Welcome to the Stay or Go podcast, where we're changing the dialogue around divorce so that no woman ever stays in her marriage out of fear. Get ready to dispel myths, learn life-changing tools, and build a solid foundation in yourself from which to make your decision. And now your host, me, Britta Joe. Hello. We are here on this episode this week. This episode that last week I hyped up. I just kept saying next week's episode, next week's episode. So yeah, next week's episode has arrived. Here it is. And we are once again gonna dive into deep coaching ideas and hit the ground kind of running. So just like in the last episode, you might want to listen to this one a couple times to really digest. As I was out on my walk this morning, I was realizing there is just a lot of different nuance to all of this. And so I most of all want to encourage, as you're listening to both of these episodes, if there's anything that rubs you the wrong way or that kind of feels like, ugh, I just that doesn't sit right with me, let it go. It's not for you. It's obviously not your truth. And I'm gonna dive into a little bit more how that can end up happening and why I want you to be aware of it. So, as you can tell from the title, we're gonna be talking about the actual boots on the ground work behind creating your own reality. What does that actually look like? In the last episode, I said, you know, your thoughts get you your results, your beliefs create your reality. That is one hell of a statement. Okay. And there is so much encapsulated in that. That's why I have a whole, you know, this whole second episode where I'm really trying to break down and show you the real guts of the situation more than just that statement that makes it seem like, okay, well, if my thoughts create my reality, then let's just go change those thoughts, right? And why I haven't taught this, I would say, as much on the podcast is because there is so much nuance to all of it. It really takes, it's gonna take you guys listening to what I'm saying and really staying very conscious of what's happening in your body as well. Because if you're not careful, you can use this episode and the one I gave you last week against yourself. Okay. So before I dive into the process around changing your beliefs, I have two things that I want you all to be so aware of. Okay. So the first one is shame. When I first learned the idea that my thoughts create my reality, at that time in my life, I had a reality that I did not like. And being from a perfectionistic, you know, type A style of upbringing, what did I do? But immediately go to shaming myself. Okay, well, if my reality isn't something I want, then that must be my fault. Ergo, I need to work on it. I need to change, I need to get better, I must be broken, I need to do something different. And that is, let me just like normalize it by saying it's so common, especially for us as women. I think we're very trained culturally to assume when things are going wrong, okay, I'll fix it, or it must be me. I see this happen a lot for those of you that get on calls with me where you have been trying, trying, trying in the marriage, and maybe your partner hasn't been trying as hard, but you are still under the assumption that the issue is you. And if you could just be more grateful, or if you could just, you know, now that he's trying, why don't I want to? It must be a problem with me. So this thought, your thoughts create your reality, can set off shame potentially in you. And you can start thinking, oh my God, can just feed into maybe those beliefs that you've had from childhood that like the problem's me. So I want you to be very aware. If that has come up for you this last week, because we've had a week between these two episodes, I just want to normalize it. And I also want to say, I see you. I absolutely went through this in the beginning, and I do occasionally now, not as much. But this is the this so this piece, right? You go into shame. This is gonna tie into the second piece I want you to be aware of, which is and God does this like uh this concept I'm about to share with you is probably one of my biggest, I wouldn't even call it a pet peeve because it feels so much more aggressive than that. But one of my biggest frustrations with coaching, and what I often see happen amongst coaches and with people who get some of the tools of coaching and then start, in my opinion, using them against themselves. And the the word that I use to describe this is called thought swapping, or you might also have heard it called like spiritual bypassing. So thought swapping is when, okay, so you realize my thoughts create my reality, and the current reality I'm in, maybe I don't like it. So instead, I'm just gonna change my thoughts. Instead of going and actually examining like the deeper, complex, messy, dirty, down underneath their unconscious work that would take me face to face with my trauma and my dragons. I'm just gonna slap a happy thought on this. Right? This is like mantras, and and you you think, oh, I'm just gonna tell myself, okay, if my thoughts create my results, I'm just gonna tell myself I love my husband. And then I'm gonna get this result of loving him. And no joke, y'all. I literally saw a couple posts the other day on Facebook doing just this. So in the first one, I saw a woman posting about her children, and the way she was writing it was basically talking about some really awful things that had happened with their kids lately. Just, oh my God, reading her post, I was like, oh, children, you know, like young toddlers just destroying shit. And at the end, she's literally saying, like, even though this is hard, and you know, it's like I want to pull my hair out, it really has been worth it. I love being a mom. I wouldn't trade it for anything. And I was like, oh my God. And you can kind of feel when when someone's doing this, because there's this energy around it, and let me kind of break it down for y'all. If sh here's here's my opinion. Take it or leave it, right? This is truly an opinion. But my thought is if she was genuinely loving motherhood, okay, if it really was as great as she's making it sound, I just don't think she would need to get on Facebook to tell everybody how great it is. Can you guys feel that energy? It's this like, I'm unsettled in myself. So I need to go do something outside of me to try and show myself or convince myself that I really do actually feel this way. Makes me think too of like the other night. I was not planning on sharing this, but I'm gonna share it because it's another great example of this energy. Me and my partner Joe, we were out to dinner with his kids, just having like a lovely, lovely evening all together at this restaurant. And