The Frozen Fight

Sometimes we chase success because we are still trying to win recognition from people who cannot give it.

In this walk, I explore the “frozen fight” — the unresolved inner battle to be seen, known, valued, or finally recognized. From family events to career goals, I reflect on how much energy we spend trying to win a fight that may never be won, and how shifting attention toward what we have already survived, built, and accomplished can restore clarity, peace, and personal authority.

Walk with me.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Hello. Good morning, everybody. Welcome. Welcome to talk to Dr. Brooke. Good morning. Already think anything this morning. That doesn't usually happen. Um live from my neighborhood. So today I I tend to have themes that arise in the work with people. I talk to people a week, every week. Lots of people over lots of years. And something that's standing out, particularly today, is this um I'm gonna say it's this idea that that I I watch people suffer so much in anticipation of an event, of circumstances, of difficult family interactions that they're anticipating. And then the level of energy and fight that goes into that anticipation, especially in people's minds. And I I I came across something and it caused, it called that like it well, it's it it it was basically saying that that those types of symptoms are originating from those types of symptoms are are originated from like something that we might cause call like the frozen fight. And the frozen fight is like is like the type of thing where it's like you wanted to fight for something you believed in. You wanted for to fight for something, uh, an idea that was important to you or an accomplishment that was important to you. So, in other words, like uh from your in your early life, you wanted to fight for an opinion that you had, and your parents told you you were wrong, or a teacher told you that you were wrong, or a teacher told you that you wouldn't, you know, you wouldn't be successful at something, or you know, or you were deterred at home, or at um maybe religious organizations said you can't do that, you know, something like that. And and you and but you you you're fighting to be seen, known, heard. And I think that like when we anticipate these type of events in our head, we're fighting to be known and heard, but you're realizing it's in your head. So people suffer so much, and then they go to these events, and they're usually well prepared because we've talked about it for like a year, and they go there and and they have the feelings, but in the end, it it it turns out. I'm gonna sit use the word successful. It turns out to be successful, not because um it went well, because we know we don't like those people who we have the frozen fight with. We know how frustrating they can be, we know how upset they can make us, but the problem is we're still fighting with them, and we're still fighting to be known, to be heard, to be recognized. And if we put this into maybe how we seek out our accomplishments or not, because this could be cut this can come from like an overachieving framework or an underachieving framework, right? So let's say we have to figure out what we're gonna wear to these things, we have to figure out you know how we're gonna like armor up. So if we're all armored up and we look great and we smell great, and we are all ready to meet the fight, and when we get there, we find again, no one's looking like we're fine. There's nothing going on there. There's nothing, nothing to find, nothing to fight with. It's like punching the air, and that's what we've been fighting with all along in our minds because it's like a latent memory, it's like a muscle memory. So we're doing this, we're doing this, doing this, but we then what has happened is, I think, because we're trying to win this fight, that we're never gonna win because we couldn't win it when we needed to, with the people you can't win a fight with, right? Because there's no fight, there's just the way they see it, and we're fighting for our own opinion, but as we grow into adults, we can just have our own opinion. We don't have to fight, we don't have to prove it, but yet we still do. It's almost like there's a teenager inside, or there's something inside of us unresolved. So I also see this like you could look at this through the eyes of um, you know, this family event, a wedding, whatever. You could look at it through that lens, or and or you could look at it as like um you're success seeking in the world. I gotta, I'm gonna get this job, and then I'm gonna feel better. I'm gonna get this, I'm gonna accomplish this, and then I'm gonna feel better. And I talk about this in a lot of different contexts, but this one is sort of like I'm gonna get the recognition I finally deserve because my dad said when I got here, right, when I got to this place, or he told my brother when he got he was gonna be like, you know, accomplished. Except now you're at that place, supposedly, or you keep going to those places, and and and your dad's still not recognizing you went there because his focus was always on himself, his focus was not on what you're doing, even when he was saying this will be your accomplishment, is because you'll be like him. So any parent