Ep #94 - Sobriety, Shame & Somatics: Real Talk with Men’s Coach Patrick Fox

This week I’m joined by my friend and fellow coach, Patrick Fox—men’s life and sober coach— for an honest, practical conversation about emotions, sobriety, and why “feeling it” is the fastest way through. 

Patrick shares his journey to eight years alcohol-free, how identity shifts start small (hello, One Year No Beer), and the somatic tools from Compassionate Inquiry that help you let emotions move without buying into the old “I’m not good enough” script.

We dig into urges, shame, and that rinse-repeat cycle, plus how to model healthy emotional processing for our kids and partners. Expect zero fluff, lots of compassion, and plenty you can try today—especially if you’re a busy woman juggling work, family and the constant pressure to keep everyone happy.

You’ll learn:

• A simpler way to process feelings: feel it without believing it
• Quick somatic check-ins to get out of your head and into your body
• How small commitments become lasting identity shifts
• Why curiosity and compassion beat self-judgement every time

🎧 Bonus: I’ll share a recording of my own CI session with Patrick so you can see the process in action. Check it out after this episode. 

Links: 

Patrick’s website - https://www.patrickjfox.com/about

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/thealcoholrethinkpodcast/

Linked In - https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrickjamesfox/

Search The Alcohol Rethink podcast. 

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You can also watch this episode on YouTube with Captions - https://www.youtube.com/@TheWorkingWomensLifeCoach

If you'd like to have a chat about how I can help you further, please don't hesitate to click here & book a time with me, I'd love to meet you.

