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've 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.
(00:35): All right. Welcome back to the Alive and Free Podcast. We are going to continue the conversation from last week for just a minute and talk about perfectionism and people pleasing and some of the things that have come from it. Now, last week, as you may recall, we talked a little bit about suicide and the rampant rates of suicide. I had my sons in here and we really went to town. I was trying to dig in the conversation to get them to really explain what it's like for them, what the effect is, like everything that's going on, and hopefully shine a light of some kind of hope. I'm gonna talk about another guy that came to one of our retreats recently as a teenager. His friend committed suicide. I think he was 14 at the time. And immediately thereafter, his family moved. And so it was like his friend committed suicide and they were neck and neck with everything.
(01:21): Both of them had gotten into some compulsive behaviors and addictive patterns at the time, both with pornography and some other things. And they were struggling. They were hand in hand together and they were helping each other out of this. And then his friend committed suicide, and that was a huge blow to him cuz it was his best friend in the world. And now all of a sudden he's without him. And then they move. And now he doesn't have any friends. No closure, no grieving process, none of that. And so he bottled it up and he tried his best to be the best kid he could ever be to suck it up and deal with it. Very difficult, as you heard last week, to bring these kinds of huge things up to the parents because he doesn't want to alarm them. He doesn't want 'em to blow it out of proportion.
(02:00): And he's dealing with things on the inside. What are some of the things that he dealt with on the inside? Well, he dealt with the possibility of, if my friend can't handle this and we were doing this together, then maybe that's where I'm gonna end up. If I'm not strong enough either, I might just end up killing myself too. That idea stuck in his head. So now, fast forward a good seven years, he's got a job, he's a supervisor, he's in charge of other things. And he calls me because he's struggling with pornography and he can't find a way out. He can't find a way to quit. Now this is the major vice that he has in his mind. This is the major thing that's holding him back from so many other things. And it's frustrating him that there's no nothing that he's tried that's been able to give him the control that he wants.
(02:47): So he comes back and he gives me a call and he calls me the day that he has just looked at some pornography. It's in the morning. And he's like, Look, I woke up this morning and it was inevitable. And I went and I looked at some pornography. I was like, Okay, cool. Tell me about your day, the day before. This is instructive folks. He tells me about, How did you sleep? Well, he's like, Ah, it was okay. It was asleep. It wasn't anything major or not, it was just, I woke up this morning and it was one of those days that it's gonna happen. Which having been someone who spent a number of years struggling with that particular compulsion, among the other things that I dealt with, I am familiar with that feeling. And so I asked him to tell me about the day before.
(03:29): And he'd had some, he's like, It was a pretty good day. He had some hard conversations at work and whatnot, and he's kind of had a lot on his plate, but nothing major. I was like, Okay, t tell me about this. This is where so many people get it wrong. They say, Oh no, it wasn't a bad day. Obviously something led up to the experience that you were having. Whether it's binging on food, whether it's looking at pornography, whether it's a massive depressive episode or a panic attack, it doesn't come out of nowhere. People often come to me and they are like, I don't know. I don't get it, Bob. I was fine. And then all of a sudden it came back out of the blue. It never comes out of the blue. All of this is built on your body state, and if you are not aware of your body state, it will feel like it's come out of the blue, but it's been building up and cranking up for some time until finally the body does something, takes over control of your consciousness because your pH has gotten too acidic or too alkaline to be able to handle things.
(04:27): And so it's gonna take some emergency measures and you won't have as much conscious control of your body, your conscious control of your body and your behaviors. It's actually linked to the pH in your blood. If it deviates a little bit, and I know I've talked about this a ton, but if it deviates just a little bit already, you are losing conscious control of your life, which means your body is gonna go into emergency measures. So he says it was a great day. So I ask him more. I'm like, Tell me about these hard conversations. He's like, Well, I'm a supervisor and you need to know Bob. I'm a people pleaser. All right. How many people listening would confess to that one? How many people here are bend over backwards to try and make sure everybody else is okay to make sure that nobody's gotten hurt and or feel bad if somebody has gotten hurt and kind of beat yourself up about it?
