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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Amanda Anguish

Steps to Christlike Thinking

And I titled this Steps to Christlike Thinking because my favorite thing to do as a therapist is teach people how to think.

And I don't think we often consider how our thoughts play out in our lives, but there's a lot that our thoughts have to do with the consequences that we deal with in life.

And so I want to share some of that with you today, but I want you to take a look at some of these slides here, and I'm going to move over a little bit.

The first slide, this is sort of my motto as a therapist.

To deal with minds is the nicest work in whichever men were engaged.

Every single 1 of you, I'm sure has to do, your job has to do somewhat with people, right?

So all of you, even though I'm a therapist, all of you actually work with minds.

If you work with people, if you work with your family, if you're a stay-at-home mom, if you work with people as an accountant, you work with minds.

So this is my motto, and maybe this will be 1 of your mottos after this as well.

So how many of you remember learning about this?

Learning how to say please and thank you?

Brushing your teeth and washing your hands.

Before we cross the street, yeah, or else you wouldn't be here.

How many of you have actually had to do this in your life?

Has anybody ever had to stop, drop, and roll?

I can't believe how much time my teacher spent teaching me how to do this, and I have not once ever used this.

Unless maybe I was playing around, but not because there was an actual fire.

But how many of us actually learn or spend time in school growing up, whether it's with our parents, are we ever taught to actually how to use our minds and how to think?

Very little time, if any, is taught to us how to think.

And this is 1 of the reasons why I will never be out of a job, because so many people don't learn how to think.

What about how we think about when we lose a job?

I've actually been fired 3 times, so I think I've beat all of you.

I'm still okay because I learned how to think about those.

How about when things don't go the way you'd like them?

Have you ever thought about that, how you think about those kinds of things?

And I think this is a lot of what Christ learned to do and as he was growing up, he learned from his father, his heavenly father.

But at first I wanna give you 3 ways that we often see truth.

A lot of people, this goes into what I'm gonna be talking about so you'll hold on to this as we go through the others.

There's 3 ways that we think and how we think about truth.

And this is over the course of history how things have gone.

So the first 1 is pre-modernism, and this is ultimate truth.

This is what we get from the way we get knowledge through direct revelation from God.

And that was originally how we got truth.

But over time, we've had other things come into play.

Modernism, that's how we think about things based on what the king says, or maybe even the president.

Or what universities say, how, what we see in research.

A lot of people, we're in a university setting right now, there's a lot of research out there.

Do you know a lot of research contradicts itself?

Absolutely, but there are some people that hold on to research as though, well, I don't care what you say, you've got research.

So that's the second way our society has gone and our culture has gone towards this idea of modernism.

So this doesn't mean that there aren't pre-modernists out there, it just means that we're progressing, if you wanna use that word, maybe it's not the best word, but we're moving in a direction towards modernism, or we did, And now you see something else that's coming into play, and that's postmodernism.

And postmodernism is this idea of I distrust authority, I maybe even distrust God, but I trust my own experience, what I've been through.

I wanna know, I just know because I've experienced it myself.

Well, we know in looking at research that 1 person's experience is not necessarily gonna be another person's experience.

But just keep this in mind as you think about what I'm gonna be teaching you.

So what I do in therapy is something called cognitive behavioral therapy.

And the idea comes from the first word cognitive.

Cognitive stands for our thoughts, what we think.

Our cognitions are the same as our thoughts.

Now, most people come into therapy not because of that.

They come in for the bottom 2 triangle, or parts of the triangle.

Feelings, I don't feel the way that I want to feel, and I'm not doing the things I want to do, or I'm doing things I don't want to do.

Everybody who comes to me for therapy, those bottom 2 reasons, I'm not feeling the way I want to feel, I'm depressed, I'm anxious, and I'm not doing the behaviors I want to do.

I'm drinking too much, or I'm not getting out of bed, or I'm yelling at my spouse.

Those are the reasons people come to therapy.

Now I can help you feel better by telling you to do a bunch of different behaviors.

I can say, well, if you go exercise, you'll feel better.

Now, if you don't exercise at all, you'll first feel some pain.

But once you get past that, you'll start feeling better because endorphins will kick in.

So if you do some behaviors, or if you do a lot of good behaviors, you'll feel better.

And that's why I teach people New Start principles, nutrition, exercise, water, sunlight, temperance, and all of the rest.

Because when we do good behaviors, we feel better.

But I know people who do a lot of good behaviors, but they still don't feel better.

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Steps to Christlike Thinking

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