Reset

When was the last time you felt stuck—caught in the same patterns no matter how hard you tried to change? In Reset, licensed counselor and author Debra Fileta invites you to step off the treadmill of surface-level behavior change and go deeper. She argues that lasting transformation—spiritual, emotional, mental, and even physical—must begin from the inside out. You can’t “duct tape” unhealthy habits or negative emotions and expect them to heal; you must address the crossed wires beneath the surface. Her message is both practical and spiritual: true healing happens when we understand how our thoughts lead to feelings, and our feelings lead to behaviors.

Fileta offers 31 practices, one for each day of a month-long journey, guiding you to pause, reflect, plan, and reset. Each practice blends psychological principles with biblical truth, connecting proven therapeutic techniques to the wisdom of Scripture. Her goal isn’t a self-help quick fix but a sustainable rhythm of renewal—and she makes it clear that change is not a one-time event but a lifelong process of resetting and realigning with God’s truth.

The Core Message: Change Starts Beneath the Surface

At the heart of Reset lies the conviction that external change requires internal awareness. Fileta explains that most of us try to improve our lives by modifying behavior—waking up earlier, reading more, eating less, working out—but we inevitably relapse into old habits because we haven’t understood why we act the way we do. She compares this to duct-taping a broken car window rather than repairing the underlying wiring. Real change, she says, happens when we move from the outside in: from behavior to feeling to thought. Her counseling experience reveals that once clients understand the thoughts–feelings–behaviors sequence, they can finally turn off the autopilot and steer intentionally. Thought change leads to life change.

A Spiritual-Psychological Approach

Unlike many secular approaches that stop at cognitive reframing, Fileta argues that ignoring God’s role in transformation leaves healing incomplete. Citing Romans 12:2 (“be transformed by the renewing of your mind”), she integrates Christian faith into psychological process. Each practice becomes a spiritual discipline—pausing, acknowledging, praying, expecting, deciding, asking for help—not merely therapeutic but worshipful. She sees mental health and spiritual health as inseparable: our souls, minds, and bodies are deeply interwoven, and wholeness requires caring for all three.

Why a Reset Matters Today

In a world addicted to hustle and noise, few people stop long enough to truly know how they’re doing. That’s why the book begins with Pause—a command, not a suggestion. Fileta observes that most of us drown in outer noise and inner distraction, numbed by screens, busyness, and obligations. “Pausing is the start of the work,” she writes, because silence makes space for God to speak. From there, she teaches readers to expect something new from God, to own their junk through honesty, and to acknowledge uncomfortable emotions and past wounds.

The book’s 31 chapters cover an ambitious but structured journey through emotional, mental, and spiritual reset. Early chapters are introspective—naming unhealthy habits, exploring mental patterns, confronting cognitive distortions, facing childhood pain—while later chapters build practical systems for living differently: planning for change, resting, setting boundaries, practicing soul-care, and connecting with others. Throughout, Fileta’s therapist’s empathy and Christian conviction shine in warm, story-driven prose. Her anecdotes—from a car with crossed wires to a surgeon husband’s patience to stories of clients like Hannah, Carla, and Brett—humanize complex psychological truths.

The Power of Practice

A defining feature of Reset is its emphasis on daily practice. Each chapter ends with practical exercises: journaling prompts, prayer reflections, and behavioral steps. Fileta calls these practices “habits of inner work,” insisting that willpower alone can’t create transformation—it’s “the power of your practices.” This echoes the ancient spiritual disciplines discussed by authors like Richard Foster (Celebration of Discipline) and Dallas Willard (The Spirit of the Disciplines), but with therapeutic precision shaped by modern counseling. She bridges science and Scripture—neuroplasticity meets spiritual renewal—and shows that practice rewires the brain and reshapes the heart.

From Awareness to Action

Fileta maps change as a progressive journey: awareness (pause), acceptance (acknowledge), preparation (plan), and active reset (live differently). This mirrors behavioral psychology’s “stages of change” model—pre-contemplation, contemplation, preparation, action, maintenance—which she explicitly connects to Christian living. The process begins with humility—admitting what’s broken—and moves toward faith-filled participation with God’s healing. The “reset” becomes a rhythm of life: whenever old patterns reemerge, we can pause, examine, and choose to respond differently.

Why It Matters

In a culture that prizes performance and outward productivity, Reset challenges you to slow down, face your inner reality, and embrace healing as holy work. Drawing from both counseling science and biblical truth, Fileta reframes growth not as striving but as response—the practice of tuning your mind, body, and spirit back to God’s design. Whether you’re battling anxiety, burnout, broken relationships, or spiritual apathy, her message is simple but profound: change is possible, but only when you dare to stop, look in, and reset from the inside out.

