3 Ways To Manage Your Emotions [MASTERCLASS] EP 1332

You are creating anger, you are creating misery. All this is happening from within you because the moment your thoughts and emotions are going to torment you with external stimulant, when you're free from the fear of suffering, that is when you welcome.

To the school of greatness. My name is Louis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now, let the class begin. Welcome to this special master class. We've brought some of the top experts in the world to help you unlock the power of your life through this specific theme today. It's going to be powerful. So let's go ahead and dive in. We have emotions. thoughts, feelings, emotions of anger, resentment from something that happened in the past, upset that we see on social media, frustrations in the world. Where should we be redirecting these thoughts, feelings and emotions?

You must punch a window pane or a wall better. A stone wall is good.

You'll feel it more. Yeah, exactly.

Because that is the model that the Hollywood and the television shows, everything is setting up when you get angry, you break something, all right?

Exactly.

So, see, first of all, people are assuming that anger is happening to them or misery is happening to them. No, this is exactly what I said earlier, maybe I didn't articulate it fully. No, you are creating anger, you are creating misery, you are creating joy, you are creating whatever. All this is happening from within you. Is it true all human experiences happening from within us?

It's, it's, yeah, because we perceive something.

And then we... Something else, something else may stimulate. But human experience is happening from within us, isn't it? Right. Whether it's love or hate or anger or misery or joy or anything is only happening from within us. The simple question I am asking is, what happens from within you? Should it happen your way or somebody else's way?

It should happen your way.

Of course, because the world will never happen your way hundred percent. Because there are so many stakeholders in the world, little bit will happen my way, little bit your way, that is fine. But what happens within me must happen my way. If what happens within me does not happen my way, this is the worst form of slavery, isn't it?

Wow.

Somebody decides what happens within me, somebody decides where I should sit, this is slavery, everybody understands this. Now somebody decides whether I am happy or unhappy, isn't this the worst form of slavery?

Yeah.

So this is the liberation that humanity needs to work at. This is what inner engineering means. Inner engineering is not some mechanical process, Because engineering means this essentially. You will say something is well engineered only if it works the way you want, isn't it? If this one doesn't work the way you want, when you live accidentally, anxiety is normal.

Yes, it's every day. But when you're living on purpose and intentionally and mindfully, you should be able to shift out of that.

No, no, no, no. I wouldn't use those words.

Okay, what words would you use?

When.

You say purpose, intention, mindful, see this is the whole problem with people, their mind is full all the time.

Right.

My mind is just empty all the time, nothing happening, nothing. That's why I wear a turban just to make it substantial. There's nothing in my head. If I am walking there, I am just walking, nothing happens. Because see right now, your hands are there. Suppose your one hand starts jumping like this. Or if let's say my hand starts jumping like this, what will you think? You think Sadhguru has some kind of ailment?

I just don't know. That's the way intelligent people do things, you know?

No, no. Suppose my hand starts jumping like that, you will think there is some ailment, isn't it? You will think, maybe Mr. Parkinson's is visiting me or something like that.

Sure.

So, your mind is jumping all over the place. Why is that not an ailment, I am asking? Your only comfort is other people cannot see it, isn't it?

Yeah, I guess they see it through the manifestation of you being anxious or tense or stressed or angry or...

Whether they see it or not. They see it or not, if any part of you is simply jumping without purpose, is that an ailment I am asking?

If any part of you is jumping without purpose, is it an ailment? I think in your inner engineering course, you talk about how we have certain faculties that we can't control, like going to the bathroom and doing certain things that are part of our body.

I don't know if that's a trick question. No, no, the pee is just filling up in the bladder. It's not jumping all over the place.

Gotcha, gotcha.

If it jumps all over the place, that is an ailment.

That's an ailment, yes, correct.

Right now, suppose, let me take a worse example. Suppose your hand starts beating you in the face.

That's an ailment, yes.

For sure. So right now your thoughts and emotions are beating you up from inside. Why is that not an ailment?

Now it is.

So, let us not think anger happens to us, resentment happens to us. No, these things we are creating. We have the power to emote. We can make it love, we can make it joy, we can make it ecstasy, but people have chosen to make it tension, anger, resentment, hatred. They have turned it that way. Now they will claim this is because life has been unfair to me. Life has not been fair to anybody. Especially not me. Life is not fair to anybody. Life is simply rolling. It's for you to learn to ride it. Sometimes we are in uncomfortable situations, sometimes we are in comfortable situations, sometimes we are in situations where we know exactly what to do, and sometimes we are in situations where we don't know what to do. Sometimes somebody else is controlling the situation, sometimes you're controlling the situation, this is how life is. If you are constantly stepping into unfamiliar situations in your life, that means you are growing at a rapid pace. If you are in constantly in comfortable situations, that means you are a stagnant life.

Hmm.

So if you... if you look for comfort, if you look for a comfort zone, Because the moment your thoughts and emotions are going to torment you with external stimulant, external stimulation that happens, what will you choose? You will choose a comfort zone. This means you will limit your life. So the moment somebody can cause you pain or suffering, this means unknowingly you will make the very scope of your life very limited. Only when a person loses this fear of suffering, that no matter what happens, this is how I will be. If this assurance comes to you, then you walk full stride because whatever happens in the life around you, it will not really make you suffer. Once you are free from suffering, only when you are free from suffering, when you are free from the fear of suffering, that is when you will explore your life in full depth and dimension.

