How to Respond to Your Darkest Thoughts and Feelings

We all have dark thoughts sometimes, but if you have trauma or severe mental health issues, these thoughts can be WAY darker and stronger. Usually, you are taught to just white-knuckle through it, but there is an approach to dealing with dark thoughts that will not only help you stay safe and unharmed but help you move toward deeper healing.

You can learn to see these difficult thoughts and emotions as a doorway into healing rather than merely as a liability or threat to your wellbeing.

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Transcript

May 22 - What to do with dark thoughts
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[00:00:00] So this video is about what to do when you have a really, really shitty day. I'm talking so bad that you're having those thoughts, you know, those thoughts and nothing, nothing you do to, you know, get yourself to stop thinking those thoughts is helping, like thinking about your family, your purpose, all that stuff.

It doesn't really matter. That's how these thoughts are so powerful, right? That's what a lot of people don't understand about, about thinking about ending your life. So today I got hit with this really hard. The hardest I've been hit with it in, I don't know, long time months. And I'm still Breathing.

So, what did I do? What did I do to cope with this? What did I do to hopefully make it productive? Yeah, you can make it productive. You can actually learn really important stuff [00:01:00] when the really, really gnarly stuff comes up. So first off, if you don't know me, I'm a weight loss coach. I'm not really a weight loss coach.

I help people process their, their trauma and the, I help them dismantle the structures in the mind that we erect after traumatic events to make sure they never happen again. And what happens is those tend to cause us to perceive the world in non reality based ways and non logical ways. And we make non logical decisions in how to respond.

And this creates all of our quote unquote bad behaviors. All of our compulsions, all of our places where we just get paralyzed. You know, when you're thinking, I should go to the gym. And then all of a sudden, you're like, Oh. Can't move, can't speak, can't think, right? All of that is due to these structures.

And what I do is I help people find them and remove them. They're actually fairly straightforward to [00:02:00] remove. It's finding them. That's difficult. So that's the first thing that I tried to do when I noticed this really gnarly dark stuff coming up. I was like, okay, it's here. It's right here. It's I feel it all over my body.

This is, this is something I'm trying very hard to get to the absolute bottom of is in my healing journey. I've, I've processed a ton of stuff. You wouldn't believe an absolute mountain, but there's some of this root core issues that they're really deep down. It's really hard to find them. And when you find them, it's hard to, they're slippery, you know, cause your entire life has been.

Built around them, so to speak, you know, if something happened to you when you were a kid and your mind, you know, tried to adapt or compensate to make sure that that wouldn't happen again, or to keep you safe, you're every stage of your psychological development literally happened. With this at your [00:03:00] core.

And so anytime your psychological development was impeded by that, well, too bad. You just don't get to develop that part of your personality, that part of your psyche, that part of your independent, autonomous, trusting, self loving, you know, ideal human being, right? At least, at least what we have the potential to be if we grow up in a healthy environment.

So The earlier these things are formed, or the earlier your mind starts to rely on them at a core level, the deeper they are, the harder they are to get to. And obviously I'm in therapy. I'm in a new kind of therapy called neurofeedback, where I get strapped up to all these doodads, electrocuting my brain at this point.

And You know, it's, it's new. It's, it's pretty cool. I'm really excited about the possibilities for it without getting into it too much. But I'm, and I'm a coach. I help people do this stuff every day. It's, but it's [00:04:00] tough. I don't have a john. I don't have someone to, I can't duplicate myself and sit outside of myself to Purely objectively help me navigate the hall of mirrors that is the inside because everything about your inner inner world is built to keep you bouncing away from these core issues why your mind doesn't want you to find and remove a system that is there ostensibly to keep you safe and has been there for a long time.

before just about any other thing that you've ever developed. So all my tools, all my maturity, all my skills, all my life experiences, my brain's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, that stuff's cool. But this, this thing we came up when we, when we were eight, this is really cool. This is way cooler than all of that. And I'm going to pick this every single time.

