Reverse, Reset, Restore

Hello Again! Embracing Self-Love Amidst Chaos

• Sally • Season 1 • Episode 111

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Hello. Again.

It's been a hot minute! Or three!! 

Chronic pain blindsided me, a hospital stay disrupted my life,  the loss of my grandmother and my job and the state of the world have left voids in my life. Yet, amidst these struggles, I've been rediscovering a profound truth: the journey to healing begins with self-reliance. As we reconvene after a long hiatus, I'm opening up about my personal challenges, inviting you to share your own stories. Together, we can build a supportive community for those navigating similar paths, finding strength in shared experiences.

This episode dives deep into the struggles of living with chronic pain while highlighting the importance of self-love and gratitude. Through personal reflection, we explore the interconnectedness of physical and mental health, and the continual journey of healing. 

• Returning to the podcast after a hiatus due to personal challenges 
• Dealing with chronic pain and emotional turmoil 
• Questions surrounding mental health and healthcare experiences 
• Importance of gratitude in daily life 
• Analyzing our relationship with our bodies and self-perception 
• Continuously working towards self-acceptance and healing 
• Invitation to share stories and build a community of support 
• Emphasizing the message that wholeness may not be achievable, but self-compassion is key

Here's the link to episode 68 which I mentioned in this episode: The Battle Within: Conquering Self-Hatred and Cultivating Self-Love.

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2071552/episodes/14318898

Episode quote “And I said to my body, softly. ‘I want to be your friend.’  It took a long breath and replied, ‘I have been waiting my whole life for this’ “ - Nayyirah Waheed

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https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100092872185263

Speaker 1:

Surprise. Hello, guess, who is back, back again. Yes, it is me, your friendly host of Reverse, recent Restore, sally, and it is great to be here. It has been a long, blimmin' time, I know, and we're going to get into some of the details about that in just a minute, but I'm welcoming you back with open arms, happy heart, head held high and with my mentalness at least back in the game again. I am so excited to have you here. Come restart, reverse, reset, restore once more, and change comes from within. Hello, my lovelies. Now, if you are here for the very first time, welcome, great to meet you. This is probably going to be a strange starting point, but hey, I'm glad that you're here and we're just going to get straight into it. If this is something that you've been waiting for quite some time for me to return, welcome back. I'm glad to be back.

Speaker 1:

The last few months I took some time off because I had a lot of stuff going on and we will talk about some of that in some detail for some things and not so much detail for other things, because it might not really be the point. But here we are. I didn't actually intend to take any time off, and especially not the amount of time that we've ended up having between the last episode that dropped and this episode. But life happens right and the whole point of this podcast is really about honoring yourself, learning to reconnect to who you are authentically, learning to love yourself again and listen to yourself and do the things that you need to do to keep yourself safe, to keep yourself protected, to get yourself healthy and whole again if whole is ever possible, which you know. There's debates on that and even in my own headspace at the moment I'd say whole is probably not an accurate statement. I don't think whole is actually achievable, an accurate statement. I don't think whole is actually achievable, but we'll get into that in other sessions. I'm sure Surprise that I ended up taking as long as I did. Let's delve into that a little bit.

Speaker 1:

Back in August of 2024, I had experienced an increase in chronic pain, and it was a new pain that I hadn't dealt with before, which ended up putting me into hospital for a different reason. But the pain was basically an instigator of a chain of events which saw me back in the ICU and on the road to recovery. As of today, which is February, I am living with chronic pain. I'm living with symptoms which no one can seem to explain or resolve for me, which has created a lot of challenges, shall we say, in my life. Coupled with that, I lost my beautiful and amazing grandmother in October of last year, just shy of her 91st birthday. The beautiful thing about that was I was able to go home and be with my family and reconnect with my cousins and quite a few other people from my earlier life, which was a wonderful gift that I was able to have even in the midst of losing such an important person in my whole life.