You can also follow me on IG @NickyBevan_LifeCoach

Transcript

Nicky: Welcome, welcome, welcome everybody to this week's podcast, where I am delighted to be joined by my friend and fellow coach, Patrick Fox. I'm gonna let him introduce himself in just a second, but I've been having some sessions with Patrick recently all around emotions and allowing the emotions to move in your body, and I just thought it would be a really great conversation for everybody to be exposed to, actually, because we don't really talk about emotions that much. So, Patrick, do you want to introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about you, and then we'll see where the conversation goes? Patrick: Absolutely. Thank you, Nikki, for having me on. It's great to be here. Yeah, so as you said, my name's Patrick Fox. I operate, if you like, as a men's life and sober coach, and I've been doing that for around 5 years. I've been working with a lot of guys, working with their emotions, which is not something that we're always talking about in the public domain, I guess. And, you know, I've been on a massive journey of self-discovery myself in the last 10 years, and so one of the reasons why I work with guys to help them stop drinking is because that's been my journey as well. Actually, in just over a month from now, I'll be going into my eighth year of sobriety, so that's a massive thing, and coaching and helping other guys has also been a huge part of that as well. Nicky: Brilliant, congratulations, 8 years? Patrick: I know, it's amazing. It feels… it just feels so normal, to be honest, like the time's become almost irrelevant in terms of how long it's been, because I'm just so comfortable in what I'm doing with it all now. So yeah, but it is incredible, it really is, because I remember in the beginning, like, you're counting days, and that can feel really tedious and long. For example, the last few weeks, I've not been eating sugar and crisps, right, because I set myself this little goal. We've got this calendar up in the kitchen, and every day I was ticking the calendar, and I was waking up all excited when I'd gone a day without having sugar and crisps and stuff. And then after about two and a half, three weeks, I just stopped ticking it, because I just wasn't having any desire or urges to eat it anymore, and so I just kind of… I wasn't conscious that I was doing that anymore, so that was really fun, just to recognize, like, “Oh, that again has just become really normal,” so that was cool. But yeah, you know, in the beginning, you can really be focused on what you're trying to get away from, which might not always feel great, but the longer you go, the better it gets. Nicky: Yeah. Yeah, and the easier it gets. And it's… it's interesting, because I've only ever known you sober. So I don't know you in any other version, so are you willing to share with us what you were like 8 years and before? Patrick: I can, yeah, I can share. Chaotic is probably the word that I would use to summarize all of it, but for me, drink and drugs were a huge part of my life from about the age of 15, 16 years old. Nicky: Right. Patrick: So I think it was quite normal for me and the circles that I was hanging around in. For some people listening, they'll be like, “Wow, that's crazy,” but for me back then, it was really, really normal. I started smoking weed at a really young age, like when we were still at school, going to school stoned, which is obviously not very helpful. I don't know, alcohol wasn't a huge part of my life then, it was more just the smoking, but then alcohol came involved, and then it was ecstasy, and then it was cocaine, and so most of my late teenage years, early 20s, were just spent going out every single weekend and getting absolutely… Are we swearing on this podcast? Nicky: Yeah, yeah! Patrick: Going out and getting absolutely fucked, you know? And that was just my mindset of go to work, survive, go hard on the weekend. And when you're young, you can get away with that to a degree, but over time, it really, really starts to catch up with you. I always think about… it started off as being something that was fun and then ended up becoming something that I needed to be functional, you know? So I couldn't go out without going out and drinking and doing drugs and stuff, I just didn't know how. And so, over time, that really escalated effectively in lots of ways. One of the weird ways was because I thought I was really good at it. So I thought I was really good at going out and drinking and doing drugs. The ego part of me really took a lot of pride in that and, it sounds really perverse, but I almost wanted people to perceive me in that way as well. I always thought I was in pursuit of a good time and stuff like that, but since I quit drinking and everything else, I've been doing a lot of deep work. Before I even stopped drinking, I got into coaching, but once I actually stopped drinking, I really got back into coaching, and more recently Compassionate Inquiry, which is what we've been working with. Nicky: Mmm. Patrick: And I've been able to see my relationship with alcohol and drugs in a whole new way. For me, I always thought it was about going out, having a good time, being with your mates, all of that kind of stuff, but actually there was a lot of other things going on for me, in terms of not really liking myself, the challenges, traumas I had when I was growing up. Even just saying that now, there's a part of me going, “You don't want to identify with that, who are