The Power of Unspoken Stories: Why Emotions Matter More Than Ever

Transcript

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I was a guest on a podcast last week.

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This gentleman liked to get into the nitty gritty of a person, like really go deep.

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And I guess I didn't go deep enough because he made a comment to the effect that he was shocked.

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I didn't answer things or didn't go very deep.

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And that's what he expected that I would do.

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And the reason he wanted that was because he wanted to build a connection between me and the audience And yeah, I was holding back.

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I was holding back for a few reasons and I started to evaluate them on the weekend if they were really valid Then I saw this video of a seven year old giving a TED talk, a seven year old in front of this gigantic audience, giving a TED talk about the power of playing peekaboo with your child and the first five years being so important.

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Having the connection.

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Having the interaction.

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How to build trust and the things that you can do with your child so that they can get the foundations, the foundations for being a trusting, communicative and healthy, emotional human being.

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I don't know why that struck me so much.

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I guess because the crux of why I do what I do started at age five.

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And.

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It's a story that I don't really share very often.

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I refer to it very lightly and I thought, you know what, if I'm going to do this, I need to really share what I'm about and why I do what I do because this is what I want to do for the rest of my life.

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And it's a good reason.

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There's a really good reason why I'm doing this.

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So, if you are triggered easily, I am going to talk about some really sensitive stuff, so, uh, I don't know if you need a Kleenex, maybe you will, but, um, yeah.

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This is me and this is why I do what I do.

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So this is, I feel kind of like a reboot of my podcast where I'm going to get down to sharing me and I'm going to make sure that I really share a lot more of myself in coming podcasts so that you can hopefully connect with me and connect with yourself more.

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So let's get started.

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I was raised south of San Francisco on the Peninsula, and I lived in a really kind of idyllic neighborhood.

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This was back in the Sixties.

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We had fun.

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I had a lot of fun.

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I was very experimental and curious.

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I can remember, I guess I was probably, under six, I might even say In the four ish age or a little, a little older, and I sprayed raid on my sister's cookie because I was curious what it would taste like.

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So I said, here, taste this.

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Tell me what it's like.

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And then I thought twice of it and told my parents and my sister had her stomach pumped and she still doesn't forgive me.

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My house that I lived in at that time.

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I can still remember it pretty vividly for as young as I was when I lived in it.

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A living room with a dining room.

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And then that led to the kitchen.

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Everybody lived upstairs and we had this single bathroom that we all had to share.

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And, uh, up above, uh, in our bedroom was the attic.

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So you could get to the attic from our bedroom.

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And that was the only way up.

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I can remember playing We had one of those easy bake ovens My sister and I were playing with it in our room.

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There was like a small fire in the garage and we were pretending like it was too hot to walk on the floor.

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So you can see, I had some really good, fun memories But one memory that, I repressed actually until my late 20s, was when a family came over for dinner.

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So I was raised in a very, uh, strict religion, very cliquish.

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You didn't associate much with people outside of the religion, you know, at school or whatever.

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Some people couldn't even play with kids in the neighborhood.

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We did.

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Um, but the family came over and they had a son who was 10 years older than I was, and I was five.

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So we were up in the attic, and it was my brother who was four years older, my sister who was one year younger, and, um, he decided to, uh, behave inappropriate with, um, I can't even say it, he decided to behave inappropriately with me in a sexual manner, it wasn't that he, had sex directly with me.

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It was just what he did with me was sexual in nature.

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My sister, as, as this all came back, my sister said she remembered, running to leave cause she was scared.

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And she remembers going down the ladder to our closet.

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Really quickly.

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I think she banged her knee and my brother just remembers focusing on hammering something on the ground so it was hard on all of us kids what happened in that day and Yeah, that that was a difficult day, but you know, there was other difficulties in my life Fast forward, I'm around eight and, my friend and I had been at a purse party.

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We're picked up by her mom from this party because she and I were besties at the time.

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And we actually became besties later in life too, but she and I were in the same religion and congregation.

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We got dropped off at the house of the boy that had molested me when I was five.

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So I want to say we're about eight, both me and my friend.

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And I remember walking into the house, and the boys were in the kitchen, um, drinking.

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It was beer.

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There was two boys and, you know, I say boys, but they're 10 years older.

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Right.

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I just remember the beer And we sat at this table drinking milk and then the mom had to go to the store.

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She said, you know, watch after the girls, boys And so there was some bad behavior.