How do we rid ourselves of the fear of suffering then?

See, as I told you, the suffering is happening because your faculties are not held in your hands. If I have to go to this in little detail, I will have to take a few minutes. See, for example, if I ask you a simple question, Do you want your intellect to be sharp or blunt? What is your choice?

Sharp.

Sharp, of course. So you understand, your intellect is the better... the sharper it is, the better it is. It's like a knife. So if it's like a knife, it's a cutting instrument. So if you give anything to your intellect, it will dissect everything and see. This is the nature of our intellect. You don't have to physically dissect, but it dissects everything and sees, what is this, what is that? This is the nature of the intellect. Without dissection, it doesn't know because It is a knife, it's like a scalpel. It must be sharp. A knife that is not sharp is no good knife, isn't it?

Right. Good for butter.

That also depends. If it just comes out of the refrigerator, even that it won't cut. So, if you are using a knife to do everything, To do everything, let's say you eat with a knife, you brush with your knife and you do everything with your knife, of course you will be bleeding. That's all that's happening. Only one dimension of intelligence within us. In yogic way of looking at things, we look at mind as sixteen parts. This intellect is just one part. Because our education systems are such, which are totally intellect oriented, human beings largely are using only one dimension of their intellect to do everything. You use a knife to stitch your clothes. What will you wear, only tatters? See, that's what you are seeing in Los Angeles right now, half the people are wearing tattered clothes, maybe they used a knife to stitch their jeans.

Exactly. With holes in them, yes.

So if you use a knife to stitch, That's what will happen, all tatters. Right now human life is in tatters, mainly because of this. Instead of using a needle, you're using a knife. So intellect is a very good instrument of survival. If you want to survive on this planet, you need a sharp intellect. The sharper it is, the better you will survive. But that will not make life, that will not put everything together. Right now because through intellectual process, People are trying to handle everything with so much care, they're trying to do everything right, right, right, right and a blunder. The result is a blunder, everything right but the end result is a big blunder because you're using a knife to do everything.

Hmm. When... Okay, here's a question for you. When you... When was the last time that you felt anger or resentment and actually expressed it.

I was just thinking of getting angry with you just now.

Perfect. Bring it. I love that.

The thing is, Louis, I did not give this privilege to anybody that somebody can make me happy, somebody can make me unhappy. Somebody can make me angry, somebody can make me miserable. I have not given that privilege to anybody. It's not that I am incapable of all these things. If I want, I can be all those things.

Right.

But I have not given this privilege to anybody. They can't do something to me and make me angry.

No.

I have not given that privilege to anyone.

Did you have that experience or give that privilege to someone when you were younger? Did you learn that at a certain point where you transitioned Till I was.

Twenty-Three, twenty-four years of age, from the age of probably eleven-twelve, I was always twenty-four hours angry.

Really?

Yes. Because I was on this binge of what is justice and injustice. So once you start looking what is justice and injustice, just about everything in the world looks unjust.

Everything makes you angry.

Yeah.

Yeah, everything, anything unjust means it makes me angry. And everywhere I see, whether at home, in school, on the street, in the society, in the country, in the world, wherever I see, I think this is unjust, this is unjust, this is unjust. So much injustice, always angry.

Right.

I mean, I feel like there's a lot, there's a lot of people in the, in America and in the world who a lot of things make them angry and there's a lot of injustice for people. So, When did you shift and how did you come to that realization that this no longer works for you in your life?

See, it doesn't work for anybody.

That's true.

Not just for me.

But for you personally, when did you realize?

The reason why people think anger is some kind of a virtue, because they say righteous anger, all right? Right now America is sheathing with anger. and they think it's righteous anger. This is simply because it takes some horrible thing to stimulate them into action. There's not enough love in your heart to stimulate yourself into action. Something has to poke you, you must get angry and then it propels you into action. So that kind of action sometimes will produce results, of course. If you want genuine results which will be good for everybody, we must do it when everything is right. But when everything is little comfortable, nobody does anything. When something horrible happens, then we will get angry and propel ourselves into action. Right now, this propelling yourself into action with anger, how long will you keep it up? You cannot keep it up forever.

You cannot keep it up for long. Yeah, you get tired.

If you keep it up forever, you will destroy yourself and you will destroy everything around yourself. So anger is become valuable because most people are so lethargic in their responses. Once in a way when they get angry, they feel empowered and seem to be doing right things once in a way. You must be doing those right things all your life. Then by the end of your life, everything might not have changed, but you would have made a difference. That's the way the world works.

So how... Man. So if people are lethargic and comfortable a lot of the times and they're unwilling to choose love and act with love to make a change, How do we get people to wake up when things are calmer so that they can act with love and get the change in the results they want?

