#42 How to Bring Fun to Recovery | Recovery Secrets Series

Welcome to the Overcoming PTSD Podcast. My name is Brad Schipke, and this is the limited series called Recovery Secrets Daily Coaching. Now, these were private sessions that I originally ran as a paid coaching program, but now for the first time ever, I'm making all 100+ sessions available for free for all of you podcast listeners. And this series is over 100 days of practical strategies that have helped thousands of trauma survivors fully heal. So make sure to subscribe because I'm dropping a new episode every single weekday until the archive is complete, and you definitely do not want to miss it. So without further ado, let's dive on in.

All right, we are live here. Welcome everyone to our Recovery Secrets Daily Coaching Call. So I'm excited for today's episode, and I'll let Brad do a little intro while we make sure everything is rocking and rolling.

Hey everybody, welcome. Great to see all of you. Today we're gonna be talking about a, it'll be fun. It'll be a fun episode cuz we're gonna be talking about how to have fun through recovery. How to find the humor. And you'll likely hear a lot of stories from us that are funny and hopefully are funny. I was thinking about doing like a little standup comedy routine, but I've never done that and I don't particularly know if I'm that funny. So we're just going to talk about it and hopefully tell some stories that'll be funny and bring some humor, bring some positive vibes to you this Friday, and hopefully help you look at some of the more dark things in a more positive light. Because sometimes having a little bit of dark humor when you're going through dark times can not only be funny, but it can also be a great way to cope with the dark times. And we'll kind of get into that a little bit more too, but it's going to be very interesting. It's going to be the first time we talked about, to this degree, we talked about bringing humor and having yourself laugh a little bit more at the hard times, at the hard things, and how that can help you cope.

It's almost a foundational conversation to have as far as we teach things that are very serious, right? We talk about mindset. Now we have a lot of fun while we teach, but talk about mindset, we talk about routines, we talk about processing, all that. And like, is very serious. And this is one of the things that you can bring throughout the recovery journey and you can bring to your life every single day. It's something that I'm really passionate about, which sounds like maybe you've heard me say that a million times, but that's true. I really love what I do and I'm passionate about almost everything that we talk about. I'm really passionate about it because I think life should be fun and I think life can be fun. And even in dark times, we have the ability to make it fun. So we're going to talk about a couple things. And if anything, I want you to walk away with today is the idea that you can allow yourself to not take life so seriously, not even take yourself so seriously. And sometimes it's a choice to let those walls down. And when we're talking about PTSD, we're dealing with some very serious things. And most of the time we're being very serious about it with ourselves. It's okay to bring a little levity to it, to laugh a little, to Like, let the sensitivities down. And so I'm someone who loves stand-up comedy. I will like sometimes just like when I have a night by myself every now and then, I will just sit and I'll put on a stand-up comedy special and I will just howl. Like, I will just cackle all night long, right? Or for that, whatever the hour and a half special is, and just crack up. And what I do is I allow myself to crack up. Now, if you've ever seen stand-up comedy, and maybe now more than ever, You know, a lot of it is fairly insensitive, right? Meaning like the, the comics, for the most part, you know, they make fun of themselves, they make fun of certain groups of people, certain things, certain stereotypes. And so if you go in with this big guarded kind of wall, you're not going to enjoy it.

Yeah.

And so now I care very much about a lot of different issues, and I'm sensitive to a lot of different groups and a lot and their needs. And so I see how inappropriate that is. But when I'm in the mode of going to enjoy that, what I do is I purposefully put that down. And what I do is just not take life so seriously. And I want everyone to kind of walk away here today with the idea and this— the idea that you can put that down and allow yourself to laugh, allow yourself to take things not so seriously, to bring a little levity, to put the sensitivities down. And it doesn't mean you're not caring about things. It doesn't mean things aren't serious. And allow yourself to have fun, allow yourself to laugh, allow yourself to smile.

