Hi, everyone, Welcome back to another podcast episode. My name is Alicia
Gogan, the host of the Globe Seekers podcast. Why I help you expand
your mind and become more self aware so that you can glow up. It's
the best version of yourself. Hello, girlies, how are we doing?
Today? Is part four of our summer Glow Up series? And if you
have not listened to the previous episodes for the series, please go back and
do so. But today we are going to be talking about our emotional health
because that is something that will transform your glow up journey, your level up
journey. I don't think that we can truly become well rounded women or men.
I know there's men listening to this podcast unless we really address what is
going on in some of the deepest parts of us. And I think one
of the literal biggest transformations that I made in my life was addressing my emotional
health. Now I realize that I'm going to need to split up the emotional
health component of our glow Up into two episodes, So it's going to be
this episode and next week's episode. This week, I want to talk about
the mental emotional side of things, But next week I really want to touch
more on the physical component of your emotional health, because realistically, your physical
body is not disconnected from your emotions, and your body is constantly responding to
your emotional well being. And for a lot of us, when we haven't
had a healthy relationship to our emotions, our bodies tend to be in a
very unregulated nervous system state of fight or flight or freeze or fawn, which
again I want to talk more about the nervous system in next week's episode.
But I think it's so important that we realize that our bodies are always responding
to how our mental and emotional state is. So the way I like to
look at it is your mental state is more of your thoughts, your logistical
mind, your analytic mind. When we were talking about last week, you
know, having a mental diet and reframing a certain narrative that you tell yourself
every day and working on the thoughts that come up into your head and you
know, positive affirmations and things like that. But we also have a feeling
state, We have emotions. And I'm going to get into my story a
little bit and how I came to the realization of how absolutely important it is
to have a healthy emotional life really, because it's one thing to be somebody
who has a good mindset right, thinks positively and has good beliefs about themselves
and knows what to do and has the right information. But that doesn't necessarily
mean that you have a very healthy relationship to your emotions. For we get
into my story, I just want to let you guys know that my one
on one private coaching is now open, So if you are interested, you
will see the link in my description or wherever you're listening or watching this podcast.
You can also find me on Instagram. I have my story highlight am
I one on one Coaching and you will find it in the link in my
bio. You can always message me as well if you're interested. Okay,
so let's bring it back. I'm going to try not to go to in
depth here, but y'all know this is the longest form of my content,
so we will go for as long as we need to. So. I
was raised by two very different parents, actually, but let's just talk about
my dad's influence on me, because I think that this really he was the
reason why it was very hard for me to tap into my emotions. And
I also just want to say, I'm not having this blame game of any
putting anything on my father or you know, being in this like victim mentality
things like that, Like I'm not. I've actually come to peace with so
much with his relationship towards me and also his passing everything like that. But
I'm just kind of laying out the groundwork here. So my father was very
strict. He was honestly kind of a tyrant. He was a very strict
Jamaican father. He came from Jamaica at like thirteen years old. He had
a very strict mother. He didn't tolerate complaining, whining, crying. He
really taught me to just be quiet, do as I was told, be
a good girl, and that's really it. There wasn't a lot of room
for me to express my emotions, to express myself, my authentic self as
a child, and you know, healing from everything that I've been through,
I've realized that he just didn't have that emotional capacity to know how to deal
with a child and their emotions and everything. And it's crazy because on the
flip side, my mom was so completely different. So I feel like throughout
my childhood I did get somewhat of a healthy expression of being able to like
express my emotions and cry and laugh and be myself and whatever. But when
I was around my father, which was a lot of the times, I
was very suppressed. I was taught emotions were not a good thing, they
were irrelevant. I shouldn't have them and I should suppress them. And the
problem with that is I was a child, and realistically, I'm a human
being, and humans they have emotions, whether you want to acknowledge that or
not. Wherever you're at in your life, you have emotions. You experience
anger, you experience sadness, you experience fear, everything. And so when
you don't have a healthy environment to express those emotions, that will inevitably come
up through just being socialized as a child and just in general things happen in
your life. What ends up happening is you learn to demonize these emotions that
you feel. You don't even know how to express them because maybe a parent
around you has never actually told you like, okay, this is how you
express your anger, and like this is what it means when you feel this
way, or oh you're sad today, This is okay that you feel sad
and you can let it out. Things like that. I didn't have that
from my father, and I had a little bit of that from my mother,
of course, but you know, when I was constantly around my father,
I just I really was taught that emotions were not okay, and furthermore,
if I were to express my emotions, there would be consequences. And
so when you get taught from a young age that if you do cry,
you're gonna get in trouble, you will do your absolute best to never cry.
But again, the problem with that is there's going to be things in
your life that trigger you and you're gonna want to cry. So I was
conditioned to kind of be that way, and I think as I grew up,
I didn't even really realize how much I was desensitized to my emotions,
Like I wasn't connected with myself. I remember being in high school around my
friends or this one friend that I had, she was like one of my
best friends, and she was so weird. It out from the fact that
I never really cried, or we would watch like sad movies and I would
never cry, Like I just I didn't feel anything like I wasn't I didn't
feel a lot of emotions, and as I was in my teenage years,
my awkward teenage years. I think that really made everything worse for me,
because I already was a little bit awkward and weird to express if I was
really happy, if I was really sad that day, because I wasn't.