Speaker 1:

I've returned back to Sydney. I don't have a job which for someone like me. I love working, I love being busy, I love interacting with people, I enjoy challenging myself with new things. So not having a thing to get up in the morning and go and work with other people and achieve goals and projects and all those sort of things has impacted my mental health. On top of that. That's just one part of my cycle of self-abuse that's been happening the last few months as well.

Speaker 1:

So I've had chronic pain. I've had symptoms that the doctors don't seem to really care about or have not actually really investigated why I'm having these issues or what can be done about it. They just have all swept it into one little thing of oh, you're clinically depressed, so we can't fix the physical problems that you've got going on until your mental health is better, which actually, ironically, I was having quite a downward spiral again with my mental health and I had a week of I saw specialists and I saw my doctor and I saw a therapist and all of them said oh you're, you're clinically depressed, you've got complex trauma, ptsd, all of these types of things. Until you get your mental health fixed, we can't resolve the physical problems. That sent me home feeling really discouraged and feeling really trapped and helpless. And if you are someone who has suffered any kind of chronic pain or ongoing symptoms that can't be accounted for or felt like, you are screaming into an abyss because doctors and healthcare professionals just don't seem to care enough to try to figure out what is going on. Please comment below if you are on a site that allows that. So if you're listening to this through youtube videos, make a comment below. If you're listening to this through YouTube videos, make a comment below. If you're listening on Spotify, you can make a comment there as well.

Speaker 1:

Reverse, reset, restore is across basically every type of podcast platform that you might encounter, and I would love to know that I'm not screaming alone into this abyss, because I'm pretty sure that maybe you, like me, are living with things that just make life very difficult and more complicated than it needs to be. I came home after this week of being basically told there's nothing we can do for your physical problems and your physical symptoms and your chronic pain. You just have to live with it until you get your mental health well, and at first, that first week or so after these conversations, I felt yeah, I did feel really helpless. Then my brain kicked in and reminded me that, even though I want the medical teams that are involved with my life and with my care to actually care and to actually be invested in trying to help me, ultimately the buck stops with me, which, when you're feeling a bit down about yourself and you're feeling overwhelmed, it's a really hard thing to entertain that thought that, oh, I actually have to do something. But I had to do something.

Speaker 1:

And my brain kicked into this idea of you know what if I can't get help for these medical things that are going on, for this chronic pain that I'm living under, for all of these weird complex symptoms that seem to lead in various directions and yet no one's invested enough to try to help me resolve what is actually going on in my body, then I'm going to have to do it and I'm going to have to find my way out of this umbrella that they've put me under, this definition of oh, you've got mental health issues, you're feeling down, so this is why it's happening. Got mental health issues, you're feeling down, so this is why it's happening. Yeah, maybe I'm feeling down, doctor, because I've got so much chronic pain and unexplainable symptoms that I'm living with every day. Maybe that's contributed to the mental health. It's like that. What came first? The chicken or the egg type scenario, right? I don't know if the mental health stuff has impacted the physical condition that I'm in or whether the physical condition has influenced the mental health. Who's to say? I think it's a little bit of both, but I have been thinking about how to get myself out of this situation, both in the physical sense of the chronic conditions that I have, the symptoms that I experience, the impact that has on my everyday functionality which is one of the reasons why I haven't done this podcast for so long and then, on the other hand, how to nurture myself into a stronger frame of mind and a better, healthy thinking patterns.

Speaker 1:

After about a week of me feeling all doldrums about those experiences with the doctors, I realized, oh, I've actually stopped doing some of the things I was doing that was really helping with my mental health and my overall holistic well-being. I'd stopped waking up in the morning and doing my little gratitude moment. I had talked about this before, about starting your day with gratitude. So when you wake up and before you get yourself out of bed, lie there and for about a minute sometimes longer, sometimes less just be grateful for whatever comes into your mind. So I just thank the world or I give some gratitude for the things that whatever comes into my head really.

