In this episode, Gina has a conversation with Gem Fadling, CLC about taking thoughts captive, and about her new book Hold That Thought: Sorting Through the Voices in Our Heads.
Gem is a founding partner of Unhurried Living, a non-profit that trains people to rest deeper, live fuller and lead better. She is a Certified Life Coach and a trained Spiritual Director who coaches women at the intersection of spiritual leadership and soul care. Gem is the host of the I Can Do That! Podcast as well as the co-author of What Does Your Soul Love? Eight Questions That Reveal God’s Work in You, and author of Hold That Thought: Sorting Through the Voices in Our Heads.
Listen below to follow along starting at 20:18.
The Seven Voices
Gina:
You’ve said a few times how practical you are and I agree with you. You introduce these seven voices in the book, and I would love for you to unpack that as much as you want to at this point. I don’t want to give it all away, because we would love for people to go get the book.
Gem:
Let me just talk about the book before I move into the voices. This is really what I’m offering. I offer boots on the ground. My life’s work right now really is to do just that. I’m sharing with you what I’ve learned from my almost 60 years on this planet.
I am sharing what I’ve noticed, how God speaks, how God moves, what God invites me to, what the outcome has been. I just think that’s important for us to do. Those old evangelical words like witnessing or whatever. I mean, isn’t that what a witness is? They just speak what they know, and what they saw with the experience.
So my witness is this: God has been faithful, and my part is that I’m diligent in my noticing and cooperation with Him, even though I do this completely imperfectly. I think that will get you a long way if you are intentional. That’s a lot of what’s in here. As far as the voices, I’ll just name all seven of them and then describe a couple of them.
These voices are not every single voice that ever happens inside of your head. I use the words “voice” and “thought” interchangeably, synonymously in the book. I’ve sort of personified these particular ones. I think they run the gamut of the kinds of thoughts that we have. So I have: “The stressed achiever.” She’s the one that got me in trouble with the anxiety, because she paired up with “the inner critic.”
Gina:
They are ganging up on you.
Gem:
Yes, they do, they collide and then they gang up and they move. So, I’ve got “The stressed achiever, the positive thinker, the inner critic, the anxious controller, the complaining victim, the passive spectator, and the unsettled heart.”
Each one of them I just named so that we could look at that dynamic inside our own lives and see how we might discern what’s happening. One of the metaphors I really love is that of the dining table. You have your own inner dining table that you’re sitting at.
I remember the old days when it was like the dad would sit at one head and the mom took the other head and then the kids are on the side. So that’s the kind of table I’m talking about. What happens is the voices want to sit in my chair at the head of the table.
So when I’m noticing that’s happening, I can walk over to the voice and I don’t have to chastise it or blame it because it’s already doing enough of that. I just say, “Thank you so much, this is my seat.” I ask the voice to move to another seat and I take my place. That’s when we start discerning.
So, if I wake up to this fact and my adrenaline is pumping, I go, “What’s going on?” I look over at the head of the table and I see not one but two chairs, the stressed achiever and the anxious controller.
I can walk over and say, “Thank you so much.” and then you want to listen because these are all parts of us, our emotions. Lots of dynamics happen. There’s a part of us that’s disgruntled or nervous or afraid and it wants to control. So we need to listen. Listen and have compassion, and let ourselves know that we can step out of this trap.
Gina:
That is so good. I love that even just the act of naming that emotion, “the anxious controller”, naming that suddenly gives me a perspective where it’s no longer “What’s wrong with me?” Because you can turn on yourself. The enemy loves to accuse. I don’t want to hyper spiritualize everything, but there’s these things that we tend towards and we’ll get little nudges to help them out.
But when you can actually name it, then you start to recognize where it’s going, where it’s taking you, what it’s achieving. Then the other thing I love about naming it, is there’s something powerful when it doesn’t just stay locked in your head, but you actually speak it out and you go, “Oh wait, you’re an anxious controller.”
Then suddenly it’s almost like you turned the light on in a room and what seemed like a huge monster in the dark suddenly gets right-sized, and that gives you power. That gives you the ability to not just get dragged by the rip current, but now you see it for what it is, you’re able to put it in its right size. Like you said, you can listen, but then not give it more attention than it needs. So I just really love that process and it gives so much context and power.
Gem:
Oh yes. I love everything you just said, because sometimes we let fear, fear of any kind for any reason, keep us from doing this work that you’re talking about. Here’s the thing, Jesus is the light. Talk about turning on the light. We bring things into the light so that we can be healed. So anything that’s trying to keep you afraid of sharing that, be cautious of that. Because bringing things into the light to be seen is where the healing happens.
Gina:
The enemy’s number one tool is isolation, because he knows that place of being in the light of relationship with Jesus. He knows that relationship in general with God and then with one another – that’s where healing takes place. So the more and more you feel the need to isolate, to pull back, and that’s where it gets dark.
That’s where those things become bigger than they should be. That’s where the question of, “Did God really say?” He’s got no new trick in the book. It goes all the way back to the garden. But look how effective.