this woman walks up to us, comes up to Joe, and is like, Joe, and ends up, she's somebody from high school, had been friends with his ex-wife. And the energy, y'all, it was so just for me as a coach, so psychologically fascinating to watch, right? Because she comes up, she's totally focused on him, she completely ignores me. Then she makes this huge show of just being over the top, excited to see the kids and inviting them to come to her house. And y'all, I'm sitting there, you know, I've never met this person. I don't know who this person is. I don't know how she knows Joe. And watching her performance, that's what I'm gonna call it. I would have thought, wow, this person's super close to their family. She must be almost like auntie status, the way she's talking to the kids. And right after she leaves, Joe sits down and turns to me and he's like, That woman hates me. And I was like, What? What are you talking about? And I found out later that yeah, she'd been his ex-wife's best friend growing up. And literally the last time he'd seen her, like a decade ago, she hadn't even talked to him. She, you know, had glared at him and walked away. So what's happening here, y'all? What's happening here, right? It's this amazing, you know, in becoming a coach, I've learned people's behavior tells you so much more about them than it ever does about you. And often when we aren't living in consciousness, when we aren't aware of our thoughts or other people's thoughts, we can get lost in the illusion others are creating, right? I I in the past, if I'd seen that first woman's post about how much she loves being a mom, because I wasn't clear with myself about my own relationship with being a mom, with my own feelings around motherhood and, you know, what I think of myself, I could easily have seen that post. And instead of seeing what I think it is, which is that she's trying to figure out her own stuff by projecting out thoughts into the external world, I might have seen it and thought, oh man, I'm not a, I'm not a good mom. Oh, um, watching that woman that night, right? Like, oh wow, she seems to have, you know, such a connection with Joe and the kids. And I might have reflected it back at me. But because in that moment, I am really grounded in my relationship with my partner, I could just sit back and watch it and be fascinated, watching this human, you know, laughing really loud and like over the top performing and afterwards find out the story behind it, right? And then just have the fascination. For me as a coach, I am just fascinated with the way humans interact, the things they do, and what their thoughts may be behind that. Obviously, I don't know for sure, right? I've never talked to her. I'd have to go factually find that out. But there is an energy. That's what I'm trying to uh paint for you guys. There's this energy you can feel when someone is projecting an idea or trying to convince themselves of something that maybe they don't actually believe inside. And that's what I mean by the thought swapping of you're just picking another pretty thought and you're you're putting it on your life without actually changing the feelings, the energy that's behind that thought. You can't just let me put it this way, guys. The thought, I love my husband. If you just go repeat that thought over and over to yourself, and it doesn't actually create a genuine feeling of connection, it's just like bludgeoning yourself over the head. I also have another, I want to read you a little bit more from this other post that I'd seen on Facebook. So this is actually wildly enough, I don't even know how obviously the algorithm must have sent it to me because um this is not someone I know. It was just a post on my local business thing. So it turns out it is actually a coach, a counseling coach. And I'm not even gonna describe anymore. I'm just gonna read it and you guys can tell me what you think as you're listening to it. So she's saying, you know, once upon a time I had a fairy tale marriage, and then I started to have a hard time letting my husband lead. I know this is not every family's dynamic by choice, but I wanted him to be the head of the whole household. Are you a wife who wants to let him lead but feel like there's something stopping you and just can't seem to trust him with decisions? Do you feel like a mom to your husband? Maybe you always step in when he disciplines the kids. Maybe he has had to retreat and let you have your way for the sake of the marriage and to stay together for the kids. Do others joke about you wearing the pants in your family? I used to butt heads with my husband in these areas, but then I read The Empowered Wife by Laura Doyle. Side note, y'all, I have not heard of this book, but I'm dubbing into chat GPT it soon, and learned so many things I was doing wrong. I learned intimacy and control are opposites, and when I control, intimacy goes way down. I learned all control is based in fear. I experimented and started to trust my husband with household decisions. I relinquished control of what he wore, what he ate, his spiritual life, how he drove, and started to see him take the lead in a big way. My mental load started to lighten because I didn't feel responsible for all the decisions. It turns out he has the best ideas, makes awesome decisions, and always has our family's best interests at heart. We just celebrated our 20th wedding anniversary and our household feels balanced and healthy. I feel loved and in love. Okay. So I just want to say, first off, like I said, y'all, I am coming from my own perspective. So some of you may have listened to that and been like, oh my God, yes, I want exactly what this woman is gonna teach me. Okay, and if if you did reach out to my assistant, we will get you her information and we will send you over to her. Okay. But that is not what I'm gonna talk about in relation to this to this post. When I read this post, what I feel like I'm hearing is a woman who has basically gaslit herself. Okay, because where my coach brain goes is obviously there was something there in the beginning that is creating the fear and the need to control. And you don't just fix that by deciding, my husband makes great decisions. I'm gonna trust him to do everything, it's gonna be great. There are much deeper roots to that. Do you guys feel that? Like I trust that her intuition or her trauma or her, yes, there's work there to be done on her side, right? But I truly don't believe that work gets fixed by just being like, I'm gonna trust him. That's what I'm gonna do. I'm just gonna believe that he can do this and he's gonna magically step up. I mean, y'all, I've been doing this for four years. Haven't seen it yet. Then again, I'm not really coaching