Speaking and Communicating Podcast

And this emotion is coming up. That's just something from the past saying, Hey, you promised me that you were going to deal with me. Are you safe now? The problem is that we haven't yet realized that we're safe. We are still trying to protect ourselves from these emotions that we're carrying inside of us. But you cannot run from something that lives inside of you. Welcome back to the Speaking and Communicating podcast. I am your host, Roberta Nleila.
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If you are looking to improve your communication skills, both professionally and personally, this is the podcast you should be tuning into. Communication and soft skills are crucial in your career growth and leadership development. Whether you're about to speak in public, make presentations at work, pitch to investors or an entrepreneur looking to showcase your innovation to a wider audience, you'd be glad you joined us.
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By the end of this episode, log on to Apple and Spotify, leave us a rating and a review and what you'd like for us to discuss on this podcast. Let's get communicating.
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Now my guest today, since we talk so much about mental health and how it affects the workplace and your personal life, is a mental health coach and an emotional fitness trainer. Benjamin Sherer, hailing all the way from Canada, is here to share with us his journey and how he got to be the kind of person who helps people in this space. And before I go any further, please help me welcome him to the show.
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Hi Benjamin, who goes by Benjy. Hi Roberta. So good to be here. Yes, I prefer Benjy. Thank you very much. Benjamin just sounds very, very mature. Like when I'm 80, you can call me Benjamin. For now, Benji is fine. We'll remember that on your 80th birthday. Go ahead. Yeah. It's a pleasure to be here with you. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you for being here. Yeah, definitely excited to talk about all this. It's my pleasure. Me too. Okay. Tell us a little bit about yourself.
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So I grew up in Montreal, Quebec, in Canada, which is a beautiful place, has a lot of great culture, a lot of great things going on, aside from the terrible winters, it is a beautiful place to grow up. Yeah, I went to a private Jewish school, so it was kind of in this small bubble of a kind of culture and community. I recognized from a very young age that there was a lot of beautiful things to our community, but we were only experiencing kind of like one very small version.
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of what life was and I felt the need to explore a little bit more than that in my teenage years and in my university and along with that need to kind of explore different cultures and communities and different lifestyles, I had an intense fear of death my entire life. I remember actually one of my first memories ever was me sitting in my bed when I was probably like four years old and counting down from ten in my head.
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And the closer that I got down to zero, nine, eight, seven, I got this horrible turning feeling in the pit of my stomach because some part of me was understanding this concept that like the clock is ticking and at a certain point you get down to zero and it's over. And I didn't really understand that at the time, but the older that I got when I was like eight, nine, 10, I started thinking about death and seeing, you know, articles or seeing death around me when I went to a funeral at like nine years old.
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I started getting that same turning feeling in the pit of my stomach. I started understanding that this constant tension, this constant fear that I was in, was this fear of death. So that led me to studying philosophy and world religions. So in CJEP, which is something we have in Montreal, which is like two years in between high school and university.
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So in CJEP and in university, I was studying a lot of philosophy and a lot of Eastern religions, studying Christianity, studying Islam, just kind of trying to get a bit of a taste of everything because I was desperately trying to find in my mind somewhere that I could put God or the afterlife or just some gap in logic about the physical world because when I was very young...
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I did believe in God and felt like I had a connection with God or so, but as I started getting a little bit older, I started questioning all of that because I had realized that having been born Jewish, I believed in Judaism only because I was born into that. And I recognized that around 12 years old, they're like, well, if I had been born Christian, I'd believe in Christianity, or if I had been born Muslim, I believe in Islam. So I had to start questioning and looking at things.
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You know, this gap in logic, somewhere where I could put God or religion or the afterlife to kind of quell that fear of death. And also because I desperately wanted to figure out what I believed about life and the universe and everything so that I could really figure out how I wanted to live my life. And by the time I got through the end of my main studies, I did an honors degree, I was still lost. I hadn't found anywhere. I hadn't found that place where I could say like, oh, you know what? Well,
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this doesn't quite make sense so there must be a god or there must be an afterlife. I did have these ideas about quantum mechanics and the idea that like, well, if the universe is actually 11 dimensions as opposed to just the four then maybe there's something there. So I had some thoughts but I still felt lost, still felt kind of hopeless, still felt kind of depressed and just kind of wanted to then make the most of my life. Like if there is no meaning, if there is no greater thing, which is how I felt at the time, if there's nothing more to life.
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than I just want to make the most of this physical world. So I finished my degrees and I started playing bass in a band. That was a few of the best years of my life and it was a lot of fun. And the guys that I was playing with, two brothers who were complete rock stars. And I mean that in the best and the worst ways. So I mean like they were rock stars in the sense that they were ridiculously talented. Even to this day, it is an absolute shame that they didn't achieve the fame that they deserve.
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while also on the other hand being rock stars in the sense that they are very irresponsible and terrible business acumen and never follow through on their plans which is why they never attain the fame that they deserve. So I played with them for a while and it was fantastic but when we weren't making the progress that we wanted to because they were rock stars I dropped out of the band and then spent like six seven months just trying to figure out what to do with myself and the way that I express it to people is what does a good Jewish boy
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with a background in philosophy do when he's given up on life, he goes to law school. Oh, is that the answer to that? Okay. Yes, that's the answer to the question. Yeah, law school did not seem any more meaningful, but philosophy tends to lead into law school. Like there is a connection there. If you're good at philosophy, you will likely be very good in law. When none of the options feel meaningful, law is at least it's a lucrative profession.
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And if you know that you're going to be good at it and it's easy for you, that's what I chose to do. But first day that I showed up at law school, I looked around at everyone and just with no judgment, it's like this isn't me. They all seem like lovely people, but this doesn't feel right to me. So I spent two years in law school, two and a half, I think, and I just started getting more and more depressed and more and more anxious. And it got to a point where I couldn't eat and I couldn't sleep and I couldn't get out of bed.
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And not because it was hard, exactly. There are some people who drive themselves insane in law school spending 16 hours a day in the library, and that's why they have to tap out. It wasn't like that for me. With my background in philosophy, the actual schooling of it was fairly easy. I was the guy that would show up on the first day of class and then would show up at the last day of class for the exam and everyone else in the class.
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who hadn't seen me all semester would be like, wait, you're in this class? And I'd be like, yeah, I'm in this class. And what grade would you get? I would usually get a B plus or an A minus. Oh, we hated your kind of university. Yeah. Well, don't get me wrong. In philosophy, I worked my butt off. In law school, it was like, I just wanted to do the bare minimum and get through it, which is also a great sign that like, you know, I shouldn't be there. Yeah. So the story actually of what finally got me out of law school.
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was there was one exam that I had deferred earlier, like at the end of the year, I deferred the exam because of anxiety, suffering too much with anxiety and depression. On the day of the exam, I just couldn't do it. So I deferred the exam. And I was supposed to take the exam sometime in the summer, but I was so anxious and so resistant and so like I didn't wanna do it, that I just never checked the date of the exam.