you to say you had a hard time growing up?” But the fact is, I did have a hard time growing up. Nicky: Hmm… Patrick: And so there are all of these things that really played into why I was doing it. But at the time, you don't realize that's why you're doing it, your brain's just learning that actually we can have a different way of living life that is very hedonistic. Nicky: Hmm. It's so interesting, isn't it, how our ego and our primitive brain think that the drugs and the alcohol and the socializing is the survival requirement. Like, that's what we need to do, and it just doesn't have any concern whatsoever, it just doesn't give a shit about the actual long-term health consequences or social consequences of that behaviour. Patrick: Absolutely. You know, I think when you look back as well, you think about the friendships that you lost because of it, because I was just so immersed in going out and getting wasted and stuff. I think it does have a really big impact. But yeah, the brain doesn't care, because the amount of dopamine, the amount of feel-good chemicals you get outweigh all of the consequences. Until they don't. Until the consequences – the hangovers, the come-downs, the way it impacts your mental health – become worse and worse over the years. Nicky: Yeah. Patrick: And that's where I really started to struggle, in that I was going out, but the recovery periods were taking a lot longer. But then I was just finding I was really unhappy and dissatisfied with my life in general as well, but then come the weekend I'd be all excited about going out, and we'd be in a rinse-repeat situation. So yeah, it's tough. Nicky: Yeah. So, was there any particular moment that you can remember when you went, “Right, enough is enough”? Patrick: There were lots of moments like that, to be honest, over the years. I think I had lots of little insights as to “I don't think I want to keep doing this anymore,” but because my identity, because my ego, was so wrapped up in it… honestly, Nikki, and it sounds really sad, but honestly, it was one of the only things I actually thought I was good at in life, you know? And so the fear of letting go of that was really quite big and quite startling for me and difficult to comprehend. At the same time, though, you've got these competing wants of, like, “Well, this is who I am, but I don't want to be this person anymore, but who am I without alcohol and drugs in my life?” So yeah, it was a big deal. But there was a final moment, let's say, in 2018, where that whole month of December, I called December “silly season,” right? Because I was chatting about this with one of the guys at football last night, because he was talking about all of these events he's got to go to in December, basically piss-ups, right? And that whole month was spent going out a lot. I would almost check out of… I was working for my mum's business at the time, and I would almost check out because December was a quiet month in the industry anyway, so effectively I was giving myself permission to go out and just do whatever I wanted. So there was a lot of drinking involved, a lot of drugs involved, and it was a particularly heavy month. But every time I was going out, obviously it was harder for me the next time, and throughout that month, I was getting fed up with myself, but still doing the same thing, right? What's the expression, you know? That's the definition of insanity, doing the same thing, expecting different results. And I had a conversation with my mate, and I was telling him I was feeling down, and he told me I looked like shit, I think were his exact words, and he recommended a book called This Naked Mind by Annie Grace. And it was a book about stopping drinking, effectively, and it was all about mindset and how the brain works, and how alcohol affects the brain with dopamine and stuff like that. And I read this book, and it was so insightful. It really helped me to understand that my drinking wasn't a personal defect. It wasn't my fault, which is what you hear a lot in terms of people, when they're struggling with addiction and stuff: “Well, just stop doing it, don't do it.” But if it was that easy, people wouldn't have these challenges to begin with. So what it did was help me dissociate from that personal blame that I had towards myself as to why I was engaging in these behaviours and activities. Think, right, that was 20 years of habits of going out and doing the same thing, that's a lot to unlearn. It's like, no wonder I was finding it challenging. So I read that book, and it really helped start making some shifts for me, but there was one particular thing in that book. I had a conversation with someone yesterday and for them it was really obvious, for me it was basically brand new, and that was: alcohol is ethanol. Right? Ethanol is what we use to fuel planes and cars and stuff like that. I don't know what it was, but that vision of putting fuel into my body like that was disgusting. I was like, “That is crazy, why are we doing that?” So I went on this path of learning more about alcohol. And what that did was get me really wanting to stop, but in a whole different way. That said, I didn't stop, I carried on drinking for a little bit longer, but then on Boxing Day 2018 we had a new dog, and we were driving to my girlfriend's sister's, and I was driving, so I wasn't drinking, and I had one or two drinks throughout the day. And then when I got home, I had a few more, because obviously I'd been denied throughout the day. Then the next day, I went