Today's podcast is a short response to what I've been noticing in myself or my clients when we're having a first response of reactivity, fear or self rejection. This rewiring process of cultivating a sense of emotional congruency is about healing the threatening gap of self rejection, judgment and exiling. When we commit to being a safe landing place for our own emotions we can expand our sense of internal and external safety and lower the threat response in our body that keeps our muscles tight, our pain alarms ringing and teaches our brain that emotions and sensations are dangerous and need to be avoided.
Today's podcast is a short response to what I've been noticing in myself or my clients when we're having a first response of reactivity, fear or self rejection.
This rewiring process of cultivating a sense of emotional congruency is about healing the threatening gap of self rejection, judgment and exiling. When we commit to being a safe landing place for our own emotions we can expand our sense of internal and external safety and lower the threat response in our body that keeps our muscles tight, our pain alarms ringing and teaches our brain that emotions and sensations are dangerous and need to be avoided.
There's no time like the present to start practicing how to cultivate coherence and self connection for healing.
[00:00:00] 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.
[00:00:58] Hello, my feelers and healers. Welcome to the curiosity cure podcast with Deb. And today I know that it is not the podcast about the comfort scale that is coming up. But I wanted to talk about, a, experience that I've been having, that I've been witnessing in my clients, that I have been seeing in people that I've been working with just around hypnosis is the first response.
[00:01:28] And one of the things that I am noticing happening for people is this idea of suppression as Our kind of first line response. And it's very understandable because nobody has taught us how to have feelings in a way that is bearable. Feelings, right? It's those things that we experience in our bodies. Whether we call them feelings or whether we call them emotions, they are the felt senses of our mental and physical experience and to make it real basic, like negative emotions, feel negatively, positive emotion, feel positively.
[00:02:20] If we just start with this very basic approach, it's really normal to be like, Ooh, yeah, give me more of the feelings that feel good. And please give me less of the feelings that don't feel good. And because of the ways that we're socialized, what our families of origin believes about emotions, that goes a long way into teaching us our own personal approach to emotions, or feelings are going to be, and certainly a lot of these are created in that developmental stage in which we are just a wee little baby being cared for by other human beings who may or may not have any kind of adeptness with emotions or feelings.
[00:03:06] So this is my pitch, as always, to practice something different. So we can get a different experience. I want to share like today, you know, we're in an election cycle in the United States. And in less than a week, we will be voting for a new president and we will be, you know, having an election in different states have different amendments and things that are about protecting certain human rights. No big deal. Not high stakes at all. Right? Like just an everyday kind of experience. Sure. Um, So, yeah, there's a, there's a lot that is happening and in a representational government, that is also complex. We do not have our own individual. control over everything. But what we do have control over is this part, is the way that we interpret and relate to the feelings, the sensations, the thoughts, and our perceptions of what is going on around us.
[00:04:14] And we have the ability to change our relationship with that. And I like to start with reframing the first response. Like, what is your first response when you wake up in the morning? Oftentimes we do some kind of body scan and we kind of check in and, you know, we check in and sometimes it's like, what's wrong?
[00:04:40] What doesn't feel good, right? That's kind of where our brain goes. We're often not doing a body scan and saying what feels great or what almost doesn't feel like anything. I was doing a practice with a client and we were talking about like becoming aware of a sensation in your elbow. And sometimes that's the only time we have an awareness that we have an elbow, right?
[00:05:07] When we feel something that doesn't feel quite right if you ,have an arm and you have an elbow, you have an elbow all the time. Most of the time, even when we're using it, like I'm making hand motions, you can't see it, but I am basically moving my hand and talking with my hands and moving my elbow and like, have no elbow awareness whatsoever.
[00:05:32] But here's my elbow doing my elbow thing, doing its elbow thing perfectly well. And I have kind of no relationship to it. So, one of the things our first response might be this habituated pattern of checking in with the body and seeing what's wrong, what doesn't feel good, and then projecting that experience now throughout the rest of the day, thinking ahead, which seems so logical and reasonable, right?