So that's what we're dealing with here. That's ultimately what it is. And this, I don't believe that thoughts of self harm. always come from the structure directly. [00:05:00] Sometimes they do. Sometimes the, the structure says the only way, the only option here is a bad option. And that, that is partly what's happening when you're having self harming thoughts, but also you can just, you can accumulate so much fatigue and distress and hopelessness and all the, what would you call it?

Like if you're, if something's crumbling to pieces, all the detritus, all the debris that gets spewed around, you know, you have to carry that as well. So you have to carry the results of the various dysfunctions that you've been living with. So we're not just dealing with the structures themselves, which are causing us to Misinterpret the world and then react based on a non logical system We came up with when we were a child in the worst time of our life when we really didn't have any good options So we had to pick something that was less than good.

So some variation of bad, right? And this can cause you to accumulate so much fear of failure Disappointment, [00:06:00] you know shame Self hatred not so much your survival mechanisms themselves driving you to the edge, but the results that they have caused driving you to the edge. Because at some point you're just like, I don't want to deal with this anymore. Yeah, the world's beautiful and amazing and I'm done. Yeah, I got loved ones. They need me and I'm done.

That's how bad it can hurt. It's not a conscious decision. It's just. It's just like when you've had a day at work and you are absolutely dead on your feet, it's like lying down. That's not, you're not trying to give up. It's not like that. You feel so fucking tired that It's, it's just like wanting to drop onto a couch at the end of a 13 hour shift.

That's what it feels like. It's just like, I can't care anymore. I just can't care anymore. And so I think people need to understand that when we're talking about self harm, because a lot of people just think that [00:07:00] it's, that's the coward's way out. You know, as they say in in. Was it Vince Lombardi or some, some famous coach at one time said fatigue makes cowards of us all, meaning you can't stand up to, to resistance when you're fatigued.

That's what fatigue is, right? We'd like to believe that we have this limitless supply of human endurance, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That's not true. Our, our supply is way deeper than we think it is, but there's a limit.

So that was a bit of a ramble. Maybe this hasn't been helpful, but to my point, what did I do today when this came up? Well, maybe this gives you some context for understanding why when this came up, I said, Oh, hey, hey, you're right here. If I'm if I'm having a good day and I'm like, I want to do some inner work and I start digging around trying to find this stuff.

It can be really hard. Why? Because. This, the pain that it causes, I deal with it all day, every day. So, [00:08:00] it's really hard to pick out the signal from the noise, right? That's another, that's another reason why it's hard to heal from trauma, because there's so much dust kicked up by our survival mechanisms, that it's very hard to find our survival mechanisms.

But there is a yin and yang, a balance to mental illness and to mental health. There's a balance to all things. And here, the balance works in our favor in a sense that when things are really, really heavy on you, they're in your face, right? Or you're feeling that weariness of life. The trick is to notice like, Oh, So, for it to get to me like this, it's got to get right up in my face.

Which means, if I turn around and stop running from it, I'm in its face. And ultimately, this is a part of me that is unhealed. This is a part of me that is hurt, was hurt, has remained [00:09:00] hurt, and the wound has just festered for decades. This is not a part of me that needs to be controlled or berated. This is just the, the best that a little me could come up with when his needs weren't being met and people were doing things to him that they should not have been doing.

And I need to see. That this is the work of a child who's trying to do his best in a really shitty situation where he doesn't have good options. So he only had overcompensation, overcompensation, fear of failure, perfectionism, overwork, paralysis overthinking, right? He only had those avenues to try to make progress.

a difficult life work for him. And he had to use those to do adult things because caretakers [00:10:00] weren't doing them for him. So is he powerful? And here's the thing, the thing that's trying to kill me is the thing that has kept me alive. At least there was a time. There was a time in, during that situation, this kept me alive.

This kept me, this, this got me what I needed to survive, not to thrive, but to make it through childhood. That's important, right? As I grew up and I got free from those people in those situations, I found better, healthier ways to meet my needs. But these things don't stop once these are getting ingrained in your mind.

That's it.