See today, this whole movement, what you're seeing as Inner Engineering, is a movement from religion to responsibility in a way. Essentially what I mean is, religion means people are thinking responsibility is somewhere up there. Where is that up? Nobody knows, all right? You just have to believe where is that up. But now you are sitting in California, I am here in Tamil Nadu. If I look up, I am looking at looking up in one direction. If you look up, you are looking up in another direction. So my up is different, your up is different and by tomorrow morning again my up will be yours, your up will be mine. It will be big confusion. The damn planet is spinning and it's round. Which way is up? Does anybody know which way is up in this universe? Is it marked somewhere in the cosmos? This side up? There is no such thing. So, responsibility is up there. No, no, no, it must come here. We must understand, if we want to live in a wonderful world, it's only us and us and us who can make this happen. No other force from anywhere is going to make this happen. Unless we realize and transform ourselves from religion to responsibility, that is here, what this whole thing has come up is... See, because we have no explanation for creation. Before you and me came, so much creation has happened. Who did it? A simplistic, childish understanding of this is, A big man must have done it. So he is somewhere up there because you can't see him here, he must be up there. Now of course women are claiming, why not it be a woman? In India we sorted these problems out. There are... we have man gods, we have woman gods, we have snake god, we have cow god, we have elephant god, we have every kind crawling ones, creeping ones, flying ones because we foresaw all the future problems that may happen. You don't know who will claim what tomorrow. So we said everything is God. So what I am saying is, our idea of God has essentially come because we have no explanation for creation. How did all this happen? Such a complex, fantastic stuff. Who did it? Because we are human, we think it must be a big human being. Suppose you and me were buffaloes having conversation right now. We would definitely think God is a huge buffalo. Isn't it? Nobody could argue with us about that. We would definitely say he's a huge buffalo because that would be our imagination. Right now, this is our imagination. It's fine. If you are using it to settle a few things, if you are using it as a way of a psychological process, fine. But solace is one thing, solutions for life is a different thing. So one first thing that we must decide is those who are in extreme states of poverty, war, other kinds of misery imposed upon them, only for them you must give solace. Rest of us who have eaten our breakfast today morning or dinner, we should talk about solution, not solace. Solace is just a psychological process to settle something within you. But why? People who have eaten well, people who are healthy, people who have a life to live, why are they psychological problem? They should not have any psychological problem, that's all I'm saying. I know this will be very cruel for a lot of people, but they better get it because life is brief. If they don't get it now and they think being psychologically disturbed is normal, they will spend their life like this, it is not normal. To be healthy is normal. To be balanced is normal. To be joyful is normal. Look at yourself when you were five years of age. Were you miserable or joyful? And if somebody had to make you take the joy out of you by poking you with something, otherwise joy wouldn't go, you would be bouncing all over the place, isn't it? Today somebody has to make you happy, somebody has to work hard to make you happy. At that time somebody had to work hard to make you miserable. Today somebody has to make you work hard to make you happy. The whole equation has gotten reversed. What is it? What is it that happened to you? You just grew up.

It sounds to me, and it looks to me like when I'm connecting with people that a lot of things from the past, past memories, past pains, hurts, traumas are being brought to the forefront for a lot of people with the chaos of the now. How do we start to heal the memories of the past, the traumas of the past, so that they don't keep hurting us in the present.

Well, the first thing I would say is, you know, sometimes there's a crisis in well-meaning mental health professionals rush in to discuss the trauma while it's still happening. That's a really bad idea. People are generally traumatized because something actually horrible happened. And dwelling on it in the moment just makes it worse. It's not like anybody has a solution. Here's how you should understand this. You know, someone's just shot up your kid's school. Here's how you should understand this. That'll make it all better. It's like, no, it won't. If you have old baggage. That often comes up if you're having an argument with someone, doesn't it? You know how it is. This is partly why people don't like to have a dispute within a relationship because it's a thread and you pull on that thread and just God. Oh, that we had another rule. Do not agree with something you don't agree with.

Ooh.

Like if we're gonna, if we decide you and me, that we're doing this. We don't go back and say, well, I didn't really mean it. We don't get to play revisionist with our history. So if you don't agree, don't agree. Fight, object, or hold your peace. Because you see what happens with couples is there's a little fight and then one says to the other, yeah, but you did this. And then that person says, yeah, I know I did that, but then that was because you did this and each this gets bigger until what's on the table is why the hell should we stay together at all?

Right.

And so every fight becomes why the hell should we stay together at all? So that's another thing you want to do is you want to have the fight about this thing.

Not about everything.

Not about the past, not everything. It's like, okay, you were flirting. I think you were flirting. more than you should have been. Okay, so I go away and I think, well, okay, maybe I was. Okay, well, then we have to have a discussion about why. And maybe we can solve that. But mostly what we have to do is figure out how to not have that happen again. Okay, so we're gonna go see the same couple again. What is it that you want me to do? So I'm the flirtatious one, let's say. What do you want me to do? Well, you have to figure that out. It's like, no, I'm stupid like you. We're equally stupid. I need to know what would satisfy you and you need to figure out what would satisfy you. So I know. And that's also extremely useful is let your establish your conditions of satisfaction, make them explicit, let the other person know.

Yeah, you can't read someone's mind.

We're very bad at that. We're bad at reading our own minds, for that matter.

Yeah.

So if I have a fight with Tammy, let's say, sometimes I remember to say, okay, what do you want me to do right now? What can I do? What should I say and mean? You know, and you think, well, you shouldn't let the other person put words in your mouth. Well, fair enough. You know, I'm not asking for something false. I'm saying, I'd like to not have this happen. Can you see a way out? Is there something I could do to increase the probability that that's the route we could take? And, you know, sometimes that works.

But.

The other person has to let you know what they would find satisfying.