It's a great thing to develop. And like, it would force— it would force you to break out of that old mindset even more. Like, the reasons why humor is good is that it can break you out of those negative mindsets and find the humor, find the funny thing, get you to laugh, you know? And then that's something that we would do, and it would break that big amount of tension, that big amount of negative energy. It'd be like a big pattern interrupt where like you're triggered and like Tension is high and then you make a joke and the ice breaks and then you're just like, oh, like you're laughing and like, you're like, that is so inappropriate. You should never have said that. Like, you need to be more sensitive. Like, is kind of like the idea around it. I'm not very good at explaining it, but—

And that's just one of a handful of ways that we kind of use humor.

Yeah.

So like using it almost in such an inappropriate sense that you're like, that is so inappropriate. It's not funny that it's funny. And so there's just one example. Brad talked about pattern interrupts and there are a handful of times that like You know, now you don't always have to do this with partners. You can do this with yourself. And so we had a client use fart sounds with her husband and her young boys. So it could be something like that. That's humor. But what I want to point out is there's a little bit of give and take to that. There was a little bit of him allowing that smile to kind of tug at him, even though he wanted to be mad, to say, you know what, that is funny. I'm gonna allow myself. You know what? We can laugh at that.

Right.

So like, we can laugh at ourselves. We can laugh at these situations. There's a lot of different ways that we can bring humor. Sometimes it's looking for humor. Looking for ways to smile, looking for things to laugh at. Something that I still do, and I love doing this, I just think about, and I've shared this before in here, like, today's the best day of someone's life. That makes me so happy. And that's not so much humor as smiles, but we're on the same wavelength there, looking for things to be happy about, looking for smiles, looking for humor, looking for things to laugh at. And laughing at yourself can be a really amazing thing as well. And so what I wanted to kind of prompt and what I wanted everyone to think about today while we talk about this subject. Is, you know, there are things that are gonna make us laugh. And part of that we've already talked about is allowance, allowing yourself to not take yourself, not take life so seriously, not take jokes so seriously, like allowing that wall to come down. And part of that is quite literally like an active process, an active process of saying, you know what, I'm gonna choose to laugh at this. There are 2 paths that I can take. I can continue to be mad.

Right.

Or I can bring a little levity and I can laugh at this.

Yeah.

And so that allowance is a big thing. I want you to think about what are some things that could make you laugh? What are some things that could make you smile? Now, it could be a joke you tell yourself. I crack up at myself all the time. He cracks up at himself all the time. Like, we make jokes and sometimes the other person doesn't find it funny. Oftentimes we do, but sometimes we don't. And I just, I'm just cackling. I'm just laughing and cracking up to myself at my own joke. You wanna have that kind of self-love and think about that as a sense of humor. But what are some things that make you laugh? What are some things that don't make you laugh, right? We can think about the inverse as well. What are some thought patterns? What are some ways that you have conversations, things that you bring into situations That don't make you laugh.

Mm-hmm.

I'll share an example. My dad and I love to laugh, and we are constantly what we call poking at each other. We're constantly like trying to poke fun at each other and trying to make each other laugh. And mostly we're picking on my mom together, and we're just always cracking up. We're just always having a good time. And there's this one time when my dad and I get bored, we tend to pick on my mom and we tend to look for ways to laugh. Now we create ways to laugh. And so when we were in Florida where my parents' condo is, they can see their community pool like probably 2 or 3 football fields away. So you can see it. But you can't make out people's faces. So you might be able to tell. So I could tell that my mom was there. I knew where she was 'cause I knew the hat she was wearing, but I couldn't really make out her facial expression. So we were there, we were eating lunch and we were like, my dad, when we were growing up, he used to do this big whistle. Like he could whistle and we would hear it half a mile away. And as we were growing up, and this sounds a little darker than it needs to, but he would do that whistle and we would kind of like snap to attention. He would do it to get our attention so that we would like focus on him. And so my mom reacts to it too. So anytime he whistles or he like clears his throat, we all kind of like look at him because that's just what we did all growing up. And he had said to me, he said, I wonder if Mom would react to my whistle from all the way over here. I wonder if she could hear it. And he does this big whistle. And so my mom was walking around the pool deck and she snapped her head around. I feel like she looked dead in the eyes of the binoculars. My dad and I just cracked. And that was a moment we just created. It wasn't a moment that was naturally gonna happen. We created that moment. So you can do things like that. You can look for things like that. Now, there's silly things. That's a niche thing to me. You're probably not gonna find that very funny because that's not your situation. But look for things that make you laugh. Look for opportunities to have fun.