women in the like aggressively wanting their husbands to lead arena. So I may just be not coaching women that are in this mindset. I don't know. I'm just laughing so hard because I was talking with Joe about this post last night and I was like, am I just crazy, Joe? What is happening here? It just feels off. It feels off. And he was like, No, baby, it totally feels off. And I was like, Okay, and this shit is really triggering for me because uh this is what I did to myself uh for so many years in Mormonism. I just ignored what I was actually feeling and brainwashed myself with my thoughts back into the bigger hierarchical structure. I brainwashed myself into I should love being a mom. I should want to volunteer at church all the time, I should be happy going to church. And meanwhile, underneath all of that, I'm just re-abandoning my shadows. I'm driving those parts of me even further down into the darkness. And y'all, fuck. I'm just gonna say it like aggressively now. Do not do this, do not do this. This is like such a pollution for me of coaching is when you learn the tools of how to manage your mind, and instead you use your own mind to gaslight yourself. You use your own mind to brainwash yourself back into a marriage that, as she said, I mean just the way she says it, I feel loved and in love. He makes awesome decisions and always has our family's best interests at heart. It's like talking to a robot. Do you feel it? There is a lack of genuine, authentic, like fuck, here's reality, y'all. And it does not look like I just let my husband lead and everything magically turned great, and now we're celebrating 20 years. Maybe it does for her. I'm seriously doubting it though, y'all. I've seen the underbelly of humanness. I see it all the time. And to be honest, I find it beautiful. I find it fascinating. I find a huge desire to actually go into those dark, scary places with my clients, not just be like, let's figure out what we can do to save your marriage. So I hope I have made this very clear of what I don't want you all doing with this idea that your thoughts create your reality. Okay, that felt good. I had to get all of that out. I was on my morning vlog this morning and I was like, I swear, if women take this tool of thoughts create your reality and they go do this fucking bullshit to themselves, and they use my podcast to do it, they're like, Well, Britta said this. Oh, I will die. Okay, so with that out of the way, here's the beautiful, meaty heart soul of this that I am going to take you into, which is yes, the phrase, you know, your thoughts create your reality, is so simple. But to be at the level of where you can truly create your reality consciously, it takes an epic, epic journey of releasing your stuck and old beliefs, of not finding, because your trauma just naturally finds you, of letting your trauma find you, of sitting with your pain, of getting to know those parts that you have cut off and and thrown away, loving them, curiously interacting with them, and then re, you know, reintegrating them into you so that then you can choose consciously. Okay. It makes me think of that phrase, like with great power comes great responsibility. I believe if you are going to actually use that tool, it requires a lot of truly understanding the nuances I'm gonna take you through, and then committing to do it ethically with yourself and not just in this, I'm gonna convince myself back into the reality I've always been in. Makes me think of what I said in the last episode, right? Of that feedback loop of just using your external reality to keep yourself looping, looping, looping in the life you've always had. Now, in the book by Hawkins, okay, Power versus Force, in chapter two, he starts breaking this down and he talks about the hidden determinants of human behavior. And I am obsessed with this, y'all. This is all about our subconscious mind, okay, and how it is what governs the majority of our thoughts and behaviors. The subconscious, okay. This is the part of you that is down in shadow, underworld stuff, the things that come out in dreams. This is not what's operating when you are up in your conscious mind during the day and awake. And he explains how our unconscious belief systems, okay, these are the operating systems we were programmed with by our parents from birth, by our cultures, by our religions, that societal programming, right? And our suppressed emotions from the trauma we have been through that's stored in our body, all of that blocks us from accessing. Accessing those higher states of consciousness, right? That map of consciousness I explained last week, all of that stuff is what blocks you from being able to move in those states 200 and up. And if you want to start moving into alignment with those upper levels, it involves addressing these hidden factors. It's Joseph Campbell's hero's journey. It is going into the underworld, reclaiming things. It is not just spiritually bypassing, jumping over all of that and being like, no, I'm happy and I love my marriage and things are great. So when we go through this journey, where we start, where I often start with my clients, is we have to have our first starting point. Just like in a GPS, you gotta have where you're starting and then where you're going to actually create a route. Okay. So so much of the work in the beginning is just awareness of your current beliefs and emotional states. And hopefully that's what you've been doing this last week. When I said, I just want you to be aware of what are the emotions on this map of consciousness that you end up feeling the most. And when you're in those feelings, what are you doing? How are you acting? You have to know where you're starting. And then you want to have an idea of where you want to go. And once you have those two points, you can start identifying the beliefs in between that are your obstacles that are blocking you. So anybody who has done a nine, I'm like so excited because I like can feel this like ha from those of you that have already done my 90-minute intensives with me, right? This is what I'm doing with you on those. We do this incredible breakdown of your before. You know, before is everything leading up till the moment we get on that call. And then your after is where I really take you into that future. I help you flesh that out. That's where most of you have no idea because you're so stuck in the box of your current reality that you can't even dream of what's possible. I expand that for you. And then through me watching that whole process, you know, using my gorgeous coach brain, I have spotted, I'm like, whoop, there's the belief. There's the belief, there's the belief, there's the thing that's blocking her. And we walk away from that