It's time to rip the cover off what really works to ditch addiction, depression, anger, anxiety, and all other kinds of human suffering. No, not sobriety. We're talking the F-word here: Freedom. We'll share, straight from the trenches, what we have learned from leaving our own addictions behind, and coaching hundreds of others to do the same—and since it's such a heavy topic, we might as well have a good time while we're at it.
Bob: All right, time to bring out the nerds in all of us. How many of you have read the Eragon, the youth juvenile fantasy series by Christopher Paolini? Oh dear. Here we go.
Okay, so we’ve got dragon riders. We have these people who are able to do magic and whatnot. They're the riders of the dragons, and the villain in this is Galbatorix. He's this guy that has lived for a 100+ years. He's got some special powers and he's killed off all the other dragon riders, and there are only two who are left. One of them is Eragon, and the whole series is them trying to figure out how to fight this. [01:13.8]
Spoiler alert, if you haven't read all the books, I'm going to let loose the piece at the end of the fourth book. This is important, though, so I say enjoy the spoiler.
At the end of the books, right at the very end, Galbatorix has figured out some ways to help to stop other people's magic from working and whatnot, because he has figured out the name of the ancient language—and when you know the name of something, you have power and control over it, so on and so forth, right? It’s a thread through the book.
It's actually a powerful principle in life, when dealing with the root issues of addictions. Knowing what it is and being able to name it is actually a very powerful place to be in, because now you have some control over it. It's kind of like your pet, but too many people make it into pets and that alone is a problem, because when you make it into a pet, some people never release it back into the wild. [02:05.9]
Here he has figured out the true name of the ancient language that is the magical language, and so now he can just shut off everybody's spells. And so, they're fighting him, but he has control over everything, more power than anybody ever could possibly believe and there's nothing they can do against him. He can just stop anything that they're after.
But then, all of a sudden, what happens is Eragon just starts to wish that this Galbatorix could see in his own heart all of the pain, all of the devastation, all of the massive destruction he has created, and all of the wounds and the emotional turmoil that he has put people through over the last century or more. This becomes a desire, a magical desire, that isn't a spell that is made with words, and all of the other dragons and whatnot join in and add their power to this one spell as they're just wishing for him to open his to see all the devastation and destruction that he has done. [03:02.9]
In so doing, it so overwhelms him—because he can't stop it from happening. It’s a nonverbal spell—that all of a sudden he just has this tremendous desire to cease to exist and he just utters the words “Be not,” and it creates this massive explosion and this negative whatever force and influence over the entire environment, and leaves this nasty trace on the land, moving forward forevermore, and it had happened once earlier in the series, because he was so overwhelmed with sorrow at everything that he had done that he couldn't manage existing anymore.
Now, this is what happens very, very frequently. People get so overwhelmed in their life by the sorrow of what's happening by their circumstances and their situations, and they feel like a victim in many ways in their life that often they go into depression, and many people or even going down into suicide—and the suicide rates in high schools around the nation right now, it’s insane what's happening, and the amount of depression and the amount of antidepressants that people are on in the United States. [04:10.9]
I just read a statistic the other day about people in the State of Utah, in 2010—it might have been 2000, but I think it was 2010—that the number of prescriptions for antidepressants per capita, that means per person, the average number of prescriptions per person on antidepressants for adults was 1.1. That meant every adult has a prescription on average and some of them have two.
Now, that's not actually how it works out. There are probably people who have three or four prescriptions and other people who don't have any, but that's literally what's going on. There's so much depression, so much anxiety, so much negative emotional turmoil, that people are in this place and they need to use drugs to counter it. Otherwise what happens? They go into suicidal fits and they go deeper and deeper down, and maybe that becomes a criminal path or maybe that just becomes suicide, or maybe it just becomes abuse or whatever else happens inside of that space. [05:14.5]
That's how badly it got, just in the State of Utah, the place that Mormons typically call Happy Valley. Ironic, right? It's huge, the amount of stuff that's going on here and it comes from being overwhelmed with sorrow, and it's about time that we ended that and helped people to see the value of sorrow and what to do about it.
