Bridge to Believed: A Mindful Rant and Release

Bridge to Believed: A Mindful Rant and Release

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[00:00:08] Hello. Hello, this is Danielle Ireland and you are catching an episode of Don’t Cut Your Own Bangs. And today’s very special solo cast is coming straight from the heart, straight from my life. And into the cozy corner of the internet that we’re hoping to create here with the don’t cut your own banks community.

[00:00:26] what do I actually do when everything just feels like it’s too much? There are a lot of conversations around stress management and self-care in theory, but what I wanna talk about today is what do I actually do when the, you know what? When the shit hits the fan, when struggles just feel intense when it all just feels like it’s all tumbling down at the same time. When your nervous system is activated, when your brain is spiraling, when your chest feels tight, when your stomach drops, and you still have to be a person in the world because that is really where the rubber meets the road when everything falls apart and.

[00:01:03] It’s not falling apart so much. You’re still functioning enough to meet the demands of your day, and it’s just really fucking hard. What do you actually do? And this is, or rather, what do I actually do? This is what I wanna talk about today. Because the reality isn’t, there are so many days, and I, of course, you know, I am an advocate of self-care.

[00:01:22] I’m an advocate of boundaries. I’m an advocate of stepping away and taking breaks when you need them. And there are also days. This is a self-guided journey. This is a choose your own adventure. There are some days where opting out maybe isn’t an option, or you have to show up when it’s hard or maybe uncomfortable.

[00:01:39] How do you get through it in a way that actually is in service of you and potentially in service of the people around you? And I had one of those days yesterday, which is what inspired this episode and what I was able to access. In real time and then through reflection felt so appropriate and so, and I think in so many ways, universal to what the clients I work with and my friends, the people in my life and community experience too.

[00:02:11] So I’m going to try to kind of duly blend. Talking about myself and then talking about the content. So I’m gonna try my best to not distance myself from my own process by talking about what a person would do. I’m going to use myself as the example. And also try to extrapolate where this can be more generalized or can be more specifically applied to you.

[00:02:37] So bear with me as I probably shift from speaking in the first person, to the third person, to the you, to the me. but it’s all coming from, I think, a really good place. And it’s important for us to explore together ’cause the best things in life are shared yesterday. To give you a brief bullet of, of all the different factors so that I don’t get too caught up in the story.

[00:03:00] Um, I had a, have, have, still have a dog, 14 years old. Her name is Emma. if you’ve been listening to the podcast for a while, she sometimes is an accidental guest co-host on the show. I found out while I was on a Disney cruise that she had a growth on her hip and got an appointment with her Monday to get it checked out, and then she was signed up for surgery on Tuesday and we, that brought up a lot of feelings that I wasn’t ready to sit with.

[00:03:31] I also had terrible, terrible sleep. I have had an ongoing off and on challenge battle with my relationship with sleep. I’m 41. Everything I’m reading and pretty much every conversation online says that this could be perimenopause.

[00:03:48] So I’ve had a health journey, a wellness journey, a supplement journey, trying to get a good grip on that. And that particular night I. Felt like I was right back to square one. It was like I had made no progress and I just had terrible fitful sleep. I would wake up and then I couldn’t fall back asleep, and then I had to be up at five 30 to get my dog to the vet and also help get my kids out the door for my husband to take them to school so that I could get the dog to the vet for her surgery.

[00:04:18] It was just crunchy. I was exhausted. It’s emotionally charged and then seeing. Distressing news on social media, seeing things that really, as a, as a person and as a woman in the world, it, it hit a really raw and tender place. It, and it touched on. And rather than focused on what it was, what I can tell you was how it impacted me.

[00:04:43] It, it, I felt in that moment, like my. Progress. No matter how hard I try, no matter what I achieved, no matter what I accomplish, it was never going to be as important as what men in my field do. It wasn’t gonna be taken seriously. It wasn’t going to be of impact, and it was of less value and worth less.