You mentioned. You mentioned sexual shame, and it triggered something in me about just the shames of the past that people tend to hold on to. I think I might have mentioned this to you the last time we talked. I'm not sure if you know, but I was. I was sexually abused when I was five by a man that I didn't know. And for 25 years, I held on to the secret, the shame. And if anyone ever knew about this, then I would never be loved. I, you know, right.

Because you feel contaminated. A permanently.

Yeah, I would, you know, I wouldn't have any guy friends. No. Girls would find me attractive. My parents would disown me. You know, I went down the rabbit hole. These stories of, you know, I'm the only one this has ever happened to. I never saw any examples of this happening to you.

Right.

And about eight years ago, I started to really heal that and start sharing that shame in many different therapeutic experiences that allowed me to start the healing process. I'm curious from your perspective with all the work that you've done, what is the best approach for someone to really heal their shame? Whether it's around sexual abuse or trauma or just anything, whether it be small or big or any type of shame that they might have, How does someone release shame in a healthy manner so that it doesn't make them a prisoner of these emotions of the past that hold them back?

Well, you hinted at a few things when you just described what happened to you. You said, well, first of all, you know, I thought I was the only person this had ever happened to. It's like, no, it's a universal human experience to one degree or another. Now, you know, I'm not saying everyone was sexually abused, and I'm certainly not saying that some people aren't sexually abused to a degree that's so extreme it's unimaginable where there are others, you know, get off relatively lightly. But it's still, it's well within the realm of normative human experience that sexual, that sex goes wrong in some way. At least you regret something that's happened, something you've done or something that was done to you. So putting it in to when you're the only person that something has happened to, that's really not good, right? Because it alienates you even from yourself. You have no idea what to do with that. And so that's sometimes why people find it such a relief to have their illness diagnosed. It's like, oh, there is, this is known, there's a category, other people have had this experience, maybe there's a pathway through it. So just knowing that you're not the only person like that can be very helpful. Updating, it's like how you were how old?

Five.

Okay, well, one thing to realize when you're 25 and you were abused when you're five is that you're not five anymore.

Right.

Right. That the person to whom that happened is no longer there. You're there. But so, you know, you might feel afraid of relationships. You might feel afraid of all sorts of things. But a lot of that was, you're sort of feeling that like that residual five-year-old. I tell a story about one client I had. She was abused by her older brother and she told me this story and I drew a picture in my head while she was I kind of pictured her at five and this teenage, hulking teenager, taking advantage of her. But as she told the story, I realized that her older brother was only a year, two years older than her. While he was seven, was like, okay, well, they were, she wasn't the victim of a tyrannical male in some sense. They were two badly supervised children. Now, that doesn't mean that what he did was right. But she was still the five-year-old in the memory, but she was 27 or so when she came to see me. And so the first thing I did was just point that out. It's like, think about the seven-year-olds you know. For a five-year-old, a seven-year-old is an adult. But for an adult, a seven and a five-year-old are clearly both children. Well, that just changed things somewhat. It made her feel less vulnerable in the moment. What your brain wants from you in relationship to a traumatic memory is indication that you're no longer vulnerable to the same problem. That's what memory is for, right? You remember something bad and you process it so that you change your interpretation or your behavior or the situation or whatever you can change so that it isn't going to happen in the future. And that'll, if you do that thoroughly, you'll generally let yourself rest.

It's to. You have the memory to protect yourself from it happening again.

Well, that's the purpose of memory in general. You.

You. You.

You make sense of your past Behavior so that bet the good things that happen to you can be duplicated, and the bad things can be avoided. It's not to make an objective record of the world. It's to make a functional map of the world that you can apply to the Future. And so.

So how do we let that go? How do we disassociate something that happened a year ago, 10, 20 years ago, that is no longer happening, but is seems to be triggering us?

Oh, it's very, it's, it's very difficult. Well, I would say, you know, one of the things you need to develop if you've had an experience like the one you had, perhaps, because I don't know the details, you probably need a theory of malevolence. you need an explanation. It's like, how could a person do that? Well, you have to have an it.

What if the explanation isn't good? They were just bad person. They just.

Well, then you need a philosophy of bad. You need a philosophy of evil. You have to understand it so that you're no longer a victim of it. You have. Because otherwise you can't put the event in a. In a context, right? You know, and sometimes that means the development of real. a real philosophical sophistication. And that can help because then, you know, then you can start to separate out malevolence from benevolence because maybe you're afraid of any intimate relationship now because it's been contaminated with that and everything's fuzzy and foggy. And so you need to understand the person who did that, at least to some degree, so that you can separate that person out from all the other people around you who that you encounter in situations that might be reminiscent of it. You know, so you, you felt vulnerable for out for perhaps you felt ashamed. All those things have to be gone through. What do you think? You know, when you're ashamed, when does, what elicits that? What are the eliciting cues? What do you think when that happens? All of that has to be taken apart. I said in this Beyond Order book that, you know, if you have a memory older than about 18 months, that still bothers you, right? It's still got emotional resonance. They write it out.

Older than 18 months ago or before?

Yeah, no, older than 18 months ago or more.

Got it.

