Latest / All The Light She Found / Your Anxiety is Not a Reliable Narrator
Transcript
- kelly: Hello, my friends. Welcome to episode four of All the Lights You Found with your host, Kelly McGurk. Hey guys, I am so glad you're here with me. I just love, love thinking about all my friends and my friends that I still have to meet out there in the world who might be listening. It just is so fun to think about that. Today, girls, we'd be talking about. the stories we tell ourselves when we don't have all the information. That is one of my favorite things. And a pastime of mine recently. yeah. I don't recall Feeling so uncomfortable with uncertainty as I have in the last couple of years. I don't remember feeling this way, oddly. It's not that I was never uncertain or unsure, don't kid yourself, but I don't remember the discomfort of sitting with it. Like maybe I just bulldoze my way through it with staying busy and not focusing on my own feelings. that could be true. But since Mike passed away and I've had a chance to bring my nervous system down to a normal level and cortisol levels down to a normal level. I have noticed my crazy discomfort with uncertainty. I hate it and I try to do everything to avoid it. And I've noticed that a lot in the last year, and it's So crazy. It's a definitely a growth area of mine and an area that me and my therapist have got to talk about. because it feels new, even though I'm sure it's not. so the stories that start with one, let's let's just get an example. Maybe it's a one unanswered text or a can we talk later You know, you're on social media and you see like a group of girls that like went and did something fun and you're like, wait, why wasn't I invited? they must hate me. You know it's the little things, and then somehow it ends with us convinced that everything has changed, or you know, our our friendship's over, or I'm losing a job, or who knows? it goes from like a 20-second exchange into A big ass story, you know? And so that's what this episode is about. It's about the way that uncertainty can turn to fear and how fear takes one little tiny piece of information in it, creates a whole dad gum movie, you know? And so I want to talk a little bit today about why our brains do that and how we can separate what actually happened from what we decided to make it mean. And How to stop letting a scary story ruin our whole Tuesday before we even know what is true. Because, girl, some of the things we are reacting to have not actually happened. I hate to break it to you. They're just really convincing stories that we have told ourselves. So grab your coffee or your wine and let's chat or go on your walk, or I hope I'm on your ride to work. But girl, let's just, we need to talk about the absolutely Wild stories that we can create with not a lot of information. Doesn't that sound crazy, but it happens. So, what happens to our brain? Well, our brain starts filling in blanks. That's what happens. We decide something when someone's tone changes or they haven't responded in a way they usually do, or you know, just a little something, something, and and And we make a meaning. Okay, they're mad. I did something wrong. I'm not important. I'm about to be rejected. This relationship isn't safe. I need to fix this immediately. So the story we create out of a 30-second exchange can last us six days. You know, We can take one missing text, one weird tone, one facial expression, and some, some way, we turn that thing into a Netflix series. We're not doing this because we're ridiculous or because our brains, you know, are off. We're doing it because our brains want an explanation, an explanation that gives us an illusion that we're prepared and safe. That's what the brain is looking for. Back to safety, back to safety. The story that we come up with, It's not random. It it it really usually connects to something we've felt many times before. If if in your younger years, maybe you're one of your parents left, you know, uncertainty could feel like abandonment. if love felt unpredictable in your home, a change in someone's energy can feel dangerous or scary, not in a physical way, in an emotional way. If you learned growing up that conflict meant disconnection, someone that gets a little upset may feel like a relationship is ending. If you have spent your life managing everyone's emotions, someone's discomfort may feel like your sudden emergency to fix. Your brain is using old information to explain to you a current situation. And that's what's happening, and that's where fear comes from. An old wound can be loud as hell and still not be giving us current information. Sometimes our past walks into the room and it grabs a microphone, like the one I've got right here, and it starts explaining a situation it knows absolutely nothing about. It is using all old facts and it is recycling them into a current situation and it gets a little messy there. I want to talk to you guys about the feelings that you're having when one of those moments have, like when