7. Wake Up: How to Wake Up and Live the Life You Were Meant to Live

What would you say if I told you that over a period of 78 years, the average person spends three years of that in intentional and conscious Choice? The other 74 years were spent in autopilot? What would that mean to you? What would you change if only three years of your 78 years were intentional and conscious with? What would you do in order to reclaim another year or maybe 10 or more? What would that be worth to you? Today we're going to talk about fear, trauma, autopilot, and how to wake up and live the life you were meant to live. Welcome to my podcast. I'm Dr. Nicole Caine, a naturopathic doctor with a master's in clinical psychology. I'm a consultant, operational author, founder of the ACT Method, and your expert in integrative approaches to anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, and trauma. Departure from the Fear and Anxiety in its earliest definitions, the word fear did not refer to a feeling, but rather, in early 1700s it meant danger or peril. It was not until the 1300s that the word fear became attributed to a feeling. Feeling fear in its truest definition refers to a specific danger that our conscious minds can address, a specific danger that we can do something about. Like a fear of falling is controlled by avoiding heights. A fear of small spaces is negotiated by staying away from small spaces. Or a fear of snakes can change your behavior so that you are unlikely to encounter a snake. It appears that the human race is born with two primal fears. They are the fear of heights, which develops around nine months of age, and the fear of sudden and loud noises. All other fears appear to be learned by the young and developing mind and are processed into complexes which become stored in the unconscious. Fear is necessary. It keeps us out of dangerous safety situations and preserves human life. Human life is always at risk and the world can be lethal. Being aware of potential threats keeps us alive. If you hear rustling in the bushes, the ability to determine if it's a friend approaching or a lion looking for supper will make the difference between your life and your death. Unlike fear, which is specific, anxiety is generalized, abstract, and vague. Jungian analyst James Hollis describes anxiety like a vague cloud of fog that crosses the highway, obscuring the path. The fog slows your vehicle, but if you get out of the car and reach your hand into the fog, there's nothing there. Anxiety and fear align us against our true self and puts us into survival autopilot, to realign with our true selves, to reclaim our souls and gain sovereignty from fear, we have to willfully release distractions, turn off autopilot and face our fragility. A big ask, right? But if I told you that you could reclaim another year of your life, or 10 or more, would it be worth it? If you're interested, let's take a journey together. Let us begin by exploring our complexes. Complexes, activation of past parts that run the show. Complexes, as described by psychoanalyst Carl Jung, are core patterns of memories, perceptions and emotions around ideas and images and the moment that we are enduring an important event. Our feelings, thoughts, coping mechanisms and understandings get stored and logged away with the memory of that event. The way we process and experience and store this event is largely dependent on our resources at the time of the event. There is a study conducted where a family was analyzed for the effects of trauma. The family was comprised of a man, a woman and their three children who were a baby, a toddler and a 10 year old. Frequent fights erupted between the parents and the children were exposed to screaming, breaking of objects and witnessed physical violence. When we looked at the family for signs of trauma, the revelations were surprising. If you were to guess which child suffered the most trauma symptoms, who would you suspect? The baby, the toddler or the 10 year old? When I first heard this study, I thought, well, the 10 year old, obviously they understand better what's going on around them. But I was completely wrong. The research revealed that it was in fact the infant that exhibited the more extreme trauma response. This study was repeated many times and we've come to learn that often the younger the victim, the fewer the resources and the less resilient they are to trauma. We live our lives carrying our history and our experiences with us stored and as complexes. These complexes live mostly in our unconscious awareness until they become triggered. And these triggers may emerge as fear and anxiety. When a complex is triggered, it pulls us out of the moment and brings us to the time and place and stage of development we were in at the time that that complex was created and stored. We are pulled out of our adult state and we enter an emotional and a mental state where we are flowing, flooded by understandings, reactions and coping mechanisms that accompanied that original state. Here's an example. Let's say you were in a car accident as a toddler. When your car was hit, it was by a red truck. Your childlike understanding may have believed, therefore, that red trucks are dangerous and stored that in your brain. Then as an adult, you may have a fear of red trucks. And whenever you see a red truck, you feel your heart palpitating and anxiety mounting. And