with this gorgeous list of all the obstacles and where to start changing them and the resources to do that. So for those of you that are like, oh my God, that 90 minute was amazing. That's because I am taking you in a condensed form through this exact process. And then I'm giving you that roadmap to go forward and do the work of changing each of the beliefs. And so many of us, why you get stuck in not being able to believe the future thoughts. Okay. So you see the future you want, maybe you know, you know what you would be thinking, right? Because your thoughts create your reality. So it seems simple, like, oh, well, I'll just go think those thoughts and then my reality will become that. But no, the reason you can't do that yet is because until you clean out the previous beliefs, okay, you can't bring in the new. That's the whole thing, that's why like slapping a thought, a new thought on it doesn't work because there's, I want you to think of it as like there's a space for that belief and it's already filled with the old belief. And when you try to just come in and dump a new thought on top of it, there's no space for that new belief to take root, right? If we think of it as like a garden, your garden's full, you've got all these old plants. Old beliefs are plants that have root systems that are taking up that space. We got to go in, dig those babies up, renourish the soil, and then plant the new beliefs. Okay. So that's a great visual for you to use on this process, right? Is a garden. And that's why, you know, that woman saying that basically her just like stepping back and letting him lead. Granted, I haven't gotten to talk to her and go deep into her process, but that just doesn't resonate because that's all external. That's her just stepping back. And and maybe, maybe she just got fucking lucky and her husband just randomly stepped up and changed. And the reason she was, you know, all the fear she had previously and all the control she was doing just magically disappeared because he stepped up. But what I know for certain is okay, maybe she got lucky. But what is guaranteed is that when you do the work on yourself, then we really get changes whether or not your spouse is gonna show up. Because a lot of you have done this with me, and especially those of you that I've one-on-one coached with, where, yeah, in the beginning, we do open to possibilities. We do open to seeing what your partner can do. If we're communicating with him more clearly, if we are stepping back, how does he show up? But if he doesn't lean in or step up, there's gotta be a different strategy, right? And my strategy, always from the beginning, and I, you know, I teach you guys never to be depending on somebody else changing for you, is going in and starting to find those old beliefs that are limiting you and cleaning them out. In one of my favorite books called Busting Loose from the Money Game by Robert Scheinfeld, he describes this exact process. He does it through the framework of money, but he is literally like that's why I'm so obsessed with that book. Read it like three years ago, and it is a huge foundational piece of what I do in my own life and what I coach my clients to do. But in it, he describes this exact process as he uses it as eggs. So he describes these eggs of your beliefs that you've like imbued with energy. Okay, so you can think of these capsules of power that you have contained in these beliefs and you've fed them with that energy of that faith, that belief. And the work is to identify those eggs, and then you start draining the energy out of them by realizing they're not actually true. They're just a belief. And as you keep draining that energy, right, which would be, okay, so let me just give you an example. Like when I was considering divorce, I had an egg that was definitely a fear around, you know, judgment of others, okay, that I was gonna be ostracized, that I, or that I was gonna like end up on the street, not have anything, you know, I was really scared about money. Those are all various eggs that I had at the beginning. My work through coaching was going and feeling into those realities. And in doing that, which I'm gonna dive deeper into that process in a second, what it actually looks like, I'm gonna break it down for y'all. But as you go into the belief and you sit with the feelings, you realize, oh my God, it's just a thought. It's it's not actually real, right? Often it's so much of us future tripping to the worst possible scenarios. As you sit with it, though, the power in the egg releases, and you do this over and over and over. And you are what you're doing with that is you are releasing the power you have programmed into the limiting beliefs. And once you do that, that power then comes back to you, right? So this egg is now released, or in the garden analogy, we've now removed the plant that was taking up the space. Now we have all this power within us, and then we can now choose to use it for what we actually want to believe and create. And now we get to intentionally put power into new eggs, new beliefs that then become our reality. Do you see it, y'all? Like it's so fucking beautiful. It is the most amazing, incredible process when you start understanding how life works and coming back to that shame piece when you can see that the majority of your eggs were not programmed by you. That's the work I've been doing over the last seven years is finding all of the shit that Mormonism and my fucked up parents and my traumatic childhood and the boyfriends, you know, the broken relationships that I had. I've been finding all the beliefs that I had from those that create all those like negative lower vibrational emotions. And in sitting with them and in working through them, I've reclaimed the energy and now put it into new thoughts, which, as you guys have seen from the podcast, are getting me very different results. Right? I mean, at the beginning of 2024, right before I met Joe, I introduced a new belief into my reality, which was I deserve to have a partner that I can heal with who is a secure attachment. That was the moment where, so it's kind of it almost I almost think of it as like a scale, like tipping, right? There's like a tipping point where the old belief starts out really strong, but as you keep releasing the power, the scale starts dropping down, dropping down, dropping down until finally you reach like this critical moment where there's enough power released and enough power flowing into the new belief that now the new belief is strong and your external reality starts to change in accordance. And that was the moment for me because I felt at the beginning of that year, right? I'd come off the burn, I'd met some amazing guys there, but