Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Ready to lose 40 plus pounds without giving up happy hours, weekend brunches, or date nights. Then it's time to uncover the hidden link between binge eating and toxic relationships. And finally, break free from both. Welcome to the Hungry for Love podcast with Jillian Scott. Y' all ready? Let's go.
[00:00:24] Hey. Hey. Welcome back.
[00:00:26] All right. I am coming to you from Monterey, California. I am out on a workcation and I brought my little travel mic pack with me today. So might sound a little bit different recording from the hotel, but I've got my fireplace going and I can hear ocean waves. It's sunny. It's such a weird mix today. It shouldn't be getting warmer throughout the day, but it is a lovely January winter day on the coast.
[00:00:51] Today's episode is more of a workshop, not your traditional podcast or quick listen. It's intentionally slower and deeper, so give yourself permission to move through it at your own pace. Do it in one sitting or feel free to listen to it in parts. This is really here for you as a resource and a guide for when you feel overwhelmed. When big goals in particular can feel overwhelming, not just at the new year, but, but any time of year. This comes off of talking with many clients, many people really right now, who are just not feeling it.
[00:01:29] They are not in the mood. They don't want to set big goals. They're feeling a little aversion to setting goals, feeling really overwhelmed. And this kind of comes on the back end too of this future vision workshop where we talked about one year goals, three and then five year goals. And it was like the thought of setting a one year goal just felt so overwhelming. And not to mention something like three or five years, but it was like, I can barely make it through the month or I can't even think through this next quarter. I have no idea what life is going to look like in June, let alone a year from now. And so realizing this and recognizing that this is a very common theme, I think there are a lot of people still in survival mode and recognizing that. And maybe this is a place where you're at as well. Maybe you are a place of survival. Maybe you are starting to recognize it or come out of it or maybe starting to recognize some depression, whether it's due to trauma or maybe seasonal depression, that comes pretty consistently in the winter. But recognizing where we're at is really important. So especially around trauma and complex ptsd, these are like, starting off strong for January is not always the best thing. And one of the things that I mentioned in this future vision workshop Was that when we think about most plants, right? Or like this idea of we are in the dead of winter, this is a time for slowing down, a time for hibernation, a time for pulling back. When we think about plants and like flowers, for example, even is it perennials that bloom every year, it's like they go dormant in the winter and it doesn't mean that nothing's happening, it doesn't mean that they're dead. It just means that they're not producing fruit, they're not flowering right now because it's winter, right?
[00:03:15] And so this is not the energetic new year. This might be the new year in terms of the calendar and the calendar that we're using right now. But from an energetic standpoint of setting goals and thinking big or thinking creative, achieving new things, this is really not the best time to be doing it necessarily. And it's okay this is great if you can, if you feel motivated and invigorated, but if you don't, I just want to be clear that nothing is wrong with you, nothing has gone wrong. And I think what can happen is so often it's like we feel behind, it's like middle of January and we already feel behind because we missed the first two weeks. Or maybe this thought of setting those big goals is overwhelming, exhausting. Maybe it seems pointless, right? Or there are these aspects that could change pretty significantly in the next couple of months where you're like, hell, I could set a six month goal, but I don't even know because there are these other things, these other factors, these other people that I can't control in the next couple of months that might throw this all out the window. It's kind of like, well, what's the point? What's the use if it's all going to go to the wayside? And I definitely thought this in the past as well, of why am I setting these one year or five year visions when a few months from now, like, everything is going to change and it's going to look totally different. And so for a long time I just stopped planning and I literally was just winging it.
[00:04:33] Like life felt like one big, I'm just gonna wing it and figure it out as I go. And there's a time for that and there's a time for the goal setting and the intention setting. And so what I have decided to do is to do a future vision workshop in the spring, most likely early April, is when I'll do another one when we are more in that energetic place of kind of coming out of winter, coming out of this hibernation, coming out of a period of slowing down. And this is just. It's really good to recognize that we are not meant as humans. We are not meant to produce all day, every day. We are meant to have seasons of recuperation, seasons of rest, seasons of downtime. There's a book, actually that I have not read yet that I probably should. I think it's called Wintering. And it is this idea of, as humans, we can go through seasons where we feel down and if we allow ourselves to just recognize what's happening and what we need at different times and learning how to give it to yourself without this expectation of needing to be a robot, of needing to always be on and productive and pushing forward and achieving new things, sometimes that's not actually what we need. And so if you are in a space and if you could resonate with this, of feeling overwhelmed, feeling behind, already feeling like, oh my gosh, I need to make up for the last couple of weeks, feeling frantic, just know, number one, you're not alone. Number two, nothing is wrong with you. Whether January brings motivation and excitement or it brings crash and this realization that you've been running on fumes, that's okay. We want to just make peace and accept where we're at. And so if you're in survival mode, if you're feeling depressed, unmotivated, or just really emotionally tender, maybe emotionally worn out and burnt out.
[00:06:20] Big goals are not the starting line.
[00:06:23] Setting these big goals, these big future visions, is not the starting line. Safety is. Safety becomes our starting point. And this episode, I'm going to walk you through why big goals can feel overwhelming. And it's not because you're broken or undisciplined or lazy or you just don't want it bad enough. None of that bullshit is true. It's because your nervous system is asking for something different. And I'm going to walk you through a gentler process that starts with permission, emotional honesty, and rebuilding from the inside out. And this is one of the things that I learned through my trauma coach training, is that we can move as fast as our nervous system will allow. That's it. We can set goals, we can set intentions, but the reality is we can only move as fast as our nervous system will allow.
[00:07:11] And there are going to be times where it's like a period of healing and then maybe a pause or a rest, and then we go back to that healing, then a pause or a rest, and then. And you get slowly better and better about talking about trauma about recognizing it, healing it, moving through it, getting to deeper and deeper levels where it feels better and better. It's not so triggering. It doesn't shut you down, it doesn't get you so emotional. It doesn't activate your nervous system like it might be right now. I'm going to walk you through the survival mode reset. This is how I'm thinking about it. This is how I'm talking about it with clients.
[00:07:45] This is how I want to share and encourage you. And I'm going to make an invitation of, if you feel like you are in this space, of a way to get some help and support completely for free with the clarity room. So I'm going to explain this and it's going to shift. It's going to look a little bit different all throughout the year. But I'm going to offer one to two days of free coaching every month. And this month, I think what would be really helpful, really restorative, is to come at it from this lens of not just clarity, but peace and acceptance with where you're at and, and what these next steps might look like for you. In particular, if you feel like you are in survival mode, if you can resonate with that. And just as a little note, a couple past episodes where I talked about similar concepts would be episode 169, complex PTSD and survival mode post divorce, and episode 152, from heavy depression to feeling unstoppable within two months. And that was more of my depression story.
