Transcription
Okay, last week we started a new series on what's a realistic way to look at recovery. So what will it take to recover? Be real about it. And I find that a lot of what I do is trying to help people get a realistic understanding of what it will take in order to recover. So tonight I want to take it in a little different direction. I said we're gonna come at it from different angles, and I'm gonna come at it from an angle tonight that I hope will really help you kind of get one piece of understanding recovery clearly into your mind to lead into it.
One of the things that I've enjoyed doing over the years is thinking of metaphors, word pictures that describe recovery well. So I picked three. So I love the iceberg—so an iceberg, 10% is above water, 90 percent below. The 10% you see is really the tip of the iceberg, they say. All of the real issues that can sink the ship are under the water, and so you got to go and deal with the underlying stuff if you want to get recovery. And that's what we focus on at Finding Freedom.
The second one is a chain. So you could have a chain with the best steel in the world, thick steel, and then you could have one link that was a daisy chain from a dandy light. Your chain is only as strong as your weakest link. And so in recovery, you can be doing really well in a whole bunch of areas, but it's the area where you're weakest that is what messes you up. So your weakest link is what will be taking you out over and over again. So that's the part that has to get stronger.
And then the third one, and it's what I'm going to focus on tonight—in recovery, you're in a war or a battle, and the enemy, the worst enemy, is yourself. So you're fighting external enemies, but you're also fighting an internal enemy—yourself. What I have tried to do over the years is just help people understand how we are our own worst enemy. And let me say this up front: when I say that you're your own worst enemy, I don't mean that you go home and you think, "How can I mess up my recovery? Let me write down a list." No, most of it is subconscious. You're not doing it intentionally, but if you're not aware of it, you will continue to do it subconsciously, and you will keep messing up. So I want to come at this in a way, again, that I hope will really help you understand the parts of you that need to be looked at and you need to be aware of because you're your own worst enemy in those areas.
First thing, and we've—excuse me—we've talked about it on a number of occasions, people coming out of complex trauma don't realize that they have a default setting that is not good, that is negative, that basically is self-destructive. And what I mean by a default setting is: if you don't work on yourself at all, where will you gravitate towards? Where will you end up in your thinking? Where will you end up in your emotions? And for most people, that's a dark place. So if you don't go to meetings, if you don't have a routine that has proper physical care, emotional care, spiritual care, most people will gravitate towards being lazy again or being very hard on themselves or feeling sorry for themselves or being negative about everything or isolating and not being around people or not wanting to feel anything that's painful—so this trying to disconnect so you're always feeling happy. Some of you will gravitate towards anger, towards fear, towards anxiety. Those things are default settings. So what a lot of what I do with clients is to try to help them understand what their default setting is—where do they go when they're not working on themselves? And then I want them to understand that if they don't, if they stay there for too long, it's lights-out, because they can't tolerate being in that negative place because it only pulls them into more negative place. So in your default setting, if you give in to it, it will only make it worse, and you go to a darker place, not a better place, when you give in to it. It makes you feel better in the moment, temporarily, but in the longer run, it takes you to a darker place. So that's default setting; that's problem number one with inner self.
Second thing, we have a dark side. So we have a good side as well. There's a part of you that wants to do well, that wants to love, that wants to be there for your kids, now wants to be a good employee, a good partner, a good citizen, but you're a Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde, split personality, and there's that dark side. Now the challenge of complex trauma and addiction is that it's fed the dark side for years, so that the dark side, through all your years of addiction, became the ruling part of you, and it was being fed and nurtured and developed, and it is there. And so people in recovery, if they feed that monster, it will come out with a power and a force that takes over, and it is almost impossible to stop; it is so powerful. And so it is something that if we give in to it, it takes us downward very quickly; it takes us to a darker and darker place; it takes us to violate our morals and our values; it is not a good thing inside of us. So we have a default setting that's negative; we got this dark side that's been fed and become very powerful.