I didn't really have that nurturing home to be able to do that. So
it wasn't normal for me to go around my friends or family or anyone else
and express myself because I learned it wasn't okay to express myself. And then
on top of that, you know, as you're a teenager, things are
awkward and weird, and you don't know if you should say, like you're
always like scared to say the wrong thing, or you know, people judge
you, and so I really became very closed off. I became very monotone.
I became very suppressed in a way. I think I did a pretty
good job at still being able to socialize with people. I'm very adaptable in
a way, I can adapt to new environments, but there was still a
huge level of me never feeling comfortable, fully like, very awkward and just
quiet. I was actually a very very shy child as well, and even
in high school. I mean I did my best to kind of socialize and
be a normal kid in a way, but I knew that there was always
things that were kind of closed off, but I didn't really question it.
It was just kind of who I was. I just didn't really express myself.
I was never too happy or was never too sad. I never cried
in front of people, and so that's just kind of how I lived my
life. And then as I started to get older, my father unfortunately passed
away. You guys know, or some of you guys know, we passed
away when I was around sixteen years old, and unfortunately my mom went through
addictions, and so I had to grow up very quickly. I all of
a sudden had to be very responsible of everything, which, you know,
what I'm not even going to say is a bad thing, because there was
so many things that I learned, even from my father being as strict as
he was, as much as there was a lot of unhealthy strictness, in
a way, there was healthy levels of discipline and structure that I did learn
from him. But on top of that, you know, of course,
like learning how to be on your own and being an adult, those were
very good things that I had to learn. But unfortunately too much of that.
It was just too much, right, So I was kind of pushed
into having to be very very independent at a young age. And because I
was somebody who was not really tapped into her let's say, feminine side.
And we can talk about that, and I don't know when maybe I'll unpack
that. I'm not saying like everyone has femine masculine energy within them, but
I just didn't have. I wasn't tapped into my nurturing side, my loving,
my expressive, my chaotic, my whatever, just like letting myself out.
I just didn't have that because I was around my father that wasn't like
that. And on top of that, when I had to be very responsible,
I didn't really have time to like play and have a good time and
express myself and be this like fun child the way that I should have been,
because I unfortunately had to be an adult at a very young age,
and so I moved into a very hyper masculine woman. Honestly, and again,
there are very amazing traits that came out of that. I was disciplined,
I achieved a lot of things in my life. I got my life
where exactly I needed it to be. But unfortunately, there were so many
things that I cut off from. I wasn't tapped into my intuition, I
wasn't tapped into my emotions. It made it very hard for me to trust
people. It made it very hard for me to connect to people because I
wasn't connected to myself. All I cared about, and all I was really
primed for was survival. That was the only thing that I was really focused
on. I was worried about, Okay, my schooling, money, how
I was going to live without my mother because my mother was going through a
lot of her own stuff and she wasn't able to show up the way that
I needed her too. And so I ended up living a very stressful life,
and that bled into every area of my life. I was stressed about
finances, I was stressed about my health, I was stressed about school,
I was stressed about relationships. Every single thing I was stressed about. And
I didn't realize how the disconnection that I had from my emotions and the hyper
masculine identity that I took on was affecting my physical health really, and me
being this hyper masculine and stressed out and disconnected from myself led me down a
very long path of health issues, chronic health issues, and my first breaking
point was when I got diagnosed with alterative colitis when I was I don't really
even remember when somewhere in my early twenties, and I actually didn't now I
know, but back then, I didn't realize how my mental state and my
disconnection from my emotions and all of the traumas that I went through, and
the way that I was operating a survival mode, all of that was creating
this really unhealthy physical state within me to the point where now I have an
autoimmune disease. And back then I didn't know what I knew now. I
didn't understand how it's so important to address your mental state and your emotional state
and how that affects your body. But when I first got diagnosed with klitis,
I just tried to address it through my diet. I was like,
Okay, I'll just like search different diets and exercise. It must be the
things that I'm eating, it must be my movement. And although that's definitely
a component of becoming a healthier version of you, I didn't realize that a
lot of the things that I needed to address was in my mind was my
emotions was like the fact that I was living in a survival mode all of
my life, and no matter how much working out or dieting I did,
it wasn't going to change the fact that I was unhealthy mentally. And so
I would try the diets, I would try the working out, and realistically,
a lot of the diets the working out was from a place of me
wanting to even change myself in the first place, because I didn't like how
I looked and I wanted to be accepted by everyone. But every time that
I did that, it would work for a little bit, like not even
really, it would sustain me a little bit, but then I would get
a flare up or I would become unhealthy again because I actually wasn't dress addressing
the root cause of my disease. And this is what I'm not going to
sit here and tell you that if you have an autoimmune disease that it doesn't
have anything to do with your genetics or your biology. And how I look
at many health issues is from a place of epigenetics, and I'm not going
to go into that because one I'm not a freaking scientist or a doctor.
You can look that up. But it's not to say that you're not predisposed
to having certain health issues, like things that run into your family's certain genes
whatever. An all sort of clidis does run in my family. But what
I believe to be true is my environment turned on that gene for me.
I was very, very stressed. And every single person in my family who
does have all sort of clitus they have gone through many traumas I have.
