Episodes

  • 16. Emotions [part 2]: what it means to “feel your feelings”

    16. Emotions [part 2]: what it means to “feel your feelings”
    May 23 2024
    This episode is our longest yet, but jam packed with vital information all about the role of emotions and how actively feeling them will change your entire life. It is the part 2 continuation of emotions part 1, and finalizes the “little learnings” for the emotion/body sensation phase needed to “interrupt the cycle” is step three of the healing process. I begin the episode with a short recap of part 1, and continue on to speak about the preliminary steps before we’re able to fully feel our emotions. Next, I move into the key steps of actually feeling your feelings and what it specifically entails. I also provide real examples to illustrate how this might look like in your real life. Key concepts include mindfulness, emotional granularity, resistance, and agitation/limbic friction. I then move into how our emotional regulation plays a role in communicating and expressing our emotions to others, while also understanding the communication and expression of emotions from others on a more empathetic level. I talk about how these emotional fields collide and the best way to blend the two together. I also open the real possibility of rejection/abandonment in emotional relating and how to overcome to not just improve your own emotional health and wellbeing, but to also strengthen your emotional bonds with others. I also go over coping mechanisms specially related to emotions, as thinking and emotions are two separate roads, and explain where these two roads merge and where they diverge. I stress the importance of creating space between thoughts, feelings, emotional body sensations, and action in order to come to the greatest and most effective solutions to our emotional problems. It’s a long one, but there’s no time wasted when you’re learning to master the most important skills of your life - emotional regulation and healthy relating to other people. The benefits that come from this learning are far reaching and exponential!
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    1 hr and 34 mins
  • 15. Emotions [part 1]: changing the narrative

    15. Emotions [part 1]: changing the narrative
    May 23 2024
    We are back with another “little learnings” episode, now covering the emotional piece. I know this is a long episode, but it’s probably my most important episode to date - and the most researched! I’ve working on this episode for 5 months, trying to flesh out all the details and nuances of emotion to help change your narrative and understanding of emotions as a whole. This episode starts off by de-mystifying emotions and the emotional experience by explaining the scientific and biological need for emotions to exist. By providing a clear definition and intricate understanding of emotions, I hope you change the way you relate to them as well. While the old narrative might be emotions are useless and to be avoided at all costs, we move into a deeper, wiser understanding of what emotions really mean for our lives and how to begin listening to what they’re trying to tell us. I touch on the impact of emotional trauma and how it affects our ability to feel, express, and communicate our emotions, as well as detail the grave problems that occur when they are ignored. I venture into explaining in detail the 5 core emotions and give plenty of examples to help emotional concepts stick even in the most emotion phobic minds. I truly believe recovery begins and ends with experiencing, understanding, and relating to our emotions in a healthy way, and this episode serves as the overarching framework to do just that. I know it’s long, but it’s packed with information that I feel is the most vital part of our recovery process.
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    56 mins
  • 14. Understanding & overcoming fear of abandonment

    14. Understanding & overcoming fear of abandonment
    May 17 2024
    The perfect bridge between the past three dark intermission episodes and talking about emotions in the next episode coming, episode 14 really gets into the uncomfortable feeling that abandonment brings. Sometimes we fear being left so intensely that it effectively dictates the way we live our entire lives. In this episode, I discuss how childhood experiences shape our brain, nervous system, core beliefs, and inner dialogue which then serve as the compass of the life we live. We think life is inherently as it is, but it’s these underlying factors that are guiding the types of experiences we have throughout our lives. From those experiences, we layer on even more behaviors that we think protect us from the pain, but inadvertently come face to face with our own demise. It may seem that we are meeting the same kind of person with different faces, and, in this episode, I explore why that may be. I talk about the origins of abandonment issues and how those issues manifest in the quality of lives we have. I also discuss how sometimes the hardest things we face often bring the greatest jewels life could ever bestow. Could the secret to healing from abandonment be in the abandonment itself? And what kinds of things free us from this plaguing fear? Find out more in this bridge episode, combining dark intermissions with uncovering the truth at the emotional level.
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    59 mins
  • 13. Why no amount effort on your part will ever make up for a lack of effort on their part

