Debra Fileta: Take Control of Negative Thoughts and Emotional Triggers | Kirk Cameron on TBN

Counselor and author, Debra Fileta, examines the importance of inviting God into our healing process. She shares how to identify the negative thoughts and triggers that often accompany trauma and discusses how to work towards healing and hope. Don’t miss this insightful interview here on Takeaways with Kirk Cameron on TBN!

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There’s a difference between fixating on our past and actually facing our past.
Facing our past means that we go back with the intention of healing so that we can move forward.
We go back to some of those pain points, and we invite god’s truth into our trauma.
I’m particularly fascinated with, uh, with this topic because relationships are life. Right?
I mean, at the end of the day, it’s the people that, uh, that you love and care for and that love for you that mean the most to us.
Yeah. Absolutely.
And and we’re gonna be talking about mental habits, um, needing resets, and how to do that when it sometimes feels impossible to change.
Yeah. Um, why is it so hard to break relational habits?
Well, first of all, you’re right in saying that relationships are such a huge part of our life. Right?
They’re everything. And oftentimes, people will ask me, what is your best advice for me to have healthy relationships?
My best advice is get healthy standing alone because your personal mental, emotional, spiritual health is like a magnet.
You know, you attract and engage with people on your level of emotional health.
So when we focus on our healing, it overflows into the relationships around us.
So if you wanna change your marriage, you wanna change your relationship with your kids, you wanna change your relationships with your friends or even your relationship with your boss, you start with getting healthy, doing an assessment, taking inventory of where you’re at, what your habits are, how healthy you are in your thoughts, your feelings, and your behaviors.
And when you begin to do that work, it overflows into all of your relationships.
That’s so important because I think the natural default, isn’t it, when when you’re talking to people in some of your counseling sessions is like, won’t they do this and she does that and he does this.
And and and, uh, if all these people just had not done these bad things to me, I wouldn’t have all of these these hang ups and bad habits.
Right. You know, Jesus says in in the bible, it says, take the plank out of your own eye first, and then you will be able to see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye.
We always are looking for the plank in our brother’s eye. What are they doing wrong?
What do what do they need to change?
And God doesn’t say that we don’t have to confront our brothers about things.
You might have a speck in your eye that I need to take out.
You might have something I need to confront you about, but I can’t do that unless I take the plank out of my own eye first.
The healing of relationships has to start with me.
If somebody needs a a reset, and this is what you talk about in in in your book, how to break these habits and reset the way that I think and process, maybe maybe process things that happened when I was a little kid or early on in a in a marriage relationship.
How do you know when you need a reset?
Human beings are kinda like a volcano. Right? We can only take so much pressure.
There’s all this pressure building underneath the surface, and the pressure comes in the form of stress as well as all kinds of different emotions.
And when the pressure gets too high and we’re not dealing with the pressure, guess what?
It will find the point of least resistance, and it will come up to the surface of our lives.
And it comes up differently for different people. For for some people, it looks like anger or rage.
Some people find themselves in a marriage conflict or crisis. Yeah.
For some people, it’s depression and anxiety that comes up to the surface of their life and all of a sudden they’re like, we’re in need of help.
You know, oftentimes what we do is we try to shove it back under. Yeah. We try to ignore it.
We try to, uh, cover it up.
Yeah. Soldier on.
Exactly. Or let’s just be tough and and toughen our way through this, but that’s not how it works.
We’ve gotta stop and actually begin to deal with what is going on.
Oftentimes, when it comes to behaviors we wanna change, people like to start with the behavior.
You know, think about it. In the new year, everybody has something they wanna change. Mhmm.
They think of all these goals.
But did you know within just a few months, everybody, like 90 something percent of people, have failed in their new year’s resolutions within just a few months of the new year?
Why is that? It’s because we start with external behavior rather than internal awareness.
We start with the external. We start with the things on the outside.
Uh, if I wanna lose some weight, I’m gonna start eating healthy, but we don’t get to the root.