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Firstly, that was a big sign to me that look Benji clearly some part of you is fighting this intensely But also you now have a zero in this class You are getting a minuses and B pluses and that was great But now you have a zero in this class and that's gonna mess up your average So that was just the sign that kind of pushed me to finally make a move So I was scrolling on Facebook one day and I saw an ad for a band that was looking for a manager
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And even though I'd never managed a band before or anything, I responded to the ad. And when I showed up in that room, even though I had no idea what I was doing, I felt at home in a way that I didn't feel at home in law school. And so that started my spiral moving out of law school. I dropped out, I built a recording studio and I spent the next three or four years living that dream. It wasn't even a dream. It was like a fantasy.
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because there was no point in my life where I thought like, maybe I could run a recording studio, like built the studio. And I had no official training as a sound engineer, but I taught myself and I started doing it and it was fantastic. And while I was running my recording studio, I started working gigs at a few various venues, concerts and other stages and stuff like that. And I found myself at this burlesque club where I started working as a sound engineer there. I started running the sound for the shows.
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And there was something magical about that place. There was something about the energy and the attitude and the openness. I just fell in love with that place and the people there. And it was fantastic. And so I actually started performing burlesque there and my dream was to sing. So I started performing burlesque as a way to improve my confidence. If you can perform burlesque, if you can finish a performance, you know that you're never going to be nervous on stage again. Right.
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Is it almost like you inhabit an alter ego when you become your own Sasha Fierce kind of thing? That's it. You take on, you dial your own personality up to 11 and you take on this alter ego. So I was actually performing under the name Man Halen. I like it. So that was my alter ego. And in the band I was known as Crash Adams. So I've had a few alter egos throughout my day. That turned out to be kind of ground zero for my awakening.
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emotional awakening and a spiritual awakening and for all the healing that I went through because what I hadn't realized at the beginning when I started there was there were a lot of really unhealthy emotional and relationship dynamics going on there. They were mistreating me, they were pushing me away, there was a lot of gaslighting, a lot of emotional abuse. I was performing there because I was finally learning how to be myself.
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Finally learning how to not care what people think, how to bring the most passionate, most expansive, most loving version of myself out into the world without fear, without any issues. That's what drew me to the place, because that's what I thought that everyone there was doing. There was a freedom about it. But what I didn't realize at the time was that while I was there learning to become the most authentic version of myself, most people were there hiding from themselves.
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Because burlesque was a lot of alter egos and a lot of glitz and glamour and smoke and mirrors and a lot of makeup. Like most of the people there, I didn't even know their real names. I called them by their burlesque name. And there was, you know, this world of sex and drugs and alcohol that was associated with that whole thing. A lot of people there were running from their own trauma and running from their own pain and using this alter ego.
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And this glitz and glamour and makeup is a way to hide from themselves and using the sex and drugs and alcohol is a way to numb their pain away. So the more that I started being and expressing my truest self to them and really coming out as that expansive, highly passionate version, it rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. They didn't like it. There's an expression in the spiritual community that says, you know, some people will never like you because your light irritates their demons.
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that it's almost like the opposite version of the Marianne Williamson quote of our deepest fear is that we're powerful beyond measure. You know that quote? Yeah. So when you hear that, sometimes they say the opposite happens. If you think I'm gonna let other people shine, if I let my light shine, they get irritated and want you to step back. So I think that's what you're referring to. It's something along those lines. The fact that I was opening up
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to my truest self kind of shined a light on the fact that they weren't. They were using this place as a way to hide from themselves. So now here's this person that's using it in this other way subconsciously. I don't think that any of them recognize this consciously, but subconsciously makes them realize that like, well, that's not me. I'm not doing that because I didn't understand any of this at the beginning either. I was looking through their masks. I was seeing them.
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I was trying to see the real people behind them and they didn't like that. They didn't want to be seen. You know, I have to just always put this asterisk now of who knows, maybe I'm misinterpreting, but that is what I took away from it. I know a lot of the people that I've helped, and I'm sure a lot of your audience might've experienced this thing of, you know, being called out for being too passionate, for being too much, for being too, you like, you express too much. You need to
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quiet yourself down in order to fit into the crowd kind of thing. Yeah, because then people become uncomfortable in your presence if they feel like you are being too much. Exactly. And they started turning against me and they started becoming very rude to me. They were gaslighting me. They were being very emotionally manipulative. Then on top of that, I fell in love with one of them. I fell in love with a woman who was an alcoholic and who was suicidal and who had some other issues.
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I don't know if I didn't notice it or if I just didn't fully appreciate how much pain that she was in because I was seeing everything through my own particular lens. I was in this space because I was learning how to love myself. So when I saw these other people that were partying in that way and that were open in this kind of sex, drugs and alcohol kind of way, and then there's a whole story of what happened with her and I, but I won't get into that. But basically when things turned sour with her because she couldn't handle emotions.
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and we both decided like, look, I said that I'm focused on my life and my, you know, I had built this recording studio. I'm focused on that direction that I'm going in. So I'm not really looking for a relationship. And she told me that like, well, she can't handle emotions. So she's not looking for a relationship. So great, we're just hanging out. But then at a certain point, some stuff happened. And it became real. Like the emotions became real. I really fell in love with her. And because I fell in love with her, and she couldn't handle emotions, she started pulling away.
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She wouldn't talk to me about it. She wouldn't explain to me what happened. So all of a sudden now I'm feeling intense emotions and she's feeling intense emotions, but my reaction to feeling the intense emotions is to try and get closer and her reaction to the intense emotions is to run the hell away. And I didn't understand any of this. So the more that she ran away, the more desperate that I became. And the more desperate that I became in that relationship, because she was a
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social group at that burlesque club, because she had been there before me also. So everyone knew her more than they knew me and kind of gravitated towards her. All of a sudden there was this awkwardness between her and I, and it created this awkward energy that everyone kind of gravitated towards her side of, which led to more of the gaslighting and more of the emotional abuse from these people at that club. And so that sent me into this horrible downward spiral where just everything in my life fell apart.
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I couldn't enjoy the burlesque club anymore, which was my home at that time. It was the place in my life that for the first time finally felt like home where I felt fully comfortable and now I wasn't being accepted there and everything was very awkward and I had to pretend like I didn't care. So that started spiraling out of control and I was so in love with this woman also that I couldn't stop thinking about her. It was insane. It was genuinely insane. So even when I was in my recording sessions, I couldn't focus anymore.
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So I couldn't run my recording studio and I couldn't be at the burlesque club anymore. And then one of the other venues that I was working out shut down and became this medical center. So everything fell apart. And I, for the first time in my life, became genuinely suicidal. After having left law school to find this and then losing it, I'm not going to find this again. And so I didn't believe that there was ever a way out again. So I became genuinely suicidal.
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And when all the standard approaches to mental health and all the standard lessons that I was learning online just made me hate myself even more and hate the world even more. That's when I kind of started going through an awakening of my own, which at the time was this intense spiritual awakening. But we can just look at it as an emotional awakening at this point, because I've come down from that kind of high end spiritual place where I was at the time. But I had to go through that kind of spiritual awakening that led me to discover a lot of things about myself.
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And that led me down this path of emotional healing that eventually just kind of snowballed into the work that I'm doing now. The more that I started doing the healing, the more that I started sharing myself online because authentic self-love and self-expression is a huge part of the healing journey that I was going down. So I started sharing of myself. And the more that I started sharing, the more that it started becoming clear that I really did have a unique perspective, really did have a way with words, really did have.
