What happens when we get stuck in unhealthy patterns? How do we let Jesus into the broken places and step into spiritual and emotional wholeness? In this episode, Gina has a conversation with Ali Ash about the things that get in the way of healthy relationship with God, ourselves and each other.
Ali Ash is a certified Life Purpose Coach. She is also certified in the Restoration Therapy Model, a TRR (The Relationship Resource) trainer and has been cultivating healthy leadership for the nonprofit world for over 10 years. She is passionate about coming alongside people where their mental and emotional health intersects with Spiritual Formation. Seeing people find a renewal of hope, joy and purpose through intentional holistic living is her sweet spot. She and her husband Ryan have been married for 20 years and live in San Diego, CA with their 3 boys.
Click below to listen starting at 39:04 to follow along.
Renewing our Minds
Ali:
They can also help us connect to others in some really powerful ways. They can help us experience an intimacy and dependence on the Lord that we didn’t even know is possible. We feel like we shouldn’t have to deal with stuff from when we were little or in our first marriage. We create these phrases that we don’t even know. We’re listening to that voice that says we shouldn’t even try, we’re not worthy of, “How embarrassing that you call yourself a Christian and you still struggle with these things.”
I’m learning in my own life and in the workshops that I get to do that if we are willing to be playful with it and almost address the voices or some of those false core beliefs as parts of us. We talk to those parts. It might sound weird, but if you think about it, we do it in our everyday life. We say stuff like, “On one hand, I think this, and on the other hand, I think this.” There’s different parts of us.
Based on our stories, we have these parts that really protected us in different times of our lives. Those parts are pretty amazing, but maybe now as an adult, we don’t need their help anymore. We have Jesus and He not only protects us, but we’re learning how to step into healthy relationships with others. We have a unity that can help us.
Gina:
I’m so glad you said that we create these things for self protection and there comes a point where I actually don’t need that anymore. I remember several years ago I was at a retreat. There was a friend who actually does inner healing, prayer and trained in inner healing prayer. I was walking through something pretty significant and hard.
One of my daughters was going through some hard things and I was really struggling with that. We were in this prayer. It was like a deep inner healing prayer. At one point I said, “I feel like there’s a wall, there’s a barrier.” This is how she led me. She said “That wall was there to protect you and you don’t need it anymore. Why don’t you just thank the wall and say thanks. I’m good.”
There was something about that acknowledging and saying thank you, but I don’t need you anymore. I just want to say, there’s semantics. I think it’s easy for us to get very triggered by certain words, “That sounds very Biblical.” Let’s put it in Biblical language. We’re going to tear down every stronghold and high thing. That wall was a stronghold. It was a high thing, because I didn’t have the capacity as a child to recognize that God can be that strong tower and refuge.
You, Lord, are the strong tower that I run into. I didn’t feel that I didn’t have that. I was not safe as I built my own tower for protection. I was getting to that place where I don’t need that tower anymore, because I have Jesus, so I can tear down that stronghold. Because the very thing that I’ve constructed to protect me is now the very thing that is standing in the way of my freedom and healing and further intimacy with Jesus.
Ali:
It really is whole another way of looking at how to renew your mind. Renewing the mind is not a one time thing. It’s a consistent and constant choosing to renew your mind and taking your thoughts captive. The first step to renewing your mind is identifying what it is that you’re feeling and thinking. Being able to identify what you’re thinking means, you actually have to pause and go check in with yourself.
“What am I thinking?” If you have a mood, you wake up and you’re in a funky mood. Instead of dismissing that, what if you paused and asked yourself, “What am I feeling right now? What am I thinking?” Even better, write it down, journal. Sometimes we think there’s a template or a format that makes journaling the proper way to journal, but actually journaling can just be a brain-dump. You can dump whatever it is you’re thinking. It can be fragmented. It could be pictures.
Gina:
You did a workshop at the church that we’re both at, New Community Church in Vista. There was a lot of anxiety coming up, you talked people through what you called My Pain and Peace Cycle. Would you quickly go through that? That was a really powerful tool. We can say, “Journal!” I open my journal and if I’m not a journaler, I look at the blank page and I don’t know where to start, but I think this really helps people with an understanding.
Ali:
It’s one of my favorite tools. Dr. Terry Hargrave is who gets credit for the Pain to Peace Cycle. It’s from what he and his wife created called restoration therapy. It comes from looking at the pillars of healthy relationship. Restoration therapy teaches that the pillars of healthy relationship are love and trust.
When we say relationship, we’re talking about with God, with ourself and with others. Love is our identity. We know who we are by how we’re loved. When we ask ourselves, “Am I unique? Am I worthy of being loved? Am I lovable?” We’re asking these questions when we’re even a little person up until adulthood. That’s that pillar of identity, of love.