Now I want to take your dark side a little bit further. About two years ago, when I was thinking through, "How do I help people understand this dark side?" I came up with an idea that there's five people living inside of you. Now some of you are gonna go, "You're making me feel freaked out here. I'm a split personality. Now I'm multiple personalities, and I'm getting to be a basket case in a hurry." What I mean by the five people inside of you is you got five distinct provinces of brain circuits inside of you that when that circuit is initiated, a different personality comes out. So let me give you example number one: in you there's an attic. So let's say you're doing recovery and you're doing really well in recovery, and you're honest, you're involved, you're serving, you're opening up to people, and then you relapse. It's like a whole different person just comes out. Now you're self-centered, you're angry, you're not present for anybody; it's all about me is your way of thinking, and you go, "Who? Where did that person come from?" So you, when you're in recovery and doing well, there's the person that you like, but there's that addict inside of you that if it gets fed for a minute and it comes out, it takes over. Now what I want you to see is: when the attic comes out and gets fed, it takes you in a negative direction in your thinking; you become negative, critical; you find fault with everything; you make it all about me; you distort reality, and it takes you in a negative place in your emotions; you get angry, you get demanding, all of those things, and it takes you in a negative place in your actions. So it tolls you to nothing that's good; it pulls you in a self-destructive way. And so with that attic person comes out a manipulator, a liar, a control freak, somebody that doesn't manage their emotions, somebody that's unreliable, somebody that's irresponsible—all of that comes out, and five minutes earlier it was a responsible citizen. So that's person number one inside of you.
Person number two: there's a mental health person inside of you. So that is the person that when you go into depression or anxiety, it's like somebody different comes out. Or if you go into mania, where you're everything is—you're hyper—it's like a different person comes out. So think of it: you're in recovery, doing well, you're involved with people, you're opening up, your energetic, your disciplined in your daily routine; you get depressed. Now you want to isolate; you don't want to do anything; don't want to get out of bed; want to eat all the time or not eat at all—totally different person. If your anxiety kicks in, all of a sudden you want to either do—have everybody there for you or you want to isolate; you talk nonstop or you don't talk at all; you run away or you're super needy—all of those things—different person comes out. If you're manic or hyper, all of a sudden you want to buy gifts for everybody; you make all kinds of impulsive decisions; you want to talk nonstop to everybody and don't realize they're all falling asleep because you're just so hyper, and this person comes out, and then the next day you go, "Look at my credit card bill! What did I just do?" And now your stress is through the roof. So inside of there's that addict, and that addict will always be there; you don't have to feed it, but if you do feed it, it comes out and it takes over very quickly. That mental health person is inside of you; you can get help for that, but if you have chemical problems in your brain, you'll probably always struggle with some mental health things. So you may need medication, you may need therapy, treatment to help you with that, but what I want you to understand about the mental health—you—depression, anxiety, hyper—it always pulls you in a negative direction; it pulls you in a negative place in your thinking, a negative place in your emotions, and a negative place in your actions; it takes you to instant feeling better but self-destruction down the road, and if you give in to it. So if you're depressed, then you say, "I'm gonna stay home all day," the next day you're even more depressed, and you want to stay home even more because you fed it. And so those are two very powerful people.
Third is the traumatized you. So down there somewhere inside of you is a person who has complex trauma, who's been traumatized, who's lived in fear, who's been on guard, who's always looking—hyper vigilant—and you might be doing well in recovery, and then somebody comes up behind you and taps you on the shoulder and triggers your trauma, or somebody at the bus stop flips you the bird and you feel disrespected, and that triggers something in you—a whole different person comes out, and it's a person that goes in there thinking to a very distorted place in their emotions; they escalate, and they go into fight, flight in a nanosecond; they're ready to take somebody's head off; they're so angry, or they're running for their life, trying to get away from everything—all of that is when that traumatized you gets triggered, and it pulls you in a totally negative direction. Now here's the challenge for people from complex trauma: you've got hundreds of things that can trigger your trauma; you can be doing so well, and then one day you go home and your kids say, "I hate you, Mummy," and you're devastated; all your abandonment stuff comes out; all your shame comes out, and you just want to give up; you feel hopeless; you get down on yourself; you want to just beat yourself up, run away, quit everything because your trauma got triggered. So that traumatized person is inside of you.
