Latest / Why You Got Sick: How Emotion Drives Chronic Illness & Healing in Women / #45: The Weight of Everyone Else's Problems Is Secretly Fueling Your Chronic Illness

Transcript

#45: The Weight of Everyone Else's Problems Is Secretly Fueling Your Chronic Illness · Why You Got Sick: How Emotion Drives Chronic Illness & Healing in Women

0:00
[SPEAKER_00]: There is a world renowned philosopher and psychiatrist who said real freedom is being disliked by other people.
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[SPEAKER_00]: For a woman who cannot stand the thought of someone being upset with her, that is a hard pill to swallow.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But what if you're healing depends on you being able to do exactly that?
0:18
[SPEAKER_00]: This is why you got sick.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I'm Teclody Francesco, certified mind-body practitioner, and certified holistic life coach.
0:26
[SPEAKER_00]: This podcast is for women living with chronic illness, autoimmune disease, IBS, chronic fatigue, PCOS, andometriosis, migraines, fibromyalgia, or persistent symptoms that no one can fully explain.
0:40
[SPEAKER_00]: Twice a week we look at how emotion drives chronic illness in women.
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[SPEAKER_00]: One episode goes deeper into the pattern beneath the symptoms.
0:48
[SPEAKER_00]: The other gives you a quick way to interrupt the cycle.
0:51
[SPEAKER_00]: If you're done organizing your life around symptoms and flare-ups, this is where that changes.
0:57
[SPEAKER_00]: This podcast shows mind-body education.
1:00
[SPEAKER_00]: It is not medical advice and is designed to complement, not replace your medical care.
1:05
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's begin.
1:08
[SPEAKER_00]: In this episode, you'll discover why almost every problem you're having right now at its root is a relationship problem.
1:15
[SPEAKER_00]: I'll teach you an easy hack to separate what is actually yours to deal with from what belongs to somebody else.
1:22
[SPEAKER_00]: And we'll dive into how caring the weight of everyone else's problems can worsen physical symptoms and flare-ups.
1:29
[SPEAKER_00]: At the very start of this episode, I said something that was probably very tough to hear.
1:34
[SPEAKER_00]: That real freedom is being disliked by other people.
1:37
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's come back to that.
1:39
[SPEAKER_00]: That idea comes from Alfred Adler, and I learned about his work through a book called The Courage to Be Disliked.
1:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Over the years, I've read more than 100 personal self-development books, easily.
1:52
[SPEAKER_00]: Most of them I could relate to in the moment, and there were a lot of similarities between them, but I can't say many of them really changed the entire course of my life.
2:01
[SPEAKER_00]: This book did, and now I use Adler's philosophy in my teachings, because I've seen it free women from the things that have been caring for years.
2:10
[SPEAKER_00]: Adler said that almost all your problems are relationship problems.
2:15
[SPEAKER_00]: And when I first heard that, I was super skeptical.
2:18
[SPEAKER_00]: I thought, where on Earth is this going?
2:21
[SPEAKER_00]: But the more I learned, the more curious I became?
2:24
[SPEAKER_00]: He said that if you could take other people out of the equation completely, most of what troubles you just wouldn't exist.
2:31
[SPEAKER_00]: the stress, the worry, the guilt, the resentment, the things that keep you up at night.
2:36
[SPEAKER_00]: It always involves another person.
2:39
[SPEAKER_00]: So if relationships are where the problem lives, they're also where the answer lives.
2:45
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is where Adler's philosophy gives you something incredibly tangible to work with, something you can actually use to change your life.
2:53
[SPEAKER_00]: He says that in any situation, you have to be able to separate whose responsibility something truly is.
3:00
[SPEAKER_00]: He calls it separating your tasks, because most of the pain and frustration and emotion we carry in relationships comes from crossing over into someone else's lane, and trying to control a task that was never ours.
3:12
[SPEAKER_00]: And that is a pattern I see in women constantly.
3:16
[SPEAKER_00]: You've crossed into everyone else's lane.
3:18
[SPEAKER_00]: You're carrying their responsibilities, their problems, their tasks.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And you have no idea how much it's costing you.
3:25
[SPEAKER_00]: That's the pattern.