your gut gets tight or your chest gets tight. It's that weird, gross, icky feeling. The feeling is real. You don't want to dismiss the feeling. Your body is genuinely reacting. Okay. but the goal is not to say, I'm being stupid or too sensitive. I shouldn't feel this way. the goal right now, in those moments when that happens, is To kind of just notice. I use the word notice a lot in in my office because that's really important. Notice what's happening rather than create a story. Something in me feels afraid. that feeling deserves care. But we don't have to turn that negative feeling into facts. The feeling is real, but the meaning that I give to the feeling may not be real. And that's the golden ticket here. That's the ticket. We need to remember that the feeling is legit. But we don't have to go and just believe that there's something bad happening. We can believe ourselves without believing every conclusion that our fear reaches. And that's something that I've had to learn how to do. It's kind of like pause, stop, don't react. If your reaction is to run, avoid, numb, stop for a minute. We can honor our intuition and still give ourselves a space to collect more information. And let me remind you of this. We can care for ourselves without immediately reacting. It doesn't mean we're abandoning our feelings or what we need in that moment, but it means, hey, there's a yellow light and we pulling up, and that means slow down and take a beat. And I think that's what I have learned. That is where I'm at. I get in the uncertainty, I feel all the gross feels. I can tell in my head I'm starting to create what I need to do, an emergency exit plan. For me, that's how it goes. And now I've learned, okay, notice where is this coming from? What actually has happened? Which part is true? And what could another side of that be? I think for me, the thing, the what actually has happened is the one I gotta slow down. Take away every filter of whatever I bring to the table with myself and my messy, and start to just maybe think, okay, if I recorded that and I gave it to somebody else to to listen to, what would maybe be their feedback? Let's do let's do an example. Fact. My f she has not texted me back story that I tell myself. She's mad. I said too much. Our friendship has now changed. Fact. My boss might have said, let's talk later. That would be if I had a boss. but okay, let's say my business partner said, can we talk later? And then I give myself this big old story. we're having a problem. this is gonna be a disaster, right? fact. My child is upset with me. Story. I failed as a mother, she feels abandoned, I must fix it right now. Okay, these are just some of the things. fact, I was not invited to an event. Story: nobody likes me, I am no longer important, and everyone has moved on without me. I'm just left solo. Facts are usually short, stories have chapters, plot twists, and sometimes extremely dramatic endings. Let's be honest. So Separating the fact from the story does not mean your concern is invalid. It means you're refusing to make a final ruling without full evidence. I think that's just responsible, right? Now, where it gets a little bit dicey is when emotions flood our nervous system. I'm gonna use a nervous system a lot, because you know, Trauma therapist, so we focus a lot on somatic, how your body feels, how your body's interpreting danger. So nervous system, it gets flooded. Okay. Somebody does something, and then our nervous system gets flooded, and it takes us back to a time where we felt like we had to respond immediately. Like this is bad. Danger, danger. I think if we Can take a beat from that. The crazy part is the deeper belief shows up. And when I say we're going back to childhood, let's do it. Let's do it. I'm gonna throw a a truth bomb at you. 90% of how we show up in the world was already created by H5. I know that's insane, but when we were growing up. Whatever environment, whatever caregivers we had taught us how to behave in the world, whether it was from positive or negative influence. Where people get this all kind of screwed up is they believe they have to blame their parents or make their childhood this horrible thing to feel like it's valid and they don't want to do that. That's not at all. what we're talking about here. A couple of short examples are if you grew up in a home, okay, I'm gonna give them some some personal stuff about me. My parents were super young when they had me. my dad had barely turned 18 and my mom was 20. I mean I'm just guessing that was a little bit overwhelming and frightening for them to have a baby at that point. not, I don't believe well planned. And they had to make life work real quick. And they had to work two jobs each and they had to figure out what to do with this baby. And so I was often, you know, with babysitters or my grandparents or my aunt, my uncle, like cause they were still young and living at home. So I think when you live in in something, even though there was love all around, it was a lot of