[00:08:42] Episode 151 might also be helpful here of like toxic positivity and weight loss and marriage because I felt like I was very much in that camp of always looking on the bright side. That was one of my survival mechanisms was really toxic positivity. It was don't feel the pain, don't feel the negative, don't acknowledge it, minimize the pain, shut it down and now just stay positive. Always look on the bright side. Always look at how your spouse is really amazing. Even if he's abusive and he's hurting you.
[00:09:10] Don't look at that, focus on all his good sides. Don't throw out the baby with the bathwater kind of thing. Right of. You can't just negate and erase all of the good things he does with these few bad things. It's all the ways we learn to survive. And I survived in my marriage that way because that's how I survived my childhood, because that's how my mom survived her marriage. It's what I learned. One of the things I explain in my depression episode as well was it wasn't like a specific trigger. It was almost this culmination of waking up to abuse in my childhood and then in my marriage and then this post divorce space of just feeling overwhelmed. And it was just this culmination. It wasn't that anything specific happened. There wasn't a specific trigger. It actually came months after I had somebody die. It came years after the divorce is when I really hit my depression period. It was like I held it together, but I would say I was still very much in this survival aspect. And there's a part of me that looks back and wishes I would have done things different, wishes that I would have changed and pivoted and maybe made it not so hard on myself, not so difficult. And yet I also know there's a part of me that because I've gone through this, I can better see it and identify it in clients. I have a process now of how to work through it. Not just what's worked for me, but how I walk other clients through it, other people through it, and help you really craft this and make this your own. Because just like with weight loss, there's a framework, but now we are going to customize it to you. And so that's how I want you to be thinking about it. Whether you feel like you resonate with this, or maybe you have a friend or a family member or a coworker, somebody that's close to you and you want to refer them to this episode or you're thinking about it from their perspective, this is going to be really helpful. And just knowing that this is the baseline, this is the outline, and then we fill it in with your specific things, your specific thoughts, beliefs, emotions, patterns, trauma.
[00:11:00] That's what's so important.
[00:11:01] Okay, so let's dive into this survival mode. Reset, and I'm gonna walk you through. I think I have six steps outlined, but each of them are small, so it's not big. I really broke it down into what are the smaller bite sized pieces that we actually need to work through. So step number one is name where you actually are without needing to fix it. This is an acceptance and an acknowledgement of this is where I am. I'm in survival mode. I am depressed. I'm in a season of anxiety.
[00:11:35] We want to be clear and just make peace with that because one of the issues is not just that we're there, it's what we're making that mean. So it's if I'm depressed, then that means blank. Sometimes spirituality can come into this. So it's if I'm depressed, it means I don't have enough faith and belief in God. If I'm depressed, it means I did the wrong thing by getting divorced.
[00:11:57] If I'm in survival mode, it means I've made bad decisions and now I'm being punished. It's not just the issue or it's not just the thing that we're resisting. It's what we're making being there mean or say about us as people, about us as spouses, as women, as men, as parents, as sons and daughters, like, it's all of these different aspects that get woven in.
[00:12:22] Okay, but survival mode isn't laziness.
[00:12:25] It's what happens when your system essentially shuts down to protect you. It's coming in. It is that wintering, it is that pulling in, that hibernation of out there is not safe and we withdraw. I think that a lot of times that's what happens with depression as well. And I think of depression as a symptom of survival mode. And when we are there, I think those two are very connected. I'll be talking about those two the most because that's what I see the most. That's what I have experienced. It's what most of my clients are experiencing. An aspect in this sense of survival mode and being shut down as well as depression. But I want to reframe it as this isn't laziness, this isn't procrastination, this isn't something's wrong with you. This isn't, you don't want it bad enough.
[00:13:10] This is a self protective mechanism.
[00:13:14] So your brain and body detect danger is essentially what's happened even when there doesn't seem to be a real threat.
[00:13:22] And often this is a sign that you've been carrying too much for too long. It's a sign of unprocessed, unhealed trauma. On the surface, we see it as I keep procrastinating, cleaning my house. I don't want to clean my house or I don't want to do these projects. I know that I should go for a walk, but I just don't want to. I know that I should eat more vegetables, but I really don't want to. I don't feel like it. I don't want that there's a level of danger associated. Even when it doesn't seem to make sense on the outside, there's a level of it's not safe.
[00:13:51] Just like I talk about creating safety and weight loss, right? And how it's like on the surface we're like, oh, of course I want to lose weight. But oftentimes what holds us back is past trauma of what happened when we did lose weight or what we made it mean. And even when we want to be losing weight, it's like there's something that doesn't feel safe about it. And that can be true of any goal of anything. Even this idea of like life post divorce life as a single mom or a single dad. It's what we want, it's what we know is going to be the best. And yet there are also aspects that feel very unsafe, very unstable because there's a lot of uncertainty and our brains do not like uncertainty. Our brains really rave certainty, which is why we often crave routine. We crave what we know. It's why we get into new toxic patterns that mimic and mirror our past trauma. It's because it's familiar. And because it's familiar, it feels safe. This is not about being lazy. This is not about being flawed. This is not about procrastination. This is the check engine light, the indicator of there's something unprocessed, unhealed. I'm going to reference the book and the author, Britt Frank. She's the author of the Science of Stuck. She actually has a new book out that I have not listened to yet on Audible and I heard her speak and she came in and did the guest coaching in a program that I was in a few years ago and I really admired her coaching and that's actually why I read this book and I have it both as a hard copy book of like physical pages and also on audio, which I love because I like the visuals that are in there. Oh, align your mind. So that's her newer book. I believe it came out last year in 2025. So that one's going to be up next in my playlist here.
[00:15:38] But the Science of Stuck, that was the first one that I read and it was really talking about trauma and trauma responses and better understanding that and recognizing what we might see as this character flaw or we see as something that we do that we get really frustrated by. And really it's. Oh, it's a trauma response. And so chapters two and three really highlight and talk more about what trauma is. Trauma responses, trauma inducing events, triggers, like all of these aspects. If you have not read it or listened to it, I highly encourage you to. It's a really great book, fairly easy read and it creates a really great starting point.
[00:16:15] So trauma is anything that is too much, too fast, too soon and that is the lens and the approach that I have adopted myself. Just like how I said earlier in this episode, we only move as fast as our nervous system will allow.
[00:16:29] Trauma is anything that goes beyond your brain's ability to process.
[00:16:33] It's an internal process, not an external event.
[00:16:38] So it is an internal process in that your brain is overwhelmed. Your brain can't process something or a series of events. It is not specifically an external event. I'm going to use combat veterans for example, here, because that's often what we think about with ptsd is like somebody who goes to war, somebody who experiences a certain incident. And you can have two people experiencing the same event, the same incident, one that walks away with ptsd, post traumatic stress disorder, and one that does not. And it's part of how our brain is processing it. It's part of having an empathetic witness. And I think this is why, actually, as I was talking with some other veterans, it's been really interesting to hear how it's coming out of a war zone, coming out specifically with the millennials and my generation, people of my age, it's been Iraq and Afghanistan coming out of there. When they had a space to process through, when they were able to connect and talk through it, even for a few months, maybe a year, it was like there was some processing, there was some healing being done. And the moment that they were then put in a position where that wasn't the norm, where there wasn't that almost like a safe space to truly talk about it and to be able to process through it, there's now no empathetic witness to acknowledge it. That part gets shut down. So sometimes healing can start, but then it gets shut down, diminished. And especially within the military community and anything related to service and having a security clearance, things like that. Any type of mental health condition can be highly stigmatized. And so it's this double edged sword of like they want people to get help and support, but then sometimes they're inadvertently now punished for it. It creates a really difficult environment to heal.
