THE COMBAT MANUAL

Communication

The First Line of Defense

Taught by John Lenhart  |  flowcess.com

Probably the most important topic I am going to teach you is communication. Ed has laid out how everything in the spiritual realm is done through words and sentences. This lesson is where that principle hits the ground — in the real, daily interactions you have with every person in your life.

I want to be upfront: this is not something you are going to master immediately. I highly advise practicing these principles as much as possible until they become second nature. But once they do, you will have a diagnostic tool for human interaction that almost nobody else possesses — and it will change your relationships, your effectiveness, and your spiritual resilience in ways you will not be able to overstate.

Other people can take your thought process down and weaken your brain. Communication is your first line of defense.

Remember from the previous lesson: there are no zero events to the brain. Everything you say, hear, and think is making your brain better or worse. The words and sentences flowing through and around you are either building your thought process up toward flow, or dragging it down toward 160 and 320. Once you understand how communication works at this level, you will never hear a conversation the same way again.

A CAUTIONARY TALE: MICROSOFT’S CHATBOT

In 2016, Microsoft launched a chatbot called TAY — Teenage AI, a large language model similar in concept to today’s ChatGPT. Within twenty-four hours, they had to shut it down. Why? Because in less than a day of interacting with people online, TAY had descended into producing pro-Hitler and deeply misogynistic content.

What happened is a perfect illustration of the thought process model from our previous lesson. TAY started at 80 — a conscious, functional, human-level thought process. Through its interactions with people communicating at 160 and 320, it was pulled down to 320 itself. A perfect representation of exactly what happens to each of us when we are exposed to unhealthy communication over time.

KEY PRINCIPLE Your conscious brain is built by the words and sentences you say, hear, and think. Unhealthy communication from others is not just unpleasant — it is neurologically damaging. It actively degrades your thought process and pulls you away from flow.

The Three Communication Guidelines

There are three healthy communication guidelines. They are simple enough to put on a card, and powerful enough to transform a household. Here they are:

✅  HEALTHY GUIDELINES	❌  UNHEALTHY GUIDELINES
Share ON yourself (I feel, I think, I believe…)	Make statements ON other people
Ask questions of others	Do NOT ask questions
Answer questions when asked	Do NOT answer questions
Effect: Open, safe conversation — people share freely	Effect: Bullying, shutdown, conflict escalation

A quick note on the phrase “share on yourself” versus “share about yourself.” The distinction matters. Sharing about yourself is broadcasting — “I was the youngest inventor of the year in the history of Dow Chemical.” That is information about me. Sharing on yourself is disclosure — “I feel like I am not being heard. I think this matters. I believe we can do better.” That is vulnerability. The guidelines call for sharing on yourself, not about yourself.

The three unhealthy guidelines are simply the opposite: make statements on other people, do not ask questions, do not answer questions. And here is something important to recognize: those three behaviors, taken together, are the operational definition of bullying. When you understand these guidelines, you can identify bullying instantly — not just the dramatic kind, but the subtle, everyday kind that happens in homes, offices, and conversations all around you.

THE HOUSE RULES EXPERIMENT

A colleague of mine was working with a family — a mother, a father, two teenage daughters, and an eleven-year-old son. He described the house as being like the movie Roadhouse, minus the beer bottles. Constant noise, yelling, fighting, never a quiet moment.

One day he walked in and said, “We’re going to play a game.” He handed each family member a three-by-five card with the three healthy communication guidelines written on it. He had a bag of candy, a buzzer, and a crown. The rules were simple: everyone talks freely, but must follow the guidelines. Follow a guideline, you get a piece of candy. Violate one, you get buzzed out. Last person in wins the crown.

He counted to three and said go. For the first time in that house, there was silence. Nobody knew what to say that followed the rules.

Then the mother spoke. She said, “I have been wanting to share this for two years, and I have been afraid to do it. I feel like I do all the work in this house and I am not appreciated.” And she started crying. Notice: the guidelines created safety. They gave her permission to say something she had been holding for two years.

The game continued. The eleven-year-old boy won and received the crown — and he was upset about winning, because winning meant the game was over and he could no longer earn candy. He had gotten genuinely good at keeping others engaged and in the game. His goal was the candy. The crown meant nothing to him.

WHY IT WORKED The game did not teach anyone to listen. Listening is an effect, not a cause. When you tell someone to listen, you are trying to produce an effect by demanding it — which never works. The game put everyone’s brain on the cause: following the communication guidelines. Listening happened automatically as a result. Causes produce effects. Stating effects produces nothing.

