The Human Experience

Having a sense of purpose is one of the four pillars of well-being and mental health.

That’s what I want to talk to you about today, because the loss of it is one of the main features of aging + menopause.

FYI – the primitive brain doesn’t really like interesting and fun as it is a little unpredictable and may be unsafe so you may need a little courage in there.  As an old song goes, written by Garth Brooks "I rather have more life in my years than years in my life”. Me too.

Shara came to me because she'd been dealing with perimenopause, self-doubt, anxiety, fatigue and overwhelm for 3 years.

So, sometimes it is helpful to allow ourselves to do what we've always done so we can observe and gather information that will allow us to understand,

My brain was trying to tell me I shouldn’t be coping this well, that it is meant to be hard, that I should be suffering more, struggling more, I experienced feelings of guilt about feeling okay through it all, as if being okay meant I didn’t care enough.

Now of course this was not the intended lesson. But I watched, I listened, and I learned and as a child I was pretty sure I had it right. I was meant to worry. So long as I was worried it meant I cared. I wasn't meant to do anything with it. Just ruminate and worry about people and things outside of my control when I should be worried about myself.

Compassion feels safe. Judgment and criticism does not feel safe. And the part of our nervous system that promotes calm and good decision making, confidence, etc., is activated when we feel safer.

acing up requires that you be willing to have the experience that is causing the stress response and the stress, so the physiological experience of it, as the first step. Once we face up, our next step then is to gather information, ask questions and get really clear about the problem.

So, I think a really good place to start ...

So whether we like it or not, as humans we have core needs that require recognition and fulfilment to survive and to maintain general wellbeing. These needs need to be met both internally by ourselves and externally by others.

Ep26 - We desire excitement as much as we desire comfort and because of these and other conflicting drives we can easily find ourselves stuck between the wanting to change and being too scared to change or wanting something different and not knowing how to achieve that because our fear of the unknown gets in the way.

You might try and argue that your brain has never been supervised or managed, you’re doing ok so why would I need to now.

As children all of that supervision comes from outside of us from our parents or peers, they guide us, they manage our brains for us by telling us what to do, how to do it etc. they supervise us and appropriately so because we don't have the knowledge or the experience to be able to do that for ourselves as children.

The goal of this podcast is to share knowledge and information that normalises the human experience. Did you know

that all disorders are just normal human behaviours that developed out of self-protection. One of those normal behaviours, the one that I want to talk to you today about, is called projection.

The challenge of the messy middle is why so many stay stuck, why people continue to engage in behaviours and relationships that are not healthy or helpful for them.

The only reason anything is a problem is because we as either the individual or a collective have decided it is. Problems are very personalised; they are not facts.  This is why one person in a relationship can consider something is a problem and the other may not.  A problem is an idea we have about something.

I know when I began to look at my micro decisions it shocked me to realise that the results that kept happening that I thought were out of my control, were actually due to micro decisions I was making, that at the time I made them seemed so inconsequential.

our imagination can be in the past or the future, it's very rarely in the present, because that's where reality resides. And I was reminded earlier this week during a conversation with my husband just how easy it is to fall into the trap of confusing imagination with reality in an unhelpful way.

I used to believe if you really want something then taking action is easy, I’d let nothing stand in my way, I realise what I was also stating by omission was, if I found taking action hard or I didn’t take the action I thought I should, it meant I didn’t want it enough. What a load of bollocks.

The problem with that is that there is literally nothing authentic about operating in the world that way.

This is a shortened version of a People Pleasing webinar I hosted earlier this year.

If we don't see that and we decide to put anticipation in the feeling line, and I'm not saying it's not ever there, I'm just saying we need to be mindful of the context so that we can correctly identify whether, in this instance, it's in our feeling line or in our action line.

If we had all been given those skills as we were growing up, most of us would probably be experiencing a much more satisfying life and certainly much more improved well-being or for some of us mental health, right?

When we can come to grips with the truth of internal dialogue we can stop resisting, fighting, judging it, we can accept it for what it is just learned words and sentences being used by our brain in an attempt to keep us safe, once we do that then we are able to ask the helpful question…

The problem is it’s “negative” labelling and viewing it through that lens interferes with our ability to see any value in it.

To get to a “predictably unpredictable” space we require significant exposure and experience within the environment and/or relationship that we want to be comfortable in. We need to have spent enough time watching, observing, asking questions, experimenting, participating etc. to gain the knowledge that leads to this type of predictability.

Look at all the different marketing in the world related to therapy, counselling, life coaching etc.  They all offer a variety of possibilities, options, and ideas about both the problems we all have and how to solve them. This is a wonderful thing because we are all so different and we will all be looking for something that specifically resonates with us.

The one thing that they all have in common no matter what, is that they all support you to look at yourself, to get to know yourself, so in essence Self-discovery, is the solution to every problem.

“Trauma is caused by a deeply disturbing or distressing event that activates a primitive intense survival response, and creates a direct connection between our senses, and our survival response. 

Considering context supports a more helpful perspective, more balanced, more open, context is the grey in the spectrum of black and white.

This phenomenon struck me as very curious. My feet, having been in my warm shoes, would have me believe the water was cold. My hands, having been in the cold air, would have me believe the water was warm. The water temperature was the same, it hadn’t changed. But my experience of it, my perception of it, was quite different depending on which part of my body was submerged in the water.

This is the experience of confusion, and as unpleasant as it can be I welcome it because I know that it means I am questioning old, learned thoughts, behaviours, patterns, or information and if I give myself some time and space, I will figure it out.

Now most of us, most of us look outside ourselves for validation, why, because when we're born, we have a basic need to feel safe and this requires a sense of belonging and approval.

Spectrum of unsafe through to safe – most of the time we sit with the see saw leaning towards safe, those of us with trauma in our histories are often more often than not sitting on the unsafe, alert side.

The truth is from the moment we are born, we are enough, we never question the worth or good enough-ness or value of a baby

A great question to ask yourself, is what is my contribution? what is my part of the responsibility pie?

Our beliefs have a lot to do with how we operate, act, make decisions day to day, they affect our relationships more than any other single factor, so what we believe matters.

Don't wait for tragedy or a personal crisis to have these conversations.