I'd realized fuck, being in a relationship with men who are not secure is really difficult on my nervous system. It's actually really triggering. It creates a lot of, you know, CPTSD flare-ups. I don't want to do this anymore. And I chose intentionally to believe and and really just chose, I am not dating anybody who is not secure. I'm fine with connecting and having fun with people, but I'm not actually moving into a relationship or anything serious with someone who cannot be there for me in the ways that I am there for all of my previous partners. And lo and behold, y'all, once I changed that belief, literally, it was like three weeks later that Joe came in. In fact, I remember the moment because Quinn was coaching me and she did a tarot poll, and it was like talking about someone new coming in. We actually asked how long would it take, and she said three weeks, and it did. Like, y'all, that's a whole other story. Quinn is such an incredible tarot reader. She's actually been doing last month, she did a tarot reading. I think I said that on the podcast, a big tarot workshop in the community. Ugh, um, and we're actually putting it on a schedule now every month. I'm sorry, I'm just having to like gush and vibe about my best friend and her amazing tarot skills. So coming back though, that was the moment where my old belief that old egg I'd released enough power from it, and that power had flown into the new egg. And when the new egg reached this, I don't know how to call it, but it's like a tipping point, all of a sudden I see in my reality the change. Okay, so this idea where like what it all encapsulates in for you guys is understanding that true freedom, okay, is reclaiming your energetic birthright of this incredible power that you have of belief. It's reclaiming that from all of the bullshit ideas you were programmed with and that are creating the current life that you may not actually love or want. The other way I've also thought of this, there's so many beautiful visuals that I'm trying to give you guys, but another one I've thought of is it's like, it's like you're in a hole, okay, from all the negative beliefs that you've picked up over your life. And as you keep releasing that energy, it's like you're filling the hole with dirt. And as the hole fills, you rise higher and higher out of the hole until eventually you reach a space of neutrality, which is where you're on solid, stable ground. There's no up, there's no down, you're neutral. And then from neutrality, you can start foundationally building that skyscraper of the new life that you want. And I want to explain too that in practice, okay. So the way I'm describing it makes it seem like it's a very like one, two, three kind of step, right? Where, you know, now you're filling the hole, eventually you reach neutrality, now you're building the new belief. But y'all, in practice, these different sections are not actually separate, but they're very interconnected and happening simultaneously. So, you know, I'm releasing power out of old belief at the same time as that power is flowing into the new belief. And not only am I doing that in this belief, but I am doing it across every area of my life. Okay. And you guys may be thinking, well, Berta does that because she's a coach. No, y'all. This is this is the creationary power of being a human and having a mind. This is what you are doing all the time in your life right now. Your beliefs are all in different states of either death or birth. That is the one constant in life is change. Everything is either moving towards death or moving towards birth. But we are not in states of stasis. Okay. So this makes me think of like that quote that says, you know, when it talks about like the two different wolves and like which one survives, and it says whichever one you feed, this is the principle that we are talking about. And if we go back to the garden, right, your life is a huge garden of beliefs. And you have beliefs in all different states of either death and decay or birth and growth. And where you put your attention, right, determines whether some of them are getting like more fertilizer or water, and others aren't. And the work of coaching is getting the tools to be able to more intentionally do that, to more intentionally pick and know oh, this area of my life, these plants over here are creating results I actually don't want. We're gonna go clear those out, and now we've got space to create something new. This is what I'm so obsessed with. This is why I'm a coach, y'all. I love this work of changing our realities through changing our belief systems. And okay, so let's dive in to what it looks like to actually move, to actually get into the heart of that process, okay? Because where spiritual bypassing is just trying to jump that whole messy work of getting into the garden, getting your hands dirty, digging up the roots, seeing what's in there. What I am most passionate about is the heart and soul of this journey, which is where you get to do the deep trauma work. This is where we use the tools found in the CPTSD management or in the parts work book that I mentioned at the very beginning of the year. Like this is where we get to truly meet and reclaim ourselves. So, how do we do it, y'all? Last week's episode, I brought up the map of consciousness. Okay. And I mentioned that it can be tricky when we see this of thinking, ooh, negative emotions are bad. I want to resist them, and trying to move up into upper states by just forcing yourself to love or forcing yourself to be happy or to feel joy, or right, I'm talking about thought swapping, just brainwashing or gaslighting yourself that you feel a way that you don't actually because there's no real root system there. I'm trying to think of how this would fit in the garden analogy. And this is the whole like, you know, I I have heard people talk about like faking it till you make it. I get that that can be helpful if you don't understand what I know. Okay. If you don't have, I think of that as almost like a lesser idea, like, okay, that'll get you somewhere. But y'all, I'm not here to teach you just a quick fix. I want actual deep changes, cellular changes in your body that are gonna last. Because those are the things that make the real changes. So we do not get there by resisting those lower emotional states. Okay. And actually, in resisting them, in fighting against them, that is one of the biggest things that keeps you stuck. Versus, okay, acknowledging that these emotions, the shame, the guilt, the fear, they are normal and valid based off of the beliefs that you've been programmed with. Right? If you are currently facing the choice of divorce and you have been programmed with a belief that divorce