who does that, who's not hi crow friend. Um sorry I got distracted. The crow is playing with blue jays. Now it's interesting, the reason I got kind of stopped in my tracks with that, I'm gonna make a little divergence here, is because um the blue jays represent whether you dabble in life. Oh my goodness. I'm I came out prime time, ladies and gentlemen. All the all the guys around, doggies, the neighbors, they're convening. I always feel bad about that. This is like two divergences. I always feel bad about this because um I'm always on like this time walk animal when I'm talking to you, and everybody's like convening, and I'm always like, oh, they like have they're not on the time thing like me, which you know just ends up showing me that wow, I'm regimented or disciplined around this. And they're just their dogs, they're all meeting. If I if I was with my dog, I'd be like, no, we gotta go home because mommy's gotta do whatever. Anyway, um, side note of the divergence from the divergence. So the blue jays. What the blue jays represent, at least to me, they're at the heart of the matter. Um is that um is that at the heart of the matter? Okay, just past the people, sorry, I'm so distracted. Um, that at the heart of the matter, for the heart of the matter for the blue jay, is that the blue jay represents whether you're gonna dabble things in life or whether you're gonna own your power. Are you gonna dabble or you're gonna own your power? And part of owning your power is developing mastery over something rather than like putting your hands in a lot of different places. So I think that's interesting because if we're gonna talk about being successful and we think about success through the eyes of that early fight we're gonna win because we're gonna prove our worth through these successes, whether they be, you know, how we look at a family event, how we manage at a family event, or what we accomplish, and then try to show the people so that we can say, look, I became everything you told me to become, so now I deserve your love, that type of thing. Meanwhile, people's heads up their butts, nope, up their A-holes, they're not paying attention to you, which is why you have the fight to begin with. Anywhere where you've been attended, do you notice you don't fight for the attention of the people who think you're awesome? You just don't. You you I never hear about those people in my office. All the wonder and the beauty and the grace. We talk about that three seconds, and then we move on to uh you're uh the person who didn't recognize who you are, and then we talk about that for years. I mean, isn't that under it's so crazy? And I think in the same vein, we do not look at our successes through the lens of whether or not we have actually been successful. We often look at it. Did this feeling go away of not being recognized? Did this feet did I get what I needed from this person? I mean, it's wow, right? Like we look at the focus, but we're born that way. This isn't anyone's fault. We're absolutely born to sort of look for that shiny thing to reconcile where the heart of the matter has failed, you know, like what has failed us fundamentally. And I use the word failed us because psychologically, I don't know, maybe that's how it feels, but psychologically that's how we're taught to think about it. But really, in the end, we get what we get. Okay, so I'm taking a couple this from a couple different angles, but the irony is also, I just want to say, I I'm I tend to deal a lot with people who are overachievers in the context I'm in. But this could be easily if you're not achieving something. In other words, sometimes we don't achieve something for the same reason that we're striving to achieve something. It's the opposite ends of the same coin. So even though we're super smart and we have plenty of I don't know, good work, you know, good things we know we can do. We even make you do them privately, we don't show them in public because we're never gonna give those people a satisfaction. Meanwhile, those people, their head is up their butts. Again, they're not looking at you whether you're successful or not. They're not looking at that. No, this is really funny. Wow, this is one of these days where I'm going off on tangents. That's kind of fun. I haven't I don't feel like I've done that in a while, but maybe according to you, uh your perception, I might have. There's a whole new swing set in this person's backyard. I think it's new, but maybe it's not new. I think maybe no, I actually do think it's new. But maybe it's been there and I just didn't notice it. So weird. But again, this is what I'm saying, wherever you put your attention. So if you put your attention on the people and the things that you didn't do yet, and the attention you didn't get or may never get, and you do not focus on all the love and the beauty and the appreciation that you have from the people who do appreciate you and get it, because they also are in the frozen fight with something they're never gonna win. Um instead of the person who doesn't achieve, listening to the people who want them to achieve. Like sometimes I'll I'll say to people like I'll get upset or fervorous or angry at them. And the reason why I'm angry is because I'm like, uh, you're fighting, you know, you're