[00:18:22] Now let's bring it back to us because some of you may be active duty or service members, but many of you listening probably aren't. You're more like me. Maybe you were married to somebody in the military, married to a service member, maybe you have friends or family who are a part of that, but you likely never saw war specifically. You've dealt with some challenging circumstances. But it's not war, it's not famine, it's not this big crisis per se. But we can still Internalize what happens to us. And anything like emotional abuse is very insidious. It really flies under the radar. But it is abuse, and it is problematic just as much as physical abuse. Even verbal abuse is something that we can sometimes minimize or diminish. And so it's not just what happens to us, it's what we make things mean. And when things are repetitive, when you are constantly to blame, when you are constantly being criticized and put down and demeaned, when you can never do anything right, when there are snarky and passive aggressive comments, when there's all of these little digs to just put you down, to put you in your place, to quote, make you behave, really is what it was all about. It was like somebody was trying to control you and manipulate you. And they could do it easier when your nervous system was activated. So if they could activate any triggers, any trauma from your past, that was the starting line because now you were easier to manipulate.
[00:19:46] So many of us have experienced a lot of trauma. Even if we've never been in a war zone, even if we've never experienced a world famine or a national famine or something like the Great Depression.
[00:19:57] New thoughts and new habits are not going to work. They are not going to take place until your subconscious brain perceives safety.
[00:20:07] And so this can go back to even as a high school student, you might have felt like you kept procrastinating on your homework and you would always wait till the last minute. It's like there's a level of certain things not being safe. So there has to be safety to take action.
[00:20:21] Which means that we often need to start with small actions for it to be safe. Very small, very bite sized. And this is where we also have to combat our brain saying, that's not good enough. We're looking at this from a lens of a life perspective, maybe kind of relationship perspective here. Not necessarily food, diet, weight loss, but these two mimic and mirror one another because it's the same thing with food and weight loss. When we have diet trauma, we now have to start with small, simple actions. Small steps like leaving two bites behind and recognizing how your brain is going to want to tell you that's not good enough. But this is the internal battle, the internal tug of war that happens until we create safety to take action. You'll continue to procrastinate, feel overwhelmed, shut down, and then you'll keep shaming yourself for where you're at. You're going to keep fighting and resisting it.
[00:21:17] That's the issue is we keep fighting and resisting where we're at telling ourselves, I should be over this by now. This shouldn't be happening. I should have figured this out. I thought I dealt with this already.
[00:21:27] This is really important that we recognize this first step is peace and acceptance with this is where I'm at. We want to name it and claim it, even if it is not something that you want to keep and you want to maintain. People like this name it and claim. I think it comes from a manifesting type of thing, right? Of like the naming and claiming the positive things we want in the future. We also have to do that with our reality of where we're at. We have to stop fighting reality because anytime the word should comes up, that is where we are fighting reality. We are not at peace with what is happening right now with where we're at. And the longer you fight, the longer you resist. The more it persists, the longer it stays. I want you to think about it as like depression, anxiety, being in survival mode. This is your body saying, I can't keep going on like this.
[00:22:17] It does not mean you failed. It does not mean you are a failure. It doesn't mean anything about you. But the first step now is we want to name and acknowledge it without trying to change it and without making it mean anything personal about you. We normalize the grief, we normalize the anger. We normalize the exhaustion that you feel from over functioning and people pleasing every single day. We're not reframing anything. We're not looking on the bright side. We're not looking for the silver lining. We aren't looking at how God takes bad things and he makes all things good, right? We are just acknowledging what feels true for you right now. That's it. That is step number one. And how I know is if this keeps coming up, if you feel like you've been in survival mode for a long time or you've been in a bit of a depression for a while. I know that we have to come back to this because likely there is an aspect of fighting and resisting where you're at or thinking, I was depressed last year, so I shouldn't be this year, or I was in survival mode. But I thought I worked through it and apparently I haven't, but I should. I should have worked through it all, I shouldn't be here now. Often there are subtle language indicators of how you are fighting and you are resisting where you're at.
[00:23:27] And for some of us, it might even just be like, I don't have time. I don't have time to be depressed. I can't be depressed. I can't be in survival mode. I've got kids to take care of. I've got a job to go to. I've got a business to grow. I've got all of these things that I'm doing. And now it's like, I can't. Ain't nobody got time for that. And that is what prolongs it. That's what makes it worse. Okay, so step two. So that's step one is getting to that piece. And anytime you find yourself fighting, resisting, things feel prolonged, go back to it. Where am I fighting this? Where am I resisting this? What about this? Am I not wanting to accept?
[00:24:01] What am I making this mean about me? And therefore I'm trying to run from it and not allowing it to move at its own pace, in its own time.
[00:24:09] That leads us into step number two. Allow emotions to exist without a deadline.
[00:24:15] And this is hard because there's this fear that if I sit too long in a negative emotion, it's going to overtake me. It's like, no, no, no, don't do that. Then it might overtake you. It might consume you. You might pull you under and keep you down. We are very afraid. It's very dangerous. Your brain sees that as danger. If this emotion overtakes me, I might die. That is the subconscious pattern. Your brain is always trying to keep you alive, keep you safe, right? Keep you avoiding pain, seeking pleasure via the path of least resistance.
[00:24:49] And so anything that feels dangerous is I might die.
[00:24:53] Even if it's a social, emotional thing, right, like public speaking or speaking in front of a class, that feels scary, that feels dangerous, I might feel embarrassed, I might die is what your brain is making it mean. It can be very dramatic at times. The fear then is I can't feel a negative emotion, otherwise it will be the path that overtakes me. It's going to just consume me. So I can't ever feel it. I'm just gonna stuff it down. Part of it is like, when we acknowledge the negative emotion, we also have to acknowledge the hurt of what feels hurtful, where we feel like we're not enough, what feels bad about it. And we also can be afraid of. If I'm there too long, then it's bad, then it's gonna pull me under. I can dip a toe in, I can feel a little bit, but I can't feel it all the way through. And the opposite is actually true. Emotions get louder when they're ignored, not when they're felt. So last week I Had a hard day. And I was sharing this with my friend on Boxer about how Tuesday felt really hard. There were some heavy emotions that I was going through and heavy things I was working through myself. I was also helping clients through some heavier things. And I just noticed, even though I felt it and processed it, Tuesday evening just felt a little sad, a little down, just a little more emotional, emotionally tender.