So let me give you some of the common triggers that you're gonna encounter in recovery, and a lot of these you won't see coming; they will blindside you. So number one: you may have memories and flashbacks; you might come here to Finding Freedom or go to REACT or another program, and they start talking about losses, and all of a sudden flashbacks, and you didn't see that coming, and memories that you had lost now come back. Or you might go home that night and have a dream, and that comes a nightmare, and you are super triggered. The next thing is: when you feel overwhelmed or stressed, because when you're starting to feel stress, your brain is starting to say, "Do I need to fight, flight?" Because you're getting close to not being able to handle this, and it's getting ready to be traumatized; it's right on the edge, and it just takes one little thing to push you over, and you're gone. And then you can be in any type of situation that might create anxiety, so you go into a change or an unknown situation, or somebody asks you to do something and you don't feel like you're good at it, but you're afraid to say no, and then you're uptight all week—that triggers you. And then anything that makes you feel that you might get abandoned or rejected can trigger it; anything that feels like disrespect or hurt triggers that traumatized you, and that person is always there. Now that can get healthy; it takes a lot of time, and you're always going to have some triggers, but you can get fewer and fewer as you deal with stuff. But now you've got that person that you now have to account for.
And then with that, there's a fourth person, and that's the little child in you. The little child is the wounded part of you that you were embarrassed of when you were younger. So let's say that you cried or were very sensitive, and then people made fun of you, or you got punished for crying so much or being so sensitive, and you hated that part of you, and you kind of stuffed it away, and you didn't want to be like that at all. And so that little part of you never got to grow up; that part of you never was loved, and so it's connected to the traumatized you. But I ask clients this all the time: when that little child gets triggered—so let's say you go home for Christmas and Mum raises her eyebrow, just the way Mum raises her eyebrow—and all of a sudden you feel shame. I ask clients, "Describe what that child there that got triggered looks like," and many of them say they can't look you in the eye; all of a sudden they're looking at the floor; they feel shame; some they just want to go in their room and curl up on their bed in a fetal position; some want to hide. That's that little child, and that can get triggered, and when it gets triggered, it affects your thinking, your emotions, and your behavior. Your thinking and emotions go quickly—"I feel hopeless; I feel like that little child again"—part of you, and your brain wants to beat that child up for being such a wimp, and you get mad at yourself. Some of you want to self-soothe or somehow stop the pain through self-harm type of behaviors—all of those happen when that child gets triggered, and it can make you powerless or feel that you can't do anything in your situation right now to make it better—that's how powerless and hopeless you feel.
So for people inside of you, you realize that those four all pull you in a negative direction, and they pull you with a lot of power, with a lot of intensity, and a lot of force, and that is the reality for many people in recovery; you got all four. Now I got to add one more: there is a fifth person, and that's the adult you. That's the part of you—thank you, whoever agreed—wonderful—that's the part of you that is mature, that acts like a grown-up, that thinks stuff through long term, makes wise decisions—exactly. So here's what I want you to see: the adult you is the weakest part of you. So here you got all these little kids running around inside of you, getting triggered left and right, and the adult's trying to herd cats, and they go, "This is impossible," and they just take over. And so recovery is about strengthening the adult part of you.
Now let me give it to you another way: those four first people, the ones that pull you negatively, they all are out of your limbic brain; they all are based out of your emotional, child-centered part of the brain; they think in terms of immediate gratification—right now I want to feel better. The adult is the only part of you that works out of the cerebral cortex; that is all about thinking stuff through in light of what is healthy, loving, long term. So what you have is a limbic brain that is overdeveloped that can get triggered in four different ways and always pulls you in a negative direction. So what I'm wanting you to see, and you're supposed to be getting excited about this, is now you're seeing why you're your own worst enemy, because you realize, "Okay, if I'm gonna do recovery, the adult part of me, that cerebral cortex part of my brain, has to learn how to manage those four little misfits and has to figure out what to do when they have a temper tantrum and has to figure out what to do when they get all scared and want to run away and what to do when they're depressed and don't want to do anything." So I have to somehow figure how to not let my limbic brain trump everything; I have to figure out how to let my cerebral cortex be the adult and the parent in my life, like it was designed to be, and not have my limbic brain running the show. That is a challenge, and I think, and I hope you can see, you can't do that alone; you need help with that. So I don't want anybody in recovery to wake up and say, "I can do this, simple as pie." I go, "You gotta meet your enemy, and it is you."