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something unique and special to share with the world that I was helping people just by sharing my own story and my own journey. So I started sharing more and it just kind of started snowballing into creating my courses and writing my books and becoming a coach. It all just happened naturally. Like there was never a point at which I sat down and thought, okay. It came from you, your experiences, not that you didn't have to think about, obviously you did, but.
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just having gone through those things like you shared, you shared your experiences, it's you. That's how people connect with you. That's exactly it. The work that I do is just me. It's just me being the most authentic version of myself. That's what I do. That's what I do for a living. I be me. I show up, I share my life experiences and my path. And yes, because of this healing that I went through and everything like I created.
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tools and exercises and skills. So I have specific things that I'm teaching people, but overall it's just me being and sharing the most authentic version of myself, my own wisdom, my own path, my own experiences, my own opinions with those who resonate with it. And the more that I started doing it, the results that I have seen from people have been nothing short of miraculous. Like I've had people who've spent three decades in therapy.
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People who have been on all the medications, who have tried CBT and DBT and EMDR and spiritual retreats and empowerment retreats and meditation and yoga and everything, finally learning how to wake up happy. People who had come to me genuinely suicidal, people who had planned their suicide, who like me had believed that they would never be happy again, and they stumbled across my webinar, they stumbled across my book, and it gave them some hope, and they signed up for my course, and within eight weeks or a couple of months,
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had them just feeling completely differently about their lives by teaching them how to handle their emotions and handle their thoughts and handle the sensations in their body in a way that they had never understood before. So when I see someone who spent 30 years analyzing their trauma in therapy, finally learning how to be and express their true selves, it's a truly beautiful experience. It is an honor to be able to help my clients.
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I want to go back to the beginning of your story. I was raised Christian. They used to scare us with the idea that if you do something wrong, God is watching in secret and you're going to go to hell on Judgment Day and Satan's waiting with the fork. But I didn't have the level of fear of death that you described. I was doing something wrong. I like, oh, hell, here you come. If the fork comes, what do you think caused that level of fear?
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For me, the fear of death wasn't the fear of hell the way it might have been for you. To me, the fear of death is that one day it's over. That's it. For the rest of eternity, complete nothingness. That is what scares the absolute living hell out of me. Keeping in mind the spiritual awakening that I went through and how natural the work that I'm doing now is.
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The most honest answer that I can give you, I think, is that the fear of death was an intricate part of my journey. If we can presume for a moment that there is something more to this universe and that I came in here with this mission and purpose and passion kind of thing, the fear of death was necessary to lead me on this path. To explore and study and question.
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If I hadn't had the fear of death, I wouldn't have studied philosophy. I wouldn't have been in the band. I wouldn't have lived my life in a particular way that eventually led me to what I'm doing now. I think that I just, I loved life. I loved, like even though it had its challenges and there was pain involved, even at a young age, I understood that I am enjoying this life and the idea that it will one day just completely end was petrifying. Right.
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When you felt suicidal, why went drugs to numb your pain, your first go-to? I find that in this culture, you guys don't talk to people close to you. Well, at least compared to where I come from. And secondly, now that I'm in America and I've had somebody close to me, they say, you know, the first thing you think of is, let me go get drugs to numb my depression, my anxiety. Why was that not your first point of...
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call and did you not have anybody to talk to about how you were feeling? I had people that would listen, let's say, like I had my mom around and maybe a couple of friends that I could talk to, but no one that I felt understood what I was saying or knew what to say in response, or even, you know, when I would go to see a therapist or something, I felt like I had a certain level of self-awareness.
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an introspection that a lot of people don't have. Like the work that I'm doing now is proof of that. What makes me good at what I do is my ability to look into myself and to both analyze my experiences in a particular way, but also learn how to cope with them in various ways. So I had a certain level of self-awareness that most people do not. I think I can say that at this point in my life without it being arrogant or ego. I'm not.
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I'm not great at everything. I'm not great at maths, I'm not great at sciences, I'm not great at history. I am great. Yeah. I am great at introspection, philosophy, religion, looking and investigating our experiences of life and deciphering meaning and lessons from them and learning how to be myself. That's where my skills lie. So you take someone like that and...
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put me in front of a therapist who doesn't necessarily have that innate skill, but who has simply studied at school for six to eight years. It's not the same. They're regurgitating out of a book or they're taking notes in this particular way, but they haven't mastered themselves. So there were people that I could talk to. So with therapists, for example, I felt like, look, maybe if I talked to this person for the next five years, then they'll understand me enough and I'll understand them enough. And maybe we can finally make a breakthrough.
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Yeah, like a relationship, you get to know each other over time. So you thought that's how it was going to play out. I thought at best because I was not appreciating or enjoying or getting anything out of my sessions with the therapist at the beginning. It felt like I was trying to get someone up to speed about what I already know about myself and all the things that they were suggesting, like I said, actually made me hate myself more because I already understand about me, the thing that you're pointing out right here in this moment, and I've thought for
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thousands of hours about it. But you're now sitting here across from me saying it to me as if understanding that is supposed to make me feel better, but I don't feel better. I've already understood that about myself and now not only am I thinking about that thing that's about myself, but I now have to explain to you why knowing what you just said doesn't changing anything for me. And so I felt like I was getting the therapist up to speed. He didn't understand me and he was regurgitating out of a book and like so it just didn't feel right. It wasn't helpful.
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So there were people that I could talk to. There were people who made me feel like I was doing something wrong by just being aware of myself or by trying to express myself. And there was this period where a few people in particular were taking advantage of me being very cool. Like the short version of it while I was running the recording studio, the last project that I ever took on was something that I called the Octa Launch. Basically I took eight striving artists, courted their albums for free and was gonna promote their music through my style.
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And there were a couple of the artists that I had taken on for free, spent a lot of my time, a lot of my energy, recording their stuff, mixing it, preparing for the release, and a couple of them who really took advantage of me. One of them who just the day before the launch of his album, decided, nope, I'm not going to do this, and pulled out. Because I made one little comment about his album cover. Not even a comment, like he sent me the picture of his album cover, and it was just a picture of his living room, and I go, okay, are you sure you want to use that? And just asked!
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As soon as he said yes, I'm like, okay, cool, no problem. But even me asking just sent him off. I didn't know that you were like, wanted to have creative control over my project and you were gonna say this, so I don't wanna do this. There were a couple of people who had taken advantage of me. And like, even when I expressed that to my mom, I remember her trying to like, well, what did you do? Like, what did you do wrong to deserve this? And I'm not trying to say that I don't wanna look at myself and that there haven't been times where I caused certain problems. And I do live now by a lesson of
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Even when someone else has genuinely done something wrong, what could you have done to change the situation? So I'm not saying that I don't want to look at myself and I want to pretend like I never do anything wrong. But in this particular situation where people are being cruel to you and you've taken advantage of and someone is trying to make you think, well, what did you do wrong? It feels insulting. I didn't. I recorded her album for her. No, the reason I asked and now that you've shared your experience, it makes.