out because Watford – I support Watford, my local football team – I went to the football with my mates. And I felt very entitled, I felt very owed, and I felt like I had a lot of catching up to do. So we went to the football, we ended up winning, so we went to celebrate. We would have gone and commiserated either way, it wouldn't have made any difference whatsoever. We're in this pub after the game, we'd had quite a few drinks by this point, and whenever I had a few beers, this habit, this thought of “Right, let's get some cocaine in so we can keep the night going” would come up. So I was on a mission at this point, because we know how our brain works. Dopamine works twofold: we've got the anticipatory response of motivating us towards doing something, and then once we do it, we get the pleasure of doing it as well. So I was very much in the hunt. I was on the hunt, I was phoning people, trying to get people down there, I was asking people in the pub. The battery on my phone was dying, so then I was starting to get really anxious. I bought a phone charger from the shop across the road, I charged it up in the pub, then the charger wasn't working, and I was worried about missing calls. Honestly, it was ridiculous. Luckily, that night, I didn't get any drugs, I wasn't able to get any, but I did leave the pub drinking this shot of Baby Guinness, and I vaguely remember walking home down this alleyway near where we live, kind of stumbling around. Then the next morning, I woke up on the sofa and I felt terrible, as you can imagine. Not only did I feel terrible because I was hungover, I felt a tremendous amount of guilt and shame about my behaviour the night before. To put this into context, I've got a brand-new dog, I've got a one-year-old son, and I've got an eight- or nine-year-old as well, and I was just thinking, “What the fuck am I doing? Seriously, what am I doing?” And what scared me the most was that I had this vision that I was turning into the person that I'd always promised myself that I was never going to be, and that was an unavailable dad who was prioritizing the pub over family. And that scared the shit out of me, because as you can imagine, that's what happened with my dad, or that's how I felt about my dad at least. So that really… that was a true sliding-doors moment. My girlfriend came downstairs, and she was like, “Oh, what's the matter?” and I was like, “I'm done, I just can't do this anymore, I'm just done.” And I'd said those sentences so many times before, but you know with beliefs, right, we say something and we don't really mean it. But I said it, and it dropped. It went down this funnel of “Something has to happen here.” So what I did was commit to One Year No Beer, because there was – and I think there still is – an organization, that's their motto. It really worked for me, I really loved the idea and premise behind it, so I was like, “Right, one year, no drinking, let's see what I can do with my life.” I had a lot of false beliefs. I put a big expectation on sobriety. I was thinking, “If I stop drinking, all of a sudden my life is going to become magically better and infinitely… I'll be taking all this action, working on my coaching, doing all this stuff.” And that has happened, it just didn't happen in that year. But after a few months of not drinking, it became really clear to me that I didn't even want to wait for a year to commit to not drinking again. I was like, “I'm just done, I just do not want this in my life anymore.” Nicky: Yeah. And it's so interesting, isn't it? Because I was never necessarily a huge regular drinker, but when I did drink, I would drink to extremes. I can remember – again, it was 2018, that must have been the year – I'd been out, it was when I left my job and we went out celebrating. And I can remember the next day waking… I was ill for days after that, even though I was a happy drunk, and on the night, even though I was throwing up going, “This is fun!” I can just remember waking up the next day and I was like, “That's complete now. I don't need to do that anymore in my life. I am done.” And I haven't drunk a drop since, but my identity was not caught up in it. And then because I'd done it, that Christmas Johnny, my husband, him and his mate did a bet: “We'll just do a month.” The month went to 3 months, his mate then gave up, and Johnny went, “I'm gonna go for a year,” and he hasn't drunk since. And he's done that with sugar this year, he's like, “I'm just not going to eat sugar for a year.” And here we are, getting close to the end of the year, and he hasn't. I mean, he's had maple syrup and honey, but not refined cakes and chocolate and sweets. So when you start small – “I'm just going to do a month,” or “I'm just going to do 3 months,” or “I'm just going to do a year” – at some point you just go, “Actually, why don't I just pick this as my new identity?” And then off you go for the rest of your life. So I'm curious to explore how the… because we're both qualified by The Life Coach School, aren't we? So my regular listeners are familiar with the self-coaching model, as in thoughts create feelings, feelings drive actions. And then you've taken that to another level with Compassionate Inquiry. So tell me how that has evolved and then benefited your journey and now your clients' journeys. Patrick: Yeah, yeah, 100%. Could I just, before I answer that question, just, off the back of what you were saying a minute ago about saying a month, 3 months, whatever… I think it's such a valuable thing to