I come from a line of unfortunately generational trauma, a lot of stress,
a lot of unhealthy thinking and believing and environments and things like that. And
so you know, your environment and where you grow up and everything around you
can really trigger certain things within your body in a really unhealthy state. So
that's just how I look at things, by the way, because I'm not
just gonna say like, oh, I just fought my way into an autoimmune
disease, Like there are definitely biological things that are still happening. But I
do think that your environment, in your mindset, and your traumas turn things
on or off for you. So anyways, when I was trying to address
my colitis, from that standpoint, things never really sticked. I still just
was on medication and I was still having stomach issues. I still had health
issues. But the more that I look deeper into why I kept falling on
and off of diets. Once I started to realize that fad dieting and doing
all of these obsessive diets anyways wasn't working, I started to address more of
my mental health in a way, and I realized that my health condition always
seemed to lessen the more that I had a better mental state, the more
that I was happier with my life, the more that I was working on
myself. But it's still around. Like in my early twenties, I didn't
really see that connection. I was just kind of stumbling uphill until of course,
where I'm at right now. But one other thing happened. Another rock
bottom that was really really huge, which is where I'm going to bring this
episode too, and which transformed my life, was when I had nerve pain.
And like I said in last week's episode, I talked about it a
lot, how I had nerve pain in my hands for damn near almost two
years. I didn't know what was going on. I literally tried every single
thing. I got core zone shots. I was going to get a carbal
tunnel surgery because they thought I had carbal tunnel, which is insane because I
was like twenty five years old, Like what do you mean. I did
kind of mean shots at a clinic because they thought that that would help me
reset my nervous system. My pain signals were all off. I did chiropractor,
I did acupuncture, physio. I literally, I told you guys already.
I did everything until I started to change my mindset and how I looked
at my health conditions and I realized the way that I was going to heal,
which I didn't know how it was going to even heal, but I
just knew for me to get out of this hand pain, for me to
live the life that I really want, I need to change my mindset first.
I need to change my mindset from being a victim of being somebody who
believes that she's not going to get well to someone who knows she's going to
get well. Somehow, There's going to be some answer. Something's going to
change. I don't know what it is. And I really tapped into my
masculine energy here, my logical brain, and I told myself, like,
of course things are going to change. Of course I'm not going to be
like this forever. I didn't know what the answer was going to be.
I didn't know how it was going to heal. But I just knew that
I had to change my mindset first, and which I did, and like
I said in last week's episode, that led me down to a path of
learning the information and the modalities in which was going to allow me to heal.
And so I want to talk about some of those things that I learned
through the process of healing to help you heal, to help you tap into
your emotions more, to help you release. And this is the thing.
You don't have to have, clydis You don't have to have nerve pain,
you don't have to have this chronic whatever. But this is so important that
you address somewhere along your glow up journey, because one you're going to need
to and hopefully it's going to be before you burn yourself out or you're constantly
in cycles, or you have some sort of health issue. But you can't
deny and ignore the fact that you have emotions, the fact that you've been
through traumas, the fact that you probably need some sort of inner child healing,
the fact that you need to address certain parts of you that you have
not actually fully addressed right. And this is not to look at yourself like
you're broken or that you need to heal before you have a great life.
But it's so important if we want to be this gloat up version of ourselves,
that we do tap into this part of us. And I will only
assume that a lot of you have either had health issues, or you've dealt
with depression, or you have been somebody who's been hypermasculine and you've had to
be independent, and you're on this healing journey and you're trying to figure out
like why I feel like this or why I'm burnt out, I'm why I'm
like this? A lot of it has to do with the fact that you
actually haven't gone deeper into your emotional body. So how can you heal?
How can you tap into this part of yourself? Well, I'm going to
give you some of the things that I have done. So the first thing
that I did, without realizing where this was going to take me and where
this ended up leading me, was out of hand pain, out of pain
in general, and really just healing more than I ever have was emotionally releasing.
And I want to just quickly mention Nicole Sacks. She is a licensed
what does she social worker slash? She does like therapy and stuff. She
has a very big Instagram and a podcast which I have mentioned before, The
Cure for Chronic Pain. So if you're somebody who does struggle with any sort
of health issues, I highly suggest you go look into her content and in
general start to look for people who talk about chronic pain and the mind body
connection. But I think her, like starting with her, is really helpful.
And what I really learned from her was it is so important that you
emotionally release the things that you have been thinking, feeling, suppressing, denying,
rejecting, hating on whether that be about yourself or towards other people in
your life. And this is the thing. When I was in pain,
I didn't really think, like, oh, I need to sit down and
journal about how much anger I have towards my dad or my mom or anything.