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people understand why a lot of people wouldn't even bother sometimes sharing how they're feeling because they feel like they're not gonna understand anyway, what's going on inside of me. And then when you started doing this work, I watched some of your videos and you say you can't logic away emotional pain, which I feel some of us who don't understand when a person goes through that, I think that's where we come in. We come in with the logic.
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Yeah, as modern humans, we are very used to living up in our head. That's what we experience. We do all of our lives through logic and rationality and thinking things through. And we are very disconnected from that kind of core part of ourselves. Like some people even scoff and roll their eyes at the idea of intuition. You know, everything has to be logical. I've been watching old episodes of Dr. House, for example, house, and he's, it's all about logic. It's all about my brother. He loves.
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There are people like House who like everything has to be logical. If there isn't this logical deduction and kind of like logical math to it, then it's not real. We spend a lot of time living up in our heads. If we can't understand something logically, then it's not real. That was why I spent all of that time in philosophy looking for a logical gap somewhere that I could put God or the universe of the afterlife. So we spend our lives.
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pushing away emotional discomfort that feels like a threat. When I say you can't logic away emotional pain, the way that I like to express is like, look, let's say that you had a headache and you sat down with the doctor and the doctor explained to you, all right, well, here are all the reasons why you have a headache. Firstly, there are these chemicals going on in your brain. Secondly, it's because you haven't slept enough. And thirdly, it's because 10 years ago, you were hitting the head with the bucket and now there's some trauma that's still in your brain.
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And so these are all the reasons why you have a headache. If the doctor did that, would you then go, thank you, doctor. I feel so much better. My headache is gone. Have a great day. Or would you say, well, that's great doc, but what do we do about it? Yes. Well, how do we make this thing go away? Exactly. So what people tend to be doing in therapy, again, I want to put an asterisk on this in advance, because I'm not trying to say that there aren't phenomenal therapists out there.
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I'm not trying to say that. No, we're not knocking therapy at all. Yeah. And because therapy is also a very generic term. There are lots of different kinds of therapy. And I'm glad that we live in a world that has all of these different approaches. But a lot of people, this was my experience and just so, so many clients that I've worked with, they spend their time in therapy trying to find and analyze the trauma. So you're carrying around this pain, you're carrying around these defense mechanisms of why do I keep pushing people away?
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Why am I always at arm's length with people? Why can't I form healthy relationships? Why am I always anxious? Why am I always afraid? And you sit down with the therapist and, okay, well, what happened with your parents when you were young? How did they treat you? How did they do whatever? And you're sort of analyzing the stuff from the past. Now, is it true that your current pain finds its root in childhood and how your parents treated you? Absolutely. But...
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The real healing doesn't come from analyzing what happened in the past. Like usually, so sometimes I'll have my initial call with people on the phone, you know, people who are looking to be clients or who are interested. And basically within a half an hour, we can get through everything that you need to know about your past. If I'm going to boil everything down into, let's say one scenario, there's like one overarching experience that basically everyone has had that this all comes down to is that somewhere in the past.
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you were made to feel rejected, pushed away, uncomfortable, ashamed, awkward, unsafe for being and expressing your emotions. That's what's underneath the core of everyone. So you're out in public, let's say, and you're crying and your parents are like, big kids, don't cry, you better hold it in. Then on the abusive side of things, you know, people who would get insulted or get rejected or get sent to their room because like you would
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ask your parent like I'm in pain right now or I'm hurting and like how dare you shut up go to your room or just not a great example but like throughout our lives one way or another we would express ourselves we would ask for the help that we need we would cry we would be in pain and our parents or our teachers or the authority figures would make us feel bad for being and expressing ourselves at one story weller I fell off my bike and my brother went and I was scared again my brother went and got my dad my dad showed up
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He put me in the back of the car and I remember him being in the front of the car with my mom being so frustrated. Like, why did I have to come pick him up? He's just a couple of blocks away from home. It's just a skinny. Why on earth do I have to go here on my day off like it's Sunday and I've been working and I don't want to do this. I remember him in the front seat being all like disgusted and ashamed with me and frustrated and angry with me. Now, compared to the trauma that a lot of the people that I help with have been through, not a big deal. But in that moment, what lesson does a kid learn?
33:24
The kid learns that if I'm vulnerable, if I open up about the fact that I'm in pain, if I ask for help, if I express myself to my family, it leads to guilt, it leads to shame, it leads to me feeling terrible inside. Behind every emotion, there is a certain amount of energy. And I don't mean this in the spiritual woo-woo kind of sense, but it takes a certain amount of energy for your body to do anything, to cry, to scream, to shake. So in that moment, when you're feeling any kind of emotional pain, there's a certain amount of energy.
33:54
going towards that. Your body wants to cry. There's a certain amount of physical and emotional energy behind that urge to cry. Your body desperately wants to cry so that it can purge that energy. The same way that your body naturally wants to sweat when you're working out. It's trying to purge some chemicals and it's trying to keep you operating at the right temperature. That's why your body sweats. For similar reasons, your body wants to cry.
34:24
It wants to shake. It wants to scream. It wants to laugh. These are all ways of purging emotional energy that is happening in that moment. But as we grow up and we're made to feel unsafe for feeling and purging and expressing our emotions, well, here I am stuck in the backseat of that car and I want to cry, but I know firstly, I'm already being judged in that moment.
34:47
And I know that plenty of times when I have cried, my dad has looked down on me and has made me feel really bad about myself. And I remember this expression on so I said lots of times we'd go and play racquetball together, for example. And I was never allowed to just play. I just want to spend time with my dad, my brother and have fun. But it was always about getting better. And you had to do it right. And I would leave every one of those situations crying because I just wanted to love and have fun and spend time with my dad. But he was a lot more stressed at the time.
35:17
He's a stubborn Israeli who kind of lost himself in the army and then came and had to work. That's why I even wrecked at both like being in the army. Yeah, exactly. So I don't blame him and our relationship is better these days. It's okay. But these are all just examples of how I learned growing up that wait a minute, if I cry, it's going to lead to more pain for me. You know, he's going to judge me. He's going to look down on me. He's going to be ashamed of me. I'm going to be ashamed of myself. I'm going to feel bad about myself. So
35:46
There's this energy behind your reactions when you're not getting treated properly. Your body naturally wants to do certain things in order to purge that energy. Cry, scream, shake, laugh, sweat, whatever. But I had learned that if I do those things, it leads to more pain. So here's this energy that my body wants to purge. It wants me to cry, but I don't want to cry because if I cry, it's going to lead to more pain. So I'm holding it in. So what happens to that energy?
36:16
doesn't go anywhere. It gets stuck there. The other example that I like to use is as far as like why we can't analyze away the logic in the pain. The second part of it is that let's say you cut your arm 20 years ago and you never did anything about it. So it's been getting infected and it's gangrenous and it's all kind of nasty. Now, if you show up to the doctor now, he can't heal the wound that happened 20 years ago.
36:44
He can heal the wound as it is now. I mean, hopefully, but you get my point. We can only work on the way that the wound is now. If you show up to the doctor and show this cut and like, Oh my God, my arm is all kinds of infected right now. He might ask you how this happened, like what happened 20 years ago, but that doesn't change anything. We have to work on the wounds. It doesn't fix the 20 year cause of the wound. He can't, he can't go back 20 years and heal.