do, because a lot of guys, when they come to me, the thought of never drinking again is absolutely terrifying, and rightly so, because you've spent a long period of your life, that's what you've been doing, so it's hard to see you not doing that. But there's something really special about just committing to a shorter amount of time, and then as you do it, kind of reevaluating as you go. And what I've found with drinking, and what I found with sugar recently, is one of the nicest things is just when that mental confusion and dissonance starts to disappear, and it just becomes such an easier decision to make for yourself. So yeah, that's cool. So yeah, coming back to your question: we spent a lot of time learning the model, applying the model – this was part of my sober journey, to be quite honest with you. Once I stopped drinking, a couple of months in, I remember I was sitting there on the sofa and I was doing some journaling, because journaling became really important to me again. Although at that time, I was quite abusive to myself in the way I was journaling, but that's something that changed over time as well. I just came to this realisation of, “I learned how to coach about 5 years before I stopped, and I don't want to regret never having done something with this,” because I really enjoyed it, I could really see how beneficial it was, I just didn't believe in myself at that time because of the way that I was living my life. So I really decided I wanted to get back into coaching, and so yeah, I got back into coaching, went to The Life Coach School, did a completely different certification and learned about the model, which was huge – understanding facts, thoughts, feelings, etc. That was brilliant. But since then, I've gone on and done this course, Compassionate Inquiry, which is created by Gabor Maté and a lady named Sat Dharam. It's a more psychotherapeutic approach, and honestly, it's been a game changer, because there's a lot of coaching elements within it anyway, which is great because it really… I felt like, “Oh yeah, I can do this, it really supports what I'm already doing.” But for me, what I've learned and why I think it's so valuable is it's very somatic. So it's really getting in touch with feeling our feelings, but more than that, it's understanding why those feelings are there. We think that what we feel in the moment is just what's happening to us now, but what's really going on, often – or when we're triggered at least with emotions – is our body is remembering something that has happened in the past. And what really helps is that we create space, as you know, we give that feeling permission to be felt, to be expressed, because probably way back in your youth it wasn't able to be, which is why we get triggered by things, right, because we weren't able to express how we were feeling. Attached to that emotion is a belief, and this is what blew my mind, because we understand that we believe things, but to understand when and why we believe things is completely life-changing. Because in the same way that I learned that alcohol was ethanol, that helped me to dissociate myself from what I was doing and who I was. And I think with beliefs and emotions, when we understand that, for example, we might believe “I'm not good enough,” and that belief, that script, has been playing out your entire life as far as you know, and it's been there so long that you don't even question it. You don't even realize that that's what the tape in the background is. But through this Compassionate Inquiry, what we can do is sit with the emotion and understand that thought is usually associated to a memory from a time in your life. What you might notice is that when you were 7 years old, you were trying to talk to your parents about something that happened at school, but because they were dysregulated and they weren't able to hold space for how you were thinking and feeling, 7-year-old you decided to make that mean that it's because you weren't good enough. And then that thought you have starts to gather pace. Your brain starts looking for all… we know how beliefs work, what we focus on, we create more of. So that thought “I'm not good enough,” your brain starts finding more and more and more reasons as to why that's true, and so it just becomes this internalized core belief that you have about yourself. Which is amazing, right, because you're here as an adult – say I'm 41 – and I'm believing I'm not good enough. But actually, that belief was invented when I was 7 years old, because my parents didn't have capacity to hold space for how I was thinking and feeling. I feel that now, right? All of a sudden it's like, “That's not about me, that's about what was happening back then.” Nicky: Yeah. And it's so interesting, isn't it, given that we are such emotional animals? I mean, our emotions and our ability to think about our thoughts is what separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom. No one actually ever teaches us how to process or be with our emotions. And before I came to see you, I considered myself to be quite an expert in emotional processing, but I hadn't ever done it at the level at which we did it, in the sense of allowing your emotions to move and moving your body however the emotion needs to be moved. And then I can remember – and we're going to share the video – did you end up finding the recording? Patrick: Yes, yeah. Nicky: Yeah, so what I'm gonna do next week, I'm going to share the recording of the last session I had with Patrick, because