Episode 16 Our Brains are Liars .... Shame Needs A Witness.....

Episode 16

Chatting About Shame, 

Fixing..

Our Brains are Liars..

I would Love to Hear from You...

email sleeplessingranada@yahoo.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Hello and a huge big Scottish welcome. Sleepless in Granada, episode 16. Today my furry girls are so full of energy. They're playing tag together. Watching them so full of life and with so much energy makes my heart zing. Today I'm sipping a cafe con leche and I'm thinking, our brains are liars. Absolute liars. Our brains believe what it repeats. not what's true. Our thoughts create our feelings. Our feelings drive our actions. Our actions create our identity and our personality. But our identity is plastic. Our brain is constantly rewiring. So when we repeat something over and over again with enough intention and emotion, we can change our identity. Self-talk isn't harmless. It's like casting a spell. Your brain and your body are listening all the time. So the more encouraging your self-talk is, the stronger the relationship you will have with yourself. Your life will always reflect who you believe yourself to be. be. This is why you will never outperform your self-image. Your brain doesn't know the difference between what is real and what is imagined. When you visualise the person you want to be, how you want to act, how you want to talk, you're achieving your goals. You're rewiring your brain for success. You don't have thoughts, you are visited by them. You don't have to believe every thought that you think. You don't think your way out of a feeling you know, but you can feel your way into a new way of thinking. All your unprocessed emotions stay stored in your nervous system. The body is always keeping score. More than 90% of our behavior is automatic. It's run by the subconscious. Your brain is a prediction machine. It constantly guesses what will happen next based on old data. So if you can program that data, you can change your future forever. Overthinking is underfeeling. Are you an over thinker it most likely means that you are under feeling suppressing some sort of emotion and most of the time it feels like things like guilt sadness rage or anger things that we find very uncomfortable to feel the mind will come up with 20 50 100 thoughts to basically distract us from feeling that feeling because it's so uncomfortable so painful I was such a huge over thinker I played out every situation and every scenario, I would overthink the way I behaved all of the time. By doing so, I was simply underfeeling that emotion. Now I am aware of this and I don't overthink anymore. It was my coping mechanism in disguise. Next time you start overthinking, just ask yourself, what am I underfeeling? What am I not letting myself feel? Become aware of it. Literally feel it and watch thoughts completely disappear. Now that's powerful. Next I'd like to chat about two reactions that are fear responses but no one really talks about them enough. We all know about fight, flight and freeze but what about fawning and fixing? These can look like quieter strategies that don't resemble fear as much because they sneakily perform like connections. They are not. Fawning is about appeasing. It's a trauma response where you try to avoid conflict, criticism or harm by pacifying your person. It's mostly rooted in fear and not in kindness. This is what fawning looks like. It's avoiding your own wants and needs to keep other people happy. It's saying yes when you want to scream no. It's feeling responsible for other people's emotions. It's struggling to express anger, hate, disagreement So when your partner says, I felt very dismissed by you last night, and instead of pausing, you go straight to, oh my God, oh my God, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, I was tired. I'll do better, I promise. But the nervous system says, if I can make you like me or make you calm down, then I'll be safe. I want reconnection at the cost of being honest because being in rupture is the scariest thing in the planet. It's a sort of overriding. It's smiling when you want to shout and scream. It's about over apologising and agreeing with them so you don't lose them. It's about being the bigger person when inside your inner warrior is on fire. You basically become who they want you to be. You appease, you edit, you downshift and it's fucking exhausting. Fawning often develops in environments where our safety was tied to keeping others happy Being assertive was punished and ignored. Where love always felt conditional. Fawning is a survival strategy. It's not a flaw. You're not being too nice. You're conditioned to survive in the only way you know how. But awareness is one step towards healing. Practice saying no. Begin with small things. Begin to notice how your body reacts to conflict. Does your jaw clench? Does your stomach tighten? Does your throat close? Work on your