and Eve. Instead of using their their brains to express their hearts in the garden, they use their brains to hide their hearts. God came into the garden and said, where are you? And Adam said, okay. Here's the truth. I was afraid emotionally, and so I hid because I saw my condition. I ran from my condition. Now the thing is once you've been wounded, even if you've been healed with it from it and into it and you're risking love again, like, if you've ever been, let's say wounded emotionally with a loss of a girlfriend or boyfriend, what is it the thing that you and I say once we've been wounded in heart, lost a girlfriend or boyfriend about the next one? It's gonna happen again. It's gonna happen again. I'm not gonna take that risk. I'm not gonna let that happen to me again. We practice some form of being safe. And once we've been wounded, healed or not, this is what your brain is doing when you look into any relationship. The front of your brain, which is your thinking brain, is saying, is it safe? Is it safe? Is it safe? Is it safe? Do you get that? And the back of your brain, which is called the limbic system or down inside your brain where we have emotional and spiritual experiences and long term memory, there's a part of your brain that actually carries what we call the heart. There's a part of your brain that actually carries your emotions, spirituality, spiritual connection, and it carries long term memories. And in that part of your brain, you're always asking, do you care? Do you care? Do you care? So the front of your brain is going, is it safe? And the back of your brain is going, do you care? And if you're not safe, you don't care. And so instead of being able to say, look, I just need to know if I'm safe and can you care. Instead, I'm trying to figure out what you're doing and watching your face to see what I need to do to try to make you care instead of trusting that you will if I ask you. So I want you to know that we start using our thinking as a way to try to appease, please, caretake, approval, seek, and achieve with people so we can be valued. That performance takes the place of the presence of a person. Do y'all get that? That performing for people, for love, takes the place of being ourselves and just sort of taking the risk of assuming it might happen because it's me. Huge difference. One person can receive mercy, and the other person will never trust it when it comes. If I have to perform for mercy, I don't trust it when it's get when it's given. If I have no place to go but to to to to reach for it, then when it comes, I can't excuse the fact that it I didn't do anything for it. It happened for me. Somebody did for me what I couldn't do for myself. So I just want you to know that our brains are always working off of the answer to life. And Steve mentioned that this is so crazy, but the answer to life is a question, and we knew it when we were six years old. The answer to life is a question, and the question is, do you like me? I like you. Circle yes or no. That's it because that's what we're doing all the time all the time. Everything else is pouring concrete, neurosurgery, and and and recipes for cakes. You get it? And there's not a lot of difference between neurosurgery and making a cake. It's a it's a recipe, series of things you learn, and a bunch of tools you use to make a product. Now I know there's a difference between your brain surgery and the cake. The cake falls, okay. I do another one. The brain collapses, uh-oh. But I want you to know that even under those circumstances, both people who the one who makes the cake and the one who's doing the brain surgery, they're practicing. And practice means mistakes. Practice means, I'm I'm like, practicing something I can't ever do perfect. So we don't ever get away from clumsy no matter what. But here's the beauty of clumsy. The beauty of clumsy is that I can't help but be human. I don't like it. I hate it. If any of you read The Voice of the Heart about the eight feelings, I don't like them. You don't have to like them, but the gifts they can give us are worth whatever it takes to have them because all the feelings give us gifts. Now this is the beauty of clumsiness. Human beings are the same all over the world in Korea and Kansas, in Russia, Rhodesia, Brazil, and Botswana land. How about all those bees? But we're all made the same regardless of what your color, your ethnic background, your religion. It doesn't make any difference. We're all identical. We're 99.9 identical. The DNA of the emotional spiritual structure is identical across all cultures. And either culture will cultivate the heart or become a cult, a regimentation as a form of hiding the heart. So 99.9% identical, and we're 99.9% identical emotionally and spiritually. You have the same feelings I have. You have the same feelings I have. You have the same spiritual hunger for connection that I have. And either you can admit it and be with me or you won't and you can't be with me. You and I can't have a connection unless the connection is connection of heart. Otherwise, it's a connection of, what's called practical objectification of the other person. You and I can get along and get together, which is great because you have the capacity to mix, mortar, and I've got bricks. So we can get together and form a brick company, but that's a business. It's not a covenant of heart. It's not a a contract of love. It's not a true caring where people are gonna show up with each other. Now amazingly, we're point 1% separate from each other. We're point 1% unique. And look how we major in the point 1% and minor in the 99.9%, how far removed we are from the truth of how we're made. And if a parent isn't good at being human, then the 99.9 of what