Yeah.

To bring levity, to let the walls down, to make a joke. Something I used to do is bring this to myself. And so every now and then I would find myself really down and kind of in Maybe more of a depressive state. I'm busy all night having a pity party for myself. And so when you can start to even just pick at yourself, poke fun at yourself, almost very naturally, once you kind of let that wall down, very naturally you start to feel that light. You start to feel that levity. You start to feel the effects that humor can have. You start to laugh at yourself and you start to realize how ridiculous we can be getting into these mindsets. And very often— Fairly simple it is to get out of these mindsets.

Yeah. And that's what it can do is it can break the perspective, those dark perspectives that you have, and you feel like you're just stuck. You're stuck in this dark hole and humor can be that thing that pulls you out and just jolts you outta that moment so you can see it for what it is. But it is important, like a lot of the examples that we're giving are like with other people, and that's a great thing to bring, like with relationships. But you can do it with yourself. You can look for reasons to laugh. And just a quick poll here. How many people here have had trouble laughing? Like, how many people, like, in their recovery, like, it was very hard just to even get a laugh? Because I remember a few years, maybe like 2, 3 years, where I didn't laugh. And I didn't realize that I wasn't laughing until I laughed. And I remember I was watching The Dick Van Dyke Show.

Yeah.

It was like a very wholesome show. But like, I was watching that and I laughed. I'm like, wow. And that was after I was doing some processing. So it was just something that naturally happened. I was like, Wow, that's weird. Like I'm laughing. It felt so good. And then from that point on, I realized kind of like the healing benefits of it, where it's like you feel good and it brings up other emotions. Sometimes you laugh and it might make you want to cry because it just makes you so happy. And those are other benefits of laughter. If it just, it reduces so much of the tension, so much of the stress, but it's something that like, if you don't want to laugh, if you're, if you haven't laughed in a while or it's hard for you to laugh, it's something that you're going to have to look for. You're going to have to like go out of your way to make happen. Whether that's you're watching something funny or comedy, whatever you call it, stand-up comedy special, whatever it is, you're going to probably have to allow yourself to put those walls down to laugh because you have to put yourself in a little bit of a more open, vulnerable position to laugh, in my opinion. Like, when you're laughing, you feel safe. If you don't feel safe in environment, you're going to be closed off and you're not going to allow yourself to laugh at anything. So you kind of have to rebuild those muscles of allowing yourself to laugh and feel comfortable enough to laugh. And sometimes that— it's good to do that on your own when, like, put on a Put on something funny and just allow yourself to laugh, even if you don't want to. And it can be so healing.

It can be so, so freeing. And so laugh at yourself. And I encourage you to do this, like always. This is something I still do. Like, so I was sick. So I woke up sick. I woke up with a fever. And so I don't know if this happens to you, but when I'm sick, I'm like very, very clumsy. And I like try to do stuff and I like keep dropping stuff and I keep just like forgetting, like basically like where I'm going and what I'm in the middle of. At a moment where in the past it would've been a frustration, I basically kind of taught myself to laugh instead of doing that frustration. There are plenty of times I remember a lot when we were teaching sailing where like a line would get stuck or it just seemed— you have those days where one thing, you know that feeling, one thing after the other goes wrong and goes wrong again and goes wrong again, and you just kind of build up this tension. And so instead of letting that tension out as frustration or anger or a lash out, You can start to choose to let that out as laughter. You can start to choose to just crack up. And so that's what I do now when I'm like frustrated, you know, or when I would've in the past been frustrated. I'm like, where are these freaking scissors? And then I finally find them, or I'm going around doing something else and I try to put something on the counter and I dropped it. And like every single time I vacuum, there's this piece that falls off the vacuum.