Yeah. Otherwise, it's not really in the past, right? It's still happening. That, that, whether you should delve into something, how you should delve into something traumatic that's currently happening is a whole different issue. But if it's an old memory and it still bothers you, it means that you haven't decomposed that experience sufficiently to detach it from the emotion. So imagine when something terrible happens to you, you don't understand it. So then you might say, well, if you don't understand something that's happening to you, how can it be terrible? Because doesn't terrible mean that you understand it? And the answer is, well, you understand things in stages. And the first way you understand a terrible thing is by freezing in terror or running. That's the understanding. It's not conceptual. It's embodied and emotional. And so event terror, That's the first category. Okay, now the next question is how do you get it out? How do you get out of the terror?

Well.

You realize that nothing truly dangerous is happening. Well, what if something truly dangerous did happen? Then you elaborate your view of the world to the point where you're no longer vulnerable to that terrible thing. That's extremely difficult. So the memory of something terrible stays terrible until you effortfully process it and decompose it into, well, often into a much more sophisticated map of the world. And it's really hard to do that.

I think we have like maybe five, six, maybe seven strong positive memories. Then we have five or six or seven like strong negative memories that we always kind of reflect back to and think about. And obviously there's filler memories, but I was trying, I was like, I don't really remember much from ages 5 to 18 in between those 5 to 10 memories on each side.

The reason that you have those really high positives and maybe really low negatives was because of the emotionality attached. So the bigger the emotion we tend to to be able to retain those memories. Those memories. Because our memory center, our emotional center, our limbic system, it's all interconnected. And a lot of the reasons why we encode and then can retrieve, essentially put the memory in and access it later, is because of the emotionality.

How strong it was.

How strong it was.

So what were the memories you had, the experiences you had that created the limiting beliefs? Scarcity.

It's interesting you say this because then there's another category and this is where I fall and I actually diagnosed myself with a memory impairment for quite some years. Memory impairment based on the fact that I had no memories.

I dated a girl that said she didn't remember anything between before 18 one time. I was like, she was super positive and amazing and loving. And I was like, there's something off if you don't remember anything before 18. Nothing? I was like, how's that possible? There's got to be some serious trauma that you're... Right. And later I found out like there was incredible trauma.

But I think societally, so there is that. So when I realized I had no memory, I had two theories. Two working theories. Two working theories. Two working theories. One was that I had such a cataclysmic trauma, you know, that I can't remember and that washed all my memories. And I spent a lot of time thinking and oh gosh, you know, what could it have been? And I keep coming up with, I don't, and then the other diagnosis that I gave myself was a memory impairment. So anyway, Flashing forward, I've now come to realize that I started to share when I got the Instagram platform. I started to talk a bit more openly about my lack of memories. I started to understand our nervous system and our stress responses a bit more. And I came to realize that more of us than you would realize are like this ex of yours and myself that we don't have memories and it doesn't have to be, you know, biological thing wrong in our brains and it doesn't have to be the big T is like the big T trauma that I think a lot of us talk about, the big cataclysmic event.

I feel like you'd remember the trauma.

But, yeah, so sometimes it's a low lie or a low level stress, chronic stress, an inability to have emotions present in the home that results in that lack of memory. So anyway, to answer your question though, the way I came to know that I had a lot of my lack-based mindset was because we still remember. So I have people who reach out to me and are like, oh my gosh, if I can't remember how well heal. So I don't have a visual memory. I can't go back in time. And when I talk about inner child work and you go back to heal, you don't need the memory to heal the way that I see it, because we all are a walking memory, whether it's in my habits, based on our reactions, our triggers, our patterns, the thoughts that we frequently think. So a lot of my orbit around lack based or not having type of things, lack of consideration. So we can see evidence of our past, whether or not we see our past.

Yes. So you were being, you know, for example, you were like, where's my food? My half is gone. Or you took three fourths. And so that's definitely like reflecting a memory of experiences or an experience you had that you held on to and said, like, I'm not deserving of enough or there's never going to be enough for Whatever the story you said to yourself, right?

A lot of mine was based around this concept of being considered. So for me, it was a bit of emergence between lack. So when I attribute that to my dad, he very much was, my parents were much older when they had me. My mom was 42 and my dad was 45.

How old are you now?

So, and I am 30, I'll be 37 in September. So, same age. So, yeah. So, my dad very much had a lot of the depression and error-based thinking. I mean, my garage looks like a fallout shelter with literally twine wrapped up because enough twine put together, you have a rope. I mean, that kind of so very direct ways and indirect ways. I'm sure my dad's messaging about money and holding and keeping, and then the consideration piece gets wrapped up in there for me.

You weren't being taken.

You weren't being considered.

You weren't being seen or being thought about.

Comes to my mother who was very much emotionally completely vacant, absent, and so not feeling seen, heard, understood. So for me, when items would go missing, like my brownie that I really wanted, it was, it became not only do I not have enough for me, but the meaning that I'm not thinking about was, I'm not considered. And that would open up a really deep wound. So when my partner's looking at me like, what the hell is wrong with you? It's a brownie, Nicole, I'll go get you another one. you know what I mean? So, but inside, I was like a little girl who is not being seen. I was being told that there's not enough for me. And, I mean, so that's where that pain was coming from when I was tearing around the apartment about my brownie. It wasn't about my brownie. And I think that's the way that, I mean, if we all look at ourself and our patterns, and I'm always talking about developing self-observation to do that, all of our Clues are there. Our, our past is present with us, and that's why we're stuck, and that's why we can't. the way I see it, at least. That's why a lot of us struggle to move forward, and that's why I hear the word stuck probably more often than I hear any word spoken.