3:27
[SPEAKER_00]: Let me show you what this looks like in real life.
3:30
[SPEAKER_00]: Think about a mother and her child's homework.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The homework is the child's task.
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[SPEAKER_00]: You know this logically, but watch what actually happens.
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[SPEAKER_00]: You're the one chasing it, reminding negotiating, sitting over them, feeling your stress rise the night goes on and it's still not done.
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[SPEAKER_00]: By the end, you're more worked up about it than they are.
3:51
[SPEAKER_00]: Here's what the book lays out, and it's so much cleaner than how most of us operate.
3:55
[SPEAKER_00]: Studying and doing homework is the child's task.
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[SPEAKER_00]: your job is not to order it, nag it or force it.
4:04
[SPEAKER_00]: Adlers view is that forcing a child to study is like dragging a horse to water and shoving its head under.
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[SPEAKER_00]: All it does is destroy their independence.
4:13
[SPEAKER_00]: What you do instead is separate the task and make one thing clear to them.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I'm ready to help you whenever you want, but I'm not going to force you.
4:21
[SPEAKER_00]: That's it.
4:22
[SPEAKER_00]: You've named that the homework is theirs, and you've left the door wide open to support them the second they reach for it.
4:28
[SPEAKER_00]: And then you let the natural consequences happen.
4:31
[SPEAKER_00]: If they choose not to study, they're the one who carries the consequences.
4:36
[SPEAKER_00]: The bad grade, falling behind, facing the teacher, that lands on them, not you.
4:41
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is the part of the book that hit me the hardest.
4:45
[SPEAKER_00]: It's the reaching into their task that makes you miserable, not the homework itself.
4:50
[SPEAKER_00]: Taking on something that was never yours is what wears you down.
4:54
[SPEAKER_00]: Now take that same principle into your relationship with your partner.
4:58
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a fine line between supporting the person you love and reaching across into what was always theirs to own.
5:04
[SPEAKER_00]: You feel the argument you had still sitting there unresolved.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So you go soft, you go over explain.
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[SPEAKER_00]: You do the emotional work of smoothing it over so things can feel okay again.
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[SPEAKER_00]: You tell them how you feel and then you keep going, managing how they took it, whether they understood you,
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[SPEAKER_00]: But look at where your task actually ends.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Your task is to communicate honestly and respectfully to express and share what you need to clearly and with care.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And that's it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Whether your partner understands it, agrees with it, changes because of it, stays or leaves over it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: All of that is theirs.
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[SPEAKER_00]: You don't get to reach across and decide or do it for them.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And when you try to, you end up caring both hoves of the relationship.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That's not closeness.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That's you taking on the responsibility for two people's feelings.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Now let's talk about family, especially in a dynamic with a younger sibling or the friend you've somehow always been responsible for.
6:07
[SPEAKER_00]: They call you with the latest problem.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The job going wrong, the relationship falling apart, the decision they can't make.
6:13
[SPEAKER_00]: And you don't just listen, you catapult into action.
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[SPEAKER_00]: You're building the plan, working out their options, following up to see if they did the thing you told them to do.
6:23
[SPEAKER_00]: You're lying awake at night carrying the emotional load of a situation that isn't even happening in your own life.
6:29
[SPEAKER_00]: And when they don't take your advice, or they make the choice you predicted was going to hurt them, you feel like it happened to you.
6:37
[SPEAKER_00]: Ask the question though, who carries the consequences here?
6:41
[SPEAKER_00]: When your sister stays in the relationship, when your friend makes the call you warned her against, they're the ones who have to live with it.
6:48
[SPEAKER_00]: The consequences are never coming back to land on you.
6:52
[SPEAKER_00]: Your task is to love them and to be there, to offer your honest perspective only if they want it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: What is not your task is to manage their life and protect them from their own consequences.
7:04
[SPEAKER_00]: When you put all these things down and step away from trying to own control and manage everyone else's tasks, you realize why you were so freaking exhausted to begin with.
7:15
[SPEAKER_00]: Now let's come back to where Adler started.
7:17
[SPEAKER_00]: The majority of your problems are relationship problems.
7:21
[SPEAKER_00]: Almost every one of them in some way comes back to another person.
7:25
[SPEAKER_00]: And here's the piece we haven't connected yet.