Speaker 1:

So today, for example, I woke up. I did wake up a bit late because of the pain medication I'm on sometimes makes me sleep later into the morning or because I haven't slept during the night. Anyway, I woke up. A thunderstorm was rolling in. It was getting really dark, the skies had rolled into this beautiful gray landscape and it just poured down. There was this incredible electric feeling in the air. There were shards of lightning bursting all over the place Rolls of thunder cracking across the sky. To me it was exquisite. I love a good storm and it was beautiful and I was so thankful and I remember sitting here thinking, oh, this is fantastic, is fantastic, I love this. This is beautiful to me.

Speaker 1:

Now, I know not everyone likes storms, but I am like obsessed with them. And when you live in a hot place and I live in Sydney, which is hot enough for me and it's summer you really appreciate these moments, these pockets of days where it is cooler and the rain is present and it's a bit bleak out there in some ways. But I was like, yay, I can open up all my windows and get all the the fresh air coming in. The cool breeze might actually come into my house. So that was exciting and it was something I'm truly grateful for.

Speaker 1:

And that's the thing when you begin a practice of having gratitude in the morning before you start your day with anything else, if you can just take even 30 seconds, even 20 seconds, even 10 seconds before you get out of bed, to say, oh, I'm grateful for and name the things that you're grateful for For me, it's coffee, for me, it's the sky, it's the clouds, it's the sun, it's the rain, it's having a roof over my head, it's the fact that my partner still has a job and he, even though we don't earn a lot of money, he's still able to support us enough to continue having that roof over our heads and having food on the table and paying our bills. I'm grateful, I'm so grateful for that, but I'd realized I'd stopped practicing my morning gratitudes. So I've implemented that again and I do feel a lot better. I've also started to remind myself of the other things that I was doing, so naturally, and then life happened and I stopped doing them little by little, and perhaps this is something that you can identify with as well.

Speaker 1:

Sometimes we get so caught up in life and the chaos it can create for us that we forget to do those practices that keep us well, that keep us healthy, and when you are in pain and when you are unwell, it can be all encompassing. So for me living with chronic pain where I'm having stabbing electrical current, like pain, shooting through my body periodically or sometimes all day long. I'm having pain where my whole body, every single part of it, just aches, like I've raced a marathon and I'm exhausted and physically, just even moving from room to room is a battle. When you're living under those kind of constraints and that kind of circumstance, it is actually really easy to fall into that pain and that's all you can think about, it's all that colors you, it's all that you can respond to. And I recognize that's exactly what's happened to me the last few months and it's one of the reasons why I wasn't able to do any more recordings, because I physically couldn't cope with sitting and speaking or writing an episode or even thinking about the social media aspects of it. None of it mattered at the time, and the longer the time went on and the more enclosed I became and surrounding myself in the shroud of pain, the harder it seemed to get out of it. So it is a vicious cycle.

Speaker 1:

So in some ways the doctors were right we need to take care of the mental health before we can take care of the pain and me being pissed off at them and thinking you don't give two hoots about how I'm feeling or what is happening to my body or how just bleak my existence seems right now because of all these things that I'm going through. My anger and frustration at feeling this way has re-energized me, which is exciting. Now does that mean that my mental health is perfect and I'm no longer having any depressive thoughts? Yes and no, but I am going back into the practice of reminding myself of the things that I can do to pull myself out of that gray state of being, and it's helped me so much. So I am feeling really good and much better than I had been about a month ago.

Speaker 1:

In my mind, in my mental house, which is great Physically, though in my mind, in my mental house, which is great Physically, though still got considerable problems, still having a lot of these issues that are really defining my waking moments. And the doctors are saying things like you can't get a job if you're in the state physically. My friends will say the same thing how are you going to get a job and work if you're having this kind of physical problems? Again, it's the chicken and egg scenario. I keep thinking about that. I keep thinking if I have a job, then maybe the physical pain won't be so absolute, right? Because I'll have other things to focus on. I'll have other things to provide my energy into. I don't know until it happens, but I am going to be looking for work again and we'll see. We won't know until I get a job and begin that process and see how things go.