even though that feels completely illogical and confusing in your adult brain. The reaction happens automatically. This is why we can feel infantized in our trauma responses. We feel a loss of our adult selves and feel like we've been sucked right back in time and are emotionally re experiencing the events that happened to us when we were little. Our minds racing with abstractions of what happened to us based on our child selves understandings and coping mechanisms. You are unconscious compliance and avoidance. So much of our lives are reflexive patterns of survival. In fact, we spend more effort every single day engaging in fear management than any other project. In fact, according to an article published in the journal American Psychologist entitled the the Unbearable Automosity of Being, they said that approximately 5% of what we do on any given day of our lives is a result of intentional and conscious choice. That means that 95% of what we do is done by habit. Wolfgang Keller, in his book beyond what do you Know? What yout Believe states if you live 95% of your time in unconscious autopilot, not 95% of your thoughts are reactive. Even your free will is a memorized behavior that you learned from third parties or heard as a child. You think from memory. If the average human lives to 78 years of age, let's do some math. They live for 683,280 hours. And we must subtract time for sleep. So let's say that the average person sleeps seven or eight hours per night. The average person will then sleep about 229,961 hours in their lifetime. So then we can calculate that their number of hours spent awake average about 453,319. And so if 90% of that time you're on autopilot, that only leaves 22,665 hours or 944 days and nine hours of life spent truly living. Wow, let's back up. 944 days out of 78 years. The average person spends three years of that in intentional conscious choice. The other 74 years are autopilot. Our lives are spent with fear automatically jumping in to promote survival. The system jumps in to promote your survival via two strategies. Compliance and avoidance. Compliance is where we align with the world and lose ourselves for safety and survival. This could be something like the romantic sleeping around with many partners to fit into masculine culture. He has lost a piece of his true soul. Or the business executive whose passion is not for profit business growth. But he's been hired by a large corporate firm and against his own personal values, strikes a deal that offers his investors Great profit to the detriment of small business. We make thousands of unconscious decisions every single day for compliance. And the more we comply, the more we avoid ourselves and the less contact with reality we are in. How are you complying in society at the loss of your inborn calling and mission? We strive to protect our survival and we drift away from the reality of the fragility of the human condition and our ultimate mortality. Avoidance is the second strategy we use to promote survival. While avoidance can be good, extreme avoidance causes alienation from our self. When we suppress our emotions, push them to the side, the self gets locked up and hidden. How are you suppressing your emotions and pushing them to the side? I had a client come to me. Her name? We'll call her Tracy. Tracy owned a multi million dollar company and as a result of a corrupted business agreement, Tracy became stripped of all of her rights and power within the company. The new ownership utilized gaslighting and threats against Tracy and her family and caused a great amount of emotional and financial hardship. As a self identified warrior, Tracy pushed her emotions to the side and allowed anger to fuel her next entrepreneurial endeavor. But a year later, a worldwide pandemic struck leaving Tracy unemployed, socially distanced and alone. In her thoughts, she tried distraction. She read personal development books, she took online courses and got drunk a lot. But eventually she came full circle again and encountered the one person she was completely unfamiliar and uncomfortable with. Herself. 17th century French philosopher, scientist, mathematician, inventor and theologian Blaise Pascal was quoted once saying, the greatest threat to our lives is the difficulty of being comfortable with ourselves in our private chamber. Assaulted with the reality of her own mortality, with the uncertainty of a pandemic, unable to distract and suppress, Tracy found herself locked in her own private chamber. And she had a choice to make. Does she buckle and self destruct? Or does she walk through the door into the unknown? Tragedy an invitation to freedom from Autopilot. When tragedy happens, fear ultimately causes us to come back to ourself. Fear and tragedy introduce us to our inner experiences of ourselves. It pulls us out of autopilot. And we can respond to the loss of autopilot in one of two ways. First, we can embrace our fears. Go deep into the core of our unconscious experiences and memorized behaviors. Awaken to our acorn's calling. Or we can push it deeper and suppress the calling with distractions. Drugs, alcohol, scrolling on our phones, oversleeping, getting lost in television or video games or prescription medications. Carl Jung wrote, until the unconscious becomes conscious, the subconscious will continue to direct your life and you will call it fate. What is your answer?

