First Love

Guest (Male): Welcome to First Love with Dr. Robyn Kassas and Dr. Nathan Kassas, where faith meets real life. In this weekly broadcast, you'll discover practical and spiritual keys to reclaim God's story in your life, deepen your relationship with Jesus, and encounter Him as your first love, whether for the first time or all over again.

No topic is off-limits as we make Jesus real, relevant, and relational. Stay with us; your journey back to first love starts now.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: Hello, everybody, and welcome to First Love. My name is Dr. Nathan Kassas, and I am sitting with the one and only Dr. Robyn Kassas. Dr. Robyn, how are you doing?

Dr. Robyn Kassas: I'm doing fine, thank you.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: That's awesome. We are excited to say that you're in your healing journey, and your toe is getting better.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: Yes, it's coming out of the black.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: Through it, God has been getting you to rest and allow you to lean into not being so active, but experiencing what it's like to have that rest. Yet, you're not inactive.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: That's correct. This morning, I actually went out on my property and walked around and found there was no snow.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: Wow. The winter is over, and spring has sprung. God is about to bring us into a shift of seasons as we come into that preparation for Passover. Dr. Robyn, thank God for that. We are excited for the winter to be over. Hallelujah.

We are going to talk today about a very important topic. We've been going on the story of God's story unfolding, which I love how you use that word "unfolding" rather than God "exposing" the moments that He missed out on. I think that's a really important way to address it because when we address it as exposing, it still has accusation behind its tone and motivation.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: I think it's a violent way of saying it sometimes: exposing.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: Yes. Important along this line is what we've been talking about. The first step was rest, the next step was trust, and then last week we came to one of the most important episodes, which I have had feedback from people telling me it has helped them tremendously, which was that you can't trust Him until you've trusted Him with your trauma.

Now we're going to come to the next T. These are all Ts that happen in God's story. We have to be very careful when we talk about trauma because trauma rehashes certain emotions, pains, wounds, and things of the past that if we don't integrate correctly, we retraumatize ourselves.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: Then we make it an excuse. We can't make it an excuse if we want to be healed.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: That's a very important key gem to this whole processing rightly. If we don't process right, then we'll end up producing the same cycle. So what I want to bring us into in this episode—and I really have this dear to my heart as someone who's called to counseling—is that the reintegration is to bring another T, and that is called Truth. When God is going back to reclaim what He has lost in the moment, He also has to bring truth to the moment of where we deliberately didn't give it to Him.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: That means we have to participate by recognizing the truth or, another word, locating it. These words are words that the Holy Spirit uses.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: I love them because they bring clarity. Clarity is so important in the healing process. I just want to make a statement here. Someone could easily say, "Well, that was trauma. That was trauma." We could label everything in life trauma. Not every painful experience in life is trauma. We need to establish that off the first bat. Everything can be labeled trauma, even rebellion, sin, or avoidance could all be labeled trauma.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: Being deliberately disobedient or not obeying can still cause a form we would recognize as trauma, but it's caused through rebellion. Rebellion is a form that comes out of trauma, but what happens is we have to take responsibility.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: There's another R we're going to talk about. Rest, responsibility—these are all key factors in God reclaiming His story. Let's just quickly define what trauma is. Trauma is when the opportunity to process right, to actually handle the situation right—remember we said last week trauma is an overpowering of the body's response system. The body can't handle what it's taking in in that information all at once, so it fragments and it splits and it sets on a journey these little memory pockets so that it can just get through without having to try to be overwhelmed and process all of that at once.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: I think that's an amazing way to understand it, and I think everyone that's listening can really benefit from understanding what it means to have trauma.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: In every trauma, there is an opportunity for response correctly, for a correct way to integrate it into our nervous system. When we don't choose that, that's not trauma; that's rebellion. That's what we call in attachment styles "avoidance." That's an avoidance attachment style. Or there's an ambivalent attachment style where I have to be connected to something to fill the void at all times.

Why I want to bring this clarity to our listeners is to understand that yes, there may be trauma in our life, and yes, there may be things that were deliberately done against us and were deliberately done over us—an overpowering of our will, like a suffocation in the moment where we felt we couldn't have the opportunity to choose. That's a trauma. God never takes the opportunity to respond away.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: Another word we need to remember here is denial. If we deny and we continue in that rebellion, then the trauma, which really started off less, will become like a mountain in our lives. That's hard to move, that mountain.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: Again, to bring a scriptural example here, there are many characters throughout the Bible who have faced traumatic experiences: people wanting them dead, people stealing from them, people stealing inheritances. We talked about Jacob last week. But in every pocket of those trauma events, God was always giving the opportunity to respond correctly with truth.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: In the trauma, we can determine our part to play in this by how big this mountain is. Is it a mountain or is it a molehill? Because I can tell you right now, God can get back and reclaim His part in this, your healing.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: We have to be careful because if we don't have truth to trauma and we don't get that right integration in the right sweet spot to bring that clarity, we have to be very careful because our trauma can become a trophy.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: We're going to come back on that one, I can tell you.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: We definitely need to get into that one because we can't have a mantelpiece with trauma trophies saying, "I made it through; I survived," because it will give us a wrong integration of identity. That will be another trauma because we will be reliving what we're not.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: Then we would interpret it wrong.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: Let's go to a break. You're listening to First Love with Dr. Robyn and Dr. Nathan Kassas. The story isn't finished yet, and neither is what Jesus wants to reveal to your heart today. Let's jump back in and pick up right where we left off.

