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Alicia Michelle: There was this shift now where I said, "How many other people have these inner thoughts that are driving them, where they know truth, they know that God loves them, they know that they're enough in Christ, but why are they still," including me in the "they," "why are they still not living from that? Why are they still living in this emptiness and feeling not enough?"

Dave Wilson: Welcome to FamilyLife Today, where we want to help you pursue the relationships that matter most. I'm Dave Wilson and I'm Ann Wilson. You can find us at FamilyLifeToday.com. This is FamilyLife Today.

We're talking emotions today, so I'm going to leave and let you two women talk.

Ann Wilson: I was wondering what your part was going to be in this conversation about emotions. You know what? We're going to talk to you. Alicia Michelle is with us, and she's going to analyze our emotions, specifically maybe yours today.

Alicia Michelle: I am looking right at you right now.

Dave Wilson: I'm done. Let's talk emotions. Honestly, I'm joking, but I'm so excited because I wouldn't categorize it that men aren't emotional and women are, because we all are. But you're an emotional coach. Tell us what that means.

Alicia Michelle: It just means I help people learn how to manage them with confidence. It doesn't mean that we aren't going to have the crazy ups and downs. It just means that we can learn how to have skills and practical things to understand how our body works, but also how to connect with God through this process.

That's what I love doing because I feel like we all have emotions, like you said, in different degrees, and we've had a lot of things that may have told us we shouldn't talk about them, or we shouldn't deal with them, or they're not something God wants us to even have, just focus on truth. I think there's a middle road in there somewhere.

Ann Wilson: Even the title of your book, *Emotional Confidence*, which you just said, *3 Simple Steps to Manage Emotions with Science and Scripture*. We've been on your podcast before, Alicia, but you also get into brain science in a lot of the things you talk about, which I thought was interesting because you're hitting brain science, science, scripture, and Jesus. Those don't always all go together.

Alicia Michelle: As somebody who has always been, "I want to know the reason why behind something," to me, as I started when God transitioned me to look more into this area, I wanted to understand how were these emotions happening in my body. If God made our bodies and He designed our brains, then doesn't it make sense that we should understand things like neuroscience, understand how thoughts are formed, and understand what happens to our body when we're feeling an intense emotion, so that we can partner better with the Holy Spirit to manage them well? That's what I love doing because I feel like we all have emotions.

Dave Wilson: I've never once had that thought. When you were saying that, I was like, "Yeah, we really should, shouldn't we?" I'm sort of kidding, but there were a lot of decades of my life as a young man I didn't. I honestly, if I sat down and you were counseling me, you would say, "Dave, you avoided it all those years," partly because of trauma in my childhood. I learned to shut down emotions and perform. Just perform, get the job done, don't even think about it. I've learned as I've matured everything you just said is so true. We have to dive into what's going on underneath and understand it if we're going to be the people God's called us to be.

Alicia Michelle: My story is the same as yours, basically. For most of my life, I did push emotions down. I didn't want to have anything to do with them. They got in the way of me needing to perform and to just get stuff done. What do you do with an emotion when you don't? It won't go away. You can't change a situation. Like you said, there have been things in the past where it was like, "If I go there, that means I have to open up this whole area, and what do I do with that?" So it's easier to just keep going.

Ann Wilson: It's true. Traumatic. I've talked to so many people that say, "I don't want to go to a counselor because I don't want to open up the whole past because I don't know if I can survive that because of the emotional trauma that they face."

Alicia Michelle: Absolutely. Often there is a lot of emotional trauma there, but even if it isn't, there's the idea of, "Okay, great, God, I know there's stuff in there, but again, what do I do with it?" So that's why I love helping people understand the practical tools to say, "Here it is, Lord. How can I walk through this well with excellence, understanding how You made my body, not shaming myself for feeling this, but also not letting it rule my life?" There's an in-between that I know You have for me, so help me to figure out how to partner with You to do that, how to even grow closer to You through that.

Ann Wilson: Some people might be thinking, "Why are we talking about this?" Because this affects our marriages, it affects our parenting, it affects everything in our family. Even how do we help our kids with these big emotions? So yes, this totally fits in.

Dave Wilson: If there's anything I've learned as a husband, and I didn't know this when I first got married, maybe a lot of us don't, I have to understand Ann's emotions and lean into what she's feeling, what she's thinking. I didn't want to do that. I felt like, "You're good, right? Please just be good. You go deal with that on your own, honey. We're good, you're good, right? Okay, good, I'm going to go do my thing."

Ann Wilson: And I'd be like, "What are you feeling?" and he would say, "I don't know." What do you mean you don't know?