[00:05:05] And though cognitively and the more involved version of me knows that that’s not true, there is a thread and an undercurrent of fear and insecurity that sometimes when pushed, which is. That’s what pain points are. It activated. A feeling, it activated a feeling in me. And I was experiencing, I think a lot of, when, when it’s coming in from all sides, I feel like an ache in my chest, a drop in my stomach.

[00:05:33] I want to rage, scream, or cry. And mind you, all of this was happening between five 30 in the morning and 7 45 in the morning. And that was the start to my day. And then I had a. Full workday ahead. Okay, so that’s the scene. We’ve said it and I probably gave more detail than I needed, but you know, this is a podcast.

[00:05:52] We’re here to talk. Right? It was the perfect storm. This was the perfect storm, and it was like the perfect confluence of life events. And I still needed to show up for these clients. Nothing about as hard as everything was that I just described. It’s not unique. It’s not special. I wasn’t the only one having a hard morning that morning.

[00:06:10] I am sure. And. It still sucked. It was a lot. And then I had people that I was committed to showing up for and seeing I wasn’t in a place to put myself in a positive mindset. This would’ve been a point in time where toxic positivity, trying to find something to feel grateful for, trying to put a positive spin on a tough situation when so much of it felt uncertain.

[00:06:32] It just, it wasn’t accessible and it wouldn’t have worked for me at that moment in time. Or also premature devils advocating, well, what you have to understand about all these factors, like the logic hat, putting on the logic hat or trying to see where someone else maybe could have been coming from, that wasn’t accessible to me either it, it would’ve felt invalidating and it just would’ve made me angrier or.

[00:06:55] Explaining something away. Again, the logic hat would not have worked or trying to fix the experience before acknowledging it now and trying to fix the way I was feeling without actually acknowledging it. I’m not sure what that would have looked like in real time, but I, I know that for the support system.

[00:07:16] In my life, there were attempts to try to, what can I do? Like what can I do to help? And there really was nothing. That could have fixed or changed what I was feeling in that moment. There’s nothing that could have come from outside the house. Whatever work needed to be done, it had to be done inside.

[00:07:33] And so that’s what we are going to talk about here and what I hope will help shed. Either some comfort or offer some clarity or help you access some curiosity when things just feel like too much when you have a morning like I had, or a day like that, or even worse. Whenever I try to talk myself out of something, before I fully acknowledge and express it, I am robbing myself of the energy I need to actually move forward.

[00:08:01] I just wanna be really, really super clear that the process that I used and the process that I wanna share with you is in no way about ignoring, suppressing, bypassing, or trying to negotiate with reality that is exhausting, it’s depleting, it’s soul sucking, and it doesn’t work. It, it just doesn’t work.

[00:08:21] It’s not sustainable. It’s not really, just don’t do it. What this is about. Is acknowledging what is true or the truth that you have access to in that moment. Because there are capital T truths that are non-negotiable and lowercase T truths that can shift based on how you feel.

[00:08:39] And there’s a quote that I’m gonna reference again, but it makes sense in this context that when you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change. And so what I’m talking about in this moment is acknowledging the truth, the lowercase T truth that might be conditional to the moment, but still needs to be expressed by you.

[00:08:55] And then allowing it to exist, giving it the time and the weight that it deserves. And then relaxing your grip. Now relaxing your grip, actually like releasing the emotion can only come after it has been fully acknowledged. Fully expressed. And I wanna talk about what that actually means, because I think that the fear, now, putting on my therapy hat, not my personal hat.

[00:09:23] I think that the fear is if we let ourselves experience and express an uncomfortable emotion, that we will stay stuck in that and that it will never stop. Your pain has a bottom. Your pain has a bottom, and your story has an end. An emotion in and of itself has a shelf life of approximately 17 seconds.

[00:09:45] What. Exacerbates or perpetuates or prolongs. That is when we have a feedback loop of cyclical thinking or a pattern of thought that leads to grasping for more unanswerable questions, or we enter into a courtroom in our mind where we’re debating and arguing a. Point with somebody else that isn’t in the room with us.