fighting for the wrong team. Like you're it's like it's like you're not on your own team. So let's say you're in a frozen fight with someone from the past, and um that I just like heard my Long Island roots in that statement. Every so often my husband will be like, he'll hear my Long Island uh roots come out in this way, this way in particular, sort of talking about with the past, you know, anyway, um, Long Island accent. So, so we're gonna be in this this we're gonna focus on this fro this frozen fight, we're never gonna accomplish, whatever, whatever. We're not gonna focus on everything we have accomplished, and it's extraordinary. It's extraordinary how we don't don't look at things clearly. How we focus on these things that are unresolved, and we work so hard to get them resolved, and life's going by, and we don't look at things that we've either want to accomplish and don't in light of this, but can it's just scary, I think, to change, or outlook, but it's really a shift in attention. And somebody gets to me that, well, that's a whole mindset change. And I go, Well, you did come to the mind doctor, right? Like, and it's kind of funny because I'm not sure that when you go to the mind doctor, the psychologist or the mind, that you actually accept realize how hard it is to change a mindset, to change uh a perceptual field, taking a pick, taking a pick. Um, and how hard it is to change a perceptual field from your mindscape because our mindset is so focused on these things that we don't get, we don't have, or we don't have yet. So that we think that that that this idea we got. Sorry, Picker. My hands are cold. Um, so it's kind of like the weather, right? It's kind of like, oh my god, it's freezing. I can't believe all this snow. I can't believe, oh my god, I can't believe it's 90 degrees. I can't, it's too hot, right? And it's sort of like you would do anything in those blizzard days for it to be 90 degrees, right? And but then when it's 90 degrees, you're like, what happened in the spring? We didn't get this, and it's like this endless ways we look at things, which we're always focused on what we don't have, not what we do have. And you know, it's okay, whatever you like, you like, but I'm sort of more saying about this, you know, this space that we live in where we don't look at our accomplishments. Like, I don't know, just I know I have a bunch of working moms who listen, and just being a working parent, a working mother, that's a lot. I don't just doing that's a lot, not even like doing it well. Not I don't know. Okay, like it's a lot, and so if we don't look at just what we do every single day when we get up, I have people who've been through, I don't even know, unspeakable things you can't believe people live through. You can't believe people wake up every morning, and I think you got you guys are just waking up in the morning. Okay, and then you're just getting through the day. That's a lot for some people that that holds tremendous burdens or guilt or over things that actually happened, not things that are happening in your minds. I mean, actual tragedies that people have to walk and live with, things that happened at their hands, things that they didn't do, and then something happened, you know, something happened. So that's those things are incredibly difficult to live with. And they get up every morning, and then there's all the accomplishes, like let's say, actually, within all of that, you are also successful at work. People trust you, you've built your own business over time, you have created things if that's what you do. You you've you've like risen. Maybe you've you've been in an incredibly difficult relationship that you got yourself out of. But no one's looking at that. They're looking at, what am I doing to my kid? What am I doing? I'm so what look at look at what I did to my kids. Well, you didn't know that when you married this guy and you had kids with him or this woman and you had kids with her. You obviously weren't trying to create strife for yourself. I mean, this is not what we set out to do. We just don't know what we don't know. Because of these frozen fight scenarios, because of extinct experiences, you know, we didn't have. I mean, where do these focuses come from? Why are we focused all the time on what we cannot have, what we cannot get? Because we were taught to focus on that. I mean, it's like it's actually that simple. Like some will be like, oh, I know where that came from. My father would always say, do do do. Or, but guess what? Where did he learn it? Um, this is this is a recent good one. Um, my mom said I can't leave my job before a year is up because it's not a good luck. Now I remember that. Okay, I remember that um being true. Legit. True, true, true. But these days things are different. And in this in this scenario, we were looking at healthcare, and so I asked, I asked the Google, and in this regard, this is it's it's a wonderful, the these these tools are wonderful because, and I was saying to somebody this yesterday, because they're objective. So you're not getting your mom's opinion if you use these things correctly. Okay, not for subjectivity, just for objectivity, you know, kind of like how is this scene in this sector? Nope. As long as it's not a pattern, and as long as she's