Speaker 1:

But I'm hopeful right now, here today, that by coming back to some of the things that make me feel fulfilled and reverse, reset, restore is one of those things. It's one of the things I do in my life that make me feel better about myself, that make me feel less alone, that make me feel like I can give something back to the world, and I've missed this and I've needed this, and I'm recognizing the last few days have been pondering over how do I start this conversation again, how do I come back on air and be like, oh, my life has been bullshit and it's been hard and it's been gross and it's been challenging, and I have felt very much obsessed with all the problems and all the pain that I've been experiencing that I have forgotten, and all the pain that I've been experiencing that I have forgotten all of the things that I talk about and all the previous episodes we've had. I've been rereading some of them and going, oh, okay, yeah, I forgot I talked about that and I forgot that I did that and I forgot that this actually still applies to me. So one of the things that I've been recently listening to again is an episode I did back I think it's like episode 68, and it was about self-hatred, and I will find the exact episode details and pop it into the show notes for you so you can go and explore that too. It's really made me consider just how much self-hatred still is a part of me, and this was really apparent.

Speaker 1:

A few weeks ago I went on a vacation with some of my family. We went on a short cruise. It was beautiful, it was a fun, awesome time together and we'd got dressed up. They have cruises have nights where you dress up, so one of the nights was like a Gatsby thing 1920s and another night was a white night and I hate wearing white, but I pushed my boundaries in my comfort zone and thought I'm gonna do it anyway and I dressed up for the Gatsby thing. We had fun and we had such a great night and we got photos taken and all sorts of things.

Speaker 1:

And then I went to look and I couldn't find the photos of me and my mum, or me and my partner. I found the photos of everybody else. All my other family members could be located, but I couldn't find the photos of me and my brain decided that this would be a wonderful time to really stick it to me. So it began to say things over and over. This is the loop to me. So it began to say things over and over this is the loop. Your photo must be so bad, you must look so terrible that they couldn't even put it on display. Your photo must just, you must look so gross and so disgusting that it can't even be shown. They mustn't have even bothered to print it, because no one wants to see how fat and disgusting and ugly you truly are.

Speaker 1:

Now, when I'm me, my authentic me, I have learned to stop that train of thought, to recognize A. That thought is bullshit, it's a liar, it's not the truth and it's not me. It is a thought that I should have just been like whatever Wonder Woman does when bullets come her way and she stops them with her bracelets. That's what I should have done with those thoughts, but I didn't. No, my dear friends, what did I do? I entertained it. I might as well have said pull up a seat, kick your shoes off, I'll get you a drink. Let's hang out and become the bestest of friends. Because the longer I couldn't find those photos, the more I fed that thought.

Speaker 1:

When I eventually did find the pictures, I had hyped myself up into this place where I was frantically like I'm so ugly, I'm so hideous. So when I saw the photos, I didn't see what probably anyone else saw. I just saw the worst photos I've ever seen of myself. I saw fat, I saw ugly, I saw the hippopotamus elephant persona that I used to always see about myself. So when my mother was like I'm going to buy the picture of you and I together, I reacted and sorry, no, not sorry, and sorry, no, not sorry. It was a very primal reaction based upon these thoughts that I had not swatted away like the little flies that they had started out to be, they had become this massive construct. So my mother didn't buy the picture because she was just like oh, I don't want to upset her, I'm not going to buy something, even though I don't think there's anything wrong with it. She honored the fact that my feeling was it's an awful picture, I hate it, I hate myself.