    13. Why no amount effort on your part will ever make up for a lack of effort on their part
    Apr 30 2024
    After some life changes, we’re back with another dark intermission episode (in the same thread as episodes 8 & 12) examining what to do when someone’s effort toward your relationship suddenly starts to decrease. While I begin by focusing on unhealthy relationships that serves as a continuum of episode 12, I also shed light that some effort levels drop simply because that person is no longer in alignment with you. Sometimes your journey must move elsewhere, and moving on and letting go could be the best course of action. In this episode, we talk about the reasons why we get involved in relationships with people that don’t reciprocate our efforts, while also exploring the effects of staying in those kinds of relationships. We talk about how one sided relationships compare to healthy relationship and how, ultimately, building your self worth and vision for your life is your highest protection and guide to living a truly fulfilling life with quality, mutual effort relationships of all kinds.
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    29 mins
  • 12. Why they didn’t choose you, why you can’t let go, and why rejection really is redirection

    12. Why they didn’t choose you, why you can’t let go, and why rejection really is redirection
    Dec 22 2023
    This episode is in the same “dark intermission” thread as “the case for not choosing the guy (or girl) that makes the huge effort.” In this episode, I examine the questions a lot of us have following the ending of a toxic relationship - particularly the one where we did go for the guy who made the huge effort, only to be dumped just as quickly as they came into our lives. We can’t help but think, “why didn’t they choose me?” “They liked me so much in the beginning, what happened? What did I do? Why didn’t they love me?” So often we focus this conversation around what we did to repel or push them away, not realizing that the basis for the relationship was never even about you or them - it was about a need you both shared. A need that was complementary in the beginning that became contradictory once normal relationship issues come up. Ego and genuine, honest love simply cannot exist together. They negate each other. So while you think you’ve done something wrong, sometimes it’s doing something right that’s chasing the unhealthy people away - and this isn’t a bad things. Sure there could be things you also need to learn and work on, but someone’s ability to love you rarely has as much to do with you as it does with them and the relationship dynamics they are familiar, comfortable, and accustomed to. Sometimes it’s normal, healthy behaviors that push unhealthy people away, and that’s okay - because their rejection really is just divine redirection. Have a listen to find out why and what you can do to stay on your path.
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    31 mins
  • 11. Thought reappraisals

    11. Thought reappraisals
    Dec 22 2023
    After going through the “little learnings” of logical fallacies and cognitive distortions, we finish off this cognitive restructuring segment with thought reappraisals. Thought reappraisals begin with identifying distortions that other people have told us or ones that we’ve told ourselves. By first recognizing that we’ve fallen into thinking traps can we start to find our way back to truth. By finding our way back to truth, we can more easily regulate our emotions by intervening at the thought level, challenging the core beliefs and world views that might be limiting our perspectives. By learning to see as things actually are rather than as we are, or as our trauma has informed us to see, we can move past dysregulation and into a more happy, healthy, and balanced future.
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    16 mins
  • 10. Cognitive distortions

    10. Cognitive distortions
    Dec 16 2023
    This is the second of the “little learnings” we’ll be using for interrupting the cycle at the thought level. While logical fallacies talk about argument and evaluation in terms of interpersonal debate, cognitive distortions really speak to our mind’s misinterpretation of events, information, situations, or people being presented to us. Even more often, cognitive distortions can affect the way we see ourselves. If we accidentally distort the way we see things, we may act in ways that aren’t aligned with what’s healthiest for us or others. The goal is to uncover the truth about our own thinking patterns, so we can move toward a better reality because we see one is possible. In the next episode, we’ll get right into thought reappraisals and how to reframe our thoughts to be more geared toward reality and accuracy. From there, we can potentially reverse the downward spiraling of our lives by interrupting our behavior at the thought level. By lodging in new thoughts, we can allowing for a new feelings, body sensations, behaviors, and, essentially, an entire upward spiral to take hold.
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    23 mins
  • 09. Logical fallacies

    09. Logical fallacies
    Dec 16 2023
    Before we deep dive into [step three] of mapping healing - interrupting the cycle - I wanted to give you guys these “little learnings” to shed light on how exactly we can interrupt the cycle at the thought level. Understanding logical fallacies are critical in seeing how people’s perceptions, arguments, or evaluations of us can shape the way we think and feel about ourselves. We may shockingly come to find we’ve been basing our opinions of ourselves in distortions of reality or even down right lies. You might also be surprised to find some logical fallacies even border on emotional manipulation, in which you might have been subjected to you. In any case, I’m here to help you get your mind right. From getting your mind right, our feelings, body sensations, and behavior tend to follow, and, hence, begin to help us break free from our familiar patterns. Whether you’re unearthing trauma and past things people have said to you or stuck in a heated debate, logical fallacies are essential when thinking critically, so let’s get right into them!
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    21 mins