Finding Light in Your Darkest Tunnels

Raw vulnerability takes center stage as I pull back the curtain on my recent struggles with rejection, chronic pain, and unexpected emotional triggers. We've all experienced those moments when life seems to be "bitch slapping" us around—when old wounds we thought were healed suddenly reopen, leaving us gasping for breath and questioning our progress.

The heart of this episode explores what happens when well-intentioned friends tell us to "calm down" or "get therapy" instead of simply holding space for our authentic emotions. These dismissive responses often reveal more about others' discomfort with pain than any genuine desire to help. I share how this experience with a close friend—someone I once considered "another version of me"—forced me to confront not only my fear of rejection but also the painful reality that some relationships are seasonal rather than permanent.

Through my personal journey, I offer a powerful reminder that you possess more tools and strategies for emotional resilience than you realize. When meditation fails, perhaps a walk will help. When affirmations feel hollow, maybe music will reach you. The key is persistence—continuing to seek what works rather than surrendering to despair. I close with Florence Scovel Shin's transformative affirmation about creating new mental records, emphasizing how our words literally shape our reality. If you're currently navigating your own dark tunnel, remember: the light exists, even when it appears as nothing more than a distant pinhole. What quotes, verses, or affirmations have carried you through your darkest moments? I'd love to hear what works for you.

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Transcript

Welcome to Reverse, Reset, Restore

Speaker 1 0:00

This is Reverse, reset, restore, the podcast. That is all about looking at ways that you can make your life amazing by embracing who you are and by employing some strategies and techniques that can reshape the way that you see yourself and experience this world. Come on in. Change comes from within. Hello, my loves, I thought I would just pop in here and just have a quick sort of chat about life. As is evidenced and throughout these episodes, this podcast explores what is going on with life and we look at lots of different things. But today I really want to be a bit vulnerable and I'm going to share some stuff, kind of what's been going on, but not really. It's more about just saying, hey, this is the way I'm feeling and this is what I'm doing about it and the kind of epiphany that I had, thinking that maybe you might feel less alone knowing that other people are going through stuff. I have friends who will listen to my podcast and be like this amazing, you're doing all this work and they have no idea that I'm actually suffering. So here I am telling you that I'm suffering. If this is your first time here, first of all, welcome. Wonderful to have you here. Hopefully you're exactly where you need to be. If this is the first time you're hearing this, if you've been here before, welcome back. Time you're hearing this. If you've been here before, welcome back. Hopefully you'll find some encouragement in this as well.

Job Opportunity Gone Wrong

Speaker 1 1:50

Today I want to talk about kind of going through it. You know, life feels like it's just, quite frankly, bitch slapping me around a little bit of late and there's been some things that have been happening that are in my control and some things outside of that control, and it's been some hard fought lessons in coming back to me and recognizing that sometimes trying to hold on to stuff that I really just need to let go of, sometimes, as painful as it is, those lessons, those opportunities that life provides for us to learn something from or grow through, are usually accompanied by pain and discomfort, and that's really where my last few months have really felt very much in that space, to be honest, I've felt like I'm floundering and there has been multiple times where my mind has wandered off into very dark spaces and dark places and I've considered what the heck is it that I'm doing here not here on this podcast so much as just here in general in life, and part of that's been because of this ongoing chronic pain. Part of it's been not working, which is something I find rewarding and fulfilling. It's also been in some of the relationships that I've got going on in my life, and I'm talking about it because I feel like I just want to be transparent about things, because I'm hoping that if I share with you the Cripola of my own personal journey and pain might somehow uplift you if you're going through this too. So I had been offered a job opportunity and I was super excited about it because it was going back to a group of people that I knew and it was perfect because it was only three days a week and I was like that's great.

When Friends Don't Understand Your Pain

Speaker 1 4:01

With this chronic pain that I've got going on, this is what I need to do right now. Everything was set, but they needed to then formalize things, so I was sending off the things that needed to be done to make everything tickety-boo, as we might say. Only, not everything was tickety-boo, and what happened in this process? Almost well, it did destroy me. It really shook my confidence, it made me feel worthless, it tore into a scar and reopened that wound, and it's something I've had to work through again, and this is why I'm here, because I don't want to go too much into the details of all of that. But I want to say that the reality is, in my experience and this journey of personal development and self-healing and learning to love myself again, there are times when I'm like, yes, I got this, I got this boo, you know, you're good, like you've got through that trauma now, and then a few months later or a couple of years later, it turns around and bitch, slaps you in the face and often you don't see it coming. So this is what happened to me that a few phrases were specifically said to me which just brought up all this wounds from my childhood, wounds that I thought I'd done the work and I'd worked through and I was confident and I'd let that trauma go. The reality is that we do the work and we get through stuff and we get through the gunk and we pull it out and we toss it aside and the wounds somewhat heal and then things happen in life that maybe reopen that wound as a opportunity for us to oh, I've still got some pain there. I've still got some gangrene in the wound now that needs to be cleaned and washed away so that I can heal.