is the worst thing ever, of course you are gonna be in a lot of shame, guilt, and fear. So it is not something for you to be like, ooh, bad, I'm broken. It's merely an operating piece. I've been programmed with this operating system. I think I've described it once, not on the podcast, but of having a phone that has a whole bunch of apps on it. And you're like, man, these apps are really fucking up my life right now on this phone. I don't really want these. We need to go uninstall them. And we don't uninstall them by just suppressing or bypassing them. Because when you do that, y'all, that's what puts things into shadow. That's what shoves things way down in your subconscious, and then they come out sideways. And I know I've given you examples of this where, like, when I have suppressed emotion, I then end up, you know, a month later with it coming out sideways and hurting somebody that I care about because I wasn't being honest with myself about what I actually need or what I'm actually feeling. So, contrary to the idea that you can just shove all that down, it's actually gonna become louder and more dominant inside your body. And you're gonna need more and more thoughts to suppress it. And it just creates, I mean, I think that's where a lot of like our mental illnesses, our depression, our anxiety come because we are trying so hard to hold down all of the repressed things that we cut off with the beliefs we developed in childhood that actually aren't even making us happy. Instead, we want to use compassion and curiosity to release and reintegrate these parts that are so upset and confused. Now, I'm gonna have to do an episode on this in depth in the future. I already mentioned it at the beginning of the year. This is where, though, the internal family systems work, the book called No Bad Parts, is phenomenal. Okay. Because through that book, he provides a framework of thinking of these parts of ourselves, those parts that feel the shame, that feel the guilt, that feel the fear. Instead of being like, shut up, stop, you need to be happy and feel love and joy. We go to them and we realize they are these younger, wounded parts of ourselves that are just trying to protect or keep us safe with the knowledge they have. So I have done a lot of parts work recently. And what I have noticed over and over is one of the defining characteristics when I find a part, right? And often parts will come to me through emotion. I'll be feeling like a really intense emotion. And if I'll go and sit with that emotion, I will start to feel into and be able to see kind of in my mind the part. And what's so interesting about each of these parts is they are snapshots in time. So they come from usually something stressful or traumatic happening in my life. And they are trapped in that moment of time inside me. So they don't seem to have a lot of knowledge at all of anything past that moment. So for instance, you know, parts that I have when they get triggered, the emotional flashbacks, right? Where I'm triggered back into these little parts of me, these younger parts, they don't know that I'm a grown woman that's divorced now and that my mom's dead. They're still feeling this fear of like, we need to make this person happy or we're not gonna survive. They are literally trapped back in a different section of time. And when I come to them with the compassion and the curiosity, I find they are often just trying to protect me. They're taking the limit of knowledge they had back then, they're looking at this current situation and they're going, Oh my God, this is how we have to fix it. And the the deeper work that I do is going back and sitting. With them and be like, oh, it makes so much sense that you're afraid right now. Of course you are. Of course you are. Because back then it really was scary. And it really did mean, you know, you were going to lose everything. Recently, I've been doing a lot of work around this with this belief that I have that just came up recently. I was doing a coaching session, had a strong emotional reaction come in. We went and found the part. The part is this little girl inside me who's very afraid that what she desires will lead to her being abandoned or that her desires are bad. And going back and really being in that moment with her, it made so much sense why she would think that because she was punished for her desires. She was emotionally abandoned and neglected. And with the limited no support that she had back then, she just formed this belief: desires are bad. I need to stay away from them or I will hurt the people I love or hurt myself. That is not the case now, y'all. My desires are massive, important fuel for my journey, for my coaching, for my work. I need those babies. So in sitting with her and feeling, right? Because that's like the first step is that when you notice you're feeling these lower vibrational emotions, you get curious. And instead of resisting, like, ooh, bad, I shouldn't feel shame. Ooh, I shouldn't feel afraid. I need to get away from this. You then start dialoguing with that part. And if this is sounding totally foreign to you, right, that's what the book is for. No bad parts, go read it. It's gonna fucking change your life this year. So as you get curious, as I'm getting curious with her, I am feeling first, first, I am feeling and just acknowledging exactly what she's going through without any like, oh, actually it's different. I just meet her where she is and I acknowledge her pain and I sit with her in it. And often, especially with some of my younger parts, they'll be a little bit afraid of me. And then eventually, as I sit with them and I'm like, I see you, I got you, right? Like as was saying in the episode a couple weeks ago, I'm not gonna leave you. I'm right here. They then come join with me. And once they join with me and we re regulate again together, then I can be like, hey, guess what? This is the facts now. We actually don't live with people who punish us anymore for our desires, you know? And I thank them, and then I get to thank her for like, thank you so much for trying so hard to protect us, for just in the best way you knew possible, which was making us feel really afraid and overwhelmed, right? Trying to protect us. And guess what? I've got us now, and you don't have to do this anymore. And I always see that my parts typically are very relieved at that moment because deep down, you know, they're just trying to do the best that they can with the limited tools and knowledge they have. Which to kind of expand this, because I'm just like, ah, y'all, this is the beautiful work of truly becoming an adult, a true emotional, like in true emotional adulthood, that's what Brooke calls it. That's where you are in