So let me give you a very quick example: how does your limbic brain work? So I was thinking this week of—on my—we were thinking of getting a dog when our kids were little, and some of you have done this. And so you go to the kids, "We're thinking of getting a dog," and they get excited, "But we're only gonna get a dog if you guys will walk them and clean up the poop after them." "Oh yes, Daddy, we'll do it; we'll do it; we'll do it; we'll do it." And they did it for three days. So guess what happens when your limbic brain is running the show? It gets all excited about something and feels, "I'm committed to this," and then after three days it kind of gets a little boring, and you're still in your limbic brain, "You know this is no fun; I quit." That's what we're talking about. And so that's what I see in recovery all the time: people come in and they go, "I am so committed to recovery," and I go, "Yeah, 'cause you just had a crisis." Three days later, "This is hard work; I don't think I want to do this; let's go back to the old buddies and old friends and all behaviors." You go, the limbic is still running the show. So recovery is growing up, but you're growing up fighting against four people that don't want to grow up, fighting against four people that want to keep pulling you down in a negative direction. Hmm.
So for the Christian part, last week I thought we would start a little look into the life of a guy in the Bible called Nehemiah, and he was given the task of rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem. So the city had been reduced to rubble; they had been overrun by an army, taken into captivity; there's a few people that still live there, but they had no protection because their wall was destroyed, and it was just a desperate, terrible place. And I thought, "That is a great illustration of somebody in recovery," because you're rebuilding your life from the rubble. And so I looked at Nehemiah—I looked at the challenges that he had as he began to rebuild that wall; they directly parallel the challenges that people have in recovery as they rebuild their life from the rubble. So tonight I want to look at three challenges that he faced, and then I want you to notice one thing that he used for motivation—so a strategy that he used to help people.
So the first one is hopelessness. And here's that—here's this scenario: when Nehemiah goes—he lived far away—and he when he got down to Jerusalem to the city, he found there were hundreds of Jewish people living there. And so the question in my mind is: these people have been living there in rubble, why didn't they rebuild the wall? And then I thought, "You know what? I wonder if they did try to rebuild the wall, and every time they got started the enemies would come in and give them a hard time, and they'd quit, and then they'd start again, and they'd get a hard time, and they'd quit, and they finally got to their place where they just felt, 'This is a hopeless endeavor; why try anymore?'" And I think that parallels what many people go through in recovery: they try to rebuild their life and they fail; there's something that stops them, and they go back down into the rubble. Then they say, "I'm going to try again to rebuild," and they try and fail; something else messes them up. And after many attempts with failures, they begin to get to a place of hopelessness, and they go, "What's the point? I don't think I can do this; it's every attempt on my part has resulted in failure." Hopelessness is one of the hardest things to overcome. I don't know if you've ever noticed that a little child has—it's tremendous capacity to hope. So if Dad gets mad at them, they hope, "Then I might just do a better job, and I'm a better kid; Dad will not get mad at me," and they hope, and then Dad gets mad at them, and they keep hoping and keep hoping, "If I just try this; if I just try this," and they can keep hoping for years. It takes a lot of years of abuse and neglect to knock hope out of a child, but they can get there, and they can finally get to a place where they go, "Dad will never love me; Dad will never accept me; he'll never validate me; it's hopeless; don't even try." And then if Dad starts to be nice to them, they go, "Don't get your hopes up, because it's never worked before," and they'll sabotage it just because it hurts too much to get your hopes up and have them crushed. And I've watched that happen to many people in recovery. So I was very interested in what Nehemiah did. He did two things: first, he said, "I'm not building this wall because I think I'm strong enough on my own; I'm not building this wall 'cause I just have this fantasy idea that it will happen; I'm building this wall as God said He would help me; He promised me, and I can trust Him." That doesn't mean it's gonna be easy; doesn't mean we're not going to have opposition, but I got a promise, and I'm gonna trust that. And then he does a second thing, and he says to them, "You might not have hope, but I do. So piggyback on my hope until you get some hope." And I say to many clients that come in who have applied for REACT, and you can say—tell their hope has been long shattered, and they're afraid to get their hopes up because they failed so many times, and I say, "Just piggyback on my hope for a while, because I know from experience that if you do what I'm going to lay out for you, it will help you." You might have trouble believing that and hoping right now, but hang in there. And so a lot of us don't have hope naturally after it's been knocked out of us for so long, but if we can find somebody else who knows what they're doing, and we can piggyback on their hope, that's a great starting place. So that was the first thing. So I want you to see that the starting place for many people in recovery is: "Do I dare hope again?" Because if I don't dare hope again, I'm gonna sabotage my recovery if it starts going well. So it's really a huge battle in many people in early recovery: "Do I risk hoping again?" And that's where it began for these people, and that's where it will begin for many of you.