Speaker 1 6:16

That's how I'm viewing what happened recently with this particular job and the terrible things that were said to me that resulted in me not taking on this role, and it crushed me for a day or two. I was really quite distressed and I really had to work through that distress. I was speaking to a friend on the phone and she basically said oh, you're catastrophizing, you know, you need to calm down, you need therapy. And I was like, first of all, this has just happened. Today, I'm allowed to be upset with what's happened. I'm allowed to feel my feelings. I'm not catastrophizing. I'm just feeling really vulnerable and really wounded and really shocked at this situation.

Speaker 1 7:09

So don't tell me how to feel. First of all and that's where we get things wrong sometimes, where we think that we're being good friends by saying don't worry about about it, or you'll get over it, or all of the little things that we try to say, when in reality it's not about trying to help that person who's distressed. It's about avoiding the distress that those emotions and those feelings that we're seeing bring up within ourselves. Unfortunately, this is the person who I thought was like another alternate version of me to some degrees. We finished each other's sentences. We were really good friends.

Speaker 1 7:55

So I was already irritated that she was telling me to calm down. Don't tell someone to calm down, please, please, just don't do it. Allow them to express how they're feeling, because their feelings are valid, and I've spent a lot of my life feeling condemnation for how I express myself and how I allow my emotions to be present. I actually think it's a strength, I think it's a power that I have my ability to actually sit with those feelings and experience them and allow them to be expressive. The other power I have and this is something that has come through a lot of hard work and what I was talking about that you think you've done the work and something tears open the wound again and here we go again. It's understanding that this stuff there's always opportunity to heal the trauma and you don't necessarily know how deep something goes until you hit it again, which is what happened.

Speaker 1 9:04

So I said to my friend you know, I appreciate what you're saying, but it's just happened today. I'm gonna feel the feelings and it's okay for me to do that. I'm just really upset and angry about it and it's really brought up some stuff for me. So when she'd said I need counseling or therapy, I was like. I've also done a lot of therapy around this as well, so I am clearly aware even I'm in the middle of my emotions and my feelings. I am actually consciously aware of my emotions and my feelings and that I'm going to need to use my strategies to pull myself out of this dark space. That's what I want to encourage you for your own self is that you have more skills than you realize. You have more strategies and tools in place to get through the crap that comes your way than you probably even realize.

Finding What Works in Dark Times

Speaker 1 10:01

We often discount ourselves when we're feeling down and out and it's really hard to pick yourself up off the floor sometimes. And, like I said, there's been some times when I've seriously contemplated how I don't want to be here, how everything feels really hard and painful and the world is really scary and awful and the way that we treat people is so sad, it's beyond sad, it's infuriating. Yet here we are, but I'm still here and I'm going through a tunnel right now. But I know, even if the light just seems like a pinhole, I know that the light is at the end of it, and the light is at the end of the tunnel that you might be in yourself right now too, my love. I want to be vulnerable with you, because this is what this podcast is about.

Speaker 1 10:59

It's talking to you about my own personal experiences and identifying the stuff that's happened in my life that has caused some pain but also some growth, and I don't know where my friendship is right now with her. To be honest, this happened a few weeks ago. I text her and I haven't had a response and, yeah, that hurts, but with more time and distance, the pain is lessening and I'm recognizing that actually, who I thought she was in my life maybe wasn't going to be a person that continues on in my path. I appreciate her, I love her, I will always value the time and the relationship that we have, but it's just another reminder that sometimes our relationships and our friendships that we cultivate don't always stay on with us for the rest of our lives. They are seasonal and I'm okay with that.

Speaker 1 12:01

It's been tough because it's kind of brought up my fears of rejection and I've had to really work through that and I've gone to all the different strategies that I talk about in so many of the episodes. I've tried them all and sometimes, when I've been really in a very high anxious level. I've had to go through a number of these different techniques to try to find something to ease my mind and to get me, you know, back into feeling in a safe space within my body and within the sphere of where I sit in the world. So this is really about a reminder to you that sometimes you're going to find things work for you really well and then other times the things that normally would work for you may not work so well, when you're in a high level of stress or you've got anxiety or you've just got so many things on your plate that it's all feeling very much overwhelming. I would just encourage you to do what I've been doing Keep finding something else to try.