it was really interesting. Even as an emotional resilience expert, the embarrassment that I felt around allowing my body to move… I think it was shame that we were talking about, I can't quite remember – shame or anger, may have been self-doubt. I've experienced all of those recently. But we don't… no one ever teaches us that, and yet it is what makes us human, regardless of whether you're masculine, feminine, male, female, it doesn't matter. We have emotions, and yet we have these… we were just talking before we came on about society's expectations and belief systems around how people and genders should deal with their emotions. So tell us a bit more about that side of things. Patrick: Yeah. Well, we're not taught about emotions – or we are actually taught about emotions, because we're modelled how to deal with our emotions, and often it's by our parents or those around us bringing us up when we're quite young. And we have to remember that our parents are modelling what their parents modelled to them, and then you can keep going back and back and back. You think about what civilization has been through in the last 100, 200 years, for example, it starts to make a lot of sense why men especially are dissociated with feelings, because I believe… you look at World War I, World War II, these guys went through horrific things. They came back and I don't know whether they weren't allowed to speak about it or they just didn't want to speak about it because it was so horrific, and they just learned to bottle things in. That obviously had an impact on their kids and their kids' kids, right? It's been changing in more recent times, and I feel like I'm much more emotionally available, but I don't get it right still. I still react to how I'm feeling, which is because we're human. We're not always going to get it right, but it's about being able to start recognizing, like, “Oh, there's this feeling coming up.” It’s crazy, because someone can just say something, and all of a sudden you'll be reactive to it. I had it recently: someone on a podcast was speaking about something in terms of, “Oh, I don't think people should invest in early recovery,” and that's something that I'd done, and all of a sudden I had this feeling come up and be like, “Oh, I've done something wrong.” And it wasn't… that wasn't what was happening in the moment, that was me being triggered by something that had happened in the past when I was younger. So learning and understanding why we are triggered and what beliefs are associated with the emotions is massive. The more that we can do that for ourselves, the more we can model that for our kids and our kids' kids as well. Nicky: Yeah. And I think that's really important, isn't it? I often say that kids don't do what we say, they do what they see, which is why I think… I love coaching women and mums, because I think it has to start with us, it has to start with the parent. A lot of parents want their kids to be “better,” whatever the fuck that means, but they're not willing to do the work themselves. I think it does have to start with us being okay with our emotions, then we're okay with everybody else's emotions. If we're not okay with our own emotions, we're never going to be alright with everybody else's. So it's a really powerful thing. Sometimes if you don't think you're worthy of doing it for yourself, then do it for the people that you love, so that we don't keep passing down these ingrained behaviours. Patrick: Yeah, exactly. And it's not easy, it's hard work sometimes, but the more you do it, the better you get at it, of course. But with emotions, what I've found – and kind of linking back to what you said about the model and then doing this more CI-based work – is that we have a thought that creates a feeling, whether that thought is something we think consciously in the moment, or it's something that's being triggered from the past. We have the thought and we have a feeling, and then that feeling starts influencing our thoughts. For example, I was just working with a guy this morning who… his circumstances changed and he ended up staying at home and not doing much and watching TV and stuff, but towards the end of the day he started feeling guilty because he thought he was wasting his day. And then from that feeling of guilt, your brain starts reacting to that and starts looking for evidence of why it's true, which then reinforces the feeling that you're having, and then all of a sudden you're spiralling. It's classic negativity spirals. So yeah, how you feel is real… Nicky: Yeah, yeah. Patrick: There's no getting around that, right? Whatever you're feeling is happening because you feel it in your body. There's that chemical release coming from your amygdala – you feel how you feel. The story of how you feel, that's optional. That's the bit that we've got to start getting better at recognizing and deciding, is that actually what I want to believe right now? You know, or is it even 100% true? And it's never 100% true. There may be elements of truth to it sometimes, but is it helpful to actually believe that? Does it serve you to believe that, to think that about yourself? Nicky: Yeah, yeah. Patrick: Very tricky, because sometimes we… My mum always says, we don't know the label of the jar we're in. If you are feeling this emotion – and some emotions feel stronger than others – what's interesting about that statement is that for some people, they will automatically go, “Oh yeah, shame and anger and guilt and stuff, they're negative.” But