I didn't. You know, I knew my story. I knew that
I didn't have that healthy relationship with my dad. I thought that I healed
from that, like I understood my story, and because I was a very
hyper masculine, independent woman, I kind of took care of my shit,
like I got my stuff done, I figured out my life whatever, But
I didn't realize that there was still a lot of hurt, a lot of
sadness within me, a lot of anger, and on top of that,
there was a lot of anger towards my mother and just my life circumstance in
general. Especially if you've been somebody who's very strong and doesn't cry a lot
and doesn't you know, like you are really responsible and you just take on
that brunch, most likely you haven't really actually released. You haven't really let
yourself express how you're really feeling. And like I said, I never was
really one to cry a lot, Like I really didn't cry unless I was
like super super overwhelmed. And even when I did that, I just like
do it by myself. But I didn't really let myself cry a lot over
my father or over my mother and the relationship that we didn't have and things
like that. So she taught me to do this thing called journal speak I
think she said it was, but I just ended up just doing my own
kind of thing in a way, like it just wrote out how I was
feeling. But this is what I'm gonna say. You don't have to be
in pain in order to do this, and I think it's very very helpful
that you look at your story, your upbringing, the relationship that you have
towards your parents, or the relationship that you didn't get and writing out all
of your true, deepest feelings about those people and even yourself. And so
this is not a journal practice that you're gonna want to be perfect with.
This is a journal practice where when I was writing things out, I was
writing literally my deepest thoughts about people and my certain situation in my life,
and to the point where I was ripping these papers up and throwing them out
as soon as I wrote what I was feeling out, because this is not
something that you really want people to be reading. This is the thing,
when you are truly emotionally releasing, you are saying, feeling things that you
suppressed all of your life, things that are not appropriate to say to people,
things that if you were to say to people, they would probably get
mad at, or things that they would be upset about. But the truth
is, you feel those things about them. And this is what I realize.
I realize, actually, you know what, I was fucking pissed off
about the fact that I had a father who taught me how to emotionally suppress
myself, my authentic self. And again, I'm not one to be,
you know, the victim mentality like oh my god, see you, like
my parents did this out in the third of Obviously I've gone past that because
I've done this practice, but there's still room to always be that victim,
right, So this is really allowing yourself to just be that true victim of
who you really weren't able to be. So for me, I was pissed
off. I was so mad at my father for not being the dad that
he should have been, the fact that he just didn't allow me to express
my emotions or I wasn't I didn't feel safe enough to cry around him,
or I didn't feel like I could go and play with my friends, because
I felt like a fucking slave because I went home every single day because he
demanded of me to go home and do like hours of dishes and hours of
homework that I did not understand, and I couldn't ask for help because he
would yell at me like there was so much. I literally felt like a
fucking slave, like literally and I'm not even exaggerating, And so I let
that shit out. I literally wrote as if I was writing to him,
like I told him how mad I was at him, I told him how
fucked up it was that he treated me like that, Like I literally wrote
all that stuff out and it felt so good. And of course, naturally
it's like, oh my god, I can't do that. I can't see
that, I can't whatever. It doesn't matter, you know why, because
he actually feel that way. You actually, deep down there's a part of
you that feels anger towards that parent or sadness. Okay, So another thing
was like, even, and I do this for my mom too. I
don't actually mean I wrote this to my mom. I just wrote this out.
And you know, I'm totally fine with her knowing this, and I've
had these conversations with her before. But I wrote out how angry I was
about how she wasn't the parent that I needed her to be, and how
she decided to really be that teenager when I was supposed to be a fucking
teenager, and also all the sadness and the longing that I was actually feeling
deep down when I was sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen twenty, realizing
I was never going to have that mother daughter relationship that I really wanted,
and how I was really good at telling myself that I was okay with that,
but I wasn't okay with that, And so I let out the feeling
of anger and sadness and just like longing and wishing and hoping for things that
weren't going to happen that I just missed and I wasn't going to get back.
I wrote out all the ways in which my life was so fucking hard
and so fucking stressful and so incredibly just such a struggle, and how everyone
else had it better than me, and how it wasn't fairer. I literally
let out all of my true deepest feelings towards everything, And on top of
that, I did that with myself. I wrote out all of my true
deepest insecurities, my shadows, all the ways I was disgusted with myself,
all the ways that I hated how cringey I was, or how I didn't
look like this or how I looked like that or whatever it was, or
all the mistakes that I made in my life that I tried to ignore and
suppress. I brought those up, and I was like, damn, like
I fucking made those mistakes, and I'm not proud of it, like literally
everything, and I cried. I cried for days. I did that every
single day. And the reason why I was doing this every single day this
is not something that you need to do like all the time, but I
find if you're struggling physically with an ailment, it's very, very important to
emotionally release as well. But I had learned from Nicole Sacks how important it
is to do this when it comes to actually having physical pain in your body,
because your body is literally storing these thoughts, these feelings, these emotions
to the point where you're literally feeling pain. And so I was doing this
as a daily practice, morning, noon, and night. I was just
writing and I was letting things out and I was purging. I was literally
purging, and I was crying. And I've never cried that much of my
life. I never really was that or real with myself about how I felt
towards my mom, my dad, my family, my situation, my everything.
But I let that shit out, and I swear to God, it
changed my entire life. And so I suggest, and this is what I'm
gonna say. I'm gonna preface this by saying there's gonna be certain things that
you've gone through in your life, deep levels of trauma that could be way
deeper than I went through. Right, And I'm also not giving you guys
the full backstory of what I've been through. Obviously, I've seen a lot
of things that a child should not have seen, but I do know that
a lot of you guys have gone through worse things than me. So what
I'm going to say is you have to be careful with this because there's going
to be a lot of emotions, a lot of things that come up.