Then the second problem: external opposition. A lot of people, when you are at your bottom, they say, "We want to help you," and they support you to get you into recovery, into a program of some kind, and they're all there for you. And then all of a sudden something changes, and now you get all this opposition. And so here's what happened with Nehemiah: it says, "When Sanballat told by a guest from the Arab"—so three different people who are very powerful men heard of what Nehemiah was doing—"they scoffed contemptuously." So they sneered at them, laughed down at them, and they said, "What are you doing? Are you rebelling against the king?" They asked. So there's two things: they scoff, sneer, disrespected, put down, took shots at—that's number one. Number two: they gave false allegations; they said, "You're rebelling against the king; that's why you're building this wall, so you can rebel." That wasn't true, but that's what they said. So the disrespect was they were making fun of them, and they said, "Who do you think you are, trying to better your life?" Then have you heard that you're starting to get your life going, you're working on your life, and they go, "Who do you think you are? Think you're better than us now?" And all of a sudden all that support they were giving becomes opposition, and they locked down at you, and now you never made it before, you're not going to make it now; you can never do anything right, and they take shots at you, and then they start false allegations; they accuse you of wrong motives; they say you're doing this just so you can get this or that; you're not doing it for the right motives; and and they distort everything for you. And I suspect most of you have gone through that. Now think what—what—how do you respond when that happens? And this is important because this is what these guys were hoping would happen with Nehemiah. So I've had many clients that have come in to REACT in the morning, and they are mad as a hornet, and you go, "What?" Well, somebody just posted on Facebook something about me that wasn't true—a false allegation—and guess what they do? They—they Facebook a thousand messages exonerating their character; they go around talking to everybody, confronting everybody. Guess what you just did? You took the bait; what they're open you do now; you're distracted from your recovery because you're working on your reputation, and now you're not doing the stuff you need to do to stay clean and sober. And so what these guys were doing with Nehemiah is: "Let's accuse them of stuff; let's make fun of them; if we can get them all mad and they'll start running around trying to quiet us and get everybody straight—that's not our motive; that's not our motive; we're not rebelling; it's like the king—they'll—they'll stop building the wall; we'll have succeeded." So here's what I want you to think about: you're gonna get opposition that disrespects you, accuses you of stuff that isn't true; you can take the bait, get all worked up, and get your focus on the wrong thing and affect your recovery, and they have won, or you can say, "That's their problem. If people really care to know about my motives, they'll come and ask me," and then I'm not going to get drawn into that stuff; I'm going to keep doing what I'm doing. When I was in Surrey, BC, last—two weeks ago, I had a good talk at the end of the training with a lady that started the—the place where REACT is going to be housed there, and she's been doing it for 15 years, and she's basically gone against all kinds of opposition, and she's been accused of all kinds of things that aren't true, and she said to me, "How do you respond when people say lies about you?" And I say, "I had to learn early on that I'm not going to fight those battles; I'm not going to get distracted from what I'm doing in helping people, trying to straighten everybody out about what they think about Tim." And she said, "That's the exact same place I've had to come to—that I'm not going to get distracted by all of that stuff going on out there." And that is so hard for people in recovery because you feel disrespected, and something in you just accelerates and says, "I gotta straighten a whole bunch of people out," and you obsess; you can't sleep; you play in your head a thousand different things you want to say and might say, and all of that, and they have won. And so don't get distracted; that is a huge issue.
