Transcript

Self Awareness · Wanzology

Self Awareness Howdy! How-dowdy-dowdy duty, how-dowdy-dowdy duty, da-da-dada-da-dah!!! What's going on everybody? How you doing? It's Wednesday, which means it is another episode of WANZOLOGY, I am your host, The Wanz!! I'm glad that you're here. I hope that you are glad that you're here 'cause as we all know, it's good to be anywhere, which is much better than being nowhere. Today on the fabulous program, I want to talk about something that I'm kind of going through right now. That is a journey towards self-awareness and what self-awareness you may ask yourself? Well, what it is is part of a an attachment style. Everyone has this thing called an attachment style. It's based on when you were a kid and whether you had healthy relationships with your parents and your parents taught you how to regulate your emotions. Now, I didn't get that. I got something different. What I got was parents who, really, I don't think understood how the seventies worked. I mean, they had a great time raising my brother and sister, but they were raised in the late fifties, early sixties, and here it was the seventies with disco and free love and a volunteer army. I don't think that they understood the pressures and, uh, situations that I went through in school. That caused me to start figuring things out on my own, and as we both know from watching any law show, anyone who represents himself in court has a fool for a client. But I didn't know that. I didn't realize that until probably two years ago. Two years ago, two and two and a half maybe, is the first time I ever heard of attachment styles, and I found that I had consistently left serious relationships the same way ever since leaving college. To me, this was a shock. I mean, I didn't realize what was going on. It was about the similarities, not the differences. What I found in those similarities is that I would fall for somebody and everything would be great for a while, and then all of a sudden I'd feel weird about how they felt about me, or I'd get insecure about whether they liked me or not, or whether this was just an experiment or whether it was just a matter of time before they figured me out and we're gonna leave, and that caused me to freak out a little bit. That freaking out involved jumping to conclusions. It involved lack of self-confidence. It mainly involved me losing any kind of semblance of control of my emotions. I don't mean that in the way that you lose control of your emotions, it's like all of a sudden you're just crying for the sake of crying, it's not like that at all. I was afraid. I was afraid I was going to screw up at every turn matter of I was afraid my next move was going to be the death nail of whatever relationship I was in, regardless of whether things were going great or not, I just figured it was a matter of time. One of the relationships, once we figured out that we were really, really in like with each other and started getting serious about it, I looked at her like she was nuts. “Do you know who I am?”, I would say, “Do you understand me?”, it was like the old Icehouse song, “You gotta be outta your mind, you're crazy! Crazy to want a man like me! You gotta be outta your mind, you're crazy!!” Little did I know, I was describing a, a self-fulfilling prophecy. I was digging my own hole. As the relationship went on, things got a little deeper and marriage was talked about, then I lost my job and then all of a sudden I was mentally lost. I didn't really understand what the hell was going on with me, but I knew I was really, really scared. I was really, really scared that now that I didn't have a job, I wouldn't be enough for this person. Now, that changed a lot of my behaviors. When I latched on to this attachment style stuff, I found that I had an anxious attachment style, meaning, I was always sure bad things were gonna happen because I didn't feel worthy of receiving love, nor was I qualified or experienced at giving love. It's cost me a lot, ‘Mr. Undaunted’, you know, call me crazy, repeating the same thing over and over again, and expecting a different result. So again, I delved into my attachment style to try to find out more, get more information. What I found out is I was not very skilled at self-regulating. Meaning, unbeknownst to my partners, they would do one thing or another and it would trigger me and take me back to when I was a kid, and those inadequacies that formed my attachment style. For example, you want to get me really, really mad? Interrupt me while I'm talking. Interrupt me while I'm trying to make a point. It's taken me a long time to not really get angry about it, but when I was a kid, that was one thing that you could never do to your parent. You could not interrupt your parent when they were talking to you. You’d get the backhand if you were lucky. So as I got older, feeling misunderstood on so many levels, I learned how to talk a lot. Not all the time did my speech make sense. So for some it was hard to follow. For me, I knew exactly what was going on in my head, but I think my mouth couldn't keep up. Well, what that led to is getting unregulated. Meaning, that I would get emotionally driven in one direction or another. It almost always came off as anger, but it felt like frustration. I felt like, “I'm speaking English. It's the only language I know!!”, but whoever I was speaking to, they didn't seem to understand or they didn't acknowledge the worth of what I was intimating to them. It was messed up, I was messing it up and that's, that's the way it is. Pops used to say, “The first step to solving a problem is admitting you have one.”, well, now I'm 40 years later admitting that I have the same problem and I haven't been able to adequately fix it. I found this practice called mindfulness. Mindfulness is a practice of being aware of how you feel both physically and mentally in any given moment. Meaning, that something that just happened to you reminded you of a feeling you had in the past, nor are you in the future afraid that something is going to happen like it did before, and this is really difficult for me, It just is. There are so many weird little crevices of inadequacy that have been feeding my-self (two words) for decades, and since Rome was not built in a day, it's taken me a while to even get to this point, and I'm not even sure whether there's a solution. What I do know is that when I read up on self-regulation, and when I read up on triggers and emotional intelligence, all these places lead me to a place called self-awareness. What that means is being aware of how you feel at any given moment. What good is that you ask? Well, let me tell you, being aware