If you don't really know how to handle these emotions, it might be better
that you do this type of practice with a therapist or somebody who knows how
to hold space for you. This is not going to be for everyone,
and I think that if you just try this and if you just feel like
it's too overwhelming them, that's fine. You don't have to do it.
But I think that it was such a huge turning point for me because I
was like, holy fuck, like I unlocked this part of me that I
was suppressing, and you know what was underneath all of this anger, sadness,
all of this confusion, all of this longing for the things that I
didn't have was my inner child. There were parts of me, very young,
parts of me that I never learned how to connect to. I learned
from my father and sometimes even from my mother to deny, to push away
because that wasn't useful for me. And so once I let out all of
this rage, anger, like shame, whatever, all of my emotions,
I realized, like, whoa, Okay, I have this new version of
me here, which is this little girl that didn't get what she was meant
to get in her life. She didn't get the love from her father,
she didn't get the proper mother daughter relationship with her mom, she didn't get
all of these experiences where she got to play and express herself and just live
her life. And you know, obviously I had to let go and forgive
and move on from the fact that I wasn't going to get that from my
parents. But then I realized, of course, because I'm that creator versus
a victim, I get to do that for myself. Now I get to
reparent myself. I get to nurture this inner child, this part of me
that my parents unfortunately couldn't do. But I can do it now. I
can meet her needs, a new way I can meet her emotional needs,
a new way I can go explore and create a life where her needs and
wants are considered, where she does have a say, where she gets to
actually be herself. You see, when you live in survival mode, you
ignore your internal guidance system, you ignore your body, you ignore what you
actually need for yourself because you're so focused on making sure that you are alive
and safe that you do a lot of things that aren't actually healthy for you,
but you have learned that that's the only way to do these things.
Let's say slowing down when you are burnt out. If you have grown up
learning that your needs and your wants are just not important, and you just
don't listen to your emotions because you're not even tapped into that, and you
just you don't see any value towards that. When your body is literally telling
you to slow down, you're gonna be like, I don't care, We're
still going right, Like I don't really care, Like we need to work,
we need to whatever. You don't really see the benefit and slowing down.
And on top of that, maybe you've been taught like for me,
my father taught me Okay, Well, it doesn't matter if you want to
slow down or you want to rest or you want to whatever. Like,
we're doing this thing very masculine, very harsh. But the problem is your
body is speaking to you. You do need to slow down. There are
going to be things, especially when it comes to your health issues, which
is why I personally believe when you start having health issues, that's when you
really need to listen, because you have not been listening. And I'll give
you a clear example of when I started to realize that I had different parts
operating within myself, aka my inner child that was always driven to do certain
behaviors that I thought were self sabotage. But it wasn't really self sabotage.
It was just a part of me that learned how to do a certain behavior
to self soothe. And because I was such a hyper masculine person and I
just didn't I just always ignored my true needs and wants. Every time that
I would start a diet or I would do something that I thought was supposed
to be good for me, I would end up falling off and going into
these unhealthy behaviors, not realizing that there was a part of me that was
trying to self soothe by going to candy, by going to unhealthy food because
she was scared. She didn't know how to handle her emotion. She was
overwhelmed. But I looked at myself as, what the fuck are you doing?
Why are you eating candy again? Why are you falling off a diet?
Why aren't you being perfect? That's the energy that I had towards myself
until I realized, wait, I have clearly a part of me that is
doing some behavior that is actually not sabotage a way that I think it is.
It's there's something going on here. And until I learned how to really
release my emotions and drop more into that feminine energy and be more loving and
kind to myself, only then was I able to realize what was actually going
on, which was part of me. My inner child was trying to self
soothe because she was really overwhelmed. She didn't know how to hatele emotions.
When somebody walked away from her in her life, she didn't know how to
tell herself that things were going to be okay, so she went to food.
These are things that you're not aware of when you were constantly in survival
mode, and when you're constantly in this like hyper masculine, per perfectionist mindset.
And so I realized, instead of getting mad at myself for going to
the sugary foods or always falling off these strict diets, I started asking myself,
what do I need here? Why am I doing this? Not from
a place of self hate, but a place of exploration, a place of
being curious, not from a place of my tyrant father type of identity,
but actually from my loving motherly entity that I did have that I learned how
to tap into. Once I started to release my emotions and let myself actually
cry for once I started coming at myself from that energy. And when I
came to myself with that energy, I realized what was actually going on here.
And there was a little part of me, a child that was so
scared. She didn't know how to deal with her emotions. She didn't know
how to process her fears, and she had a lot of low self worth,
and so you know, when things in her life did come up that
really created this emotional response, all she knew how to do was to go
and run and hide and be shy, or go to food or go to
candy. And what she really needed was a healthy parent to work through those
emotions when they did come up. When she would go to school and she
would be nervous, or she was trying to make new friends, but she
didn't know what to say. She really needed that parent to be loving and
walk her through things and be there for her and help her have this healthy
attachment style. But really, unfortunately what I got was not that. And
so the way that I learned how to deal with those emotions, the fear
the unknown, was through candy er was through self soothing in an unhealthy way.