moving parts and probably a lot of uncertainty. And so Our frontal lobes are not even developed at that point. So when people react in a way, maybe if there's some chaos who knows, maybe they were, frustrated or fighting with each other. I mean, I can only imagine I would have been at that age. and I'm getting dropped off at different places, right? You start to make a story about that by the time you're like two, three, four, right? It it could be like, okay, I need to I I'm just giving different examples. Maybe I need to be invisible so that I'm not in the middle of chaos. Or maybe I need to, you know, be the good one who's always helpful and who who, you know, never makes anybody upset. Or maybe I need to be the helpful one and I'm always just like, How can I sure, I'll help you. I'll help you be the docile one. You know, or I need to be the really smart one. Okay, that was not me. I'm not gonna lie. anyway, so Possible meanings that we create is when we're younger from these said environments. And we're not even touching on ones where there was substance abuse or domestic violence or an absent parent or a mental illness. I mean, we're not even going there. We're talking about some basic, you know, young folks raising a baby here. But there's all kinds of layers of trauma that people go through. But I'm just giving you a simple example. So possible meanings you can come up with from that is I'm too much, I'm not enough, I'm not important. People always leave. I have to be perfect to be loved, I have to keep everyone happy. if someone is disappointed in me, I am unsafe. these are just some things that our little tiny brains start to create because when your frontal lobe isn't developed yet, there is no me and then you. Okay, there's an expensive. Experience that someone's giving me, and then I respond to it. So the story is often less about what happened and more about what we fear it says about us. So take us back to the adulthood. The unanswered text is not just an unanswered text. It becomes evidence for an old belief that we already carry. I'm not important, or I was too much, or whatever. We are not just filling in the blank, we are filling it in. With this sentence we have been afraid was true about us all along. Crazy little next nugget. People usually don't figure this out until they have a little space, a little bit of breathing room, and all of a sudden you start going, wait, holy smokes. Man, I have been doing the following things to feel valued or loved or accepted. And when you're in the heat of it, right? Like I'm talking the middle, right? Where you're raising kids, going to work full time, trying to be a rock star at work, run into sports events, having birthday parties in a marriage. when you're just in it, you don't have time to step out and go, Whew, man, I've been doing all the things. So I'll be a little vulnerable because this is what this is all about. Mine, it turns out, was overfunctioning. Like, I didn't know it then, but now that I've had some space and I've had some time to reflect, it was all about having to do everything the best, create successful businesses, make sure my daughter has the best life, make sure I throw the most amazing birthday parties, make sure our house is always looking like a model home, make sure that when Mike and I would have a party, it was the biggest, nicest, coolest thing ever. everybody needed to like me, like overfunctioning. And I was on that hamster wheel for my whole adult life for real. I went to therapy back when my mom was dying in 2018, 2019. And that's where this first became revealed to me. And I'm a therapist. Okay. So it takes a hot minute for you to kind of unpack some of this and how you carry this heavy weight of. What you need to do to be loved or to be accepted. And you may not be able to unpack that until you have a little space. I just think if you're noticing as I'm talking, like, my God, I hear this, like I feel this, like to my core. I want you to know that the very beginning of unpacking is allowing yourself to notice. When you start telling yourselves these stories, or when your body goes into full panic. when you see a Instagram reel of your friends in a group and you're not there, and all of a sudden you make it mean all of these things about you. it's just important for you to just take a beat, start noticing how it's affecting you and That's how you're going to start to unpack what your story is about yourself, how you show up. I think the problem is once something happens like that and our nervous system gets reacted, and then we want to do something about it really quick. Okay. So we send a full paragraph of an explanation of a text, or we overexplain, or we apologize before anybody's even accused us of anything, or we Ask for reassurance repeatedly. Like, are you sure you like me? Am OK? Are you mad at me? Or you pull away first in a relationship because you just figure you're going to get hurt. Or you get defensive, or you try to fix everyone's feelings if people are