37:12
He can't put the Bactine on the initial wound so that it never happened. Now we have to work on the way that it is now. So we go into therapy and we start talking about the thing that happened 20 years ago. And while an intellectual understanding of it is nice, because now you start understanding that, Oh, I'm not to blame for this pain. And you start recognizing that I'm not alone, that everyone experiences this and I'm not a terrible person. That's nice. But the real problem.
37:40
is the unresolved emotional energy. Because your body, firstly, not only did it hold back from purging this emotional energy, but it started building defense mechanisms around these emotions. It doesn't want you to feel them. You feel safe, yeah. Exactly. I learned that crying leads to danger, that being vulnerable, expressing myself, oftentimes we open up to someone in a relationship and they end up taking advantage of us. Using that against us, yeah.
38:08
using it against us. So what do we learn? Oh, well, if I'm vulnerable, it leads to pain. So we build up all of these defense mechanisms around feeling our emotions, around being ourselves, around expressing ourselves. And so basically all of those emotions begin to feel like threats. So when you are in a particular moment and someone is mistreating you and it's bringing up this feeling of shame inside that feeling inside of you, that's just your body's way of trying to deal with something, trying to purge something.
38:36
We learn somewhere along the way that, oh no, that feeling, that's a threat. That's gonna lead to danger. That's gonna lead to problems. So I need to stop that away. I need to make sure that I don't feel that and I need to pretend like I'm not feeling it to the outside world. But in that moment, your body is trying to help you heal. As we started learning this lesson that expressing myself is gonna lead to danger. In moments of trauma, it's like this head says to the heart, okay, hold on to this pain and we'll come back around and deal with it later when we're safe.
39:03
the heart that needs to feel and process and express this emotional energy kind of goes, okay, I'll hold on to it. I know that we can't purge it right now. I'll remind you about it tomorrow. The day after I'll remind you about it when we're safe. So now when we're going through our lives and we're getting triggered by people who are mistreating us or by stress or by anxiety, by whatever, when we're getting triggered by the external world, then the body responds and goes, oh, it's going to send up this pain from the past.
39:29
That's gonna say, hey, here's this pain that you promised me you were gonna deal with me when you were safe. Are you safe? Are you ready to deal with me? So when you're getting triggered and this emotion is coming up, that's just something from the past saying, hey, you promised me that you were gonna deal with me. Are you safe now? The problem is that we haven't yet realized that we're safe. We are still trying to protect ourselves from these emotions that we're carrying inside of us. But you cannot run from something that lives inside of you.
39:57
Imagine that you were literally afraid of your shadow, like your actual physical shadow on the ground. If you had a paranoid fear. It's constantly there and there is nothing that you can do to escape it. There's only one thing that you can possibly do to escape your shadow. Sit in the dark all day long. If you're in the dark, then you have no shadow. And that's exactly what we've been doing with our emotions because we've been afraid of these emotions that live inside of us and you cannot run from it. So you're...
40:27
in paranoid fear every moment of every day with all of the emotions that are running inside of you You basically have only one choice which is to sit in darkness. So that's why we numb ourselves We numb away the pain We do everything that we can to push away the emotions because they feel like threats But those emotions they're not threats. That's your body's way of saying like hey Here's this pain that you didn't deal with. Can we please deal with it? Now exactly
40:54
Where you say anxiety is mind versus heart internal conflict. The mindset, okay, park this thing for now. We'll deal with it later. And the heart saying I need to purge it now. And you did, that's how you describe anxiety. That's very, very accurate because there are a few things that I say about anxiety. And one of them is that anxiety is about this inner conflict that's going on inside. Or one part of you wants to go left and one party you wants to go right. One party you wants to just sit down and cry.
41:22
And because it feels like you're being pulled apart by horses in different directions, there's that inner turmoil going on that creates that anxiety. That's one of the ways that I explain it. And in that context, yes, you're exactly right, because your heart is the one that desperately wants you to just feel me already. Please feel this pain. Please look at me. You promised me you were going to deal with me when you were safe. Here I am.
41:48
Please look at me, please look at me, please look at me, please look at me, please look at me, the heart desperately wants you to feel these things. But the head has learned this lesson along the way that oh no, if I feel those things. The survival instinct kicks in. Exactly, the head thinks no, no, no, no, no, no, no, I don't wanna feel that thing because that thing is gonna be a threat. So your heart is yelling at you, please look at me, please look at me, please look at me, and the head is going, don't you dare look in that direction, don't you dare look over there. So we learn to stuff away our emotions and we learn to live.
42:17
from this logical part of ourselves. And that is why so many of us are disconnected from who we really are at our core. We've lost ourselves along the way. We don't realize that we're not living as an authentic version of ourselves because along our lives, we have to stuff away that core version of ourselves and operate based on all of these defense mechanisms. We have built up our entire identities around the defense mechanisms that we have used to keep ourselves safe and we don't realize it.
42:45
We are not that authentic version of ourselves that we were when we were four years old, because every time an authentic emotion came up, oh no, that's a threat. So let's push that away. And it could be something even as simple, like when you were six years old, maybe you told your friends like, oh, I really like this TV show. And then one of your friends went, oh, that TV show is stupid. And you're stupid for liking it. It's a tiny little thing. But you just realize, wait a minute, when I shared my love and my passion,
43:14
with this person that I care about, it led to pain. So now I'm gonna start stuffing that away. And now not only am I gonna pretend like I don't like that show, but I'm gonna be very weary of admitting the things that I love. I'm gonna create this pattern and this identity of wait a minute, before I admit that I like something, I need to make sure that other people- We need to hear what the others are saying about it. Exactly.
43:39
And that's why you have grownups even in workspaces who don't volunteer the idea first. They want to see what everyone in the boardroom is thinking and so that they can go along with that so that they don't want to sound like the weird stupid one. Yeah and the thing is we've developed that pattern so innately and so subconsciously that we don't even realize in our adult lives that
44:07
The things that you love and the ways that you talk and the ways that you act, they've all been built up around these defense mechanisms that you use to keep yourself safe. So you don't even know what it is that you truly love anymore and what you truly like because this part of you is taken over. Your brain can be programmed. You can train your brain to like things that you don't initially like, or you can reprogram your perception of certain experiences, certain things in your life. You can change the way that you think about something. Yeah.
44:36
but you cannot change what your heart knows and wants. Your heart knows what it knows and wants what it wants and that's all there is to it. So in order to follow the mind as opposed to the heart, we need to stuff this part away. You need to pretend like that's not there. So we've spent our lifetime following the logical mind while the heart has been there in the background yelling at you like, you promised that you were gonna look at me when you were safe. Every day that you're going through your life and you're getting triggered.
45:04
You're getting frustrated, you're getting angry, and you're getting defensive, and you're getting depressed or anxious. That's that core part of you in the background yelling, please look at me. And the head goes, nope, because when I did that, that led to pain. So we keep on going down that pathway and we never realize that's not who we are. That's the programmed version of ourselves that we use to keep ourselves safe. One example that I like to use for that is sarcasm.