the child is made like won't be kept, and the point one o percent will be emphasized. And you can't make a life out of a point 1%, and yet we try to do it like crazy. It's just astounding to me. So across all cultures, we're identical. If you see two people because I remember seeing this on on film. I saw two people, look like a mother and the return of a female child into her arms in Korea. The mother was, like, maybe maybe 60 or 70, and she had not seen this daughter, a guest daughter, for a long time. I knew that much. But no sound, they ran to each other. This wasn't like a psychology class or something. This was just like a movie. And they ran to each other and clashed each other, and the mother's face was just weep. She was weeping like, like that. I knew what she was feeling. I knew exactly what was happening. She had had a return of some kind. She was overwhelmed with the span of time between when she had last seen her daughter and the years or time that went by when she saw her before she saw her again. And she was weeping, and I knew the sadness, and I knew the joy. I knew she's from Korea. She's not like me. I remember, when I was tutoring at the University of North Texas, there was a guy from India. His name was Sam, Sam, and he and his father were in a book club. And he had been in The United States and was working as a tutor for this student tutoring service at University of North Texas, and he and I started talking about he and his father's book club. And he and I started talking about To Kill a Mockingbird, and he began to cry related to Tom Robinson and Atticus and Scout and Jim. And that's when I knew for sure I didn't know the language of all this yet, but you're from India. That's Alabama. What are you crying about? But he knew what it was like for a culture, a cult, to eradicate other humans from being a part of belonging and mattering just because they were human too. That skin and birth right and class separated people, And he was crying about the loss of knowing that this equality was never going to couldn't occur where he was living. And To Kill a Mockingbird from The United States reminded him of his own experience of living. And he and I sat there having barely met, and he was crying. I was at the Olympic Village. I mean, no, a a a retreat for Olympic chaplains and Olympic athletes. And I sat down at the table having never met this woman before, and I said something to her about her Olympic, experience. She was a biker. And I asked her one question about sort of desire of heart and loss or something to that effect. And before I knew it, she's weeping about that she was literally was going to get a gold medal, and the chain came off and she crashed. Just within and and she's attempted to get back into the Olympics again. And I was just talking, and I asked her the question of her heart. And she was sitting already for somebody to just talk to me about this. For example, loss is the same all over the world. The Olympic chaplain was teaching me that he goes to the Olympic Village at every Olympics. He says, I don't go there to actually be a chaplain. I go there to bury dreams. He said it's one funeral after another one of all these people who have worked for four years to get to this place, and only three go to the stand and only one really wins. And there are 10,000 athletes there, and they go he goes to funeral after funeral after funeral after funeral because this guy knows that loss is the same all over the world. Not only is this true across cultures in our time, but this is true up and down throughout history. The king says to Nehemiah, Nehemiah, your face is downcast. You must be sad. And this is a king talking to a wine bearer, a a poison tester. Right? And he looked at his face and said, I know this face. That's what? Three thousand years ago. And you look at the frescoes, the Greek masks, all of them are saying the things we identify with. And literally, the more our culture gets removed from neediness, the more we use our faces to hide our hearts. The more hardened we become against, our our cry out for pain or an athlete's need for a coach or a child's need for a parent, the more we become removed, the stronger we become for the approval of others, the less we have ourselves to grow into who we're made to become. And we look to lists to find the answers to our lives instead of the path, and that list will take us to a pill. We'll take a pill instead of seeking the path. And it's the Psalm, I think, one sixteen talks about you've shown me the path of life. And what does it say? Even at night, my heart instructs me. And what that means is that even at night, the 99.9% of what I'm made like comes up into my brain and tells me things about living. Even at night, my heart instructs me. My emotional and spiritual makeup attuned to how God made me, speaks to me during the night. Anybody wake up in the morning and go, oh, I see, or oh, I get it, or oh. Right? It's happening. It's a path of life we're made to follow, not a list or a pill that's gonna give us an answer. So we're created as emotional and spiritual creatures, and we're made to use our brains to articulate our hearts, so that we are together in relationship with each other.

This is Stephen James, the executive director of Sage Hill Counseling. Thanks for listening to the Sage Hill podcast with doctor Shiv Dott. Sometimes in life, we get stuck or blocked or reach an impasse. At times like these, intensive short term therapy can help you overcome what's keeping you from the growth and changes you desire. At Sage Hill Counseling, we offer therapeutic incentives to help couples gain new momentum in their recovery process. If you wanna find out more, please visit sagehillcounseling.com.