Mm-hmm.

And I was cleaning that day that I was sick too, cuz I wanted to get stuff like What? Clean for this weekend, right? And so I was, I was cleaning and I dropped this piece, and then I tried to put it on the counter and it fell off. It was just one of those moments where I was like, you either laugh about it or you lose your mind about it. And you really can start to make this choice and laugh about it and not take life so seriously and not take— even to be honest with you, to go a little bit further— the insecurities and the sensitivity so seriously. Poke fun at yourself. Make fun of yourself. For the crazy stuff that you've done. Make fun of yourself for throwing an ice cream sandwich at your partner, for putting a hole in the wall. So you can poke at yourself, you can make fun of yourself, even your insecurities, but make fun of the little quirks that you have, the little things that you do.

Because it's crazy looking back. It's like something I would do is like when I would get so overwhelmed. I mean, everybody here knows what that's like to be overwhelmed and feel all that pain. I would get to that very overwhelmed state and I like, I was somebody who was like, I don't want to break anything. I don't want to do any like damage or throw anything or whatever. So I would literally just take my socks and then I would just pull them up and it would rip them, you know, just to let that anger out. I would like literally just grab my socks cuz I usually wear tall socks and I just pull 'em until they would rip and then I would throw my socks at the trash can. Yeah. So it's pretty funny. It's like insane. And it was crazy. Like, why would somebody just, you're mad and you rip your socks off? Like, just imagine that people did that. It's just like you get angry and then someone just rips their socks off and throws them.

Imagine you're at work and like your boss yells at you and you just like, you're late again. Okay.

So that's so funny. Oh my gosh.

It's like that.

Like you can make this stuff up in your head. There's sometimes— and I can't think of anything. I know there was something recently where I just thought of something that I thought was super funny, and I was cracking up. I was just in the car driving by myself, cracking up at some sort of joke that I made or some sort of thing that I thought would be super duper funny. Didn't share it with anyone. You want to look for these moments and you want to create these moments.

Mm-hmm.

And so what I want you to start to do is see that even in the depths of pain, even in the depths of PTSD, You can start to find these moments. You know, it could be adding an input of a little bit of laughter. I wouldn't recommend probably starting with a standup comedy special if you're a little sensitive around the edges, 'cause that takes a little effort. It'd be pretty tough.

It could be pretty tough.

Oh, but yeah, it could be something super simple like that. But what I want you to do and what my challenge for you to do is to start to look for moments, look for smiles, look for moments to laugh, look for someone else laughing. I cannot tell you, it cracks me up to watch somebody else laugh. I could do that as a pastime. You know how people like people watching, right? It's always interesting to people watch. I don't even know why they're laughing, but I know that it's funny. That makes me laugh. So look for these moments. Look for smiles. Look for laughs.

Yeah.

Make these moments start to happen. See if you can just actively kind of put that wall down, put that to the side. Allow yourself to poke fun at yourself. Allow yourself to laugh at yourself. Allow yourself to not take yourself so seriously. Realize that we're all a little wild sometimes. We're all a little whack sometimes. And it's part of the process. It's part of the game. It's part of life. We're all human and that's what makes life so special is that we can laugh at these things.

Yeah.

And also see that like how, how wild and wacky this is sometimes is really helpful.

It is. Yeah. So what are some things that you, that make you laugh or something that you can do today to make you make yourself laugh? I like watching fail videos on YouTube. Like that is something that makes me laugh almost like nothing else. Like just seeing people do crazy things and just like, it's amazing. So funny, people hurting themselves in like silly ways, and whether they're on quads or on a bike. What are some things that you guys like? Share it in. I'd love to like even check out some things that you guys, that make you laugh, and then maybe other people in here can get some good ideas to maybe get a good laugh today.