for some people, feeling happy or joyous can feel negative as well. So it really works both ways. Sometimes we don't recognize what's going on and how we're feeling or why we're feeling like it, and that's the key: to start creating that awareness around it. Nicky: Yeah, yeah, and I love expanding… when you expand your capacity to feel one emotion, you expand your capacity to feel others. So I know for me – which people will probably find quite ironic, because I think I'm perceived to be a very positive, happy person – I have had to do a lot of work around getting comfortable feeling excited and getting comfortable feeling successful, because they were not familiar emotions to me. I can remember growing up, my mum used to say to me, “Don't get too excited, because it might not happen.” So I then wouldn't let myself get excited. Now, that's not my mum's fault. My mum didn't have the capacity to feel excited because of circumstances in her life. But when you are then aware of that, and you have compassion for that and not judgment or any shame, now you get to work with it, I think. Now you get to allow yourself to experience it. And what I think is one of the biggest mindfucks when it comes to emotions is how we instinctively want to push it down or push it away. We think if we allow ourselves to feel it, it's never going to leave. Whereas actually, it's allowing yourself to truly experience the emotion, let it move as it needs to, that then enables it to disperse or ease or be okay. And so it feels counterintuitive when we perceive a negative emotion or an unfamiliar emotion – so for me that was excitement, success. It seems counterintuitive to feel it, because people think they're then gonna fall down this hole and never come out of it. But actually the opposite is true. When we allow ourselves to feel it, it reduces in strength regardless of how we perceive it. And that, I think, was so fascinating for me when I went through the Compassionate Inquiry with you – how my emotion could feel so strong, and yet quite quickly, after just moving or looking at it and just giving it space, I was like, “Oh, no, I'm good, I'm good now.” We didn't need to explore anything particularly, it was just giving it permission to be there without judgment. Patrick: Yeah, and that's the key – without judgment. Nicky: Yeah. And so I'm curious for you, because I know I've experienced this with my clients. They kind of look at me and go, “What, you want me to feel it? But then isn't it ever going to stay?” And I'm like, “No, no, the opposite is true. It will actually release you.” Patrick: Exactly. Sorry, just quickly – because you're feeling it without believing it. You're not believing the thought that created the feeling; you're just feeling the feeling that was created by the thought. Okay? So, let's say you were feeling shame. The reason you were feeling shame is because you were telling yourself that “I'm not good enough.” Nicky: Yeah. “I shouldn't have done something,” or whatever, yeah. Patrick: Okay, so when people think you have to feel the feeling, they think that they're still accepting the belief. But actually, that's not the case. You're accepting how you feel and not choosing to believe that you're not good enough at the same time. You're just kind of letting it wash through you. Which is the same with urges, by the way, right? Nicky: Yes, yeah. Patrick: And what I find incredible, the more I've done this, is that when we give ourselves space to feel how we feel, what ends up happening is that it creates a lot of relief for people. I hear that word a lot. When you actually sit with your feelings, nothing bad's going to happen to you. If anything, it's going to be the opposite. It's going to feel like a relief, because you've allowed that emotion to express itself, to be witnessed, to be felt, to be seen through. That's powerful. Nicky: Yeah, yeah, it really is. And I've done previous podcasts on how to actually process emotions, and I do it by answering very simple questions like: where in your body do you feel it? Is it hot, is it cold, fast or slow, heavy, light, what color is it? So we're learning how to look at it. But you've kind of taken that to a slightly different level again. So how would you describe, or is there a difference? Like, how would you… if someone was listening to this and they're like, “I don't know, I still feel a bit resistant to feeling shame or excitement or contentment or embarrassment,” where would you suggest someone starts? Patrick: I mean, that's a good question. I think parts work can be really great – this kind of, not something I've learned explicitly, but Internal Family Systems, IFS. So when there's resistance to feeling how we feel, it's usually because there's a part of us that doesn't want to feel it. Or the part could be a belief, for example. I've just been curious about, “Okay, so what do I think is going to happen if I feel shame? What is my brain afraid of? What's it trying to protect me from here?” You have to be super curious with yourself, right, and understand: what's the worst that's going to happen if I feel this feeling? And often it's because we're still believing the thought that's created it in the first place. I say, look, there's no right or wrong way, okay? We just get out of that mindset. It's more: what are you noticing happening in your body? What are the sensations? It could be tingling, it could be buzzing, you might notice it as shapes. Everyone's going to have a slightly different experience