"Too Good to Be True"⎮ How Trauma Is Causing You to Reject the Best Things in Life

In this episode, John tackles one of the greatest tragedies of unhealed trauma: the fact that it causes us to vehemently reject good things in life. 

• Why, every day, millions of people actively reject opportunity, money, and caring relationships.
• How childhood trauma creates a false frame of reference that warps adult judgment.
• How this warped judgment causes good people to reject good things.
• Why people get scared when they near a genuine opportunity for change.
• Why we distract from the misery of our lives (and not just to avoid misery)
• How this phenomenon forms a negative feedback loop that traps us
• How we can slowly but surely free ourselves from this trap
• How we can expand the possibilities for our lives by identifying and dismantling this malformed aspect of the psyche.

To inquire about 1 -1 Coaching with John - email John at john@oakesweightloss.com

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Transcript

Change is Too Good To Be True
===

[00:00:00] Today, I'd like to talk to you briefly about why any significant step towards healing a truly better life, free of the things that are really dragging you down, feels too good to be true. Now, you may be thinking, well, no, that's, that's not true. Sounds great. Sign me up. But I see this all the time with potential clients who, you know, they, they want to talk to me because they love my content.

They're like, Oh, I've never heard anything like this. I've never heard anybody who seems to get it the way you have, you know, you've lost the way you understand what it's like. Right. And they're basically just reading down this list of all the reasons why they're, they're going to sign up for coaching, right?

They're going to, it's a slam dunk. They're going to want to work with me. And I've seen so many times how these people, they walk right up to the line and they're like, yeah, send me the link, sign me up. And then boom, they're gone. One of the many reasons this happens is that there's a voice in our heads that says, [00:01:00] Well,

so people, there's this weird middle ground where people want to have confidence. They want to invest in something that could make their lives better, that could solve their issues. They come to me because I make a compelling case that listen, you're not going to lose weight unless you deal with the inner stuff.

That's basically the origination of your weight issue to begin with. You're not going to change your weight unless you change your behavior and you're not going to be able to change your behavior unless you change the internal structures that are regulating and automating large portions of your decision making and your.

Daily experience and your behavior. And so people are like, yeah, yeah, this is, this is what I need. I can't, I don't need a pill. I don't need a certain workout program. I don't need a diet. Like I need to really reshape the way I think and how I treat myself. And sure. There are people who. [00:02:00] Once they realize that, Oh, I'm going to be dealing with my stuff, that that's intimidating and scary.

And that's totally understandable. And that's something that I don't think people need to be as scared of. I mean, I understand if somebody is very scared of it, however, in coaching in practice, it's never overwhelming. If it's truly overwhelming, we back off and we find a different approach to where it's not overwhelming.

By definition, we're not going to make progress in this inner world. If we're, you know, spinning into oblivion, that's not how we make progress in the inner world. We make progress one baby step at a time, making sure we're on footing, making sure that we're on solid ground before we go charging forward.

It's a methodical slow and steady approach that really is. The kind of thing where slow and steady really does win the race, right? You, the fastest way to do something is to go smoothly because the fastest way to do something is to do it once and not have to, you know, redo large portions of [00:03:00] it.

So no, the inner, the inner journey, while it's difficult, it's probably still one of the most difficult things you'll ever do. You don't need to be terrified of it, especially if you have a knowledgeable coach who's been back and forth down this trail many, many times,

but there's something else that happens. And it'll, it'll happen particularly before people ever start coaching. And it doesn't have to do with fear of their inner world. It has to do with the fear that it's too good to be true. See, when I was first starting out, you know, I was, I was new to, you know, pitching services basically.

And I didn't like it. I was very uncomfortable with it. So I. Would basically just try to be like, Hey, I'll help you lose weight. We'll do dah, dah, dah, dah. And honestly, when I was not as good at conveying the full value of coaching and what's possible, I think.

It scared people less because now when I tell people [00:04:00] confidently like, yeah, we can do this, we can help you get over your emotional eating. We can help you get remotivated. We can help you accomplish more significant change than you could accomplish through weight loss surgery or through taking a medication like Ozempic

and certainly a, deeper transformation than you could possibly have through any existing diet program or exercise program on the market and covering things that most people don't have access to in therapy. You know, that's why psychologists and therapists come to work with me because as much as they've looked for the answers to these particular questions.

In their milieu, in their professional environment, in that, in that space, they haven't found those answers yet. And to me, that's not so shocking because, well, that's why I've had to find these answers because I went deep into the mental health world to try to get help and I couldn't find what I was looking for.

So I, by definition, I understand how therapists and psychologists feel when they kind of come to the same conclusion of like, man, I really. [00:05:00] I really want to, to be better. I really want to change and I'm searching for whatever therapeutic modality or whatever frame of mind is going to help me do this.

But they just haven't found it yet. And there are, I think quite a few reasons as to why that is, but I'll say that for another day. So it goes like this. Someone will come to me because they are very interested in my approach to weight loss and really to, you know, mental health and overall healing from trauma, all that good stuff.

And they will book a call or they'll email me asking questions, wanting to know, how do you actually do this? Right. And the better I explain to them the mechanisms by which we will change, the more real it becomes that, Oh, I really could get free from this stuff. And then something happens. And some, some clients will literally not [00:06:00] clients, people who don't end up becoming clients.