What are the thoughts underneath the surface of my life that are causing the feelings that are motivating me to engage in this behavior?
And when we don’t get to the roots, the behavior is just gonna keep coming back into our life.
So reset is all about changing your behavior, but changing it from the inside out.
In the first chapter of your your book, you talk about needing to pause the noise. Yeah.
The noise outside and the noise inside. Why do you start there?
Because a lot of healing work happens in the pause when we can stop and rest and take inventory of what God is telling us.
Mhmm. Um, we don’t often take the time to listen to what he wants us to change.
Sometimes I have my own list. I wanna change this. I wanna try this. I wanna do this.
But have you ever paused and inquired of him, Lord, what do you see in me?
What do you want me to change?
What area in my life is the most prioritized to you?
Where do you what do you want me to do? How do you want me to change and heal?
We need to pause, silence the noise.
So each of these practices that you read about comes with a homework assignment and and something practical that you have to do in the process of healing and change.
And for for pause, I challenge you to take 10 minutes without screens, without music, without company, and just be still with the Lord.
Ask some questions. Be curious. Ask him to reveal to you what he wants you to change and hear what he says.
You start with a pause, and then you end with 5 stages of change.
Can you go through those 5 stages with us?
The first stage is precontemplation. That’s when you’re not quite sure if you’re ready to do this change thing.
And maybe sometimes you think about it, but there’s not enough motivation, so you just end up defaulting back to your old behaviors.
The second stage is called contemplation.
Contemplation is when all of a sudden the reasons to change are starting to outweigh the reasons not to change, and you’re realizing, I think I actually need to do this change.
The third step is coming up with a plan. And reset helps you come up with a plan.
Reset helps you do the internal work because step 1, 2, and 3 of change have nothing to do with the action steps of change.
There is so much internal work that has to be done before step 4, which is taking action.
But oftentimes, when we wanna change, what do we do?
Just go straight to the action.
To the action. We miss step 123. We go straight to step 4, but we’re not ready for it.
Then we fall back into old patterns. So step 4 is action, and step 5 is maintenance.
I finally have achieved change, and now I’m walking in it. It’s not something new, something that I’m pursuing.
It’s now just a part of my everyday life.
Is willpower enough?
Willpower is not enough because it’s based on our ability to continue these external habits rather than strengthening our internal self.
When we strengthen our internal emotional and mental well-being, that’s when change becomes lasting and sustainable because we’re gonna run out of willpower at some point.
Yeah. How important is others to support us? How important is community in lasting change?
Oftentimes, we wanna do this whole change thing alone. And you know why?
Because there’s sometimes shame around the things that we really want
to change. You need to change.
You know, the things that maybe you haven’t told people about the addictions, the struggles, the running to the fridge at midnight when nobody’s watching, the the things that are in your life behind closed doors, the way that you treat your spouse, the the way that you talk to your children.
And sometimes we don’t want people to know.
And so we try to change alone, but life is not a one player game.
And God has given us community to heal in.
And so a big part of the the changing process is learning to ask for help and figuring out why we don’t to begin with.
What is it underneath the surface of our life that prevents us from being authentic with people, from going to people and telling them what we need, from sharing our journey with others?
And so we’re on this journey together. God has called us all into the process of healing. Yeah.
And we’re so much more effective when we do it together.
Asking for help is uncomfortable. It makes us feel vulnerable and weak.
What will give courage to say I need help?
Well, first of all, I would say, why do you believe that asking for help makes you weak?
Because our belief system, right, if somebody believes that asking reason Was there a season in your life where someone made you believe that it was wrong to ask for help?
Even our our inability to ask for help is rooted in a false belief system that we’ve gotta pause, take the time to confront, and begin to alter our beliefs.
Reset is essentially based on this one formula, Kirk.
If you get this formula, it’s gonna help you in in all of the things that you’re trying to change.
It’s the formula that thoughts lead to feelings.
So what you think leads to how you feel, which then influences how you behave. Thoughts to feelings to behaviors.