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There's no need to go into detail as to what took place, but there was some inappropriate behavior And, then inappropriate behavior by a next door neighbor.

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And, that was even worse, I think.

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He taught me how to ride a bike.

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And so it was very confusing for me because here was this person who was being so nice and yet hadn't been very nice in the things that he did.

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And once again, he had a friend and there was some, uh, you know, very, very, very confusing for me.

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Very, very confusing because I got my period at age nine and that's when it all ended.

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And I remember his cousin came to live there.

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She was a young girl.

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And, I can remember even having a dream where I went up to the door.

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And she shut it on me because of her shame over what was going on.

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So I don't know that anything happened for sure with her, but I guess inside of me, I always worried that something had.

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So, you know, five to nine, I had more than my fair share.

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I think even one event is more than anybody's share, but I, it was still more than my fair share.

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And to top it off, my mom had a drinking problem and she died of alcoholism when I was 30.

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So it went on for a very long time.

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And I had shut down a lot of what had happened to me when I was younger.

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And so I was shutting down lots of things, like my mom's drinking.

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I saw things in a very idyllic way.

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I saw everything as way more positive than it was, which is why sometimes today I am anti positive thinking, like you have to deal with something for what it is and then try and make something positive.

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Um, positive out of it, but you know, if you don't face what is negative, then you're just going to have to deal with it sometime or another.

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So let's go fast forward.

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Um, I actually lived at home in to my twenties, late twenties because, um, to be quite frank, I was worried that if I left the house, my mom would die.

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And one day my mom came into my room.

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And she started telling me about her hallucinations.

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I think I was probably 27 about this time.

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Oh, stop, before that.

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I'm sorry, I'm screwing up this story.

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Um, my grandfather had died.

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We were at a restaurant and we're just talking and having dinner.

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We had just been to the family viewing and the funeral was the next day where every, the memorial service where everybody would be there.

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And my mom starts talking about that event when I was five, and she talked about it, like it was not a big deal.

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So you can see that pushing down or disassociating from feelings was common in my house and I know that my dad does the same thing and he did so for a reason because he too had alcoholism and dad beat his mom horrible things happened in his life and my mom, I think, had her own set of abuse that could have taken place based on what she's said, and it seems like a very strong possibility, even though I don't have confirmation just based on things she'd said.

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It seems like she had.

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So it's not a wonder that at this dinner table inappropriately brings it up.

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And both my sister and I stopped eating and we're like, what?

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I'm like, dad, did you know about this?

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And he goes, Oh, I don't remember this.

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My sister and I are looking at each other.

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And I finally said out loud, I thought that was a dream.

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I literally thought that that was a bad dream that I had had.

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And I remembered it as a bad dream.

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And my sister did too.

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But she just remembered her piece of seeing what was going on and going down the ladder into the bedroom from the attic.

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So that was huge, right?

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So now I know this is true, but I still didn't connect to it.

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In fact, I talked with a friend of mine, her name was Julie, who had also been sexually abused by somebody within the religion.

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It was awful what happened to her by a babysitter's son.

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And so Julie's like, well, Kim, don't you feel things around this?

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I'm like, no, it's just what happened.

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Like I didn't feel anything.

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anything around it.

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It was just something happened to me.

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No connection.

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Now we can go forward.

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And I'm in my bedroom.

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It's about five in the morning and my mom comes in and she's talking to me about her hallucinations.

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I'm like, what?

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She's saying, yeah.

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Um, So and so's out on the deck and I'm in trouble and so I got really scared and we called the hospital and they said, she's got DT, she's detoxing and she hadn't had anything to drink because she was trying to sober up, bless her soul.

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And she, ended up in a rehab and it was pretty rough when she was in rehab.

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She stayed there for a month and she came out of it.

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I mean, my mom and I were always very, very close, but we were incredibly close after that, and I participated in everything that she needed to have support, like I was there.

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And then a licensed social worker who talked about alcoholism and the problems that happens in families and that the sexual abuse that can take place and things of that nature.

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And I was like, I want to talk to this woman because I felt now, like I needed help.

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People were saying to go to Al Anon and I, it just didn't feel good for me.

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So I went to go see this woman and it was like, I guess I had I've been abused written on my forehead cause she asked me.

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And so I told the story about what happened when I was five.

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And, she's like, how do you feel about that?

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And that was when everything started coming back, was when I went into therapy.

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God bless her for having her in my life at that point in time.

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She served such a great purpose and helped me to uncover and to recollect what went on when I was five.