And it'd be a great idea to share these. Just share a quick post if you're watching a video that's funny to you, or if you see something funny and, or if you notice something funny, or if there's something that makes you laugh, notice that. Just really take it in. And I know I just saw Judy Shear kids, like it's hilarity and they're not even trying to be funny, right? They could just be eating something and it's just all over them and it's just cute. It's just funny. It's silly.

Yeah.

Right. Helene, I love this one. Watching dogs play. I mean, that's another great one. Joe sharing Fuzzy Iglesias. That's a comedian. I think he does a good donkey, not donkey impression, but a Shrek impression where he says donkey. I'm pretty sure that's him. So I love these. Jen sharing, I like standup and watching funny animal videos. That's awesome. That's awesome. I love to poke fun at my family members, to be totally honest with you. I like, in a very wholesome way, none of this is mean, and it all happens in the room with everybody else.

Yeah, to the right audience. To the wrong audience, it could be mean, but to the right audience, it's not at all mean.

But I want you to know, all parties involved, including the one that we're picking on, are involved in this. But if something were to go too far, we have kind of a signal for each other, right? And so there's multiple meanings for the word roast. We talk about roast as Comedy Central roast, We also talk about roast as roasting something in the oven. So when we're done with a roast, we'll just say, ding, the roast is done. Just like, ding, the oven went off, the roast is finished. I do this with my family and everyone's always in the room and everyone's kind of always on board with it. But, you know, I kind of like to poke fun at my family members and roast them a little bit, and they do the same to me. We all pick on each other and we have this great dynamic. And when I spend time with my family now, which is amazing compared to What it was in the past, we just crack up. The 4 of us just crack up all the time. We just laugh and laugh. And that's been a lot of healing on my part, a little bit of a change in dynamic because my part in the relationship of the 4 of us changed. And also because some of, you know, we're putting some of those sensitivities down. We're choosing to say, hey, we're gonna let these things down so that we can have fun with each other, so that we can all have basically a safe space to poke at each other, roast each other. But again, there's so many different ways to do this. You don't have to do that, but I encourage you to do it with yourself. I do. I really do. Because to be honest with you too, the more that you make fun of yourself, it's almost the more confident you become because you're aware, like, hey, this is a weakness I have. I have no problem with that. When you embrace, you own it. And when you own it, guess what? Even if someone was genuinely being mean, they can't hurt me.

Yeah, I know.

Because I can own it. And I can laugh at it. I can laugh at my flaws. Yeah, I know I have flaws. I know I have weaknesses, and I can laugh at them. And there's something really special about that.

There was an Eminem quote where it was something about like, if he points out all of his flaws, then nobody can hurt him or something. I don't remember what it was, but it stuck out to me. It was something like that. It was like, when you, when you own everything that's like, that anybody could make fun of you for, just like can't hurt you.

And I actually remember reading Ellen DeGeneres. She has this A couple of books. She has 3 books. And I remember reading her books and I don't know if there was a specific name for this type of comedy, but she said like growing up going through comedy clubs and becoming a comedian, there was a type of joke that she resonated most with and the audience resonated most with. And it was basically like a non-invasive joke where no one was the butt of the joke or she was the butt of the joke. And so that's why a lot of people—

The comedian versus the butt of the joke.

Yeah, the comedian, right? So Ellen herself. You know, would make no one the butt of the joke or make herself the butt of the joke. And she's expressed that she's not 100% on that all the time. You know, every now and then she does something different, but that's what makes her feel best, for her to be the butt of the joke.

Mm-hmm.

And I remember really resonating with that because there are certain comedians that I really like, and Kevin Hart is one where he's constantly making fun of himself in his life, in his relationships. His comedy specials are him roasting himself. It, it's, it's a 1.5-hour Roast of Kevin Hart every single time. Okay, and it's so so funny, and it's so I mean it's still inappropriate, but it's wholesome in its own very unique special kind of way because he's up there basically tearing himself down because he's so built up because he's so strong and so confident. Yeah, he's owning it. He isn't caring.