The second pillar is trust. I’ll know I’m safe with you, Gina, when I can trust you. Safety is another thing that we’re constantly scanning our environment for. “Is this person dependable? Are they gonna do what they say they are? Are they reliable over time?” Two pillars of love and trust is what foundationally builds healthy relationship.
Then we look at throughout our life, those things have been disrupted, broken, violated multiple times. Because of that, we learn how to cope. That is what takes us to this next layer. Underneath the love pillar, we would see blame and shame. Underneath the trust pillar, we would see control and escape. These are the spin out or the coping from when we felt violated in that space of being loved in that space of feeling safe.
The Pain to Peace Cycle helps you identify four steps that can really regulate your mood in a moment. They’re personal to each of us. Although it’s the same format, the words are going to be different. For example, number one is to say what you feel. You’re going to say what you feel in those moments of typically conflict, relational conflict, or a stressful situation.
The first step is to say what you feel. My go-tos are: I feel misunderstood, I feel devalued, therefore I feel unknown and unsafe. Those are like my automatics. It doesn’t matter if I’m talking to you, if I’m talking to my husband, if I’m at work. That happens in milliseconds, I will start to feel those feelings. When I feel those feelings, then I tend to do something.
Number two is your coping. You’re going to say how you feel. Then you’re going to say what you do when you feel that way. So what I tend to do is, my heart will start pounding and I get a little anxious. When I feel that anxiety, it actually prompts me to do something. I tend to perform. I over-perform. I’ll work harder. I’ll do whatever needs to get done, to try and make things better.
But usually that doesn’t work, because it’s not a healthy way of responding. Then I very quickly get to the point where I blame and I will blame in my head. I will blame out loud. I will point it at you. You and the next one. Then I’m so embarrassed that I just blamed, that I withdraw to protect. I very quickly will then retreat, because I’m now protecting myself. That’s my step one and my step two. Step three is where we want to get.
Step three is God’s truth. The truth comes from God. It comes from others, it comes from ourselves. My truth is that I actually am understood. Remember my first feeling is misunderstood. So my truth is that I am understood. I’m understood by the Lord, by my Father. I’m understood by those closest to me. And therefore I am valued.
I have great value and I’m known, therefore I’m safe. You go through the truth and then that truth is gonna help you. Before I was coping, based on feelings that were rooted in lies, now I’m in my truth and out of my truth, I have new actions. When I’m functioning in my truth of being understood, being valued, fully known and safe, therefore my new actions are, I can relax and let go. I don’t have to be anxious anymore.
When I can relax and let go, I’m able to value myself and nurture others. When I’m valuing myself and nurturing others, I’m able to stay reliably connected. I don’t have to withdraw to protect. When I say, reliably connected, it’s not just physically, it’s emotionally, it’s relationally.
Pain to Peace Cycle from the Hargraves is really helpful when you realize that you’re hijacked or your mood or your actions are out of control. That would be a moment where you could look back and see what you were feeling when that happened? We never want to miss opportunities to learn from what happened.
Instead of feeling embarrassed, if you have a fight with your significant other or your child or your parent, look back and use that as an opportunity to ask yourself, “What was I feeling? What was the lie I was believing? What did I do when I felt that way?” Then you’re going to try and ask yourself “What’s God’s truth? What does His truth say about me, about who He is? What’s my new action off of that truth?”
That’s really how we’re trying to renew the mind. Not just renew the mind in our thought process, because it’s directly influencing our behavior and our actions. Ultimately we want to be able to regulate what we’re thinking, regulate our moods, to where it influences our actions to live out of who are in Christ.
A great way to test that if you feel like your behaviors are fine, test them to the fruit of the Spirit. Are you a loving person? Do you have joy, peace, goodness, kindness, faithfulness, gentleness, self control? Those are ways that you can test and see if you’re living out in a way that reflects the fruit of the Holy Spirit.
Gina:
The fruit of the Spirit and I would also say the love chapter. Because it’s easy to say “That’s loving!” Let’s define love. Love is patient, kind, keeps no record of wrongs. It’s moving us to learn how to respond versus react. What I love about who you are is that it’s easy to get in a hyper spirituality, where then there’s nothing that I can put actions to, or we can go the other way and get very action oriented.
If I do this, then this will happen. It’s that integration of how do I receive God’s presence? How do I enter into intimacy with Him? But then how do I walk that out? How do I become more self-aware? How do I not get caught up in the frenzy of it?
You alluded to where you don’t choose what you’re born with, who you’re born to, you get what you get. Going back to how we were raised in tradition. Does God’s sovereignty mean it’s was God’s will that I was born into this very difficult situation, or something very traumatic happened to me. That’s a very hard thing to reconcile, God’s sovereignty and His plans and His purposes versus, in my opinion, His redemption.