Usually we'll say some variation of it just sounds too good to be true. And I, in that moment, I think two things. One, you have no idea, like you're just, you're dabbling at the edges of an idea of what it could be. You haven't even experienced it yet. You don't know what too good to be true even is yet.

And I've had many clients say to me, if you told me what I was going to. Accomplish this, this far into coaching. I wouldn't have believed myself because this, whole coaching paradigm is just so different from what's on offer. And that means it's going to feel different and weird, but it also means that .

It's not going to operate according to the same rules and timeframes. And it's not going to move to the same beat of the drum of everything you've ever experienced so far. Right. So that means it's not limited in the same way, everything you've tried so far. That's the whole reason I'm here. These [00:07:00] were the things I were, 420 some pounds and.

Extremely unwell, riddled with chronic pains and PTSD symptoms. And,

So people will come to me in these consultation calls, ask me to explain to them why what I do works and how it works. And then I do that and their brains freak out and they go, well, this is too good to be true. Oh, wait, it works.

Oh, you actually answered my questions. Oh, okay. It must be too good to be true. What in the world is going on there? Well, today I want to explain why any genuine solution to your core issues is going to feel too good to be true by definition and why that is a logically invalid thought that our brains perceive as extremely logically valid. And it has to do with the experience of the child who ends up [00:08:00] creating these survival mechanisms to begin with. And really, once I explain this to you, you're going to see so much of the tragedy of human limitation, especially as it relates to trauma, mental health, self worth issues, self esteem, all these things and how, how deeply sad it is for people.

For any human being to be stuck in such a situation okay, so let me tell you a story. Let's take our avatar Cindy, right? Cindy grew up in a home where she was made to feel like she had to take care of her Because they were childish, selfish maybe they were addicts in their own right to food or substances.

And Cindy had to learn to do adult things before she was. Intellectually or emotionally ready. And she had to care for herself in ways that really [00:09:00] could not replace the care and support of a parent. And she experienced abuse, and these abuses shaped her worldview to, to make her believe that.

Large swaths of her mental map, right? The decisions she could make, the possibilities for her life were closed off to her. Because I can't go to that part of the map because I'll get hurt there. That's where I get hurt if I go there. Right. So I have to avoid all those types of situations and all those types of people and all the types of circumstances that might prompt an abuser to do that to me.

Right. So now we have to darken huge parts of the map. Psychologically, we're not allowed to act in certain ways. We're not allowed to express certain emotions. We believe at our core. We learn truly in childhood that care, nurturing being physically nourished, [00:10:00] having shelter protection, that these all come with a heavy cost for children that grow up in a healthy environment, being cared for, being fed, being clothed, being nurtured.

Cleaned having, you know, teaching them hygiene or doing it for them, teaching them good habits, holding them when they're having a hard day allowing them to express their emotions, even encouraging it. Children who grew up in that environment never feel. Like any of those things were an imposition to their parents, and that's the hallmark of a good parent where a child's development and their, their humanity never becomes an imposition on the parent's life or their worldview or what they're willing to allow, et cetera, when a child being a child and.

Going through the phases of psychological development that children go through when that becomes a problem [00:11:00] that the parent tries to stand in the way of or that a parent checks out from we create instances of abuse and neglect where we effectively punish the child for being human for going through normal human phases of development or just experiencing and doing very human things.

And this is a problem because children have no other recourse. If the parent does not provide what the child needs, that child does not get their needs met. End of story. There is no plan B. There is no other way. To get your needs met. This is why children are powerless.

And the only power they have is their ability to encourage, manipulate, cajole adults into caring for them. If you've ever been around a child who is upset, you will know what I mean. Children are born with this ability [00:12:00] to get your attention. I remember holding my three week old daughter and just like not really knowing how to comfort her and I was still totally new to the kid thing and her cry was so blood curdlingly loud.

I, I.

Broke my soul. Like it took years off my life. Like it just, the sound of her cry was like nothing I had ever experienced in my life. And it's for a reason. Like I, my brain is made to respond to that cry 

if I don't care for this child, then the species doesn't survive, then my genes don't pass on. So, everything that our brains are wired for

biologically, children have these mechanisms. That helped them be seen, heard, attended to. However, in practice, we know that this doesn't always work. We know that oftentimes children are punished for crying . They're punished for trying to [00:13:00] force adults into meeting their needs. And from a very young age, adults can start to see their children as impositions on their life.

They can start to see their children as the enemy. Of their wellbeing. And this, this can happen at so many different levels. I mean, I think most parents can admit that. Yeah, there was a day or two where they were like, I'm supposed to love you, right? Cause right now I just, I, I don't want to be on this planet.

Well, if there was a button I could push that would send me into the cold darkness of space, every parent's been, you know, taken to their limit. But we know that there are levels, many, many levels, you know, a parent who, kind of checks out a little bit versus a parent who starts being abusive or a parent who goes and gets drunk and doesn't come back for a day. 

Like the hugely different levels to this stuff, right?

So

usually when people begin to [00:14:00] tell me about their parents before they tell me what their parents did to them. They will stop and say, well, you have to understand my mom was raised by so and so, and she had these problems and my dad, , he had a hard life. He had this, this, and this. And I remember trying to speed up the history taking process when I was first going into community mental health services in 2018, where my brain was completely going through a nuclear meltdown.

