Me - Ownership

In this solo episode, I sit with a quote left by the previous guest, Matt Peale:

For things to change, you have to change. For things to get better, you have to get better.

What starts as a conversation about change quickly becomes something much more personal.

I talk about recovery, Bali, Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, and the strange reality that some people completely transform their lives in their seventies and eighties. People who spend decades living one way, only to discover that a single year of genuine change can become the best year of their lives.

This episode sits inside responsibility.

Not the social media version of responsibility.
Not the self help version.
The real version.

The uncomfortable moment where you stop waiting for life to change and start asking what needs to change inside you.

I speak about a difficult period in my own life involving a neighbour who pushed every button I had. Anger. Resentment. Revenge. The part of me that wanted to retaliate. The part of me that wanted to prove something.

Years ago I would have handled it differently.

That is what made it important.

Because real change is not what you say.
Real change is what you do when life gives you another opportunity to become the person you used to be.

The conversation moves through projection, self reflection, recovery, consciousness, and the tendency we all have to blame different people while repeating the same patterns.

Different partner.
Different job.
Different city.

Same person.

The more I talk through it, the more it becomes clear that most of us spend our lives looking through the window when we should be looking in the mirror. We keep asking what is wrong with everybody else while avoiding the harder question.

What is waking up in me?

This is not a conversation about perfection.

It is about recognising that the common denominator in every area of your life is you.

Sometimes the thing that needs to change is not the world around you.

Sometimes it is the way you respond to it.

The question I leave for the next guest is this:

Why do we prefer the certainty of misery to the misery of uncertainty?

It’s You. Oh Fuck. It’s ME. In Session with a Psychotherapist
Hosted by Chad Taylor. Author of It’s You. Oh Fuck. It’s ME

No tips.
No fixing.
Just real conversations.