[00:10:05] It’s the type of thinking that isn’t leading you somewhere new. It’s leading you to more similar thinking and it’s going to drag you down. And that’s a really hard habit to catch, to be aware of, to bring a presence to or to break. But that is what I’m hoping to help share, at least through my own experience, what that can look like today.

[00:10:25] This is where a meditation that I used, I actually used this. Could be a tool to help you access some of this for yourself. Now, I’m gonna try to do something new here. I’m going to try in the podcast to describe the meditation and if you have experience with meditation or if this lights something up in you and you wanna just take the description and take it and make it your own, you can.

[00:10:52] But what I’m not gonna do is. Do the meditation in the podcast because if you are like me, you’re listening in the car or you’re listening in places where you’re doing two things at once. So what I’m going to try to do is explain the meditation and then I will try. In a separate place to actually make the meditation for you to access.

[00:11:14] So this is called, I call it my bridge meditation. And I set the scene where I am, essentially, I’m in like a grassy field, and then there’s a river and there’s a bridge. And the important part for what you need to know is you need to get to the bridge over the body of water Now.

[00:11:31] How that looks, the color, the flora, the fauna. You can make that as personal as you want. Once you’re on the bridge and standing on the bridge, what you’re gonna notice is there’s a large woven basket on the top, railing of the bridge, and then there are several and various sizes, smooth river stones, river rocks, and again, it can be as big or as small as you want.

[00:11:51] now the process becomes, each stone is representing a thought, a person, a challenge that is stuck in your mind. It’s, it’s, the, the debate with someone that keeps repeating or the comment you can’t let go of, or the facial expression that you aren’t sure what it means. But if you let your feelings.

[00:12:12] Have a bottom for me. I was able to get to a place where what my, what my emotional body was telling me based on how I was feeling yesterday was, I’m not believed. I’m not safe. I’m alone, I’m not valuable, I’m not capable, I’m not worthy. And I know that sounds heavy handed, that could be a really sad Sarah McLaughlin song, but it was true.

[00:12:36] It was lowercase t true to how I felt at the time and. It’s a residual, like anything you clean there, there’s a little bit of residue. There’s some residual that I’m still in process of healing, transmuting, transforming, and, and growing, and these life experiences, everything coming at once brought these, brought these stories up for me that I’m not safe, that I’m not heard, that I’m alone.

[00:13:01] And so based on. And it, it’s, it’s very intuitive too, but I would pick up a stone and that particular stone, that river rock, represented that statement and represented that story or represented that person. And I put it in the basket until I feel like I’m done.

[00:13:19] And once I feel like I’m done, I name the stone as I place it in the basket. And then I place both hands on the basket. Because again, I just wanna reassure you eventually everything that needs to be put in the basket will you will run out of things for the purposes of this exercise. I’ve never let anybody through this that had stone, after stone after stone and was never able to stop.

[00:13:43] But you’ll know when you wanna stop both hands on the basket. You push and however hard you imagine yourself needing to push it can be is these can be small stones, big stones, but you push them over the railing and they all fall into the water and now the water is running over these stones. And then what you do, you turn around, you go to the other side of the bridge, and

[00:14:02] you just watch the water flow. Over these stones, these stories, and for me, the first part took about five-ish minutes. And then for about 10 minutes, I just imagined this river flowing because that’s where I wanna be. I wanna be in the flow, I wanna be in the energy of the flow. I wanna move like water over and around challenges, bumps, stones, stories.

[00:14:29] I wanna be able to move through life with ease and And that allowed my body to express what it was experiencing and what it needed to express. And then through the power of imagination, meditation, imagination, you call it what you will, I was able to be present with them, and then I was able to relax my grip.

[00:14:51] I don’t wanna say let them go, because that also can invite a sense of, I’ve let it go. It’s gone. I don’t have it anymore. it’s not, it’s not present with me in this moment. I’m not in pain still at this moment, but some lessons bear repeating sometimes I, I probably will have to do this exercise again.