45:31
I see this a lot on like dating sites, for example, people who pride themselves immensely on their dark humor or on their sarcasm. No judgment, no issues there. They'll have like a big line in their dating profile. If you can't handle my sarcasm, then you are not a good fit for me. And they pride themselves so immensely on like my sarcastic sense of humor is, oh my God, I'm such a, and that's okay. But what they don't realize is that sarcasm is a defense mechanism. It's a way that we keep people at arm's length. It's a way that you can say something that is true.
46:01
while pretending that it's not true. Yeah. Just in case they're going to judge you for it or saying something that is not true and pretending it's true, just in case it's a way of circumventing that vulnerability, exactly both sides to see which one is safe and which one you will not be judged for exactly. You're keeping people at arm's length where someone's going to make a joke hitting on someone like I'm flirting with you and I'm going to make this joke about it.
46:30
And if they respond positively, then it wasn't a joke. But if they respond negatively, oh, no, no, no, I was just kidding. I was just kidding. Exactly. So that's what sarcasm is. It's a way of keeping people at arm's length. It's a way of pretending that something isn't true while it is true, or pretending that something is true while it isn't true and saying it in that way so that you can then kind of figure out which way you want to go about it. Hiding your authenticity under this sarcastic tone.
46:58
The whole reason that I brought this up is because there are lots of ways that we have built our identities around those defense mechanisms. So people who are sarcastic, people with a dark sense of humor, people who do keep people at arm's lengths, people who have trouble forming connections, people who don't know who they truly are deep down their core, people who have taken jobs and who've sat in careers for 20 years. It's something that didn't feel right because they don't know who they are anymore. So how do we craft this now authentic self identity?
47:28
and also bring out all that's been hiding in the heart and then start going towards that light. Here's the thing and this healing can actually be so much simpler than people think it is. It's not necessarily easy, it's not going to be comfortable at every second but it is actually simple. Your body is trying to help you heal all the time. As we were just saying when you're going through your day and someone's being rude to you or something doing whatever it's triggering these
47:57
Those emotions that are coming up, that's your unresolved trauma yelling at you saying, here I am, please look at me. And all that we really have to start doing is start understanding that those internal messages that we're getting, that turning feeling in the pit of your stomach, the tightness in your chest, the negative self-talk, the emotions of fear and doubt and shame and guilt, all of those things, they're just your body's way of trying to purge emotional energy that you haven't dealt with before.
48:24
So we just have to start recognizing, wait a minute, that internal discomfort that I'm feeling, that's not a threat. It's my body's way of starting to heal, trying to purge this emotional energy. And if I just let go of the resistance around it, if I can not be afraid of it in that moment and start leaning into it, then you can start purging the emotional energy. And if I'm gonna break this healing down into the simplest way that I can explain it. Number one, there are three elements of your experience of reality. Thoughts.
48:54
emotions and sensations. Okay. That's it. So you're watching me through the screen, the light that's hitting your eye, the sound that's hitting your ears, every bit of your experience of the external world, those are sensations. Then your understanding of what's happening and your experience of your conscious inner world, that's your thoughts. So the sounds are hitting your ears, but those are just sounds.
49:18
It's only because we both have language and we both understand English that you can then take those sounds and translate them into meaningful whatever. That's your conscious inner world is your thoughts. And then there's your emotions, which is this kind of intangible thing. It's hard to put your finger on exactly what is happiness, exactly what is sadness, what is joy, what is fear. You can't really put it into words very well, but it's also not a physical thing. It's not a sensation.
49:47
There are sensations associated with it, like anxiety comes with a turning feeling in the pit of your stomach, but fear is not in and of itself a sensation. Happiness is not a sensation that you feel in your body. It's kind of like the flavor of reality that you're experiencing at a moment. It's your mood, sort of the lens through which you're interpreting things in the moment. Because when you happen to be happy, you experience things a certain way and you interpret things a certain way. And when you happen to be sad or angry, you experience things a different way. So...
50:16
Thoughts, emotions, sensations. That's all that you can experience. And every moment of every day, you're experiencing those three things. Now the secret is, there's this subconscious cycle going on between those three elements of your experience. Every moment of every day. So a lot of people in the healing space talk about how your thoughts manipulate your emotions. Like, oh, if you wanna be happy, you need to think positive thoughts kind of thing. Which is nice. There is some truth to that, that your thoughts impact your emotions.
50:46
but it's much more true that your emotions manipulate your thoughts. When you happen to be feeling sad, you think much more pessimistically. You see the terrible that's in the world in a very different way. When you happen to be happy, you're much more willing to see the positive things. You think very differently. In everything, you smell the flowers, everything looks good, life is great. Exactly. So point being, basically kind of what happens is a moment of fear, well, we resist that emotion.
51:15
We don't want to fully feel it and we want to make sense of it. We don't want to feel the emotion of fear. We want to tackle the thing that we think is causing the fear because we've spent a lifetime pushing aside of our emotions. So a moment of fear leads us into our thoughts. Start thinking. We start analyzing. We start looking at the things that are causing this. Now, those thoughts create a stress response in our body because we're telling ourselves all the reasons why we're not safe. So those thoughts create that turning feeling of the tension in your stomach or they have you.
51:42
tensing up your shoulders or clenching your jaw or whatever, because you don't feel safe in that moment. That stress response in your body then tells your subconscious mind that you're in danger, which creates more fear. And that fear creates more thoughts. And those thoughts create more of that stress response. And that stress response created more emotions. And those emotions create more thoughts. And those thoughts create more sensations. Around and around and around and around and around we go. And it works in the other direction as well. So each one of these elements is constantly manipulating the other.
52:11
Mainly because we've spent our whole lives living up here. We are only truly connected and only truly in charge of, because we're not, but in charge of what's happening up here. We've spent a lifetime avoiding the emotions and avoiding the sensations. So we're only having any sense of awareness of what's going on up here. These three elements of your experience and how they're constantly manipulating each other. So in order to start healing,
52:37
You're going to need to learn how to isolate those three experiences. How to understand your thoughts. They're their own thing. And when you're stuck in your cycling, negative thoughts and all of that, they're not real, all of the negative cycling bullshit that you're telling yourself. It's actually just your mind's way of making sense of emotions that it doesn't know how to feel. So we learn how to deal with our thoughts as their own thing. And then we'd learn how to feel our emotions as their own thing. Like a moment of feeling down or sadness doesn't mean that there's a problem.
53:04
But sometimes you happen to be feeling down one day and your mind desperately wants to understand, why am I feeling down today? And when your mind looks for an answer of why am I feeling down today, it's going to find an answer. There's always going to be an answer. There's never no answer. There's evidence of everything you have already decided. You find the evidence. Exactly. There's never going to be a moment in your life where everything is so perfect that you cannot possibly find a reason behind a low emotion.
53:31
So you feel low emotion, your brain finds a reason, and now there's a reason. There wasn't a moment to go, it was just an emotion, but your brain wanted logic attached to it. So we learn how to feel our emotions as their own thing, and we learn how to feel the sensations in their own thing. So for example, for people who are dealing with anxiety, I remember there was this moment at which I had managed to deal with my thoughts. The thoughts weren't fooling me anymore, the emotions, I was still feeling fear, but I knew the fear was going to pass, everything is fine. But there was still that turning feeling in the pit of my stomach. And there was this one moment.