GROUPS/COURSES: PATREON

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:10

I'm Chad Taylor, psychotherapist, author of It's You, Oh Fuck, It's Me. No tips, no fixing, just real conversations. Today I've got myself here. So I won't be asking the question, who the fuck are you? Although sometimes I feel like I need to ask myself that question the most. I'm gonna go straight into what the last guest left today, and that was Matt Peel. Matt works with people around posture, around stretching, completely opposite to what I do. He works with the body, but it all ties in together, which is why I loved having him on the podcast. I learned so much. And surprisingly, it's the podcast that I had the most people reach out to me about so far, which thanks for being on, Matt. He left for things to change, you have to change. For things to get better, you have to get better. And I think for me, that's so relevant in my life. I've just gotten back from a week in Bali with my partner and went over there for the international Indonesian Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous conventions, which they hold a week apart and talk about being in a place full of change. I love the analogy of the caterpillar turning into the butterfly because it's just such a profound physical change to see this animal that crawls along the ground and then it goes in and it builds a cocoon and breaks down into a black oozing mush and it works hard and then it flaps its wings inside that cocoon, and it has to really strengthen itself, it has to really prepare for when it comes out and it can fly. And it's life, there's these misinformation out there, I suppose I'd call it, around they only live for 24 hours and all this kind of stuff, and some do, but I think the average lifespan of a butterfly is about one month, so it goes through all this hassle and this fucking effort and change to become a butterfly for a month, and I think a lot of us would probably look at the hard work it goes through and think, fuck, what a waste of time. And I guess that leads me into this change. I've seen so many people in my life make change early in their lives, like I was lucky to make, and continue to make, but I also see a lot of people who make change later in their life. And when I say later, I mean I've seen men and women in their 70s and 80s come to recovery and then get a one-year chip at the end of 12 months being clean and sober for drugs and alcohol, and then get up and share that it's been the best year of their lives. And there's many people out there who would think, why the fuck would I bother getting sober at 77? or why the fuck would I bother getting sober at 83? And I suppose that leads me into we've only ever got the now. We really only ever live in the now. Everything happens to us in the now. And how do we change? We change a little bit by a little bit. You know, how do we eat an elephant one bite at a time? If we keep doing what we've always done, we'll keep getting what we always got. And I suppose that for me, if that's misery and stress and anxiousness and depression and unhappiness, which is really the inability to live in the present moment, you know, to be present as the moment is happening, is the real Latin example of happiness. What is happiness? To be present as the moment is happening. So there's so many sayings out here, right? I've heard a lot, nothing changes if nothing changes. And when I stopped waiting for life to change and started changing myself, life changed. There's so many quotes I could give you guys, and it's not about me researching quotes and coming here to be the smartest person in the room or the smartest person on the internet. It's more about saying that if we want different results, we've got to start to learn different behaviors. And that in the rooms we use the serenity prayer, and I know a lot of people have an aversion to God. So when I share that with people for the first time, I sort of remove the first part and turn it into a serenity statement. But I think it does lose a lot of the effect when you remove the connection to consciousness or the connection to the universal intelligence or whatever creative intelligence created the Big Bang. But for me, it really is about granting me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference. And I guess what that's really saying there is that it's in understanding, it's back to step one for me of my life where what can I change and what can't I change? I remember an old guy once said to me, and it was strange coming from an old man, but he said, stand up straight and imagine you've got a hula hoop around you. Whatever's inside that hula hoop, you have control of, and whatever's outside that hula hoop, you'd have no fucking control of whatsoever. So when we talk about change, it really has to happen inside that hula hoop or within that one meter radius outside of ourselves. Remember when we went through fucking COVID and there was that one and a half meter rule? There was footprints on the ground in the supermarket, and some places still have those footprints. Where did I go? I went to an amusement park a little while ago, and those footprints were still, I think it might have even been Jambaroo recreation park. Not that that's relevant to anybody here, but it's a waterslide park close to me, and I took the kids, and there's still these one and a half meter foot stickered footprints or painted footprints in the ground, and that was a crazy time for everybody to be alive. Didn't matter what side of the divide you're on, whether you're pro-vaccine, whether you're pro-anti-vaccine, or whether you're in the middle. The quality of our lives is determined by the quality of the questions that we ask ourselves. In other words, how much self-reflection are we willing to give, and how much self-reflection can we actually withstand without it becoming almost an addiction or an obsession in itself? Because I think at times in my life I've probably been too far down that path. And I guess what I want to talk about today is that that really what is the difference between understanding what you can change and understanding what you can't change, and then how do you get the wisdom to know the difference of what are those two things? And there's no actual definitive answer on that. There's a part of my book where I write in there, oh fuck, it's me. Once that lands, the real work can begin. Relationships fail because we're unconscious of our own shit. We keep repeating the same patterns while blaming different people. We change partners, we change jobs, we change cities, we change identities. But until we become conscious of what we're carrying, we're just taking ourselves into a different environment. The common denominator is always us. So I guess what I'm trying to explain there is if everybody thinks you're a fuckwit, the truth of the matter is you're probably a fuckwit, or you're portraying yourself as a fuckwit. None of that sounds pretty harsh. If one person out there thinks, oh Chad's a fuckwit, they could be right, they could be wrong. If three or four people start to think Chad's a fuckwit, which I'm sure many of you that know me probably think I am, and that's okay because a bit of a segue here, but what other people actually think of me inside of themselves is actually none of my business. It really isn't. Because and I don't say that because I'm egotistical, far from it. Generally, what bothers us about somebody else is something inside ourselves that we haven't dealt with. And even as I say that, I think about what are the who are the people that bother you at the moment? And I won't mention their names here because some of them are very close to me, right? And it's not my partner and my kids, thankfully. What is it about them that bothers me? And I guess leading back to this, that where I was going with that was if one person thinks I'm a fuckwit, could go either way. If everybody thinks I'm a fuckwit, maybe I need to start looking in the mirror and thinking, why do these people what am I doing in my world? What how am I holding myself in the world where