They took this same game into an EBD classroom — Emotional and Behavioral Disorders — at a middle school. After playing it once, three weeks later the kids in that classroom were still listening to each other. The principal was so impressed she bought crowns, buzzers, and candy for every teacher in the school and required them all to play the game once a week.

They also took it into an alternative middle school — students who had done things that permanently barred them from returning to public education. Three students were stood up in front of the room and given the cards. What followed was remarkable: these students were physically lunging at each other, hitting their chests, posturing for a fight. Everything in their bodies was geared toward violence. But as long as they followed the communication guidelines, they could not start a fight. The words and sentences are the ammunition. The body is the gun. Without the right bullets, the gun cannot fire.

If you don’t say certain words and sentences, you can’t fight. The body is the gun. Words and sentences are the bullets.

The Four Conversation Causes

The second half of this framework is what I call conversation causes. A cause is the first thing said in an exchange — the opening that sets the entire trajectory of the conversation. There are four categories, ranging from healthy to destructive:

CAUSE	TYPE	EXAMPLES	EFFECT ON CONVERSATION
✅  GOOD	Open-ended question OR statement of fact	“How was your day?” “My team lost.”	Gives up control — maximum openness. Conversation can go anywhere.
👍  NOT BAD	Close-ended question OR statement of opinion	“Did you have a good day?” “My team should have won.”	Gives up most control — conversation is slightly directed. Still opens dialogue.
❌  BAD	Projection — telling someone what they think, feel, or judging them	“You didn’t have a good day.” “You’re stupid for not liking my team.”	Takes control. Women shut down. Men escalate. Defined as abuse.
🚫  WORST	Directly negating or invalidating another person’s stated experience	“Your favorite color is blue?” “No, it’s pink.”	Takes ALL control. Total invalidation of the other person. Defined as abuse.

Notice the pattern of control. Good causes give up control entirely — you invite the other person into open space and let them go wherever they need to go. Not bad causes give up most of it, with just a slight direction. Bad and worst causes take control — they impose your frame on the other person, tell them what they think or feel, or outright deny their reality. Bad and worst causes are, by definition, abuse.

THE ATTRACTION PRINCIPLE

Here is something I love to share when I have a room full of men: women with mid to high self-esteem are attracted to men who give good and not bad causes. When a man gives a woman a bad or worst cause, she shuts down. Full stop. The conversation ends.

The opposite is also true, and it explains a lot of confusing relationship dynamics: women with low or no self-esteem are drawn toward men who give bad and worst causes. That is why reality television works. They cast exclusively for people who communicate at 160 and 320 — bad and worst causes in every sentence. It would be a boring show if everyone were giving open-ended questions and statements about themselves.

Men work differently: when given a bad or worst cause, men escalate rather than shut down. I gave this talk inside a juvenile prison and an adult prison. When I asked the guards which was worse, they said the juvenile prison, which I am sure surprises none of you. But here is the relevant insight: I told those guards to ask any inmate how they ended up there. In virtually every case, the story began with someone giving a bad or worst cause — and someone else responding to that bad cause with another bad cause, and the interaction escalating until it ended in violence or a crime.

DIAGNOSTIC SKILL Once you have these causes internalized, you can predict the trajectory of any conversation in real time. You will know within the first sentence whether the exchange is going toward connection or conflict — and you will have the tools to redirect it before it goes somewhere destructive.

Communication and the Thought Process

Now let’s connect all of this directly back to the flip count and thought process model from the previous lesson. Your communication level and your thought level are inseparable:

THOUGHT LEVEL	LANGUAGE USED	SPIRITUAL STATE
10 — Flow / Holy Spirit	Listening deeply; questions that open understanding; words that build	God flows through you — instant, effortless discernment
80 — Conscious (Healthy)	Healthy guidelines + good/not bad causes. One focused thought at a time.	Human — disciplined, in control, able to receive and process well
160 — Habitual / Reactive	Statements on others, bad causes, projecting, not answering. Reactive patterns.	Fleshly — multiple competing thoughts, loss of focus, emotional flooding
320 — Destruction	Worst causes, full negation, abuse language. No capacity for dialogue.	Seared — words become weapons with no regard for the other person

When someone gives you a bad or worst cause — or makes a statement on you — notice what happens in your mind. One moment you have one focused thought. The next moment you have several: “What did they mean by that? Is that a judgment? Why would they say that? What do they think of me?” You just got pulled from 80 to 160. Multiple competing thoughts. No single focus. That is what harmful communication does to your brain, every single time it happens.