of how you feel and being honest and open with your feelings doesn't always sound like a great idea, but actually it is a great idea. If you take a moment to think of why you feel a certain way, most times it's pretty easy to determine, “Well, you know, I'm feeling kind of down.”, “Oh? What's the weather like?” “Oh, it's gray and it's rainy and it's cold.”, as opposed to being warm, bright and sunny. One of them will make you feel great. The other one not so much. It's a lot like that. My frustrations center in my inability to communicate my needs effectively with my parents. I learned all that stuff from watching other people when I was in college and beyond. There were a lot of things I did not know about being in a relationship. I just knew that when I liked somebody, I liked somebody, but I didn't realize that my emotions were being driven in such a direction I was almost out of control. I the feelings, I mean, it's like a fire hose, they're just spraying everywhere. I'd watch people and see them in their relationships and I'd try to mimic those. Yeah, those results weren't so good. A while back, I met a person who I, I dated for a while and we both had this drop dead honest communication. I had to be perfectly honest with this person and say, “You know what? I'm not attracted to you in the sense that I just want to be physically and joined at the hip and marriage and all that other crap.”, I just really like talking to this person because we were straight up, honest with each other. We had no secrets between each other, and to this day, this person is one of my best, if not my best friend, because I can say anything to them, anything. And that became my blueprint for other relationships. I realized that I'm not gonna find a carbon copy of that relationship, but there are certain similarities that I can look for in another person if I was looking for a romantic relationship or if I was looking for an activity partner, maybe I just wanted someone to go to the movies with, but there were certain things I was looking for in, uh, an acquaintance that went to the next level and started developing a friendship. Now in the year 2026, dating is challenging at best when you're in your thirties, but when you're in your sixties, I might as well be digging for gold in Wisconsin. It's almost impossible. The majority of people my age have either had a long-term relationship, raised their kids, gotten divorced or their spouse died, or they never married, or they and their spouse just decided to call it quits 'cause it just wasn't happening for 'em anymore and they're like the best of friends. Me, not so much. I mean, I have sort of those results, but not, not really. So to become self-aware, I am starting a program where, number one, when I start feeling agitated or frustrated or sad or something like that, I have to be aware of myself enough to stop. I need to stop and identify the trigger. And then once I identify the trigger, where do I feel it in my body? Because humans transmit a lot of stress to their body. These books that I've been listening to, they talk about an overactive amygdala, right? And that is the fight or flight, little being that's inside of us that is only there to help keep us safe, but it doesn't know from what everything is dangerous. Everything is a danger to the system, so we have to, we have to mitigate this, I don't know what it is, run!!! Flee!! And before my frontal lobe can get involved, Lord knows what I've said or done. There are techniques that are going to help me, I hope, recognize when I'm starting to drift into this amygdala zone and maybe do some breathing techniques. Maybe do some awareness of what I'm feeling and where in my body I'm feeling it. Breathe. There's a technique that is, uh, breathe in for four seconds, hold it for seven seconds, and then breathe out for eight seconds. I'm already starting to practice that, so that when I feel a certain way and I don't know really what it is, it'll be more intuitive for me to work on this breath thing. I'm also adding a little more meditation time in my mornings because I need to be self-aware. I can't count on, nor should I count on someone else to regulate my emotions. Being self-aware is a gift that a certain percentage of people just don't have. It's like 20, maybe 40%. So once again, I'm a minority, I'm special, I'm weird, I'm different. Wasn't enough being black, I also had to be different in other ways. I can either take that and label myself as ‘special’ in a good way or ‘special’ in not so good way. I'm not sure. I just know that I can't continue doing what I have been doing because it always leads me back to the same place, and that place is full of disappointment, guilt, shame, none of the things that I really want to feel because I felt them before and it sucks. So if you can kind of understand the similarities between what I've been talking about and how you've felt, just go online and look up attachment styles and read the definitions of the, of the attachment styles. See which one resonates with you, especially if you're emotionally driven. I have to reconstruct my self-talk. I have to be able to soothe myself because I've been looking for someone to help me soothe for decades, and it's never worked, at least not for a long period of time. They tell me that everyone deserves to be happy. Some days I'm not so sure. Some people are meant to be in purgatory.They're not in hell, and they definitely are not in heaven. They're in this middle place and they can't get out, and a lot of the time, that's what I feel like. Music is my release. It lets me escape the four inches between my ears. It is the pleasure that I reward myself with so that I'm not thinking myself into the ground. Self-awareness. Look it up, check it out. I'll keep you posted on how things go. 'cause you know, hopefully it, it won't be treated like a gym membership where like, oh, for the first three weeks I was doing really good and then one day I didn't want to do it. I didn't wanna do the work. And then next thing you know, I haven't been for three weeks and then the next thing you know, it's like, well, the bill's due. Well, I haven't even gone to the gym, why do I even…and then you cancel it. Hopefully this won't be like that. Your results may vary. I really appreciate you listening and if I've said anything that resonates with you, maybe reach out to the WANZOLOGY page on Instagram and, uh, drop me a note, I would really like to see if there's anyone else wandering in the wasteland. Okay? Till next Wednesday, take good care of yourselves. Take care of somebody else too. When you're doing something for somebody else, it feels really good later!