people think I'm a fuckwit? Everybody I encounter thinks I'm a fuckwit. Am I arrogant? Am I a know it or? Am I unable to listen to somebody else? Do I always butt in and one up everybody? Am I aggressive on the road? Um, do I speak to women badly? Do I have a resentment towards women? Is it an issue that I've still got with my mother that I don't even know? Why am I angry? Why am I racist? Why am I sexist? Why am I homophobic? Why why do why do these things bother me? What is it about me that bothers me? It's almost getting upset that somebody doesn't have the same favourite colour that I do. Like this is how we live in the world. It's almost like blue is the best colour and somebody else says it's green, and now I fucking hate you because you don't think the same way that I do. So what the real answer to unconscious projection is conscious recollection. And really, what I mean by that is instead of asking what's wrong with the world, really the question is what is waking up in me. In other words, unconscious projection is the way we see the world. We see the world, in other words, we project ourselves onto the world. I don't like bamboo because it grows up and drops leaves everywhere and I'm lazy and I don't want to rake it up. That could be an unconscious projection. Say my neighbour plants bamboo against a fence and I want to poison it or I want to complain. And I completely understand that these things can inconvenience other people, but maybe going over and having a conversation with the neighbour, if that's okay with you and them, and there's no then you're not at war and saying, Hey, do you reckon you could take care of that bamboo so it doesn't grow over my side? I'm probably using that one because I had a couple of years ago I built a house and I had a neighbor who was very unwell, and I had my windows shot out with a with a BB gun. I I had my I my last straw of living in that house was I'd plant bamboo all along the fence line and try and block him out before I sold it because it was next level. And again, I wasn't the only person in the street, I was just one of many that um this unconscious projection got projected onto, and there was nothing I could do. The old me would have handled it a different way. So the last straw was planting this bamboo along the fence line, right? So I'll go and spend $4,000 on buying established bamboo that's already two or three metres high and it's planted all the way along the fence line, and then where it runs past his house, it all got poisoned. And I'm smiling as I say this because I sold the house after that, and I live in such a better spot now where I've got footpaths and I've got infrastructure, and my daughter can ride a re-bike to town to see her friends. So, really, what looked like um unfairness, and I had to swallow so much anger in that there was so much retaliation and revenge, I wanted to exhume back over that fence line. And I'm being pretty raw and real here, right? This is what this fucking podcast is about. This is what it's about. And in the end, there was nothing I could do because the old me, like I still carry criminal record and criminal history from things I did when I was sober that weren't really, I didn't handle my emotions very well. I chased up money that was owed to me in a bad way. Um, I didn't do it in the right way and ended up with a criminal history. And I don't want to, my work and the way I live right now, especially what I get to do in schools and institutions and jails and with underprivileged people, I don't want to lose that through not handling my emotions again. But fuck did I have to work hard in my therapy through this period of time? And I had no idea I was going to talk about this when I come on. That's the benefit of this podcast. And part of me wants to delete it and start again, but I'm also I want to honour the journey of this podcast, right? Which is to be raw and real and honest. So here I was coming on thinking I was gonna give a lesson about change, and I've just almost given you guys an insight into stuff that I've dealt with previously that I really had to change. And you know what? That was the litmus test for me. When I didn't retaliate, when I didn't jump the fence, I had friends saying, I can go around and bash this guy, I can go around and I was there was a part of me, there was that black wolf still in me that was like, I'm struggling with my masculinity here. This is not like me, and I didn't back down, I would have never backed down um one-on-one to that man, and that's a strange thing to say, but you know, if somebody's gonna hurt me or my family physically, then that's another story. But I guess what where I'm going with this is that I really had to show that I'd changed, right? Things had to change, and that was the universe giving me this test, and because I handled it the right way, now I live in such a better area. Not that that wasn't a great area, that was an amazing area, but I've I've sold that house and not that money matters, but I did okay out of it, and it allowed me to get to where I am. Now it was a stepping stone, but fuck it was hard to go through that. It was fucking terrible, really, to be honest. It was one of the worst parts of my life. And I guess what I'm saying here is I could have hung around there waiting for him to change, expecting him to change, but that was never going to happen. He'd done it to the neighbour across the road, he'd done it to the next door neighbour, he'd done it to someone else down the street. One night some kids hired a they're only teenage kids and they hired a house. Teenagers early 20s hired a house two doors down and had a party, and he went down and smashed all their windows with a metal pole in the party because they were annoying him with the sound. The issue wasn't me, and I was collateral damage, but what I did was I moved myself out of that. I moved myself out of the firing line rather than me become a victim to it or me retaliate and then blame him and justify why I behaved the way I behaved. What I did was I just did the next right thing. I prayed, I meditated, I did active imagination, I closed my eyes and I'm doing this as I share this, and I almost went into a meditation and about him, and I thought, and what came out was this poor person, like what is he dealing with inside of himself that gets him to behave that way. And I don't actually know, but what it did, it actually gave me some compassion for him, even though he'd wronged me, it gave me a lot of compassion for him because the thing that needs to change is me. It really is. So what Matt left was for things to change, you have to change for things to get better, you have to get better. I could have behaved the way the old chad would have behaved, and who knows where that would have led me, but I didn't, and I'm proud of myself for that because it really allowed me to show that, and I'm not saying I'm I'm a butterfly, and I'm not saying that I'm better than anybody else, but what I'm saying is that it shows that I'm practicing what I'm preaching. If I had reverted to my own actions and my own way of being, that was that that showed me that I hadn't changed. I guess it's short and sweet. This I don't want to bore you for too long. I've already gone carried on too long, but I don't like links in the bio and all this fucking crazy crap on this podcast. But I do have a group that I've set up. It is about working through stuff like this without having to bear names and and bear exact exact examples. What I was planning on doing today was coming on and giving everybody here a bit of a I was gonna do a reading on instincts, but when I looked at what mattered left, it formed into what it has now, and I'm gonna run with that. And I guess one thing that has been standing out to me is Bruce Perry, who was a child psychiatrist, child psychologist, he had a statement of which I'm gonna leave for everybody else. Why do we prefer the certainty of misery to the misery of uncertainty? So I'll say that once again. Why do we prefer the certainty of misery to the misery of uncertainty? And I'm gonna leave it there.