54:00
where I finally like, okay, I know the thoughts are nonsense. I know that the emotional past, so I'm not scared of these things. And then I turned my attention directly to that turning feeling in the pit of my stomach. And what I realized in that moment was, hey, guess what? That's all it is. It's a turning feeling in your stomach. It's not comfortable. It's not pleasant, but I don't need to freak out about it.
54:22
I don't need to add fear to this experience of what is that turning feeling in the pit of my stomach means. It doesn't mean anything. Well, actually, it means my body is healing, it's trying to purge unresolved emotional energy. I don't need to add thoughts to it. So when we can separate those three elements of your experience and deal with each one as their own thing, then the cycle stops itself. You stop being afraid.
54:43
of your emotions, you stop being afraid of that turning feeling in the pit of your stomach, you stop believing the nonsense negative thoughts that are going on, and your body can finally start purging all of the unresolved emotions that's been going through, and you can sort of start settling yourself back to the authentic version of yourself that you have stuffed away throughout the years. When you do feel the, whether pit of the stomach or a lot of time it's something in your chest, like it feels like it wants to come out, like your heart is literally going to be ripped
55:12
You can just say, Hey, that's what that is. Or do we need to look deep and say, huh, why am I triggered? Huh? Let me look back to my childhood. Huh? What's going on here? And that's when we go back to what you said earlier, which is analyze the trauma. So based on what you just said, it feels like just be in that moment, feel it and let, let it go. So while that is a bit oversimplified and
55:41
I really hate it when those spiritual or emotional teachers who tell their clients like, oh, just sit with the emotion. What does that mean? You know, when this thing happens in the moment? Firstly, it's not just tied to one thing. It's never just tied to, oh, well, there was this one moment where my dad did this to me and that's why I'm feeling that way in this moment. It's attached to a thousand memories where you felt a particular thing. Yes, it started in the past, but it's never just one memory. And
56:09
The logic isn't going to help us. The other thing that I like to say about analyzing the past is you can't read the label from inside the bottle. What I mean by that is you will never fully understand your defense mechanisms and where they really came from until you escape them. So when you are constantly stuffing away your emotion, when you're constantly being sarcastic with people, for example,
56:37
as a way of keeping them at arm's length. You're using that sarcasm as a defense mechanism against some of your emotions. As long as you are still stuck in a state of fear such that you need to use sarcasm, you're never gonna fully understand why you're doing it. It's only once you process the emotions and once you break free of that pattern, that then you'll be able to look back and go, oh, that's why I was doing it. Because you need to change
57:05
the emotional reaction to it first before any of that can really make sense. Which is the exact same reason why I can sit down with you. Let's say there is someone who's using sarcasm as a way of keeping people at arms length and who can't have healthy relationships because of it. If I were to sit down with them and explain to them, Oh, here are all of the reasons why you're being sarcastic. They wouldn't fully understand it. They could understand it from up here. They wouldn't understand it here. It wouldn't penetrate. In the heart space. Yeah.
57:34
But until they allow themselves to feel that pain that they are avoiding, it's not going to fully make sense to them. But if you show them how to feel that discomfort first and how to process it, then they can look back and go, Oh, I was being sarcastic because I was trying to avoid that experience that I just went through. It's not until they finally experienced that purging that they're actually going to understand what this really is all about.
58:03
So does it mean the work with you do with your clients mostly is going into the heart space, the purging of the emotions? If therapy is a process of drilling down into the past and finding the pain that caused this, what I do is a process of excavation. So drilling is like, okay, here's where I'm living my life and here's this past trauma and I'm going to drill down, try and find that trauma. And when I find that trauma, I'm going to pull it up to the top.
58:31
And by doing so, everything else is going to crumble and it's going to settle into who I'm supposed to be. Doesn't work that way. I said that there were two things that I want everyone to understand about this healing. I mentioned number one, which is those three elements. Number two, I'm going to say it here because it actually fits into the question that you're asking. The second thing that we need to understand about this healing journey is that it needs to be done gradually. You need to build these emotional muscles. And this is why I call what I do emotional fitness training.
59:00
So think about that experience from your childhood, the worst of the worst thing that happened to you that really set all of this in motion in the first place. That thing that happened to you when you were very young, that's like the 500 pound weight of emotional distress that you're carrying with you. And right now you're not even strong enough to lift five pounds because you haven't been practicing. You've been spending a lifetime not feeling your emotions. Imagine that you spent the last 20 years not walking on your legs. Well, your legs are weak.
59:30
And you certainly cannot walk into the gym and lift 500 pounds right now. Similarly, we have spent a lifetime actively not connecting with our emotions. So we haven't built that emotional strength, that real emotional muscle. So we need to start small. You're going to start with the small triggers. You don't want to deal with when your parents smacked you upside the head and put you in an ice bath when you were five years old as a way to punish you. That's way too intense. You want to deal with, okay, well, what about when I'm stuck in line at the grocery store?
59:59
and this person in front of me is taking a really long time to pay. Okay, well, that's going to bring up some frustration. Let's learn how to deal with that. Because in that moment, there's a little trigger. So we need to learn how to deal with that five pound weight and then that ten pound weight and then the 15 and the 20. Because what good is it to hunt for the worst of the worst trauma that you ever experienced if you haven't yet built the skills and the tools and the wisdom of how to deal with that? It's like a dog chasing a car. Even if the dog catches the car, what is it going to do with it when it gets it? So what are you going to do?
01:00:28
with the worst trauma that you ever experienced if I were to bring it up to you right now before you've learned how to handle it. Let's say even as an adult, you know, I express that, oh yeah, you know what, I just saw this movie last night and I thought it was really good. And then someone across from me goes, oh, you know what, I saw that movie yesterday and it was the stupidest thing that I had ever seen. So now all of a sudden I'm feeling threatened because I had just invested some part of my personality.
01:00:56
in this statement of, oh, I really like that movie. And I hear this person who's saying that they disagree with it, which makes me feel uncomfortable and unstable because my identity is being challenged in that moment. I just invested a certain part of myself in that statement. And now that statement is being challenged by this other person, which makes me feel unsafe in my body. So it triggers some unresolved emotions inside of me. And because of those unresolved emotions, maybe I get a little defensive.
01:01:22
Maybe I get a little aggressive with this person. Maybe I'm trying to avoid feeling that discomfort inside of me. I feel threatened in that moment, and I don't know how to process that emotion. So I'm going to maybe get a little defensive. And when I get a little defensive, well, the thing that I say challenges that person's identity and their beliefs, because they said it was so stupid now. And I'm going to say, well, how can you possibly say that that was stupid? It was brilliantly written. So me now saying that.
01:01:51
maybe makes that person feel unsafe and feel like, wait a minute, am I being stupid? Because I just thought that this movie was stupid, but he's saying that it's so like, maybe I don't understand something. So they're feeling threatened. So they respond in a particular way. They just got triggered. So they're gonna respond defensively. And then their defensive reaction makes me respond defensively, and they respond defensively. And so I'm getting angry, and then they're getting angry or defensive or upset or ashamed. We're both triggering each other back and forth and back and forth and back and forth until one of us blows up.