He's not even tearing himself down at all because he just owns it.

It can look like that. It feels like that. If you just saw the words written on paper, it would look like that, but it's not like that at all. You know, it's owning it. And it's being whole enough to do that. And part of being that whole is starting to do that, in my opinion there. So there's a lot of benefits to this. I want you to start to look for these things. Look for things that make you smile. Look for things that make you laugh. Look for somebody else smiling. I love when I find somebody else smiling. It puts a big old stupid grin on my face because it makes me so happy. And that radiates out in a lot of different ways.

And allow yourself to feel it. Allow yourself to Laugh, because for years I didn't allow myself to laugh because I had so much pain. And if other emotions start to come up when you laugh, allow those emotions to come out. So if you laugh and then maybe some, like, tears come out, allow those tears to come out. It can be healing to do that.

Yeah.

Where you start to open the door for one emotion and other emotions start to come out. Like, or it can just be overwhelming in a positive way to be like, wow, I'm laughing again. That's amazing. And then that will let other emotions out. But no, that's a good thing. So allow that to happen. If those emotions come out, allow yourself to cry, allow yourself to feel them and let it out, and then allow yourself to laugh some more and keep doing it. So, I mean, if you want something to laugh to, just play this recording back on half speed and then it'll be funny. Something that cracked me up, and maybe this will just make you guys laugh, and then I'll stop it with this. I haven't laughed this hard in so long, but I was having a barbecue dinner at the house I was living in at the time in the backyard. I set up this long table and then chairs all around it, and I put tiki torches around it.

Mm-hmm.

It was great. I made risotto and there was some food. Everybody brought some food. It was like a potluck thing. And so it was a long table, again, tiki torches around it. And then I asked my friend who was on— my best friend actually, who was on the other side of the table. I said, hey, can you pass the risotto down? And he is like, yeah, sure. And then he, so he picked it up, he got out of his chair, and then I got up outta my chair too to meet him halfway on the side of the table. And then he walked over to me and stopped with his hands out. holding the pot of risotto and I just started cracking up because he literally stopped with the tiki torch in between his legs because it was so low that the fire, he just stopped and like, just imagine somebody walking towards you being the nicest guy in the world. So sweet. So nice. So like he was trying to get up and be really nice, trying to hand you with like a, like, like a smile on his face, giving you a pot of risotto. And between his legs is a lit tiki torch. Like perfectly between his legs. And the flame was probably like That far away from the crotch, his pants. And it was hilarious. I think this was the first time I ever fell down on the ground laughing. Like literally, what do you call it? ROFL, rolling on the floor laughing. For real. It was the funniest thing.

So there's all sorts of moments like this that you create or you allow yourself. And honestly, it could not happen to a nicer guy.

That was the, that was the best part too, is like he was so—

what was part of it?

Because to see his like, mortified face and like slightly embarrassed, but then also laugh was like, oh my gosh, if you knew the guy, it'd be so—

It's a perfect situation. So there's all sorts of moments. We want you to start to look for them. We want you to start to create them. Even just allow yourself to enjoy these things. And I allow myself to just be free and laugh and have a good time and create this great experience because you can kind of let that wall down, let that judgment— you're never told to laugh at something silly. And, but sometimes it is about allowance, allowing yourself to do—

Oh, it is huge. You know, the silly things and just stop judging it and just enjoy it. Like you're there.

Yeah.

So I just, I like allowed myself to laugh at it and that's a huge part of it.

Be fully into it.

Yeah.