[00:05:58] I'm going to think ahead about what I feel now and organize my day around this feeling. And, it seems so reasonable, but this is in fact, A pain behavior. And when we think about our predictive brain, you're basically organizing your brain to live your rest of your day based on this experience that you're having in this moment.
[00:06:24] And when we start to unravel that, what we can notice is the sensation can also unravel just as quickly as it took to notice it. This morning I woke up with some dread, feeling stiff, and I almost can't remember what it used to be like to wake up in a negative feeling state, even though I can remember laying in bed for hours, even though I can remember pretending to be asleep. That was a strategy I had in an early relationship in my 20s and I look back and I, I, I cringe a little bit. I have a little bit of judgment. I have also, I have to remember to have a lot of compassion for that me because obviously had I known what I was doing, had I known that I had another way of coping, that obviously I would have done it.
[00:07:23] So I'm thinking back to that me, that me now, 30 years ago, who didn't know anything other than to stay in bed. To even lie about how I was feeling because, you know, as I'll tell a story, you know, what I was authentically feeling was never okay. And so of course, lying about it makes a lot of sense.
[00:07:49] And only with conscious awareness and self compassion has been the way that I've been able to be able to look at my current timeline and my past timeline with a lot of love. Which then decreases my nervous system reactivity, right? So it has a direct effect on the body. So now through a mind body approach, and I've shared this conversation or this idea before that the first hour of the day doesn't count.
[00:08:15] Now that is a statement that was made by Dr. Stracks to Hassana Fletcher, who is a mind body therapist. Who's in her nineties, maybe at this point, or in her eighties, she worked with Dr. Sarno originally. And this was reported in a podcast of Dan Ratner's called, crushing doubt. And they were talking about aging and that conversation offered me this reframe.
[00:08:43] And I just laughed and she laughed and he laughed because it's kind of funny. Right? To have a doctor basically tell you, well, the first hour of the day doesn't count. What all of us understood was that it was this opportunity to allow the body to just be without codifying it, without chronifying what we're experiencing in this moment, without launching into fear and fight or flight and control in this singular moment.
[00:09:15] Right? It's allowing the body to move through this process of waking up. And so now when I apply that reframe to my morning, to my sense of waking up in this body on this day, what I notice is I don't have that sense of distress any longer, right? I've trained myself to think the first hour of the day doesn't count, or I've discussed on this podcast before.
[00:09:46] Oftentimes those transition moments from sitting to standing, you know, sometimes that's wobbly. If I'm sitting for a long time and I'm not really conscious of my body and then I go to stand up, my body's like, huh, well, yeah, you know, Hey, give me a moment. And I don't make that mean anything anymore.
[00:10:04] And I allow for this transition and what it does in that allowance is it turns off the fear response and the fear response being off, turns off the alarm and the alarm being turned off, turns off pain. Right, so I'm allowing my body and my emotions and myself to be in process. Yeah, so I go away from hiding, from anticipating all the things that I didn't want, or I couldn't deal with, or even whatever monkey poo that my brain wanted to stir up.
[00:10:36] And now we've all had this experience where our brain wants to provide evidence for what it is that we believe. So if we believe that we can't cope, our brain will be like, yeah, and you can't cope about this. And remember that time, that thing that happened in like, Oh, well, you're not going to be able to handle this experience and this.
[00:10:56] And so our brain is off to the races wanting to be in coherence with its belief system. It's going to continue to find evidence. And I say evidence with air quotes, because of course, Thoughts aren't evidence. The thoughts are important because they create a feeling, an emotional state. They create some kind of vibration in the body.
[00:11:22] And I don't really like to talk about vibrations. in a woo way, but I, I just want to say vibration is as a word because everybody has a different felt sense of something. Anger might feel different in one person's body than it feels in another person's body. If you've, ever read, Lisa Feldman Barrett's work on how emotions are made, like there are no emotional pathways. Emotions are constructed by the brain and they're socially constructed and formed by socialization. So it makes sense that anger might feel different in different people's bodies. So I don't know, the word vibration popped into my head. So the monkey poo that your brain is stirring up is offering you.
