Taming the Inner Voice & Nurturing Mental Well-being [BONUS EPISODE Presented By BetterHelp]

This episode was sponsored by BetterHelp Online Therapy. Big thanks to Hasu Joe, licensed therapist and head of clinical operations at BetterHelp. Hasu Joe is not my actual therapist and we are not in a therapist-client relationship. Also, just because you might hear something on the show that sounds similar to what you're experiencing, beware of self-diagnosis. You'll want to find a qualified professional to assess and explore diagnosis. if that's important to you. Here's another question.

How do we continue to come from a place of compassion, humility, love, and empathy, even when we find ourselves navigating difficult situations that require us to stand up for ourselves and set firm boundaries? It can certainly feel challenging to be a warm and kind and nurturing person to somebody else when we feel like we're kind of all out of sorts in ourselves. So if you're really concerned about continuing to show up as this, what you're describing, like really wonderful person, you are working on yourself, even when we're navigating difficult situations. So give yourself time and space and put in the energy and invest in yourself to navigate those difficult things. Before trying to help a bunch of other people. Advocating for ourselves and setting firm boundaries is not the same as not being compassionate or having humility, love, empathy, all those things. These things can happen in parallel, but I do think it's very important and beneficial to continue to prioritize yourself. And remember that doing that doesn't make you a self-absorbed or selfish person. If anything, like it means that you're wanting to put in the care to continue showing up as the best version that you can be to anybody else, especially for yourself.

Yeah, and as a recovering people pleaser, this is one of the hardest things because I've always wanted everyone else to like me. So I've been overly compassionate and overly giving and overly whatever you need and here, I'm here for you. And I didn't create great boundaries for myself. and therefore I would feel overextended, I would feel frustrated, resentful because of that. And so again, this is probably one of the hardest things for a lot of people to do is to create these boundaries and know that you might ruffle some feathers and you can be loving and compassionate and kind in your communication with people and people still may be upset. They still may be frustrated and push you and push your buttons. and you get to be clear. It doesn't mean you have to be mean or hard on people, but you get to be clear to create your energetic boundaries with self. And I think you may lose or frustrate some relationships over time, but I think at the end of the day, you have to live with you, and that's the most important relationship. And if you're resenting and frustrated and exhausted, then you're not gonna live a joyful, peaceful life. So it's a dance, it's an art. on how to do this, and I think you can do it. It's just takes practice. Yeah.

And, you know, when you're, when you're setting boundaries with people, you're modeling something. You're showing them that you respect your own time and, and you, you're communicating without saying it explicitly that you're hoping that in this relationship they can be someone that respects your time, too, and you will be someone that respects them. and this ruffling of feathers, losing people sometimes in our lives, which can happen when you are prioritizing self. But I would challenge folks to think of it this way. It's like, I would hope that you want to surround yourself with people that want to be around who you are authentically, rather than just constantly trying to be around people that only like a version of yourself that you're curating for them.

Mmm. That's great. A few more questions. This one is has to do with parental rejection.

As many queer folks experience myself included, being rejected or not accepted for who we are, it can create a deep sense of unworthiness or not good enough that can bleed into many areas of your life, like self-care and self-love and repeating patterns of needing to earn love in adult relationships. So my question is, how do you overcome this feeling of not good enough and replace the lack of belonging and acceptance that you didn't feel as a child and maybe still don't feel from your parents? Thanks for your time.

And I know you touched on this a little bit before, but if who you are at your core is not accepted by your parents or your closest family members, How do you learn to overcome that feeling of I'm not good enough? Because everyone in my life has told me, I need to change, I need to change, and they don't accept who I am at my core. How do we learn to say, I am good at my core, but there are just certain people that don't accept that?

I think the answer is going to look a little bit different for each person, depending on where this core belief of not being good enough came from. And I am afraid that I'm not gonna be able to answer it sufficiently for everybody listening to this, even the listener that asked this themselves. So my encouragement really is to get into therapy, especially for something like this, because I'm not sure if you're referring to abuse, trauma, or is it something that's a little quieter but just as damaging, which is childhood emotional neglect. Was it that your emotional needs were not being met or nurtured by the folks that we now know are supposed to be the ones that love unconditionally? So, you know, part of this journey of healing for something that's happened to us as children, especially something like parental rejection, is rediscovering and reconnecting with that inner child. We've all heard that phrase.

Yeah.