Speaker 1:

Visceral reaction as I reflected upon it a little bit later, and almost immediately actually, I okay, I'm in some dangerous territory here again. I'm in a place where my love for myself, my respect for myself, all this work that I've done to undo this self-hatred, to pull apart the constraints that have held me back from really loving my body and myself as a person. All of that work has been washed away, almost. That's how I felt. I realized pretty rapidly that I needed to pause. I needed to acknowledge that my headspace about myself was not good and that I needed to come back to my authenticness. And who am I authentically? I'm fun, I'm intelligent, I'm friendly, I am exuberant, I have so many talents and abilities and capabilities and I'm creative and all of these things that are true about me. I allowed this pain that I'm living in, that is housed within my body, to really begin to dictate again this really unhealthy, toxic relationship with my body and my mind and the Sally that I am, and it was a pretty confronting realization. Oh shit, I'm back here and I have stopped doing the work and I have allowed my circumstances and the challenges to really become insidious thoughts and patterns once more, and this needs to stop.

Speaker 1:

I've been reading this self-hatred's impact on the body which was an episode from like probably around a year ago, and realized I've got some work to still do, and I think that's the reality and this is where I want to go back to not feeling like the idea of being able to truly be whole is actually an achievable thing, because I don't think we can ever be whole. I think we have to learn how to honor and love the pieces of us that have been changed, the pieces of us that may be always going to be missing or incomplete, and that life has happened to us, to each of us. Things have happened that have created challenges or that have created pain in our lives. When we understand this and we are able to self-reflect and give ourselves self-compassion, it is a gift that we give ourselves to recognize that wholeness is not actually an achievable thing, but we can overcome and we can heal ourselves and reconnect to our body and reconnect to the parts of us that we feel are broken.

Speaker 1:

For me, my feeling about myself is not good, right, and especially because my body has been, I have felt, retaliating against me or rebelling against me, and I had this massive conversation with it back in August when I had the real deep pain come through and it was something that was really crippling, and I remember lying in bed one day and I just was. I yelled, I screamed at my body if I'm in all fairness, screamed at my body how much I hated it, how I couldn't stand it. How could it dare to do this to me when I was working so hard to love it and accept it and honor it, and why can't work with me? And I got myself into this whole screaming match and, within seconds of me finishing my little hatred rant, my body responded with a wave of pain that kept me pinned to my bed, basically, and I was screaming out in pain, crying for a solid 20 minutes, not able to move, just pain coursing through my body and like just immense waves, wave after wave. And that's because I had ended my rant with I'm the boss, I'm in charge, you will obey me. So my body proved otherwise in that moment.

Speaker 1:

I see now that I've been reflecting the last two weeks or so, that moment where I screamed out and I felt it retaliate by giving me this pain that literally I couldn't move, I couldn't even get the phone to call for help or anything. I was like completely pinned to my bed. That that was a trigger that set off what has happened in the last few months, where the pain has been increased in a lot of ways, where there's been a disconnect between me and my love for my body and there's been a reopening of the borders for that self-hatred army to enter through and try to dismantle all of the beautiful and amazing work that I had done prior to love myself. So that's where I'm at, that's where I've been. This is one of the reasons why the podcast hasn't been in action for a while, and I'm hoping that, as I just come back to these baby steps again of reaffirming my worth and finding that place of loving myself and forgiving myself that my healing journey will continue. On the other reason I didn't do the podcast apart from the fact that physically it was almost impossible for me to do it was also because I knew that my headspace and my physicality didn't seem to correspond with my belief systems and everything that I've been talking about in previous episodes, and so there was a measure of shame and confusion and fear and feeling like, oh, maybe I'm being, maybe I'm being foolish to proclaim that you can love yourself to healing and all these sorts of things that I do believe in, but it wasn't working in my life, and so I was like I'm a fraud. I can't talk about these things with any truth in them, if my whole world is just completely a disaster zone right now. This is why this podcast needs to continue to exist, because I need to remind myself A this is actually what the point of the podcast is to be honest and to be truthful and to say, hey, this is where I am at right in this moment and it's okay. It's also B to allow me my own healing, because when I talk about this, allow me my own healing, because when I talk about this, what it does is it actually allows me to work through the crap that's going on in my mind, the thought systems that I'm still trying to dismantle, and it also c makes me feel less alone and d I'm hoping that it makes you feel less alone as well in your circumstances, in your situations, dr Bessel van der Klok says, in the Body that Keeps the School, which is something we've talked about previously rage that has nowhere to go is redirected against the self in the form of depression, self-hatred and self-destructive actions.

