Stop Holding Yourself Back & Rewrite Your Story | Lori Gottlieb EP 754

0:00Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation Show.

0:11So I sometimes call them compassionate truth bombs because we need to hear them. But how do we do it? It has to do with timing and dosage. So the timing is when they're really raw, when something just happened. You know, now's not the time to say, you know, this has happened with your last three boyfriends. Right. Maybe you're the problem here. Have you noticed that going through people's phones is not working well for you? You know, we are not going to say that maybe in that moment. And then the dosage is how much are you going to say in a particular moment and in a particular conversation? It doesn't all have to happen in one conversation.

0:44So I think that that has to do with being a good listener. And a lot of us don't know how to listen. And I think it's really helpful. I see a lot of couples in my practice, too. And if you can say to the person when they come to you with something, how can I be helpful in this conversation right now? I know you're really hurting. Do you want to just vent? Do you want to hug? Do you want me to help problem solve with you? Do you want my honest opinion? Or do you want me to hold off and we can have that conversation another time? Let them tell you what they want so you can give them something that is helpful to them in that moment.

1:14And then in another conversation, you might be able to offer them something more. So instead of saying, you know, when they say like, oh, here's what's going on. And we say, oh, well, we try to cheer them up. Like, you know, here's what you can do. We try to fix it. We try to cheer them up. We try to make it seem like it's not so bad, whatever we do. Instead, just say, tell me more. We do this with our kids. I can say as a parent, we do this all the time, right? So your kid comes to you and says, you know, I'm really sad about this. I'm really worried about this. We say, oh, don't worry. No, it's not a problem.

1:46We say, oh, don't be sad, right? Go have ice cream. Right, exactly. But the thing is that then you get the message as a kid that like, oh, wait, I'm not supposed to feel this. And really what it is, is we get uncomfortable as parents with our kids' feelings. Why is that? Because we can't, we are uncomfortable with feelings. We grew up in a way where feelings were messy, feelings were uncomfortable, feelings were something that, you know, they were going to be trouble. Yeah. As opposed to feelings. Stop crying, stop crying as a kid. Yes. As opposed to just, you know, feelings are actually a great thing.

2:22People say, oh, there are these negative feelings like sadness, anxiety, anger, whatever, even envy. I always say feelings are like a compass. They tell us what direction to go in. So with envy, for example, I say, follow your envy. It tells you what you want. If you are feeling envy, that's great because it says, what do I desire? It puts you in touch with your desire. What is it that I desire and what steps can I take to get something like that in my own life? If you're feeling sad, if you're feeling anxious, what is not working right now that you can look at? If you stuff down that feeling, if you pretend it's not there, it just gets bigger.

2:56And here's what happens. It doesn't go away. It comes out in too much food, alcohol, drugs, insomnia, a short temperedness, inability to function, distractibility, that mindless scrolling we all do through the internet. A colleague of mine said that the internet was like the most effective short-term non-prescription painkiller out there. And so what happens is your feelings are still there, but you're not dealing with them. So we have, just like we have a physical immune system, we have a psychological immune system and we have to take care of our psychological immune system. So it's just like, you know, what do you do to keep healthy with your body?

3:38Like you're going to eat right. You're going to exercise. Um, you know, you're going to do all the things that you want to do to take care of yourself. You're going to get enough sleep. Those things also help your psychological immune system. They're not totally separate. The mind body connection is profound. But at the same time, you know, are you going to be around people who don't nourish you? That's that that's going to hurt your psychological immune system. That's going to make you sick. Are you going to stuff down your feelings? That's going to make you sick. And so how do we take care of ourselves?

4:07And part of it is instead of trying to numb out your feelings, because numbness isn't the absence of feelings. Numbness is a state of being overwhelmed by too many feelings. Wow. And then not only do you not experience the feelings that you don't want to experience, but you don't experience the other feelings. You mute one feeling, you mute the others. You mute the pain, you mute the joy. So you're living in this state where you don't actually get to feel the range of feelings that make us human. And that's what happens to people is that they're alive, they're going through the motions, they wake up every day, but they're not really living their lives.

4:42change is really hard because we cling to something that's familiar to us so even though we may know oh this would help me this would be a good change for me we don't do it because it's unfamiliar and so if you grew up with a lot of chaos if you grew up feeling sad all the time or anxious all the time that feels like home to you even if it's unpleasant or or even miserable she'll keep finding chaotic right and keep recreating it yeah and so and so you know it was funny because because my own therapist gave me this great analogy he said to me he said you remind me of this cartoon and it's of a prisoner shaking the bars desperately trying to get out but on the right and the left it's open right no bars so basically the prisoner is not in jail and that's what so many of us are like we feel like we're trapped we're not in jail we can change We can just walk around the bars.

5:35But why don't we? Because with freedom, the freedom to walk around the bars, comes responsibility. And if we're responsible for our own lives, that scares us. We feel like, oh, I don't know if I can do that. I don't know if I'm competent enough to do that. Or now I'm to blame if things don't go right. I can't blame it on everything else. What happens is people say, okay, when I'm an adult, I'm going to pick a partner who really makes me feel nourished, who really gives me all those things that I did not get growing up. But what they don't realize is unconsciously they have this radar for the people who look very different from their parents on the surface.

6:11But then once they get into that relationship, it's kind of like, oh, this feels familiar. Right. And so what they did was their unconscious said when they were picking their partner, hey, you look familiar. Come closer, even though in consciously they thought, oh, you're totally different from my parents. I'm going to this is going to work out great. But no, they have radar for that if they haven't worked out the stuff that's sort of their unfinished business. There's this saying, we marry our unfinished business. We actually do marry our unfinished business. So that is why it is so important as an adult to take responsibility and say, you know what?

6:45I'm going to have to grieve this loss of what I didn't get. And I'm going to have to work through this and assess where I am as an adult so that I pick people and surround myself with people who are healthy for me. There's this dance that we do in relationship. And what happens is people are doing these dance steps. And people become very, they become very ingrained. It's like, oh, here we go. You can script out people's arguments. You know exactly what they're going to look like. It starts with one thing and then it goes back into many different things. And you know exactly how it's going to go and who's going to feel what and who's going to accuse the other person of what.

7:18And that's the dance. And so if one person changes their dance steps, the other person either is going to fall flat on the dance floor or they're going to have to change their steps too if they want to keep dancing. And usually, so we always say you can't change another person, but you can influence another person. How? By changing your dance steps. So for example, we like to say insight is the booby prize of therapy, meaning people will come and they'll be like, oh, now I understand why I keep getting into that argument with my partner. And so then they go home and they come back the next week and I'll say, well, did you do something different when you got in that argument?

7:50Well, no, but I understand why I did. So you have to be both vulnerable and accountable when you come to therapy.

8:22come back tomorrow for another episode of the Daily Motivation Show.