That is the formula. And, again, instead of just looking at the behavior, I need to just ask for help.
Let me just go ask for help. I have to get to the root.
What’s what’s the feeling I have when I ask for help? Maybe I feel ashamed. Maybe I feel afraid.
But what’s the belief? What’s the thought process, and where does God need to help me exchange that for truth?
Deborah, um, so many of us have heard that, uh, well, your feelings aren’t facts. You know?
Uh, you let your feelings drive the car, and you’re gonna wind up in a ditch every time.
Do you agree with that?
Here’s the thing. Feelings are a necessary part of our life. You know?
God made us all with feelings, and it it’s a part of who we are.
We just have to learn how to honor God with our feelings.
When the disciples asked Jesus to tell them what’s the greatest commandment, he said, love the lord your god with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.
I really believe that heart represents our emotional health. Soul represents our spiritual health.
Mind represents our mental health, and strength represents our physical health.
So emotional health is an important part of our life, and I think sometimes Christians want to just shove that part of them away instead of realizing that God gave us emotions as a signal.
They’re a signal. When you have emotions, instead of just ignoring them, you need to lean into them and say, what is this signal telling me?
And how do I respond to this signal in a healthy way? Do you know that Jesus had emotions?
Biblical scholars have identified over 39 emotions that Jesus had and and expressed in scripture.
He felt angry. He felt worried. He felt compassionate. He felt joy. Jesus had so many emotions.
He felt grief at the death of his friend Lazarus, but it’s not the emotion that’s bad or good.
It’s how we respond to that emotion that can be healthy or unhealthy.
So Jesus knew that emotions were a signal, and he responded to those signals in healthy ways that honored God.
So same for us. We’re going to have emotions and not only that we should have emotions.
If we don’t have emotions, there’s a good chance that somewhere along the way we’ve kind of turned down the volume of our emotions.
We’ve we’ve muted them, but we’re missing out on the signals that our body is sending us.
And oftentimes, it’s because we need to change something. We need to pay attention to something.
We need to heal something.
It seems so easy for us as human beings to jump to these negative conclusions about other people.
Why do you think it’s so easy for us as a default to just jump to negative conclusions?
Because we get triggered. And and let’s talk about that a little bit because I think we deal with that a lot in our society today, in our culture today.
Trigger is kind of a buzzword, and everybody’s getting triggered by everyone and everything.
A trigger is really an exaggerated emotional response. Okay?
It’s like all of a sudden I feel these feelings, and I’m so upset, and I feel hurt, and and I you know, you said something that really bothered me and really hurt me.
So what am I gonna do?
Well, culture tells us if something triggers you, just cut it out of your life. Right?
Yeah.
If that person triggers you, stop being friends with them. If that pastor triggers you, stop going to that church.
If that book triggers you, throw it in the garbage.
Culture tells us to cut out the things that trigger us.
But what if triggers were god revealing the things that we need to heal?
And that’s really what I believe that triggers our I think these reactions we have to people are actually emotional sore spots, and I think that’s what happens in relationships.
We have these emotional sore spots that we carry.
Things from our past, trauma from our past, hurts from our past, wounds from our past, and we carry all of these things with us unhealed.
And then when we get into the context of relationships and people start to push on those sore spots, we react.
We get angry at them. We want them out of our life. We think the problem is with them.
But what if these triggers were God’s way of showing us, hey. There’s something here
Yeah. That I
want you to pay attention to. There’s something here that I want you to heal.
And so as we’re even talking about reset, one of the practices is starting to open our eyes to the triggers in our life and what they might be revealing that God really just wants to heal.
Is there ever a time when overly positive thinking can be a bad thing?
Yes. Really? You’re absolutely right. I call it toxic optimism. And here’s the thing.
Positive thinking is important, but not just positive thinking, Kirk. What’s really important is truth filled thinking. Right?
There’s a difference between just positive mumbo jumbo and actually keeping my mind on god’s truth.
So so there is definitely the tendency to be toxically optimistic, and what that means is that you’re afraid of pain.