Alicia Michelle: Well, just, my husband is more of a quiet guy, and so he sometimes I have a hard hour understanding what he is feeling. I think men in general, it's harder for them to understand what's going on inside.

Dave Wilson: So what do you do with that with your husband? Because you're a coach. Yeah, I mean, you can tell us how you got into it, but right away, there's husbands listening going, "Sure," or wives going, "Yeah, that's my husband. So what do I do with that? What do you do?"

Alicia Michelle: Well, I think you can only handle you. So even if like with that original thing when you just said a second ago to Ann, "I want to know what you're feeling, I need to understand your emotions." Well, before you can even understand her emotions, she needs to know what's going on and how to process it. So yes, that question comes up of, "How do I fix him? How do I get him to talk about his feelings?" Of course. But the first question is, let's focus on what's happening in you and understanding you so that if that time comes, understand how to express that even and be more sympathetic and compassionate, as part of it.

Ann Wilson: Because that expressing part is really important too.

Alicia Michelle: Oh yes, definitely.

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Dave Wilson: Okay, I guess we've got to go back and say, okay, how did you, what's your story? How'd you get started in this?

Alicia Michelle: I've always been somebody who's been very emotional. The official term is a highly sensitive person, a HSP, if you've heard of that term before. But I had no idea what to do with it. I was always just very driven, very performance, very perfectionistic, that kind of stuff. I didn't have time to deal with the other things. That worked for me for a really long time, until I noticed when I got married, there's tension that builds. Things are overall fine, but then there's these little things that keep building, things that don't get resolved, things that can't change.

My husband was traveling a ton and I had a lot of young kids by myself and all this pressure on me. That all came to a head in 2017 when I suddenly started getting a really bad headache out of nowhere. I don't have headaches. I was about to go on a missions trip down to Mexico. Went down there, and it got really, really bad to the point where I had to go to the leader and say, "This is, I need to have somebody else help me find some medicine or something," but nothing was helping it.

Finally about 2:00 a.m. one morning, it was the second night there, I went outside into the desert and I just heard that voice of God to say, "You need to go home, and you need to go home right now." I was leading a Bible study, we were already short-staffed, this was not possible. Next morning I went back to the leader and I said, "I think I need to go home," and he said, "Okay, no problem."

They drove me to the border. My husband picks me up. It was a Saturday, thankfully, because when you have a headache and it's a Saturday, you pretty much go to the ER. That's the only thing you can do. So I got to the ER and they took scans and did all this stuff and said, "You're having a vertebral artery dissection. How are you even standing here? We don't even know how you are walking around. We need to send you to a specialty hospital."

I was like, "What are you talking about?" They kept asking me, "Were you doing bungee jumping? What were you doing in Mexico?" I was like, "I'm on a missions trip. I'm a mom." Nothing. But they said the injuries that we see in your neck right now are on par with someone in an accident or someone who had been doing bungee jumping and they had their neck snap. They kept asking me all these questions.

Long story short, I ended up in the hospital for a week. A few days later, the other side had a dissection and went back to the hospital. An aneurysm is a vessel that would expand outward. A dissection is where the vessel collapses inside of itself and the inner lining separates from the outer lining. Blood clots start to form. The vertebral arteries are in your neck, and so there were some blood clots that were forming.

I did have a few mini-strokes while I was there in the hospital. I spent the next nine months on my back. I could not do anything. I had everything taken away from me. Everything. Four kids, we were homeschooling at the time. My husband was out of work at the time, we'd been out of work for 15 months.

But it was a God thing because I could not get out of bed. I could not feed myself. I had to have injections five times a day to keep my blood thin. All of these things. If I didn't have my husband there, he completely had to take over everything. Interestingly, as soon as I started getting better, that's when the job offer finally came through. So, God works.

Ann Wilson: I'm thinking of you too, Alicia, because I'm a doer, I'm a go-getter, and so are you. Here you are on your back. You can't even be a mom, really.

Alicia Michelle: I couldn't do anything, and that is a very sobering place to be when God takes everything away. You have nothing but just the aloneness with the Lord. It was just like, "You need to change. I'm going to give you a second chance here, but it's not hacks. It's not like, oh, I just need to sleep a little bit more."

People had been telling me for years, "You need to sleep more." I was sleeping four hours a night for probably about 15 years. I went to bed at 12:30 and woke up at 4:30 because I had so much to do. That was how I felt like I was at least able to do something in my life was just get stuff done. So that just had built up.