of what it's like. The key is to know where it is in your body, right? And so often we find it in our chests or throat and shoulders and places like that. But if it feels very much in your head, in terms of where you're thinking about it, often that's a way that our mind is kind of distracting us from what we're actually feeling. Nicky: Yeah. It is interesting. I hear that, especially from people that are really unfamiliar. Some people get it straight away when you go, “Right, just check in with your body, how are you feeling?” They get it. But when we've got that disconnect, if we're not used to feeling our emotions and you kind of have that disconnect with your body, I would say 95% of people, regardless of the emotion, will say to me, “Oh, it's in my head.” I'm like, “Okay, we're gonna come out of your head for a minute and come down into your body.” And it can be challenging for some people to do that, because we've never been shown. That's never been demonstrated to us. But there is… I love how you said about the release and the relief that you feel once you've allowed yourself to look at the emotion. And as you were talking then, it reminded me, I had Nan on the podcast a couple of weeks ago – you know Nan? And she uses the phrase, “Get curious, not furious.” So when you're looking at your emotions or your behavior or whatever, that curiosity – and I also like to invite in compassion – rather than judgment or being furious at it, it's so much more effective. Patrick: Yeah, 100%. And, well, that's Compassionate Inquiry 101, right? It's inquiring into yourself from a compassionate lens. That's not always available to people to begin with. It's a skill; compassion is a skill, something that we need to learn. But often, through the Compassionate Inquiry process, when we start stepping back and seeing ourselves as this kid who was doing whatever they could to survive in an environment that wasn't safe – or it didn't feel safe for them – they adopted this kind of behavior or belief or whatever it may be. And it's suddenly like, “Wow, yeah, I have a lot of compassion towards them. They were just doing what they could,” right? So that helps us dial down that judgment that is often very accessible for many of us, unfortunately. Nicky: Yeah, yeah. So, I'm just aware of time, so I'm going to start wrapping up our conversation, although I do think we probably could talk about this for hours. Patrick, is there anything that we haven't discussed yet that you think is relevant? Patrick: I think we've got a lot of things in there for people to take away. How would I summarize it? There's no right or wrong. Be patient with yourself. Recognize that getting into your body, learning how to feel your feelings, it's a skill, it's a practice, and it's one that's available to all of us. So yeah, just have patience with yourself as you're doing it, and really see how we can begin to be more compassionate with ourselves and our younger selves, and notice how that influences everyone around us. There's a great quote – I don't know if it's a quote – but you know the book The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho? There's a bit in that book where he says, “When you evolve, everyone around you evolves.” I love that, because it's so true. When we do this internal work for ourselves, it's going to impact and influence all those around us as well. Nicky: Yeah, yeah, I agree 100%. And I think that sometimes having an external, neutral support – which is why I believe in coaching so deeply – when you have that neutral person that isn't going to judge your emotions and can hold that space for you with compassion and kindness and curiosity is so very powerful. So we will put all of your links, Patrick, in the notes below the podcast. But if there's… this podcast is advertised to the working woman, but if there's someone here and they're like, “Oh, my friend, my boyfriend, my husband, my dad, my brother, I think would really benefit from Patrick's help,” where is the best place for them to find you? Patrick: They can go check out my website, which is patrickjfox.com. Or probably the best and most resourceful place for a lot of people is my podcast, which is the Alcohol Rethink podcast. Once you go there, you can start listening to a lot of the things that I talk about and digesting it – it'll make a lot more sense for you. Nicky: Yeah, yeah, brilliant. Thank you so much. And I'll put the recording of my session that I had with you – I think I'll do that as a bonus rather than an episode on its own. I'll put it as a bonus episode so that people can listen or watch on YouTube, so that they can get some idea of what I went through. They can maybe practice it themselves. If you love what Patrick's said today and you kind of like his energy, check out his podcast. Are you on any other social platforms? Patrick: I'm on Instagram as well, which is also the Alcohol Rethink podcast, or LinkedIn, Patrick Fox. Nicky: Yeah, okay, brilliant. We'll put all your links below anyway. But Patrick, thank you so much for joining me today. I've really enjoyed our conversation, and even though I've known you for a while, and I've got such fond memories of walking around Texas in the boiling heat with you and Luke, it was really lovely to hear your story and a bit more about what actually brought you to this point. So thank you very much for coming and talking to me today. And for everybody else, I'll see you all next week! Patrick: Amazing. Thanks so much, Nikki. Bye. Nicky: Okay, bye!