So, that's what today is about. That's why I named it Enough with the Sorrow Already. See, if you've grown up in a Christian tradition, then you know about this thing called “godly sorrow” and that the idea is that you're supposed to feel sorry for things that you've done wrong, because if you do, then you won't do them again. Right?
For people that we work with, people who are dealing with addiction, particularly, porn addiction, it has both a moral side of it where people are like, No, that's like adultery. It's lustful. We talked about “Is it cheating?” a little while ago. [06:03.1]
But then, there's also the addictive or compulsive side of it where they're already struggling with anyway and their feeling of hurting people. And then, there's the collateral damage inside of it where you see other people who are affected by it, because they're choosing to be affected by it because it's something that they don't like, and there's nothing necessarily wrong with that either way.
But because of this, they've learned to feel bad about it, and then they can't live it down and they can't live it down. I spent 18 years in that space, and if I had to go back and really fix 18 years, man, that's a lot of time that I would still be stuck in trying to let go of all the sorrow. I'm supposed to feel bad for what I've done.
And the problem is there is a use for sorrow, and I'm going to get to that, but, most commonly, what people use sorrow for is a means of manipulating behavior. I don't mean religions are using this to manipulate behavior. That is an unintended consequence I think and, sometimes in the course of history, it has been an intended consequence. [07:01.2]
But parents use sorrow and remorse to manipulate behavior. “You should feel sorry for that,” “You should tell your sister sorry for hitting her,” or “You should feel bad about that. Why don't you feel bad about that?” We tell people this. I mean, I don't, but I used to and we grew up in a society that teaches this, “You're supposed to feel bad about that. How come you don't feel bad about this?” when the reality is this: when you feel bad, regardless of what it's about, you're actually killing yourself.
It's a literal way of committing suicide by small doses. You're poisoning your shelf in degrees. When you feel bad, you're literally killing yourself. So, what people are saying is you need to start killing yourself now because of what you've done. That's not what they mean, but that's what in an actual practice is happening.
So, when we tell people or we have this thing where you're supposed to feel bad, and we do, like, Oh man, he doesn't even feel bad about it. He's so cold-hearted. He doesn't even feel bad about it, that we want people to feel bad. We want them to be mourning on the outside, so that we can produce some external evidence of some thing that's going on on the inside, when the reality is that's not what any of this was designed for. [08:11.4]
If you grow up in Christian culture, you know the idea of godly sorrow, but you also know that the godly sorrow is meant to lead to repentance. What is repentance? The word in Greek is metanoia and that means to literally change your way of thinking. It also is linked with ideas about breathing, and your spiritual self and whatnot, which is some of the stuff that we use in physical work, breath work and other types of things that we use with our clients, so that we can affect, in a sense, even though it's not a spiritual program, repentance from every possible angle, physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, you name it.
We want to affect repentance in that way, meaning we've affected the way that think. We've literally shifted how they think, their habitual thoughts that they're always used to seeing the world a certain way and their identities, root issues and stuff, that we were also shifting the way that they think about things happening in their life that they don't like or that they didn't want, and the way they react to stuff. We're literally shifting the way that they think. [09:13.1]
And that shift, how long does it take to change your thoughts? It can come at the speed of thought. So, how much sorrow do you need? Sorrow is literally your body telling you, Hey, you're killing us, and it's information that is meant to tell you, Hey, can you make a course correction, so we don't die? That's what it's there for, and the only point of having it is so that you can become aware of a thought process and a feeling inside of your heart that you weren't aware of, so that you can shift that into a better way of living. That's all that it's for, which means the amount of sorrow you need is only the amount that it takes for you to shift your way of thinking about things.
If you or someone you know is looking to drop the F-bomb of “Freedom” in your life, whether that's from addiction or depression and anxiety, or just anything that's making you feel flat-out stuck, but you have no clue how to shake it and just want help doing it, head on over to LiberateAMan.com and book a call, where we can look at your unique situation and give you the roadmap you've been missing.