boundaries and your non-negotiables. This was the first step for me in rebuilding my self-trust. Fixing. Fixing is different. It's about control. Your partner says, I'm still hurt about what happened last week. And before they even finish, you're already in mid-solution. Okay, shall we have a mid-week check-in moving forward? Fixing is where we learned we have the most value and have been rewarded for it in the past. So it can come a complete surprise when it doesn't work for you. You may have come from a family that never spoke about feelings or emotions. A family that rewarded external validation, that rewarded behaviour that looked really great on the outside. You have also been rewarded for it in the outside world and it has probably gotten you where you want to go. You have seen that it works for you so you keep doing it because it's how you've gotten some of your success. You have learned that fixing and doing, doing, doing is way safer than occupying the emotional space in your body. Both adaptations have a hard time sitting in tension. Instead you rush to, everything's okay, everything's okay. before anything has actually landed. Because here's the problem. When you're sprinting towards a resolution, just to get your body to shut the fuck up, you're not actually in connection. So the first thing to do is just start to be aware that you're doing it. Start to be aware that there's a moment that starts feeling so uncomfortable. So don't move towards it. Move away from it. Stop. Just stop. Stop saying, that's just how I am. It's the biggest lie you have ever told. Bet you've said it before. Oh, I'm not a social person. Oh, I don't like taking risks. That's not who you are. That's who you became to feel safe. That's your coping strategy in disguise. You built this personality around protection, not power. Most of what we call personality, it's really just patterns, self-protection. You're not quiet. You're just cautious. Because once you got your feelings hurt, you're not indecisive. You learned that choosing wrong had consequences and you were punished. None of this is who you are. It's who you learn to be in order to survive. I don't blame you. I learned these behaviors too. It's called survival. Us humans are social creatures. We want to be accepted into the tribe. It's a protective mechanism in our brains. Really weird, isn't it? Our brains don't build identities. They build shields to protect us. When we experience humiliation, rejection, shame, embarrassment, etc., our nervous system kicks in and it takes mental notes. And then it whispers, don't trust too fast. Don't speak up. It's not safe. So over time, we stop doing these things. Eventually, we even stop trying. That's when we convince ourselves and we tell everyone, this is just who I am. Stop it. Stop it now. Here's a question for you. What do you think most of us get wrong about how we communicate? It's that we think that arguments are something to win, not something to unravel. Arguments are like knots in the conversation and what happens is you pull your way and I pull my way. As opposed to saying, how can we unravel this? How can we smooth it out? Never win an argument. Anytime there is any kind of miscommunication, it's because what is sent is not what's received. So what you thought you said is not what they heard. The question should always be, what did you hear? What did you hear when I just said that? I know what I meant, but I need know what did you hear? Help me with this, Nott. Remember, when arguing, try to remember and say, please tell me, what did you hear? It worked for me. I'll tell you, life is no joke. Sometimes it punches you in the gut just so hard you can't even get up. So how do we manage and not let emotions take the wheel? Understand this. Life really doesn't give a shit if we're ready or not. Work still piles up. Are people still disappoint us? And things go wrong. It doesn't mean that you need to stay calm all the time. It means that you can recover. You can move on. Move forward without digging yourself into a shitstorm. The key isn't about avoiding your emotions. It's learning how to manage them. You've got to know how you react when things go wrong. What do you do? Do you overthink, pretend everything is fine, or do you crash out? Just paying attention to our patterns without judgment is step one. It's okay to mentally check out when feeling completely overwhelmed. That awareness gives you the space to do something different the next time. But before that, you need to shift your thinking. So instead of saying, this always happens to me, I can't deal with it, you catch yourself and you say, okay, this is shit. But what can I do right now? Life will throw all the shit it can at you at once. You just need to build up your tolerance to do it gradually. It's like doing weight training in the gym. It's one step at a time. You build mental toughness one small challenge at a time. You must