So my core, core issues are, you know, what happened to me is quite unique, but the, the things I took from it are pretty broadly shared with people who've survived trauma shame, self worth [00:11:00] on and on and on lots of compensations. Try always trying to find ways to manage the pain and pain management is rarely going to leave you healthier than you were before.

It's rarely going to leave you. more successful than you were before. It tends to just take from you. And we know that, and it doesn't, knowing that doesn't help. Why? Because we're still stuck in this situation and we can't just change our brains and get healed instantly. So that's the first trick.

Understand that this monster is just a kid. You know how we call kids little monsters? Because they act like monsters and they can make us feel as if they are monsters and yet somehow they're so little and innocent. That's what's going on inside of your brain. There's, you know, the inner child. Is there a psychological child in there?

Well, it's possible that in some form What? The, [00:12:00] the older software systems that we ran at different levels of psychological development, they could be around in some form. I'm not well versed on the science behind that. However, could the, could the infrastructure that those software programs created.

Could that still be lingering? Yes, I believe it absolutely is. The apps that that's, that that software helped create they managed to work with every successive upgrade and that's why they almost like a virus, you can't get rid of them. You can't upgrade your way out of it. Maybe, so maybe that's more of a hardware issue than software.

Yeah, whatever, not super, not an expert on computers either, but you get the idea. It's insidious and it's so, it feels so evil because it's, it's taking, taking, taking from you, but you got to turn around, you got to look at it and you got to take that opportunity [00:13:00] when things are really, really bad, realize that this is one of the best opportunities you will ever have to Find and pursue and speed up your healing.

When it gets really, really bad, turn around. Turn toward it. Don't run away from it. You will find that this stuff is not bigger than you. Literally, today, when I felt it in my body, I felt it everywhere in my body, except a little bit at the edges, where it couldn't truly, you know, be. couldn't truly overwhelm me, right?

And that's because I've gotten used to understanding that, that the feeling of being overwhelmed is just a feeling. Whereas if I really, really locate what I'm feeling in my body, it's never bigger than my body. It's always somewhere inside of my body. Which is why locating your feelings in your body is so helpful when you're dealing with anxiety, stress, panic, any of that stuff.

It will help you see that, [00:14:00] okay, no matter how bad this is, it's smaller than me. Meaning, I'm just the aquarium, the fish tank, in which this water is splish splashing around, or in which this fish is swimming around, making a big ruckus. And really, it's It's kind of like a an angry child in an empty room.

It just, it echoes. It sounds so much louder and more pissed off than it even is because of the loneliness, because we don't attend to it. And so it has to fight harder and harder and harder to get our attention, right? And that's why the pain lingers because pain is supposed to get your attention. Oh, my leg hurts.

You look down. Oh shit. I got there's an ant biting me, right? That's pain just helped you. The pain told you look exactly here, right, right below your knee and you look there and you see an ant gnawing away at your leg and you swat it away. Boom. [00:15:00] That's what pain is trying to do when you're dealing with self harm.

If you turn toward the pain, it's going to show you where the wound is. So I turned toward the pain, I turned toward the voices, the, the hopelessness, that, that weariness of like, I just, I got nothing left. I turned toward it and I just held it. And I didn't, if you can hold it, you know, the way a parent comforts a child, that's what I usually coach people how to do today.

Not doing that just didn't have it in me. I'm completely, you know, overwhelmed, so to speak. All my faculties are, have been absorbed by this, not so much a drive to self harm, but just no, nothing there to stop it. You know what I mean? So when the thought comes up of like, Hey, we should eat too many cheez its, it's like.

Okay. I don't care whether I live or die. So sure. Let's, Hey, let's stay up watching that new TV show. We don't [00:16:00] need to work tomorrow. We don't need to, we don't have goals and dreams and ambitions. It's like, yeah, no, I don't care about any of that stuff. Cause I don't care if I live or die. That's, that's what a lot of it, that's what a lot of self harm really is.

Just a lack of . Sort of an active wellbeing. And it doesn't mean it's not there. It just means that it's being repressed by all these other highly active structures of survival mechanism. So you turn toward it and I didn't, I didn't have the capacity to love it, which if you can give it some love, I just acknowledged it.