full responsibility for yourself, for your feelings, for your actions. So few humans do this work. So few of us actually become true adults. We just end up being scared kids running around in adult bodies, you know, with all of the pressure and the power of our adult decisions, but without any of the grounded actual connectedness inside of us that comes when we actually reintegrate our parts and we help them realize they're not alone anymore. We've now got them. And we have this empowered, grounded self that can now guide all of those parts that can now guide the whole group into what we want most. And this, of course, ties back into what I talked about in the last episode around force versus power. So a lot of us come to our parts with force. Stop crying, stop being annoying, stop sabotaging my life. Why can't you just love love our husband? Why can't you just be grateful for what you have? Instead of sitting with them, we reenact the same trauma we experienced in childhood from our caregivers, our partners, etc., on our inner self. And that is the like reabandoning piece that we end up doing to ourselves. And so I want you guys to understand that that's that's from a force perspective. Moving into the power piece, it does not mean you are ignoring the tough emotions, but rather, like this is true power. True power comes from holding space for those emotions, learning from them, and then moving forward with the greater clarity and the wholeness that comes from that experience. And I feel like when I'm talking about, you know, moving into this power, some other words I wanted to help you understand what I mean by that energy is this is when we're cultivating the self-trust, okay? By tuning in to what I've often called your inner compass. Okay. We're we're going deeper into ourselves. Instead of using the tools of coaching to push ourselves into what our mind thinks we should be doing or into the path that we should be living, we are realigning with flow. We are shifting. We are shifting into those upper vibrational levels, not through force. We're moving into, like, for instance, the courage and the love and the acceptance. We're moving into those by focusing on what feels true for you, not what society, family, or your partner thinks, because those are the beliefs you've been programmed with that have gotten you to this exact moment. So we don't get out of the current life you're living. We don't find clarity by just continuing to force you into beliefs that obviously aren't working because you're where you are. You're listening to this podcast about considering divorce. Instead, we recognize that what's really being asked for is aligning with those deeper knowings, is letting go of the certainty that, you know, because that's that's what we want. That's what that's what's being sold us in those beliefs, in people telling us what to do and people telling us how to be happy. We get this false sense of secure of not security, certainty. I guess it would also be security, though. I would say like a false sense of external security. Well, people are accepting me. People seem to be okay. I'm staying in my marriage. My parents don't hate me. But we are sacrificing the internal power of deeper knowing and getting to move through our life with that energy. And you guys have felt this, by the way. I want to give you the expanded vision of what that power does in the world. And when I say you guys have felt it, you feel it every time you listen to this podcast. Because I come to the episodes from this energy. I am tapping into that flow. I am aligning with where that power wants to take me, what it wants to say through me. Instead of, you know, what's on the docket? What am I supposed to write today? What did I schedule out three months ago? It's a very open, fluid, like I am life, life is me, and I am co-creating everything with the universe. And damn, y'all, when you start acting from that power, when you start living from that, it doesn't just transform your life. Like I said in the last episode, it positively impacts everyone around you. As I've started to live from this energy more, there's been this image that comes up for me of like being this sun in my life that has this beautiful, deep gravitational pull that draws the people who are meant to be around me to me. And then in being the sun, I put out all of this gorgeous, powerful, yummy light and love and acceptance, right? You guys feel that. I know, especially when I'm on 90-minute sessions, I can see the impact that that has on the women that I get to coach. And that light then feeds those people that are drawn to me. And so it becomes this very beautiful, like synergistic. I see myself in my role in the universe, right? As I go in and heal and reclaim and reintegrate the parts within me that have been operating at those lower vibrational levels. I then put out higher vibrational levels that then magnetize others to me who are ready to also make the shifts. And this, y'all, this is how you do it. This is how you break the cycles of the fear and the shame and the lineages that have been passed down from your parents and your grandparents. It truly becomes the way we choose the way we change the world through these individual personal heroes journeys that we go on. And damn, right? Can you see how incredible then it, I think it helps so much. I just wanted to put in perspective for all of you what you are doing in this journey of yours. This is not just if you, you know, if you do it the way I do it, right? I am not a coach who's just like, let's just fucking get you a decision. Let's just, you know, get a different result. Let's just change a thought and make you believe your husband always has the best decisions so you can stay in your marriage. You know, he we may through the journey end up discovering that. But I go into the process of considering divorce with you, not from let's force you to get this result, but let's through the journey of finding this result really uncover and learn, right? In my one-on-one coaching, that's where I'm teaching those much deeper tools that you use that then are what you're going to use the rest of your life to always be re-examining your garden. I mean, you guys remember a couple episodes back where I talked about the massive importance of understanding what do you value, what are your priorities. This is your garden. You get to choose what you want to plant. The issue is so many of us had our gardens stolen at birth, stolen in our childhoods by people who wanted things from us and so planted ideas in us to get those things. The gift of becoming an adult is reclaiming that power, is taking back, is realizing, oh, I am living in a world. Most of you are living in a world