So I just came in and brought the, a few pages of like, Listen, here's the history. Like let's save time. I need to get help. Like, let's get down to business. And I remember my summation of my relationship to my parents. Most of what I wrote about was their upbringing and the things that had shaped them.

And children who have been mistreated often do this. They're so concerned. With what's motivating the actions of the parent. [00:15:00] Why? Because the parent is one of the key nodes of danger in their life. We've had to become anthropologists of our caretakers in order to be able to completely understand and hopefully predict all their movements.

Why? So we can stay safe. So we can avoid the certain little landmines that we know are there, avoid the tripwires, avoid triggering these adults into acting selfishly, abusively, neglectfully.

So for Cindy 

Her mom would leave her with her older sister who was only nine years old and Cindy was six years old and her mom would go out with her friends. Her mom was friends with these like biker types and she would do cocaine and get drunk and whatever. And some nights if her older half sister wasn't there, then her mom wouldn't have a babysitter.

So the mom's solution to that was just to have [00:16:00] all these bikers come party at her house and they would go into her bedroom and just kind of party in there. And meanwhile, Cindy's in the living room. Watching TV and nobody puts her to bed. She doesn't really want to go to bed because she doesn't feel safe in her own house.

She kind of was waiting for these people to leave and eventually she just falls asleep on the couch, watching TV

situations like this showed Cindy that She couldn't trust her mom to keep her safe. She couldn't trust her mom to keep herself safe. Her mom was putting herself in horribly dangerous situations in order to God knows what. So there was no sense of safety. If, if Cindy wanted to feel safe, she had to make it so that she felt safe.

So Cindy grew up in a paradigm where the idea that she could just, you know, have somebody put her to [00:17:00] bed at night and give her a kiss goodnight and tuck her in and read her a story. The idea that somebody could do those things that would show a child care as they drift off to sleep. That was. Not real part of her life.

She never experienced that. More often than not, she experienced either a perverse version of it or. Or a complete lack of nurturing, a complete, complete lack of care.

And this is just this one situation where this was happening. Obviously her mother was not clued in. Her mother was off in Lala land. If not high and hung over most days,

pretty much leaving Cindy to fend for herself in most situations, most days, most of the time. So as a child, when Cindy was six years old, she didn't have anybody she could go to. To get her needs met. She didn't have [00:18:00] her needs being met. End of story. End of story. So her psychology developed around this baseline understanding that in reality, There is no safety, there is no care, there is no presence of others.

And if there is, it comes at a great cost, a great risk, only through a great amount of work and attempts at controlling the situation and trying to manipulate caregivers into doing their basic job. So either way, even when Cindy did get taken care of, she had to work for it in one way or another. In adulthood, right?

If we, if we met Cindy, she's 51 years old. She's got two kids. Cindy works at a bank. She has a big girl job. She manages some people. She's responsible for large amounts of [00:19:00] money being moved from here to there. She's a member of, community organizations. She does things at her church.

She's, she's a fully formed adult, right? But

the baseline reality of her psychological development was that to be nurtured, to be cared for, for her to have safety. She had to work for it. And it was never going to be there unless she made it happen. So the idea that you could be safe and at peace at the same time are, that is not a possibility in her mind, because she's never experienced a reality where that was true.

And because of the way her mind identified potential dangers

and places of lack.

It took that view of the world into her adult life. She is [00:20:00] still, even though she is in an adult body and large portions of her brain have matured to, to the point where she can have responsibilities and show a lot of excellence in many areas of life. When it comes to her self care, when nobody else is involved, she's good at taking care of other people.

Right. She learned how to take care of her mom. Because if she took care of her mom, her mom was more likely to be able to take care of her and that's not a position she should have ever been put in. So Cindy has no problem with meeting her responsibilities at work. She has no problem with meeting the responsibilities of being a parent or being a friend or being a caregiver.

She has no problem with generosity toward others, but when it comes to, okay. I'm home, I'm alone. The only context Cindy has ever had at the core of her psychology is that this is an incredibly dangerous place to be. When I'm alone, I'm unsafe. Why? Because no one [00:21:00] ever modeled what an adult consciousness meant or could do for her.

So when she grew up, she had no framework by which to parent herself. She had no mental framework by which to say, Oh, this is the role that an adult mind plays in the life of a child's mind. This is the, my mom was this way for me and taught me how to be like her. My mom knew how to keep me safe and she, over time, taught me those skills and transferred all that to me so that I could go out in the world and keep myself safe.

This is basically parenting in a nutshell. I'm going to feed you and keep you safe. until I can teach you sufficiently how to feed yourself and keep yourself safe. And then you go off on your own, you live your life, you procreate and the cycle [00:22:00] continues.

But if you don't have a parent who is able or willing to keep you safe, let alone teach you pass along that cognitive framework of how a human keeps, keeps themselves safe, then you will enter into life completely unmoored with no, no software installed to keep yourself safe.

No hard wiring that allows you to care for yourself no matter what. So when stresses build up in your life, the activities that start to go are the ones that costs you the most cognitively. These are the things that are not automatic. So if no one ever taught you to be automatic and habitual about brushing your teeth, then that means that every day it's time for you to brush your teeth as an adult.