I just, I just said, I see you. And honestly, right, right in this moment, I agree with you. I agree. I don't know what to do. I don't, I'm tired of this. You're tired of it. Don't know what to do. And that is so vastly better. then trying to [00:17:00] stuff it back down or run away from it. Because sure, I could have distracted myself.

I could have, you know, said, okay, let's just, let's just move our body. We'll, we'll just, you know, exercise our way through it. Yeah. Exercise is a good way to, to deal with anxiety and depression. Absolutely. But when you're dealing with a wound, you can't exercise a wound away. Eventually you're going to need to heal.

And if you're constantly trying to exercise, trying to walk it off. This can actually make the wound worse. So when we're talking about daily self care exercise, top notch, number one, probably the best thing you can do for yourself. But when we're talking about how do we actually heal, how do we take people who are literally on the edge and bring them back?

How do we take people in 500 pound bodies and bring them back from the edge? How do we take addicts and bring them back? Right? This is, this is what we need to talk about. This what it feels like to be at the edge [00:18:00] and how to deal with it.

So when you feel really overwhelmed by anything, you turn toward it. Now, I eventually, because this was so heavy and so in my face, turning toward it allowed me to just like spend more time with it. And this is really valuable because ultimately, Every time when I've found this sort of wound and worked through it and found healing, it's, it's never caused uh, a desire or, or a choice.

You don't choose to heal, right? That, like, if your leg's broken, you can't just go, I choose healing and watch it snap back into place. No, it's not the way it works. You break your leg. You need to acknowledge and accept that it's broken and that you need help. Right? We, we treat our mental, we treat mental illness like it's not even illness.

Like it's just, like, allergies or [00:19:00] something. Like, just go, just go to the store, get some allergy pills. You know? And just sneeze and have snot run out everywhere anyways. That's how we treat mental health. Like, something that an over the counter medication should be able to not fix. Fine. And if it doesn't, oh well.

Don't really care. You can just have snot and tears and be all red from your allergies. Too, too fucking bad. Nothing we can really do for you. But our mental wounds are what keep these structures needing to work. Because when you have an open wound, let's say, are you going to be more protective or more free? I, I knew this lady, her name was Ella and she was an old African American lady. And I loved her. She was sort of like a, like a auntie, you know, like obviously not related,

and she was just the best. She and her sister, Ruth were like big [00:20:00] influences on me growing up in a positive way. Ella eventually developed, diabetes and her feet got really, really tender. And so , she had to like lay back on a recliner and keep her, her feet up. And this is kind of a sad story, but this is how wonderful Ella was.

Every time anybody would get close to her feet, she'd flinch cause she didn't want anybody to touch her feet. Cause it hurt so bad. And then she'd just start giggling. She'd laugh at herself for having this reaction, which I just, I mean, she was the best, but that's how, that's how we are. You know, when something's hurting, when there's a, there's an active wound or.

Some kind of disease state or not. We're not well, we flinch really easily, really easily. And so that flinching is for you, smoking, drugs, alcohol, food, sex, working too hard, staying up too late, all the, all the stuff, right? That's what we're doing. We're just [00:21:00] flinching. Ella wasn't choosing to flinch.

Her mind was just making a snap decision. The same part of the mind that causes people to OD on heroin was the exact same part of the mind that was causing Ella to flinch to try to prevent harm from happening to her body, right? And so in Ella's mind, it was actually working properly. There was pain. She needs to protect her foot.

Her brain's trying to protect her foot. That's what it's there to do. And for the heroin addict, The dysfunction is merely in the fact that the brain has identified the problem as something that only drugs can solve when actually the problem isn't anything that drugs can solve. The problem is something else, right?

The problem is the actual wound. So, on the really dark days, you turn toward it, you notice When your mind tries to flinch away, you notice when you try to, you start to get distracted [00:22:00] and eventually you will learn the difference between the structure that's keeping you safe, so to speak, your survival mechanism and the wound itself, right?