[00:15:11] , But what I’m talking about more succinctly and more realistically. That meditation allowed me to relax the grip I had on, I’m not safe. I’m alone. I’m not believed. I’m not worthy. I’m not capable. The grip relaxed and now, now my nervous system, my body, it’s grounded.

[00:15:35] And it’s feels safe enough to then explore the next part because again, the whole point of this, what do you do when it’s all too much? What do you do when you’re getting hit from all sides and you’re still trying to show up for the responsibilities in your day?

[00:15:49] this won’t sound like a very wsa one with peace and love. But here’s the next step. So after I relaxed my grip, I rage journaled. I rage journaled. I relaxed my grip, but I was, it wasn’t like the emotions went away. I wasn’t not upset anymore. I wasn’t, my feelings weren’t gone. I just, the vice grip I had on them relaxed, my body relaxed.

[00:16:14] And then the emotion that came to the surface that needed to be expressed was anger. And I haven’t had access to, I think healthy anger. For a lot of my life, and I know that that’s not unique to me. It’s certainly not unique to a lot of women, nor is it. There are also plenty of men I’ve worked with who don’t have access to healthy anger either,

[00:16:31] When I say healthy anger, any emotion you feel is a healthy emotion. What is often chastised, rebuked, rejected is not the emotion itself, but how the emotion is expressed. And we often associate anger with aggression. Anger does not have to mean aggression. I, the part I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t have had access to what I needed to express when I rage journaled if I hadn’t done the meditation first and I journaled for about 15 minutes.

[00:16:59] Now, you may hear this and you’re like, God, that’s pretty indulgent. And I will say, in so many respects, I feel so lucky that before I had to actually show up for my first client appointment, I had. The time, probably because I had to drop off the dog so early, but I actually had time to do all this before I had to show up.

[00:17:17] So I’m sharing my experience, and it may not look like this for you in the time that you need it, but this process can be personalized in a million different ways. So it took me about approximately 15 minutes to fill about three and a half pages of saying everything that I wanted to say and exactly the way I wanted to say it.

[00:17:38] I just got it out of my head because the internal dialogue, the internal debate, the mental courtroom, the reproving, my case, the re arguing, my point, or the re-litigating a conversation in my mind that is exhausting. That is so exhausting.

[00:17:59] And what I started to notice was not in the moment. Not in that exact moment that I rage journaled, but I, I got it all out. It was only upon reflection later that night that I was really able to, to feel and see the shift that happened for me by letting the anger be expressed as anger and not try to dress it up or package it in a different way What I was able to see in hindsight was that what I was writing, what I was fighting, and what I was trying to prove was actually a pattern within me of not feeling believed, wanting to feel validated, wanting to feel safe, that predated. Anything that had happened in that moment. The things that are so rooted in us, the things that are hard to shake, the patterns that we find ourself caught up in a lot, they tend to have a history.

[00:18:57] Rarely, if ever, is the thing that we feel stuck in just about the moment and. What it brought up for me was pain points, sticking points, residue, residual ick that had been collected over time. That started when I was probably really young, and so I was able to even loosen my grip further on the story, the lowercase T truth, the story that I was holding onto from that day.

[00:19:29] Once I realized, oh, this isn’t just about today, once I saw that there was a root pattern here. The way that I showed up within my intimate relationships, within my client relationships, the conflict that I was perceiving, I really recognized, this isn’t actually about conflict between me and another person, or me and a public figure, or me and a systemic societal issue.

[00:19:54] This, this, what I’m experiencing in this moment is. Not feeling, I don’t feel safe enough within myself to believe the truth of my experience. And so the convincing, the performing, the courtroom drama, the debating and arguing in my mind, the righteous indignation in my mind, not that those don’t also have a place outside of me, but the, the soul sucking, draining, exhausting, mental fatigue that comes from all of that cyclical thinking that doesn’t have a place to go.