So what a sweet way to give people some tools to be able to go on this journey and know that they’re able to name those things. They’re able to allow God’s presence to come into those places that they’re able to move beyond and not be controlled by, and it’s really powerful.
Notice, Discern, Respond
Gina:
I know you have a practice, and you meet with people and all that. How have you seen this play out for people? How have you seen testimonies on this road of discovery?
Gem:
I’ve seen it in my own life, and I’ve seen it in the lives of women that I meet with. The process that I teach in the book, and that I teach in my coaching, is called “notice, discern and respond.” I call it “NDR”. It’s a beautiful practice because it’s invitational and it doesn’t attack anything, because the first movement again is to notice, to see.
Then the second movement is “discern.” Now that you see it, the first movement actually within discernment is compassion. It doesn’t work to beat ourselves up. It’s already been happening. Compassion and then curiosity and honesty. I think that’s the posture inside of discern.
Then you just ask questions, “What, how, where.” Where might this be coming from? Is this helping me? Is it true? Start asking yourself a bunch of questions and let yourself discern. Then the response is usually a response that is self-evident by the time you spent discerning. The response can be maybe a new thought or it could be a new action, or it could be an action that feels more like a letting go or a release.
So a response could be anything. As I work with people, a lot of people just love the first step. Notice there’s great fruit that happens from becoming a person who’s not on autopilot. So I’ve heard that feedback from a lot of people. “I didn’t know I could just notice what was happening, and then I could make a choice.” That is a big, huge, light bulb moment.
The Power Pause
Gina:
That really is huge. We live in a world right now where things are happening so fast, our attention span is reducing rapidly, an example of that is social media and news. We’re inundated with thoughts and activities and stuff coming at us constantly. So even the idea of noticing, really requires me to be still, it requires me to stop for a minute. It requires me to breathe to put my phone down.
You pause and go, “Wait, where am I? What am I doing?” How often do we drive somewhere and we don’t even remember how we got there, we were just driving and our brains were going the whole time. You’re listening to a podcast and you’re listening to music and you’re thinking about so much. I think now more than ever, that whole idea of noticing, and just naming it, requires us to stop for a minute.
Gem:
Yes, and you don’t even have to take a long time. Some voices, when you’re in the discernment process, and then coming up with a new response that can take a long time. But some day to day stuff Yeah. You could pause for two minutes. For example, way back at the beginning when we were starting the podcasting, my husband and I started the Unheard Living podcast.
We’ve now branched off. Now I have my own and he’s still doing that one. When we first started, everything’s new, you’re all nervous. We’re getting set up and we end up just bickering about stuff, and I’m getting all perfectionistic and, I wasn’t happy with the way the sound was happening. I wasn’t happy with whatever we were doing.
It doesn’t even matter at this point, but I know I was just in a bad mood. And all of a sudden I just sort of woke up in the middle of that and I paused and I said, “Alan, you know what? I’m actually afraid right now. I’m afraid of looking stupid. I’m afraid it’s not going to look right to people. I’m afraid of what people will think.”
As soon as I said all of that out loud, anything I was upset about before, it didn’t even matter. It was gone. All of that was just this chatter at the top of it, when way down inside of me, what was happening was I was scared. So we both have been doing this kind of work. As soon as I got to that he understood what happened. I understood what happened, we reset ourselves.
That’s this thing where you can wake up in the middle of a triggering moment. In that case it was relatively quick. I realized I was afraid, and then I did some self examining. So I don’t have any control over what people are going to think. I’ve chosen to do a podcast, so there’s that. What I’m going to do right now, is I’m going to just do my best. So that’s a very quick turnaround.
Gina:
Yeah. I love that. That’s so significant because you’re getting to the root. You’re getting to the “why,” because so often we get stuck in this up here. We get stuck in the bickering. We get stuck in anxiety or control or whatever those things are. If you try to start up here dealing with the symptoms, and then it turns into a blame game.
Whose fault is it that we’re bickering? Or whatever the case may be. All of that is just noise. But if you can actually stop long enough to notice “Why am I feeling this way? Why am I so agitated? Why is this triggering me?” Or I didn’t get triggered by this, when I wouldn’t have gotten triggered by this a week ago.
That noticing gives you the ability to identify some vulnerability there to even kind of admit that you are afraid. There is a little bit of a process when you do take the time to stop and notice, it’s a vulnerable thing to have to look at what is at the bottom of this. I just keep thinking of the word “grace,” you know, having grace for yourself. But women in particular move to self-judgment and self hatred or self-rejection so easily.
Gem:
Yeah. It’s definitely been a process. I mean, it’s been a lifetime. I struggled with anxiety my whole life. I did the typical first half of life that everybody does. You know, you build your ego and you don’t know what you don’t know and all that stuff. The reason I was able to turn on a dime basically was that conversation probably happened about six years ago.
It shifted immediately because of the decades that I’m not exaggerating that led up to that moment. Both my husband and I have been on spiritual journeys, and then we had some therapy and both of us have done enough work to where in that moment I was safe to be vulnerable to him, to say, “Oh, I just found out that I’m afraid.” He understood exactly what I meant.