Speaker 1:

One of my patients told me it's like hating your home, your kitchen and pots and pans, your bed, your chairs, your table, your rugs. Nothing feels safe, least of all your own body, and that is exactly how I've been feeling in the world. Nothing feels safe for me in this world at the moment. I have a lot of stress and distress about things that are happening, not just with my own life but globally, and this quote really highlights for me. Oh, I don't feel safe, I don't feel safe. I don't feel safe anywhere. And even my own body, with the chronic pain it, doesn't make me feel safe, doesn't make me feel secure, doesn't make me feel like I want to be here some days.

Speaker 1:

And to acknowledge that is to acknowledge there's still work to be done and there's always going to be work right, because our systematic beliefs, our false narratives that we have so beautifully woven into the landscape of our being are really entrenched and it's going to take more than a few months to fix things. We are always going to be a work in progress. That's just the reality of it. So I am a work in progress. That's just the reality of it. So I am a work in progress. I know you are too. I'm welcoming us both back to the table of being able to reflect, to restart and reshape and reclaim who we authentically are. We are more than our bodies, we are more than our jobs. We are more than our jobs. We are more than our relationships. We are more than what is happening in this big old world. If we can come back to a place of just being authentically in love with ourselves, that's where we will find the healing. That's where we will dismantle those lies and the stories we tell ourselves and we find our freedom again. So hello again.

Speaker 1:

I am looking forward to being involved in conversations with you and I hope that you can support this podcast. Please, if you can give it a follow, share. Do what you got to do to help me. Share this message with other people who maybe need the reminder that, even if their body feels like it's completely broken and deranged, that there is still hope for each of us, that raging against ourselves, to find that safety that is in who we are, as a human being, as a person, as a spiritual entity. I want to encourage you to take a moment today to give yourself some grace, give yourself some love.

Speaker 1:

For me, having that moment with that storm and just standing at the windows and watching the rain pelt against it and run down in these giant globs, and hearing the wind and the thunder rolling against the sky, was actually a really beautiful moment for me and I really wanted to honor that experience of just being in that moment. And I really wanted to honor that experience of just being in that moment. And I think that a lot of us forget to just be. We're so in the business of doing that. We forget that we are being.

Speaker 1:

So I want to encourage you today to take a moment to be out in nature or to just pause and look at the sky.

Speaker 1:

Whether you're seeing stars, whether you're seeing clouds, whether you're seeing vibrant blues of an open, endless sky, whatever the colors surround you, I want you to just really acknowledge that when we look at nature and we can embrace it and we can accept it and we can just be in awe of it, what it does is it actually connects you to something greater than yourself, but it also allows you to be in the moment and become appreciative of this moment, which is all we have, and I feel like that that has really helped inspire me today, to encourage me to look beyond my chronic pain, look beyond my circumstances of not working and all that kind of stuff, and just fall in love with my life again, and fall in love with right, where I am and who I am, and it's all going to be okay.

Speaker 1:

As always, I always finish off every episode of Reverse, reset, restore with a quote, and this one I've been holding on to for quite a long time and I've really started to utilize it a lot more in my day to day, like I speak it over myself every single day over the last few weeks, and I'm sure that's one of the reasons why I've been feeling refreshed in my mind and with my body. And it comes from Nayira Wahid, who said and I said to my body softly I want to be your friend. It took a long breath and replied I have been waiting my whole life for this.