[00:12:11] It's not to say that there is not monkey poo in the world because there sure as hell is tons of it. It is a very disturbing feeling to be surrounded by disaster and distress and expect ourselves to wake up out of bed like a Disney princess. Except Anna from Frozen, who Kristen Bell voiced.
[00:12:32] I just watched a video of her in which she asked the illustrators to give a more realistic morning. So that character wakes up with drool and is stumbling and has wacky hair. And I love that that was created by the actress. Who is voicing this character because she's like, you know what, she might be a Disney princess, but she's also a real person.
[00:12:56] We can look at the influence of media. We can look at this scene, and then we can look at the morning scene from the TV show, Mrs. Maisel, where she goes to bed wearing makeup, waits until her husband falls asleep. She washes her face, sets her hair, and then does the reverse in the morning, getting up and doing her face and hair before he awakes, so that he actually never sees her, because somehow that wouldn't be acceptable.
[00:13:24] And she learned that from magazines and her mother. And you know, that's kind of how this socialization around gender and sexism and the patriarchy informs our lived experience. And so I love that Kristen Bell, you know, could see that there was this unrealistic expectation around Disney princesses, around what we believe is acceptable or unacceptable for ourselves to be and ourselves to feel.
[00:13:56] And when we do not see ourselves reflected in these larger media places in, in our community, in our parents, like that creates this sense of self distancing, when we don't see or feel ourselves reflected in the world, then we internalize that as meaning. Hey, there's something wrong with us. And then that often means that we have to reject the parts of ourselves that we don't know how to create connection with.
[00:14:27] So waking up like Anna from Frozen and reframing the moments of getting up and not distressing or damning or triggering fearful subconscious beliefs about your body now and in the future. That's what I've been doing and training myself with and it's been so much more pleasant to wake up. It is safe to wake up.
[00:14:51] For me, it is safe to be in the world. And part of how we create that sense of safety is making our internal experience safe to be in, safe to witness. What's the most distressing is when our external and internal experiences are incongruent. I think that's a kind of existential threat that can make us feel really self rejecting and continue to need more and more external validation to keep us feeling okay.
[00:15:20] And I'm not against external validation because we live with it. In a world with other people and, you know, I would say people who reject the idea of wanting validation are really just perfectionist. Like, we don't need to be perfectly internally self validating to feel okay. What we need is greater and greater awareness and when external validation Doesn't create more self connection.
[00:15:51] Isn't actually connecting, isn't feeling true to the self, then you will need a larger and larger dose of it, which in turn creates more suffering because the disconnect of how we feel inside ourselves and how we want to feel becomes even more mismatched. So as I said in an earlier podcast, in one of my earliest podcasts, telling yourself the truth of how you are feeling is a powerful way to meet the complexity of being a human being in a human body in an imperfect world in which we cannot control everything and make it how we want it to be.
[00:16:30] This morning, I woke up with fear and dread about the election. Some frustration with personal things, and I was feeling mad. And now I could have told myself there's nothing to be mad about, or I could do what I've heard lots of people do, which is think about people in dire circumstances, people who have it worse off than me.
[00:16:52] And then I think, well, they're entitled to feeling bad. And then I dismiss my own experience of the emotion that I'm currently feeling because I tell myself that I am not allowed. That I am not entitled to have this emotion. I once remember telling my grandmother that life isn't fair. I was upset about something.
[00:17:14] I don't know. Probably my sister got something and I didn't, I can't remember the content of it, but I was young and that's how I was feeling at the time. And she affirmed that, yeah, life isn't fair. And she retold the one defining story I know about her life that she had an audition for a dance thing. I don't know what it was.
[00:17:36] Maybe it was something she would have been paid for. I'm imagining something like the Ziegfeld Follies, and her father was supposed to take her and he didn't show up. She was born in 1917. This was happening in her teens. So I would say, you know, it was 1933. It was the Great Depression.
[00:17:57] Now, looking back, I can only imagine how painful and even enraging that must have been for her. I'm sure it was not the only time that he was dismissive or disappointing for her. It was the Great Depression and she was a girl of that time. And yeah, none of it is fair. But what she missed in her connection with me was to connect with the hurt that I was feeling for whatever perceived pain I was experiencing.