And so what we do is we bring these self soothing behaviors that we've
picked up once in childhood and we bring them to our adult life. They
can change, for sure, but somehow, some way, we usually translate
that into our adult lives, and then we get mad at ourselves for doing
the same thing over and over again, not realizing that there's a part of
us that needs us to listen, that needs us to actually finally need its
needs. And the way that I learned how to even have a dialogue with
this part of me and understand what I even needed was doing something called parts
work, and I did a lot of examples on my TikTok a long time
ago, which I will link that playlist in the show notes and stuff.
But you can also get the book called No Bad Parts by Richard Schwartz.
I think it's a very good book to get. And also I have a
general guide which I'll talk about the end, but my inner Discovery Journal problem
guide. If you struggle with connecting to yourself and really like even knowing what
your inner child is or feeling, or how to talk to your inner child
in that way, So essentially parts work is you taking on the consciousness the
identity of your young self and speaking out or speaking to someone from that perspective
or journaling out from that perspective. What does your inner child really feel in
this moment right now, and you let her speak, You let her take
the stage, you let her speak for the first time ever because you never
ever, ever learned how to let her talk. And for me, my
father never let me talk. So I really got good at just dismissing and
denying whatever it was I was actually truly feeling. So letting out those emotions,
letting out what you truly feel, is so important because only then will
you be able to actually know how to aid yourself in healthier ways, and
for me bringing it back to candy. Candy is a very good way to
make yourself feel better in moments where you feel uncomfortable, moments when you feel
scared, moments when you just feel like you don't know how to handle things.
That's how I learned how to deal with weird emotions that I never learned
how to deal with. But of course, obviously going to candy all the
time is not helpful, and I found the more I was strict on myself
through high school and college and I wanted to strictly diet, it actually created
more emotions that I didn't know how to handle because I felt very restricted,
and so I would end up falling off my diet and going back to candy,
and then I would get mad at myself for doing that, not realizing
that I was creating so much emotional distress in my body and I wasn't dealing
with these emotions properly. And what I really needed was to let my emotions
out, let myself cry, let myself talk to people, connect to people,
go to therapy, set boundaries, communicate with people in a healthy way.
I wasn't doing any of that. And this is the thing. We
look at self sabotage as a bad thing. We think that we are literally
there's a part of us that we can't control that's, for whatever reason,
is doing something that we don't want it to be doing and it's just so
sabotaging and we hate it. But you need to understand that there's always a
part of you that is convinced that whatever the behavior it's doing, is doing
it for your benefit. My young self thought that going to candy was going
to be the way to help me feel at ease. That was only when
she knew how to feel okay in that moment when she was scared around her
father, or when she was alone in her room all the time, or
when she was in social situations where she was too shy to say what she
really wanted to or whatever. That's how she learned to cope. So you
need to understand, actually not even just understand, you need to have a
different energy towards yourself moving forward if you actually want to heal. And this
is what really changed the game for me, And this is how I learned
how to love myself was looking at myself from this place of I was always
just trying to keep myself alive. I was always in survival mode. And
how beautiful is that? Actually that my young self, all these little parts
of me that have been suppressed and denied and rejected, all these little parts
of me are just trying to keep me safe. I'm always trying to keep
myself safe, and that is what you are doing. So stop looking at
yourself like you are bad, you are wrong. Stop hating on yourself or
the things that you do, because realistically, the things that you're doing is
all because there's parts of you that are convinced that these behaviors are keeping you
safe, and it's just stuck in a consciousness not understanding that these unhealthy behaviors
are not a healthy way of dealing with your emotions or self soothing. And
once you understand that, you realize, Okay, what do I need now
when I don't know how to handle my emotions instead of going to candy,
what can I do? How can I reparent myself? How can I hold
my inner child's hand and say, we don't need to go to candy anymore,
We don't need to go to unhealthy relationships anymore. We don't need to
not communicate our needs anymore. We can go somewhere where it's going to be
healthy. We can go get help, we can go to therapy, we
can go to people around us who know how to hold space for us.
We can go and do healthier behaviors because we deserve these things. And that's
truly what it means to reparent yourself, to heal, to love yourself.
I was not able. I didn't even understand, guys. I did not
understand truly what it meant to love yourself until I realized that I had an
inner child that was always actually just trying to keep me safe. Quite frankly,
I was never able to actually love myself because I was always looking at
the behaviors that I was doing as self sabotage. And until I actually changed
my mindset and realize, this is not self sabotage, this is just my
inner parts trying to keep me safe. Only then was I actually able to
actually love myself, actually tap into that feminine energy and that nurturing, loving
side of me and use that to help myself heal. You See, the
thing is, when we're talking about masculine feminine energy, that masculine energy,
it's not to say that masculine energy is not healing. It's very when we
actually get healthy masculine guidance from a father, a man, or within ourselves.
Right, it's very healing in a way because it's protecting, it's keeping
us contained, it's keeping us safe. But what we really need here is
that feminine, nurturing side of us. We need that motherly side of us
that we never learned how to tap into and we never learned how to give
ourselves because we were in such survival mode that we didn't have time to nurture.