It takes conscious force of will, right? Whereas for people who were just brought up brushing their teeth in the morning and at night, they, it's not even a thought. It's just completely [00:23:00] automated.

So Cindy has learned that every form of care in her life. The format that she was given all through childhood, and she had no other format given to her. There was no other opportunity to, to receive a different format. She had her mom and the situations her mom put her in, and there was nothing else. Only framework, the only worldview that could have possibly been conveyed to her is one where if she needs care, it's going to come at a cost.

It's either going to come at the cost of her safety, her peace, her rest, right? It's going to cause her to put herself in danger. At risk at harm to put herself to work in the need to control circumstances or people to predict circumstances and people for her to care for herself, to [00:24:00] be cared for, to be safe is a full time job for Cindy.

And

at the core of this exists, this belief that she's not worth. Being safe, why? Because again, this is the context that was forced onto her mind when she was a child. There was no other context that her brain could learn from reality as, as a child. She was not worthy of care because. Her parents didn't treat her like she was worthy of care.

They treated everything else in their life like it was more important than caring for her. So she ranks her self worth lower than just about everything else in life. The mind can only learn what it's taught.

So She lacks self worth in adulthood. She's able to give, give, give to people outside of herself. She's able to meet meet responsibilities, right? She's able to spin the plates and to keep life moving, [00:25:00] but for her to do all those things, it requires, it's very hard for her to do those from a place of flow, natural not having to overthink things.

She has to overthink everything. She has to predict just to watch out for, for danger. She has to avoid large portions of the map because in childhood, she learned she can't go there. She can't express this. She can't express that. She can't say this. She can't say that she can't ever let her, let her guard down.

She can't go to sleep at night without some sort of security blanket.

Her brain is just riddled with rule sets about what she has to do to be safe. So now Cindy is 350 pounds. She's entering her fifties. She has been using food. As a coping mechanism, as a security blanket, as a nighttime routine for her entire life. Why? Because when she was 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 13, she didn't have access to a lot of substances of [00:26:00] abuse.

She didn't have access to a lot of things that could remind her of the love of a parent. But she did have a fridge, and from the moment she was born, she learned to associate food with mom. She learned to associate physical nourishment with the care of a parent. So, when she was able to figure out how to pour a bowl of cereal for herself when she was six,, her brain clicked onto something and said, Ooh, we are providing for ourselves the care that we are not being given.

So I want you to imagine that, Billy received 10 units of care in childhood. If Billy's parents suddenly started to not care for him, he would notice, oh man, I'm at five out of 10, right? If they started to really not care for him, he would notice, wow, I'm at two out of 10. The problem for people like Cindy is that she never even got to five.

She never even got to four. She. In [00:27:00] her mind, care only goes up to three. So this is the first problem, because a bowl of cereal, even though it can't possibly give you the 10 out of 10 care and nurturing that a parent should provide to you, but because your parent has been providing you so little care the ability of food.

To nourish your body and functionally give you care starts to feel pretty close to the maximum of what your parents have been giving you. Sometimes it might even feel like more. Sometimes a bowl of cereal comes at a lower cost than what it would cost you to get the care you need from your parent.

Sometimes the bowl of cereal can give you a four when you'd have to work overtime just to get mom to give you a three. So no, logically. Serial is never going to come close to giving a child the care that they need. It's not going to come close to giving them what they lack. However, from Cindy's perspective, [00:28:00] Cindy has never known anything beyond three.

So if cereal is a four at best and a two at worst, it's still way better than nothing. And at its worst, cereal feels like two thirds of as good of any of the care that her mom would ever give her. And in a context where she has no other options, a two out of three is way better than a zero out of three.

And we will cling to two out of three.

every single time. If the alternative is zero out of three or one out of three.

If a bowl of cereal is the closest thing you have to love, then you will cling to it just as much as a child would cling to a loving parent. In adulthood, this means that Cindy clings to food with the same vigor that a scared child would cling to a loving parent. But cereal is not a loving parent.

Cereal cannot [00:29:00] truly provide her the care that she needs.

Even the most enjoyable bowl of cereal can only provide her a three or four out of the 10 that she knows she needs. And her heart knows that she needs, she feels pain, right? The gap between what she can provide herself and what she needs that 10 out of 10, the rest is supplanted with pain. She feels that in the form of pain.

And this pain just continues to drive this cycle of. Lacking care and then trying to supplant that care with something that's going to end up costing her. Cause that's the other thing is that by relying on food for care, she's making an exchange. She's having to exchange her health. She's having to carry around excess weight.

It affects her sleep, her quality of life. It's going to shorten her life. Most likely It's going to make and harder to take advantage of.

So Cindy. [00:30:00] Is doing two things. She's always looking for the next meal, looking for that next hit of that three out of 10 level of comfort. Why? Because she's never experienced anything better than that. And if she did experience anything better than that, it came with such a cost that it's like, ah, that wasn't worth it.

Yeah, I did this and it got me up to five, but it was a truly awful experience. Whereas. You know, serial, the downside is it's not immediate. The downside is, you know, more long term. I don't have to pay the price today. So to speak, I can enjoy my three out of 10 and I can deal with the slowly mounting consequences later.

And this is why in the moment it's logical to do seemingly illogical things. Why? Because of the non logical context that was forced. Onto the mind of the child.