[00:26:05] And it just. It was a little bit different. It's. I wasn't my kind of. I. I'm normally very bubbly and perky, and I just. I needed that time to just allow myself and to not feel fake, to not have to try to be positive, but just to allow myself to be neutral. And that's really more how I felt. We didn't feel super sad, depressed, like, really negative. I just was more neutral, neutral to sad.
[00:26:30] And then Wednesday, I felt so much better. Even Wednesday morning, like, I felt more like I was back to normal. And by Thursday, now the creative juices are flowing. Now I'm thinking, now I'm getting ideas. Now things feel like, back and flow. But I needed that day. I needed Tuesday to just sit there and be with my negative emotions and just sit with everything.
[00:26:51] Fear, anxiety, worry, uncertainty, hope, excitement, desire, longing. Like, all of these things. And also the fear of, maybe this won't come true. Maybe this isn't in the cards for me, right? Because I have a normal human brain, just like you.
[00:27:05] I'm gonna believe in myself. But there are also days of doubt. There are times of doubt, and that's okay. It was really interesting as I was talking to my friend about this, and she was like, I'm glad that you didn't sit too long in those negative emotions, otherwise they might have overtaken you. Like, it's a good thing you didn't stay there too long. And it's just this, like, social view, this social, like, overarching belief that negative emotions can be dangerous. Or maybe negative emotions are dangerous. And we have this fear of if I'm there too long or if I'm there at all, it's gonna completely overtake me. I'll drown in the deep end of my negative emotions, right? It's like you can't swim and you're wearing a weighted vest, walking or maybe jumping into the deep end of a pool.
[00:27:50] But the reality is that when you can allow the emotion, it's actually like you're sitting in a pool, floaty, in the deep end of the pool. Let's still keep this analogy. You're in the pool. You're in the water. But you are in a pool floaty, right? You might bob up and down a little bit, but there's no fear, there's no worry, there's no anxiety that you're going to fall in or drown or that there is any sense of danger.
[00:28:12] Last year would take my little pool floaty out and just lounge out in the pool and just enjoy some sunshine. And sometimes Caleb would come and sit with me. So even with extra weight, even with my kid in my lap, I never felt like we were gonna drown. I felt completely safe, even if I couldn't touch the bottom of the pool, even if I couldn't swim, which I can, so it's not exactly the same.
[00:28:33] But just imagining that I am very safe, I'm not afraid of the pool floaty, losing air. I'm not afraid of it getting a hole, right? It's like our brain wants to throw all of these negative things, but what if it can't support me? Or what if I take on an extra person or this extra weight? But I want you to think of that's what it's like to feel an emotion, is you are in something very safe, very secure. And you're floating over the water and there's a little bit of movement. You're bobbing up and down, but you're not trying to force emotions down under the water. You're not in the water trying to swim when you can't, or trying to doggy paddle. You're not treading water where you can see your head, but it's like you could go under at any time.
[00:29:11] But that's often the negative context that we have around emotions, specifically negative ones. And this is our problem. We are so afraid of negative emotions and too much of them. And this comes from how we were raised, how we experienced another person in marriage. And it was like, you're not allowed to be stressed, you're not allowed to be overwhelmed, you're not allowed to be sad or depressed, you're not allowed.
[00:29:33] Or you have to feel happy, you have to be grateful, you have to feel whatever it is that they want you to feel so that they can feel good about themselves. It was never about you. It was always about them.
[00:29:43] So you had to perform, you had to stay in line, you had to control things. You had to control your emotions. Even as a kid, you learned to shut things down because it was not safe.
[00:29:53] And now, as adults, we have to look at now what do we do when we're shutting them down? We can stuff them down, avoid them, Just think Happy thoughts.
[00:30:02] But so often we're turning to something or someone then to do that for us, to help us re regulate our nervous system.
[00:30:10] So we eat over them, we drink over them. We're basically doing whatever we can to get out of that discomfort of feeling a vibration in our body. Because that's all an emotion is. It is just a vibration in your body. But this is why we can turn to TV or Netflix, we can scroll social media to act in and of itself. The thing is never the problem. It's the intention behind it. It's, am I doing this to escape? Am I doing this to avoid a negative emotion? And what if I just sat here and felt that negative emotion?
[00:30:41] Because the truth about our emotions is that emotions will move when they are allowed and they will move and you can move through them when you're not forcing them, when they can go at their own pace.
[00:30:54] This has been true time and time again.
[00:30:57] Feeling sadness or anger doesn't mean you're going backwards. It doesn't mean you're not healed. Healing is not linear. Grief is not linear. There will be waves of emotions that come and there's no timeline on it. There's no like, oh, magically I'm healed and I'm all better. My grandmother passed away in 2007 and there are still times when I miss her, when I'm sad, when there's this little wave of grief.
[00:31:23] It doesn't have me bursting into tears in the airport or in the middle of the grocery store, but I am sad at times. I do miss her. I do wish she was around.
[00:31:32] I also know my grandfather is around and I'm gonna make sure that I call him and I talk to him and that I send him emails and I send him updates. I make sure to keep that going as well. This is where we release the pressure on ourselves. And specifically as it relates to the new year, we can release the pressure to start the year strong. Release the pressure of needing to feel motivated or to be super productive or to have it all figured out right now.
[00:31:58] And for some of you, if you know what you want, you have your goals in mind. But the thought of creating it, the thought of taking action on it, can feel overwhelming. So for some, it might be you don't want to set goals, that feels too much, too overwhelming. For others, it's the implementation, it's creating a plan, it's the follow through of that plan, it's wanting to have it done in a certain amount of time. And especially if you didn't hit a goal Last year. So now this year, this year I have to speed up. This year I have to do it faster. This year I need to make up for lost time. We have to be really careful where we can use our past against us and again, are not going at the pace of our nervous system.
[00:32:34] All right, step number three. And I realized I'm spending a lot of time on this episode. This is going to be a longer one, specifically because this is really important that we address and we identify. This is its own masterclass, really, around how to work through survival mode of what are the steps, how to better understand and acknowledge, and what does the healing process look like? If your starting point, your starting line is survival mode.
[00:33:00] So step number three, this plays right into. It is like we make peace with survival mode as the starting line. And you need to find something worth fighting for.
[00:33:08] So survival mode is like the check engine light of your car. It's not there to shame you. It's there to protect you. It's there to indicate something else is going on. And no amount of positive thinking is going to turn that light off. No amount of good intentions or smart goals or the right goal is going to turn off that light. You actually have to look under the hood. And this is important because we can make the issue about the food or about the alcohol or about the person or about divorce when really we have to look underneath, under the surface, right? So it's like when that check engine light comes on, it's not that we go to war with that light. It's not like, oh, no, how do I turn out this light? This is telling me something else is not right. A couple months ago, I noticed I got an exclamation point light that came on. And so I wasn't upset about that light. My thought was, oh, I need to figure out what this light means. I need to flip through different buttons on my vehicle to figure out what is this indicating? What is this trying to tell me? And that's how we want to think about it. That's how we want to think about depression. That's how we want to think about emotional eating or binge eating. That's how we want to think about binge drinking or your relationship with alcohol. What is this here trying to tell me? So any of the symptoms, any of the things like the depression, the overwhelm, the survival mode, it's not your identity. It is simply a trigger. It's information that is going to help you understand it. We don't want to override it. We don't need to push through it.
