PDF Summary:Get Out of Your Head, by Jennie Allen

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The battleground is your mind. Satan attacks you there because he knows your thoughts determine how you live. This means the stakes are high, since taking control of your mind is the key to finding peace in other parts of your life as well. A famous line from the great Puritan theologian John Owen brings this home: “Be killing sin or it will be killing you.” Applied to the mind, this could be refashioned as, “Control your thoughts or they (and through them, the enemy) will control you and your life.”

Negative Spirals

The enemy’s attacks show up as negative mental spirals. Many people’s lives work like this: Emotions → Thoughts → Decisions → Behaviors → Relationships. Emotions drive everything else down the chain, with end results feeding back up the chain when consequences reinforce emotions and thoughts. When you live like this, your life is on autopilot, spiraling ever downward into dysfunction.

Here are some examples of negative spirals in action, to illustrate their deep grip on us:

• An unexamined core emotion of inferiority will lead to...

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A Demonic Attack and a Downward Spiral

The author’s most striking personal example is her account of a demonic attack that launched her into an 18-month dark night of the soul. It began when she told a women’s gathering that there’s a real spiritual enemy opposing them, served by demons, who wants to steal their faith and make them useless to God. During a break, a woman approached her with a dark expression and said, “We’re coming for you. Stop talking about us.” Allen told one of the security guards.

Partway through the author’s final talk, shrieking erupted in the hallway outside. She later learned it was both the strange woman and her daughter. Then the church’s power went out. It was the most undeniable manifestation of spiritual attack the author had ever seen.

Initially, she wasn’t terrified but on fire with faith. The day’s events overwhelmed her with their confirmation of the reality of God, Satan, and spiritual warfare. That night she told everybody she ran into about Jesus.

But immediately afterward, a downward spiral caught her off-guard. Starting that night, she woke up regularly every day at 3 a.m. in a panic, wondering about the laundry, her kids’...

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We can take a lesson about this from the way we deal with our children. We teach our children to interrupt their downward spirals all the time, as in a parent disciplining a toddler throwing a fit in public. We remind our children that we love them and that they can choose other thoughts and behavior, that they’re not victims of their negativity. Why not apply this to ourselves?

Crucially, this “art of interruption” doesn’t just give you better thoughts, it gives you more of God.

Also crucially, this ability to use the interrupting thought is ultimately for Christians. As a Christian you have God’s power to choose your thoughts, focus, and purpose. You’re not a slave to sin. Consider:

• God gives you, as a Christian, everything you need for a victorious life (see 1 Peter 1:3).
• In Philippians, Paul observed that because God has recreated us in Christ, we have the Holy Spirit’s power and the ability (and responsibility) to choose whether to live for the Spirit or for “the flesh” (our old, fallen self-nature with its sinful desire). The ability to change our heart-minds is built into us as Christians.
• When he wrote his letter to the Philippians, Paul...

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This work isn’t about improving your outer circumstances. You’ll still encounter difficulties. It’s about choosing to believe God loves us and is with us and for us even amid hellish circumstances. It’s about experiencing peace and joy that transcend circumstances and come from the higher realm that you inhabit as a child of God.

Your Mission

Part 2 of this book identifies seven enemies of our minds (all lies), names the truths that oppose them, and equips you with specific weapons and interrupting strategies (all derived from the master interrupting thought, “I have a choice”). It’s a course in retraining your mind.

Your mission is to learn to spot the enemy’s lies, recognize when and how they’ve trapped you, and fight effectively against them to achieve freedom in Christ.

Three Barriers to Victory

• The devil. He tempts with evil and inflicts suffering—but deviously, disguising them with promises of success and pleasure.
• Your wounds. The world is fallen and broken. The ubiquity of pain, misery, and dysfunction can keep you from noticing this fallenness in your own life and seeking healing.
• Your sin. This is the most common barrier....

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• Fear of having to change: Quiet time brings up an awareness of sin, bad habits, and your need for repentance.
• Fear of being all alone: Quiet time potentially brings up the fear that you’ll find God isn’t really there.

The lie behind all these fears is the idea that you can’t face God as you really are. Satan’s hand in establishing such an idea, and also his motivation for doing it, is clear. The enemy hates your time with God because it heals you and makes you dangerous to him.

The author gives many real-life examples of distraction from God, and of its seductive gravitational pull:

• A friend sought the author’s counsel over frantic and exhausting troubles with her marriage, children, friends, and a hectic life. The author recommended that she spend half an hour in solitude with God. A day later, the friend gave multiple excuses for not doing it.
• The author describes her own tendency during her 18-month crisis to shy away from quiet time with God. She didn’t even know why she acted that way.
• The author gives an account of a day when she compulsively socialized at her church and spent too much time on social media when she really wanted to spend some...

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Ironically, the current generation has actually made an idol out of this dysfunction. We worship and promote absolute independence from others as if it’s a virtue, when in fact it’s the very thing God is calling us away from.

The Truth: God Made You for Community

The truth that explodes the lie of shame is that God made you not to go it alone but to be seen, known, and loved.

A key scripture highlighting this truth is 1 John 1:7: “If we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin.”

The author learned a critical lesson about God’s plan for community when she and her husband went through the process of adopting their son Cooper from an orphanage in Rwanda: For children to thrive, you have to make them feel seen and loved. Moreover, this insight applies to all of us. The old saying “it takes a village” applies to more than raising a child. We’re “village people,” built to thrive in communities that gather together and share each other’s lives.