where your beliefs are creating this illusion that keeps you in a box and you think this is all there is. This is all I can have. I better just be happy with it. As you guys know, I'm so passionate about breaking open that box. It's like I open it up for you and I'm like, hey, come here, come here, come step outside. Oh, I'm also remembering I once had a dream of this exact thing. I was in a giant, kind of would be like a giant Walmart kind of looking building or a big Amazon warehouse where the only windows were up at the very top of the warehouse and everybody's living in this warehouse. And I had this moment where I finally escape and I walk out the store, similar to the Truman show. And as I open the door and look out, I am shocked to see trees and sky and this whole big world that I didn't even know existed. Which is probably why, right now, have you guys at all watched The Silo on Apple TV? Uh me, my kids, Joe, we've all been watching it. We watched season one last year, um, season two just dropped, and so good. It's the same premise, though, of people being told this is your reality, this is all there is, and trying to figure out what actually is real. What actually is possible in God when I say that, like what actually is real, I just get such chills because as you guys know, you know, I haven't talked a lot about the deeper books that I've read or the people that I've been interested in that I feel like have cracked the code on this. But over and over, it it just comes back to this theme that like we are the divine, we are the creators, we are the ones creating our own realities. And to get back that power, hopefully, this episode has helped you realize what that journey actually looks like. That you can't just, you know, it's all well and good to say your thoughts create your reality, but there is actually a whole bunch of gorgeous, beautiful journey processes that you get to embark on to reclaim that and to actually start having the power to, like I did at the beginning of last year, have drained a belief so much that I could bring in a new belief that then created and brought me a partner that is what I've been wanting and talking about for years. I look back, the seed of that belief was really planted when I got divorced. And I believed that it was possible. I had no proof that I could ever have a relationship like this. I'd never seen anybody who had it, definitely none of my parents, none of the people in my religion, nothing. I didn't even have people out in the world that I could say, like, oh, their relationship, that's what I want. I just had a knowing deep inside me that was like, I want this more than anything else. And if I go to my deathbed and I don't have it, I will regret this. So I'm going to take the leap. And I'm going to deep down keep believing that it's possible to have a partner who is really deeply soul aligned and sees me. And holy shit, y'all, four years later, that's what showed up. And yes, it has been a fuck ton of deep trauma healing and seeing myself and shadow work and all of the beautiful journey that led me here. And I would do all of it again, over and over and over again. And not just so that I could have Joe in my life, but because of who I have become. It's both of those things, it's all of the things. I became the person that is now creating this amazing relationship with Joe, right? It's not just Joe coming in, it's that when he came in, I was me. I am the me that I am now that knows how to go deep with him, how to really, you know, surrender and receive and also give and love at these high, high levels because I went on the journey. And I want to finish by telling you all that is probably one of the most important things I could help you understand at the end of this episode is you may look at my journey and think, oh my God, you know, well, I've got to do it the way Brita did it. But no, no, no, no, no, no. I know your journey is perfectly tailored exactly for you. And that's why I don't necessarily teach, like, here, do these things, and then you'll get this result as much as I teach trusting and following your soul knowings. Because I know the journey for you is so hyper-specific, so tailor-made, that I can't tell you what the journey is gonna look like. I can't tell you what you're gonna go through. But what I can do is teach you the process, right? Which I did in this in this episode, really giving you an overlay of what does it look like, and then diving in in various episodes, right, into the different tools that can help you at different points in your journey. And once you have those tools, then life becomes this gorgeous game of what's it going to unfold for me next? What's going to happen next? And when what when whatever comes up, comes up, I have a tool on my tool belt that I can pull out and use. Oh, okay, today like a ton of fears coming up. All right, I'm gonna drop in, I'm gonna process, I'm gonna see if there's a part here. Oh, you know, there's all this desire and excitement coming in. Okay, I'm gonna fuel that. I'm gonna lean into connecting with my partner, I'm gonna channel that out into my relationships and my work. It is an incredible way to live life. And I cannot recommend it enough. And I want to reassure all of you that in listening to this episode right now, being in this moment where you're hearing this, you are on your path. You are speeding up the journey. You are leaning in and calling forward what is so eagerly awaiting you. Yeah, I'm just so happy with the way these two episodes came out this last week. And then this one, I feel like these are concepts that I've known for a really long time that it's just, you know, it's complicated to try and explain this to a huge group of people when I can't drop into like those really personal nuances. So I've mainly only, I would say, shared this in like my one-on-one coaching at this level, but damn, just feeling a lot of pride at getting to, and as I say pride, I'm like, that's an under 200 level feeling. Maybe it's joy. I don't know. I'm I love I love some good pride. I am kind of a I don't know if maybe I need to find a new word for that emotion. See, look at me getting all stuck on Hawkins' map of consciousness and which one I'm in. I talked a lot about my 90 minutes on this session. Of course, as you guys remember, hopefully you can text 90 Min. That's 90M I N to 33777 to be taken straight to scheduling with me. Of course, you know I will be delighted to see you. I love when my emails come through when you've scheduled. I always get super excited to read your notes before and then to jump on and get to see you in person. Also, please remember to go subscribe to the podcast and leave a review if you feel called. Till next time.