[00:34:36] And we don't heal by just trying to override and stuff down and move through it faster.
[00:34:42] We heal by listening to it. We heal by understanding what. What is it there to show me? If we go back to Brit Frank's book the Science of Stuck, every time we try to override and push through a survival mechanism, especially one stemming from trauma, we make it worse and we prolong the negative emotion and discomfort.
[00:35:02] We make that discomfort worse, we make it last longer. This is why I was really adamant about step number one is you make peace and you accept it. Because if you don't, you will only prolong it. You're gonna end up fighting it, trying to resist it, and it's only going to prolong your experience of it. And this was a really profound shift. When I was talking with my coach when I was depressed and we had what I would consider like a come to Jesus moment for me in acknowledging the depression and finally being able to accept and say, I am depressed right now. And that feels really scary for many reasons, one of which being, who wants to hire a depressed life coach?
[00:35:40] Like, it felt really scary to acknowledge that and yet that's what was going on. And I had to make peace with that. And I really fought her on a lot of it. But she pointed out the last two months, she was like, look at the last two months. You have been fighting and resisting and trying to force your way to doing things and it hasn't created anything. You literally have nothing to lose because worst case scenario, you follow my guidance, you follow my coaching, and you still create zero. You would have done that anyways. So at least give this a shot. At least try this and then from there we can rule this out and look at what's next.
[00:36:20] And it was hard, it was scary. But I had to stop forcing, I had to stop fighting. And when I did, that's when things could change. I think I actually made a note to talk about that a little bit later with Joy. Ah, yes, that'll come in just a sec. But we want to make peace. We want to accept that this is our starting line, this is our baseline. This is what's going to create the foundation for the next step.
[00:36:43] But within this, we also need to find something to fight for. So it's okay. I'm going to make peace with, I'm depressed. This is my starting line. This is my baseline right now. And I also want something to fight for. I need something to fight for. Because with my depression in particular, I felt really hopeless. Life Felt really meaningless. I was like, what's the purpose? Why am I here? Why am I still breathing? Why did God put these dreams on my heart if I can't pursue them, if I can't achieve them, if I'm never gonna have them? Why am I even here? Then? I felt so hopeless, so helpless. And really, it was just, what am I even doing? Why am I even here on this earth? Am I just gonna waste resources? Like, it was a very hard moment to get to, but to be able to have that with myself and with somebody else was really powerful because I had those thoughts under the surface for a while. I just kept stuffing them down and not wanting to look at them. But they stayed. They trickled. It was that undercurrent of depression and of emotion that continued. Just like we can have the undercurrents of shame and guilt and not enoughness. We have to be able to address this undercurrent pattern if it has been one for you. For me, it was my son that really gave me something to fight for.
[00:37:54] And part of this stemmed from the past when I thought if I died, Caleb would be just fine. Being raised by his dad, if something happened to me, it'd be okay. Wouldn't be that big of a deal. Sure, a few people might be sad for a little bit, but in the end, people would move on. My concern for Caleb was very much, it's okay. His dad has a good job. He's gonna remarry. He can keep Caleb safe. He'll be okay. And then I stopped to think about, what if my mom died when I was young? What if I was raised by my stepdad? And how hard that would have been, not just to lose a parent, but to lose the stable parent, the emotionally stable and mature parent. To be now raised by the abusive parent, that would have been really hard. I would like to think that I would have survived, but at the same time, I can't imagine what that would have been like. Because my mom has been in my corner. She's had my back, she's helped me. And so many times when my stepdad wouldn't and he didn't want to. Big things and little things. Her belief, her encouragement. There's just. There's so much that I have so heavily relied on. It's going to bring me to tears of just the profound impact that she's had in my life. Even with her mistakes, even with her challenges, she is still one of my best friends today. And I can't imagine not having her in my life, not having her as a kid and to grow up with.
[00:39:16] That was a really powerful reminder for me of why I was going to do whatever I could to fight for healing, not for growth, not for any one goal in particular. And that's really why I was willing to fight for myself to cling to something like Caleb was my life raft. When I felt like I was in the depression, felt like I was drowning at times. He was the life raft that I hung onto. And it was that conviction of I'm going to be here for him. I want to be able to raise him in what I think is a better, healthier way. I want him to know that his emotions are safe. There are gonna be some positive things that he learns from his dad. There are also still coping mechanisms that I see evolving already at age 5, he's learning who he needs to be loved and accepted. He's learned that certain emotions are not okay with his dad.
[00:40:10] And it's heartbreaking. And part of that is motivation for me of I will do whatever it takes. However long I'm on this earth, I'm going to keep asking for and praying for more days. And every day that I wake up and there's breath in my lungs, there's a purpose, there is meaning. And part of it, a big part of it may be for him. Maybe it's not for my goals, maybe it's not for my desires, maybe it is more for Caleb.
[00:40:37] But I also hold on to this view of God will give us the desires of our heart. It just doesn't always look like what we think it should, number one. And number two is if it's in me, it's for me. If I have this desire, if I have these goals, if I have this vision of a life, it is there for me and I get to figure out how to create it and how to enjoy the journey of creating it. That one can be a little trickier. But part of our journey in achieving and pursuing any goal is gonna be this foundation and baseline of heal. And then looking at what growth and healing looks like within this context of truly healing from trauma, releasing our fear of emotions, expanding our capacity to feel. That is what so much of this is about. It's about being able to self soothe our nervous system, be able to re regulate on our own. Not letting anybody else's thoughts or emotions or actions impact your nervous system, your emotional state, letting them own their emotions and not feeling responsible for them and not feeling responsible to fix them, and creating that deep personal safety to feel any vibration in your body as Long as it takes. And knowing that it won't consume you, it won't pull you under. This is what's required.
[00:41:52] And anytime depression keeps coming back around. Survival mode keeps coming back around. Anxiety keeps coming back. We need to look at where are we fighting, where are we resisting?
[00:42:01] And sometimes the thought for me was God's not done with me yet.
[00:42:06] There were times when it felt like, what am I doing with my life? I'm a complete failure. This, what was I thinking? I was stupid to believe in myself. Like maybe this was a mistake. There were some normal human brain thoughts and emotions all along the way, all along this journey.
[00:42:23] And I always kept coming back to God's not done with me yet.
[00:42:27] Yes, things might be hard, things might be challenging, I might be at a fork in the road or this bridge might feel really wobbly, but I know there's still more to come. And it was very encouraging. But it was part of that 50 50. It was scary of like being in the uncertainty, being in the unknowing, having that belief without having proof or evidence, it's very scary.
[00:42:50] So that's step three.