When a child was forced to identify a three out of 10 [00:31:00] as a 10 out of 10, that child is making a non logical conclusion in their mind, but that doesn't mean that the conclusion isn't as firm as anybody else's conclusions. It's the best available to them. If they've never experienced four or five or six or seven, then three might as well be 10.

It's about their frame of reference. So over the years, you know, into her thirties, she starts to really notice like, okay, my brain is fully developed. I can see, my failings in sharper relief. I can sense more and more that there's a deep fault line or a number of different fault lines at the core of my psyche.

And this is going to cause more and more problems. And it's going to make her feel less and less safe inside of her own mind. Let's say one day Cindy gets on social media and she's scrolling and scrolling and she's listening to people talk about intermittent fasting or take this magic pill or drink this mushroom tea and this will make you lose weight.

I know you've got to [00:32:00] just right. She's scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, looking for all the solutions. Nothing ever works. Why? Because nothing ever gets to the root of the problem, which is that Cindy can't lose weight she's never found anything that's worth more to her than food. Everything that she's ever found is just expectations.

Hey, here's a plan you can do to lose weight. Great. Here's more work you can do to try to get the, the wellbeing that you deserve. And she's so addicted to these programs that demand work from her because why? Because she's associated every scrap of care and love that she's ever gotten with having to earn it through work.

And this is why the. The influencers that are demanding her to be disciplined and to commit and to, you know, grind for it. They're so seductive by, because that matches the roadmap that was imprinted upon her from day one, you can't just have [00:33:00] wellbeing. No, you've got to earn it. You've got to work for it.

And one day she finds somebody on Tik TOK or YouTube or Instagram that's saying, Hey, you if you're struggling to lose weight, it's because of this core issue and that resonates with you. And you're like, dang, tell me more. And you learn more about this new paradigm for

Getting to the root of your behavioral issues, getting to the root of the false, the non logical structures that were created in childhood that have kept you stuck in cycles of delusional behavior, thinking that I'm going to eat cereal and then I'm going to be okay when that's not true. That's, that's a lie, but we, we will cling to the lie because we've never experienced anything better.

And so you come to someone like me and you're like, Hey, I'm really interested in this. Tell me more. And I explained to you, okay, you're going to be able to let go of [00:34:00] food as your, you know, life raft and, and right there, part of her brain. Here's great. I want, I don't want to be beholden to food anymore.

The other part of her brain. Here's what? No more life raft. We're going to drown. And that's just the reality. Everyone's brain is probably hearing both things. It's just a question of which voice is louder and in what quantity are they hearing those voices?

And then for good reason, they, they asked like, okay, but how can I, how could I possibly let go of this life raft if I'm clinging to it? Like it's a life raft. And. You know, someone like me says, okay, well, here's why, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? I obviously could explain it in great detail and I do, but to some extent, Cindy's brain is hearing somebody talking about level four or five, six, seven, eight, nine, and 10.

And she's like, That I've never experienced that you might as well be talking about flying on a spaceship to an alien planet doesn't compute. I don't [00:35:00] have a frame of reference for that being a real thing. So it doesn't matter how logically I lay out how somebody can walk themselves out of that deeply unhealthy mental world that's been created by abuse and neglect because all their brain is hearing is this exceeds.

The parameters that we've been living in our entire lives.

So this is why if getting healed and getting free from the things that are keeping your mind stuck, feel too good to be true. Yes, of course. Of course it feels that way. If you've never experienced safety that didn't cost you an arm and a leg, if you never experienced care, that didn't cost you an arm and a leg, if somebody walked up to you and said, Hey, would you like a weekly paycheck?

And you said, sure. And they handed it to you. And you were like, well, [00:36:00] what do I have to do for the week? And they're like, nothing. You'd be like, what, what's the, what's the catch, right? You would start to get defensive. You'd get scared. Like, wait, what? Hold on. You're tricking me. What's the, this is going to be, if you're not telling me what, what the, what I have to do for the week, then you're trying to, this is going to be something worse.

You're going to end up making me do six months worth of work for this. This is a trick.

You know, if people have been badly hurt in childhood and they go into the dating world and somebody shows up and just wants to appreciate them and spend time with them and care for them. People will get very suspicious being like, wait a second. Why, how could you possibly like me?

Like I haven't earned it yet. I haven't done anything for you. Like, how could you want to be around me? And so they get very suspicious and they start basically pushing people away.

And when we're thinking about trying to understand how the brain works, you have to imagine being a human being 10, years [00:37:00] ago, and large parts of the day were without light. The entire world was dark. There was no, there was no plan B, right? You could light a fire though. It would probably be very hard to take that fire with you.

And even if you did, it would be a very small fire. It could only illuminate a few feet around you. So your sense of safety was really around that campfire. In the daylight, your sense of safety was the horizon. And for the other half of the day, your sense of safety was the horizon. The horizon of what the campfire could illuminate.

So we evolved with these imaginary boundaries that exist to the extent to which we can see. And beyond that boundary,

there's a big question mark. And. To our minds. A question mark is a liability. The unknown is scary. But if you've been stuck in, let's call it Cindy land, right? Cindy, this is the land that Cindy has occupied [00:38:00] her entire life. And she's never gone outside the bounds of what she can see. She's worked very hard to try to make life livable at any level.

