Latest / Banish the Lies: Outsmart Your Inner Critic / 76: I Took the Red Pill | Why Self-Awareness Can Feel So Damn Hard

Transcript

76: I Took the Red Pill | Why Self-Awareness Can Feel So Damn Hard · Banish the Lies: Outsmart Your Inner Critic

• 0:03
  Tania: Welcome to Banish the Lies, the podcast where we outsmart that sneaky inner critic and get closer to the truth that sets us free.
• 0:11
  Tania: I'm Tania Cervoni your host and fellow work in Progress here to share real stories and small shifts that help you reclaim what fear and doubt once stole.
• 0:21
  Tania: Let's jump in.
• 0:27
  Speaker: Do you ever find yourself getting tired of being a self-awareness warrior?
• 0:31
  Speaker: The fact that you're listening to Banish the Lies, I'm taking some liberties here, but I'm assuming that you're pretty committed to living an examined life.
• 0:41
  Speaker: And obviously, I share that commitment with you.
• 0:44
  Speaker: But I have a confession to make.
• 0:47
  Speaker: Sometimes I look around, and I see people who don't seem to do any of this self-awareness, self-growth stuff, and there are days when I even feel a little envious of them.
• 0:59
  Speaker: Now, granted, I'm making a whole bunch of assumptions about their life and looking from the outside in, and I know that's dangerous.
• 1:09
  Speaker: But you know the folks I'm talking about, the ones that have never, ever picked up a self-help book.
• 1:15
  Speaker: They've never spoken to a therapist.
• 1:18
  Speaker: They don't spend time analyzing their thoughts and their patterns or journaling about them, and maybe they don't even listen to podcasts.
• 1:27
  Speaker: I know, right?
• 1:29
  Speaker: Crazy.
• 1:30
  Speaker: But they seem just kinda content, which got me thinking about that old expression, ignorance is bliss, and wondering, is ignorance actually bliss?
• 1:43
  Speaker: Because sometimes this path of self-awareness, of awakening, self-development, whatever you wanna call it, kinda can feel like a burden.
• 1:52
  Speaker: And yet, I really can't shut it off because I'm someone who just wants to know.
• 1:58
  Speaker: I wanna know what's behind the hard days.
• 2:01
  Speaker: I wanna know what's behind the good days so that perhaps I can have more of them.
• 2:06
  Speaker: I wanna know what's underneath the anxiety, the worry, the overthinking, the perfectionism, the depression.
• 2:13
  Speaker: I wanna know what beliefs and old stories are operating without me even realizing, and ultimately, I want freedom from all of it.
• 2:24
  Speaker: So I've been thinking about the cost and the payoff of this journey of self-awareness, and I've definitely come to the conclusion that it's paid off.
• 2:35
  Speaker: When I think about Tania at 10 years old, 16 years old, 21, 35, and Tania now, there's definitely been a payoff or a reward or an ROI, if you will, from paying attention to my inner life.
• 2:51
  Speaker: But at the same time, I'm still left wondering why does something that can, on the one hand, give so much freedom sometimes also feel like such a fricking burden?
• 3:04
  Speaker: Well, I think there actually is something to this idea that ignorance is bliss, because when you don't see something, you don't have the discomfort of deciding what you're gonna do about it.
• 3:15
  Speaker: If I don't see my perfectionism, I don't have to wrestle with it.
• 3:19
  Speaker: I can just keep on keeping on, keep perfecting.
• 3:22
  Speaker: If I don't see that I'm people-pleasing, I don't have to deal with the discomfort of setting boundaries.
• 3:28
  Speaker: If I don't recognize that a relationship isn't working, then I don't have to decide whether I'm going to leave or stay.
• 3:36
  Speaker: So there is kind of an ease in not seeing things.
• 3:41
  Speaker: And I know I'm throwing out all these expressions today, but there's also this idea that with awareness comes great responsibility, and I don't mean that in the sense of, well, now that you know better, you should do better.
• 3:55
  Speaker: It's more that awareness introduces choice.
• 3:59
  Speaker: Before you see something, you're just living it, but once you see it, now you have to decide what you're going to do with what you now know.
• 4:08
  Speaker: I'm thinking, for example, about a long-term relationship I was in.