[00:42:52] Step four is to create a very small baseline. It's not a goal. Okay? This is important. Baseline does not equal goal.
[00:43:02] So going back to, if you're in survival mode, it's not about leveling up or growth or catapulting into the next stratosphere.
[00:43:10] Your job is to stabilize. Your job is to create safety, safety in your body, safety in your nervous system, safety with your emotions, safety with your thoughts.
[00:43:22] Rather than creating these goals and like what we have to achieve, we want to create these. The foundation. We want to create the baseline. It's your starting point. I'm going to invite you to choose one non negotiable anchor, something that's going to support your life and be supportive of you. Your mental physical wellness. Not necessarily growth, not necessarily weight loss. Okay, but maybe it's something like you move your body every day sometimes. Maybe you're able to get outside and get some sunshine. But it's like no matter what, I move my body every day. Even if it's five minutes in the morning, five minutes in the afternoon, five minutes in the evening. Right. It doesn't have to be a lot, but we create this simple baseline.
[00:44:05] It might be you drink 8 ounces of water in the morning before you have coffee or tea.
[00:44:10] Maybe you make one nourishing meal every other day. So that way you have leftovers for the next day at lunch or dinner.
[00:44:18] Maybe you schedule a check in moment with yourself, to journal or reflect on your day or to process through emotions. And it's on your calendar. Set time every single day, and you decide, this is what I need.
[00:44:31] Just some time, some space to breathe, to process, to be honest with yourself, right? To stop lying to yourself.
[00:44:40] Or maybe it looks like a shower or a bath that feels really nourishing, really restorative.
[00:44:46] Maybe it's, I'm just going to make sure that I brush my teeth and take a shower before work every day, right? This is the floor. This is not the ceiling. This is not. This is not all you're ever going to do or ever amount to either. Remember, it's like this just becomes the starting line, the starting point.
[00:45:03] And we have to make it simple enough, doable enough, and we tell ourselves, this is good enough, this is okay.
[00:45:10] From here, after we have our simple baseline, one to two things.
[00:45:15] Okay? Give yourself permission to just do one thing.
[00:45:18] Then we follow joy. So step number five is what brings you joy.
[00:45:24] No shoulds allowed. Shoulds are not allowed here. We're going for what feels pleasurable, enjoyable, less heavy.
[00:45:32] Okay. Joy doesn't have to be big or exciting. It can be something that's a little more neutral. But we do want to look at, where can I find joy now? There can be bigger, positive things that we look forward to each week. But I also really encourage you to find and to create time, to put in time, to prioritize joy. Because when we do, when we can find joy outside of food and alcohol, we don't need that in our life as much. I don't need sugar, I don't need sweets, I don't need wine in my life if it's not the primary source of joy. But if that's where I'm deriving all of my joy, all of my pleasure, everything I look forward to is what I eat at the end of the day. I drink at the end of the day. It's going to be really hard to not do that, to not eat that food, to not drink the wine, right? This is why it's like, we may want to give it up, but it's. This is how I know to feel better.
[00:46:25] And so when it is the primary source of joy, it's a lot harder to give it up.
[00:46:30] This is why we want to look for joy and create joy in other parts of life every single day.
[00:46:37] Joy rebuilds safety first, and then motivation returns. I promise you, start with joy. Joy is going to rebuild safety. And I promise you motivation will naturally return, because I think that's Our other fear is like, we're gonna get stuck at this low level baseline and we're never gonna grow. And we're like, this is what we're gonna do for the rest of our life. And this isn't gonna get me where I wanna go.
[00:47:03] And that's not it.
[00:47:04] Okay, Rebuild the safety by prioritizing and focusing on joy. So what is that minimum baseline? Maybe it's I shower, I go to work and I come home in the evening. And maybe it is ordering doordash, maybe it is having pre made meals that somebody else makes for you. And maybe it is now, okay, I make sure that I get in a vegetable.
[00:47:24] That's maybe that's like the baseline when it comes to health and prioritizing that and then allow yourself to do what feels joyful, what feels relaxing. If it comes with a should, it doesn't count.
[00:47:38] So some examples might be watching a favorite show or a movie. Watching or listening to something that makes you laugh. I have found that this really helps me even when I'm just not feeling very good. If I listen to a comedian or a funny show like Modern Family or Friends or something that I know that it's like there's just this natural fondness for.
[00:47:57] I re like it perks up my mood. It does make me feel better. It's that whole concept of like, laughter is the best medicine. Yes, sometimes we need other things, but there is something about laughing that truly can help with our mood and how we're feeling. And we're not always in the place where we want to laugh. Right. If we're being honest, like sometimes we're not in that place. But maybe it's connecting with a close friend or family member. Maybe it's working on a home project or doing an art project.
[00:48:24] I love the adult paint by numbers, like the oil paintings where I can paint my own canvas, but it's also been already outlined for me as to what color goes where and I can mix and match a little bit. I also love crafts that go to people in need. So one of the projects that Caleb's school does each year, especially around Valentine's Day, is called Blankets of Love. And they are asking for donations of either homemade fleece blankets that you like, the tie blankets, or you can buy one your system.
[00:48:52] And when they are taken out of a home, oftentimes they don't have anything. They don't even have a toothbrush. But to give them something that is can bring a sense of safety, can bring a sense of love and peace that's the desire there. And so it's like doing something like that where it like gives back to the community, where it goes beyond myself, can be really helpful, really beneficial. There were times when it was like, I'm going to donate certain items to people or to kids in need, I'm going to volunteer at a food bank. Something like that to me feels like it gets me out of my own stuckness, my own kind of like focus and consumption on myself. And I really think that one aspect of how I see depression is it's shame turned inwards. So there's a lot of shame, a lot of inadequacy and it's all turned inwards and it feels hard to get out. Very helpless, hopeless, right? And so anytime that I can now focus on somebody else and helping to improve somebody else's life, that will naturally make me feel better.
[00:49:54] So just some things to play with pleasure without productivity. And of course we all hear about self care, right? But like really prioritizing, that is like a massage, paint your nails, you can get a facial, you can even do a home facial or a home bath or a home spa. You don't have to go out to do this. You can do this from the comfort of your own home.
[00:50:14] But maybe it's like I soak in a bath with a bath bomb kind of thing, right? Something that you can get very easily, very inexpensively and just really allow yourself to do that. And this is where I also would look at. Where is it that I would normally escape my negative emotions and now what could I do that would be different?
[00:50:33] So for example, I don't have social media on here. Maybe social media brings you joy. I think for a lot of people, social media is not that great. It leads to doom scrolling. It can lead to a lot of comparison. Sometimes our feed gets triggered with a lot of negative stuff that we don't want to hold onto or that's really not beneficial, it's not uplifting or motivating. So just be really aware if you're used to scrolling on your phone and that's how you would escape. I want to challenge you to find a different way to find joy or to find some pleasure, some relaxation.