If you need to feel bad about something for the rest of your life, how many times have you heard somebody say, Gosh, I said sorry already. How many times do I have to say it? It's because of this discrepancy. [10:33.0]
Internally, we all know, do we need to move past it? We have to get past it. We are not supposed to hold a grudge. We're not supposed to sit here and hold onto things. We all know this, and yet we've grown up being taught or believed or demonstrated or being shown that this is how you're supposed to operate, that you're supposed to make people feel bad. You're supposed to feel bad on your own right because that's the only way we can let go of things, when the reality is that you and I feeling bad doesn't fix anything. It only kills us slowly and it makes us less capable of fixing anything that might need fixing. [11:07.0]
Godly sorrow means that you experienced something and immediately you respond to it, and as fast as you can, shift your way of thinking and feeling about something, so that you are back to freedom from it. You're no longer feeling shame or guilt or anything, and you can move on with creating a life. Because which is the greater sin, really? Is the greater sin to get over something within 10 seconds?
Let's say, you went and looked at porn. What's the greater sin? To recognize that that is not how you want to live your life, to learn from it, to look at it, and within 10 seconds even, shift to where you are no longer feeling guilty in your heart, and you've done everything needed to let that go and move on with your life; or, instead, to continue to beat yourself up over it day in and day out, minute in and minute out, hour in and hour out, year in and year out, and, in so doing, prevent yourself from enjoying every other moment that the creator God is giving you, to actually prevent yourself from receiving every other gift? [12:11.0]
Which is the greater sin? To go enjoying the gifts that keep giving you every breath that you have, every heartbeat, or to make yourself feel bad, so that you can't even enjoy that and so that they function less and less, and so that you're actually destroying the body that was given to you? Some people will say, No, you're supposed to feel bad for a period of time. But what is the period of time? Even in the scripture, the idea is that it leads to repentance. The period of time is just that. How long it takes for you to shift your way of thinking and feeling, that's how long sorrow needs to be there.
And it's not like you have to create sorrow. It'll show up, and then all you have to do is figure out what you need to learn from that and move on, instead of continuing to beat yourself up about something, because if life beats you up and you beat yourself up for it, then you've just been beaten. You’re beating yourself up twice for the same thing. How is that useful? Right? [13:02.7]
Furthermore, we tend to find this sorrow for things like mistakes. Oh, I'm sorry, sorry, sorry. Right? I feel bad about making mistakes when mistakes are how people learn all kinds of stuff. A toddler learns to run and walk by falling over a bunch and figuring out the balancing. Is he supposed to apologize and feel bad about that? And, yet, we talked about this in the sorry episode with Jasmine, honestly, we apologize for all kinds of stuff because we're so used to, in our culture, feeling sorrowful about stuff, when that's not actually helpful.
So, what we want to do is move into a place where we understand that sorrow might show up in our life, but that that is only information. It is like a beautiful gift from the universe to say, Hey, look at this. We’ve found a mechanism to help you see that there's something going on in your thinking and feeling that's making you less joyful, that's making your life harder, and we want to make sure that you're aware of it.
Sorrow shows up as this beautiful ... shone off the port bow. Look, wow, we are driving next to the cliffs of insanity. Hey, let's change the course of the boat. You can celebrate that sorrow has shown up because it's a creation of yourself. It's how you've created things. But, on top of that, you've created it specifically because it's helping you see something going on in your life, and that's beautiful. [14:22.8]
And then, as soon as you experience that, your next mode of action is not to wallow in it, not to feel bad for it, but to literally to go, Oh sweet, where's the sorrow coming from? What's it about? What's the lesson I'm learning from this? What is it that needs to shift? How was my way of thinking problematic in the first place that made this show up, including the behaviors that came from my way of thinking? What needs to shift?
As soon as you shift from that, you shift it until, finally, the sorrow goes away, however long that takes. But it's not something that you need to hold onto for a day, a week, a month, a year. There are no preset limits.