All right, Dr. Robyn, we're back. We've gone and cleared our mantelpiece and taken all the trophies off by the grace of God.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: We want to come really back to what I was sharing last week, and that was God creating the moment. I want to add a little bit to this now. I want to bring out how He creates the moment. It's not about you just letting Him; it's like we just said: recognizing the problem. Recognizing that will bring truth to it.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: To set this up, this is coming off the back of understanding that when God revisits the trauma, it's Him stirring the stick. You can't stir it yourself.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: No, because we don't know what caused it, and that's when the truth comes in. What comes out of that is that we turn around and we see what He sees, and then we get the right interpretation because of truth coming in. Then, instead of sympathy that we want from ourselves, from others, and from God, we learn to let God empathize with us and walk with us through this. This is incredibly important because what I want to say is this: you can't interpret or you can't create a moment for your life because it's God that missed out, not you.

You've created yourself a trauma. Now for God to get His creation, His creative moment, He has got to get, say, if it's unforgiveness—I'll use that as an example—if it's unforgiveness, you want to do something to make that unforgiveness go away. But what you want is not necessarily what God wants. God wants reconciliation, and that's the only way He will work through a moment of His to bring an end to unforgiveness. If we try to do it, we will manipulate it. We have the right, maybe sometimes, a good motive, but you can't create this moment because reconciliation is not about you. You've been given the gift of reconciliation, but only the Holy Spirit can activate the reconciliation through a moment that God creates.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: It's very important what you're saying, Dr. Robyn, because when we allow the Lord to create the moment, we are giving to Him the opportunity to have our response. If He brings truth to the moment, then He has to also bring not just truth to what was done against us, but He has to bring truth to the part that we withheld from Him.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: Because He's been wounded in this.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: This is it. When you're interested in the truth, you've got to be interested in the whole truth. You can't just be interested in the truth of what was done to you. You've got to be interested in the truth of the part where you deliberately held back your heart from letting God touch that area in that moment, like unforgiveness. If someone hurts me and I choose to take on unforgiveness, I have held back my heart from God in that moment, letting love flow through me—faith, hope, and love. So He didn't get to express as faith, hope, and love in that moment. Now let me bring some science in here.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: That's abiding in Christ. If we realize this, then God gets to reclaim what He didn't have. Your forgiveness is for you, but if you forgive and you work with the Holy Spirit, He reclaims back that movement.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: What's really important here is that when we understand that God is getting back His expression, it gives us the right motivation. Motivation is so important. You said a statement here that I want to bring out. When we go back to let God reclaim His story or create the moment, we actually have to understand that He needs to create the motivation, the why, and the reason.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: He will never, never talk to you if you're not using the tools that He wants to create with.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: I said this to someone in counseling this week: God will never give you truth if you're going to load it in a gun and shoot it as bullets. He will wait for you. And here's the key: He will not disarm you; He will wait for you to disarm yourself before He will gift you with truth because He will not let truth be used as a weapon against someone else.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: That's so very important that we have to recognize this is the way God works. This is the way God speaks, and this is the way God acts. God the Holy Spirit acts this way.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: I want to read a couple of statements here that are important. Without truth, everything in life could be labeled as trauma. Even when trauma becomes everything to us, it now becomes our identity. In psychology, we call this: you begin to wear your trauma as your badge of identity.

Instead of living for transformation, you go back into that cycle. This is the danger of when you start to name the trauma. When you begin to name the trauma and don't let the Holy Spirit create the moment and integrate, the next thing that comes because you can't handle the trauma is shame. Naming first, then the next cycle is shame. Because of the overwhelming amount of shame that we feel, we have to always find a reason. Our first idea in that naming, shaming, and blaming idea is to blame. When we go back and we start going, "Yeah, well, that happened to me, and I missed out on that, and I didn't get that, and look at what they did there," the accuser starts to come and go, "Yeah, and it's still going on today."

Dr. Robyn Kassas: Then the Lord says, "Yes, but I didn't want it that way. If you'd allow me to have done it my way, I would have reclaimed what you needed, and that's your healing."