(05:11): So this is the situation he is. I'm like, Oh, oh, you're a people pleaser, huh? Cause in my book, he's a human. People pleasing is a behavior that has come about for some reason, whether it's upbringing, whether it's something else. But he wasn't born being a people pleaser. You and I were born screaming and crying and pooping wherever we wanted and not obeying the rules and not understanding our mother tongue and all the things. None of us were born as people pleasers. We were born having people please us . Okay? So somewhere along the line that switched, I wanna know a little bit more about it. He tells me about these conversations and they're difficult conversations because there are some employees that aren't towing the line and he's gotta have some conversations with them telling them like lay, Hey, look, your job's on the line a little bit.
(05:55): And they're a little confrontational. Now he's not gonna fire him right away, but the confrontation really gets to him because he doesn't like to feel people hurt. So I ask a little bit more about that and all of a sudden the conversation starts to turn toward, I was like, Well, where has this started and how long have you been a people these are and all this other stuff. And when was the last time it felt like you were worried about someone getting hurt? And all of a sudden it comes down to his friends suicide. When he is 14 years old, still, the man on the phone that I'm talking to hasn't told me that a month before he attempted suicide on his own life, he attempted to try and get out of it. He hasn't told me that. Nope, it's still too big. And so he's talking around the bush, beating around the bush trying to get help.
(06:34): And in many ways when I was in my compulsive behaviors, I wanted people to catch me. I laid clues in my language. I did everything I could to try and create an opening cuz I wanted to get caught cuz it was too hard for me to say it for myself. And then I thought I was a coward and a chicken and I was weak and vulnerable and all of these things because I couldn't even say it for myself. And I didn't even have the courage to attempt suicide. So I thought I was weak in that regard too. So it's in the language folks, and you have to learn to just listen and get curious and admit you don't know what they're talking about and you're not looking for them. You're not like hunting for problems in people. You're just listening to them and getting curious about their conversation.
(07:14): Okay, cool conflict, all of a sudden, 14 years old and he felt like it was his fault that his friend had committed suicide. He felt like if he had been a better friend, if he had been able to be there for him, if he had in some way, shape or form, been able to help him feel better, then his friend would still be alive. And then his friend's family wouldn't have suffered so much and so many other things wouldn't have happened in his life. And that's a burden of 14 year old picked up and carried for seven years. Tell me folks how anyone is going to carry that in a beautiful way. Is it any wonder that he had a hard time controlling behaviors when he got stressed out? Is that any wonder that any time it felt like someone was getting hurt by his actions, that he would go out of his way to try and make them feel better?
(08:10): Whether that was his parents, his siblings, yes, they teased, but if it went too far, he had to go back and fix it. It didn't matter who it was because in his memory banks, the threat of that person possibly offering themselves and committing suicide was a very real threat in his mind. And it started because he wasn't able to fully process what happened with the suicide of his friend. This doesn't always happen with therapists folks. It's not like everybody needs to run to a therapist. They're very well trained and there's some darn good therapists out there that really are, that help people process these things. But one, they're not enough of 'em. Two, many of them are booked solid because everybody on the planet is anxious and depressed. And three, the stuff that this man was dealing with was nonverbal. He could talk about the suicide piece, but he wasn't able to pinpoint where his body was holding that.
(09:06): So let's rehash a little bit how this works. There are basically a few things that happen. One in your life, your outside environment changes. Why? Because it's always changing. The wind blows, the sun comes up, the sun goes back down. The neighbor toots in the garden, a cow moves somewhere in Africa. Do they have cows in Africa? I think so. And all kinds of stuff happened. The butterfly effect, if you believe in that or not, or if you assume that that is as big a thing as other people assume it is, it doesn't really matter. But that your environment is always changing and immediately and in perfect sync, in a perfect dance with that environment. So also is your body, your senses are picking up the lights that's coming in. Your skin is picking up all the vibrations and the sounds and the text and the textures.
