63: Your Brain Is Lying to You (and That’s Great News)

We’re diving into the real reason you feel stuck—and it’s not your ex, your job, or your dating life. It’s the story your brain is telling you on repeat.

Quinn shares a deeply personal moment with her ex-husband that triggered a cascade of thoughts… and how she used it as a powerful teaching moment. You'll learn how your brain is wired to protect you—not empower you—and what to do about it.

This episode will show you how to:

• Tell the difference between facts and the story your brain is spinning
• Recognize when your brain is being a lazy little liar
• Spot and interrupt confirmation bias (aka the Inner Mean Girl)
• Practice new, bold beliefs (even before you feel ready)
• Sit with discomfort and still move forward
• Steal confidence from one part of your life and use it somewhere scary

If you've ever wondered, "What if I'm just being delusional?" — this episode is your permission slip to believe the wild, juicy, freedom-filled version of your story.

In this episode, you’ll hear about:

• [01:20] A tense moment with her ex—and why it’s not the facts that matter
• [07:40] How your brain filters reality like a shady Instagram lens
• [12:10] What pattern-seeking has to do with trauma and safety
• [19:45] Why your brain would rather be right than happy
• [25:00] The mental friction of believing something new (and why it’s worth it)
• [30:30] Two practical tools to rewire your beliefs
• [35:00] A loving kick in the ass for anyone afraid of “being wrong”