And she's going on the internet looking for solutions to her problems. Well, yeah. The solutions to her problems aren't going to exist inside of Cindy land, because if they, the solutions were there, she would have found them already. If Cindy could find the, what she needs inside of her own current existence, she would have had to have a completely different childhood where parents installed all of those things for her, but they didn't.

She doesn't have that. So by definition, everything she's looking for, everything she needs to be whole exists outside of the realm of what she's known before. This is why it's criminal that we vilify people who try to be honest with themselves about the things that happened to them.

We encourage people to ignore their victimhood and it allows them to [00:39:00] stay safely inside the bounds of what they know, but this is a prison. This is a life sentence until Cindy can, can recognize that, Hey, my childhood was messed up. Like I, there were things that I wasn't given that other kids got for free and I didn't get that at all.

And what I did get, I had to work very hard for and no wonder I'm going through life seeing dangers where other people don't see them and flinching at things that other people aren't flinching at and freaking out about things that other people aren't freaking out about. And working way too much to try to control outcomes that other people are just kind of letting happen.

Just, they're just living life, letting life move around them. And Cindy feels like she's got to keep every star in the sky and make the sun rise and set every day.

And at the end of it all, she knows she's not really in power. And so no matter how much she works, she's never truly in, in a context of safety. She's working very [00:40:00] hard to at the end of the day, be just as scared and vulnerable as she was when she was six, her experience of life will not improve until she can exceed the bounds of what she was given in childhood.

That means that as an adult. She needs to use that big adult consciousness to do some abstract thinking that she couldn't have done as a child, but she can do as an adult and say, listen, I need to go to a place. I need to experience a life that I've never lived before. And part of my brain is going to think that that sounds like a death but it's not.

I've lived in an incredibly constricted lifestyle because. I was not parented in a way that would have given me the whole world. I was not parented in a way that gave me access to large parts of my, my true potential and my autonomy. Therefore if i'm talking to someone like john and they're making a very logical [00:41:00] case as to How I could get free From my compulsive behaviors and how this could allow me to lose weight in a fairly natural and straightforward way and how this could allow me to to connect with my innate motivation to move my body without having to force everything that if that's making sense and that's speaking to my heart, but some part of my brain is saying that's too good to be true.

I have to understand. By letting my heart and my, my highest cognitive ability, my abstract thinking ability, I need to let them work together to envision a future where I can move into the unknown and good things can happen because listen. If the good things, the things I truly needed were in the realm of the known, I would have found them already.

I'm 51 years old. I'm 35. I'm 65 years old, whatever the age is. It's it's enough time. [00:42:00] You would have, you've turned over all the rocks inside the fenced in zone where you feel safe. The answers to what you're looking for exists outside the realm of what you've known

in the same way that the parenting Cindy needed existed outside the realm of what was possible for her to access, given the parents that she had

now, Cindy, I, when she was six was powerless to exceed the limits of that unknown. She was powerless to just go get different parents, right? But Cindy at 51, not powerless. Cindy at 51 is not powerless to step outside the bounds of what she's already known. What may seem like. 100 foot high walls are really just boundaries of the imagination that have been really unquestioned.

And they're there sensibly to keep her safe. So we see them as good things that are keeping the bad things out. When really, if you put up walls to keep the bad things out, you're going to keep the good things in. You're going to [00:43:00] prevent yourself from being able to explore large swaths of your life, large swaths of your potential, large swaths of.

Of everything that you could experience in life. And again, this is where, why the inner work is scary because ultimately we're just moving into the unknown within ourselves and within life, but Cindy doesn't have to go running, you know, she doesn't have to sprint straight for level 10 full abandon, right?

She could just. Take one step outside the line. She could poke one little big toe over the line and notice that she didn't die and each day start to dabble with what would, what would it look like to experience self care that didn't cost me something? What would it, what would it look like to, you know, be active and, and not Let these voices suppress it in order to keep me safe.

What would it look like to do something that's actually healthy for my body versus what my brain is telling me [00:44:00] I have to do to keep myself psychologically safe. And she can start to experiment and slowly disprove to her own mind, the falsehood.

The belief that the boundaries of her childhood reflect the boundaries of her adult potential. That is the fatal flaw. And that's the reason people come to me who need my help, who desperately need my help, but they talk themselves out of it so much so that they, they go screaming in the other direction practically, because this is too good to be true.

No, you know, what's too good to be true. The fact that some diet or workout plan is going to be what you need. The fact that that pill is really going to melt fat off your body. The fact that that, that scheme of if you just eat this food at this time of day, you'll magically lose fat. No, that's all bullshit.

That's too good to be true. And that's all you've been. That's all you've been living with your entire life. That's [00:45:00] all the bullshit that exists inside of your tightly bound existence. And if you don't step into the unknown, then unfortunately you're never going to get any tools that will actually help you because the tools that are going to actually help you lose weight are not things you've ever heard of before.

Nothing you've ever heard of when it comes to weight loss, is going to work? It's not because if it was going to work, it would have already, you've probably spent a lot of money and time trying to make those things work. And when they don't work, We come to two conclusions.

One, I need the answer must be out there somewhere. It's not this, I got to go find the answer. So we, we search, search, search, search, search. Meanwhile, we also harbor a belief that it's fundamentally our fault. The same way that Cindy harbored the belief that it was her fault and it had to do with her worth.