I’ll speak from my life. With my upbringing, with my parents, not married, a mess, alcoholic, highly dysfunctional relationship, pregnancy to try to trap for marriage.. When I came to Jesus, when I was 12, my mom’s best friend, who was a cocktail waitress, got saved and invited my mom to church. My mom said, no. She asked permission to invite me to church and for some reason, my mom said yes. I met Jesus.
I had an intimate relationship with Him, not knowledge of Him first. Through coming to know Him at 12, 13 years old, that was at the same time that I found out that my parents weren’t married and I felt like I’m a bastard. When I came across Psalm 139, God gave me Psalm 139, it was spoken over to me and I could not receive it. I didn’t understand it. “You knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, because I’m fearfully and wonderfully made.”
No, my parents’ horrible, weird relationship was sinful. How could that have been God’s will that they have this tumultuous relationship and then I’m born of it that, doesn’t reconcile. I really struggled with that. Yet that was a theme to the point that the pastor who married Norm and I, Mike Macintosh, used that verse, God gave him for a wedding day.
He said, “I’ve never used this verse in a wedding, but for some reason, this is what the Lord wanted me to speak over the two of you.” There’s that understanding and that mystery, we have to be willing to accept that God is God and we are not. And there has to be mystery. We can’t understand everything.
But the reality is, when you already talked about Genesis, you talked about that perfect union in the garden. Then in Genesis 3, that was broken. Then this plan of redemption was set into motion. In the course of that plan of redemption are things like David and Bathsheba. David killing her husband, having this adulterous affair. Them having one baby that died and the second baby that’s the line that Jesus came through.
Even His redemption of humanity, it came through these circumstances that were fraught with pain and hard things. Can I receive the stuff, not get hung up in the fact that “It was God’s will. In my family this happened.” Could it be that in this crazy, mysterious world God created, that it is the necessity for free will and the brokenness that invites God’s redemption in that. Taking what was meant for evil, the things that came as a collision of brokenness can then be turned around and woven into something miraculous and beautiful.
I was the first one that got saved in my family and subsequently, so many of my family members have come to Jesus. So much redemption has happened through this seemingly horrifically tragic situation. What does it look like to let go of that weight and the gnarly expectation or the self condemnation that I find myself in this place.
What does it look like to surrender that to the Lord and look at a verse like, “All things work together for good, for those who love God, and are called according to His purpose.” We use and abuse that verse. We can be very cruel with people and say it at the wrong times. But it’s true. It’s hard and it’s messy and it can be painful, but it can be miraculous and beautiful.
Ali:
You explained it so beautifully. For whatever reason, God chooses to use pain as a way to reveal Himself to us. Our perspective really is limited. I have to trust that based on who God is and how He sees and knows, and is sovereign with full foreknowledge, is far beyond my ability to understand. I don’t know why you see pain and brokenness from Genesis to Revelation, and that we still sit in that story and experience it too.
Those are tough questions that people will ask, “Why should I believe in God if He allows babies to be murdered or people to be abused or war to happen?” In that, I try to go to what I do know. What I do know is, that’s why Jesus came. That’s why we believe that there is this eternal perfection that’s yet to come, but that now matters and has this profound and eternal purpose in it.
We see that in so much of Paul’s writings. He calls this a momentary affliction, a momentary struggle, and that we can endure it in light of what’s yet to come, an eternal glory. When he compares eternal glory with a light and momentary affliction or struggle, I have to trust what I don’t understand, believing that I can endure. You also see in God’s Word that Paul says that the Lord is faithful to finish the good work He started in us.
Anyone who’s afraid to dabble in healing or in breaking bondage and living in that freedom that Jesus says exists. Don’t be afraid, because He promises to be with you in it. To continue to finish that work that He started. You’re not going to be left alone. There are people, there are resources that can journey with you.
It’s always worth it, because we’re talking about the God of the universe, we’re talking about our Creator. He’s going to continue to provide in ways that we don’t even know we might need. Even this, talking about it, sharing with people, being in community is one of the ways that we heal, that we break the generational curse or those epigenetics. We now realize we have somewhat of a choice in this.
Gina:
Thanks Ali. This was fun. This was a good conversation. I appreciate you so much and the things that God does in and through you. Even just recently the recent skills class you did and the miraculous stories that were coming out of that. The transformation and healing that was happening is deep. Thank you for who you are and all you do. Thank you for your voice in my life.
Ali Ash is a leader, mentor and life-coach on staff at New Community Church in Vista, CA.
Check the rest of this conversation Redeeming Our Legacy & Leading Our Emotions & Reading Emotions
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