PostDivorceGlowUp.com

Email: quinn@postdivorceglowup.com

Transcript

0:49

Hello, lover. It is such a good day to be divorced. You know, I love being divorced. I am just. Becoming acclimated to having my husband back in Arizona, so he has more regular visitation with my two youngest children. And this past weekend I went to pick up the kids and, and I don't see this man very often because he is not allowed to come to my house to pick up the kids for visitation. They have to walk to a park near my house in order to. Make that exchange. So I rarely see him, but as I pulled up to pick up the kids and they got in my car, he pulled out of his drive and our eyes locked, and he looked at me with such anger and I did not sneer back, but neither did I smile. And I remembered what it was like to live with a man who was so displeased with my choices on the regular, and I felt this welling up of gratitude for no fault divorce. Thank you feminists of the past, long lived, no fault divorce. Now I'd like to tell you that that story is. Accurate, but I know that my brain, like yours is not a truthteller, but a storyteller. So the truth of what happened, and I'll tell you as nearly as I can, is that I drove to my husband's farm. My children got into my car and I saw their father. locked eyes and then he drove away. And I think that is as truthful as I can tell But the story my brain wants to tell is that he lives with this deep and abiding dislike for me and my choices, and this story that my brain tells me, it makes me a little happy And it makes me deeply grateful. But for some people, this same story of locking eyes and him driving away, it could cause sadness or anxiety or fear. The point of this story for you is that, again, your brain is not a truth teller. Your brain is a storyteller. One of the first skills I teach my clients is to start to tell the difference between the truth, like the facts. Of what we are dealing with and the story that their brain is giving them about the facts. The facts are always going to be neutral. I pulled up to the farm kids, got in the car, dad pulls out. I see him, he sees me, he pulls away. I drive home. Those are the facts, but the story is so much more than that. And I promise you, every painful part of your life is not about the facts. The painful parts come from the story that your brain is giving you. Now, most of us are walking around in the middle of a story that we didn't even write. It was written already. It's like we came in to act two of a five act, play. And we had our parents starting the story, but even they didn't start the story before them. It was the religion Before that, it was the cultural expectations. We are part of this grand story of humanity and this story that many of us live out is full of fear and shame and longing. And I wanna talk to you about how to rewrite the damn script. So first it's really important to understand that you are not experiencing reality. You are experiencing your programming. Let's get this straight right out of the gate. Your experience of the world. Is not a live feed from a surveillance camera with black and white and no noise, and this is just what happens. The way we live our lives is more like an Instagram filter layered over our senses, our emotions, and our past traumas. Our brains do not give us the raw truth. It gives us a highlight reel of what it already expects to be true. Now, how does your brain even have those expectations of what is true? And this begs the question, how does our mind even have expectations of what it thinks will be true? And this is one of the beautiful mechanisms of the brain, It is an expectation and a pattern finding machine all on its own. So if as a child you reached out for love and affection and you are neglected, or you are dismissed or pushed away, the most important people in your life doing that, set up an expectation in your brain that love means. Someone who is dismissive or doesn't listen to you, or all of the expectations that we are fed, not even overtly, but even covertly, just through living in a misogynistic society of what it is to be a woman, what it is to be attractive, what is conventionally attractive. It's just like when. Two people go into the very same room and come away with completely different experiences because we are not seeing reality. We are seeing trained perceptions. for example. A lot of women have these contradicting beliefs about I'm not enough, as well as believing, oh, I'm too much. But if you believe one of those things, or you believe that you are not lovable or worthy of love, your brain doesn't even register when someone. Compliments you because it's not within the pattern to recognize that. And then you will easily dismiss those kinds of efforts by someone who might want to compliment you or show you their love. It doesn't even register if you believe that you always mess things up or relationships never work out for you, or all the men are a certain way. Your brain will skip right over the 10 things you did well, the relationships that are working, the men that are showing up for you, and it hyper focuses on the one thing that will support. The negative belief, as long as it is your strongest belief, your brain is going to look for evidence to support it. Now, this is not because you are broken. This is because your brain is working exactly the way it is supposed to in order for you to survive. Your brain is trying to save energy by finding patterns, and here it is trying to keep you safe, and your safety is so much more important to your brain than your happiness. Or your self-growth or self-awareness, it really wants to keep you safe. Your brain wants to be right more than anything, It wants to find evidence for your beliefs. Your brain is addicted to being right. It doesn't care if the belief is helpful, if it's empowering, if it brings you joy, but if it is familiar. Your brain is loyal to it. So if you learned at a very young age that the most important thing that you can be as a woman is attractive, your brain will search for all of the evidence to show that that is true. That is the most important thing that you can be, and it is going to show you all the ways in which you might improve. Your attractiveness, or if you've believed for years, I'm bad at relationships or I'm too old to start over, your brain goes out and It collects the clues and ignores anything that can contradict that theory. Now psychologists refer to this as confirmation bias, It is out there telling you the way it is, and this is just the way it is. So in order to shift out of this. Blindness we have to these other ways of being. Other ways of living. You have to start looking for evidence that challenges your old beliefs on purpose and. You cannot wait for your brain to do it alone. It won't. It's lazy. Our brains are so lazy. It loves to hold on to old stories, even if it doesn't serve us. And so a lot of what I do in coaching is slowing people down because we say things as if it is true, as if we are telling the truth, and all we are doing is telling a story. And yes, you have lots of proof for your story, but it may not even be true. But when we start to challenge these stories, there is this discomfort. Our brains do not like to have the stories challenged. A week ago, I was helping one of my clients through a belief that her ex-husband wants to get revenge, and she has lots and lots and lots of proof, so many stories about how this is true. But in evaluating whether or not we want to keep a story, we have to look at what it creates in our lives, how it makes us feel, the actions we take, because we're believing this story and if we're getting the results that we want in our lives. And the conclusion we came to is that whether or not her ex-husband wants to make her pay for the pain she caused with the divorce. It doesn't matter because there's nothing he can do to truly get revenge on her. More than what she is doing to herself by believing that, because when you believe that your ex-spouse is trying to make you pay and is trying to make your life miserable, you in turn, live in fear and distrust, and you create so much friction in your own life that you are punishing you. They are not even doing the thing. And you are getting so much friction and so much pain, so much discomfort in your life. So when we slow down and we look at the facts and the fact in this. Particular case was that the ex-husband refused to pay for lessons for one of the children. But from that one fact, the story was he wants revenge, and then it created all of this suffering in my client's life to where. She was making herself pay and all he had done was he had said no. He had said no to lessons. That is all, and it was this cascade within the story within my client that created tremendous, tremendous pain and suffering in her life. But she was so bought into it. That it really took slowing down and questioning what are the facts? What are the facts of the story? So when you start to question a story. Because it seems true. Our stories, they feel really true. They seem really true. So if you try to believe something new like, I am worthy of love, or I'm a damn good mom, or I am building an amazing life, your brain freaks out and that