So we'll wrap up with that, but our challenge for you to share in the group as much as you can, to look for moments to make you laugh, look for moments to make you smile. See if you can just actively let that wall down a little bit. Let yourself poke fun at yourself. Let yourself bring a little light, little levity, even if it's dark humor, let yourself Bring that in. It's going to lift you up. You're going to feel how light that makes you feel. Create those moments to laugh and don't take yourself or your life so seriously because it doesn't have to be that serious. It doesn't have to be. Life is serious enough. We don't have to lock it in this seriousness box. Life is going to be serious enough. We can bring humor, we can bring fun, we can bring love, and we can bring light, but it's an active process to do so. So I think that wraps up what we have here for today.

Yes, ma'am.

We have some awesome stuff to cover next week. Yesterday we talked about setting boundaries with yourself. Next week we're going to expand on that a little bit. We're also going to be talking about refreshing your schedule and routines and really making sure that you're getting the processing time that you deserve and that you need to in your routines, and how to, you know, ensure that your routines are going to change and develop with you. Because routines often, as much as we want them to be set in stone and routine, they need to be a little dynamic because life changes. Even just the change of seasons can change our schedules. Kids can change our schedules. There's all sorts of things that go on. So we're gonna be discussing that next week as well. So if you have any questions, feel free to get them in. Ella's sharing, I used to ask Google to tell me a joke. I know Alexa and Siri, I know that they'll do that too. I can't say it. Mm-hmm. 'Cause they're all here listening, but I know that they'll do that as well. Actually, I recently learned at bootcamp, my bootcamp trainer has very young kids, all of them under 6, I think. And I believe you can ask Alexa to like fart. Or something, and she'll fart, I guess, a bunch of different like fart sounds. And then she'll ask if you would like to upgrade the farts and buy a fart package. I'm pretty sure it's Alexa.

Yeah.

Larry's sharing, I like to read daily comics in the newspaper. That's an awesome one. I love reading the funnies. I remember growing up and being at my grandparents and they would always read the paper and my grandma would make me like wickedly burnt toast. Terrible, terrible. Wickedly burnt toast and like a banana. And chocolate milk. She'd give my brother and I the funnies and my brother would feed them to us.

Yeah, that's what my grandma called them, the funnies.

The funnies. Yeah.

Imagine with those fart sounds on Alexa, somebody has to make that, upload that, upload enough to make it something that you can buy.

Like, that's the thing.

I was just listening to fart sounds and mixing it on their computer.

Be like, yeah, there's something funny.

Imagine that. That's someone's job. So funny.

Mimi sharing, I take a picture of a cat and imagine a scenario. Or an inner dialogue. I write it down and share it with some people to make them laugh too. I often laugh by myself for our writing. That's an amazing thing. I live for memes. I don't spend time on social media anymore. This would be the thing I say I miss most about social media. But every now and then, like when something's really funny, and I love this about my friends, my friends will send me like a screen grab of whatever the thing is. And man, do they make me crack up. And I gotta say, since not being on social media, since quitting social media, They're so much more funny because you only get the gold ones. Like, if somebody's sending you something, it's super funny.

What?

Darcy the singing ventriloquist. Oh, so today's topic is how to make your recovery journey fun, how to have more fun basically in life. We've had this question a handful of times through submissions, and we talked about it a number of years ago. We really haven't brought it up since. I mean, there's so much that we talk about on the journey. I thought this would be a really good time to talk about it because It's often so serious, and we just got off of our processing boot camp. And so bringing this fun, bringing this levity session here today, like, in and of itself, it's going to be healing. And that is something super special too. So it's something that you can just bring throughout your day, throughout your week, throughout your recovery. But I— what I wanted everyone to walk away with more than anything is that you can make the choice to laugh, to smile, to go down that route even in the darkest of times. We've been there in the darkest of times. We've done it in the darkest of times. You're gonna have to do it in your own way and kind of create your own path and what feels good for you. My sense of humor might not be yours, might not be Brad's, right? But at the end of the day, allowing yourself to go that route, seeing that route at the very least is, and very often can accelerate a lot of what you're doing, but help you get out of those darker places a lot faster. If you notice in the visualization exercises, A handful of them are based off of humor, not necessarily being a pattern interrupt, but it can serve as that. But they're based off of humor.