Before charging into improvement, Fileta insists that healing begins with stillness. The very first habit is simple yet revolutionary: stop before you start. In an age that prizes motion and multitasking, pausing feels unnatural, yet it is the foundation of every reset. “Pausing is the start of the work,” she explains—echoing Psalm 46:10’s divine command to “Be still, and know that I am God.”

Tuning Out to Tune In

Fileta distinguishes between two forms of noise that sabotage our mental and spiritual clarity: outer noise (the constant stimulus of phones, chatter, errands) and inner noise (the racing thoughts, to-do lists, and what-ifs that never stop). To pause means intentionally silencing both. Her practical step for readers is to find ten minutes of complete quiet—no ringer, no screen—and breathe deeply. In that pause, we “give our brains the jump-start they need to heal.” Neuroscience backs her up: studies show that moments of rest activate the brain’s default mode network, allowing for memory processing and creativity.

The Spiritual Power of Stillness

Stillness is not passive. Fileta draws from the story of Job, where God told him to “pause a moment and listen.” Silence becomes sacred space where God speaks, revealing what to change in the present, what to release from the past, and what to pursue for the future. She calls it an act of obedience and preparation: “You can’t start if you’ve never stopped.” By commanding rest before action, God creates room for direction. This approach parallels mindfulness but anchors it in divine relationship—less self-focus, more spiritual attentiveness.

Practical Application

Each daily practice in Reset comes with concrete exercises. For Pause, readers sit quietly for ten minutes, breathe deeply, pray simple reflective questions—“God, what do You want me to shift?”—and then journal what arises. Fileta warns that silence will feel “ten minutes longer than it sounds,” but persistence changes how we think and feel. This first practice interrupts autopilot, slows reactive habits, and opens spiritual perception.

In a therapeutic sense, Fileta’s call to pause works like a cognitive reset button: it engages the parasympathetic nervous system, calms anxious thought loops, and re-centers emotional processing. Spiritually, it repositions you before your Creator. Before any transformation can begin, she says, you must stop long enough to hear what needs healing within you. That single habit—pausing—prepares the soil for growth in every other chapter to follow.

In the second practice, Expect, Fileta explores the role of expectancy in transformation. Our expectations, she writes, quietly shape our results: what we believe God will do determines the horizon of what we will see. Many people stop expecting from God after disappointments. To protect their hearts, they lower the bar of hope, interpreting unfulfilled prayers as divine silence. But low expectations shrink our faith and mute our prayers.

Raising Expectations of God

Fileta describes a personal crisis—her young son’s impending surgery—that became a test of belief. Though she prayed for his healing, she secretly expected disappointment. Yet when the surgeon reported that the issue had mysteriously resolved, she was stunned. It was an intimate reminder that “little faith, big God” still moves mountains. Her mentor Christine Caine’s advice echoes through this chapter: “Ask Him for everything, and let Him decide what He does.” The lesson is not to control outcomes but to reopen our hearts to divine possibility. Isaiah 43:19 captures it: “I am doing something new. Do you not see it?”

The Psychology of Expectation

Drawing from cognitive psychology, Fileta links expectancy to the self-fulfilling prophecy effect: when you believe change is possible, your brain unconsciously orients your behavior toward making it happen. Expecting breakthrough leads to attentional bias—you start noticing evidence of it. Expecting failure yields the same outcome in reverse. She applies this principle spiritually: if you expect God’s goodness, you will begin to recognize it everywhere. Faith, then, becomes not blind optimism but the mental posture of partnering with what God is already doing.

Practical Habits of Expectancy

The habit called Expect includes journaling areas where you’ve lowered expectations—your relationships, work, health, or faith—and writing three specific hopes to pray for daily. You don’t have to manipulate the result; simply stay open. Fileta urges readers to revisit these prayers regularly, noting progress or new insight. In therapy terms, this rewires neural circuits of learned helplessness; in spiritual terms, it reawakens faith. Expectation is the fuel of reset: believing not only that change is needed but that change is possible.

Change, Fileta argues, begins when we stop blaming others and take ownership of our lives. In Own Your Junk, she dismantles self-deception—the human tendency to see ourselves better than we are. Citing social psychology’s “better-than-average effect,” she explains that most people overestimate their goodness, health, and emotional maturity. We rarely perceive the plank in our own eye, Jesus said, but we spot specks in others instantly. Healing depends on honesty.