Here is a practical defense: when someone says something that triggers that spiral — “You’re weird,” “You always do that,” “That’s typical of you” — recast it immediately. Instead of absorbing their statement as a fact about yourself, reframe it: “He thinks I’m weird.” That small grammatical shift puts the statement back in their mind, not yours. It defends your thought process. It keeps you at 80. That recast is a skill, and it takes practice. But it is one of the most important mental disciplines you can develop.

COVID, REFRIGERATORS, AND STAYING SANE

During COVID, I was working with teachers who suddenly found themselves in small houses with college-aged kids who had come home, younger kids, a spouse, and nowhere to go. These were people who loved each other and were now on the edge of losing their minds.

I gave them the communication guidelines sheet. They printed it out and taped it to the refrigerator. They made a household agreement: we talk this way. Seven or eight of those teachers later told me it literally saved their family. Through months of close confinement with no release valve, they never had a serious argument. The guidelines kept everyone’s thought process up. And when everyone’s thought process stays up, the environment stays livable.

Conflict Resolution: Replacing the Memory

The last thing I want to cover is what I believe is the most powerful conflict resolution tool available to you — one that goes deeper than most therapists will take you.

Here is how the brain works in conflict: when you have a fight with someone over a specific topic — say, the garbage — you attach a negative emotion to that word and that context. Every subsequent time that topic comes up, the negative emotion fires first, before any rational thought. You are not responding to the present situation. You are responding to the stored memory of the original fight.

If a couple has four arguments a year, after ten years of marriage they have forty topics they cannot discuss without a negative emotional charge firing. Then one of them meets someone they can talk to about anything — and it feels like they have found their soulmate. They have not. They have just found someone who has not yet accumulated those triggers with them.

The way to fix a damaged relationship is not to talk about the damage. It is to replace the memory.

You cannot delete a memory. But you can replace it. The brain stores the most recent version of an experience. If you can redo the situation — consciously, deliberately, following healthy communication — the new experience gets stored over the old one. The negative charge dissipates because the memory associated with it has changed.

THE GARBAGE STORY

A couple was having an argument about whose week it was to take out the garbage. Their teenage son — who had learned these principles — walked in and said, “Let me help.” He had his father walk back out to the garage, then back in, to physically reset the experience. He told his dad to say whatever he had wanted to say, but through a question or a statement on himself.

The dad thought for a moment — and that pause is physiologically significant. Moving from the language of 160 to the language of 80 requires the brain to actually shift gears. It is not just a choice of words. It is a neurological gear change. After the pause, the dad said: “Why didn’t you take out the garbage?” Open-ended. A genuine question.

The mother answered: “Your aunt called. Your uncle just died.”

They ended up holding each other. The memory of that moment — genuine vulnerability, a question that invited rather than accused, an answer that explained rather than defended — replaced the argument in both of their brains. The topic no longer carries a charge. That is how healing through communication works.

A soft answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger. — Proverbs 15:1 (NKJV)

Let no corrupt word proceed out of your mouth, but what is good for necessary edification, that it may impart grace to the hearers. — Ephesians 4:29 (NKJV)

Putting It Into Practice

Start with the guidelines. Print the reference chart at the end of this lesson and put it somewhere visible. For the next week, pay attention to every conversation you are in — not to fix it, just to observe. Notice when you give bad causes. Notice when someone gives you one and watch what happens to your thought process. Build the awareness first. The skill comes after the awareness.

STEP 1

Observe Your Own Language For one full day, notice every statement you make on other people. Don’t try to stop — just count them. You will be surprised how many automatic statements-on-others come out of your mouth before you have thought about them at all.

STEP 2

Practice Recasting When someone gives you a bad or worst cause this week, practice recasting immediately: “He thinks I’m…” or “She believes I…” Return their statement to their mind. Defend your thought process.

STEP 3

Give Two Good Causes Choose one relationship this week where things are strained or distant. Ask two genuinely open-ended questions and do nothing but listen. No advice, no problem-solving, no counter-sharing. Just questions and listening. Note what happens.

⚔  THIS WEEK’S REFLECTION Think of one recurring conflict in your life — with a spouse, child, parent, colleague, or friend. What kind of causes are typically being given at the start of those interactions? Where do both parties land on the thought process map? What would a conversation look like if it started with a good cause instead? _______________________________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________________________

Your words are bullets. Choose them deliberately.

Next week we go deeper into your unique wiring — how your specific design shapes both how you communicate and how others communicate with you.