You don’t wanna face the hard things. You don’t wanna grieve. You don’t wanna repent and acknowledge difficult things.
So what you do is you heap on the optimism, and everything is good and everybody’s wonderful and it’s gonna be okay.
But what you’re actually doing is living in denial and living in avoidance.
God needs us to lean into the hard things in order to do the work of healing.
If we don’t acknowledge that something is broken, then we also don’t acknowledge our need for a healer.
And so sometimes in our toxic optimism, we’re not actually inviting God into our brokenness.
Inviting Him to come in and heal the wounds, the struggles, the addictions.
And so we have to be really careful to have a balanced view where we’re clinging to God’s truth, but we’re also acknowledging the pain points in our life that need to be healed.
Uh, do you have some practical tips that that that maybe you could share from your book, Reset, that would would help people recognize their triggers, first of all
Yeah.
As not just personality traits or that’s just the way I I am, but no. No.
No. That’s something’s going on there.
And then, um, how to deal with those things without sinking into that black
hole. One of my favorite things about reset is every chapter ends with practical homework.
Like, we’re gonna do the work. This isn’t just a book you read.
This is a a book that you work through.
And one of the practices that I have you do is take inventory of your negative thinking.
So how do you do that?
For the next 24 hours, I want you to take every single negative thought that crosses your mind and write it down.
Either write it on a note in your phone or get out a piece of paper and write it out.
You know, the Bible tells us to take every thought captive and make it obedient to Christ.
And the same thing is taking our thoughts captive. They’re like wild animals. We’ve gotta take them captive.
We’ve gotta face them, write them down for 24 hours, whether it’s a negative thought about you, a negative thought about God, a negative thought about your your situation, a negative thought about the people around you, write it down.
And at the end of that 24 hours, look at that list and start to look for patterns.
Are there areas in your life that you tend to have negative thinking?
Maybe you’ll find that there’s a pattern of inadequacy.
The thoughts have to do with you not being good enough.
Maybe you’ll find that there’s a pattern of fear.
The negative thoughts have to do with worries of what’s gonna happen and what could happen in the future and what could go wrong.
Look for patterns. Because in those patterns, God starts revealing to you what needs to be healed.
So that’s a really practical thing that you can do today to start taking inventory of the health of your thoughts.
Remember that formula? Thoughts lead to feelings, which then lead to behaviors. So let’s start with our thinking.
Let’s take ownership. Let’s take one step towards analyzing our thoughts and seeing how much they align to truth and how much they might actually align to our trauma.
Some people are dealing with things that have been just haunting them for for years years or causing them pain for decades.
Uh, some people say, well, this is just how it is. Uh, time will eventually heal all wounds.
What do you think about that?
You know, I wish time had that kind of power, but it doesn’t.
The only thing that has that kind of power is Jesus, and we’ve got to partner with him to deal with some of these things from the past.
We do have a culture where people are afraid to go back because we think it’s wrong to go back.
We think as Christians, we should just look forward, and we quote Paul where he says forgetting what is behind and straining towards what is ahead.
But what Paul is talking about is not his trauma history and his past wounds.
He’s talking about his accolades, his successes, all of the things he has done, he considers nothing.
And he presses on towards the goal. So we misinterpret that verse to mean that we shouldn’t look back.
There’s a difference between fixating on our past and actually facing our past.
Facing our past means that we go back with the intention of healing so that we can move forward.
We go back to some of those pain points, and we invite God’s truth into our trauma.
This is what I love about counseling.
This is what I love about the counseling process is that we’re inviting God to some of those hard places to replace our trauma with his truth, and he does it so well.
Mhmm. You know, for some people, this process, you’re gonna read through reset, and you will be able to do some of these things yourself.
For other people, you’re gonna need the help of a professional counselor, someone who is a Christian who can partner with you and help point out things to you along this journey of healing.
Deborah, thank you for writing this book and thanks for unpacking it for us today.
Thank you so much for having me.