[00:51:05] Just like if my way to escape was to watch a show, turn to a dating app, just go on a date. So instead of going on a date, it was like, yes, that could bring me joy. I looked at what else could I do that would bring me joy? That was not what was the escape that way, once I'm at a point where I Feel more in control of my emotions, more healed, better, more stable, more whole. Then I can get on the dating app. Then I can do something where I'm not looking for somebody else to meet needs in me. It's like I'm doing it from just this different lens. So that's how I think about it. It's not that you have to stop using social media forever, but maybe you take it off your phone for a little bit of time. Maybe you take it off the important people that are in my life, I don't look to social media to learn about them or to know what's going on in their life. I talk to them on the phone, on voxer, through email. Like that's how I connect with them. And so really just starting to question where are you turning to something that's an escape? And now what could you replace that with? Maybe it's reading a good book. Maybe it's sitting in a bubble bath with a really good book. Right? What could this be? What could this look like? And giving yourself space and permission to explore. And so one of the things that I like to do is write and create lists ahead of time. That way in the moment I have something that's already there that I can pick from. So I already know I have this list of things that bring me joy, give me pleasure, and I can go to that. And usually one of those will feel good, one of those will sound good. Some are like one thing is not always going to feel good in the moment, but if you have a list of 10 now I can see like what's going to feel good in this moment. I actually. So I don't typically love puzzles, but I've started to enjoy putting together Lego sets with my son. That is feels like a puzzle, even with instructions, still feels like a puzzle. And I also have this, this really pretty like 3D butterfly puzzle that has very unique shapes and that one was actually fun and therapeutic for a while of gave me something to focus on. But I could also decompress. And I find that if I put on like some soft jazz or even like ocean waves if there's some kind of sound, but it's very calming, soothing, peaceful. I love like Christmas jazz music around the holidays, but it's like that with the then the activity and kind of like using different parts of my brain, like sometimes that feels overwhelming and it's too much but a lot of times that feels really fun and enjoyable and a way to see progress.
[00:53:28] So when you give yourself permission to truly relax and say no to anything that doesn't give you joy, things will shift, but there has to be no timeline number one, and no shame. So you can't feel bad about it. You can't shame yourself for this either. You have to truly release the timeline and decide, this is my protocol for healing. It's gonna sound weird and people might shame you for it, and other people are gonna give you lots of thoughts and it doesn't frickin matter. What matters is that you get better, that you heal.
[00:54:00] But you do this and you focus on joy. You prioritize joy as long as you need to.
[00:54:07] Truly, there is no timeline on this.
[00:54:11] And when you let go of the timeline, there's this fear of, but what happens if I do it for a month or I do it for two months and nothing changes? We have this fear that we're gonna do this and then nothing's gonna change.
[00:54:23] But I promise you, when you truly allow it where it really is, I can do this and I can focus on joy. And I'm gonna take care of my needs, I'm gonna take care of my son, I'm gonna still show up for work, but I outside of that, like it is truly, whatever sounds fun in the moment. And sometimes it literally was sitting on the couch, watching TV for like hours and not feeling bad about that, giving yourself permission to that.
[00:54:47] And within two weeks, I was probably feeling 75 to 80% better.
[00:54:52] After three weeks, I was at like 90%.
[00:54:56] Four weeks, like 95. Like after a month, little over a month, it was like four or five weeks. I felt right back on track with this new hope, this new conviction, this like revived sense of life and passion. I went from being very depressed, very hopeless, to truly, like feeling convicted and on fire.
[00:55:17] In a month and a half, in six weeks, it really did not take very long, but it was because I was willing to let it take as long as it needed to. I was willing to slow down and to go slow as long as it took. And I kept creating safety. I am safe today, I am safe in this moment, I am safe this week, I am safe in my body.
[00:55:40] Keep going back to that over and over again of creating this sense of safety and now finding ways not just to tell myself that, but to reinforce that with how I'm operating, what I'm allowing myself to do, to feel all of that. So that was step number five, is we prioritize joy, we focus on joy. And when we do that, our motivation for other things will increase and it will come back.
[00:56:03] Step six, the last one here Is to start to explore and ask yourself what needs to be healed, what is asking to be healed, what is trying to get my attention?
[00:56:15] When you're no longer forcing yourself forward, something interesting happens and the real work starts to surface naturally.
[00:56:23] Grief that you never had space to feel, anger you swallowed to keep the peace, old wounds that kept you in survival mode to begin with.
[00:56:33] All of these things now can start to come to the surface because they are allowed to. And now you can actually work and heal the real things, the real emotions, the real trauma, the real aspects can truly be healed and you can move forward to where in the future when negative emotions come, when grief comes, when anger comes, it's like a wave that comes up on you, but it doesn't overwhelm you, it doesn't overtake you. It's less intense, it goes out faster, it doesn't stay as long, and it comes more infrequently.
[00:57:06] You might still feel waves of grief, but it's not as big, not as overwhelming. It leaves faster. It doesn't take you out. It's like waves of the ocean, but instead of it coming up to your shoulders or your neck, it's like you're out at the shore and it just comes up to your toes, to your ankles. Maybe it's noticeable, but it's not huge. It's not all consuming.
[00:57:27] But we have to give ourselves space to walk through this process. The whole thing of acceptance, allowing the emotions, prioritizing, joy, creating a very minimum baseline, this becomes the foundation. This is your starting point. And now you can recognize we can get to the root of what is driving this survival mechanism, this survival mode. That is one of the biggest things is waking up and recognizing it wasn't just from marriage, it wasn't just from in laws, it wasn't just from high school. It's been our entire lives. We have learned how to survive, we've learned how to cope, we've learned how to take on these mechanisms, keep us in these same survival patterns. And now we have a chance to do something different. But different will often feel scary. And if it's scary, it's going to feel dangerous. And if it's dangerous, your brain is going to see that as we might die.
[00:58:17] So we need to create a lot of space, a lot of safety, and again, be willing to move at your own pace.
[00:58:23] But this is where we can address divorce grief.
[00:58:26] Sometimes it's grief of losing a relationship. And I see grief as a loss of the hope of the future you thought you were going to have with Someone, so it doesn't mean that they've died necessarily. It could just be a changing of the dynamic of the relationship. And there can be a lot of grief at different times, a lot of heartache. There can be grief after dating and just recognizing, oh, I thought I was gonna marry this person, and now we've broken up.
[00:58:52] He's not who I thought he was, she's not who I thought she was. And there can be a lot of grief with that. Betrayal trauma is another one. If you've ever been cheated on by a spouse, a boyfriend, a girlfriend, and any type of betrayal. But I think, especially when it's an affair, whether it's physical or emotional, I think that can be really hard.
[00:59:11] Especially when often we are not given time to process through everything. It's like the person who cheated on you often. And I'm just going to use the example of, let's say you're female and you were married to a man and he cheated on you. You. Okay, I'm just gonna use that as just for ease of language and pronouns and everything. If I was cheated on, I'm now learning about this for the first time. And there's a lot of emotions. There's hurt, there's anger, there's grief, there's loss, there's feeling. Not enough. There's what that. What I'm making that mean, how it reinforces old wounds. There's all of this processing that needs to happen.