Godly sorrow is literally a gift from the creator of the universe to help you recognize, Holy cow, my life could be even happier and even better than it is now, and if I shift my thinking, I'll be able to taste of that grand gift, and be able to even more fully enjoy every moment that life and creation is giving me as a present gift, because I know how fleeting it is and how fragile life can be and I want to savor every moment of it. [15:27.1]
So, as we talk about sorrow, you have an option. You can continue to make yourself feel worse and, eventually, be like Galbatorix and do some drastic and desperate measures. In his case, it was to “be not,” but other people do different things. You continue to build it up to where the only way you can think of doing it is to end life in certain ways or you can shift your mode of thinking.
What would those books have been like? I'm sure they wouldn't have been satisfying to a crowd because we always want to see the villain destroyed, right? But what would it be like if we got a bunch of literature where the villain in the middle of it just simply repented in a powerful way? They recognize in the middle of everything going on like, Oh, let me just shift this. This is not okay. I feel bad about this. Let me change this. [16:14.0]
I guarantee you that there would be a lot of movie critics saying, This is not a good movie. There would be a lot of literature critics that are like, This book was kind of weak. It's too much that the person … It's okay for a person to turn to the dark side in 10 seconds, right?
Anakin Skywalker is over there in Star Wars and he turns over to the dark side in 10 seconds. He's like, Oh, I shouldn't, I shouldn’t, okay. But it's not okay for a person to turn to the light side in 10 seconds. That has to be a big struggle. We have to take multiple episodes for Darth Vader to turn back. We have to take multiple episodes for Kylo Ren to figure it out. It’s like, Oh, no, people can't turn good easily, but they can turn bad easily.
That method is messed up, and it shows just how much our society is addicted to the emotional roller coaster of ups and downs and how people are supposed to feel bad, and that there would be nobody satisfied, typically, in an environment like that, if you saw a bad guy just recognize something is wrong, not feel bad about it, but just change his life. [17:11.0]
Everybody else would want him to feel bad about it. We want him to pay for his crimes, even if he did pay for them, even if he went and made amends for everything, but he never felt bad about it. He never beat himself up. He just had a moment of realization like, Oh, I am changing my life down.
We want to see a movie that's drawn out. We want to see his emotional struggle and the development of his character, and we want to see this. We can't just accept that a person can change—and that mentality has played out inside of our movies a lot.
It should be indicative to you, to me and to everybody, of just how much we've missed the mark, how much joy missing in our life, how much enjoyment we could have in our life, how much peace and pleasure we could have in our life, if we would stop being so addicted to having things feel bad in order for us to be okay with them feeling good again. [18:03.7]
But, unfortunately, we've grown up learning that you're supposed to feel bad about what you've done and bad about yourself, and you're supposed to beat yourself up and you're supposed to say you're not good, and you're supposed to say you married up, and that you got lucky and your wife is better than you.
By the way, that's an insult to your wife. It's like saying that she's stupid enough to have married you and you pulled the wool over her eyes. That's why it's a weird compliment, and why they are both flattered and not flattered by it.
Stop beating yourself down to make other people feel better because it just makes them feel worse. Learn to live in such joy, peace and love, that people want to be around you and that your life becomes powerful, even if they don't want to be around you. Build your life out of joy and peace, instead of building it out of sorrow.
Hopefully, this has helped you. I get that you'll still go to church meetings and people will say you're supposed to feel bad about something in order to repent. That's not true. That comes prior to repentance. But I get that you'll go and you'll see moms and dads trying to get their kids to feel bad about doing something to other people, in order to get them to change their behavior. I get that you'll see people that will want you to feel bad about something or they won't be satisfied that you've changed. [19:18.4]
But that does not a whole person make. It does not a happy person make. Sorrow is only useful to the extent that it helps you shift. Beyond that, it’s just killing you slowly.
And that's it for today's “Alive and Free Podcast.” If you enjoyed this show and want some more freedom bombs landing in your ear buds, subscribe right now at wherever you get your podcasts from. And, while you're at it, give us a rating and a review. It'll help us keep delivering great stuff to you. Plus, it's just nice to be nice.
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