• 4:11
  Speaker: I probably knew for the last three years of it that something really foundational was not working.
• 4:19
  Speaker: But here's where things get uncomfortable.
• 4:21
  Speaker: Knowing that didn't mean I was ready to leave.
• 4:25
  Speaker: My fear was still bigger.
• 4:27
  Speaker: All the what-ifs, my fear of lon-loneliness, my resistance to giving up the dream, and it wasn't just fear.
• 4:36
  Speaker: There was sadness.
• 4:37
  Speaker: You know, there was sadness I anticipated that I would feel that, frankly, I didn't want to deal with.
• 4:42
  Speaker: There was a whole slew of emotions as I think about it.
• 4:45
  Speaker: So I attempted to keep things together with duct tape.
• 4:49
  Speaker: I tried to make it work, tried to be happy, tried to act as though things were okay while something inside of me knew that they weren't.
• 4:58
  Speaker: Which I guess means it wasn't so much the awareness itself that was painful.
• 5:03
  Speaker: It was living out of alignment with what I knew to be true.
• 5:07
  Speaker: It was the incongruence that was really the burden, And I think that's true any time that there's a growing distance between what we know and what we've seen and how we're still choosing to live.
• 5:19
  Speaker: And unfortunately, awareness alone doesn't automatically give us the capacity to change immediately.
• 5:25
  Speaker: Sometimes we're terrified.
• 5:27
  Speaker: Sometimes we don't have the emotional or the practical resources yet, and sometimes we're just not ready.
• 5:34
  Speaker: But the knowing changes the experience.
• 5:38
  Speaker: So for me, thinking back to that relationship, eventually the pain of living against what I knew to be true became greater than the fear of leaving.
• 5:47
  Speaker: But I can still see places in my life where I have the awareness and I continue the old behavior anyway.
• 5:53
  Speaker: I think about my tendencies towards perfectionism.
• 5:57
  Speaker: I've long realized, at least intellectually, that my worth doesn't depend on how perfectly I perform, and yet I can't tell you the number of times where, you know, I've needed to give a talk and I'm up until 1:00 AM still tweaking the same damn presentation I started weeks before.
• 6:15
  Speaker: Or if I think about the people-pleasing thing, I recognize that saying yes to everything and everyone costs me energy and sometimes even my health, and then someone I love comes along and asks me to do something, you know, something that I truly don't feel I have the capacity to do or even sometimes frankly want to do, and what comes out of my mouth?
• 6:37
  Speaker: "Yeah, sure.
• 6:39
  Speaker: No problem." Now, I recognize that these are small examples, but they're uncomfortable because the old behavior doesn't fit quite as comfortably once you recognize it for what it is, and I guess that's one reason awareness can feel like it's making life harder.
• 6:56
  Speaker: You know, I think back to my multi-decade struggle with bulimia.
• 7:00
  Speaker: When I s- was still in the ignorant phase about what was really going on, you know, food was my drug of choice, and it was working.
• 7:08
  Speaker: I mean, it was wreaking havoc on my life and on my body, but it was working in terms of numbing me out from the emotions underneath, the feelings of unworthiness or of being unlovable or not enough, all the things that were brewing and operating below the surface.
• 7:25
  Speaker: But then something interesting happened.
• 7:28
  Speaker: My awareness started to expand.
• 7:30
  Speaker: I began to recognize that no amount of binging or purging or starving myself was ever going to resolve those feelings because food or my weight or my body size wasn't ever the real problem.
• 7:46
  Speaker: What I was longing for was the freedom to be fully self-expressed, the need to feel loved and to love, self-acceptance, self-compassion, all the things.
• 7:58
  Speaker: Those were the things that no amount of food or dieting was ever going to address.
• 8:05
  Speaker: And once I saw that, continuing the bulimic behavior became harder.
• 8:11
  Speaker: Not instantly impossible, unfortunately.
• 8:15
  Speaker: It's not like I went cold turkey overnight, but I did eventually get to the point where the pain of engaging in the bulimic behavior outweighed the benefit of numbing.
• 8:24
  Speaker: It really just stopped working, and awareness had essentially changed my relationship with a strategy that once worked for me.
