Reset by Finding Peace and Healing for a Weary Soul

In December of 2024 I picked up a book that had been on my reading pile for a year. I was given the book the previous Christmas, but had not taken the time to read it. I wish I had. Reset by Debra Fileta was transformational for my soul. As a Christian counselor, Debra outlined a message that pierced through the brokenness I was feeling. And because of this brokenness, I was facing depression, severe anxiety, and neglecting the life and calling God laid out for me. As Debra says, “if our hearts are broken, our souls wounded, and our minds tormented, we will not fulfill the greatest and most important commandment.” I was experiencing all of those things. I was in a place I never wanted to be again. I wanted out. In the first few chapters Debra asks the reader, why are you here? What do you seek? I wanted to feel joy and be at peace. That was my underlying pulse, motivating me to be willing to do the work necessary to bring healing to my heart, soul, and mind. 

I needed help. A lot of it. More than I fully comprehended when I started Reset, because “somewhere along the way, what you believe got misconstrued, and what you feel got misunderstood, and what you did became misdirected.” Debra explained how the mind and body work. Our thoughts influence our feelings, and our feelings shape our behaviors. If we let negative thoughts run amuck, then before long our behaviors reflect a tortured, critical, negative mind. That was the place I was in. I was miserable, because I let myself be miserable. I was letting my thoughts dictate who I was, instead of taking ownership and management over them. The mind is a terrible thing to waste, and I was no longer in control of it. 

As I prepared to embark on the journey of resetting my life, these words touched me: “be patient, have grace with yourself, and get yourself ready.” We all need to have grace with ourselves. Grace subsequently became my word for the coming year (2025). I am extending grace to my current self, my past self, and to those around me. And in the process, as grace washes and swirls around me, I am healing. I am becoming whole again. And in many ways, more whole than I’d ever been. As I read Debra’s book I realized that the practical steps she outlined were things I never learned. I was completely unequipped to deal with emotions and feelings. Until now. Reset is structured around thirty practical steps to reset your life. Not all steps spoke to me, or things I dwelled on for long, as I read the book I often went through several steps in a day. But out of the thirty concepts, there were a few I found especially helpful for resetting who I am. And I would like to share what those are, and how they are changing me, and helping me take back my life. 

One main point Fileta made was on the importance of recognizing our thoughts for what they are. We cannot make progress in transforming our thoughts or feelings if we don’t even acknowledge and sit with our thoughts. Fileta states “if you want to change your default thinking, you have to recognize it first.” I wasn’t. I was letting thoughts dictate my life. Thoughts would spawn in my mind and run rampant. To start the practice of taking back thoughts, the practical step was to write down your default thinking for 24 hours (or longer). You need to identify the patterns, the cognitive dissonances that misdirect your steps. Once thoughts are identified, they can be changed. They can be changed by reframing with God’s truth. This is why 2 Corinthians 10:5 is so important – when we take thoughts captive for God’s Kingdom we stop the lies our mind tells us and instead live in peace and joy from Christ. As Fileta states “if you think healthy thoughts enough, you will change your default thinking.” So I made space each evening to sit with a journal and record what I thought that day. The thoughts we don’t want to share with others, the insecurities, the criticisms, the dark thoughts that whisper to us in the night. But as these thoughts were laid bare on the page, I saw them for what they were: lies. Suddenly I had recognition of a series of cognitive distortions that were subtly leading me away from who I was. Although identifying daily thoughts was a good step, I needed to keep going to get down to the roots. 

Going deeper requires facing your past hurt. I admit, I wrote a lot about this chapter in my notes (4.5 pages). I sat and recorded significant life events. As I did, a pattern started to emerge: rejection. Over 80% of what I wrote were events/times when I felt rejected by others. I felt hurt and confused with each rejection. Even worse, the result of this pattern of rejection created a cognitive dissonance of thoughts that said I wasn’t good enough, because “when we get stuck in our wounds from childhood, we end up living out of a place of pain rather than a place of power.” But because I was almost halfway through the book at this point, I was able to start implementing the practical steps Fileta described in earlier chapters. I recorded past events, identified the patterns, broke down the lies those patterns created in my mind, and reframed them with God’s truth. Lies cannot exist in the light, which is why it is so vital to bring them out of darkness and into light. Fileta outlines a practical way to reframe our thoughts by writing them out side-by-side:

Negative thoughts / Cognitive Distortions	What does God say?
“I’m only valued if I’m perfect”	“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you.” (Jeremiah 1:5)
“Everyone leaves me if I’m not good enough”	“Be strong and courageous…I will be with you.” (Deuteronomy 31:23)
“I’m only valued for the things I do but not for who I am.”	“While we were sinners, Christ died for us.” (Romans 5:8)

Now that some roots were exposed, I could start becoming a thriving, vital, healthy person by continuing to dig deeper into my psyche.