Because what happened to me is different than the structure I created. To keep it from happening again, and this is a really important part of healing trauma that you have to understand what happened to you is in a sense was traumatic, but the trauma is everything that you've done since then to protect yourself.

That is what trauma is. It's all these structures inside of you that you built to keep yourself safe. And then one day five alarm fire and all of them try to go off all at once. And what it does is it just carves you up into little pieces. And so not only are you in a prison of your own making, various pieces of you are now cut off from one another.

Every little piece of you is in its own prison. And so healing [00:23:00] from PTSD is really about finding those prison walls on the outside of you and on the inside of you and picking them apart. And because

let me put it this way, all of these structures are held together with things that are not true. Notions that are not true. Facts that are not true. Beliefs that are not true. Bullshit that is not true. Things people said to you that isn't true.

And, you know, it's hard to see this in your own experience. So I'll just share you with mine. Okay. So let's see, which, which one should I pick? There's so many. Go through my Rolodex of dramatic experiences and when I was about five and a half or six years old my dad started getting really, really abusive with me anytime I did anything to sort of upset my little sister who was, had just been born. Of course, I'm [00:24:00] five. I'm in the backseat. I'm like, you know, Hey, how's it going? I'm just playing with her and oftentimes because I'm five, you know, accidentally pissing the baby off and causing her to cry.

And I get that that's stressful. It's not fun. Been there, but

I think on this one occasion that that's what was going on. I think it was happening for a variety of other reasons. I was getting, dressed down for just about anything. And at the time I thought, well, okay, I deserved it. Cause I was messing with my little sister. I was like, you know, poking her in the nose or whatever.

I was just trying to, I'm just five. I'm fascinated by this little thing, you know, and I'm bored. I'm in the backseat of a car. There's no tablets. There's no, there's no nothing. Maybe the radio was playing. And, you know, a lot of this memory, I don't remember. I've pieced it together from things that actually that my dad told me about later on, because he's able to admit to some of this stuff and [00:25:00] talk about it from his perspective and how, how awful he was being. And so he pulls me out of the car and just starts.

screaming at me, like dressing me down, like just the absolute, just taking me to pieces for what was, I suppose, an infraction, but the punishment didn't fit the crime. And a passing, lady, coming out of the grocery store or whatever And she stops a few feet away.

She goes, what are you doing? And he, he stops and he, he realizes like, Oh yeah, this is probably a little too much. It didn't stop it from happening. Oftentimes, oftentimes I would get Screamed at and not understand what I had done exactly right because I'm just like la la la la la. I've crossed the line. I don't realize it and I'm being screamed at and I'm basically I'm blacking out. I don't to [00:26:00] handle the pain and the terror of being berated like that for long stretches of time.

I started to just like blackout. And so it's hard to learn your lesson when you don't remember the lesson and you don't remember why you had the lesson to begin with. And so just kept happening more and more and more. So later on in life, if somebody accused me of something, I would just immediately assume that they're right. I obviously I deserve it. I just assume that I deserve it.

And so anytime somebody comes out of the left field with like, you're this, you're that, I'm like, okay, tell me more. Yeah, there was a time, well, basically like up to recently where you could accuse me of something. And I just, I would not have the psychological apparatus to be like, what are you talking about?

No, that's not true about me. I just, I would take on literally anything anybody said about me because of this [00:27:00] abuse. And I would figure out later, I would try to figure out what I had done so that I could prevent it from happening again. So I would, I would try to prevent getting screamed at

by trying to avoid whatever I had done to upset my dad, but I wasn't being screamed at. I wasn't being abused because of anything I had done. See, here's the trick. I was being abused because my dad was a stupid asshole. I was being five. I was doing things that six year olds do. Sometimes six year olds do things that are naughty, that are crossing a line.

They need to learn where the boundaries are, but we don't scream at them. We don't abuse them for 15 minutes straight screaming at them in the parking lot of fucking shopko or whatever it was back in that back in the day. So I was trying to solve [00:28:00] problems. We're not my fault, never were my fault, but I assumed they were because I could, I could associate guilt.