• 8:33
  Speaker: So I guess as I'm talking through this with you, I'm realizing that maybe the discomfort isn't really awareness itself.
• 8:42
  Speaker: It's having the awareness and then continuing to live out of alignment with it.
• 8:46
  Speaker: That's where the pain really comes in, and maybe that's where this idea that ignorance is bliss holds a certain level of truth.
• 8:55
  Speaker: But here's what ignorance can't give you, that same level of choice, of agency.
• 9:03
  Speaker: Again, you don't always make the new choice.
• 9:06
  Speaker: You can still see the pattern and continue to repeat it.
• 9:10
  Speaker: You can know that something isn't working and still be afraid to change it, but you're not completely captive to it in the same way anymore because now you can see that there is an alternative And actually, this whole conversation is making me think of the movie The Matrix.
• 9:28
  Speaker: If you haven't seen The Matrix, I highly recommend it.
• 9:31
  Speaker: But for those of you who are familiar with it, I guess what I'm saying here is that I took the red pill.
• 9:36
  Speaker: And for those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about, here's a quick version of the movie.
• 9:44
  Speaker: There's a character named Neo who's given a choice.
• 9:47
  Speaker: He can have the blue pill and return to the life that's comfortable and familiar, but ultimately an illusion, or he can take the red pill and see what's actually happening outside of the matrix.
• 9:59
  Speaker: And here's the interesting part, taking the red pill does not make Neo's life easier.
• 10:04
  Speaker: In fact, it creates problems he didn't have before.
• 10:08
  Speaker: But it also gives him agency he didn't have before.
• 10:11
  Speaker: And I guess that's what those of us who choose this path are really looking for.
• 10:17
  Speaker: We're looking for the freedom that comes from being able to see our choices.
• 10:21
  Speaker: And granted, it's not always an easy path.
• 10:24
  Speaker: Sometimes you see things about yourself that you just can't unsee, and on those days, the blue pill looks pretty damn appealing.
• 10:33
  Speaker: Because as we've talked about, there can be a certain comfort in not knowing.
• 10:39
  Speaker: Awareness, on the other hand, does come with discomfort.
• 10:43
  Speaker: But I can say for sure that I wouldn't trade what I know now for the person I was before, not because awareness makes life instantly easier, as we've discussed, but because it gives me the opportunity to participate in my life consciously.
• 10:59
  Speaker: So I guess my invitation today is simply one of reflection.
• 11:03
  Speaker: What has awareness made harder for you, but also made possible?
• 11:09
  Speaker: Maybe awareness made a relationship harder to tolerate, but leaving became possible.
• 11:15
  Speaker: Or maybe perfectionism became harder to justify, but imperfection became possible.
• 11:22
  Speaker: You know, that's something I've talked about in other episodes, how I've been playing with imperfection, and it's really uncomfortable.
• 11:30
  Speaker: But it wouldn't have been possible if I hadn't first seen the cost of my perfectionistic tendencies.
• 11:37
  Speaker: Or maybe people-pleasing becomes uncomfortable, but boundaries become possible.
• 11:43
  Speaker: Or maybe self-criticism stops feeling motivational.
• 11:48
  Speaker: I criticized myself for years thinking that's what drove me to be better, but eventually seeing the cost of that gave me another choice.
• 11:57
  Speaker: Self-compassion became possible.
• 12:00
  Speaker: So yes, there are many days when ignorance looks pretty damn blissful to me, days when I get tired of examining my thoughts and noticing my patterns and seeing the places where what I know and how I'm living don't quite match up.
• 12:15
  Speaker: But apparently, somewhere along the way, I took the red pill.
• 12:20
  Speaker: And as tempting as that blue pill might occasionally look, I don't actually wanna go back to sleep
• 12:32
  Tania: Thanks for listening to Banish The Lies.
• 12:34
  Tania: If today's episode resonated with you, take a moment to let it settle in.
• 12:38
  Tania: And maybe share it with a friend who could use it too.
• 12:41
  Tania: Lies, lose their power when we're brave enough to challenge them.
• 12:45
  Tania: I'm Tania Cervoni and until next time, be kind to yourself.
• 12:50
  Tania: And remember, you're not broken, you're not alone, and you don't have to stay stuck.