leaving that last job on good terms, she worked very hard, she was very well received there. No, this isn't gonna be a problem. But this is the thing, this is why we're focused on all the negative things, because we come from people. If you grow up in a house that goes, focus on the wealth within, it all comes from within you. Don't look outside, you you work from within, and I don't mean this not creating material outcomes. I mean that you know you're okay because you're a child of God, you know you're okay because you'll figure it out no matter what, or you or you have a parent say, we'll figure it out no matter what. I will be here for you and we will figure it out no matter what. Not what happened? What did you do? Right? So, or how come you what happened? You got a 90. What happened I obviously grew up in this high achieving framework, right? Okay, like so. But what happened with the other 10 points? Or maybe no one even noticed if you had a I mean, look, the opposite ends of both these spectrums exist and everything in between. I'm talking about the extremes because the extremes really are what tend to throw our minds off and our feelings off and all those things. So a lot of times growing up in a sort of extreme, a rather extreme environment creates a lot more psychological symptoms, and you can understand why, because uh, in my opinion, context is not often being used in the decision making, it's a lot of these ideologies, and that's another thing I can bring in, right? If we're not looking at what we have actually accomplished in our And we're sourcing from an ideology that our mother had from 1980. In one context, you're leaving in good in one context. You're leaving someplace on good terms. It's a good thing. You're moving on in your life. It's really important that you do this because you're really unhappy where you are and you need to move forward. And so you do this thing. It's a major task for you to move on from to say you're going to give your notice and leave this job. And I'm looking at it like, you know, good for you. Oh, if we go back to, I'm sorry, I got interrupted, but if we go back to like when I said I wasn't, you know, when I would cheer for people, say they I that I get upset with them. Sorry, I didn't close that loop before that I get upset with them. And why I get upset with them is because I'm like, you're like shooting for the wrong team. It's like you're shooting for your mom's team from the ideology of 1980. You're not shooting the basket for yourself. It's the same way of saying where are you where is your attention turned towards? Right? So if you learn that this is a negative thing, but in the reality you're currently in, it's an accomplishment. Failure versus you see, you see how confusing life can become because we are not focused on what is in front of us, what we're actually doing. We're focused, and this is a different kind on the ideology. So where's the attention? Is the attention in look at what I've accomplished in my career? Are you actually looking at what you did in your career, or looking at all the times people told me about my potential, and I didn't act on it? I didn't, I didn't try, and then it was like, it's too late, it's too late. I'm telling you, I see people pick up old things they did in high school in something that made their heart sing. Been seeing this a lot lately with pottery, people picking up. I mean, I couldn't, I can't even believe what they what people talk about, like, and and they didn't, they've never even brought it up with like the these arts, or they sang, and they still sing, but they don't really talk about it. You know, these things that make your heart literally sing. Same thing with the um what I'm talking about here, and they go back to it drawing, they go back to, and they think, uh, you know, I never developed that. Look at all these other people. That's there it is with the context again. Let's focus on everything I'm not doing and everything everybody else did. But still, what I mean by this is if you have something that you were really good at and you repick it up, and I mean you're really good at it, you know, you know, I don't know, because you have a knack for it. Which me all that means, in my opinion, is it's many lifetimes, many lifetimes. Um so that we've done that, so we're good at it, type of thing. So you have credit, you have credit from other lifetimes for if it's always your work, right? But but you could pick it up, it's too late. Uh no. It's not, it's not too late. So this is the same thing I'll see in in it's hard, it's good, it's hard for me to find a relationship, right? It's hard for me to find a relationship. And I'm like, see, I think you can meet someone in the supermarket. Now, I think what it's hard to do is have faith that you're gonna meet someone in the supermarket, or maybe you'll meet them on the playground. A parent, you know, parent, another parent, or another, or even a teacher. You know, you don't know, you don't know who you you never know who you're gonna meet. But as we know, we all all look down, we're on our phones, whatever. So we're looking at our apps when maybe there are people around. You know, you see the reels. I see those reels all the time speaking. Gen X, or people love to show the different