prepare yourself and not get mentally injured. You must learn to respond and not to react. Remember, you're not broken if the pressure gets to you. Believe me, it gets to everyone. Emotional resilience gives you a little more headspace between what has happened and how you respond. And that space, that's where your power lives. Go on, tap into it. It's amazing. How do you know when someone is safe for your nervous system? It's not how long you've known them. It's not how much you laugh together. It's how they respond to your vulnerability. Do they hold it or do they weaponise it? Do they listen or do they get defensive? Do they stay in the present or do they shut down? Because the ones that are safe won't make you shrink or second guess. They will make your system regulate. You can't fake that response. Shame is a silent wound. Shame doesn't just say, you did something wrong. It says you are the something wrong and that kind of belief It doesn't scream from the rooftops. It hides and festers in the mucky black corners of your mind. It burrows into your nervous system, into your voice, your posture, your choices, your truth. It becomes the reason you don't speak up, or why you feel like you have to prove yourself to be good, or why you keep people at a distance, even when you're starving for love and closeness. Where does this shame come from? Shame Shame is often inherited or it's imposed on you. It's not chosen. It's what you were made to feel for being different, for needing something others couldn't give, for the survival strategies you clung to just to make it through to another day, for the parts of you that were too loud, too emotional, too sensitive, too much. Shame forms itself around all your cracks and then whispers, you are the crack Shame shadows your expression. You may not say, I feel shame out loud, but it may look like this. People pleasing to avoid criticism. Perfection as protection. Being hypervigilant in case you are misunderstood. Constantly apologising. Even breathing. Anger at others that masks the shame inside. Self-sabotage because deep shame. Deep down, you don't deserve good stuff. Shame is loud in the way we hurt ourselves before others get the chance to. Shame feels familiar. The hardest thing about shame is that it can start to feel like the truth. If you have worn it, Long enough, it doesn't feel like a wound. It feels like who you are. This is why it can be so very difficult to let it go. Not because you want to hold onto it, but because it became your armor, your map, your measure of safety. Shame needs a witness. Shame thrives in silence. It grows stronger in complete isolation. That's why healing shame often starts by letting it be seen, not by everyone, maybe by yourself, maybe by someone who's earned the right to hold it. Maybe you could start writing it down or speaking about it out loud. Shame loses all its power when it's brought from the darkness into your light, gently, safely, and without demand. Shame often shows up as collapsing posture, avoiding eye contact, feeling frozen or numb, or a sudden need to run, run, run away and hide. Give yourself comfort before trying to fix the feeling. My journal prompts on how to meet my shame with compassion. I used to write, number one, what part of me feels the most unworthy and when did this story begin? Number two, what did I learn was bad about me and who or what taught me this? Number three, if I could speak to the version of me who first felt this shame, what would I say to that person? Number four, what part of me am I still hiding in order to be loved, accepted or safe? And number five, what might it look like if that part of me showed up with kindness and gentleness instead of judgment? Shame would tell me repeatedly, you must be small to be safe. But I learned the parts that I had buried, they were not my curse. They were my cue to my softness, to my power, to the version of me that was never meant to be in hiding. This was the beginning. I was now turning toward what I'd spent my lifetime avoiding. I believe the biggest need on the entire planet is to do the inner work, the healing work. Every single problem that we face today in this world has been caused by a hurting little child inside the body of an adult who has been disconnected from the truth, disconnected from love. When we take a step back and think of the root cause, somewhere along the line, A little child stopped feeling loved, stopped feeling safe, stopped feeling appreciated and accepted, seen or validated. So what did that little child do? They abandoned themselves and they abandoned everyone else because they no longer felt safe. I'm glad that one's over with. That was hard. Everything I chat about on my podcasts are simply my point of view and life lived experiences. I'm in no way an expert. Thank you so much for listening. I'd love to hear from you. Email me at sleeplessingrenada at yahoo.com. Next episode to follow soon.