[00:18:26] I got this dismissing version of like, yep, life isn't fair. Get used to it. Get over it variety. And that didn't help. That gave me the message, which I got a lot as a kid, that my feelings didn't matter, that they were an issue, and that I shouldn't be feeling what I was feeling. No one taught me how to self witness and care for the hurt part of me because nobody taught them.
[00:18:51] So this morning I woke with a version of it's not fair flowing through me. I had a strong annoyance for, hey, I don't want to be dealing with these feelings. And I could feel the impulse to dismiss and diminish it. And now that I have this mind body approach and know that repressing my emotions only creates self fracture and that it shows up in my body as pain.
[00:19:13] I decided to make space for my emotions. My body was feeling tense and I again have a reframe on my morning from Dr. Stracks. The first hour of the day doesn't count and when I say it doesn't count, it's like that quality of outcome independence. That we teach through pain reprocessing, it doesn't count as in, it's not going to necessarily have an effect on the rest of the day. I translate that for myself, meaning waking up stiff or sore doesn't have any intrinsic meaning. Once I get moving, I feel differently. I don't need to make this feeling go away to have another. And in fact, when I just let it be, I can notice it change and often pretty quickly. in a manner of less than a minute.
[00:20:06] Whatever that waking feeling I have, if I'm not hyper focused on it and how much I hate it and how I don't want it to be there and how fearful I am of getting messages about the future, it changes and the ease I want to be feeling emerges. When I have an ease approach to my sensations and emotions, I feel more ease and less distress.
[00:20:30] Less tension, holding, fixing, and fixating. And this isn't the same as ignoring. It's neutralizing the meaning that I am infusing into it. It doesn't mean anything that this morning I woke up feeling sore. When I inquire with myself and ask, Hey self, are you having a feeling you're not letting yourself fully embody?
[00:20:55] The answer this morning was yes. I was feeling some anger and frustration. Sometimes With that, I do a journal speak practice and I meet that emotion on the page without judgment, without suppression. It is a safe place of expression and self connection followed by self compassion and soothing.
[00:21:14] Today, I decided to stomp around giving the middle finger and letting that feeling move through me. And the stomping really helps my body feel more powerful, solid, and capable of moving in a way that I enjoy. It's like I'm more here, if that makes any sense. It's not just my mind or my heart that's having a feeling, it's like I bring all of myself to the part, creating more self connection, safe embodiment, and of course, stomping around, holding my middle finger up, also gave me a nice chuckle, and as I felt a shift, As I was doing it into the present moment, more open to the day, more open to life, being a mixed bag, more connected to the parts of me that wishes that I was a powerful superhero, able to fix everything that's broken on my own with a wave of a magic wand and the pain of not being able to do that.
[00:22:18] And I, I know that that's my child self wanting to believe in magic, wanting there to be a simple solution to pain. And I get it, little one. Life isn't fair. And I will validate and meet you with tenderness that yes, that hurts. It's the least favorite thing about being a human, but the best part of being a human is also to be the one that meets that younger self with love, care, softness and makes room for more than one feeling to be felt at a time. And then I thought about my day and how I'm going to be helping at the polls, how I met some nice people. And I've gotten to find an activity to participate in that helps me feel connected, hopeful, and congruent with who I know myself to be and who I want to be more of.
[00:23:12] Knowing that it's not all on me, I don't have sole responsibility for the outcome. Spending time in that liminal space of not knowing what might happen, and even making that space feel more safe. Feeling more safe in the not knowing. Feeling that space to be less terrifying to connect with. And I might notice my heart beating.
[00:23:39] I might notice my breath wanting to be held. And I invite my body to open to it to validate the experience and to be a safe, loving home for all of my feelings to be felt, connected with and to drive congruent action. So, for me, that might be to volunteer to reach out to others, to connect with beauty, to find a myriad number of ways to remind myself that no feeling is fixed.