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And then I remembered when I was eight and I remembered the other things that happened with my neighbor.

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Cause that was a little bit more often because of the close proximity and, um, yeah, it was, it was a hard, hard, hard time.

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And that's what happens, right?

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When those things were pushed down and pushed down and pushed down.

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It's comes out and it's, it's, it's a lot and that's why you need someone and that's why people drink and that's why people take drugs is because they're pushing it all down for me.

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It was eating.

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I was very, very heavy.

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And so I did go to over eaters anonymous and I lost a lot of weight.

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I stayed thin, thinish.

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My, I never thought of myself as really thin, thin, except for, uh, a few occasions, but I was thin and stay that way until menopause.

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Thank you hormones.

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But point is, is that my drug was food and also I would eat and throw it up.

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So I was bulimic on occasion because I would eat cause I felt bad.

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I didn't want to get any fatter.

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I was eating the food and then I throw it up when I was doing that emotional eating, it's gross.

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I know, I know, I know, I know, but this happens.

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And the reason that this happens is because we're, we're trying to keep these emotions down.

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We're trying to feel better in an unhealthy way.

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Eventually, my mom has started drinking again, and it's like, it was amped up, like, crazy.

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She was really, really drunk, and so I had to leave the house for my own, well being.

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I was working so hard.

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I'm trying to make my life better.

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Still in therapy, I moved in with my brother and his wife and then eventually I moved into a place of my own.

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It was a nice, comforting spot for me because I wasn't really ready to be alone.

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Now, in this religion, you have this thing where you, you confess your sins you do it in front of these people who are called elders.

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And so I was still a part of the religion.

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I had, during all of this, this craziness, I had, um, a, I wouldn't even say it was a relationship.

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He and I just were having sex.

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We didn't go out to eat.

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It was just, we were having sex and, and it was very disassociated, but I, I felt like I was almost reliving part of my youth in this event.

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I don't even know how to explain it, but I did.

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And so, of course I was having sex outside of marriage, and so I had to go to the elders and confess my sins.

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And this was right in the middle of all of this therapy and all of this stuff that was coming out and my mom's drinking.

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And so, um, I told them about what had happened when I was younger.

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So I got very lightly, like a tap on the hand punishment wise within the congregation, but then it's like, okay, well, you know, you need to confront this abuser.

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So because my friend was in another congregation, she and I were going to do it together.

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Let me set the stage here.

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There were two boys.

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One was, had already left the religion.

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One was still in it.

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We decided after much contemplation and a lot of work to confront him because we didn't want to falsely accuse anyone.

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In fact, what we would do is to be very, you know, cautious and, and, um, careful about it.

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We would write down what we remembered separately from that day.

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We wrote it down separately and then we would share.

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And while everything wasn't the same, there was a lot of overlap and some things were very similar.

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I could see this one person who we were supposed to confront, I could see his shirt, but all I could see was just a shoulder, but she saw, something similar.

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I asked my brother, Hey, what color was so and so's room?

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I'm not going to give names here.

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There's no purpose in it.

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And, I remembered a very specific color green.

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And he said, oh, it was blah.

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And then he goes, no.

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And then he said, the very specific color green.

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So I'm like, okay, I got the green right.

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My friend and I, there was a lot of similar, similarities in the story.

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Even still today, like, it's, it's, This is still kind of hard to share.

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So if I'm messing up my words, that's why.

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We felt pretty confident and then we said, no, let's be even more confident.

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And I suggested we go back to the house that it happened and see if that did anything, because we both remembered sitting around the pool after it was all over swearing that we would never tell anybody what happened.

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We both remembered our friendship falling apart and, and that, that we drifted as friends after that.

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So the point is, is that we went back to this house and I explained to the couple what was going on and they were like, yes, yes.

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come back.

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So walking in, it was.

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Obviously decorated differently, but we walked in and we went upstairs and I went right to the room where it happened and it was coming back.

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And then the biggest and weirdest experience was as I went to go down the stairs, it was like the stairs changed from that of the view that I had as an adult going down the stairs to the view I had as a young girl going down the stairs.

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The pool was still there.

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She and I walked back there and we said, yeah, let's confront.

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Like we, we knew this to be true.

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We went to huge, huge, huge efforts to want this to not be true, but it was so I did that confrontation, but before any of and all of that had happened my mom had died And, um, so I'm dealing with my, my mom in the hospital with cirrhosis of the liver.

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All of this is going on.

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And I might be getting some of this timing mixed up, but all of this is all happened within a short period of time.