It was more than just, "Oh, you need to sleep." It was like, "What is keeping you stuck in this pattern where all that you are doing is just to perform, to please? There's something in there." As I began investigating that, learning more about that, learning about the science, especially how the mind works, I ended up becoming certified as a neuro-coach understanding how that works and how to help others.

I realized I'd been working with women up to that point already, but there was this shift now where I said, "How many other people have these inner thoughts that are driving them, where they know truth, they know that God loves them, they know that they're enough in Christ, but why are they still," including me in the "they," "why are they still not living from that? Why are they still living in this emptiness and feeling not enough?"

Ann Wilson: I used to say that all the time. Even going to seminary, I felt like I knew all the right answers. I know what the Bible says about identity, how much He loves me, how He's with me. I couldn't get that head knowledge to get down into my heart to feel it.

Dave Wilson: Okay, you’ve got to answer the question. Everybody’s asking, "Okay, why?" because that is everybody’s journey.

Alicia Michelle: Isn't that so cool? So I began understanding how the brain works. To make it very simple, if we think of the brain as the subconscious part of our brain, we'll call it that, and the logical prefrontal cortex. In the subconscious part of our brain, there are these patterns that we've developed. These patterns and habits are very helpful, like it helps us know how to pick up a glass, knows how to use a fork, because our brain has learned how to do that, and it's like running a little computer program every time we do that.

But around the ages of 9 to 11, the brain starts creating those same patterns around identity, specifically around love, worth, and enough. So, without us even realizing it, we're starting to see, "What is happening in my life that makes me feel loved? What is happening in my life to make me feel worthy?"

Well, if you live in a place where maybe your looks have made you feel worthy, or somebody told you that if you got good grades, so those patterns start to be developed, and the brain just says when you're in that stimulus where I need to feel loved, oh, well, this works, so you just do it. So it's this almost automatic patterning. Maybe we get to an age where logically we go, "Oh, I learned this about me, about what Jesus says about me. That's not the same." So there's this battle happening.

Ann Wilson: Okay, I have to stop us. 9 to 11, what was going on in your life that began to cement in those thoughts on identity?

Dave Wilson: 9 to 11, you know me with remembering my childhood. Dad's gone and brother died, little brother. It's just Mom and I. I mean, but that was before, but 9 through 11, I'm thinking like this is when you just go off in sports. Sports and music. Music started at eight, saw the Beatles movie, and boom, that was it. But sports and music were my ticket to be loved and enough and approved.

Ann Wilson: For me, I was 11, and I had become the MVP of my gymnastics team, but it's also when I was that age when I came home with some medals and some of our listeners have heard this, I had done the best I had ever done on this huge regional statewide gymnastics meet and I had everything set out on display. I'm the youngest of four.

My dad came home, and I was in bed, and I told my mom, "Have him wake me up when he sees all this," because we're such a sports family, performance family. My brother, oldest brother, came in at the time too, and he was older in his 20s, and they said to me, "Don't ever be," I had a third in the all-around or a fourth, they said, "We're the Barrons, we're the best. Don't come home unless you have a first place."

Think about 11 years old. We don't just try our best, we have to be the best. Their hearts were good, I had a great family, and they're thinking, "This is going to motivate her." But what that, I'm thinking neurologically, what happened that day.

Alicia Michelle: For me, to be fair, it's probably, it could go 9 to 13, it extends a little further, but still the same range. I think I learned from very early on that grades mattered. My sister, who is an amazing woman, like she and I are super close so I can say this to her now, but she was always the cute, funny one who got all the attention. I was the smart, serious, work hard one.

I kind of realized this is my role. I get really good grades and I get attention. Also around that time, interestingly, when you're talking about events in life, because I'd never really thought about this before, but there was a girl, it was like 3rd, 4th, 5th grade, there was a girl who was my best friend who out of nowhere, I just didn't even see it, she just said, "I'm not your friend anymore. I don't like you," and she turned all of my friends against me.

That's pretty typical for girl life. So I remember feeling so betrayed and out of left field. I know that that is one of the deepest fears that I have is that somebody will just blindside me with that information and betray me.

Ann Wilson: I think this would be an interesting conversation with a spouse. At those 9 to 13, what were some of the core things that you remember that maybe shaped your fears or identity? It's a powerful conversation even for teenagers.

Dave Wilson: Well, then what do you do with it? Because I'm like, "Okay, yeah, I want to be a performance guy, okay, so me too."

Alicia Michelle: I don't think you have to get rid of the performance or the excellence or living in that way. But the lie that's developed, the lie that this is all that I am. As part of this training, I have learned how to do a technique called brain priming. So we go back to where did this come from? What are the specific words that are being said?