everyone talking in the 80s, you know, versus everyone standing around on their phone today. So, okay, so if you put your focus, so on, like for example, this is what I would like in a relationship. This is what I want. I'm gonna focus on what I want. Not well, I can't have what I want. Or I think relationships are difficult. Well, did you learn relationships are difficult? Because what's a relationship and how is it difficult? You're involved in the you can pick the person, we all know, and I don't know. I think if you're listening to this, I'm sorry I brought the wind here today. I think I'm working against it now. Um if you're walking with me right now, it's fun. If you're walking with me right now, then it is likely that you have had times in your life that are positive. That you could speak to. Shining lights, moments of light. And it is also likely that you have had very dark moments. And so if we learn from our experience and our dark moments only, and not through the beauty, I'm I'm basically saying align yourself with what you want, not with what you have yet to have. Align yourself with what you want, not what you have yet to have. So if you have an idea in your head that you can't find this diamond in the rough you're looking for, because you think it's a diamond in the rough, right? You're looking for this very special thing in someone. But your neighbor or your friend, they're not looking for that. They don't want that depth. Nope. They don't want to be kept on their toes. They don't, they don't want, they don't want to deal with that. They don't want to deal with a person of high intelligence, but you're dying to have that. It's like one person's feast, it's another person's famine. And I have sit in my office long enough to know that. I've sat with women who are dying to have a kid, and they can't conceive the kid, and their adoptions fall through, and it's just this sort of endless effort. And then I've sat with people who are, I mean, cannot get pregnant quick enough, but don't have any interest in having children, and it's like, wow, right? It's very, very interesting how life unfolds in those ways. So one person's feast is another person's famine. And so if we understand that if we were to look at success through a lens of what does it mean to me to be successful, you might wake up in the morning and actually feel accomplished just because you opened your eyes, just because there's another day in front, and then people will be like, Well, I mean, it's not like I'm living in a war, Brooke. Well, you know, you're not. You're not living in a war. Because if you were living in your a war, your focus and your priorities change on one dime. So I'd love to watch, obviously not because the topic is. Well, I'll just say it. It's like I've had great interest in watching like the movies from World War II, where towns were taken overnight, and life went from, or even the handmaid's town type of situation where there was an uprising, and overnight a regime came in that was genocidal. Right? It's like one day our focus was um, I don't know if I like this guy, and the next day the focus was, how am I gonna keep my family alive? Right? It's like on a dime. It's um if you really think about, so this goes back to mindset. If you really think about are are we able to change our minds? Yeah, but sometimes we are forced to by outside circumstances, right? And here it is where we would choose to, and that we choose the mindset, change in the mindset to me, because the new mindset is uh just true, and the old mindset is just not true, and so sometimes we look at it like you gotta upgrade the uh the operating system. So it's like using Atari versus Xbox to make your to where are you focused? So if you are willing to give up the frozen fight with something that and people that will never be what you want them to be will never see you for what you are because they can't, not because they won't, and you change your focus to you and the success you desire to have. This is when that idea of which I love but also kind of love to hate, like, let success chase you, don't chase success. Let success chase you, don't chase success. I think the chasing success is when we are trying to win the frozen fight, if you at the deepest level, with someone who we'll never win with and he'll never notice, no matter what we do. Because if they notice us, it's because they came, they evolved of their own choosing, not because we did something. Okay, so in the end, if we look at what we are doing and we attend to what we are doing or what we're not doing, and we change our mindset and we shift into where we we find our own personal successes, and we know we've been successful because we've gotten that every job we've ever set out for, or we've made every accomplishment, or we could look again look at where you're not successful, where you still want to accomplish, and look at why. What are you focused on? Same thing in relationships. So you're focused on the relationship you're not gonna get, or you're focused on the relationship you are gonna get that you want. So thanks for walking with me today again. I really, really appreciate it, especially as time goes on, because because it just was great. So have a wonderful day, and please walk with me again soon.