Third problem, third challenge that they faced was an internal one, and I love it because many of you will have gone through the same thing. It says this next—were the people from Tekoa, though their leaders refused to work with the construction supervisors. So all of a sudden here's what's going on: two different things—these guys from Tekoa, they're a little snooty, okay? So that they're a sophisticated addict, and they don't want to go to a treatment program, or there's those addicts because they're a little too good for that. And have you gone through that? You go to a 12-step group, you come here, and you go, "I don't fit in here; I'm above these people"—all of a sudden like I'm superior somehow. And then I'll always love it because here's what addicts do well: they shoot needles; I don't do that; I just smoke it. Then the next group goes, "They smoke it; I only snort it, so I'm a better addict than them." And I go, "Really? You're gonna start doing that?" But we do that—compare. And so we're always saying, "I got to maintain my image, and if I start hanging around with people with all these tattoos and track marks on their arms and cut marks from self-harm, what are people gonna think of me?" That's what happened with Nehemiah—all of a sudden these people say, "I'm not working with them; they're a bunch of losers; we're sophisticated; we don't hang around with that type." And then the second thing with that was: "I don't like their personality; they're too loud and obnoxious and self-centered, and I'm just kind of quiet, and I—they just bug me, and I don't want to be in the same—with them." You know what I say to people almost every week at REACT? When you come to REACT, you're gonna learn a whole bunch of information, and part is going to think that's all there is in recovery is learning information, and I go, "You know, I know something—you're gonna be in a building with twenty other people; that's the other part of the recovery program—you got to learn to live with a bunch of crazy people; you got to learn to live with personalities that bother you." And so people in recovery don't have a lot of patience and tolerance, and so that's what Nehemiah was getting—all of a sudden these people saying, "They annoy me; I do not want to work with them." And so there's all these little factions developing, all of this conflict developing because, "I don't like your personality; you're too loud; you're not loud enough; you talk too much; you don't talk enough"—blah, blah, blah—and away you go. And that's what you did. So here's what I want you to think about: if you don't really want to do recovery, you can find an excuse anywhere. If you don't really want to do recovery, you'll always have somebody you can find that annoys you and gives you a reason to quit. And so part of what Nehemiah had to do with these people was: "We're on the same team; we're all different; we have to learn how to accept, tolerate, and be patient with each other, because if we don't, we're never going to build this wall." The only way we're going to rebuild our lives is not through a solo effort; it's through teamwork. And so in order to have a team, we have to learn how to live together, and that is not always going to be fun; that's going to require us at times swallowing our pride, learning to reach out to people that annoy us, learning how to set healthy boundaries—all of that becomes part of this journey. But what Nehemiah realized—this—building a wall is way too big a job for one or two people to do it on their own—same as recovery. You can try to rebuild your life all by yourself, without any involvement or help, and it won't work. And then what will happen if it did work? You would rebuild your life, and then you'd get a job, and you wouldn't like anybody at your job, so you quit your job; go to another job, didn't like them—at some point you got to learn how to deal with people; at some point you'll have to learn how to manage all the different types of personalities. Not a fun part of recovery, but it's part of it. And what it does, it goes like this: academic stuff, you can just file it away in your head and get it all organized and think you're really good, and you think you've got it all figured out. Relationship shows you your flaws; all those people that annoy you, they usually annoy you because of some stuff in you that you need to look at, that you need to change. And so when you're in relationships with people, what that does for you is it puts a spotlight on the parts of you that need to change the most. Or another way to say it is this: when you deal with complex trauma, there's an education piece; there's a therapy, one-on-one piece of counseling; there's a getting a support network, but none of your deepest issues will get triggered in those first three areas. You know where your deepest issues get triggered—in intimate relationships. And so you can only heal so far outside of close relationships; it's the close relationships that reveal the deepest wounds and that reveal the deepest damages, and it's there, if you will accept that challenge, that the greatest healing and growth can happen. And so what Nehemiah had to face was hopelessness, external enemies, and then internal enemies—called bad toons, thinking—or—better than others, thinking we shouldn't have to put up with anybody else, that everything should go the way I want it. Now there's a next thing I just want to show you what Nehemiah did to motivate them and encourage them and challenge them to give it their very best. So I read this: "Next Jedediah repaired the wall across from his own house; Shalem and his daughters repaired the next section above the horse gate; the priest bear thought each one prepared the section immediately across from his own house." Now what would it happen if—if he said, "You know what? You build the wall over on the opposite end of the city—of your house; you go, 'I'm gonna do half a job; who cares? I don't have to look at this again; I feel lazy today.'" No, when you build it next to your house, boy, you got your measuring tape—oh, you got everything, 'cause you want it perfect, 'cause this is your house; you got to take care of it. So you want to know where the first motivation often comes in recovery? Your kids—"I got to do this for my kids; I've messed them up now"—that can't be your motivation forever; at some time you got to be able to say, "I got to do this for me." But in the beginning, Nehemiah recognized, "We need a very personal connection to the job; we need a very family-based motivation that comes out of love that makes me want to do my very best." And what Nehemiah realized—this—if we're gonna have a wall that lasts, it's got to be done with quality; it's got to get 100 percent best