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Not Everything You Feel Is Yours · Inside The Consulting Room - Understanding the Child Behind the Behaviour

• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: Hello and welcome back.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: This is Kim Lee from the Children's Consultancy.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: Um, this is episode two of the series concerning emotional decontamination.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: And in our previous episode, we explored the idea that many of the beliefs that we hold about ourselves might not have actually originated within us at all.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: As I mentioned in the previous podcast, there is a series on beliefs and how they are formed, which can be found on my website, thechildren's consultancy.com.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: And if you if you if you click on the download our podcasts list, you'll be taken to the website where all of the podcasts that have been produced this year and in fact previously can be found.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: There are quite a lot, so please do feel free to scroll down for a while until you find anything that that that you feel might be interesting to you.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: When we talk about emotional contamination, we're looking at an invisible but gradual process.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: And it's one in which another person's fears, anger, shame, or disappointment get projected into us through their behavior, through the things they say and the way they are.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: And without realizing it, we we start to take these things on.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, childhood is really the breeding ground for this.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: Children develop and shape their beliefs about themselves according to how the environment that they live in reflects that.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: But today I want to take the next step, and that is how do we begin separating what belongs to us from our from what belongs to someone else?
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: Now it might sound like a simple question, but I think the first thing is that we have to actually recognize what's happened and what's happening.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: And in reality, this is whilst it's an important psychological task, it isn't necessarily easy to navigate your way through.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: But if we spend enough time carrying someone else's emotional world, we eventually stop recognizing that we're carrying it, and it simply becomes who we think we are or who we feel we are obliged to be.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: Now, one of the greatest privileges of my work has been watching people discover that the person they believe themselves to be was never the whole story.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: The anxious child or the angry teenager or the failing parent or the adult who apologizes for simply just existing.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: Now, these people really do exist, and these aren't just words, they're they're they're based upon real experiences of real people in real pain.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: Very often beneath these presentations is someone who's just spent years carrying emotions and beliefs that were never theirs.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: And that's why one sentence sits in the heart of this particular episode.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: And it is that not everything you feel belongs to you.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: Now that statement might feel unsettling.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: After all, if we feel something deeply, surely it must be true.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: Well, not necessarily.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: Our emotional world is shaped by relationships long before we have the language to understand them.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: As children, we absorb emotional experiences in much the same way that we absorb language.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: No one child sits down and teaches themselves how to feel guilty.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: No one gives lessons in shame.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: Yet children become fluent in both of those emotions and are repeatedly, if they're repeatedly present in the relationships around them.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: And over time, those experiences become so familiar that they no longer feel borrowed.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: They feel like that's my identity.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: Now, this is where psychology offers us an extraordinarily helpful idea.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: Because sometimes people place unconsciously, albeit unbearable feelings into those around them.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: Not because they're cruel, not because they're manipulative, but because human beings have tried to find somewhere for emotional pain to go.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: A frightened parent may communicate fear without saying a single word.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: A deeply critical parent may unknowingly teach a child to become their own harshest critic.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: Someone carrying unresolved shame may begin to see shame everywhere until those closest to them also begin to experience it.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: And none of this requires intention.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: It simply requires relationships.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: The difficulty comes when we mistake inherited feelings for personal truth.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: Imagine carrying a heavy suitcase for so many years that you forgot you ever picked it up.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: Eventually, it simply feels like part of your body.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: Only when someone asks, Why are you carrying that?
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: Do you begin to realize that you might have a choice?
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: Psychological growth often begins with that question.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: Not so much what's wrong with me, but where did this come from?