Seeing Yourself Objectively

Fileta invites readers to view their lives “from the outside in,” stepping back to observe their habits and interactions as though watching a movie. How do you sound? How do others respond to you? This narrative distance helps reveal blind spots—the subtle arrogance, defensiveness, or avoidance that stall growth. Confession, both psychological and biblical, becomes a healing act: “Confess your sins to one another and pray for each other so that you may be healed” (James 5:16). The courage to admit faults brings clarity; denial prolongs dysfunction.

Acknowledgment as Healing

Therapeutically, acknowledgment mirrors the first step of 12-step recovery programs: admitting powerlessness and unmanageability. Fileta notes that both science and Scripture converge here—transformation starts with confession. It’s not shame-based self-loathing but accurate self-assessment: seeing yourself truthfully so grace can restore what honesty reveals. Her exercises encourage journaling through a “day in your life,” noting reactions and routines, then identifying one specific behavior or pattern to confess to God and, if safe, to a trusted person.

This practice, she says, catalyzes lasting change because ownership breeds empowerment. You can’t grow what you won’t acknowledge. When you “own your junk,” your healing begins.

In “The Deep End,” Fileta teaches that emotional maturity is spiritual maturity. Drawing from her counseling practice—and her marriage to John, who prefers the shallow end of feelings—she illustrates why many adults never learn to swim in emotional waters. Some confuse spiritual depth with emotional depth; they can debate theology but not identify sadness or fear. Others suppress feelings because of upbringing, trauma, or cultural scripts that view emotion as weakness. Yet, she insists, you can’t heal what you won’t feel.

Learning to Swim Emotionally

Emotions, Fileta writes, are “deep waters” (Proverbs 20:5), holding the purposes of the heart. Those who develop “in-sight” draw emotions up to examine them. Suppressed feelings, like submerged weights, surface eventually—through anger, apathy, or anxiety. Her metaphor of swimming lessons captures the process: gradually becoming comfortable identifying and expressing feelings without drowning in them. Even Jesus felt deeply—anger at injustice, sorrow for Jerusalem, compassion for the suffering—proving that full humanity requires full emotional presence.

Emotions as Data, Not Decisions

Fileta clarifies that emotions are signals, not commands. They reveal internal states but shouldn’t dictate external reactions. Ignoring them invites burnout, but idolizing them invites chaos. Her practical “deep end check-in” guides readers through reflective questions: What am I feeling right now? Where have these feelings appeared before? How have I responded? In doing so, we transform emotion from enemy to ally—a messenger guiding awareness and intimacy with God and others.

Fileta’s integration of therapy and theology resonates with thinkers like Peter Scazzero (Emotionally Healthy Spirituality): you can’t be spiritually mature while remaining emotionally immature. The deep end is where real transformation happens.

One of the book’s most powerful sections confronts the myth that we can simply “move on” from the past. Fileta insists that unresolved wounds continually shape our present behaviors. To truly go forward, you must go backward. Using her client Carla’s story—a woman drained by one-sided relationships—Fileta illustrates how childhood abandonment created adult patterns of overgiving and fear of rejection. Healing required revisiting that early pain.

Tracing Emotional Timelines

Fileta’s therapeutic tool, the “Timeline Activity,” maps pivotal life events to reveal repeated emotional themes. As clients list memories from childhood through adulthood, patterns emerge—abandonment, shame, fear, control. These patterns explain current reactions. The insight can be painful but liberating: awareness breaks repeating cycles. This method, akin to narrative therapy, reconnects the pieces of one’s story so grace can rewrite them.

Scripture Reframed

Fileta challenges a common misinterpretation of Philippians 3:13 (“forgetting what is behind”). Paul, she argues, wasn’t urging repression of trauma but humility about past success. Ignoring pain is not holiness. Scripture repeatedly calls us to remember, grieve, and confess so healing can come. She affirms that therapy is a tool God uses to expose roots that His Spirit can then transform. “You have to deal with your past to be freed from your past,” she writes—a premise echoing trauma research by Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps the Score) that unprocessed wounds reappear in the present.

By helping readers face their pasts, Fileta turns backward-looking into forward momentum. Healing isn’t about nostalgia but restoration: letting God rewrite your story from the inside out.

Midway through Reset, Fileta dives into cognitive transformation—the renewal of the mind. She explains that your brain often runs old mental tapes: default thought loops recorded through childhood, trauma, and repetition. Without intervention, those tapes become your operating system. Drawing from cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), she introduces the ABC model—Activating event, Belief, Consequence—to trace how unchallenged thoughts trigger negative emotions and behaviors. But she adds her own letter: D, for Do it differently.