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So, My mom dies just a few days after I'm 30.

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My dad, a few weeks later started dating some woman who eventually becomes his wife and they get married seven months later.

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So I am emotionally going through a lot.

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Like it was hard for me to see my dad with another woman.

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I've got this whole therapy I'm going through and now I have, this, this accusation, which I guess could have waited, but not me.

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I just wanted to get it over with.

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And so I did.

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I said everything, I sat in a room with this person and these two men who both I knew very well, the elders, And of course he denied it and he said, why would I do that?

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I don't know, you were drunk.

00:21:25.663 --> 00:21:46.212
At the end of it, the two elders said they had been in contact with the main organization, their headquarters, and they said that they wouldn't accept our testimony, because while you have to have the testimony of two people, according to scripture, they said that our testimony didn't count because we were young.

00:21:46.573 --> 00:21:53.643
What they were basically doing was saying, okay, if, if they testify and he confesses, then you can take some sort of action.

00:21:54.093 --> 00:21:56.063
And I didn't want him to be kicked out.

00:21:56.103 --> 00:21:57.522
I didn't want any of that to happen.

00:21:57.903 --> 00:22:10.893
I wanted him to acknowledge it and say he was sorry and get a slap on the hand like I had gotten, I mean, honestly, Even though he probably should have gone to jail, I just wanted acknowledgment and a sorry.

00:22:11.413 --> 00:22:19.972
And I instead got kicked in the gut when they said, we're not going to do anything because your testimony doesn't count.

00:22:21.133 --> 00:22:30.827
So now here I am, I mean, my dad's dating this woman and my whole life was just, you It was just a mess.

00:22:31.298 --> 00:22:35.847
Okay, so now I am living my life.

00:22:36.798 --> 00:22:38.357
it's almost a year later.

00:22:39.218 --> 00:22:42.278
I'm living with a friend of mine in Palo Alto, California.

00:22:42.708 --> 00:22:49.938
And I go to, we have these, these assemblies that are called and, and a whole bunch of congregations get together.

00:22:49.938 --> 00:22:54.498
And there's a couple of thousand people in a room and they have presentations on this stage.

00:22:54.538 --> 00:22:59.208
And you have to be without any reproach to be on that stage.

00:22:59.208 --> 00:23:01.327
Like you have to be the cream of the crop.

00:23:01.907 --> 00:23:04.462
So I'm in the audience listening.

00:23:04.883 --> 00:23:20.482
And there is on the stage, the person that I accused and the person who heard it all one of the elders that was in his congregation was having him on the stage.

00:23:21.782 --> 00:23:28.272
I, as soon as I saw that, like, I, I don't remember anything.

00:23:28.472 --> 00:23:29.192
But crying.

00:23:29.623 --> 00:23:31.022
That's all I could do was cry.

00:23:31.303 --> 00:23:32.542
I couldn't hear anything.

00:23:33.012 --> 00:23:35.942
It's like all of my senses just shut down.

00:23:36.313 --> 00:23:37.532
And I started crying.

00:23:38.442 --> 00:23:40.262
And I was broken.

00:23:40.623 --> 00:23:42.663
I thought, God doesn't love me.

00:23:43.232 --> 00:24:00.792
And the reason I thought that was because when they told us that our testimony didn't count, they also told us that there was a, well, they read us this scripture that went back from the time in the, uh, the Jewish law was taking place in the old Testament.

00:24:01.298 --> 00:24:08.208
And they said that if a man accused his wife of adultery he would take her before the priest and she would, you know, she denied it.

00:24:08.218 --> 00:24:11.798
She would drink some water or something that they gave her to drink.

00:24:11.798 --> 00:24:15.117
And that if she had committed adultery, she would be barren.

00:24:15.228 --> 00:24:17.758
And if she didn't commit adultery, she'd have kids.

00:24:17.778 --> 00:24:20.367
So that was like, the proof was in the pudding, right?

00:24:21.807 --> 00:24:27.698
Kind of sick if you think about it, but that was what that patriarchal society came up with.

00:24:27.698 --> 00:24:31.968
They said to us, like, hey, you just drank the water, so we'll see what fruits come of it.

00:24:32.307 --> 00:24:45.657
So when that man, that elder had him, who he knew, my situation, my friend's situation, less than a year later, I was just like, oh my god, God believes that.