[00:20:27] that I had the power to shift, and I did. I realized that the time that I spend mentally defending myself, little Danielle needed to feel believed and recognizing that I was able to almost, once I identified what needed to happen, the grip felt even looser. My stress felt less. And then I was able to actually.

[00:20:49] Offer that to myself. And there’s a couple of different ways you can do it. So if you catch yourself in a moment like this where you need to feel validated, you need to feel believed, and the people in your life don’t seem to see it the way you see it.

[00:21:00] They’re not experiencing it the way you experiencing it. you different gender. Race culture for all the different reasons that we are beautifully different and also very complex and complicated. You can look into a mirror, look into your own eyes and make eye contact with yourself, and you can say, I believe you.

[00:21:19] Your experience is real. I see you. I’m with you. You’re not alone. I’m. I didn’t, in this particular case, there was something about recognizing what, what little me needed to hear and know, and in recognizing that I felt like my need was met almost in that moment. But mere work is just another extension, another spin I can wanna offer that you can try as well.

[00:21:44] Just to take it a little bit further the conclusion that I was able to get to is that if I’m not believed, I’m not safe. If I’m not believed, I’m not worthy. If I’m not believed, I’m not valid. And so I can believe me, and in so doing can access my own sense of worthiness, my own sense of belonging and my own sense of safety.

[00:22:03] then the war died down and things got quiet. But I, I will say that that particular part, the sort of light bulb moment at the end didn’t happen. Immediately. So in terms of like the chron, the chronology of the day, I rage journaled, had some coffee and water, ate a little bit more food, did some work, and did completely separate from myself, which honestly probably helped a lot to get out of my own mind and into another experience.

[00:22:32] And it was much, much later in the day that that final bit came. I was so in a way that I don’t think I’ve experienced. As acutely or as in real time. I was so grateful to the process, to the work that I’ve been showing up for, for so long because I, I think that, to me, as challenging as it was in terms of like the energetic toll that it took, I was proud of myself for being able to get there and I, I offer that as an example.

[00:23:08] Because I do think as somebody who sort of sits on my side of the conversation in the therapist chair, it’s so easy to, it’s I’ll say, cozy and comfortable to try to separate myself from the work that I wanna put into the world. I am still very much in my own process and I find too that as much as I would love a manual, as much as I would love someone to tell me, just tell me what to do when I’m struggling, I also know that I internally rebel against instructions sometimes as much as I may think I want them, I will pick them up and put them down, or I’ll procrastinate.

[00:23:48] But when I can see myself in someone else’s experience that ignites. And invites inspiration for me, and then I’m able to apply it in my life in my own way. And so that was my hope in sharing this with you.

[00:24:03] It all feels pretty fresh, but I actually feel good about doing it because. Once. Once it came full circle, the residual ICH was able to dissolve a lot. And then the other thing that I actually wasn’t planning on talking about, but I will add I was able to take the insight from what I was experiencing and then.

[00:24:28] Have a conversation with someone about it, and that conversation would have absolutely been a criticism. It would’ve been layered in judgment. It would’ve been, um, it would’ve made them defensive and it would’ve left us both probably feeling more distant and separate, then bonded and connected, and. by not changing my story, not putting a positive spin on it, not trying to make it palatable and not trying to make myself calm, but through giving myself the gift of processing my feelings, my death grip, and my fear of not being believed or worry about how it would be perceived relaxed enough so that I could actually reveal the tender core truth.

[00:25:14] That was what needed to be expressed all along. And then through that vulnerability, the other person was able to actually receive it. And even though I don’t know if it would’ve made a difference in my healing, how they responded to it, but I will say in this case, they received it really beautifully.

[00:25:32] like I had no idea. I had no idea you carried that. I had no idea. You thought that. and I’m so glad you told me. and I’m paraphrasing, but that is the heart of what my truth was met with and that I just firmly believe from like the core of my being that it would’ve been a very different interaction if I had been carrying around that mental chatter all day, press pause.