[00:24:07] That when I create with intention, space for self connection without judgment, I don't need suppression or amplification. I don't need to be in so much pain that I have no choice other than to focus on it. What we really need is a feeling of congruence. Where our nervous system doesn't need to be in fight or flight, but rather in flow. And connection with both self and others
[00:24:32] wishing you ease with whatever arises in the next few days, weeks, months, years, instead of deciding that a symptom emotion or experience is unbearable, where can you shift into curiosity, asking yourself things like, what can I notice about what I'm experiencing?
[00:24:53] What beliefs are being triggered? What worries? What else can I incorporate that feels real, congruent, and true in this moment? What can I see, feel, touch, taste, smell? One of the things I do with clients is to help them anchor in the emotions they want to be experiencing more often so that they can be subconsciously connected with and trigger on demand, so that we can partner with ourselves.
[00:25:23] Moving through difficult times, which often arises because we have a fixed sense of expectations and desires. If we only tell ourselves that we can't experience something, and we have no plan or capacity when we experience it, becomes a very all or nothing approach to being alive. This process of partnering with our feelings, sensations and self will reveal the triggers that we can practice curiosity with instead of avoidance.
[00:25:56] Only with connection does our brain have the ability to do the essential work of memory, reconsolidation, unwiring old patterns, habits, pain behaviors, and predictive coding. And practicing flow and not fixating. Not fixing or fixating is the way to do it.
[00:26:20] So if you're interested in finding out more about how working with a coach trained in integrative medical hypnosis and pain reprocessing can help, please book a curiosity call and let's chat.
[00:26:33] And in this next week, I invite you to practice meeting yourself with curiosity, ease, and love, no matter what is arising and holding a, Sense of external witnessing, being able to be the one, not only in the experience, being able to hold a bigger, safer container for you who is experiencing that and then noticing what shifts, what changes, what do I allow in?
[00:27:08] What with my attention, am creating in these moments, just gently redirecting yourself back to this present moment, tending to your body, tending to your heart, tending to yourself as one among many, noticing if you're holding your breath. Inviting in that breath to come in and to come out and to release and to shift and to change and to move and to grow.
[00:27:37] Connecting with that ability that you are creating to be that loving self witness. And maybe that means creating a connection with others in which you are also inviting people to hold that with you. So whatever it is that you're doing this week, I'm thinking of you and holding you in my heart and feeling you in my body.
[00:28:02] And if you want to stomp around and have your middle finger up, and that feels so good to you to just witness those feelings, I want to invite you to give yourself that freedom. That freedom to feel whatever it is that you're feeling and meeting that with love and compassion. Now, I do want to say we're not acting out our feelings, especially on other people, right?
[00:28:33] So learning to witness and experience and emotion is one thing and action is another thing. So I am going to also I invite you to be mindful about the kind of action that you take because there are always repercussions to actions and I would love for you to, you know, be mindful. And choose the ones that you, you know, later on that you're feeling like, oh, yeah, that was something I chose versus, oh, I was just kind of acting out my feelings and then shit happened and I'm not responsible.
[00:29:10] So yes, please take radical responsibility for your actions, but create that space for self connection with your emotions. in the dose that feels safe to connect with. And if that's a skill that you are interested in practicing more and becoming more adept with, then please reach out. Let's talk about it.
[00:29:35] It is a kind of reframe approach that when you practice it becomes more normal. Just like anything we practice becomes normal. a part of our subconscious processing, right? We don't have to relearn how to drive every time we get in a car. There's so many parts of driving now that happen pretty much unconsciously.
[00:29:59] And, we don't want to have too much unconsciousness. It's we're driving a very large vehicle that can, injure people. So it's about kind of being able to be present with our responsibilities. And also recognizing how much of what we practice becomes automated. And so taking that same skill, right? That is just how the brain learns and applying it to what we want to be feeling more of the time. I hope what I've shared with you helps. I really love hearing from you, so if you have heard something in this podcast that really clicks for you, that rings a bell, that lights you up, that connects those aha moments, please share it with me.
[00:30:43] I would love to hear more from you about how taking a mind body approach to life both changes your symptoms. Which obviously is the bigger goal, but also changes your sense of self connection, which of course is my personal goal for everyone feeling more friendly and connected to oneself is an important part of healing.
[00:31:08] Thank you so much for listening.