So how do people get unstuck?

First, I think consciousness. We have to become conscious to ourself because we're in our autopilot 95% of the day if we're not conscious. And that's going to be the program. I mean, the computer analogy is, I think, the one that we all understand the most. That's going to be the program that we're running day after day after day. So without consciousness, there is no change. and then becoming conscious to our patterns. We are incredibly habitual creatures as humans, whether it's our daily habits, you know, behavioral habits, whether or not it's our patterned thoughts that a lot of us have. We all tend to think the same content type thoughts. And then the way I say it is they induce feelings, actual changes in our body's physiology and our neurotransmitters and our stress hormones. And then that becomes our normal. and that becomes our stuck place. So without Consciousness, I don't think change happens.

So awareness, Consciousness, awareness of our patterns, of our triggers, of our pain, of the trauma.

Right.

Does that mean healing the past first and, and reflecting on all the past? Is that why people do therapy? Talk therapy? Because you're talking about the, the things that created the pattern today.

Yeah.

I am always a Believer, and I explore this within myself a lot. How much is the past necessary. And I keep coming to the conclusion that it's necessary that becoming self-observational understanding, I think that developing through a mindfulness-based meditation practice is incredibly helpful because it actually helps us to fire up our brain in a new way that then allows for self-observation throughout the day. Because I don't think there's no magic cushion, there's no magic anything at the way I see it. We can't do something once and then expect my day to look different magically because I've meditated in the morning. Yeah, there's some gains and some peace. I mean, a joke you made, oh, I meditate in the morning so I can calm my mind. Yeah, we get a little residual, carry out, carry away from sitting and meditating. But if I'm not watching myself throughout the day and if I don't train myself to watch myself throughout the day, to watch my patterns, to watch the thoughts that are causing those emotional reactions, especially to see when I'm triggered just when I'm having a big feeling about a current event. And typically the feeling is really big because it's about the meaning assigned to the event, the similarity of this now event based on my past experiences. And so there's always a reason why things are way bigger than they maybe ought to be logically in that moment. And then that's where we dive in and give ourselves some new either releasing the emotional valve, soothing our own emotional wounds. in that moment, not looking outside of anyone or anything else to make us feel better. At least that's the way that I view it.

So you're saying no one else should be determining our happiness?

Yeah. The big promoter of that.

That's not a shocker.

Yeah, yeah. I talk a lot about interdependence is the kind of term that I've been going back to a lot recently. Essentially being, you know, because we are social creatures as humans. We actually benefited quite quite greatly from having tribes, you know, as we were evolving in terms of safety and division of labor. So as I see it, we all, we need, quote unquote, little n, we little n need relationships. But I think what interdependence means to me is being able to be a self-reliant and resilient, you know, human meeting all my physical, emotional needs separately and then having that shared space of relationship.

How does someone become interdependent if they've been so reliant on the needs of other people, especially under 18, the needs of parents for financial or housing, food. But if we're talking adults, how do you become interdependent? And you have a lot of trauma.

Or pain or... Well, I mean developmentally, Lewis, that is the reality. Up until a certain, at this point, I think think, unfortunately, because of some of the financial struggles that many people are having, I think even now adults are finding themselves much more compromised and dependent.

College debt. Yeah.

Place or living, you know, back to live at home to be able to pay for college debt. I mean, it's really, it's a shame. It's sad because I think we're shifting back into that more just necessary dependence. So wherever you sit on that Spectrum, I think about breaking those patterns of looking outside of ourself to show up for others, take care of others, get my needs met by relating with others, whether it's because they make me feel better or they distract me or I've learned that I come by this really naturally myself. My family was and a very large reason why I'm not able or I choose now not to have contact with them is they are so enmeshed and codependent where there's just no boundary and direct and indirect messaging that I got growing up was that I was responsible for other people's feelings in particular. So for me, evolving out of that and starting to separate myself off and just see myself as a self-contained human also meant then showing up differently in my relationships, putting up the word we all love to hate, which is boundaries, and learning how to carve out space, not only physical space where my needs might be different than another person's needs in that given moment, but more importantly, emotional space. And that's, I think, a struggle that a lot of us have.

Yeah. I mean, I've, man, I feel like there's a lot of people that struggle with family, family and boundaries. I've gone through this challenge myself with different people in my family throughout the years. And on one end, I have a lot of guilt tied to responsibility to make sure my family's taken care of, at least basic needs, right? On the other end, I'm like, okay, we've all come from the same place. We all have certain skills and the capacity to take care of our basic needs. It's not like we were homeless or something like that. Like we all got college degrees. We're all very privileged in certain sense, right? Sure, we all faced a level of trauma and have our own level of limiting beliefs based on experiences and trauma that each one of us felt separately. But I still have this problem, this challenge with like, okay, do I just make sure everyone's taken care of all the time? And then I feel taken advantage of or abused or not respected or whatever it is. Or do I set boundaries and have people potentially hate me and not want to talk to me? You know, you hear these catchphrases like family is everything. always be there for your family. Nothing else matters but family. But what about our own emotional well-being? Doesn't that matter?

Yeah.

That's a good question. So how do we manage the guilt and pressure and the feeling of responsibility of needing to provide for our family or take care at all costs versus having personal freedom and peace in our own heart?