Recognizing Patterns

In chapters like “What’s on Replay?” and “Call Out the Lies,” Fileta teaches readers to catch default thinking and replace distortion with truth. Common distortions—black-and-white thinking, overgeneralization, mind reading, catastrophizing—become the subtle lies Satan whispers. Her metaphor of dirty glasses clarifies: if your lenses are smudged by pain, every experience looks darker than it is. The goal isn’t blind positivity but clear sight through truth-based lenses.

From Reaction to Renewal

Replacing thought patterns requires awareness and repetition. Fileta’s exercises involve listing negative thoughts, identifying emotional triggers, and writing counter-statements from Scripture (“I am loved,” “I am capable”). This practice, validated by neuroplasticity studies, literally rewires the brain. Spiritually, it enacts Romans 12:2’s command to renew the mind. Over time, habitual truth-telling produces emotional healing and behavioral change.

In counseling terms, Fileta integrates CBT with theological anthropology: humans think, feel, and act as whole persons made in God’s image. Her method transforms cognition into spiritual formation—thinking like Christ to live like Christ.

One of Fileta’s most distinctive contributions is her holistic view of self-care. She reframes it as soul-care: tending to your physical, mental, and spiritual health so you can give from fullness, not emptiness. Using the story of her client Madeline—who cared for everyone but herself—Fileta exposes the martyr complex masquerading as holiness. God, she reminds us, commands love for neighbor as yourself, not instead of yourself.

Understanding Soul-Care

Through practical chapters on rest, breath, and healthy withdrawal, Fileta encourages readers to create rhythms modeled by Jesus, who often withdrew to solitary places to pray. She reintroduces the Sabbath, the 8:8:8 rule (eight hours each of work, leisure, and rest), and the importance of bodily stewardship through movement, nutrition, and sleep. Science supports her claims: chronic exhaustion mimics mental illness and erodes emotional regulation. Sabbath rest becomes preventative therapy.

Embodied Spirituality

Integrating embodiment research, she explains how emotions manifest physically—stress raising heart rate, anxiety causing chest tightness—and how practices like deep breathing and mindfulness activate peace. Through exercises like the “body scan,” readers learn to notice where emotions live within them. Fileta points to Psalm 139:14: we are “fearfully and wonderfully made,” designed for interconnection between flesh and spirit.

Her holistic model mirrors the therapeutic trend toward integrated care (body-mind-spirit alignment), yet grounds it in Christian theology. Caring for your body honors the God who inhabits it.

In the final movement of the book, Fileta turns practical: transformation requires boundaries. Modern life’s pace ensures distraction, depletion, and burnout unless we concentrate and eliminate. Drawing from Anne Ortlund’s minimalist philosophy and Jesus’ words to Martha—“Few things are needed”—she argues that boundaries protect the sacred: your health, your calling, and your relationship with God.

Setting Priorities

Fileta uses the “rocks, pebbles, and sand” analogy: put first things first—God, family, health—before minor tasks fill your jar. The root of chronic busyness, she says, usually hides beneath the surface: guilt, people-pleasing, fear of rejection, or identity in productivity. Healing these roots makes “no” possible. Without boundaries, even ministry turns toxic; “Christian burnout” often masquerades as zeal. Boundaries are not selfish—they are stewardship.

Staying Focused

In chapters on distraction and attachment, Fileta warns that constant connectivity—digital or emotional—fractures presence. The antidote is focus: staying attached to God and grounded in reality. She intertwines attachment theory (secure vs. anxious, avoidant, or shame-based) with theology, showing how insecure attachment to people mirrors insecure faith in God. Healing comes as you anchor to His unchanging love and nurture healthy relationships with others.

The Ongoing Process

Fileta closes Reset with a truth both humbling and freeing: you’re done but not complete. Change is cyclical, not linear. Like her counseling clients, you’ll revisit stages—awareness, contemplation, preparation, action, maintenance—many times over a lifetime. But each reset carries you deeper. Progress, not perfection, is the goal. Healing happens in layers, she writes; every new challenge reveals another opportunity for grace. God is always making things new.

In the end, Reset is more than a self-help manual—it’s a therapy-meets-spiritual-formation guide that helps you live awake. Pausing, expecting, acknowledging, healing, resting, focusing—these rhythms form a life of continual renewal. In God’s hands, your reset never ends; it becomes your way of being.