01:02:20
or until we both, you know, we walk away from that conversation. Now I'm carrying more uncertainty and more shame inside of myself. And so is that other person. Then you go home and you have a conversation with someone who triggers some other part of you. And some of them are very innocuous. So sometimes if it's just about not liking a movie, but then you go home to your wife or to your spouse. And now and you didn't take out the garbage. So why didn't you take out the garbage? And now you're feeling really threatened because.
01:02:48
Now not only is your personality being threatened, but your security and your safety and your relationship and this love is being threatened. So why didn't you take out the garbage? And I don't know how to deal with that threatening feeling inside of myself. So i'm going to respond back, well because you didn't really tell me how to do it. Now i'm getting angry. Now she's getting angry and then i'm getting angry and she's getting angry and it just blows up and blows up and blows up all because Neither of us have learned how to feel into that discomfort. So what we are trying to do through this process
01:03:17
is start small, build our way up and start learning how to feel safe while feeling the emotional discomfort because your body is just trying to help you, it's trying to help you purge. So what we're doing then, firstly we're building the emotional muscle and then we're doing as I was referring to earlier excavating where we're going to deal with the emotions that come to the top. So in that moment that I'm being challenged and like oh why didn't you take out the garbage? Yes.
01:03:46
The reason that I'm being, that I feel threatened is because 30 years ago, you know, my mom punished me for not taking out the garbage kind of thing. But who cares about that? All that I care about is right here in this moment. There's an uncomfortable emotion that's being triggered inside of me. And all that I need to do is learn how to feel it and feel safe feeling it and learn how to process it and purge it and express it. We need to learn how to express our emotions, how to allow our body.
01:04:15
to like if our body wants to shake, if our body wants to scream, if our body wants to cry, if our body wants to, you know, there are all sorts of ways that we can express the emotions themselves without translating them into words. And the more comfortable that you get feeling your discomfort, the more like, okay, I'm gonna get home. She's gonna say, why didn't you take out the garbage? She might be getting upset in that moment, but when she gets upset, wait a minute, now I don't feel threatened. Why didn't you take out the garbage? You're right, I didn't.
01:04:42
I'm sorry, like you're upset. Like I can handle the situation very differently. Instead of putting oil to the fire. Exactly. I went camping recently. I borrowed a tent from my brother. He mentioned to me that the last time that I had returned the tent, that it was still dirty. Now in the past, in a lot of ways, that might make me feel threatened because I don't want my brother to be upset with me.
01:05:06
And I don't want him to think that I'm irresponsible. And I don't want him to not lend me his tent again. So when he brings up this authentic issue of like, you know what? The last time you did it, it was still dirty and I didn't appreciate that kind of thing, I might get defensive about it. But instead my reaction was sorry about that. Thank you for telling me because I don't want to cause any problems between us. And I will absolutely do my best when I borrow it this time to make sure that it came back. So because I didn't feel threatened in the same way.
01:05:36
I was able to respond differently. But like you said, I'm not fueling the fire because if I did, he would have said to me, Benjy, you didn't clean the tent well. And, you know, I didn't appreciate that. And I would have said, what do you expect me to do? It can't be perfectly clean. You're camping in the woods. And he would go, well, look, it's my property if you want to. And then it would have led to a fight between us all because I hadn't learned to feel the discomfort of being challenged.
01:06:03
But when we can learn how to feel the discomfort inside of us, you can handle everything in a completely different manner. And then you're also going to be able to tell the difference between situations and relationships that are right for you in situations and relationships that are not right for you. You'll be able to easily tell the difference between a toxic relationship and a healthy one. And you're going to have the strength and the confidence and the certainty to walk away from toxic relationships.
01:06:28
Benji, I've taken up so much of your time. I don't even want to look at the clock. But do you have last words of wisdom? There's anything you were hoping to share with us that I didn't ask you. This inner healing work, learning how to finally face your emotions, not the trauma behind them, not the logic behind them, but to learn how to finally feel safe, experiencing everything that's happening in your body is the most important work that you will ever do in your life.
01:06:57
Everything else that you want to achieve relies on this work. If you want to have a healthy, loving relationship, if you want to have a truly successful career that feels right to you, where you're not betraying yourself and stuffing yourself away. If you want to explore the world, explore your passions, explore your hobbies, have happy friendships, it all comes down to this inner thing first. And we spend so much of our lifetimes trying to solve our external problems.
01:07:24
telling ourselves, okay, well, maybe one day when I have all of the money in the bank, or when I have everything fine, maybe then I'll turn inside and look at what's going on here. But it's the other way around. If you turn to solve this inner stuff first, then you can bring a completely different version of yourself out into the world and everything else will change. This is the most important work that you will ever do. And you're not saving yourself anything by avoiding it.
01:07:54
They're happening anyway. And the more that you avoid them, the more that they will stick around. So you're not saving yourself anything by avoiding the emotional discomfort, you're actually perpetuating it. So find a path, find whatever works for you, reach out to me if you want, but the sooner that more of us do this inner healing work, the sooner that we can make the real changes in this world that we desperately need to make.
01:08:18
Words of wisdom from Benjy Sherer, the mental health coach and emotional fitness trainer. You can call him Benjamin when he turns 80. Benjy, I found you on your Facebook page that you share so much wisdom when it comes to all of this work. Please give us not just your Facebook page, but everything else on the web where we can find you. Okay.
01:08:44
So also by the way, I've been posting a lot more like short videos. I've been doing the whole TikTok and YouTube shorts things. So like whatever your platform of choice is, just search up Benjy Sherer or coaching. Benjy is spelled with a Y B E N J Y. I'm sure everyone will see it here. Um, but so I'm on tick tock. I'm on YouTube. I'm on Facebook. I also have a public Facebook group. Like I've got my business page on Facebook. It's Benjy Sherer. You can find it, whatever. Um, I also have a.
01:09:10
a group on Facebook called Self Love and Shadow Work, Modern Awakenings. So you can find me there. I make a bunch of posts there. I answer questions there. And for anyone who wants to really learn more about me and my approach there, I do have a couple of books. I would recommend you start with the first one. It's called Feelings First Shadow Work. It's available on Amazon and Barnes and Nobles. There's also an audio book of it, so it's available anywhere. Or.
01:09:35
You can find my webinar, free webinar, which is called healing feelings first, uh, where I go over some of the main misconceptions that we have around this inner healing journey and kind of explain my approach to things. And you can find that at my website, BenjyShererCoaching.com slash replay. Benjy Sherer, I'm going to put all of your URLs on the show notes, all of the platforms you've mentioned.
01:10:05
Thank you so much. I've taken so much of your time. I hope you don't have any appointments lingering. Thank you for being here today. Thank you for joining the speaking and communicating podcast once again. If you have a guest that you think would be a great fit for the show, please email me and my contact details are on the show notes, the speaking and communicating podcast is part of the B podcast network.
01:10:34
where there are many other podcasts that support you in being a better leader and becoming the change you want to see. To learn more about the Be Podcast Network, go to BePodcastNetwork.com. Don't forget to subscribe, leave us a rating and a review on Apple and Spotify, and stay tuned for more episodes to come.