Yeah, absolutely. It's tough. I made that noise when you said that first one because family is everything. Might as well have been a plaque. In my home. In my home. I mean that was said as a mantra. Family is everything. Family is everything. Family is everything. It was under the guise of the Italian, you know, culture. My dad is very much, you know, kind of 100% Italian. So-- and if you're not a part.

Of the family is everything motto, you might as well not be in the family.

Yeah, it was really so a lot of us, I do know that we get that direct. Some of it's a bit more indirect where you're just kind of not urged or things aren't fostered that take you out of that family unit. So there's a lot of ways that I see it, that these messages are internalized, and then we become the adult that begins to believe that ourself on some level. So the thing I will always say, first and foremost, is boundaries suck, especially when you're creating them with our families. I mean, these are Dynamics that have been sitting, set in place for as long as some of us have walked the Earth. So when we change a dynamic that's already one way, it sucks even more. However, I say that because it's uncomfortable to put up boundaries and to start to define limits of what it will no longer work for you. But what I see that saving ultimately over time, so the immediate discomfort, that's really uncomfortable for some of us.

It might be immediate for years.

It might, yeah, but the way I see it, on the other side is a much more sustainable relationship. Because even in the description you said, right, I start to feel resentful, taken advantage of. And the problem there is, I then look to these people who are taking advantage of me or not respecting me or not giving me something back and I get mad at them and then the relationship suffers. But unfortunately, I have to look at me and the role that I played in continuing to show up in a situation that wasn't working for me.

Wow. I learned a lot in the last few years about setting back. Like, I used to really care about everyone's opinion about me, like really and want to try to like win them over if like one negative review, like how can I win this person over, even though there's thousands of positive comments or whatever right on something. And I was just like, I'm not gonna be able to change someone's mind necessarily. And me putting energy on one person to try to make them like me more is a waste of time. We've got to, I think we've got to continue to just reflect on like, okay, this person's not resonating with me. Is there something I can do to improve to move forward? But if not, I'm not gonna put my energy on trying to save one person's opinion about me, right? So, yeah, I like this. So setting boundaries, define the boundary, creating like a calm communicational request with the boundary and then staying your word and following through on the boundary. Otherwise, I'll never be met.

Yeah.

So how do you feel a year later not talking to your family now?

It's been a, it's been a year. I mean, coming to the decision to not talk to them was complicated. It was really difficult. And that's why I very openly and honestly about it too, because I think I'm very surprised when I get messages of other people that have certain amounts of distance between their family, complete no contact, and I was not aware that there were so many other people that had had to put or had chosen to put distance in, because I did not come by that decision easily. It was painful for me.

35 years of your life.

To do that, yeah, and I don't want to hurt them, and I do love them, and I do want what what's best for them, but I also have to love me and what's best for me. So when I say it's been a hard year, I mean, I have moments, you know, the holidays, and there's the positive, the negative of that now, you know, on the one hand, it's like, oh, I can actually choose what I want to do for the holiday. That was completely new. Me and my partner are starting to make our own life traditions because a requirement of family is everything is. You better believe you're showing up for the Big Italian Christmas Gathering. So I was given little flexibility to have space apart around holidays, but obviously the other side of that came sadness, knowing that my family was having a holiday without me, with my nephew who's young there. I mean it's complicated on a lot of levels.

Are we talking bad about you or what?

I know that it's being viewed probably not me. I'm pretty positive and my partner is very aware of this herself, that she's probably been villainized, it's probably her who's taken me away from the family. I mean, you know, whatever story that they want to are gonna create, they're gonna create.

It's tough though because, you know, unfortunately, sometimes if family is only destructive towards you, you shouldn't have to stay there and be responsible for their joy and happiness for decades if they're always destructive towards your health, right? On another end, you could say, well, I'm just not gonna allow it to affect me.

Me.

I'll be around them, I'll still show up. I won't like distance myself from the family, but I'm just not going to allow their thoughts or words or actions towards me affect me. Is that something that's healthy too though, just to be in the space while there's manipulation, guilt, shaming or whatever, judgment, whatever it's happening in family dynamics. Should people do that or should they more separate themselves fully from family if it's a constant...

I think if they can, I mean if they can find the way. So for me, I got really good at being okay with it because what I would do and I didn't, even though I heard this word in my schooling, I did not realize that this is what I was doing is I would dissociate. Dissociate? Dissociate, yeah. So I would, I call it my spaceship where I would go away on. You weren't present. I wasn't present. I mean, I got very savvy. You would not have any idea having a conversation with me, you know, I would be in that. Looking through me. Yeah, so let's, yeah, so let's let me tie this all together. The reason I could not remember my childhood is because as I dissociate it. So I wasn't present enough to put it in, so there's nothing there to re-access so that's just to tie that all together. I was physically present, but that was out of, yeah, because of the emotional overwhelm of the family, the anxiety and no one modeling or helping me to navigate those feelings as we do as children. I will always say this as children, I believe we come to this planet however you think we get here as adaptive, intuitive creatures.

Yeah, of course.