What are you going to do?

Kellert says that free will is a memorized behavior. But I say there's an alternative. If you allow your unconscious to become conscious, you will be turning the key in the lock of the door that invites you to live the life you you were meant to live. There is something absolutely amazing about the human psyche, and it is that it desires two things. One, to express our fullest nature through alignment with the self. And two, is it a self healing? In every single person there is a spark, a fire, albeit big or small, that feels life, that pushes us forward, that desires to be expressed. I call this vital resiliency. Maslow calls it self actualization. James Hillman calls it the acorn theory. Similarly, your body and mind are designed to heal. If you fall and scrape your knee without you even having to think about it, your body will heal that scrape. You are inherently equipped to be free. You just have to be willing to claim your freedom. To reclaim yourself and gain sovereignty from fear. You must do three. Release the distractions, face your fragility, and uncover your unconscious complexes. My love, freedom is not for the faint of heart. Embarking into a journey where you explore the complexes formed by the tragedies of your youth has often been described as the dark night of the soul. Who would want to do something like that voluntarily? Who would want to face the fragility of their own condition, be alone with their self and acknowledge the unbearable? How could that possibly be worth the pain when we experience loss of the other? Whether it's creature comforts, constancy, a sense of personal autonomy, health, or any other state of being that allows us to live our lives without interference, we will be forced to find what supports us within ourself when we experience the loss of the other. If we sit in it, we will see something inside of us by bearing the unbearable. We will arrive in an oasis that we did not know was there. You will never know what you're made of if you do not face the ultimate reality of your own individuality. But let me ask you what if you were to regain your dignity? What if you reclaim your own life? What if you were free from anxiety or depression or insomnia or panic attacks, whatever it is. What if you examined your unaddressed complexes? Ask yourself this. Do I want to walk that journey like an unconscious robot, or do I want to wake up? If, as you are listening to this, you are saying yes, then you are in the right place. Your soul is calling out to you. You are equipped to Take this journey whether you know it or not. And you are taking the first step right now as you listen to this today, you are worthy of writing a new story, of turning the page and starting the next act the way you want it to be. When we return together next time, we will discuss the following how do we face change? How do we move through suffering? How do I receive my calling? And how do I reclaim my personal sense of agency over my life? Until then, let me share with you some questions I want you to contemplate. How have I been living my life? Where has my journey been dominated by fear? Where have I colluded with fear just to get along with things? Where have I sacrificed my soul? Can I stand up and face this and risk being who I truly am? And who am I that is wanting expression in this life? And how do I step into my expression? In closing, love, live the journey you were meant to live. Don't run from it. Don't give up. You are strong enough. You've got this. And you know what? You're not alone. Did you know that we have an Anxiety Freedom warriors private Facebook group? If you resonated with anything you heard here today, check it out by clicking on the link provided. Hey everyone, thanks for listening. This has been Dr. Nicole Cain. If you want more free information on how to get your life back, check out my website at www.drnicolecane.com. if you want, you can send me questions, learn about consulting with me directly, and even preview my online courses. And now for the disclaimer.

The recording you just listened to consists of the personal opinions of Dr. Nicole Caine, a naturopathic doctor with a Master's in Clinical psychology. While these opinions are based upon literature, her counseling education, medical training, and clinical experience, this content should not be viewed as the definitive opinion on these subjects. Listening to this podcast is not a substitute for any sort of medical, psychological or other form of treatment. If you are in a Crisis, please call 911-OR call the National Suicide Prevention Line at 1-800-273-8255. If you're in need of counseling, don't hesitate to make an appointment with a counselor in your area. Dr. Nicole Caine is so passionate about people getting their life back. If this resonates with you and you think this podcast would help someone you love, please share it with them. Stay in the conversation with Dr. Nicole Cain about writing the next chapter of your life so that it plays out just the way you want it. Explore your options for working with her at www.Dr.nicolecane.com that's Dr. D R Nicole N I C O L E Caine C-A-I-N.com when you're there, be sure to take advantage of the free anxiety freedom one week challenge. We look forward to seeing you on the next episode of the get your life back podcast. Here's to your next chapter.