upset. Or you make some decisions from panic. Like these are the things we do, or we overthink. We spend an entire day overthinking something before it's even happened. Maybe we have a social event and you just sit there and go over possible horrible scenarios. We may believe that this is protecting us, but we're often creating pain in the present to protect ourselves from pain that may never happen. And we get into this pattern where we do this over and over, and it's freaking exhausting. Girl, we cannot keep breaking our own hearts early and calling it preparation. Okay, when I feel uncertain and I feel this need to react in a way that's not necessary in the moment. We need to take a beat and give ourselves some breaths and maybe take a day or two, okay, before we respond. Because sometimes fear doesn't save us from the painful things. Sometimes it freaking makes us feel it twice, once in the imagination, and then once if it actually happens. And let's be honest, does it actually protect us from it when it actually happens? No. No. I think giving ourselves grace and when we take that moment Being like, Hey, I get why I'm scared or I get why my mind is going there. And then we just wanna wait for more information before we act. The scared part of me I've learned she can ride in the car. I just can't let her grab the wheel, change the destination, and start honking at everybody before we even know where we're going. Healing isn't not ever having a story. We all have a dadgum story, that's for sure. Healing is starting to notice it. Healing is starting to make space between the story and my reaction or your reaction. And healing is decided that fear doesn't get the final word. Self-trust. Which I talked about, I think in the last episode, is not knowing that everything is gonna work out, because we all know we can't guarantee that. And it's not knowing that somebody's not gonna leave. It's not guaranteeing that I'm not gonna get hurt. Self-trust sounds more like I can handle the truth when I have it. I can ask a question. I can give myself time before I respond. I can have a hard conversation. I can survive disappointment. I think the key is knowing I will not abandon myself while I wait to see what happens. Self-trust is not knowing that everything will turn out okay. It's knowing this is what I'm learning. Girls, I can stay with myself while I figure out what's actually true. You are not the same woman that you were the last time someone hurt you. You are older now, you have awareness, you have more tools, you know how to ask questions, you know how to repair when repair is possible. You do not have to predict every painful thing to prove that you can handle your life. And if I can tell you one thing, I have learned that I cannot possibly predict. every painful thing, nor could I have predicted what I have gone through till today. But I know I can handle my life. So what I've learned is I don't need to have fear stay three steps ahead. I can meet my life when it arrives, and so can you. Okay, so here's the deal, girls, for this week. When the story starts, and it will, and so will mine, when uncertainty happens, when our body becomes uncomfortable and our chest gets tight and our stomachs clinch, take a breath, go outside, move your body, call a friend who you trust to say, okay, but what actually happened? Give yourself time. To come back to the present. Help your nervous system come down. And then ask what actually happened? What did I make it mean? And what do I need to do next if I were responding from a place of self-trust instead of fear? Not every feeling needs an immediate action. I am learning that day by day. Some feelings just need a minute, a walk. Okay. Maybe they need a coffee, a wine, a snack. I don't know. We're never going to stop creating stories completely because our brains are actually storytellers. Our past will always try to talk to us in our present. But the thing is, if we get curious, we can catch it. And we can catch it sooner. And that's what I'm finding about myself. I'm catching it sooner. I'm not responding. And I can wait for the truth. So, girls, maybe coming home to ourselves means becoming the person who does not immediately abandon herself when uncertainty walks in the room. I've learned that. Maybe it means I am scared. I do feel not enough. I do feel too much. But that's okay. Maybe it means letting the feeling be real without allowing the story to become the whole truth. So, girls, there's anything I can share with you, trust yourself. Trust yourself and love yourself like you love your children or your best friends or your spouse. Love yourself enough to extend the grace to take a beat and go what actually is true. So this week, when you're out in the world, maybe your little light this week will be give yourself a little grace. When something like this comes up, give yourself some time and go, what am I noticing? Where is this coming from? And which part is actually true? I'm Kelly and this is all the light she found.