Oh, I did, I did touch my sister. I did, you know, reach over and like, you know, flicker in the nose or something, whatever I did. And so I'm like, yeah, I deserve this. And so in the future, I would just assume that I deserved abuse anytime it came my way. And. This set the stage for other people to be able to really take advantage of that.

Like my other parent really cashed in on the work dad had done. Some point she was like, I'll take the reins from here, pal. You've done a pretty good job. I think now we're going to show you what a real master can do. And

I, you could basically convince me very easily to get into a very type of relationship where I'm giving and you're taking, and that's just it. And I'm just like, well, yeah, [00:29:00] that's just what I do. And this is why I developed at a young age, a limitless ability to hold space for other people's problems and to.

Be willing to help them because that was like the only way I knew how to relate successfully was if, if somebody else is having a problem and I can help them, that's pretty much like that's good. And any other, any other outcome would be bad. So that's part of the way that trauma can create the space for you to have crazy strengths later on in life.

And in some ways, you know, anybody who has success because of trauma also has failure because of trauma. And so you sense there's, there's this huge potential inside of you, but you're also, there's all these emergency brakes being pulled and like all this inner stuff that's keeping you from reaching that potential.

And so the shame and everything just mounts. Right. frustration and [00:30:00] eventually you're just like, yeah, I'm done. I'm done trying to drag the 10, 000 pounds of bullshit uphill all the time. It doesn't matter whether I deserve it or not. It doesn't matter if it's right or wrong. I'm just tired. I'm just tired.

I've tried to find ways to, to rid myself of this. I haven't done it yet and today I'm tired and I'm ready to lay down. And if, if, you know, the grim reaper came from me right now, I'd be like, like I'm catching an Uber. I'd just be like, all right. It can't be worse. It can't be worse.

So when that, that desire to self harm comes up, right? I'm, I think it's really hard because I'm dealing with things that I was, systems I was developing at a very, very young age, five or six. And there probably had already [00:31:00] been dealing with stuff before that. I mean, absolutely. But this particular one, just by way of example, it's young enough so that it's very deep.

It's also at the core of a lot of my personality and a lot of the things I learned to become later on in life.

And so today when I had this moment of feeling like, yeah, I'm done, I turned, I turned toward it and I got to sit with that energy, whatever's left over from that time and from what happened. And by sitting around that energy. I was real close to the wound, and I'm on a shit ton of antidepressants and all kinds of stuff, so I don't have emotions, really, very often and I've cried, like, actual tears coming out of my eyeballs, twice, in the last week.

Now, when I was, before I was on meds, [00:32:00] that would be like, Tuesday, like, I'm, I was, I was, a very, very, it was always right at the surface, right, because I was in so much pain. So to, I haven't cried in, I don't know, months or years. And so clearly, I was in touch with something. And, and being able to be sad about these things.

I know it may not sound helpful, but that's the beginning of the wound healing. actually feeling the pain that's coming from this wound rather than the pain I'm causing myself to try to prevent any pain from affecting the wound. Do you understand the significance? You understand the difference there? I would rather feel the pain of the actual wound than feel the pain of all the work I'm putting in to make sure that the wound doesn't hurt anymore.

Because It's like let's say the example of pain in your leg. There's pain in your leg. You're like, ah, [00:33:00] you look down, the pain directs you. It teaches you where to look and you see a knife sticking out of your leg, right? And we don't know who did it. We don't know who stabbed you, right? But it's in there.

You've already experienced. Here's the thing. By the time the pain has shown up, the wound has already happened, right? The pain isn't, causing the harm. The pain is showing you where the harm is so you can take the knife out. And I've learned to identify that pain as good. I've learned to identify all pain as good.

It's so incredibly helpful. We said we misunderstand it completely, but in this case, when you actually get close to your wound, it's easy to feel powerless because you're like, how do, what the hell do I do with this? But again, here's the balance coming into play. The wound wounds want to heal right things will prevent that but wounds tend toward healing on their own and in living organisms.

Every [00:34:00] living living organism has some ability built in to heal wounds. Otherwise, we just wouldn't be resilient and we would we wouldn't be here. So, once you realize like okay, I'm at the wound, I have the stab wound right here, and the knife still in there. And every time that anything passes by, it hits that knife.