God’s Intrinsic Community: The Trinity

**The fact that God made you for community reaches back to the nature of our creator...

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God always gives you what you need, when you need it. You can see this in Jesus’s parable of the flowers: “Consider the lilies, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass, which is alive in the field today, and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, how much more will he clothe you, O you of little faith!” (Luke 12:27-28).

The huge majority of what we worry about—90 percent or more—isn’t even real. Most of our fears are simply reflex actions by our minds, which exaggerate and misperceive things to weave a fog of baseless anxiety.

Corrie ten Boom’s classic book The Hiding Place tells of how the author and her family hid Jews from the Nazis until they themselves were sent to a concentration camp. At one point in the book, ten Boom recalls how when she was a girl and traveling to Amsterdam with her father, he always waited until right before they boarded the train to hand her ticket to her. She said he once told her that this was like God, who always supplies our needs at the right moment. He told her that even though some of the family would inevitably end up...

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The Effects of Cynicism

The negative effects of cynicism are devastating—primarily to those who buy into it!

Most hurtfully, cynicism perverts your view of God. It wears down your ability to see him correctly. The root of cynicism is a refusal to believe in God’s goodness and his control of things. Cynicism takes away your ability to delight in the world and engage fully with other people. It robs you of joy. And it usually does this on the subconscious level, without your being aware of it.

Note that cynicism is active, not merely passive or receptive. It doesn’t simply receive or perceive gloom, it actively reads it into your life. Imagine going to a party and sitting next to people who complain all night about the food, the music, and the hosts. Now imagine the opposite: the same party, but now the people next to you rave about how wonderful everything is. In either case, your party companions would probably affect your subjective memory of the event’s quality—for the worse in the first case, for the better in the second case. To some irreducible extent, the “goodness” or “badness” of the party resides in your choice (perhaps unconscious) of how to...

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The Negative Effects of Wrongful Self-Esteem

Obsession with self-esteem results in impaired relationships. For instance, the author once spoke sharply to an IF:Gathering colleague but then held off on apologizing because her mind rationalized away the sin. (“I wasn’t wrong. She probably didn’t care.”) Later it turned out the colleague did care, and so there was a fence to mend. The seductive desire for preserving her own self-esteem had prevented the author from remedying the situation by apologizing sooner.

Taking self-esteem as your life-guide also results in a life, both inner and outer, that’s based on egocentrism. The author’s ten-year-old son Cooper, for example, became obsessed with getting Air Jordan shoes because, as he put it, he “needed” them. What he actually needed them for was to look awesome to his middle school peers. His case calls out an important truth: We’re all a bit like middle schoolers. We’re all naturally obsessed with ourselves and inclined to do all we can to impress others and make ourselves the object of admiration and envy. This is a spiritually bankrupt way to live.

The Truth: Joy Comes From Valuing God and Others

**The truth...

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The Truth: You Can Find God’s Goodness in Your Circumstances

The truth that overturns the lie of victimhood is that your circumstances, far from being a trap and making you a victim, provide all the opportunities you need for experiencing God’s goodness. A key scripture supporting this truth is Paul’s exhortation in 1 Thessalonians 5 to “rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.”

The pain you experience from your circumstances doesn’t have to become your identity. It isn’t your master. The power of Jesus enables you to acknowledge your frustration and pain without losing peace and joy.

Count It All Joy

The author’s youngest daughter, Caroline, is dyslexic. This causes Caroline exhaustion and sometimes frustration. But she’s also persistent and tough. She hasn’t let her disability con her into adopting a victim identity.

Paul had more reason than most to consider himself a victim. He suffered threats on his life, beatings, imprisonment, shipwreck, betrayal by friends, and many more such things, any one of which might be enough to throw many of us into spasms of self-pity and...

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The Truth: You Weren’t Built to Live for Yourself

The truth that overturns the lie of complacency is that God has saved you and set you free not to indulge yourself but to serve others, to elevate them over yourself and seek their good.

• A key scripture supporting this truth is Paul’s exhortation in Galatians 5: “You, my brothers and sisters, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the flesh; rather, serve one another humbly in love.”
• Another is Paul’s exhortation in Philippians 2 to “do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to your own interests, but also to the interest of others. Have this mind among yourself, which is yours in Christ Jesus.”

Saved From and Saved For

We all know that Jesus saves us from sin, but the truth we’re examining here tells us what we’re saved for. And it’s all about giving and serving: He saved us, set us free, so that our lives can point others to the joy found in him.

The Bible talks about this in various ways. In his parable of the wedding feast in Luke 12, Jesus calls us to be perpetually...

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• Revelation 22:13: I am the beginning and the end. I am the first, and I am the last.
• 1 John 1:5: I am light; in me there is no darkness at all.
• Jeremiah 1:5: Before I formed you in the womb I knew you.
• 1 Corinthians 3:16: Do you not know that you are God’s temple, and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?
• Bear in mind at all times the “secret weapon” of Christ’s pre-existing victory that you learned about in Part 2. Fight each battle, and wage the whole war, from the confident knowledge of this.

Trust Your Training

The third principle is to train yourself rigorously. Then, in the heat of battle, trust your training. Practice the disciplines described in this book. They really work. Remember the author’s 3 a.m. panic attacks? After learning to mind her mind, she actually wrote most of this book between 3 and 5 a.m. At the very hour of the early morning when she formerly woke up in a panic during her spiritual dark night, she now experiences peace.

Use the strategies in this book. Fight the battles. Identify your areas of weakness and vulnerability, and reprogram your thoughts. Do the work of reshaping your heart-mind. Remember and take...