That she wasn't being parented in the way that met her needs.

And so the same way that a child will seek out ways to comfort themselves with cereal, [00:46:00] when their mother is not parenting them properly or at all, we adults will seek out the next best way. The next bullshit failed before it started attempt. Why? Because doing things that you know are going to fail, accomplish two things.

It momentarily distracts you from the inevitable future. That you're never going to improve and nothing's ever going to change because you will enter into delusion that, Oh, this magical pill or this workout program, or this, this new diet, this is the thing you, your relationship to that is as delusional as Cindy's relationship to the idea that cereal could replace a parent, a proper, healthy parent.

And you're not deluding yourself because you're stupid or because you don't deserve good things. You're diluting yourself because you don't believe the [00:47:00] possibilities for true change actually exist. Why? Because you've never experienced anything past level three out of 10. You've never experienced nurturing that didn't cost you something.

You never experienced love that didn't demand five, 10, 20 times what it gave you. In return, you've never been picked up and held just because you deserve it. Just because it's what you need. Just because you have value that goes beyond what you can do for anyone else. When a parent picks up a baby and cares for them, it's not because of what that baby can do for them.

Because at that point, that baby can do nothing for them except be a drain on their energy and resources. You know, it can feel like a very cynical thing to talk about evolution and the human mind and survival and how it's all just about [00:48:00] reproduction and passing down genes. Yeah, but what does that cause us to do?

It causes us as, as an organism to show unconditional love and care to something that will never benefit us. As much as we benefited it. So the drive to survive kind of forces us to value unconditional love to value giving, even if we're not going to get anything in return, why, because of something bigger,

so not only do you deserve. Love, care, safety without condition and without needing to pay it back or, or make it some sort of exchange,

the world needs you to receive things without question, the world needs you, the species [00:49:00] needs you to receive those things. Why? Because if a baby, if a child doesn't receive for whatever reason, the care that's being offered to it free of charge for no reason whatsoever, then that child will Grow up maladapted or not grow up at all.

And then when it's time for them to pass down their genetic material, to proliferate the species, they're not going to be able to do it. Survival of the fittest requires. Nurturing, it requires love, it requires giving without taking, it requires generosity from one generation to the next.

And without that generosity, we cease to survive.

So if , the generation before you did not or could not provide you the care that you deserved as a powerless child, then we need to supplant it now. It's now or never right now is the, is the only moment we [00:50:00] have. Sure. If you don't do it today, you can hopefully do it tomorrow. Right? 

But in this moment, we don't know that we're going to have tomorrow. Tomorrow doesn't exist until it gets here. And at that point, it will just be the moment. So this moment is the only opportunity you will ever have. To say yes to things that your brain can't conceive of deserving of meriting of getting without some kind of catch.

This is the tragedy of abuse and neglect is that people grow up, whole generations of people grow up holding the goodness of God. And the blessings and the love and safety that the, that the world offers where it does still a dangerous, crazy world, but where it does offer goodness, we hold it at arm's length and we say, ah, not so fast.

I'm not falling for that.

We take a [00:51:00] difficult world. And we make it a truly miserable existence. We take a world that has its dangers, has its pitfalls, has its ups and downs. We take a life that's going to have sadness and tragedy as part of it. But then we also choke off the possibilities for many, many beautiful things. Why?

Because of this drive to keep ourselves safe. And if you had to keep yourself safe from a parent. When your parent represented the world, that how could you possibly relate to your entire existence, the whole world, the whole realm of possibilities for your life, how could you relate to that in a welcoming way?

How could you possibly say yes, world? Yes. Higher power. Yes. Universe. Bring it all. Give it all to me. No. You would turtle up and [00:52:00] stay turtled up. And when somebody tried to say, Hey, let's unturtle and let's go explore this, the amazing opportunities that are there for us. You would , pull your head out of your shell quickly and say, that sounds too good to be true.

And the tragedy is that it's only. Outside of your experience, but it's still true.

And if it feels too good to be true, that doesn't mean it is too good to be true. And if it seems too good to be true, that doesn't mean it is too good to be true. And when you are living in that sort of restricted hellish, miserable existence, what the fuck do you really have to lose? The only way it makes sense to not explore a little bit is to never really look at the reality of your life.

One more episode. One more bowl of cereal. Let's just not even [00:53:00] experience reality. Let's just stay far, far away from our own life so we don't have to admit that it's not real.

We're after far more than, than weight loss here. Weight loss is just one of the many possibilities for your life.

You know, because Cindy didn't grow up this way and only has weight as an, as an issue from having a parent who was, you know, snorting cocaine with a bunch of bikers in the master bedroom. Well, she's trying to watch, you know, rug rats in the living room. She doesn't, she doesn't just suffer from weight.

There's other stuff. It's infecting every area of her life. Even the areas that appear to be more successful, even the areas that other people go, wow, Cindy, how do you do it? How do you make that look so easy? She's like, well, actually my secret is I work incredibly, incredibly hard and never rest and never experienced peace.

That's the secret, right? So in the areas where Cindy is working herself too hard, we want her to be able to find rest and balance and still succeed and maybe [00:54:00] even succeed more. And in the areas where she's abjectly failing, we want her to be able to experience success and understand that that success doesn't have to come at a cost anymore.