7:28
[SPEAKER_00]: Every one of those relationship problems is really a task problem wearing a disguise.
7:33
[SPEAKER_00]: Think about your sister who keeps going back to a relationship that's making her miserable.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It feels like your problem, you're stressed about it, you're worried, you're carrying it around all week.
7:44
[SPEAKER_00]: But who's task is her relationship?
7:51
[SPEAKER_00]: The only reason it became your problem is that you reached over and made her task yours to carry.
7:57
[SPEAKER_00]: Strip that out and what's left is a sister who loves a sister.
8:00
[SPEAKER_00]: The problem is never yours, you created it by picking up hers.
8:05
[SPEAKER_00]: Underneath every problem is a task in someone else's lane that you've reached over and grabbed.
8:10
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's true of almost everything you're worried about right now.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So follow it all the way down.
8:16
[SPEAKER_00]: If almost every problem is a relationship problem and every relationship problem is really a task problem, then look at everything weighing on you right now.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Most of it is not yours to own.
8:29
[SPEAKER_00]: You've identified the problems and taken them over.
8:32
[SPEAKER_00]: You've been walking around treating all of it like it's yours to solve, but these problems belong to other people.
8:38
[SPEAKER_00]: This is the why this is why we care about this.
8:41
[SPEAKER_00]: because your body doesn't know the difference between the problems that are yours to manage, figure out, and deal with, and the ones you've taken on that were never yours.
8:50
[SPEAKER_00]: It responds to all of it in the exactly the same way.
8:53
[SPEAKER_00]: Every single situation becomes a real heavy emotional load on you.
8:58
[SPEAKER_00]: and think back to what we already know about how emotions affect the body.
9:02
[SPEAKER_00]: Carrying unresolved emotion about your own tasks is heavy enough on its own.
9:07
[SPEAKER_00]: Let alone caring at about everyone else's too.
9:10
[SPEAKER_00]: Your body takes it all on as if every bit of it is yours to deal with, and it isn't.
9:16
[SPEAKER_00]: It's too much and it's weighing you down.
9:18
[SPEAKER_00]: When you're holding that much inner turmoil, the emotional stress just piling up and accumulating.
9:24
[SPEAKER_00]: That is exactly the kind of emotional environment that makes it so hard for your body to climb out of survival mode.
9:31
[SPEAKER_00]: And you know by now what living in survival mode does to your symptoms and your flares.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It makes it really hard for your body to enter a parasympathetic state.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The state needed for healing, restore, and repair.
9:43
[SPEAKER_00]: And we also know living in survival mode
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[SPEAKER_00]: So resources are allocated toward managing problems because that's what's prioritized.
9:54
[SPEAKER_00]: One thing I want to mention before we move on.
9:57
[SPEAKER_00]: You heard me say almost all your problems are relationship problems.
10:01
[SPEAKER_00]: I know some of you are thinking, my illness isn't a relationship problem.
10:05
[SPEAKER_00]: It's mine.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's in my body and you're right.
10:08
[SPEAKER_00]: So let's be clear about what I'm saying and what I'm not.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not saying your illness isn't real.
10:13
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not saying it's not physical.
10:15
[SPEAKER_00]: It's very much
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[SPEAKER_00]: What Adler's philosophy helps us see is different.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's that a huge amount of the suffering stacked on top of your diagnosis is relational.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's not the illness itself.
10:29
[SPEAKER_00]: It's everything you're carrying around it.
10:32
[SPEAKER_00]: Think about what is actually emotionally connected to being sick.
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[SPEAKER_00]: the guilt about what you can't do for the people who rely on you.
10:40
[SPEAKER_00]: The worry about how your family judges you for resting.
10:43
[SPEAKER_00]: The pressure to keep showing up for everyone anyway while you're running on empty.
10:48
[SPEAKER_00]: The energy you spend managing how everyone else feels about your condition.
10:53
[SPEAKER_00]: None of that is your illness, that's a pile of other people's tasks and other people's expectations and you've picked up every single one of them.
11:02
[SPEAKER_00]: And that pile is an example of the exact load we've been talking about.
11:07
[SPEAKER_00]: It's the weight that keeps a body stuck in survival mode.