He knew that I was touching way deep down inside there. We were both able to see it, acknowledge it, and actually I kind of giggled like, “Oh yeah, I’m just afraid.” Do you know what I’m saying? But that doesn’t happen. That doesn’t happen out of nowhere. It’s decades of my journey with God. It took all those years of being completely un-self aware, I will not even lie about that. A lot of ignorance.
But then midlife, I embraced that challenge and I did some deep work. I let go of some things, and embraced other things. So by the time I got to that point in that room, at that moment, I was able to go, “Oh, you know what? I’m afraid.” You cannot underestimate the value of process. Peterson called it “A long journey in the same direction.” That’s what this is.
Trinitatian Love
Gina:
There’s something so profound about our journeys with Jesus and the highs and the lows and the ignorance and the learning and the falling. It’s interesting because you get to a certain point where you realize that the journey is not linear. It’s not this pretty process, but it can be painful, it can be excruciating, it can be miraculous, it can be all of those things.
But God is a redeemer and nothing is wasted. So life brings you to this place of understanding and knowledge. When we yield those things and we steward those things, then that’s where this beautiful healing can come from.
Then again, it’s not just about us. We can then become a conduit of peace, of the fruit of the Spirit. Love, joy, peace, patience’s kindness, goodness. We’re not going to be perfect, but we can be a demonstration of that to the people around us and to our families and all of that stuff.
Gem:
I think the only other thing I would add, because we had a good chance to sort of talk about NDR, which is in a big part of the book, and then be transformed, and then the voices, these are all the big things in there. The other really big thing that makes it incomplete if you do not talk about it is Trinitarian love.
I realized that I was writing the book, that I couldn’t just talk about thoughts. You can’t just go into your brain and start digging around. So I have a through line in there of the love of God and the grace of Jesus and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. That’s straight from 2 Corinthians 13-14. It’s a blessing.
So as you engage in anything that we’ve said here, and as you read the book, I’m hoping there’s two rails here. We’re talking about thoughts. That’s just one way to engage our transformation. There’s also our feelings and our bodies and we’re so complicated. This book is talking about thoughts. On the other rail is Trinitarian love.
So don’t just go into your brain, make sure you remember “In Him, we live and move and have our being.” Here’s the actual verse. “May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.” I’m inviting you to take the Trinity with you, because you’re in the Trinity. So just remember that you are encircled by Trinitarian care.
Gina:
That’s beautiful and such a significant thing to understand that the invitation from that Trinitarian love. It is always an invitation. It’s never a condemnation. When we were going back to the beginning of our conversation talking about the thoughts, talking about noticing, like, “What is this?”
It is 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18, “Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, and in everything give thanks. Don’t quench the Spirit, do not despise prophecies, but test everything.” So there’s so much more grace, so much more kindness, so much more presence, so much more love than we believe, than we’re oftentimes willing to receive.
I really love that you kind of give a very practical, clear path to consider that there’s an invitation in the middle of this chaos. In the middle of this place, there is actually an invitation into that love, into that kindness, into that presence. When we can bring Him into those things.
In the beginning you talked about unhurried living, and you talked about the importance of rest. How does that invitation for rest, and this work about this thought work. Where do those intersect and how do those compliment one another?
Gem:
Well, I think when we are talking about rest, it opens a door to a conversation about your view of time itself. Most people don’t believe they have the time to rest. So you have to ask yourself if you really believe that you don’t have time. Once you open up that conversation, then you can start having a conversation with yourself about what you do have time for.
Spiritual practices, all of them, no matter what it is, it fits under the category of unhurried time because you’re taking the time to do something that may or may not look productive, or culturally relevant, or at the right pace. Unhurried is a whole other conversation. It’s not about being slow necessarily.
We’re talking about time for what matters. So if you have a conversation with yourself about rest and time itself, and then within that, do you have the time to pause for two minutes every day and check in with yourself about the thought that’s in your head right now? I think the answer would be yes.
Do you have two minutes? Even on your busiest day. Do you have two minutes? So the grand conversation that is over all of this, is what you believe about time itself. You do have enough time. God’s not playing a weird trick on us, like giving us all these assignments and then you only have this much time, so make it happen. That’s not what’s happening here.
God is creative and generous and we’re invited to rest. We’re invited to work and that’s what we like to talk about. What does that really mean? What does that look like? It is possible because as you started, we talked about the Sabbath rest, It’s in the 10 Commandments. It’s in Nehemiah. It is that, “what you were saying?” So it’s important.
Gina:
Well, we may have to have another podcast conversation. Get your hubby over here and we’ll do a whole conversation on that because I just love that. Gem, thank you so much for being here, for your obedience with listening to what the Lord is inviting you to, and then how you are stewarding and sharing the things that He’s shown you. So thank you so much Gem, it’s been a joy to speak with you.
Check out the rest of this conversation: Renewing The Mind
Check out the Dwell Meditations