discomfort, it's. Not a sign that the new belief is wrong, just because you don't believe it yet. It's a sign that your brain has entered rewiring mode and it's a little bit uncomfortable because your brain is having to grow. It's creating these new neural pathways. And most of us have practiced our stories, especially coming out of an divorce. We have our stories about our spouse, and we've told people these stories again and again and again, and framed it in such a way. That we look a certain way coming out of it, and our ex-spouse looks a certain way coming out of it. So when we start questioning it and we want to live out a new script, we have to be willing to enter the discomfort of cognitive dissonance, which simply means that you are holding onto two beliefs. Simultaneously and they are battling it out inside of you. The old one you've rehearsed maybe for decades, and the new one is the one that you want to become true. So if we go back to my story at the very beginning, ex-husband. He drives out of his driveway. We lock eyes. He has a certain look on his face. He turns and drives away, and I pull out and take my kids home. If rather than believing, oh, he is so angry at me. Instead I could choose to believe any of a dozen other stories. I could believe that. He holds no animosity towards me. I could believe that he's late for an appointment somewhere, and that's why maybe he looked agitated. I could believe that something else altogether is on his mind. I could believe that he's wishing that he had behaved better in the past so that he could have a conversation with me and wishes that we didn't have. The protective order in place. I could choose to believe any of those other stories. It will battle my first belief that he disapproves of me and he's angry at me, and I would have to sit with that cognitive dissonance. The two stories kind of battling it out. And so to know if you want to keep a story, you look at the results that it gives you. I like the results that I get from believing the story that I have. Some of you it wouldn't work that's why our thoughts are so intimately personal and what works for you does not necessarily work for someone else. But as we practice new stories, new thoughts, it's like breaking in a new pair of shoes. It's stiff, it's awkward, but if we give it some time, it becomes very comfortable and even natural. there are a couple of tools that I wanna offer you to help train your brain to step into. Telling yourself better stories, tool number one is for you to become the huntress and what you're hunting is the opposite. I want you to pick a painful belief. You've held onto something like, I'm never enough. Now ask your brain for three pieces of evidence that suggest. Otherwise suggest the opposite. And at first your brain is going to say, that's impossible. The other story is true. I don't know, but then ask for it. To dig a little deeper, what if you did know? Let's just imagine. What would the evidence look like of I Am Enough? Maybe you held your family together while you guys have been going through hell. Maybe you finally filed for divorce even though it terrified you. Maybe you are kind to people in your neighborhood. I mean, all of that counts. As you being enough, but perhaps your story helped you dismiss that. So we start hunting for the opposite of the belief. We start building a body of evidence to tell ourselves that different story. And as you keep doing this every day, you start to reteach your brain to become a detective for finding. Truth that aligns with the future that you want. If you are the kind of person that walks around the world with, I hate men, and yet you want to date men, it's a really difficult place to be. I would suggest if you want to date men. First, take all the precautions you need to take, of course, so that you can have a safe dating experience. But I would also suggest. That you start believing better things about men. There's a lot of opinions about about men, especially from those of us coming out of marriages. To men, and so be careful of your thoughts about men if you want to date them. Look for evidence of men doing good things, protective things, using their muscles for the benefit of the less fortunate or whatnot, as well as their resources. And as you keep doing this, looking for the good. In men loving, men supporting men, it makes it easier to date men. Now, tool number two, this might be a stretch for some of you. I want you to choose to believe something before you have any proof to believe something is possible before it has shown up in your world. Do you want to attract a loving, emotionally available partner? You need to practice believing that it's possible. Do you want to launch your own business? You need to start believing that you can do that. I mean, dudes do it every day. Certainly you can figure it out. Do you want to feel safe in your body again? You have got to start believing that it's possible or that you can learn to feel safe in your body. Again, you start with believing, not blind to optimism, but grounded, messy, courageous decision to believe. That it's possible even before it's earned. Even before it's deserved, and you will feel delusional and that's okay. Most breakthroughs start out looking a little ridiculous. We are all living delusional. Lives. I can promise you there is not one person, no matter how logical or objective that they think they are, they simply are not. They are also living through the delusions of the stories that they are telling about the world. But I do get this pushback, this concern. What if I am delusional? I don't wanna believe something that isn't true. But let's kind of play this out. I often get this kickback from people who were like me, raised in very structured conservative religions. And we've deconstructed our religion and saw how delusional we were within the focus of our religion, and we don't want to do that to ourselves again, because it's incredibly painful when you have to start deconstructing your entire reality. That was based on illusion. So let's play this out. In this specific case though, if you went ahead and believed that you. Are powerful, that you are worth loving, that you have capacity and ability to live a fuller, richer life. What are you actually risking by believing that maybe you'll feel disappointed if it doesn't work out. That someone might judge you and say that you're cringe, that you'll have to stretch and grow and make decisions that scare the shit out of you. Okay? Okay. And And then what? I mean, you have already survived something that many, many women will never do. You are so strong. So do not let the fear of quote unquote being wrong or quote unquote delusional, keep you from being powerful. People thought women could not own property or that orgasms were mythical and something only that men could do. That you had to stay married to be respectable and safe, but they were wrong. Be delusional. Be free. Be full of yourself. I want you to start borrowing confidence. You already believe certain powerful things about yourself, maybe just not in all of the areas of your life right now. You might believe I am a really good friend, or I am great at my job, or I can survive anything. So ask yourself what thoughts make. Those beliefs feel true, and I can promise you, you have a story around those thoughts about yourself. Whether it's about being a good friend or good at your job or being able to survive. You have a story. Your brain has looked for evidence. And then take those stories, take that evidence, take that feeling of confidence in some area of your life, and transplant that confidence into another area that feels shaky. You can borrow the confidence of how good you are as a friend and implant that into your ability to find a job if you believe. I always find a way to get things done at work. You can also use that in your dating life if you believe I am generous and I am loyal and I take care of the people I love. You can also use that in how you see yourself as a partner. You are already the person that has the tools and the ability to get the things that you want in your life You just haven't let your brain believe it, but it's time. It's time to believe it. So here's your mission. Stop waiting for proof. Go find the proof. Stop looking to your past to define what your future looks like. Past is done. Future is out there to be created. The point of power is in the present moment. Yeah, start choosing beliefs, choosing your story. Give meaning to your life as if your life depends on it, because honestly it does. Your brain is going to argue with you. It's fine. It's fine. The brain gets to argue. Your old beliefs are going to rise up and say, Hey, what about us? Remember when you believed this? You can ignore them. You don't have to believe everything your brain tells you and your new self, the one you're building step by step. She is going to rise every time you choose on purpose. To lean in to the beliefs that feed you, that feed that that beautiful capital S self Choose your hallucinations wisely, babe. Believe. Just because you can, we're all going to have stories. Let's make sure that yours is fantastic. How about that? All right, babes. I will see you next week. Enjoy your divorce.