Love doesn't have to come out of cost. Health doesn't have to come out of cost. She can trust herself. She can do things she wants to do. Notice that she's free to do them. And then notice that she isn't. Horrifically punished for doing what she feels like doing. And then she'll notice that, Oh, the things I feel like doing don't make me a bad person.

I just learned to distrust my own sense of what I felt like doing at any moment, because that would get me in trouble in a context where I was not properly cared for or where I was subject to abuse.

So I'll say again for the last time.

Does it feel too good to be true to get healed, to lose the weight for good, to stop having to run your internal engines at 500 miles an hour, to be able to rest, to be able to put [00:55:00] your head on your pillow at the end of the day, close your eyes and sleep and sleep well. And to wake up and ask yourself, what do I want to do today?

And then do that and then watch good things happen as a result of it. Does that seem or feel too good to be true? Absolutely. By definition, it would have to feel or seem that way. Does that mean that that is the reality? No. As I've argued today, using your ability to think abstractly. And your ability to listen to your intuition, you can also recognize that no, that cannot be the truth.

It cannot be true that what's possible is too good to be true. And you have one of two choices, step your toe over the line in whatever way you can. And learn that, Oh, the boundary where I thought if I went beyond this line, I would die. That's not the boundary. Now your brain is going to immediately just push the boundary out three inches and say, well, this is the boundary.

[00:56:00] Right. And then you rinse and repeat and various different situations in life, various different struggles, various different questions, various different areas of self esteem and self doubt you continue putting your toe over that line. And it will look very, very different in many different situations in life.

But at the core. What you're doing to produce your healing is finding that line, finding that place where your brain is saying, if you do this, you will die. Something terrible will happen. You can't do X because of X. And you go, wait a second. That reflects the reality of my upbringing, not the reality of my present potential and ability.

That represents the boundaries of permission that I had as a child that represents the obligations I had as a child that does not represent what I'm truly obliged to do as an adult and what I'm permitted to do as an adult.

And if you just keep slipping. Your pinky toe over that line and keep pushing it out and pushing it out and pushing it out a little bit further. It's only going to [00:57:00] allow a positive feedback loop. Your world will get wider, which will allow you a wider base of experiences, which will help you believe viscerally and know bigger things are possible.

Because you will experience things on a very small level that disprove your beliefs about what you thought was possible. And it will start with little things like I went to the gym today and I got on the treadmill for 10 minutes. And I noticed that no one was really looking at me. No one was probably thinking bad things about me.

I had a good 10 minute workout. My brain started telling me all this stuff about how I'm a piece of crap and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I just noticed it. And then I, I finished my workout, wiped down my treadmill and walked out. My brain was like, it's not a workout unless you do 30 minutes. And I just walked out.

Look, check that out. Watch. I just stuck my whole leg over the line and I watched my brain telling me that it's not allowed, but then I just watched reality happen and reality disproved the lies.

Please, please [00:58:00] take this message to heart. If you know that you grew up. With some baggage because of the decisions or parenting styles or the abuses of caregivers, authority figures, teachers, coaches, whatever.

Then here are two things. One, what happened to you was not your fault. That was based on the decisions, the very poor decisions, the selfish decisions of other people. What's going to happen to you from here is going to be based on what you're willing to allow for your life. And I hope you'll be willing to allow yourself.

To see the lines and stick your toe over it anyways, and watch reality disprove the false boundaries.

If you are looking for a framework for how to do this, specifically in the realm of ending emotional eating, ending shame around dieting and exercise, learning how to lose [00:59:00] weight effectively in ways that are sanitized of shame and judgment. Learning a different, simpler way of going about it that is highly personalized and personalizable

learning how to troubleshoot things with grace, you know, prevent plateaus from happening to begin with. If a plateau does happen, here's what we do. A strategically sound way of, of approaching weight loss that operates on the same biology as somebody who's trying to get, you know, trying to drop 10 pounds before beach season, right?

The biology is fundamentally the same as Somebody trying to lose 10 pounds as somebody trying to lose 200 pounds, but the strategy is different, right? The length of the game requires a different strategic approach.

And most people on YouTube on social media are not teaching that strategic approach. They're talking to people who need to lose 200 pounds as if they are just You need to get ready for beach season when, no, very different strategy is necessitated. And those people also need freedom from emotional eating and they need help reconnecting with their innate motivation.

And [01:00:00] if that's you and you're ready to stick your toe over the line, even a little bit,

And you would like assistance as you do that guidance council, then please reach out about coaching. I have a number of tiers of options for, different levels of need and, , different budgets, john at Oaks Weight Loss. J O H N at O A K E S weightloss. com. If you're not in my free weight loss community you're missing out lose weight with John, not the old Facebook version. It's on a new website.

That's much better. I've got a lot more free content on there. I've got free courses. I even do free coaching sessions sometimes. And if you're new to my world and my, view of weight loss. You can go into that free group and watch the free courses there and start to get a sense of like, okay, this is how this approach works and say, okay, okay.

Maybe this is something I want to learn more about. I want to learn more about serious, full on coaching, and then we can schedule a time [01:01:00] to talk about that. So thanks for listening. If you appreciated this, I hope you'll share it with someone and I hope you'll let me know in whatever way that

it helped you or impacted you.

Thank you for listening. And we'll talk to you soon.