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: Because that question changes everything.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_00: Because it replaces self-judgment with curiosity.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: Judgment closes the mind, whereas curiosity opens a healthy emotional state that we can cultivate.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: So whilst judgment closes the mind, curiosity opens it.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: Now perhaps you've noticed that certain people leave you feeling inadequate, others leave you feeling calm.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: Some conversations fill you with confidence, others leave you doubting every decision you've ever made.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: Now pay attention to that because our emotional lives are profoundly relational.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: The people around us affect far more than our mood.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: They influence the stories we tell about ourselves and about who we are.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: Healthy relationships do something remarkable.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: They don't tell us who to become, they simply provide enough emotional safety for us to rediscover who we already are.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: There's another important truth here.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: Understanding where someone's behavior came from does not mean accepting everything they did.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: Compassion and boundaries are not opposites, they're partners.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: You may understand that someone was wounded in childhood, and you may genuinely feel sadness for what they endured, but can compassion doesn't require you to continue carrying the consequences of the wounds that were never yours to heal.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: I see this a lot in my work with adults, and particularly those who talk about relationships of all kinds, but often you know relationships with parents and but also partners, and and they say, Oh, well, but but when they were growing up, they had you know this experience or that experience.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: Or and the moment I hear that, I think you have jumped, you've you've managed to leapfrog a reality which takes you back into the trap that you're in.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: And when this isn't a criticism, because I think what they're trying to do is they're trying to make sense of why the person behaves the way they they do, but the problem is they're missing out a really simple truth, and it is this that was then, this is now, and and explaining the other person's behavior does not excuse it, and it's important we yes, we can be compassionate where the explanation is concerned, but we also have to have boundaries where the consequences are, because it's not your responsibility to give the other person what is tacit permission to continue to behave in the way they are.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: You see, I think healthy relationships allow two people to stand alongside one another.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it doesn't require one person to disappear beneath the emotional weight of the other.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: And as we begin the decontamination process ourselves, something something rather unexpected often happens because some relationships become easier.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: Well, and others, of course, might become more difficult.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: This is because when the roles begin to change, uh something really important happens.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: If you've spent years carrying responsibility for another person's emotional well-being, they may feel quite uncomfortable when you begin putting that responsibility down.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_00: Not not because not because they're bad people, but because you're breaking the rules.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: You know, the invisible agreement is when I feel bad, you make me feel better.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: That's the deal.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_00: And though that's never said, but that's that's what happens.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_00: If you deviate then, not because you're being punitive, but because it's just not healthy and you're suffering, then the other person is going to feel it.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes people will become critical, they'll move from victim to persecutor because you're no longer occupying the role of rescuer.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_00: But because the relationship has kind of organized itself around this really damaging pattern, it it doesn't serve either of you.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_00: And change has a way of revealing patterns that familiarity does keep hidden.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it that the change starts with you.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_00: It starts with realization.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: The realization, not that you're doing something wrong, but something is happening.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: And and once again I come back to this phrase, what not why.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: What is happening?
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: What is happening that causes me to feel like I'm I'm carrying something which doesn't belong to me.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_00: Now, you might not know the answer, but that's not the point.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: You're asking the question.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: And by asking yourself questions like this, by asking yourself to take notice of what you are, maybe what you're feeling about yourself, critical, judgmental, disappointed, feelings of failure, uh inadequacy, well, where does it come from?
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_00: Uh are you living out a script that someone else has written for you and you didn't know?
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_00: And I think this is this is where the the felt sense and the thought sense come into contact.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_00: Because if we live by our felt sense, then we will continue to play out these patterns because they're embedded.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_00: But what we can do is use our thought sense to say, hang on a second, what am I doing?
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: What is this?
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_00: And and that's a that's a really important shift.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: Now, psychoneurologically, that means that you move from one part of the brain, which has to do with the the feeling and sensations that very often motivate why we behave in the different ways that we do.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: We move from that part, which is known as the limbic system, to the executive brain, the thinking brain, or the prefrontal neocortex.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_00: And that that's the kind of analytical part of the brain.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: Now, just because we do that doesn't mean the felt the felt sense is going to say, oh, okay then, because because it just doesn't work like that.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_00: It takes time, we have to practice.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_00: I'll give you an example and I'll leave you with this.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_00: A person who says sorry, just says sorry, it starts every sentence with sorry.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_00: And and this pattern is incredibly telling.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_00: You know, where did that come from?
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: What why is and it's automatic, it's unconsciously motivated, but it's like a default, a default state.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_00: Now, when when certainly in my work, I s I said I might say, Can you tell me what it is you feel sorry about?
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_00: The answer normally begins with sorry.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_00: And one person in particular said, I've got have I got it wrong again?
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, You've I think you've just demonstrated to me, you know, what where what this is about, that they're carrying a belief that they're going to get it wrong, so they apologize before anything happens.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: And many of you, I'm sure, will have seen, and some of you may even be you know behave in this way, but that's the felt sense talking.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_00: My res my question is the thought sense.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_00: What is what is this about?
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_00: It's not a criticism, it's nothing like that.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's really trying to help you understand, and it's the curiosity.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_00: So what I'd like you to do is ask yourself between now and the next podcast, which will be in a day or so, is this my feeling or have I been carrying it for someone else?
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_00: You you won't know immediately, and that's okay.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_00: The purpose of the question is not about certainty, it's about awareness.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_00: In our final episode, we're going to explore what happens when we stop defining ourselves by what we have carried and begin rediscovering really the person who's always existed beneath the contamination.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I'm going to be looking at not just the psychological but also the practical, the things that we need to do both internally and externally, and how we start to separate from from this conflict between what we're carrying and who we really are.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_00: So I look forward to posting that shortly.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_00: I hope this has been helpful.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening.