Maureen is one of my coaching besties. She and I talk all about emotions, and the importance of getting 1% curious about your pain as a step towards healing. Maureen shares her process for recovering from 6+ years of back, leg + hip pain. I think this episode is a wonderful example of the power of having support and loving friendship. We could talk forever but I did you a solid by keeping this to an hour.
You can find out more about Maureen Wiley (educator, YouTuber, book lover, and cat person) here -
Website - https://www.narrative-drive.com/
YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@narrativedrive
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/narrativedrive/
[00:00:00] Deb: Welcome to the curiosity cure podcast. I'm your host, Deb Malkin, master certified life coach, body worker, hypnotist trained in pain reprocessing by the pain psychology center, queer elder, fat human on planet earth here to help you evoke the power of simple neuroplasticity techniques rooted in shame free curiosity.
[00:00:29] So you can feel more better. more of the time in the body you have today and build the rich, full life that you want to live. A quick disclaimer, this podcast is not a replacement for medical care. I am here to provide insights and techniques that can compliment your healthcare journey, but always consult with your healthcare provider for personalized advice.
[00:00:57] Before we start today's podcast. I want to announce that I'm starting a new email series called musical Mondays and it's going to be about emotional awareness, emotional granularity, how to experience emotions through musicals.
[00:01:18] So I'm going to pick some of my favorite songs. I will link them to you. I will talk about the emotional journey or invite you to have a listening experience. Because one of the things that I love about musicals is how powerful they are to facilitate an emotional experience. So I hope that you will enjoy.
[00:01:41] If you're not on my email list, please go to the curiosity, cure.coach and sign up on my email list. If you love musicals and want to share a song with me, that helps you get in touch with a feeling or have a memory about a musical moment that you want to share please let me know. And then today's podcast, I'm excited it is me and my froach My friend coach, my coach friend, Maureen, talking all about emotions, emotional awareness, how it plays into pain, recovery, and the journey of becoming just 1% more curious. And how that can be the most beautiful on-ramp to healing.
[00:02:34] Another thing that I wanted to share is that this month, February is emotional awareness month. I just found this out. And emotional awareness, working with our emotions, befriending our emotions is one of the cornerstones of the work that I do with my clients. If that is something that you have struggled with or feel confused about, I would love to talk to you about how this plays together in pain reprocessing in feeling better. So please book a curiosity call with me and let's have a conversation about what emotional awareness and that process of befriending emotions will do for you.
[00:03:19] And now thank you for listening, and I hope that you enjoy this week's episode.
[00:03:24] Maureen, thank you for coming on the curiosity cure podcast. You can introduce yourself and share who you are, what you do in the world, how we know each other, any interesting tidbits go for it.
[00:03:38] Maureen: Great. I'm happy to be here. I'm Maureen Wiley. I work in higher education. I teach writing classes to students at a college here in California. I am also a coaching and mind body pain, reprocessing nerd. I love to learn about coaching and I met you about four years ago, almost in the coaching world. As we got to know each other, I just became more and more interested in the work that you do. And I'm just a, I'm just a Deb Malkin super fan.
[00:04:14] Deb: Oh no, is everybody going to think I pick the people on my podcast just so they're going to hype me up.
[00:04:20] Maureen: No, I think it's just anybody who knows you, who is given the opportunity to talk about all the amazing work you do is going to have to take a minute to just celebrate you. So just let it wash over you. Just let it wash over you.
[00:04:36] I'm someone who dealt with chronic pain. I had chronic back, hip and leg pain that moved around. So that was my first little clue into the world that it might be mind body pain, neuroplastic pain not some physical abnormality or anything physically wrong with me.
[00:04:55] And I had this pain for about six years, including a long period of time in which I had an awareness of neuroplastic pain, but still, it took lots of various threads coming together to help me understand. What I needed to do to sort of rewire my brain, and I'm really happy to report that I live pain free, outside of, you know, humans experience pain when we get a paper cut or something like that.
[00:05:26] But I wake up 99 percent of the time with no pain and on the rare occasions when I have some pain in my hip or leg, I know exactly what I need to do, my own personal recipe for turning down the volume on my pain. Sometimes that does mean that I have to set aside the plans I had for the day to do the things I know will help me to reduce the pain signals and it works. I just feel like so much has opened up for me now that I'm no longer living with daily chronic pain.
[00:06:02] I'm not focusing so much energy and attention on managing my pain symptoms during the day because my job involves a lot of standing, walking, moving around the classroom, and it also requires a lot of patience and a lot of emotional bandwidth for the various emotional experiences of my students who are usually between the ages of 18 to about 24 on average and I have so much more patience which is huge. And that means that I am able to enjoy my life so much more because not only am I not experiencing pain, I now have greater capacity to be present in the lives of others. Some of that also involved building up stronger boundaries, all of which has been helped from understanding more about my brain and neural pathways, my nervous system and thought work, everything that I've been introduced to in this wonderful world of coaching. So I might be a super fan, but that's because it's had a profound impact in my life.
[00:07:11] And I credit you with many of the concepts that you sort of shown me. As someone who knows you and finds your interests also fascinating. You've been somewhat of a guide to me in a lot of these spaces.
[00:07:25] Deb: Thanks. I think nerds are going to find nerds. I think we're both like, I want to do a deep dive through this wormhole into this thing that like, it's often because it's a pain point. It's often because it's like this place of suffering or frustration or confusion, or I don't want to be feeling this feeling.
[00:07:44] The irony and, I know that you've now studied pain reprocessing is you can't really have a fix it mentality. But I think what drives us to this work is the fix it impulse and urge, which is like the, this thing that's happening. Yeah, I don't want that anymore.
[00:08:01] When we're talking about physical pain, that often is what sends people down a medicalized route. And then that journey is not really self directed. It's directed by your physical therapist, or your doctor, or the scans and then you go in that way that's predetermined. And I think when you circle back around after you've gotten enough information, either about how you rule in or rule out neuroplastic pain, or you just get enough messages from providers where they're like, we can't find anything wrong with you.
[00:08:32] Which sounds terrible, but in a lot of ways is a real blessing. You just come back to this place of like, well, I have to do something. We're both very turned on by that, like, I have to do something and that's something for us has been jumping into coaching and then understanding these things.
[00:08:53] I think of us as, certainly we're friends. I think of us as colleagues in this coaching umbrella but yeah, maybe it's just like nerd nerd love. That's really it.
[00:09:06] Maureen: Well, to your, your podcast title, it's curiosity. And I think that that has been the gift of this experience. I consider myself somebody who struggled with a lot of perfectionist tendencies.
[00:09:20] I even hesitate to call them like struggling with because honestly, there was a lot about my perfectionist tendencies, which benefited me. I'm reading this incredible book right now. Called the perfectionist's guide to losing control. I'm a big book lover too. I should have mentioned that.
[00:09:36] I do teach writing classes. I studied English and creative writing. So reading is my number one hobby outside of the world of connecting with other coaches and learning about coaching and studying coaching and creating materials for more people to learn about coaching. Cause I have been trying to kind of spread the word as someone who maybe came into that with some perfectionist tendencies, some skepticism, some very stuck in the mindset of it's my fault that I have this chronic pain.
[00:10:06] And I had a list of reasons that I could point to like it's all those years that I slept on that bad mattress when I was too cheap to go buy like a nice quality mattress because I had scarcity thoughts about money, spending money. It's possible to come up with any kind of narrative around why we're at the end of the day at fault for the experiences we're having, whether that's pain or emotional pain, any kind of suffering, self criticism. If we don't have an understanding of how the mind creates these narratives, then we're going to find 1 on our own, and we might not even be consciously aware of it, which is something, as you've moved into understanding more about the subconscious and the mind, I find that even more fascinating. So the curiosity begets more curiosity. And to me this curiosity is this way out, so to speak, of the experience of graspiness around it's my fault. I need to fix this. I need to do do do. I need to never stop. I need to never slow down. And that whatever I do manage to do for myself. Even if it's intended to be a positive movement forward in my life, it doesn't feel that way.
[00:11:27] It feels bad, even if we're ostensibly on the outside doing the things that we would like to do and that other people perceive as us having accomplishments or achievements in life.
[00:11:39] Deb: Oh my God. There's so much to unpack there. I'm trying to think of what is helpful in crafting this narrative, right? We could just be like, come along for a ride in this conversation between me and Maureen and you're going to really get a sample of what it's like to hang out with us.
[00:11:59] Maureen: So just a galaxy brain galaxy
[00:12:01] Deb: brain and all the different. Yeah, it's just kind of like all the spokes on the wheel and all the different places that we go. But I have having this memory of being in my storage space in California as I was going through all my belongings and you were keeping me company on the phone and we were having a conversation about emotions and I was really trying to sell you on feeling your feelings. I don't know if you remember that particular conversation. I was really touched by you keeping me company on this very lonely and boring activity.
[00:12:37] But also I think back in my earlier days when I was learning coaching when I believe something, I had that power of evangelism behind me and yeah, kind of emotional processing feelings, I really saw that as that first connection before I really even understood more deeply the subconscious mind and how the mind and body are connected together. I really saw that part of the model as like a place where we all just going to want to like scoot by like jupe around. And for me, it was this place of like incredible depth, self connection, understanding, peace, transformation.
[00:13:19] And so I know that I. I was maybe a little bit like, you gotta try it. You know, it's like, it's the best drug. You gotta try this feeling thing.
[00:13:29] Maureen: Feeling your feelings, the best drug there is.
[00:13:33] Deb: That's my memory of it. So maybe I just want to throw the ball back to you and see what that was like. Cause I experienced there was kind of resistance and confusion, which is totally normal, especially for something that we're not given the skills or the tools or the encouragement to do, or actually the opposite, which is like actively being discouraged in terms of having feelings, expressing them, being taken seriously, especially when we're young.
[00:14:02] I want to hear what you have to say about feelings.
[00:14:06] Maureen: Well, I'm so glad you brought that up because it's useful to take a minute sometimes to remember how far we've come anyone who's thinking about their own experience, getting more aware of their emotional inner world.
[00:14:21] That in itself is a huge accomplishment. I think it's becoming more common, which is fantastic. I have also turned into 1 of those people who's like telling everyone how important it has been in my own life to learn how to feel my feelings, maybe sometimes a little aggressively, and I have to pull myself back and be like, okay, what is going on with me that I'm such a proponent for people really learning how to recognize and process their emotions.
[00:14:47] When I first found this world of coaching. What drew me in is I think what draws many people in, which is this idea that we have some internal thoughts. I consider them to be our sort of like key internal narratives and we can change them through the power of neuroplasticity. And I have been teaching growth mindset, in my writing classes because writing does require, especially for many students at the college level, they're stepping into a new world where the expectation is much higher, or they might have some stories from their previous educational experiences that they're not good at writing.
[00:15:26] So I had been teaching growth mindset for a while. And when I learned about this concept of thought work or rewiring your any of the ways that many people talk about this now, where we identify the. the thoughts that we're thinking. And of course, this is all part of the ThoughtWork model framework.
[00:15:44] So, you know, identifying in a specific circumstance, the thought that you have, then what feeling and like many people, I was kind of like, yeah, the feeling I know it's like one of those messy things over there. Let's not look too closely at that. Let's focus on what thoughts am I thinking? And therefore, what actions do I take?
[00:16:02] You know, thinking and acting, thinking and acting. I was stuck in this kind of like, well, I, I got, I want to change these actions because I don't like them. They don't feel good. I want to change my thoughts and I want to change these actions. I actually think it's almost like a normal developmental phase, of someone who's learning a little bit more about how to manage their mind and take back the narrative in their own brain.
[00:16:26] I'm glad that that was my intro because it was very exciting to me to think that I might be able to actually change some of these thoughts that I had. I found ThoughtWork in the end of 2019, which was really good timing. I was experiencing a lot of distress in my life, both professionally and personally.
[00:16:50] And then of course, as we all know a few months later, there was a worldwide global shutdown because of the pandemic. And I was able to take this brand new baby interest and do a full deep dive into. I was looking at all these patterns of thoughts, most of them could be boiled down to a handful of thoughts that recurred, as you well know, like we joke about our thoughts, wearing different costumes or in a different conversation we had, you called them your brain's favorite songs as if our brain is like a radio station back in the day, radio stations would play the same handful of pop songs, or I listened to those stations and. You just, Oh, there's that song again, like there it plays again.
[00:17:39] And I don't know if I would call myself resistant. I just was like, when it came to looking at my feelings, it was more that I just didn't even know what that meant. And I still struggle with explaining to people who are in that headspace what I mean by identifying your feelings, processing your emotions.
[00:18:00] It's 1 of the reasons why I make resources about emotional literacy and how to identify your emotions and I've started teaching it to my students in the classroom. And it is been really interesting to show these young people, the reason they might be procrastinating is not because of some inherent flaw in them that they're different from other people.
[00:18:24] There's an emotion that they're not really wanting to look at, or maybe there's an emotion that they think will happen if they sit down to start working on their assignment. So that was a bit of a long way to get to, uh, but you know, those who know me know that I can go on and on, but when,
[00:18:43] Deb: I mean, this is my, sorry, I'm going to interrupt you. Yeah. My podcast, I invited you here.
[00:18:51] Maureen: That's true. Yeah.
[00:18:53] Deb: We just get to be ourselves.
[00:18:54] Maureen: So that's a perfect example of one of my brain's favorite songs. It loves to play the "you talk too much" song. And that's the song that is a narrative that I have that's both one that I've reinforced and has been reinforced in my life.
[00:19:08] That's been one that it's been really interesting for me to be like, okay, what feelings do I have? What do I want to believe? Do I even want to believe that that's a problem. Some would argue that it's what led me to my professional career. But to your point of our conversation about emotions, I was, I would say, looking back, my resistance probably came from number one, not fully understanding what it even meant to process an emotion.
[00:19:37] So I had to actually have the physical embodied experience of sitting with an emotion, allowing it to spread and rise within my body in a physiological way, and then to notice that it shifted and changed. And I had to do that a lot. I remember for me in the early days of learning how to get in touch with my feelings it was all anxiety. It was the one I was most able to recognize in my body, the physiological experience, a tightness in my chest, almost that fight or flight, like desire to run, I'm not a, I'm not a fighter. So that desire to run and running like physical exercise was the way that I dealt with it in the past.
[00:20:22] So after learning and talking to you and seeing the value of processing my emotions, I started practicing, listening to guided emotion processing meditation, which was so helpful. Thanks to that coach who made that recording because it just clicked for me and maybe it wouldn't click for everybody, but it really clicked for me.
[00:20:45] I used to lay down on the floor, because I'm such a sort of energetic productivity obsessed person that I needed to force myself to lie down on the floor so I couldn't be listening to this meditation while I'm doing the dishes or doing
[00:21:01] dishes cleaning. Yeah, exactly.
[00:21:04] Or walking or going to work. So I was like, lying down on the floor. I tell people now when I share my own meditation, emotion processing guides, that, you know, it might, it might not be something that clicks the first time, but maybe try it, try it two times in a row. Because sometimes the nervous system is so dysregulated that we can't really go into our bodies and I'm not a therapist, I haven't been trained in trauma therapy, but I do know that for some people, the experience of looking inside their body at the physiological experience can be very activating for them. So, so I don't take it lightly at all.
[00:21:43] It was so helpful for anxiety. And that was fantastic. But I do want to say that the key piece for me is something that I think gets lost a little bit in these conversations, which is that feeling your feelings is not only about feeling your quote unquote negative feelings or the feelings that you don't want to feel. Let's say if this coaching world's pitch to people is like, Hey, come hang out with us and we'll help you feel anxiety, grief, anger, shame, resentment, you know, like that does not sound like a party that anybody wants to attend.
[00:22:17] So for me, not only did I have to see the value of feeling those emotions that my brain has evolved to tell me, do not open that door, right? Instead, our conversations, the conversations I had with you, oftentimes helped me to remember that, and, I've read a lot of books on emotions, for a while it was like an anthropologist studying another culture and being like, what is this world where you know how to feel your feelings and then talk about them with other people and express them. And everything isn't sort of like swept under the rug and, you know, painted over with a happy expression and things are looking up tomorrow kind of thing, but
[00:23:02] Deb: you're secretly like dying inside. And so, yeah, the kind of divided mind experience, which can be so painful.
[00:23:11] Maureen: It's so painful and so lonely. For me, I think what clicked and one of the reasons why I am a fan of this work in a communal experience, like either working with another person, like a coach, having a group, or even just connecting with community online. That's what unlocked it for me was connecting with the community, connecting with others, connecting with you.
[00:23:39] I remember we met in a community space around thought work and coaching. And I remember having this internal desire to just know more about your brain, and I remember feeling this like intense desire to be your friend, because I knew on the other side of that, there would be this level of connection and belonging around safety of having big feelings, being a sensitive individual, which I, you know, I do consider myself a sensitive individual who's gained a ton of tools and skills to help me navigate a world that doesn't always like highly sensitive individuals or our reactions.
[00:24:24] But the real piece of the puzzle for me was conversations that you and I had around connecting to the emotions we wanted to feel and not in a toxic positivity kind of way, not in a like, Oh, I'm having the worst day of my life and I'm feeling really alone and I'm in pain and I don't see a future in which I don't feel this level of despair, but instead to bring in softness, self compassion, common humanity, like the conversations that you and I had especially ones where you helped me around feelings of connection, tapping into noticing how it felt to me to feel love and connection. I wasn't able to identify it as love at first, but I knew what it felt to feel a little invisible thread of connection.
[00:25:20] Then also just having a space in which not only are the emotions that are not sort of accepted in polite society, most of the time for those to be expressed, but also for those to be celebrated because of how they reflect this common humanity experience.
[00:25:43] You know, being able to show up on those days and just know that I might be feeling, I would say grief and shame were two ones that were like, after anxiety, cause I processed a lot of anxiety in 2020. I think I'm so grateful to have that tool because I actually no longer consider myself to be an anxious person.
[00:26:09] Deb: What?
[00:26:10] Maureen: I know.
[00:26:12] Deb: That's amazing.
[00:26:14] Maureen: Go back in time and tell high school and college me that I wouldn't wake up feeling wracked with anxiety or move through my life and relationships consumed with anxiety and over functioning in order to try to manage it. It's like, I can lay down in the middle of the day and read a book.
[00:26:34] Deb: That's powerful and 1 of the things that you said that was the most powerful is feelings are not ideas, right? Like there are words that describe emotions. I have an emotion wheel pillow behind me. And those are their concepts that explain an embodied experience.
[00:26:54] The concept isn't important, the word isn't important, really. We just have words so that we both can be speaking together to each other. And we both have some sense of knowing what it is that we mean, but actually, even if we got curious about that, we would actually see that there were different understandings and so it's, it's the making space. Not just for getting the right answer or for understanding something, but for experiencing it. And I love that those times where you're like, I put myself on the floor with this tool and gave myself this freedom and permission to have an experience to have an embodied experience and not knowing what the outcome will be.
[00:27:43] There's this telescoping lens. I sometimes think there's the meta understanding. So we understand even with the podcast with Joan, where she's like, I understand intellectually that singing in front of people, I'm not going to die, but your body is definitely in the, like, you are going to die camp.
[00:28:05] Yes. And that's the thing that we're feeling. We're not feeling the understanding that of course, we're not going to die. No, so it's really about doing that level of translation and transformation on the embodied part so that you actually can feel what that feels like to understand, oh, yeah, I can perform and I know that I'm not going to die.
[00:28:31] And then when you really believe that, that's a totally different feeling. And so I love that that's what I'm hearing you say about that experience of anxiety, that anxiety that you identify yourself with is no longer a part of who you are, which doesn't mean that you don't occasionally experience anxiety, but you're not identified with it.
[00:28:54] You don't wake up with it. You don't like seek it out. There's those pain behaviors where we'd like, train our brain accidentally, not on purpose, right? To like, go find the thing that we want to keep in our peripheral vision, right?
[00:29:08] Maureen: Yeah, it's that, it's that hypervigilance to danger, you know, and in fact, when I started working more, when I, it's funny to say like intentionally, because I do think it's funny thinking about chronic pain, because, I am one of those people who was like, this is the year I'm finally going to fix my chronic pain.
[00:29:28] Even though I was well aware that, you know bringing a mindset of intensity of like a fix it mentality was counterintuitive and not helpful when it came to actually teaching my brain that I am safe and that I don't need to reinforce this danger, pain mentality. On some level I could recognize that I had done the same thing with anxiety, on accident, because I found this world of recognizing your emotional experience and then the sort of embodied experience. I was 1 of those people who walked around just feeling like a head on a stick, just walking around just a brain basically disembodied from my physical experience.
[00:30:13] I was one of those people who couldn't read basic bodily signals like, I'm hungry, or I need to stop what I'm doing and go use the bathroom. Like I'm thirsty, occasionally to this day, I will stop and I'll be like, wow, I am feeling a lot of emotions right now.
[00:30:31] And then it's like, I go drink a glass of water or take a little break or like eat a snack. And it's incredible to me how much those things are connected, like their emotional experience. So when you were talking earlier about how we have these emotion words, and I was pointing to the feelings wheel on my wall, right by my front door, which I'll occasionally stop on my way out the door and think okay, let's just have a quick little check in.
[00:30:56] We have these words to describe to the best of our language's ability, what are essentially just these physical sensations in our body. And so I don't see pain and emotion, as being separate at all. And I think that. It was an accident that I discovered how to no longer have a daily experience of anxiety.
[00:31:23] Um, I have a lot of students who come into my classroom and they tell me within the first week of the semester, I have anxiety or I have social anxiety. I'm hearing that a lot and, I don't start like telling them about how, you know, that's not helpful to label themselves as someone who has social anxiety as if it's like this thing that, you know it's inextricable from their personhood.
[00:31:46] But I do say like, thank you for telling me that. And then I often will introduce how we're going to use emotions to guide our learning experience. And what I often find is by the end of the semester, many, not all, because some people are not interested and that's fine. Many of those same students will have a very different perception of their experience of anxiety and no longer identify it as part of their personhood. So for me doing that with anxiety was a byproduct of learning how to feel my feelings, learning how to let emotions process through me and I was able to experience relief very quickly. And that has been so wonderful to me because. It opened up my world in many ways.
[00:32:43] I am somebody who's not, I'm not like someone who's very afraid in a sort of traditional sense. I don't think my anxiety really stopped me from doing many things. I love to travel and I've traveled solo, like all over. I've taken a lot of risks in my life, making a choice to do things that put me outside of my comfort zone.
[00:33:07] But my experience of anxiety meant that even if I was able to do those things. They often didn't feel very satisfying because there was a lot of perfectionism. There was a lot of resistance to the fact that I was having this feeling and a lot of internal self criticism. So I might be, you know, backpacking around Europe after graduating from college and meeting new people and making friends and staying in hostels and taking a train to a country where I don't speak the language. I think a lot of people would be like, Oh, my God, that's crazy. Like, wow, I can't believe you did that. That was so brave of you. The experience is hampered by the fact that, I was always taking my brain along for the ride with me and I still am.
[00:33:52] But when things happen that. I noticed that discomfort, now there is also another voice. There's this new voice that's been cultivated, which is like this very, Loving, tender, gentle, sometimes irreverent voice.
[00:34:13] I know there's a lot of people that the loving tender, they're like, that's not my bag. That's not my thing. So there's also this voice that's sort of like, isn't life silly sometimes, you know, that's, it's very, just sort of like, what are rules, you know, I, I'm still an incredible rule follower and type A Capricorn to my soul. Yet, there is this sense of lightness, this playfulness, which has also been a byproduct of the connections that I've made in doing this work.
[00:34:45] This playfulness, this lightheartedness, this silliness, last year on January 1st, my journal was all about how I wanted the year to be full of jungle gym energy. Because I was one of those kids on the playground who was like climbing the monkey bars and swinging and hanging upside down and always wanted to climb things even now I'd probably climb a tree if I could get a good foothold.
[00:35:10] And I wanted my life to be with more jungle gym energy, more playfulness, lightness, silliness, and joy and connection, like pure, like truly pure experiences of joy, which were not available to me when I was stuck in these thought loops of self criticism, shame, and on occasion, like they would also be externally directed towards, Oh, everyone's against me.
[00:35:36] My students don't listen to me or this, that, and the other thing about my job. I now also feel as though it's so much more accessible to tap into connection.
[00:35:47] And I just remember you were very integral to helping me identify those little kernels of belonging, love, joy. Like, I think you were able to witness me learning how to feel my feelings and shine a light on some of those ones. If you remember our conversation about Seinfeld.
[00:36:11] During the pandemic rewatching Seinfeld, which is a show I watched growing up with my family and I was watching the show and I just felt this like warm rising sensation in my chest.
[00:36:21] And I had been doing this work to learn how to identify emotions. And it was one of the first times I would say that I was present and cognizant of the fact that I was experiencing connection. I was feeling love. I was feeling love for my family, a strong connection with them, just from watching an old TV show from the nineties that my whole family enjoyed watching.
[00:36:46] And then a couple of weeks later, I was at a funeral, a family member had passed away. And one of my brothers and I were in the parking lot. I called up that feeling. I remembered the embodied sensation of love and connection and while talking to my brother, I chose actively to not get activated or angry or even just to disconnect myself because I had to take some responsibility for the fact that I often chose to push people away and push feelings of love and connection and belonging away.
[00:37:23] I cultivated it, which was a brand new feeling for me and it was so powerful and as sad as that weekend was, it was a pure sadness that felt very powerful because, it was not accompanied with a lot of self criticism, shame or resistance to it. The sadness was able to flow through my body. And at the same time, I was able to experience this intentional feeling of love and connection on purpose, which talk about a game changer, because now I get excited at the prospect of. any emotion I want to feel on purpose. It's not a flip of a switch, but it does feel like a superpower. And that's why I kind of want more people to know about it.
[00:38:18] Deb: I love that. I think when you were talking about the experience that you had of witnessing this kind of warm rising feeling when you're watching Seinfeld, that's memory, right?
[00:38:32] That's how memory is encoded inside of us. Because it's certainly not Seinfeld itself, Seinfeld didn't create that experience, right? It was the experience of having watched it all together with your family. And for you in that moment, there was something warm and connective about it.
[00:38:53] And so then on rewatching it, you made room for this feeling to be felt. Cause it could have happened and gone unnoticed. You could have been like, Oh, I'm warm, right? Like who knows. It's like being able to kind of catch it and notice it and really identify that's what this feeling is about.
[00:39:15] And therefore I've had this experience already of feeling warm and connected to my family. Yeah. So now I know that I can take that feeling. And then apply it over here, bring it with me, right? It has now a home inside of you.
[00:39:33] This is what I do with my clients too. There's a thread that I pick up that helps me be like, this is what we're doing. This is what's happening to you in that moment. Because I think we don't understand how the brain encodes memories and emotions are really important part of what the brain decides is important to remember. Use knowledge to _then, yeah, cultivate on purpose, new experiences. _
[00:40:00] Maureen: Yeah. And I think what was so powerful for me in that experience was, in another circumstance of watching, they're just watching TV, cause this was during the like darkest days of a pandemic winter.
[00:40:12] Right. In another, in, in another person, the thought feeling combination could be very different. It could be like, using an old TV show to like block out, numb out, and I'm not judging that there's nothing wrong with, but the experience for me was one that made me feel I'm alone in my apartment and I felt one of the most powerful, profound experiences of connection, belonging, uh, love, a feeling that I had been seeking for a really long time. And also I should note that it's a feeling that I thought other people needed to co create with me. I thought my family needed to be different for me to feel a sense of connection and belonging.
[00:41:00] I think that one of the reasons why that thought felt so powerful to me is, previously some of my thoughts had been around like, oh, we only ever talk about TV. You know, not about real things like feelings and life and dreams and hopes and things like that, and in this experience where I cultivated that sense of connection was because my brother and I started talking about an old TV show and another version of my brain could have chosen the neural pathway of saying, we never talk about anything real here.
[00:41:31] Like internally when I have that thought my feeling is like this toddler having a tantrum of just like, it's not fair, instead I was able to feel in the exact same circumstance, a completely different emotional reaction. And I think that was the beginning of me recognizing that I didn't need to change anything about other people.
[00:41:53] I didn't need to change my job to feel differently about the experiences I had there. That was the first time that I understood that my emotions are at the core of my experience in my life, and also they're at the core of my interpretation of my life, of the story I'm telling myself about my life and my relationships, which. Yeah, it's pretty powerful.
[00:42:24] Deb: Yeah. There's a lot of unlocking these kind of subconscious beliefs. Things that were just operating under the surface that we're not aware of. And then creating and cultivating this kind of gentle awareness, right? Cause it can be really jarring to be like, Oh my God, I didn't actually realize this is my like internal narrative that's been like driving me for so long.
[00:42:48] I'm going to just do a hard pivot. I want to talk about your experience in the pain reprocessing course. Not everybody needs to get trained in pain reprocessing to experience it. But you made that choice and I am super curious and I want to hear what it was like for you to learn that. I know that curiosity and learning are values of yours, so you know, whether or not that was work that you're going to do out in the world. I know that you're just like, I like to know things.
[00:43:19] Maureen: Yes. My tendency is to learn about a topic and I see myself as more of a student than a consumer, not that there's anything wrong with being a consumer, but even something that is just sort of a fun topic, I always want to learn the behind the scenes kind of thing.
[00:43:36] Last year, 2023 was a big year for me taking courses to learn more about topics that I was interested in. So I read the way out by Alan Gordon and I had done a little bit of research into, the work they do at the pain psychology center in Los Angeles. I live in California and part of me was like should I go work for them at the pain psychology center? You know, that's the way my brain would react to something. It's like, Oh my God, this is so exciting and so cool. I want to talk about this all day. I should quit my job, move to another city and start working for the center.
[00:44:08] Then I thought, okay, well maybe, maybe we don't need to do all of that. That's the brain being really gung ho and super excited. And I don't want to take away that side of myself. I actually love that enthusiastic learner. I think that lifelong learning is my path in, in this world.
[00:44:26] So I was like, maybe I'll check out their program because I had been, let's call it neuroplastic pain curious, because as I mentioned, I had this chronic leg at this point. It started in my back. The pain would come and go. It was, it would be stronger during times of stress.
[00:44:43] Anything I learned about neuroplastic pain was all the more convincing that the pain was not a result of something I had done or something I had failed to do, which was a much more common narrative. And when I talk to other people, they'd give me lots of suggestions for stretching and PT and various things, which, I'm not trained medically, but those things did not work for me and everything I learned about neuroplastic pain was just, yeah little by little working its way into my brain.
[00:45:16] It was almost as if it was overwhelming to imagine that I could be completely pain free from this type of pain. Sure. So I think there was a period of time where there was almost like a resistance and maybe you even picked up on this cause we would talk about pain, but like I wasn't, I just wasn't ready.
[00:45:35] Deb: Yeah. And that's normal. I want to just touch in or pause, rewind and stretch out that moment, when you're talking about it's my fault or there's something that I should be doing, that I'm not doing like, that's the worst one. Right. Which is like, there's something that I should be doing, but I'm not doing, and that's the source of this problem.
[00:45:58] There's so many reasons why we have that story, the way we talk about bodies, certainly the way we consume information about bodies and whatever. I'm going to ramble. So I'm going to stop myself. But that belief I think is one of those exquisitely painful, almost self harming because it's something that says there is something about you that is so fundamentally damaging to you that like you are the problem.
[00:46:33] It's so interesting because we can just roll over that with like, yeah, I'll just go learn some more stretches or do these things or go to this PT. There's something that I'm not doing, so let me go figure out what it is that I need to do.
[00:46:45] But underneath that for the people who that feels really personal in this deep and powerful ego harming way. That part where we can actually let go of blame, free ourselves from that sense of there's something wrong with me, because actually it's even different, right?
[00:47:08] If you like, bust your leg, you know, you like, follow a trip over a. I was going to say, like, a chipmunk, I don't know why anybody would fall over a chipmunk, but that was what popped in my head. You trip over something, you break your leg you can identify the events that led to breaking your leg.
[00:47:26] Now, maybe you're going to be mad at a chipmunk or you're going to be mad at yourself for not seeing it. But there's not necessarily this like, internalized part where you are the problem that needs solving. So whenever I touch on this with a client, it's like, that's the wound that needs healing
[00:47:46] Maureen: A hundred percent.
[00:47:47] Deb: And even just the relationship to the things that we feel in our bodies. That relationship can be healed, so that we're not really seeing ourselves as the problem. But then again, there is the work that we have to do to change that. Right?
[00:48:02] Maureen: Yes. Yeah, I think that's why this work goes so well together. Like pain reprocessing work goes so well with coaching and understanding our subconscious and unconscious narratives because they're so intimately tied together. I mean, you might say like, oh someone would maybe trip over a chipmunk and break their leg and wouldn't blame themselves because they tripped like I would blame myself.
[00:48:26] I would be like, I should have looked more carefully where I was going. I mean, I could have a situation where I'm late to something, there was traffic on the freeway a few months ago because, there was a big event with a bunch of, political figures who were meeting at this fancy house down the road from where I live.
[00:48:42] And it was traffic. And so I was late to work. I blamed myself instead of these world leaders. Like if you're stuck in a pattern of blaming yourself, then it literally doesn't matter. You will find a way. And I will say that breaking that habit was part of the experience of reducing my experience of anxiety.
[00:49:05] It was related to a lot of nervous system regulation work, many things came together for me to be able to feel like I've unlocked a new understanding. But this is one of the things I find to be the biggest hurdle to explaining pain reprocessing therapy to people is the tendency to self blame.
[00:49:27] So before it might be, Oh, I didn't do my stretching or I sat too long in an uncomfortable position, or I don't eat right. You know, is it anything, whatever, whatever narrative comes up. For people around why their pain is their fault on a physical level. If we introduce to them that it's like your brain has created and reinforced those pain signals and that you basically have to teach your brain to no longer feel that it's in danger in order to turn down the volume on the pain and to pay attention with this like open, curious, nonjudgmental outcome independent, which that phrase, you know, it's so unfamiliar. It sounds like a foreign language, I mean, the rest of the world is not an outcome independent world.
[00:50:16] There's no other space that I have found besides perhaps meditation, which that was another thing it was easy for me to take as like a, well, I'm not, you know, perfectly Zen. My mind is not clear like a crystal bowl. I went on a meditation retreat and they said, imagine your mind is an open blue sky. And the thoughts are just clouds passing through. And I was so angry because I was like, I'm not doing it right. And I was like, having an internal meltdown in this Zen meditation hall.
[00:50:49] And when you tell people your pain is your brain's danger system, that's lighting up these neural pathways. Immediately, if you're like me, and I was this way, and that's probably why it took me an extra year or two to actually really start to open the door of reprocessing this pain, which is an ongoing process because you open the door and your pain can reduce and you have these moments of starting to build a sense of belief, a felt sense of belief.
[00:51:22] Like you do a somatic tracking meditation and your pain reduces and you're like, huh, maybe they're onto something, these pain reprocessing people. At the same time, it can be very easy to fall back into the pattern of thinking now, it's no longer thinking I didn't do my stretching. I slept on a bad mattress, any physical explanation to go to. Oh, well, I'm not doing somatic tracking, right? Or I didn't read all the books by Dr Sarno or, I can't possibly be out of pain until I resolve all of my perfectionism, right? That can become its own loop to get caught in.
[00:52:01] And I have so much compassion for people who are in that place. I was in that place myself. It's very tricky because in order to get to that belief, the first step for me was getting 1 percent curious about neuroplastic pain.
[00:52:21] And when I've talked to people with chronic pain, I find that that 1% curiosity is all it takes. Like you could believe 99%, you could believe that it's some genetic, physical, structural abnormality, but if you're 1 percent curious and you'll watch one YouTube video or you'll, try one exercise. I have this free handout that I send to people called rage on a page. I don't think I came up with that term, but I do love a rhyming, rage on a page and just write down everything, every grippy, difficult feeling, even if it's towards yourself. Yeah. And then destroy that sheet of paper, because as a word oriented person, someone for whom originally I was thought it was all about my thoughts, and I just have to change my thoughts and thinking, thinking, thinking, staying stuck in this thinking loop, writing and journaling, and I mean, there were so many times where I was like, I need to buy a shredder because these words cannot be read accidentally by even putting them in the recycling bin. I needed to feel like I was completely safe.
[00:53:28] Deb: Yeah. That's a variation of Nicole Sachs, journal speak work, but also like emotional processing through writing. We're all creating our own variations on it, but what the mechanism is behind it is that giving a space for this unheard, unarticulated, always smushed down, never given the light of day to be witnessed thoughts and feelings, um, some room to just get out from, basically like our stomachs, our heads, our sciatic nerve all of those places, that's where it comes to, to live.
[00:54:13] So yeah, I love that. Such a great example. I think as a writer, was it hard to destroy your own writing in the beginning?
[00:54:23] Maureen: No, I mean, actually, it might be easier as a writer, you know, because I am used to the idea that you might write, I have a novel work in progress. I probably wrote 100, 000 words and cut 30, 000 because in revision you go through and you're like, this isn't contributing anything. It's a bit of a cliche in the writing world, but the whole kill your darlings idea is like you get really comfortable with the idea that you're going to write a lot and you're going to get rid of a lot because that's revision is the process of panning for gold.
[00:54:52] And I think that's a useful metaphor for what I was doing in my journaling, because I did get to a point of having, read a few books about, neuroplastic pain and TMS, and checking out a couple of online resources.
[00:55:07] I mean, there's just so much out there. It's kind of incredible, the world we're living in now. And particularly for me, cause I like video content. So I watched a lot things and a strategy that I've done pretty successfully in a lot of arenas of life is like, allow myself to just be a beginner and let ideas wash over me for a long period of time without needing to become the expert, knowing that the understanding is building, layer after layer of understanding is very slowly over time accumulating. And that was the case for me.
[00:55:41] But then when I really was committed to this idea and it's so funny because I had these big dreams and goals in my life and I was telling myself like, I just got to deal with this chronic pain stuff and then I'll really be able to live the life of my dreams. So let's, you know, knock this chronic pain out so that I can start living my true potential.
[00:56:02] And that was really interesting because I basically said, I'm going to take a month. And in this month, I'm gonna cure my chronic pain, and I'm really gonna attack it, and I'm gonna do ten different things every day, and I'm gonna be completely, faithful to my...
[00:56:18] Deb: I'm really trying not to laugh.
[00:56:21] Maureen: Yeah, it's funny now. I have so much love for the version of me that was thinking that I would take 30 days to knock out my chronic pain, and then I'd be able to start the rest of my life. And then, and only then, once I was completely pain free and was one of the, mind body pain, success stories that I had seen so many examples of on the Internet, then and only then would I be able to shift my focus to the other things.
[00:56:49] It's very linear thinking, which I wouldn't say that it was necessarily a problem because it felt empowering at the time to commit. To make this like solemn vow that I was going to do my rage on a page journaling each morning, that I was going to listen to your podcast. I did. I'm a big fan of listening to back episodes of people's podcasts and again, letting the information wash over me, listen to all your podcast episodes, watch various YouTubers who were talking about chronic pain, do somatic tracking, just all the things.
[00:57:25] At the time I wasn't really aware that can also have this sort of knock on effect of making your nervous system more activated, like I basically was telling my brain that we're going to get rid of this pain so anytime that there's like the tiniest instance of pain, red alert, that's a problem. Let's hyper fixate on that, which again, I had to get to a point of recognizing that was reinforcing the pain.
[00:57:51] Deb: Well, I think what's interesting about what you're saying is, you're getting to know you in this process.
[00:57:58] You're like, this is my process. I get really excited about an idea. I'm going to do all the things I'm going to like, you know, be successful. And in a lot of ways you can probably look back on your life and see that same pattern in so many different ways in which you are really successful.
[00:58:16] That's the thing, right? So when you take that kind of strategy but then apply it to this internal experience, it can be less successful, but the success part of getting to know you and how you approach things that we've identified as problems, is so loving and powerful. You're not making yourself an obstacle. That's what I'm seeing. But there's the middle part where you're like, Oh, yeah this just sucks. You're like, I'm doing all the things and I'm only feeling worse.
[00:58:50] I always come back to that story that I know I've told so many times where Alan Gordon told me I was very high stakes. And I was like, Oh, I've never had somebody see me so clearly and not even know me.
[00:59:05] But it's a common theme with people with TMS, with mind body syndrome, where we're like, I'm going to do every single thing, and I'm going to do it the right way or perfectly, or with this level of intensity, and that is, what's going to help me achieve the results that I want.
[00:59:28] Maureen: Yes. And interestingly enough, in the pain, reprocessing therapy training that I did this past fall, sometimes I was able to take a lighthearted stance and other times I thought, wow, it's so funny to see in the chat, in the comments during the trainings, they were all taking place on zoom and in the chat, there'd be a lot of very intense, high stakes, very outcome oriented questions and responses. And there was also quite a bit of another element, which I'm not really sure what to call it, but a lot of here's why this wouldn't work for me or my clients, because it was a lot of people who are getting this training to help other people they were, in the various world of healing and mind body work.
[01:00:17] And many of them were like, Oh, but what about this obstacle? What about this obstacle? Like, I was sitting there thinking, I am not so different from these people because I was getting sort of activated by that as well, where I was like the training would literally be talking about intensity, perfectionism, being high stakes, being outcome oriented, and how that was part of the challenge of introducing people to this world is that we have to reorient away from a mode of operating in the world that I think is very common.
[01:00:53] I actually think it's made way more common than just people who identify as perfectionists or people with chronic pain. I see it everywhere. I think we live in a culture of, for lack of a better term, perfectionism, which I think throws people off because they think it's about trying to be perfect, but it's about finding fault easily and imagining all the obstacles, imagining all the ways this wouldn't work for me.
[01:01:17] That's the phrase that pops into my head so often when I noticed this. A very normal and B it also is our brains on some level are trying to protect us because learning about this stuff can feel really destabilizing for many people.
[01:01:35] I'm sometimes amazed that I was able to open that door and let this stuff wash over me. I definitely was not raised to believe in anything in the realm of like your emotions are affecting your physical body. That is just not the way I viewed the world.
[01:01:59] I'm curious enough that I Googled whatever chakra was connected to my hip because I was like, this hip pain has got to have some sort of cause. And I have never been one to Google chakras before, but when you're in pain, you're pretty willing. It's interesting. This paradox of people seeking out information and they're curious about how pain might be neuroplastic pain. Yet at the same time, it's also I am so disinclined to believe anything you say. But also please help me.
[01:02:30] I'm still learning how to talk about this work. I mean, it was like my dirty little secret that I had chronic pain and that I healed myself from this chronic pain because, talk about high stakes, it felt too personal to me to share with people both that I had chronic pain and that I had discovered this method through which I was able to reduce and essentially eliminate my chronic hip pain.
[01:02:57] Deb: Yeah, is it because other people's skepticism would somehow make your embodied experience untrue?
[01:03:05] Maureen: Yeah, I think it had to do with earlier when I was mentioning those handful of narratives that we have. One of mine was nobody listens to me. Not unrelated to the whole, you talk too much. It's the other side of that coin. You talk too much. Nobody listens to me, maybe those two things are related.
[01:03:23] I didn't make that connection straight away. All I noticed was that I would get angry when I would tell people that I had pain and that I was doing this mind body reprocessing, or that I would share with people and I'm sure they were not actually judging me, but I was projecting quite a bit of judgment.
[01:03:45] Another thing that I have to lovingly pet my brain and just be like, yeah, that's normal. That's what we like to do is we like to see judgment in the neutral or non reactive, experience of sharing with others.
[01:04:00] Deb: I do want to push back a little bit or not push back, but I do think new ideas are not often Oh, warmly embraced like, Oh, yes, I think that's such a great idea and that totally makes sense. Right? When people don't understand how the brain works. Don't understand how the brain makes pain.
[01:04:17] This is why I'm very committed to this podcast, because instead of having to have a million individual conversations, how can I help disseminate these concepts into the world?
[01:04:31] There's more and more people talking about not only their individual experiences, but the science behind it, why it works, and how we can embody this. It makes sense though, that there are going to just be a lot of people for whom this is brand new information. And boy, do we not like new things that destabilize our sense of what is in the world.
[01:04:55] Of course that when you have this narrative, if you're getting pushback on that, it's just going to light all of that up. It's just going to trigger that. I will say in doing this work you tend to develop, the skill of putting it out there and just letting people pick it up.
[01:05:12] And it usually comes from having lots of conversations that you're like, Ooh, that did not go the way that I wanted it to. And then over time, I've just been like I can help people, if they are curious and wanting to know more.
[01:05:24] Also this is not the only way that people feel better, right? Letting it be part of the information that's in the universe and always reinforcing for myself what's true about it. And then trying to task myself with the job of being good at communicating it and that is an iterative process as I am going along, getting better and better at it.
[01:05:48] How great it is to really recognize this is what's coming up for you when you're having these moments of like, I'm trying to explain something and this other person is not validating me, is not agreeing with me, is not even following along with what it is that I'm trying to explain.
[01:06:06] Because it can feel esoteric. It also can feel like a lot of bullshit. It can feel like a lot of, you know, people are saying, Oh, your pain isn't real or it's all in your head or you're making it up, which are a lot of the stereotypes that people get fed or the stigma that people who have chronic pain experience. Which is another thing that I want to go into and talk about on this podcast, but I think we have to stop talking.
[01:06:35] Maureen: Okay. As much as I could talk to you all day.
[01:06:38] Deb: That's the thing. You and I could actually record a podcast all day. I know that that is true and enjoy ourselves. But I don't know that people listening to this podcast, want to experience that. That just means that you'll have to come on again later.
[01:06:57] Maureen: I'd love to.
[01:06:58] Deb: We'll just talk more. I'll share it in the show notes, but, are you working with clients? What are you doing? How can people find you? 1 of the things that I love, because you are a teacher, you create resources for people to interact with. So how can people find you?
[01:07:16] Maureen: I think the best way to find me would be to check out my YouTube channel, which is at narrative drive, because I like to talk about how the narratives that we have drive our choices in life, especially our, unconscious narratives. I like to think of my YouTube channel as a bit of a variety show because I started making resources for students there so if you want to learn about some of my tips for being a successful college student, I've got some there. And then I branched out into talking more about emotions because I was seeing in the classroom and in my life the value of becoming more emotionally literate. And, I also have made a few videos about chronic pain, including some resources that might be helpful to people who listen to this podcast. I've got a somatic tracking meditation.
[01:08:03] I made a short one because I find that again, if you want to just check it out get 1 percent curious. I also made an emotion processing guide, which is a combination of various, approaches to becoming in touch with emotions in the body. I plan on continuing following my interests in the same way that we have in this conversation, and making videos about chronic pain reprocessing just because I feel very strongly that more information being out there, maybe it doesn't land the first two, three, 40 times you hear something, but then something clicks. And I want those resources to be available for people.
[01:08:43] Yeah I'm taking, clients, if anybody wants to talk about, emotions, especially anxiety. I'm pretty interested in using my own personal experience to help people reduce their experience of anxiety and building their relationship with themselves, building up that new narrative of love and self compassion in order to experience the full range of human emotions. Part of it is that I want people to be able to do the things that they feel they're meant to do in this world. I think reducing pain, anxiety, overwhelm, burnout, all of those things clear some space in order to pursue our creative dreams.
[01:09:27] Deb: Absolutely. Thank you, Maureen. This has been delightful.
[01:09:32] Maureen: Thank you, Deb so much for having me.
[01:09:34] Deb: You're welcome.