Everything Influences Everything

Several months ago I was teaching a class on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT): Techniques for Retraining Your Brain. One of the core foundations of CBT is the biopsychosocial model, which is a new word that combines our biological, psychological, and social lives. Typically we diagram this as the CBT triangle with our biology at one point, our psychology at another, and our social relationships at the third point. The premise of the triangle is that everything influences everything else on the triangle. In other words, our biology influences our social and psychological selves, our social lives influence our biological and our psychological functions, and our psychology influences our social and biological functions. There you have it. You are a biopsychosocial person.

When I teach this triangle, I can see the lights come on in people realizing that they may choose from a great number of options to improve their lives. For example, they can strengthen their mental heath through physical exercise, or improve their biological functions by thinking more positively about their lives, family, and work conditions. Everything influences everything else. Then I tell them what I think—that this model is right, but still incomplete. After all, we are spiritual beings and our spiritual lives play a dominant role in our lives, whether we realize it or not.

So I modify the CBT triangle into the Haggard Diamond. I draw a diamond with our spiritual lives at the top, then the other three dynamics at the other three points, pointing out that everything influences everything else on the diamond. In this discussion, I explain that there are professionals that advocate that any one of the four can individually heal us, but it’s not true. Everything influences everything.

Jesus was hinting at this same idea when he said in Matthew 22:37-38,

‘You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment.

To me, this is why our repentance has to be thoughtfully applied to every area of our lives to produce total change. A repentant thought life improves not just our thinking, but also our physical lives, our social lives, and our spiritual lives. When we apply repentance to our bodies, we treat our bodies increasingly like they are temples of the Holy Spirit, which ultimately strengthens our clarity of thought, our social lives, and our spiritual lives. When we apply biblical principles to our relationships, our spiritual lives grow, our bodies become healthier, and our thinking improves. And finally, the obvious—repentance is fundamentally the spiritual decision that influences everything else in our lives—resulting in the other changes, or should I say, improvements.

This is why we are never trapped—we always have hope. This is why I believe:

• Repentance is the most positive word in the English vocabulary. 
• Repentance is the most hopeful idea in all of humanity. 
• Repentance causes some of the most positive feelings anyone can experience.

Repentance is a gift God gives us to improve every area of our lives. He made us so everything in our lives impacts every other area of our lives. Let’s begin again today.