[00:59:46] But now I have somebody on the outside who has been already reconciling with this and maybe processing through it, and now feels very guilty, very ashamed. And now he needs me to hurry up and forgive him and move on and forget about it so that he can feel better. It's really a lack of awareness of what I need, how I need to process, how I need, what healing looks like for me to be able to trust again.
[01:00:12] And so much of it is, we need to hurry up and get through this. You need to hurry up and be a good wife and forgive me and move on so that he can feel better.
[01:00:22] And so often, this is why these issues keep coming back up. It's why I can't ever let it go. It's why it comes up in future conversations, in future fights. It's why I feel angry about something that happened five, 10, 15 years ago. It's because I never was fully allowed to process what I was feeling.
[01:00:42] Things happened, or it was like awareness happened. But in the absence of an empathetic witness, the betrayal was minimized, diminished, stuffed down, and now I was supposed to act a certain way in order to be a good wife, a good Christian, a good mother. And we need the time and the space to truly heal, which means we need time and space to feel and allow ourselves to feel the anger, to feel the grief, to feel the betrayal, and to not make it mean something negative about us. But you feel that emotion, as big as it is, for as long as it takes. And trust. This is where a lot of trust comes. It's you trust that it will dissipate. I promise it will. If you are fighting it, if you keep resisting it, that is when it persists.
[01:01:27] So if something continues to persist, it's because there's a part of you that has never been allowed to fully feel and allow it. There's a part of you that has always had to stuff it down.
[01:01:36] That becomes the work, that becomes the starting point. There might be parental wounds, childhood wounds, emotional neglect, codependent patterns. There's a lot that can be at play, and often there's healing that we need on many different levels in many different parts of our life, with different ages that we were right. There are so many different aspects of ourself that we now have the opportunity to see and acknowledge and heal.
[01:02:02] And you don't heal everything all at once.
[01:02:05] There's no pressure to have to try to heal everything all at once, to be fully healed, to have it all together. There's no timeline for it. But you have to stop pretending that nothing's wrong.
[01:02:15] That is one of the biggest pieces of this, and this message is you stop pretending that nothing's wrong. Things are not okay, and that's okay.
[01:02:25] This is the work that I do with clients. This is how I help them, is in navigating this process and then looking specifically at this aspect of what gets to be healed.
[01:02:36] What is asking for my attention right now?
[01:02:39] If this episode has met you in a tender place, I want you to know that you don't have to figure out any of this out on your own.
[01:02:47] Sometimes the hardest part isn't knowing what to do next. It's giving yourself permission to slow down long enough to actually listen.
[01:02:55] And that's why I created the Clarity Room. It's a gentle, supportive space designed for moments exactly like this, when big goals feel like too much, when you're in survival mode, or when you know something deeper is asking for your attention, but you don't want to rush it, force it. We want to allow the process.
[01:03:15] No hustle, no pressure to be better, no expectation that you need to arrive with answers. Or you need to have some big lofty goals, or you need to be all gung ho because it's January.
[01:03:27] This is a space to breathe, to reflect, to feel what needs to be felt, and to reconnect with yourself in any way that feels safe and honest.
[01:03:35] And it's my gift to you completely free.
[01:03:40] So if you're curious, I invite you to our next session, which will be Sunday, January 18th from 5 to 6pm Pacific. That's 8 to 9pm Eastern.
[01:03:50] And you can add the event directly to your calendar, which will give you our Zoom Meeting link. And that'll be in the description here of this podcast. And if now isn't the right time, that's okay too.
[01:04:01] Let this episode be enough for today.
[01:04:04] And maybe it's something that you come back to and you listen to again and again. Maybe it's something that you come back to months from now if you feel this coming up. Or maybe you send it to a friend or a colleague who's wrestling with something.
[01:04:17] And the cool thing is that I'll be offering one to two days of free coaching every month throughout the rest of the year so that you can always join in the future.
[01:04:26] So the Next Future Vision Workshop is actually be held most likely in early April. It'll be in the spring when it's more of that energetic new year. So for right now, if this is a season of winter, a season of pulling back, a season of restoration, be gentle with yourself. And when you're ready for more, I'll be here. No pressure, no urgency, just an open door.
[01:04:48] I hope that this gives you peace and a level of love and compassion for yourself, to recognize where you're at and to be able to honor it. To not feel like you have to hurry up and get out of it or figure it out or move on or get going.
[01:05:02] Life is not passing you by. We have to be at peace with where we're at right now. And when you walk through these steps, when you follow this process, follow this outline, I promise you things will start to shift. You will move forward. But we have to create the safety. We need the safety in order to get to the growth. If you would like some help with this, I invite you to the Clarity Room. Or if you would like to talk more about what it would look like to work with me specifically, then I invite you to a free Clarity call where we work through the things that have been holding you back. It's a no pressure conversation to explore your next steps. And truly my desire is that you come in in any confusion that you might have, you get a sense of clarity when we're all done. That's the whole point of this, is really to create this awareness and this clarity of what's happening and what your next steps look like, what healing truly looks like.
[01:05:56] Food, body, relationships, all of it. All right, more to come in future episodes around how to better recognize where we're at, creating this sense of awareness, making peace with where you're at as well.
[01:06:10] Because this is something that it's part of the trauma awareness side that I bring. It's part of being able to recognize where you're at and what the next steps that are for you. Not just from a weight loss standpoint, but in a life healing standpoint. This is how you create the life and body you crave. We have to start with the internal healing. And sometimes we start by letting things germinate and manifest under the surface before we see things sprout up.
[01:06:38] And I see this as planting seeds all the time, right? We plant seeds and we don't know exactly when they're gonna grow. We don't know exactly when it's gonna turn to fruit. But we trust and we know that those small little seeds, those small little desires, the small little nudges, the inklings, when we listen to them, it will move us forward.
[01:06:56] I hope you enjoyed this workshop since that is essentially what this is. But I hope that this has been helpful. As always, feel free to reach out with any questions or comments you can. Follow me and connect with me on Instagram. I'll make sure that the is in the description. And if you have not yet downloaded your feelings wheel, that is a great tool to help you process through and recognize what you're feeling and better understand why. It walks you through a clear process as to what it is that's going on and gives you a starting point to have the vocabulary to name what it is that you're actually feeling and experiencing.
[01:07:31] All right, that is it for now. I hope you all have a fabulous week.
[01:07:35] Here's to creating the life and body you crave.
[01:07:43] If this episode resonated with you, it's time to break free from destructive cycles around food, alcohol and toxic relationships. Your next step, book your free Break the Cycle call where you'll finally see why your binge eating and relationship patterns are so deeply connected and how to break free from both for good.
[01:08:03] You'll walk away with fierce clarity and a game plan to step into a life full of fun, adventure and self love. Grab your spot now at www.bodyyoucrave.com VTC it's time to break the cycle. I'll show you how.