We didn't have time to slow down, we didn't have time to listen
to our inner child. But we need to do that moving forward, and
that's what I realized I needed to do. I realized in order for me
to heal, it wasn't going to be from tyrant, hyper masculine side of
me, because that part of me didn't want to listen to my emotions,
didn't want to hold space. I had to realize that the way that I
was going to stop quote unquote self sabotaging was going to be from a loving
place, a place of understanding why I was self sabotaging in the first place,
and understanding what my inner child or what I needed, really, what
do I need? And the truth is I didn't get that when I was
younger. My mom did her best to do that for me, and I
can thank her till the end of day for that, thank God. But
there were so many times where I needed my father or I needed somebody in
my life to come to me and say, what do you need right now?
You're feeling alone? I know you're feeling alone. This is how you
deal in process with the feelings of being alone or this feeling of uncertainty,
or this feeling of going into a new social situation for the first time when
you're very young and you don't know like where you stand or how to have
conversations and thinks like that. Like this is not to say that we don't
experience uncomfortable emotions when we're young, right, but the thing that we really
needed in those moments is to have healthy parental guidance to literally guide us through
those emotions, to help us understand the emotions, to help us understand that
you know, just when there's change, or when there's unknown or there's an
uncomfortable emotion coming up, or a feeling of uncertainty, we don't have to
be afraid of it. We don't have to think that it's like the end
of the world. We don't have to suppress this part of us. We
can explore this emotion, we can express it. And I think one of
the biggest things that transformed my relationship towards myself is being very curious and asking
the question of why why do I feel like this? Why am I doing
this behavior? Why? Why? Why? Start to get so curious as
to the thoughts that you think about yourself, about the world, the behaviors
that you're doing. So let's say you are falling off certain quote unquote healthy
behaviors that you should be doing. Why am I falling off these behaviors?
What do I need? Is? Am I doing things that are out of
alignment? Am I not listening to my true emotional needs right now? My
inner child? Does my inner child need something that I'm not aware of?
You know, even when it comes to relationships or certain things like activities that
you do in your life, if you find that you're feeling uneasy about them,
or you're falling off or you're pushing them them to the side, or
you're afraid of them, or whatever, it is go inwards and ask yourself,
why am I afraid right now? Why am I pushing things off?
Why do I keep going back to unhealthy situations. There's always a part of
you, for some reason that is doing that, and I think that parts
work. Doing parts work can be very, very beneficial. Like I said,
I'll definitely link some examples of how to do that, and of course
that book No Bad Parts by Richard Sports can help. But just being very
aware of your story and understanding that there's probably a lot of parts of you
that you have not tapped into or let out in which might need a little
bit more attention from you, and how you start exploring that is bringing your
pens, your paper or letting things out with your words and being very honest,
letting the parts of you that are so suppressed and so deep within you
let them have a voice, let them speak. Stop telling yourself that you
know how you should feel, or how you should think, or how you
should act. Let yourself for a moment just be who you are authentically,
because this is a thing. We have a very big protector part of us,
our identity who we think we are, right, the independent girl who
knows her worth and she knows this, and she knows that and this that
in the third and she knows what's good for her an x Y and Z.
Okay, Well, you also keep doing these weird behaviors and you keep
having these unhealthy thoughts come up in your mind all the time. So obviously
there's something that's going on within you that you are ignoring. Stop ignoring yourself,
Stop ignoring your inner child. Every single one of us has an inner
child. We have parts within us that have probably not been really cared for,
taken in consideration, and or simply just need a little bit more time
to express, time to be let out. And this is the thing.
When you start exploring your inner child, you will find some profound answers.
And the more times you build this relationship to your inner child, to the
parts of you that you have been ignoring, you will find yourself in deep
alignment. You will start taking actions in your life that consider your inner child,
what your inner child needs. You will stop driving yourself into relationships and
work situations or financial situations or just whatever. You will stop creating this life
that is very not aligned. And this is a thing like sometimes when you're
unfulfilled in relationships, or you're unfulfilled in a certain career path or your life
in general, it's because you're really taking that action from a place of only
knowing part of yourself. You've only decided to get into relationships or career paths
because you told yourself that that's what you like. But you have so many
parts of you that you haven't discovered that need to be brought out so that
you can actually see the full picture of where you're supposed to be in life,
where you're supposed to go in life. So, if you're somebody who's
struggling right now with self sabotaging behaviors, or you're dealing with any health issues,
or you're just feeling very unsatisfied in your life, it is so important
that you start a practice of emotionally releasing. You start becoming curious by thinking
back to your past, the relationship you have towards your mom, your dad,
your siblings, your friends, anything that's happening in your immediate life life,
like even your relationships now doesn't have to be in your past. Whatever,
and let out your emotions. What are your thoughts, what are your
feelings, what are your everything? Let it out and I did. My
first ever podcast is all about letting go, forgiving moving on, Go and
listen to that podcast. If you struggle with moving on, if you feel
like you're really hurt from somebody who has maybe wronged you in the past,
or you can't seem to come at peace with the parental guidance that you never
really had, or whatever it is, right, you can go listen to
that episode. But I think that the first step is really just letting it
out, being real with yourself and recognizing that there are parts of you that
you have been ignoring and denying. And if you want to have this dream
life, if you want to have this glow up, this alignment, this
healthy relationship with yourself, it's going to take you becoming curious of your inner
world. And the more times I got good at really knowing what my inner
child needs, just letting things out, really processing my emotions, stop ignoring
when I was feeling anxious or sad or uncomfortable and trying to move past it
by adding another goal to my list or another project or another new routine to
try and fix my problems. When I just let myself be and feel and
release my life change I got out of my hand pain. I literally became
the version of myself that I am right now because I decided to move through
my emotions into really deeply heal, to let go of my past, to
let out my emotions towards my parents, to mourn that loss, and to
every day be aware that I have an inner child within me that needs me
to listen more, that needs me to slow down, that needs me to
do things a new way and not just always operate from this egotistical survival mode
identity that I have been operating out of, and quite frankly, to just
add more of that feminine, nurturing, loving energy towards myself. And the
more times that I did that, every time I got triggered, I would
ask myself, what am I feeling right now? What do I need?