Dr. Nathan Kassas: Going back to what we said last week: when we try to name our own trauma independent from the Holy Spirit, we actually give it an address that He's not giving it. We actually give it an address, a place in the brain that God is not giving it.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: Well, I know you're the one for this, but we need to address it.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: Yes, we need to address it, but it has to have the right address. Your trauma could have a little mini-house, but you want to give it a mansion. It could have an RV in God's sight—like a mountain or a molehill—but you want to give it a ten-story mansion. It's got to have the right address.

Let's get into some neuroplasticity. Experiences that are emotionally intense become neurologically dominant. When pain is processed through meaning—the right meaning, the right reflection, and the right truth—the brain rewires. This is called neuroplasticity. There's a statement: "Whatever wires together, fires together."

Pain paired with meaning becomes resilience to see us through transformation. Pain paired with bitterness becomes bondage to take us back into the cycle of trauma all over again. Resentment is bitterness wired; trust is resilience wired. When we go back in that trauma and we allow the Lord to show us, we have to trust Him to show us the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: That's so very true because if we continue to walk this way, we build this mountain. We can't do that because that is not God reclaiming back the way He does things. He is the investigator, the initiator, and the integrator of truth.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: You can't investigate unless He's investigating. You can't initiate healing unless He's doing it. You can't integrate unless He's doing it. What happens when we try to do that absent of His Spirit? We create counterfeit healing. We create counterfeit emotion that just numbs the memory; it doesn't actually integrate it back in. So we start to sympathize with our pain.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: Like I said, we need to stop sympathizing with our pain and stop trying to sympathize with someone else's pain through their trauma, because a trauma experience in your life is different from someone else's.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: Very important here: Second Corinthians 11:14. It says that he is an angel of light. This is the Luciferian way. It doesn't come as the devil with the pitchfork; it comes as that beautiful creature that sounds like God.

But here's an important thing. Until you hear the same voice in your head that accused, that made the statement of accusation—until you hear God speak in that tone, the self-talk is not canceled out. What does that mean? This is important. If I hear Nathan—God speaks to me as Nathan in my head. He doesn't come as a Chinese man in my head. Until I hear that voice inside say, "I was wrong, and here's where truth needs to come," and I deliver that in my tone, in my head, my head can't cancel out all the self-talk that it's heard through the dialect and voice of Nathan.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: I think this is the key. This is the absolute key to hearing God. He doesn't speak through another voice. He speaks through your voice because your voice got you in the situation.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: This is it. Here's an important thing. God is revealing what actually happened, what was wrong, what has to be surrendered, and what He's forming. The counterfeit to truth is sympathy. When we start revealing it, we start sympathizing, and we don't realize it, but sympathy is stopping transformation.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: Totally. Sympathy is stopping it from integrating at the right address. The process is He creates the change, then, using your words, He brings an interchange, which is the exchange of giving over power.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: There it is. He creates the moment, then He forms the insight, then He reveals the truth, then we exchange our ownership in that moment. What's the ownership? The ownership of the right to revenge, the ownership of the right to be defending ourselves, to hold back. When we try to create those moments ourselves, we start trying to please God artificially.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: Then we start trying to put things back into place, and that becomes us creating the moment after the fact.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: We don't realize it, but we actually manufacture—like an AI—we do it artificially. We manufacture what we think God wants from us.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: No one can do that. There is no way any person can do that. Only God knows what reconciliation is needed. Only God knows what restoration is needed.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: This is so important scripturally. I'll wrap this up by saying Joseph was traumatized. He was sold into slavery by his brothers. They did him wrong. They did him dirty, as we would say. But the Lord spends 13 years making sure He has a conversation with Joseph while he waits in prison about the truth of the situation. It wasn't all their brothers. Joseph was involved because he had a wrong motivation.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: I want to finish with this statement, and I want you to hear it. Was Joseph meant to go through all that if he had walked the way God wanted him to? If he had allowed God to create the moments for him, the question is, did he have to go through all that? That takes away the blame.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: Here's an important part. When God takes you back in order to give you new life, which is resurrection, something has to take place before resurrection can occur, and that's called burial. God has to bury what you thought was true so that what He says is true can come alive and live. That will lead you into transformation; otherwise, it's just cycles.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: To finish, it has to be the death of a vision. Something has to die to be resurrected.

Guest (Male): Thanks for spending time with us today on First Love. If today's message spoke to you, share it with someone. If you're looking for more teachings, visit www.torcc.org. That's T-O-R-C-C dot org for more. We'll be back next week, same time, same truth. As you go, don't forget the One who loved you first is still loving you best.

Thanks for spending time with us today on First Love. If today's message spoke to you, share it with someone. If you're looking for more teachings, visit www.torcc.org. That's T-O-R-C-C dot org for more. As you go, don't forget the One who loved you first is still loving you best.