Episode 18 Listen With Your Ears Not Your Triggers

Episode 18

surviving childhood traumas.

.anger was my mother tongue

discipline your disappointments

peace never really left you...

I would absolutely love to hear from you

email sleeplessingranada@yahoo.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Hello and a huge big Scottish welcome. Episode 18, Sleepless in Granada. I had another really busy morning. Here in Spain, the lifestyle is so much more relaxed than in Britain. I absolutely love it. The sky is the deepest turquoise blue and the sun continues to shine. And feelings of happiness just wash over me for no reason. Gosh, where has this year gone? Soon it will be August. Do you know something? There are only two people in this world that I need to make proud. And that is the eight-year-old me and the 80-year-old me. I have come to realise that you can never break a great spirit, no matter what shit life throws at you. You still maintain the highest level of positivity. And it's because of that spirit. When I was a small child, I remember feeling ashamed. I had no idea what this feeling was that walked with me every day to school. I hated it when I had to say my name out loud. I didn't ever want to draw attention to myself. I was an intelligent, happy and kind little girl. I was so painfully shy. And I was also so very wary of strangers until I trusted. In my head, I always called myself Penny Smith. My own name has 26 letters and my surname is so very unusual. I wished the ground would open up and swallow me. when I was asked my name. Today, I absolutely love my very unique name and I'm very proud of it and I'm very proud of me. Today, I'll chat about the complete wall of silence that families put up within a dysfunctional family system, especially when the dysfunctional member is being led by a narcissistic, abusive monster. What that family won't do is get frustrated or even angry at the person who is the abusive, harmful and hurtful one. They get angry at the person that calls out the abuse. There's nothing right about this. You're probably all saying, why? Why would they do that? Family is very much about appearances. Keeping the image that the family are healthy, strong and loving. And this image matters way more to the family than any individual. This is so hurtful if you are the one who has spoken up. You then find that you are the problem. The people you thought loved and cared for you. They don't protect you, in fact. They turn their backs on you and control and protect the manipulative controlling person. It's all about face. It's all about image. And it's all about appearances. When you are the truth teller, know that you are not toxic for telling the truth. You're not being dramatic. You're not being too sensitive. In toxic settings, the truth teller becomes the threat. They all want you to stop speaking. but you were never the problem. You're the alarm clock that they tried so hard to smash. There will be much eye rolling. They will tell you to stop being so angry. At first, truth tellers have to walk alone. You saw the cracks when everyone else was pretending. You're very brave for breaking that dysfunctional family cycle. You have integrity. Healing starts when you stop asking people who benefit from your silence to validate your truth. You are your truth. Stop regretting the past. There's nothing you can do about it. Don't forget it. The past is now a memory. Learn from it and get better from it so you don't make the same mistakes again. Stop regretting the past. Don't dwell there. Don't worry about the future. 85% of the shit you think about and worry about on a daily basis will never happen. Stop wasting your energy and your time. Stop looking for your happiness in other people. Other people can't make you happy. It's just impossible. Happiness is absolutely a 100% inside job and I should know. Expecting people in your life to do what you would do in a situation will only lead to your decision Disappointment, not theirs. They are getting on with their own lives, so let people be who they are, and either you accept or you don't. What expectation has been stealing your peace? Like a thief in the night, they creep in because your lack of boundaries gave them permission. Did their noisy drama draw you in? Did they disturb your tranquility? Just because they came a calling doesn't mean that you have to answer. Learn to protect your energy and your peace. You're not responsible for their happiness. When you finally choose peace, there will be a lot of goodbyes. There'll be a lot of tears. The day you trade expectations for appreciation is the day you become wealthy. Because as long as you're expecting things, you're going to be so, so disappointed. Expecting the people in your life to act in a certain way. Don't be. If you're only happy when they behave in a certain way, you'll hardly ever be happy. How about appreciation? Now that's the game. Because when you start appreciating the tiniest little things in your life, you have gifts that nobody else has. My magic moments are the vista from my bedroom window each morning when I open up my blinds.

UNKNOWN: 5:57

Ah!