(09:53): Your ears are picking up sound waves of particular frequencies, right? Your nose is picking up smells, your tongue is tasting and whatnot. And then your body's also picking up like it's gotta change position and posture and breathing. And all these things happen in perfect sink with the environment. That is what I would call your instinctive response. Okay? Certain patterns of light that people call triggers, Oh, I saw this thing and it triggered me. Or certain sounds like somebody's voice and the certain tone of voice and that triggered me. Nope, those are the environment changed and certain of those patterns you learned over time to respond to in a certain way so that you could survive. So what people call triggers are actually just patterns of light and sound and taste and texture and all that other stuff. And then what happens is you have some limbic brain shortcuts that you've created over time for how to deal with this stuff.
(10:44): They are brilliant, they help with efficiency a lot. Otherwise you would have to process what a doorknob was every time you went to try and open the door. And so it's useful to have these shortcuts, but sometimes some of them can be very problematic. They can help you survive, but they can also cause downstream effects. So the environment has changed, your body changes in natural response to it according to the instincts it's learned. And no babies have instincts. A lot of people talk about babies having the instinct of the two things that they talk about, babies instinctively responding to are loud noises and falling. But I want you to consider this in the environment they came from. Those are things they wouldn't have experienced. Muffled noises would've entered the womb, but not loud claps and bangs and stuff. So imagine a noise that's decibel levels higher than any noise you're used to. Naturally you're gonna react
(11:38): If you or someone is looking to drop the fbo of freedom in their life, whether that's from past trauma, depression, anxiety, addiction, or any other host of emotional and personal struggles, but they just don't know how or want some help doing it, head on over to the freedom specialist.com/feel better now and check out some of the things we've got in store for you or book a call so we can look at your unique situation and get you the help that you're looking for. Also falling. Well, they were in suspended in fluid the whole time just kind of floating around. And yes, mom might have jumped or whatever else, but they were still kind of somehow suspended in fluid, not falling through the air in a free fall in gases atmosphere. So their reactions are not necessarily instinctive, they're just reactions to something new. And so the same thing now there, there's the grip response, but is that these, you push on a muscle or a nerve and it responds to it in some way, shape or form. And so all these things are learned over time. And then your brain continues to make layers upon layers upon layers, upon layers of shortcuts. Just like a QR code on a screen, you scan a QR card and what does it do? It opens an app, it pulls up a certain thing it or a url, it puts in a url.
(12:57): And then that has a bunch of code and shortcuts to tell you what colors and what banners and what pictures and what headlines and all of that happens in just a fraction of a second. So that you say, Yeah, I went to his website and whatnot. But going to his website is a massive number of steps that were all shortcut. And so the same thing happens here with the brain. So environment changes, body instinctively responds, brain looks down, body instinctively responds according to what it's done. Now the brain looks down and goes, What is this actually that's happening? And then it goes, Oh, I recognize this even further. And so it says it's this, and then it sends that message back down to the body and now the body reacts to the brain. So the body's caught between the environment and what you think of the environment.
(13:42): And what happens is when the body has to respond to what you think of the environment, then the brain looks back and says, Oh, see the body's in that space. That's definitely, I see I told you I was right. So then the body reacts to the brain again and it creates this reinforcing loop. Let's say there's 10 different things the body has to respond to. Nine of them are your thoughts about something. And the first one is the environment itself. And so what we have to do is not sit there and try and battle the thoughts. If you train the body differently and put a new body into that same scenario, a body that's stronger, a body that's faster, a body that is smoother or more relaxed or breathing differently or has a different posture and all these other things, you will find that the brain, the responses of the brain are totally different.
(14:29): It gives different thoughts, it gives different feelings, gives different reactions, different behaviors, all of those things just because we put a different body into the situation. That's it. That's all it takes. Just like putting a different chemical into a chemical soup will have a different chemical reaction. So putting a new body, a renewed body, one that's been trained into that situation will have a different response. Case in point, it's very, very difficult for a person to be angry when they have their hands above their heads with the palms open and a smile on their face and they're looking up at the sun and they're like, Ah, you sound angry. It's really difficult to be angry like that. You will find if you tell a person, get in that position and now be angry, they will move their body in order to try and produce anger because the body's state is where is what the anger is relying on in order to be there.
(15:18): And so you change the body and then you train the body to just go down that road automatically. And suddenly all the problems that you thought you had to talk through that you had, that you thought you had to work through, that you had to process, that you had to go look at your shadow side and all these other things. They evaporate without you having had to do it because you addressed the one thing that they are built on your body. I know I've harped on this a ton. I really don't have a lot to teach people. I keep sharing the same thing in about 10 million different ways, hoping that it really sinks in. And the book that I finished writing a little bit ago, it should be out here shortly if it's not out already by the time that this is done. But it should be out here beginning of 2023 I think possibly a little bit earlier.
(15:59): But I go into deep depth around all of the history of where these things came from and where the science is. And it's a and good adventure with fighter pilot stories and playing crashes and deep science and linguistic journeys and my adventures, , stupid bike rides, all kinds of stuff. And it's just my life that I've thrown in there and all the things I've discovered so people can get what's really going on down at the core of it, which is that the body holding it and all the pieces that are nonverbal still need to be addressed. Cuz if you change the thoughts but the body hasn't changed, then it's gonna still be reacting to something and want some other thought. And so then people fixate on a new thought, they get a new addiction, they find another hobby and they throw themselves into that in the same obsessive way because they haven't handled the basic suffering and discomfort that their body's holding.
(16:49): That's what we did with this man. He came to our retreat. Now I've built these things to handle the nonverbal stuff to directly retrain the nervous system in as many possible ways as I know how. So they come, I'm having 'em talk through their stuff so that they can get the verbal part out right away. After that, I'm putting 'em through physical exercises to help them see the link between the emotional states that they have and the work that their body's doing so that they can start to see that if they toggle those, it'll change. Then I put them through some basic breathing exercises. Then I take them through some vocalizations and postural things and I show them how that fit feels. And then I have them check on it and see, wow, they actually do feel great by making these changes. And then wed do some rough housing and we play around with all kinds of different instruments that would make a person stressed out.
(17:38): And then we help them see that they can get out of that stress and we help their body learn it, not their brain. We're putting their body through experiences so that it's imprinted directly on the biology because every cell has intelligence and every cell has memory that passes on from one to the next, which is why you have scar tissue, you cut yourself in the skin. All the cells that were there at the time of the cut are gone within a month, and yet the scar remains. Why is that? Because there is memory being passed on from cell to cell. And so if we can imprint the body, a new memory of how to behave, of how to be with different stimulus, different sounds, different sight, different thoughts, different feelings, different situations, all of a sudden the body discovers an easier way out and it will naturally choose the easier way out.
(18:24): This man came and set down seven years of carrying a burden of guilt. That was not one he ever should have picked up. He went home with this brilliant, he was more talkative than I've ever seen him in my life cause I've known him for a while. He went home with this brilliant awareness of just how much it was possible for him to change things. He had gotten down in the dumps on this second morning or something, and then he had done something to shift it and he was like, Holy cow, I actually changed that. And he realized how much his emotional states were tied to what was going on in his body. Your kids, your friends, yourself, all of it is tied to what's going on in your body. Working out is a great thing to do generally because it gets the body moving, it cleans the lymphatic system.
(19:06): It's wonderful, but it doesn't do everything necessarily. And yet those who work out generally can have moments of feel good. Some people take it too far. They're using workouts as a cope, as a coping mechanism. Deep tissue work can do incredible things for certain parts of the body, especially if you know what you're doing and you know how to pinpoint it. Like I've developed over a number of years now, there's just not a number of people doing it. I know a lot of people that are really gifted with massage, but when it comes to the link between your thoughts, your emotions, and where they're being held in your body, I just don't see anybody on the planet really looking at it. I see people looking at say, Oh, well, when you're anxious, do this hack because they're still from the perspective that the emotions are the big things and you're just using your body to hack it without realizing that your body is where those started and that's where it needs to change.
(19:57): Now let's talk religion for a second. I was talking with a good friend who's Russian Orthodox, and he said, based on our discussions, and he's been to one of our retreats and he's been around what I've been doing for a while, he's based on our discussions, I was thinking all these pens that the priest would give you go to confession and they tell you to do this many Hail Marys or whatever prayers they do in the Russian Orthodox Church and this many frustrations and put your hands like this or whatever he says, I realized, what if these ancient traditions held some wisdom going, Dude, if we put the body in a different space and we get them chanting and we get 'em breathing differently, suddenly they'll feel better. And the anguish and the sorrow and the guilt that they were feeling will actually disappear. And what if these penances were literally like a technology and we just lost sight of that for a long time and now we're all just doing penances?
(20:49): Because we think that's the thing to do without the awareness that what's happening is we're changing the body. Think about it. You're put when if you're praying your body, your body into a new position, you're changing your thought process and opening up the possibility of something bigger helping you than what you thought you were able to do on your own. And you are talking. If it's out loud, then you're changing your breathing. You're doing a lot of different things to change some things. And I spent many, many nights in prayer, in fasting, in reading scriptures and all these things, and I had beautiful comforting experiences because they changed my position in that moment and they helped me get out of the funk. What they didn't do, and what I see missing all over the place is now take the task of retraining the nervous system, retraining the body to simply live different.
(21:40): That's where the juices guys, because it's one fun, is all get out because the retraining is all about things that you can do in your own life to entertain yourself in a beautiful way. I have a number of them that I've found are very effective. They are not the only ways to do it. And so we help people think through what are the things that they really help them come alive and we put them there. The more you stay in these places where you really come alive, the more you'll really come alive. I know it's not like saying much, but that's the truth. It happens. And so that's a part of it. And helping them understand where all of these negative thoughts and stresses and emotions are coming from, so that rather than having to sit there and deal with emotions and process their emotions or deal with all their negative thought processes, they can go directly to the sort source, recognizing that their thought processes and their emotions are reactions.
(22:35): They're not the real, they're not the source, they're not the root. They're reactions to the real thing underneath, Where do all the root issues come from? They come from the state. Your body's in the degree of discomfort at a deep granular physiological level that you are experiencing, and you don't even know how much there is there, how much has been built over your lifetime, Just like I don't even know all the places I still, I can feel a lot of things in my body, but there's still places where I am not conscious of what exactly is happening in there, and I'm still ferreting it out. That discomfort that's ratcheted up over time, that is where people start to get old. That is where problems start to show up in people's thirties and forties. That is why people have midlife crises. That is why marriages fall apart, because everybody's trying to make the other person make them happy without realizing that their happiness can only come from within.
(23:26): But because they've squeezed it out of themselves with a lifetime of little tiny ticks that don't have anything to do with trauma. I didn't have a traumatic childhood. A good, a large proportion of the people I work with never had a traumatic childhood. And yet they're stuck. They're unhappy, they're depressed, they're contemplating suicide. Sometimes their life is over. They don't know how to get out of it because over the course of decades, they have slowly, slowly, slowly ticked the notches and clicked the machine ever so tighter to the point where they feel like they're suffocating in their own life. It starts in the body, folks and all this perfectionism, all this people pleasing, all this attempts to go handle and do things perfect and make sure everybody's feeling okay. They all come from a fear of something that you didn't start out that way. And if your body can learn to do life that way, then that means that there's nothing wrong with you. If it can learn that it can also learn something else. And it starts be beneath your nose, right underneath your nose in this thing that your head happens to be sitting on called a body.
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