It's not a two-second conversation, it takes some time to figure out what that is. We can identify when these incidents occurred, why it makes sense. This whole process actually is kind of where the ADD model where that came from. It's acknowledging why it makes sense that you went through that and why you felt that way. Discerning what is the lie? What is the truth in that? And then deciding what are we going to do with that?

So we create a script, a brain priming script. The great news about the brain is that because it is neuroplastic, it can change. Our brains are not the same they were six months ago, we're always getting new neurons, we get 1,200 new neurons every day. Because of that, we can change these patterns. God is, which to me is like the most beautiful example of that verse in Lamentations that says His mercies are new every morning. We have a chance to rework these things.

The brain priming process is to take this script of things that I help them create what this is, understanding what are the things that you need to hear from God to help that heal. Like for me, it might have been about betrayal, like we talked about, being enough, I don't have to excel in sports to be enough. I can excel in sports, but I don't have to do that to be worthy.

Reworking on that, and then the science shows us that it's not 30 days to change a habit, it's actually 61 to 64 days. What happens after 30 days is that if you think of a neural network as a highway, so it's like the highway is being dismantled. Every time we have a thought, it's being strengthened, so it's being built up. If we decide to not have that thought anymore and we have a different thought, the brain says, "Oh, we're building something new. Okay, we'll start pulling off this old one and building this other one over here."

About 30 days, 50% of the time it's choosing the old highway and 50% of the time it's choosing the new highway. So we feel like we're making change, but the fact is 50% of the time you still got the old highway going. So we have to go all the way to 60 to 64 where that old highway is gone and the new one comes.

I love taking people through this process because the stuff that starts to change in them, it's such a subtle thing. I don't tell them at certain points of the process you see certain things happening, but suddenly they'll start seeing themselves, "Oh wow, I was not afraid to stand up to her and just it was second nature to not have that conversation or, oh, yeah, it's okay if I lost that game, I'm fine."

Ann Wilson: It reminds me of Romans 12:2, which says, "Don't be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewing of our minds." It's exactly what's happening. You're being transformed by creating this new neural pathway. God can help, I mean, we have the Holy Spirit in us who can help us. That happened in our marriage, where I was in that rut of constantly thinking about how Dave was doing things wrong. It took me a while, which makes sense with the whole how long it takes to change a habit. It might have taken more than 60 days. It was like years, probably years.

Alicia Michelle: Why did it take longer, or why does it take longer for us? Because for you, there was that conflict happening of, "I want to think differently, I want to talk differently about him, but this is still happening." So it's like this ongoing tension both are being built at the same time.

Dave Wilson: How did it work for you? I mean, are you still back in the bed? That was crazy to understand. Was that a life-changing future, not physically but emotionally, vocationally, everything?

Alicia Michelle: Everything changed for me in terms of what I felt God calling me to focus on. Before I had been writing and talking to women about homeschooling and marriage and family things like that, which there's nothing wrong with that. He just had shifted now, "Wow, there is this whole need for amazing Christian women who love Jesus, gone to every Bible study, know all the things, but are still crippled because they're stuck in these patterns. How can we help them find freedom?"

I know that that process of renewal I had to go through, and sometimes even when I start seeing some of these patterns start to build up again, it's like thankfully God has given me the ability to notice now and the tools to say, "Mmm-mmm, we're not dealing with that and we're not going back." So it's definitely been a life-change for me and given me the freedom and the confidence, I guess, to not be afraid to deal with it.

Dave Wilson: What was your lie that you identified?

Alicia Michelle: I think the biggest one was that I have to be perfect to be loved, I have to perform to be loved. That was probably my biggest one because I would go to sleep and only stop working when I felt, this is so crazy, when I felt like my brain could not even focus or think at all, like when my eyes and my head started hurting so much.

I would get to that point and I would not let myself stop until I got to that point because I was like, "Well then you obviously haven't worked hard enough, there's more for you to do today." I remember thinking that over and over and over. Like you had to be to the point of exhaustion, because that's working hard, you just have to get it all done.

Ann Wilson: I think this is a super interesting conversation with Alicia Michelle.

Dave Wilson: Of course you do, it's about emotions.

Ann Wilson: I know, but I loved it too.

Dave Wilson: This is going to be great for guys and women. Her book’s called *Emotional Confidence* and you can get it at FamilyLifeToday.com. Just click on the link in the show notes. She’ll be back with us tomorrow.

Ann Wilson: FamilyLife Today is a donor-supported production of FamilyLife, a Cru ministry, celebrating 50 years of helping you pursue the relationships that matter most.