Instead of getting mad at myself, I started loving on myself more and being
kinder to myself. I started to actually heal physically, mentally emotionally, everything
my life transformed. I became so much more happier, so much more optimistic,
so much more grounded, so much more emotionally regulated. On the times
that things did trigger me and things did come up, I reparented myself.
I became the version of me that honestly my young self needed. I became
that parent, and I know when I have children, I will literally be
able to be that parent that my parents couldn't be to me. And what
a beautiful thing to be, don't We all want to be somewhat better than
our parents, and like, listen, we love our parents, but you
know, we usually always strive to do better and listen, it's a process.
Depending on the trauma you've gone through, the things that you've gone through,
the level of readiness that you are with moving on and letting go or
processing so things, it can definitely take time. But I would invite you
in the next week, leading up into next week's episode, because we're gonna
talk about the nervous system and how the body plays a huge role into this
as well, I invite you to take one actionable step towards you discovering your
inner world, whether that be sitting with yourself and looking at your past and
the relationship that you have towards your caretakers or the people closest in your life,
and really being honest with yourself about how you feel about these things,
and you're letting them out. You're writing, you're thinking it out, whatever
it is you're expressing in a healthy way, and you're ripping up those papers
because nobody needs to see them, or even if you're not ready to do
that. When you start to do let's say a self sabotaging behavior, you
start to become aware of what just triggered you to want to go eat that
food or want to go suppress, or want to go escape, or want
to go back to the X. What emotion were you feeling that in that
time? And usually it's like loneliness. It's not being able to deal with
the stillness of life, the loneliness that you might be feeling when you don't
have anyone or anything. You think to grasp on too, and start to
get curious as to when was the first time you ever feel like that?
Because I can tell you right now, the feeling that you're feeling right now
before you go do that self sabotage and behavior was not the first time you've
felt this. There was a time in childhood, most likely that you felt
very very alone or sad, or this feeling of let's say a man pulling
away from you. It made you feel alone when your dad just put you
in your room and and wasn't attentive to you and just like ignored you or
whatever. There's always some sort of correlation, even if it's not the same
exact certain experience, it's usually the same emotion, and really just tracing things
back and becoming so aware of how really you're reliving so many of your emotions
and so many of your traumas really in your adulthood life. And it's good
to understand that because that does need to be the way you experience loneliness anymore.
You aren't alone in your room around your father, like when your dad
is not like paying attention to you the same way you are right now in
your life and really taking control of your life and saying, you know what,
I can meet my needs in a healthier way. Now I have the
tools in the resources to make myself feel better the way unfortunately I was not
when I was younger because I didn't understand what I was experiencing. I didn't
have a parent around me, x Y and Z. But now when I
feel alone, I have resources as I can go to therapy, I can
go get help, I can reach out to a friend, I can go
watch a video that's gonna make me feel better. I can go outside,
I can do X, Y and Z. Whatever it is that you can
have in your toolbox. Obviously not everyone's going to have the same toolbox,
but you getting better learning how to meet your needs in a healthier way is
going to help you heal. And it's gonna be so amazing. I promise
you. It changed my life when I started to listen to what my inner
child really need. So, like I mentioned, I do have an Inner
Child Discovery Journal prompt Guide, and you can purchase it online and you can
feel it out digitally, or you could print it if you want and just
feel it out that way, or you could literally just like open it up
on your computer and then write out in your journal. That's the way I
like to do it. And I really think that this journal guide will really
help you start your journey on learning more about your inner child and your shadows
and the things that you have been suppressing and denying and rejecting and putting off,
and learning how to actually for once be aware of these parts of you,
and learning how to cultivate a new relationship towards these parts of you,
towards your inner child, towards the parts of you that you've never learned how
to express in your life. And I really like to look at this journal
guide as a self love guide. This is you, for once in your
life, putting down those walls and deciding I am going to look deeper within
myself and I'm going to for the first time love myself or learn how to
love myself. And in that general guid I also have some book recommendations,
podcast recommendations, and YouTube recommendations that I think will be helpful on this journey
of you really discovering yourself deeper and really doing that healing work. But whatever
it is that you decide to do, I hope you do something within the
next week when it comes to your emotional health, letting yourself feel connecting to
yourself for once in your life, dropping that hyper masculine identity, the part
of you that won't let yourself cry, mourn the loss, let go move
on whatever. I promise you it will do so much for your body,
for your mind, for your life. Don't forget to let me know on
Spotify what you liked about this episode, what you want to hear next.
Of course, next week, like I said, we're going to talk more
about that physical side of your emotional health, because our minds and our bodies
are connected. I will talk to you guys in the next one. Bye.