Jenny Baumgartner

Twelve hours before my son Mitch was killed, he called me. It was the best conversation we'd had in over a year. He told me he wanted to come home, live with us again, and go back to college. Then he told me he loved me, and I told him I loved him too. Twelve hours later, he was gone. For a long time, that phone call felt like the cruelest part. It seemed like God let me believe everything was going to be OK, and then took my son the same day. There's a name for what happened in my brain. It's called cognitive tunneling. After all these years, I recently learned the name of it from a post by Jim Kwik @jimkwik , author of the book Limitless. Under trauma, your attention narrows to one terrible point, and you lose the rest of the picture. I've described it as a camera zooming in so far that it can only see a small part of the world. I've felt it and written about it, but now I have a name for it, and that's healing. A while after Mitch died, a chaplain friend sat with me in the hospital chapel and told me to do the hard work of looking back at that day from a different angle. So I did. On the very last day of Mitch's life, we were connected. He was looking forward to coming home. And that same day, he went to his eternal home. That phone call was a gift God gave me to hold onto. The third commandment of self-brain surgery is that I must believe that most of my automatic thoughts are untrue. Grief hands you a story fast. You're allowed to look at it again. "The LORD is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit." Psalm 34:18, ESV. If you're in that tunnel right now, I'm so sorry. Look again. It's hard and holy work, and you don't have to do it alone. Save this for the next time hardship has you too zoomed in to see other things that are still true. Share with a friend who's in the tunnel. And follow me to connect the dots between neuroscience and faith to help you navigate life and find flourishing. Click the link in my bio to learn more about the Ten Commandments of Self-Brain Surgery. #selfbrainsurgery #anxiety #mentalhealth #grief #neuroscience