Following responding to thoughts is responding to feelings and identifying what they signal. If you stop at thoughts and don’t address feelings it can hinder the reset process. That is because our amygdala is responsible for the fight or flight response. It is our emotional response center, but it can send false signals. And I was not only receiving false signals, I was acting on them. I was anticipating the signal before I ever received it and taking action to prevent it, without ever considering the veracity of the signals themselves. This is going to sound countercultural to the world we live in, but “just because you feel something doesn’t make it true. Your feelings are real, but they aren’t always true.” Responding to feelings and identifying them was one of the hardest things I had to do. I was so used to numbing myself and ignoring what I felt that most days I experienced no feelings at all. They were completely devoid from my being. But by sitting still each evening, quieting and reframing my thoughts, I began to feel. I began to feel feelings. To listen to what they signalled, and then identify why I was feeling what I was feeling. After most of a lifetime of living by cognitive logic and shunning the emotional response system, it was arduous rewiring my system. I’ll admit, my amygdala is still in a fragile state. It takes a long time to rewire the mind, especially after living in a perpetual state of flight (I don’t fight). Being so accustomed to flight meant I began to feel an uneasiness because of my different state. I knew I wasn’t the same as I was before, but I wasn’t fully healthy yet either. I was in the inbetween, on a journey of healing across unsettled territory. This journey is still continuing, but the hardest part of climbing out of that pit is over. 

There are many more steps Fileta outlines, but I’m going to share a final one that is crucial to implement, no matter where you are on your journey. The step of soul-care (yes I have her book on that too, but it is still on my reading stack, TBD). Soul-care is the act of caring for ourselves instead of constantly caring for others. This resonated with me because for a long time I had sensed that I was tired of all my care for others being unreciprocated. I felt completely empty, but kept reaching into my tank to lift up others around me. It had become a coping mechanism, a way to survive life. As long as I was caring for others, I had a purpose and I could go on. But what do you do when you realize deep down you still feel empty after pouring yourself out for others? After emptying your own tank again and again and again and no one filling your tank back up? It was soul-crushing. There are four primary methods of soul-care: emotional, spiritual, mental, and physical. If not all four are properly topped off, we start to become out of sync. I had already started practicing various forms of soul-care, but this chapter formed an impetus to go deeper. To care for my soul, I needed to be more intentional, because I was at risk of losing myself. The most restorative practice of soul-care I find is solitude. Fileta defines solitude as “the deliberate act of being by yourself, giving yourself a chance to think, to feel, and to fill up.” Solitude is time in God’s presence, because “a deep filling [of the soul] can only come from God, who made us to be filled by Him.” Although I really like time alone, it is difficult to practice true solitude for soul-care. I’m constantly bombarded with thoughts and the noise in my head makes it difficult to listen to God’s still, small voice. So the way I enter into solitude is I set up a quiet corner in our finished basement, and turn all the lights off. I go down on my knees or sit in the corner, on the floor. I listen to worship music for 15-30 minutes (until the thoughts quiet), and then I take my headphones off and sit. I don’t say much. Solitude and prayer really isn’t about us speaking to God but letting Him speak to us. This is what we often get wrong about prayer. We rattle off a few phrases without quieting our hearts to know what our hearts really want to say and the whole time is one-sided instead of entering into a conversation with the Author and Creator of everything. 

Reset helped me reset my life. I know it works because within a few weeks I was able to do something I’ve never been able to do. I was apprehensive about a meeting at work that was coming up. Nervous, anxious, and dreading it, I didn’t want to go. I wanted to find a way out (flight response). But I couldn’t. I needed to go through with it. The night before the meeting I sat there asking myself why I dreaded the meeting so much. This alone was a big step, because it involved realizing I was feeling something: dread and apprehension. I won’t go into detail, but to sum it up, the next day I was really excited about my progress. The night before I had 1) recognized that I was feeling something 2) was able to name the feeling 3) identify where the feeling came from (underlying thought) 4) reframe the thought with God’s truth (spoke scripture into my fears. The next day I was able to face my fears and attend the meeting with less apprehension (hey, it takes time. This is a long process!). The most important thing is knowing God’s truth. We are not able to reframe our thoughts or identify if they align with God’s truth if we don’t even know God’s truth to begin with! Read scripture. Meditate on scripture. Put His words on your heart, so when the subtle lies enter your mind you can say wait! That isn’t from God. That’s a lie. God says this about me, those thoughts are wrong! Speak truth to yourself. It is truly transformational. And if you have been out of practice, or never developed the practice, I urge you to read Reset, because it will help guide you towards the truth that fills your soul. 

An epilogue: 

Remember the first point I brought up? On identifying thoughts that lead to cognitive dissonance? Here is a tip: you don’t need to always do this work alone. You can ask others to help! Because here is the thing with the thoughts that are subtle lies. When they stay in our minds, and we ruminate on them in cyclical ways, our thoughts control us. But once you can identify that you have some thoughts ruminating, even if you don’t know how to reframe them yourself, get help. Go to a trusted person and speak those thoughts to them, no matter how much they make you feel ashamed. Be vulnerable, transparent, and humble. That’s what I did, I texted a friend and asked if they could help me take thoughts captive. I brought up three thoughts that my friend was able to help me identify as lies, and I left with four truths. Sometimes we need an outsider’s perspective, because we are so used to the lies in our heads that they feel comfortable. They feel like they belong there. But we need to get them out of our heads and into the open. And sometimes that means involving others who know God’s truth well enough to help you reframe them. I made myself miserable for over a year because I believed a lie that was percolating through my mind. As soon as I spoke that lie aloud, it didn’t feel right. And I saw it for what it was. All at once it clicked – I made myself miserable by holding onto an untruth. I was living in cognitive distortion. These are the nefarious ways our joy is stolen from us. We must be on guard with our thoughts and keep them grounded and rooted in Christ, or our minds may become consumed by the very lies our thoughts feed them. Truth resets lies.