Speaker 1 13:07

If you can't get your mind to calm down in meditation, then go for a walk. If you're not finding walking helps you to stay present and in the moment, listen to some music, like there's so many different things that we can try. That eventually will give our brain the safe space it needs to stop the reaction it's undertaking. At least it's been my experience, and I mean some days I do sit here and I try so many different things and I'm like this normally normally works, you know, normally if I do some EFT tapping and I amp myself up or I go into my bathroom and I read through all my affirmations, I usually get really energized and excited and I feel good, it's not working. And instead of getting disheartened about that, being able to go okay, well, right now this isn't something that is working for me. So what can I try next? And that's what I want to encourage you Not just to go, oh well, this thing isn't working, so all is lost. No, try something else. Keep looking, keep searching for the thing that's going to help you get through that hard moment. And it might be that you go and have a coffee with a friend. It might be that you pray. It might be that you go and have a huge bubble bath and sit there listening to soothing ocean sounds. Whatever you might find is going to work for you. Do it is going to work for you? Do it? Be encouraged that you don't have to sit there with the screaming voices in your head discouraging you even further, especially when you're already in a season of what feels like unending pain and challenges.

Words Create Reality: Florence Scovel Shin

Speaker 1 14:56

I wanted to share with you something that Florence Scovel Shin spoke over her own life, and I'm pretty sure I'd have to go back and research. I'm not going to do that right now because I just want to talk. I'm pretty sure I have shared this before, but if I haven't, great. If I have, we'll find it some other time. But I really want to share this with you because I found it really encouraging and, again, it's another technique, it's another tool, it's another strategy to try. You might not find this works for you, this particular statement that you can speak over your life. You might find that you need to write something for yourself. You might find it's a beautiful poem or a song that can become an anthem for you. Songs become anthems for me.

Speaker 1 15:42

But I wanted to share this with you because it has been something that's been encouraging me over the last few weeks while I've been going through this, and it has been one of the strategies that, when I'm feeling like, oh my gosh, my anxiety is really amping up. Let me try X, y and Z. I've gone through the rest of the alphabet. I find this really inspiring. I find it encouraging and a reminder to myself that words create our reality, and so when I'm feeling really distressed and really down, my thinking is distressed and really down. My thinking is full of nasty vermicious knids about how I view my world and my place in it and my very existence. Our words, our thoughts create our reality. So if we have terrible thoughts about ourselves and about what we're going through and we can change those thoughts in an opposite spirit sort of direction, then we create new thoughts and a new reality, and that reality is really one where you feel complete and whole and safe and okay and loved and accepted.

Speaker 1 17:06

And for me, who sometimes sits on that very tenuous edge of should I stay or should I go, this is a really important key thing for me. That's kept me here and maybe reminding yourself that we always have the choice about how we're going to handle the situations in our lives. And it's okay to have those moments where you do cry and you do catastrophize and you do get really upset and you are heartbroken about a circumstance or a situation or a person. That's normal. I don't want any of you to think that you can't be you or you can't genuinely have those feelings and those moments of distress. We're human. We're supposed to feel all the feelings. That's okay. We're just not supposed to stay constantly in that one feeling, especially if it's one that's not healthy for us and not working in our favor.

Speaker 1 18:05

So I'm going to share this with you. I might speak it a few times before I go and maybe you'll find it good. Let me know, in the comments of whatever platform you're listening on, if you've got the ability to do that or share with me. Even better would be if you've got a quote or an affirmation or a bible verse or a verse from the quran, whatever it is, that really resonates with you, or it could be something from you know one of your favorite authors or a lyric, feel free to drop that in there as well. Share it with me. I would love to see what inspires you and gets you out of that sort of self-sabotaging cycle that we can all find ourselves in at times. All right, this quote from Florence Scovelshin.

Speaker 1 18:57

I now smash and demolish by my spoken word every untrue record in my subconscious mind. They shall return to the dust heap of their native nothingness, for they came from my own vain imaginings. I now make my perfect record through the Christ, within the record of health, wealth, love and perfect self-expression. I now smash and demolish by my spoken word every untrue record in my subconscious mind. They shall return to the dust heap of their native nothingness, for they came from my own vain imaginings. I now make my perfect record through the Christ, within the record of health, wealth, love and perfect self-expression.