[00:25:59] Go through my day and every moment in between all of the responsibilities of my day, my mind is going back to that moment, and then I have the opportunity to unpause and reengage who, that would’ve been a doozy. Oh. Like I do not, I do not envy that version of myself at all. That would’ve sucked.

[00:26:20] And to put my therapy hat back on just for a moment, the, the cost of not really being aware of what you’re bringing into an interaction. And I see this, this is true in the story that I’m sharing about myself, but it’s also a pattern I see play out a lot in my therapy sessions with clients is that. When we bring unintentionally our internal dialogue and our internal debate into our relationship, we’re fighting a battle that really isn’t about the other person, but they become the face of, and so the vengeance we seek, the, rescuing we need, whatever need we have that we’re trying to have met.

[00:27:03] We just insert someone new into the story and now we’re fighting the same battle on a different person and it’s not fair to them and it’s not fair to you. And it won’t work out the way you want it to. We bring our history with us and healing happens within relationship.

[00:27:18] Like every relationship is co-created. So that’s not my way of saying that. Every fight is a negative product of what I’m saying. But what I will add is that the healing that happens in relationships is actually healing and. Constructive, not destructive. The more aware we are of what we, what we own, and what we’re bringing to those interactions,

[00:27:41] thank you for joining me on this solo cast today. The one of the final thoughts I wanna offer is that the more lost in thought we are, particularly the thoughts that hurt us, the less able we are to show up in, in the world and for the people we love in the way that we actually want to. In my most beautiful expression, I really believe we’re all trying our best.

[00:28:04] But we can’t show up as our best, and we can’t put our best into anything that we do, whether it’s nurturing loved ones or nurturing relationships, nurturing careers, nurturing ourselves, that the more lost and thought we are, the more lost we are.

[00:28:20] Safety, stability, grounding, that sense of calm, that sense of home can start from within. We can do this. This was a practice that was serving me in real time.

[00:28:34] So if today. Or yesterday or tomorrow is one of those days where you are, you are just getting it from all sides. I just first wanna acknowledge, you’re not alone at all. You are in good company. We all have days like that. And that being able to relax your grip, add a little bit of breath, sit with it, even when it’s uncomfortable for.

[00:29:01] As long as you can and as safely as you feel capable doing that for just a few moments, a few minutes, you have more access to bring your focus back to what really matters most to you. Thank you for being here as always. Your time, your care, your attention. They mean the world to me. Two products that I wanna put out there for you that I have made that the heartbeat of these two offerings is with all of this in mind, how can we turn emotions into allies, not obstacles?

[00:29:35] How do we use emotions like information? How do we have real conversations with ourselves and with others? With the things that matter most. The Treasure Journal, the journal for Unearthing You, it’s a seven part guided journal that I made a few years ago for my therapy practice. I had clients who would come back with a blank page and say, I don’t know what to write about.

[00:29:54] So. Came up with exercises, questions, sentence stems, prompts together, and that’s what inspired the journal. It’s accessible on my website. It’s also linked in the show notes, danielle ireland.com. And last but not least, is wrestling a walrus for little people with big feelings? It is a book inspired by my daughter She is a little one with big, big, big feelings and a fiery personality and. Every time I was met and confronted with her big emotional feelings, I found myself also experiencing very big emotions and big feelings too. Writing this book was a love letter to her, but also a love letter to the little in me that is also just trying to figure it out and put one foot in front of the other each day.

[00:30:36] And it was written with a lot of heart, illustrated with a lot of love and beauty. my illustrator Omar, on hell just. What a gift, what a talent his artistry is. But yeah, those are always available to you anytime. And then, stay tuned because I will be doing my best to try to make some new offerings with meditations, and I’m gonna try to start with this bridge meditation.

[00:30:59] So stay tuned. I’ll give you more information about that soon. But thank you so much for being here, and I hope you continue to have an incredible day.

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