We all have a guidance system and we all are incredibly flexible and adaptive. So I adapted. I dealt with my own emotions my own way, which was I dissociated. So some people though in adulthood can find the way to show up with their families. I talk a lot about depersonalizing, simply meaning not owning it. Even if they say something negative to you, if you can see that as more of a reflection of them, you can maybe come and go and leave that interaction. and be okay enough. You know what to expect. You're not expecting them to change. You arrive, you deal with it. You can maybe, I think humor is incredible, and then you leave. I did not find myself able, though, for that. I did not want to use my old habit of dissociation. And then, like I said, because of just the living structure and just the in-depth, ingrainedness of their dynamics, it was much harder for me to find that okay space. I don't know honestly what the future brings. I'm just, I'm doing and I'm using and so part of what would happen, I would go back, you know, to visit and then my partner would notice this as well and I would then become almost regressed. I'd become reactive. So I was trying to heal but I would only get so far and then I'd be pulled right back down or the next health crisis, I'd be pulled right back in. So my healing was limited. So this year has been incredible for me to be able to actually gain some more full traction to do my own inner healing so that I don't know if a future comes and I can have some version of contact with them. I'm not sure. But I know that I have to be in a different place if I am going to be that person who can come home, let them be them and leave that home intact.

Well, I'm curious. I feel like a lot of people have challenges, right? Whether it be family or living believe, scarcity, relationships, health, whatever it may be. And a lot of people do talk therapy. But why does it seem like most traditional talk therapy doesn't work and people keep going? And how can it work better for them? What do they need to do so that it starts to see benefits and results? Yeah. What's your thoughts?

I'm really happy you asked that. So one of the reasons I think, and this is, this happened in my own life, so anxiety was all I knew. I went to multiple years of talk therapy myself. I was actually in what is called a psychoanalytic training program. So think Freud, the couch, clocking. I mean, these are people that go into treatment hour. I mean, each day of the week, you know, five days a week for an hour. So I was training in that modality. And part of that training was we had to lie on the couch ourself. And so at some points I was up in, in therapy two hours a week. I was on medication. I had, you know, my SSRI, my benzo in the back pocket, and I was taking the traditional routes of treatment, and I still wasn't getting better. So for me, realizing that we have to look at the whole person, that's why I now work holistically, that there's a body that I'm. That my mind that's unwell, if you will, is attached to. So for me, it was exploring the nutritional, the sleep, all of the. lifestyle based stuff because I was so physiologically out of balance that I wasn't able to... A lot of my symptoms really of anxiety even, sometimes even of depression or what we think of as depression are the result of this physiological imbalance. Yeah, lack of sleep, anxiety, lack of sleep, anxiety, big time food, gut damage. I mean, we now know that the gut is incredibly important in our health. It's not only where nutrients are absorbed, that damage to the gut that results in chronic inflammation that can be really, really problematic in terms of our mental wellness. So for me, without that, I was just contributing and exacerbating my anxiety. So no amount of talking in a room the way I see it or even medication because we also now know that the medication that we thought all the neurotransmitters were in our brain, like I said, are in our gut.

Yeah, so we're doing talk therapy then having a gallon of ice cream and pizza afterwards, it's probably not going to help us because we're gonna go up.

Down, up, down, up, down constantly. Yeah. So, and, and I can assure you, I've yet to find a program or meet a clinician, and I now have a whole network of them that I'm connected to that have had any version. I mean, the nutrition, the gut, the body is not mentioned in any, in any training program. So I think that's a huge limitation. I also know that another big, big problem for a lot of us, whether or not we have the big T of trauma or the so the little T of trauma is a dysregulated nervous system. Yeah, so now there's science. Yeah, and now there's an incredible amount of science. Even Dr. Steven Porges is amazing. He does polyvagal theory. And so to put it really simple, unless we start to address that dysregulation in our nervous system that at this part most of us have, that's gonna limit treatment.

So the sympathetic, is that fight or flight?

Fight or flight. Most of us are spending most chronically in fighter pilots. 60-70% of our time. I mean, from this, I mean, I'm looking out at the vast city in the background. I mean, for some of us, the city, the construction, the traffic, is enough. My mind has now taken on a whole other capacity to induce stress.

So a lot of us humans are living chronically stressed. You could be in peace, you could be in nature, but your mind could.

Be in traffic thinking in anxious thoughts. And then you could have induced a completely in a panic attack. I mean, I've seen it happen in my office. you know, content we're talking about before I know it, the person's having a complete visceral reaction.

Right?

So without regulation of that nervous system, I see that treatment talking about it only goes so far because we had a great session. Thanks, Lois. See you next week. And now I'm out out the door with my overactive nervous system, and that next thing's gonna activate me, and the next thing's gonna activate me, and I'm gonna have a fight with my partner that also speaks to the power of the subconscious. so what therapy is, is talking from the conscious mind. We can have a great insightful, you know, therapy session. I can understand. I can even have a great game plan, but then I'm back out the door. And if I'm not conscious, I'm back in my subconscious, and then I'm back in those patterns. So then what I would see week after week, me too. I thought I was very insightful. I thought I knew myself, right? And I'd work with people. We had a great session, and back the next week, and it's the same rapport. Oh, got in the same fights with my partner. Right. Still stressed out about work. It's like nothing's changing. And it's because, again, therapy, the way I see it, only addresses that conscious mind. Even the best laid plans of what we're gonna do that next time we're activated only go as far as me remembering to do. Being aware and mindful of that moment when we're triggered, right? To do these new things.

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