And learning how we can be the adult and the parent for that child that we didn't have. How can we become this parent to extend the love, the acceptance and the unconditional, you know, everything for the child within us? We can re-parent ourselves and that's something that you can learn in your journey in therapy.

This is one of the most important things I learned in therapy and I went through a process for every week for six to nine months. It started to be every two weeks, maybe after six months, but it was almost every week for six months. And then it was every other week for the next few months specifically focusing on inner child healing. And, I thought this was weird when I started. You're talking to a former jock athlete from the Midwest growing up. We didn't have these types of conversations. where we said, okay, go back and have a conversation with the five-year-old you and be the adult in the room and ask your little self what he needed in that moment, what he was struggling with, how he was feeling. Because we didn't get to say those things to parents at those times. So we never said those things that we actually needed. But now we can go back and create new meaning healing and congruency from the five-year-old, the nine-year-old, the 12-year-old, whatever it was where you felt neglect, abuse, abandonment, or a lack of love. You can go back now as the adult in the room and have a conversation with that young boy or girl inside of you and start to create peace, create home, create safety if you never felt safe. and a place to talk to someone. And again, it might sound weird of having this kind of out of body experience with younger self, with current self, but for me, this practice of about six to nine months of specifically, I mean, I had a screen saver on my phone of my five-year-old self for almost a year. So that was a constant reminder to check in with the wounded part of my childhood, the psychological and emotional wounded part of me, that I was running away from, that I was masking, that I was overworking to compensate from, that I was people pleasing because I didn't want him to get hurt again from. And if we can with therapy, and I really believe that this is a thing you do with support. I think it's really, really hard to do this on your own. I just don't think it's as wise. We need that environment with a trained professional to support us in this process, to create a safe environment, to give us the tools, to give us the research and the science behind why it's so powerful and meaningful and to allow us to process authentically. And if we just do it on our own, I don't know. Maybe it's possible, but I just think it's going to take a lot longer and it's going to be a lot harder. So again, I really am such a big believer in therapy and specifically with BetterHelp. And I want people to go to betterhelp.com/Lewis. You get 10% off your first month. Even if you feel like life is really good, it's still worth going, even trying for a few months to see how can it be better? How can I outgrow certain things, shed the skin of the old and reinvent myself and in my relationships, in my career, in my health? If something feels like, okay, life is good, but I know I'm missing something. I feel like this is a great opportunity for you to get clear on your meaningful mission, Really process with someone who's trained, a trained professional from the comfort of your own home and start taking action steps to getting the results that you want. Again, to break free of the different pains, the different stress, the different overwhelm that has maybe kept you at a certain level and kept you safe and made sure that you feel protected, but you know there's something more for you. There's something more freedom, more peace, more abundance. And so again, I want people to check it out at betterhelp.com/Lewis so you have that support. Doing it on your own is just so much harder. And I've got one more question for you. This is again from one of our listeners who said, I feel like there's.

Almost too much information available on self-care and it's almost overwhelming. Could you simplify things and just give us some basics that we could do each day? that would help with our self-care.

What would you say as a licensed therapist and professional in this field that works really well? Some basics?