And it's just like, ah, it's, it's sending pain throughout my body. Guess what? If I grab this knife and I pull it out, is it going to hurt? Yes, it's going to hurt bad, but it's going to hurt probably less than a lot of the pain that it's causing. And it will allow the healing process to begin. So.

Reorienting yourself toward pain, not in a masochistic way, but in a, in a utilitarian way because the hip bones connected to the leg bone, whatever, it's just [00:35:00] reality. Pain is the doormat in front of the door to healing. And once you realize that, that there's a certain kind of pain around a wound where like, oh, this is the wound.

This is it. This is the place where I was hurt. And this is the place where I'm powerless, or I was. This is the place where somebody took something from me that I can't get back. That is so incredibly important. And you, it's going to feel powerless because you're like, it would, it would be like if I broke my leg and I need surgery.

And I'm like, I don't know how to do surgery on my own leg. Once all the bones are lined up, ? The mind can heal itself, right? And that's why we still need professional help. We still need, the same way I might need an orthopedic surgeon to put my leg back together, so that the healing process can then happen on its own.

In mental health, we need people to help us put the pieces together, and that's what I'm trying to do for you right now. I'm trying to help put the pieces together for you so that your healing can can start [00:36:00] really start and you can get off of this pain management journey and actually get onto a healing journey.

Because most people who think they're on a healing journey or not, they're on a pain management journey and pain management journeys are usually making things actively worse. So yeah, that's not a healing journey. It's just not. I'm afraid. I turn toward the wound and I sit with it. I start to appreciate what flavor of pain this is.

Oh, this is that like this is that real, that is that real pain. It's got that metallic taste to it. Like it's, it's like a tuning fork kind of feeling like, Oh, okay, this is it. And to realize how incredibly valuable that is. And so I just kept it at the surface. And I'm going to keep it at the surface and I want it here.

I want it here in the light where the doctor can go to work, where my higher consciousness can start sewing things together while I sleep, [00:37:00] literally while, while I sleep. That's part of the, what sleep does for you is when you have wounds and you're not repressing them. I'm going to There are many processes of your mind, of your psychology, that are there to heal wounds.

It doesn't mean that they go away. I have scars on me that they're not there. It's been there since I'm seven. It's never going to go away. But there isn't a four inch gash in the front of my leg anymore. Very different. It's not gone, but it's healed.

Very, very different. And, Unlike scar tissue, which is, well, I guess scar tissue usually is tougher than regular skin and places where bones heal is are tougher than actual bone. I think the same thing happens with the mind. Once it's been re knit together, and there's been care put into that specific weak place, we often have strengthened it.

You know, like, like fixing a tear [00:38:00] in a garment, you know, when, when it was, was originally all sewn together, it was done with a machine, but once you see like, oh, we got the hem coming apart here let me go in there. Now that I'm going to stitch it back together, I'm going to make extra sure that it's not going to come loose again.

Right. I think that this is, this happens at a basic level with all forms of healing. So I got to go pick up my kids from school, so I'm going to leave it there. Pain is good. Finding the wounds is good. Even though it feels powerless. What you're doing is you're putting it on the table under the light where your professional helpers or you working on your own can start to really begin the healing process. And, you know, something that has been massively wrecked, a bone that's been badly broken.

Once you get it lined up six to eight weeks, and that bone's going to be good as new, better than new, right? PT or whatever, but I won't go too far down the road of that analogy. [00:39:00] I'm super late. I got to go. But I hope this has been helpful. And if you'd like more sort of off the cuff unfiltered rambles like this, please let me know.

Check out my free group, lose Weight with John. Obviously it's about weight loss and all the techniques we have for that to make it easy. But it's also about this kind of stuff. How do we begin to understand weight loss as a symptom of deeper issues and how can we get at those deeper issues? So there's a link for that in the show notes.

There's a link for that. Wherever you're watching this. Thank you for watching. Leave a comment. Leave a like, talk to you later.