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Ah, my furry friend's unconditional love as we embrace the day on our riverside walks. The fresh air that I breathe and my health. What are your magic moments? The hard truth is people will always take everything that you have to offer if you don't know when to stop and say enough is enough. Kindness without limits will drain your spirit, your time and your strength. When you constantly give, people stop appreciating what you offer and they start to expect it. What you feel is what you attract. If you assume that you're lacking, that's exactly what you'll be waking up to every morning. You keep looking for someone else to blame. You keep looking for someone else to explain. You must look inside yourself for the answers. You can't keep pouring from your empty glass. Your kindness will cost you more than you're willing to pay. You'll eventually lose sight of your own needs. You are sacrificing your own people and joy in the endless pursuit of keeping others in your life happy. When you learn to be whole, healthy and happy for you, for you yourself, this changes everything. When I stopped reacting, when I stopped explaining myself, something very powerful happened. People instantly lost all power over me. It was almost immediate and it's incredible to watch the shift. They didn't require me to be silent. They craved my reaction, my defensiveness, my desperation to make myself understood, my emotional outburst. This is what they fed off. They fed off all that energy. When you stop giving to them, you starve their supply. They have nothing to work with. They have nothing to use against you and they cannot manipulate you anymore. Some people unconsciously build the relationship around provoking reactions from others. This gives them a sense of power and importance. They need you upset to feel in control. The moment you stop playing this game, you take away all their power. Not by bending over backwards, not by fighting harder. It's by not fighting at all. Now that's powerful. And now a short piece of writing by the incredible Rose Brick. And it's called Inherited Hunger. Women fall out of love little by little, like the drip drop of a broken tap. The tears run out slowly until there's nothing left. Women fall out of love after the hundredth time of trying to talk it out and they won't even turn around to look at us. Women fall out of love after we've convinced ourselves over and over and over again that it really wasn't that bad, but every day we carry the weight of our needs not being met. Women fall out of love little by little, building a wall to protect our hearts out of the fallen stones that used to be a mountain of love. Women don't wake up one day and decide we're done. We give all of ourselves until we realize it will never be enough. Whoa that still gives me shivers. Listen with your ears and not your triggers. This is how I learned to discipline my disappointments. If you don't learn how to discipline your disappointments you will fuck up and sabotage every relationship you especially the relationship you have with yourself. This is the only reason you suffer in your mind. This is the root cause. This sentence has caused you more problems in your life than you have ever realized you need things to be in order you need them to be in order to keep your peace that's it that's the huge problem because when things don't go the way you need them to go you lose your peace so what does that actually tell me you never really had any peace you had dependency dependency on the outside world going how you needed it to go, so the inside of you could feel fine. And here's the thing. Peace never really left you. You just turned your back on it because you felt you needed something else in order to feel good. But you were already fine. Peace isn't out there. It's in here. It's in your core. It's in your heart. The minute you stop needing life to behave, you return to peace that's inside you. People don't suffer because of what is happening. People suffer because they need it to be a certain way, their way. And when it's not, they resist it. The objection is the suffering. You think you're upset because they didn't call you back or ended the relationship suddenly or simply because life wasn't going your way or because someone had a different opinion to yours and it goes on and on. But really you're upset because you made up this narrative in your head about how things should have gone and you're clinging on to it. The mind whispers, this isn't the way things are meant to happen and you believe it. This is where most people destroy relationships. You just can't handle disappointments. You then punish your person for not reading your mind. You shut down. You withhold and withdraw. You emotionally spike. Then you blame the partner for not regulating them. Now it's no longer a partner. It's a parent-child dynamic. Your partner is now your emotional manager, constantly regulating. De-escalating, tiptoeing, walking on eggshells, trying to keep you stable because you don't have the ability to sit with. This didn't go my way. So you'll continue to throw your toys out of the pram. Your partner didn't sign up for any of this shit. If you don't learn to discipline your disappointments, your partner will start to resent you. It will become impossible and they will become exhausted and eventually, and sadly, they will leave you. You stop needing reality to shift so your nervous system can stabilize. You fix it by freeing yourself from needing them to change in order for you to feel okay. You consciously let go. You stop clinging. You stay. You show up, not from control, but from calmness and transparency, that energy, that peace. will take the entire relationship to a whole new level. Not because you forced it, but because you yielded the need to. Peace is so much more valuable than being right. So what is this shift? You stop needing the world to go your way in order for you to feel fine. You stop grasping for control. You stop externalising love. You stop expecting people in your life to give you what you won't give yourself. Sometimes we unconsciously try to impose deals in our relationship without speaking of them. Stop handing the person in your life the silent rule book that they never agreed to follow in the first place and then blame them when they break all the rules. that's not connection that's control control always leads to suffering the only place that peace ever lives is in stillness if your peace is conditional on outcomes that's not peace it's just simply acting so let it go just let it go control your disappointments before they become patterns before they become cycles before it becomes the very thing that annihilates the very people you say you love so much. A mistake repeated more than once is a decision. A mistake repeated more than twice is a habit. And a mistake repeated more than three times, that's your character. Mistakes happen. We're all human. But a mistake that is constantly repeated isn't a mistake anymore. It's part of who you really are. There are five types of human we all need in our We need a comforter, a confronter, a counsellor, a challenger. and a celebrator, a comfort. We all need a comfort in life because life is guaranteed to hurt us. And we need someone there to comfort us because if you don't have someone there to comfort you, you'll end up going to the person who hurt you to heal and console you. We need a confronter in our life. This is someone who will tell you when you're wrong. You need this person to play the role, to confront you when you fuck up. A challenger. Someone who listens, loves and lives their life so greatly. It challenges you to be a better version of you. A counsellor. You desperately need a counsellor. Someone who is full of wisdom and truth. Someone who will give you a wise idea. Lastly, a celebrator. You need a celebrator in your life. Someone who will not let you go through a day without celebrating your small and your large victories. One of the people in your life can play multiple roles and multiple people can fill the same role but if you have people in your life who are playing none of these specific roles ask yourself this are they just taking up space in your life identify tag and share the people in your life that are playing these incredible roles we all need these people in our lives before judging or critiquing before you draw any conclusions about what's going on in someone else's life remember you only know what you think you know. Anger was my mother tongue and that fire had roots that rose from silence, dismissal and unheard needs. Anger carried everything my tiny body couldn't say out loud. It was my communication. Raw, urgent and real. My burden was just too heavy for me to carry. Too much, too soon. No one explained and no one showed me how to hold it. Huge feelings with no names, no roadmap and and no mirror, just a little child trying to make sense of all this chaos around her. Healing looks like this. You don't have to silent scream anymore. You get to feel your fire without burning everything else down. You get to stay true to you with no need to prove your worth through pain. You have always been whole. Survival was your brilliance in motion. Now you get to know how to live, really live. Everything I chat about in my podcast are simply my points of view and my lived experiences. I'm no expert. Thank you for listening to this episode. I would really love to hear from you. Email sleeplessingrenada at yahoo.com. Next episode to follow soon.