I'll just say this question is speaking my language. In this day and age, it is very overwhelming. There's thousands of ads that we get everywhere for this wellness product and that. And that's not to say that all that stuff shouldn't be here. There's a lot of helpful stuff that have come onto the market that's really great. But when we want to simplify and get the basics of what self-care is. You want to remember that sometimes self-care is not indulgent stuff that makes us feel good all the time right in that moment. A really good example of this is exercise and regular movement. A lot of people don't really want to get up and work out all the time, let alone a few times a week or, you know, the recommended 7,000, 10,000 steps a day, 30 minutes of cardio three times a week, like whatever it is. Sometimes people just don't want to do that. But this is a great example of self-care looking like going out of your way to prioritize your wellness. So, you know, if you think about somebody that you care very, very deeply, if they called you at 3:00 a.m. Saying they're stranded somewhere, you would probably get up out of bed and go get them. But when's the last time you would go to that level of Kind of like trouble for yourself. Yeah. You know, a lot of times we choose to relax over these things that we don't want to do. I'll just say movement. Regular movement on a regular basis is super important. Of course, if you have injuries, if you have certain specific things going on with your body, you want to check in with your own doctor, make sure everything is cleared to go. But we are not meant to sit around and be sedentary all the time. We are evolved to be moving and on our feet for a lot of the day, but our modern lifestyles are very different. Our modern lifestyles have brought us to the desk, have brought us to a chair, have brought us into a car, have brought us into this position that we're really not meant to be in. You know, anybody that you ask, they'll say if they sit for over X amount of hours or are lying down for X amount of hours, your back starts to hurt. Is your body telling you to get up, you need to move around and get limber? And two other really simple things that are basic to self-care is sleep. Sleep hygiene is what's going to help you with regular good sleep. Insomnia is a plague to all of us as modern people. And when we are deprived of sleep, we lose cognitive ability. We're more prone to being emotionally distressed. We can't focus. You know, there's a lot of sleep studies out there and research showing that people deprived of sleep for X amount of hours will experience psychosis. Depriving people of sleep is used as a torture method. So when you think of it that way, sleep, go to sleep, people. And a lot of folks have challenges in getting themselves to sleep at a reasonable hour because of another thing that we're all talking about now called Revenge procrastination. People tend to stay up really late at night because they feel like they didn't have a lot of control over the events of the day. And now nighttime is my me time. So if that's happening to you, you might want to reevaluate how you're prioritizing time or how time is being allotted throughout the week so that you can have me time during normal waking hours and then also focusing and prioritizing the me time in terms of sleeping. This is when your body recharges, rests, processes memory. Actually, I think scientists don't exactly know exactly why we sleep still, but they know that there's a lot of benefits that come from it and a lot of harm that comes when you don't. Right. And finally, what you're consuming. I'm very much talking about what you eat, but really I see it as what you're consuming everywhere. anything that you're putting as input into your body, garbage in, garbage out. So get in some good, nutritious, whole things that are nourishing to your body's needs. Of course, if you have individual considerations, you might want to connect with a professional in that way. But if you're consuming good stuff, then good stuff will come out, right? If you're consuming bad stuff, that's what you're going to, I think, bring into the universe too.

Yeah, and what you look at, what you hear, those things are how you consume as well. What you're watching.

Yeah, media content out there. There's so much of it. A lot of good stuff and a lot of stuff that sometimes is questionable to allow yourself to continue taking in. Some of these things can be really, really interesting, but it might be harmful to you. So you want to just keep in check. how you're feeling in terms of your emotional reaction to the stuff that you're consuming. Social media is a really interesting example. People love this stuff. They're addicted to doom scrolling. The fact that we call it doom scrolling, I think it's really telling to what it is that we're doing. So if you're finding yourself using social media to numb out other stuff, then it's probably no longer a benefit to your life.

That'S it. This has been powerful. I'm so glad that you were, have shared so much with us today. Again, I'm grateful for you for your years of expertise and the answers that you shared with everyone here asking these questions. And I think this is a constant reminder that I just am a big fan that having ongoing support is helpful in our lives, even when things are good, when you're struggling with something at either time, I go to therapy now and life is good. It's not like I have some big problem. I go because I wanted to continue to be good and continue to evolve beyond where I'm at. So it's one of the reasons why I go. But I also went when I was in massive breakdown and going through a breakup and struggling and trying to figure out like why is this happening and what do I need to look at within myself that's causing this pain and how do I mend and heal the memories of the past and create new meaning. so again, if you're looking for a clearer direction in your life, if you're looking for some healing, if you're looking for just more joy and freedom and peace of mind, then I encourage you to go to betterhelp.com/lewis. Again, you get 10% off the first month when you do that, so you can try it for a month and explore it, check it out. And you can also switch, you know, you can find a therapist and you can switch, I believe, at any time. So if you're feeling like, oh, maybe this isn't working for me, let me try someone different. You can do that as well over at betterhelp. They've got, again, online.

Support.

So if you have any questions, you can ask them questions right on the website. Again, betterhelp.com/Lewis. Is there any final thoughts that you have before we wrap up?

Just, you know, you owe it to yourself, regardless of what your life circumstances are, to invest in yourself. And investment can be through financial means, but also time, energy. You are all guilty of giving time and energy away to all kinds of people in your life. I hope that you allow yourself to invest that time and energy into you so that you can continue showing up in the best way possible.

Absolutely. Well, Hesu, I appreciate you very much for your experience, for your time today, and I'm so excited that we got to have this chat. and I know it's going to help a lot of people. So thank you so much for being here.

Thank you for having me.

If you're always putting yourself down internally, then how do you expect to develop the level of self-love that's necessary to reach your full potential? If you're always saying you weren't good enough or you aren't smart enough, something I did as a kid a lot growing up, then how would that negative self-talk not start to become part of your main identity?