Right. It's giving you a different perspective on what you're going through.

Exactly.

Which is freaking awesome.

It is really super duper awesome. And then you can use these things as a pattern interrupt. You can pattern interrupt yourself. Like I said before, like there are a couple of times, and this just made me crack up because like, I'm going to take a bath and I'm going to feel sorry for myself tonight. Sorry, I'm busy. Feeling sorry for myself. That made me laugh. That made me see enough that, like, literally, that's what I was planning to do.

Yeah.

But that made me laugh enough to say, you know what, I would love to go for a walk with you instead. Or just enough of a laugh to get myself into a slightly better place. And all of those little moments matter, and they're gonna add up big time. And it's, it's just a helpful life skill to understand that you don't have to take life so seriously.

Yeah. One last thing here I wanna, I wanna talk about is if you don't think that you can find laughter in dark moments, I'm gonna give you 2 examples of why anyone anywhere can give Or can find humor even in the darkest of places. So one example is POWs, so prisoners in the Vietnam War. There was a story of an American, like this American colonel or something that was stuck in a POW camp, obviously not very pleasant conditions, very uncertain, not treated very well, as all of you can imagine. And he noticed that there were people who almost like 2 kinds of groups, you could separate them into 2 groups, but like one group was like, they were like, oh, we're going to get out by The end of the year, we're going to get out soon. And they were very serious. And the other group was like, no, we're not making any promises to ourselves. We're going to make the best of the situation as it is and hope for the best. And they also used dark humor, right? So they found humor in the little things. I forget like the little examples that they like said they were funny or, but like, like they would take like a seemingly, they would take a bad situation And find something funny about it. Like whether it be teasing something or about rats coming in and like chewing on your toes or something like something really bad and then making jokes about it. So like even in those harsh conditions with so much uncertainty, so much pain, they were able to find humor. And then also Viktor Frankl in Nazi Germany camps, he was a Jew in a Nazi Germany camp, was able to make, find humor, not only find humor, but also get other inmates to laugh in that environment. And those 2 examples for me are like, wow, anybody can find laughter. Anybody can find humor and it can be so healing and it can give you that element of control over your life. So that is something that I also wanna say is like, you can find humor no matter how dark it is. There is humor that can be found and it's a great way to cope with it, work through the pain.

And some of it's gonna be a skill and you're gonna find that skill sticks with you. It's one of those things that sticks with you. And I'll share one last quick little story. Judy sharing, I'm gonna wear Minnie Mouse ears at my 3-year-old's birthday party. And my husband is gonna wear some Mickey Mouse ears too. So I'm gonna be thinking about you this weekend. I love that. I love that. That's my vibe. Anyway, so I'm gonna leave you with that today. I want you to bring this to your life. Bring more laughs. Make the opportunity. Allow yourself. Sometimes it's gonna feel like make yourself, but start to break down that wall so that you can laugh, so that you can bring this to your life, to everyone in your life. Everyone is going to go up because of this. All right, so I love you. I believe in you at the very highest level. Everyone have an amazing— even if it's dark, it can be fun in these little moments. Okay.

Pat, Kayleen will not get this, but I get it. So I appreciate it. Uh, Pat says I can do a good Schmeagol impersonation. And Pat said I would scare you.

All right.

With that, let's get off. We'll end it here.

Pat's about to get scary on us. All right, guys. Love you. Believe in you. Have an awesome, awesome weekend. If you have something funny, if you see something fun, You think of something funny, absolutely share it with the group because it's gonna bring other people up as well and make everyone laugh. So yeah, I love you. I believe in you. I'll see you very soon.

Hey everybody, thank you so much for listening to this podcast. If you want to learn more about how you can coach with me directly, there's a link in the description you can check out. There's absolutely no pressure. The main thing is I wanted you to get value from this episode here, but I hope you have a fantastic day and I'll see you in the next one.