11:10
[SPEAKER_00]: So no, your illness is not a relationship problem.
11:13
[SPEAKER_00]: but so much of what surrounds it is.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And that part is something you have real power over.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So here's what I encourage you to do with all of this information.
11:23
[SPEAKER_00]: Come back to this one question.
11:25
[SPEAKER_00]: Who holds the consequences for this?
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[SPEAKER_00]: That's the whole thing.
11:29
[SPEAKER_00]: Anytime you notice yourself worrying about something, managing something, thinking about something at night, stop and ask whose consequences are these?
11:39
[SPEAKER_00]: Who is the one who actually has to live with how this turns out?
11:42
[SPEAKER_00]: If the answer is you, then it's your task.
11:45
[SPEAKER_00]: Stay with it.
11:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Do something about it.
11:47
[SPEAKER_00]: That task is worth your energy.
11:50
[SPEAKER_00]: But if the answer is someone else, you've just caught yourself owning a task that is not yours, and you get to hand it back.
11:56
[SPEAKER_00]: Handing it back is simpler than you think, because it's mostly a decision, not an action.
12:02
[SPEAKER_00]: It sounds like this.
12:03
[SPEAKER_00]: This is my sister's to own not mine.
12:06
[SPEAKER_00]: It's her relationship
12:09
[SPEAKER_00]: This is my son's task, not mine.
12:11
[SPEAKER_00]: His stress at work is his to feel, not mine to fix.
12:15
[SPEAKER_00]: You're naming clearly and specifically that responsibility and the consequences belong to somebody else.
12:21
[SPEAKER_00]: And then you let them have it a new step away.
12:25
[SPEAKER_00]: That doesn't mean you stop loving them, and it doesn't mean you go cold or you refuse to help or you don't care.
12:31
[SPEAKER_00]: You can still be there.
12:32
[SPEAKER_00]: You can still offer.
12:34
[SPEAKER_00]: Remember what we learned about the child and the homework.
12:37
[SPEAKER_00]: Your job is to support and to be ready when they reach for you.
12:41
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not to climb into their lane and drive the car for them.
12:45
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, here's the part that's going to be hard.
12:48
[SPEAKER_00]: When you hand a task back, sometimes the person won't like it.
12:52
[SPEAKER_00]: Your sister might want you in her drama.
12:54
[SPEAKER_00]: Your mother might expect you to keep managing things.
12:57
[SPEAKER_00]: and those people might be disappointed or frustrated or think you've changed.
13:02
[SPEAKER_00]: This is where we circle back to where we started.
13:05
[SPEAKER_00]: Real freedom is being disliked because how another person feels about you, whether they approve of you, whether they're pleased with you, that is their task too, not yours.
13:16
[SPEAKER_00]: you were never meant to manage that either.
13:19
[SPEAKER_00]: So when you hand something back and someone is unhappy with you for it, that's not a sign you did it wrong.
13:24
[SPEAKER_00]: That's a sign you're finally stepping away from something you were never responsible for.
13:29
[SPEAKER_00]: And that discomfort, the fear of being disliked is the exact thing that has kept you stepping into everyone else's lane for years.
13:38
[SPEAKER_00]: True freedom is on the other side of being willing to sit in that.
13:42
[SPEAKER_00]: So start with one person, pick the person you know you do this for the most, and the next time you catch yourself reaching into their lane, ask the question and hand that one task back.
13:54
[SPEAKER_00]: Even if they don't like it, especially if they don't like it.
13:58
[SPEAKER_00]: That's where this begins.
14:00
[SPEAKER_00]: Once you start handing back everyone else's tasks, you're left with a much smaller, much more manageable pile, the tasks that are actually yours.
14:09
[SPEAKER_00]: and that's where the real work is.
14:12
[SPEAKER_00]: Because there are other emotional patterns that are contributing to and worsening your own chronic symptoms, that's why I developed my free chat GPT prompt in the show notes.
14:21
[SPEAKER_00]: It helps you identify those in 30 seconds, and it's the fastest way I know to see what else you might be carrying.
14:27
[SPEAKER_00]: Again, the link for you is in the show notes, download it now.
14:31
[SPEAKER_00]: I'll see you in the next episode.