00:24:46.788 --> 00:25:13.067
Him, he believes him and I was gutted spiritually so now I have no mother and I Got this stepmom that I'm not particularly liking and I'm you know a mess like my whole life just felt Like a huge mess and I can still remember sitting on the floor of my shower just crying and crying and crying.

00:25:13.067 --> 00:25:20.528
And it was during all of this time period that I had become suicidal and wanted to kill myself.

00:25:21.827 --> 00:25:28.377
I thought that dying would be so much better than to live with all this pain.

00:25:29.938 --> 00:25:33.367
And so, I thought about it.

00:25:33.367 --> 00:25:35.327
I sat on the edge of an ocean.

00:25:35.667 --> 00:25:46.012
Didn't do it, but, It was a serious thought and I have a huge amount of empathy because you have to be in a lot of pain to want to do it.

00:25:46.972 --> 00:25:50.782
If you're there, let me just say you do get past it.

00:25:51.603 --> 00:25:52.553
Yeah, you do.

00:25:52.897 --> 00:26:00.258
You can get past it and you just got to go through just a little bit more pain and then the pain subsides tremendously.

00:26:00.367 --> 00:26:01.458
At least it has for me.

00:26:01.682 --> 00:26:04.266
This is around the time that I met my husband.

00:26:04.605 --> 00:26:08.476
My friend, and I went to Vegas one weekend.

00:26:08.935 --> 00:26:14.955
Our last night I met my husband, at a show that jousting show at Excalibur.

00:26:15.455 --> 00:26:22.066
He was living in New York and I was living in Palo Alto, but we fell in love fast and hard.

00:26:22.496 --> 00:26:25.165
And the next thing you know, he was seven years younger too.

00:26:25.326 --> 00:26:27.276
I was 32 by this point.

00:26:28.215 --> 00:26:37.711
And, uh, Yeah, he, um, was young, but he was an old, young, everyone thought he was older than I was, he's very mature.

00:26:38.441 --> 00:26:38.621
And.

00:26:39.405 --> 00:26:40.306
We got married.

00:26:40.496 --> 00:26:42.215
I put him through chiropractic school.

00:26:43.006 --> 00:26:57.885
Thing is with a man who hooks up with a woman who's an emotional wreck, who's got so many holes to fill inside of her heart, that that's usually the kind who likes to be a rescuer or who needs to be needed, or who's got their own thing going on.

00:26:57.885 --> 00:26:58.385
And you know what?

00:26:58.425 --> 00:26:59.026
That was true.

00:26:59.806 --> 00:27:09.786
And so, after nine years of marriage, we got a divorce because he had an affair and I had given up my career, my business.

00:27:09.816 --> 00:27:16.965
I had a consulting business and I had given all that up because we were building our future with his chiropractic practice.

00:27:17.355 --> 00:27:19.705
And, um, we had a running shoe store.

00:27:19.996 --> 00:27:25.236
And so it was like, grow it, sell it and retire and have this great life.

00:27:25.865 --> 00:27:27.925
But you know, that didn't work out.

00:27:28.086 --> 00:27:39.756
He had an affair with someone who was my friend and she was also working the front desk and she was, became my friend after working the front desk, I cooked dinner for us every Monday night.

00:27:40.086 --> 00:27:43.665
They had had an affair for, gosh.

00:27:44.195 --> 00:27:48.945
It was close to a year, and she was coming over every Monday.

00:27:49.435 --> 00:27:50.155
Can you imagine?

00:27:50.395 --> 00:27:52.226
Like, how could she sit in my house?

00:27:53.105 --> 00:27:59.185
I think it was a power trip for her, but Nonetheless, she wasn't my friend, but I didn't know that, and I loved her.

00:27:59.925 --> 00:28:10.935
So now, here I am, laying on the floor of my condo, and now you have a lot more insight as to why I couldn't get up off the floor of my condo.

00:28:11.155 --> 00:28:13.236
I was like, W.

00:28:13.306 --> 00:28:13.885
T.

00:28:14.266 --> 00:28:14.786
F.

00:28:15.036 --> 00:28:17.046
What the frig?

00:28:17.661 --> 00:28:19.221
Why can't.

00:28:19.250 --> 00:28:20.201
I get life right?

00:28:20.230 --> 00:28:22.030
Like, what did I do so wrong?

00:28:22.030 --> 00:28:23.060
They talk about karma.

00:28:23.510 --> 00:28:29.431
And, I, while I was out of the religion, I was not a part of it, participating in it at all.

00:28:29.830 --> 00:28:34.131
I, I still had those leftovers like, oh, karma, that, that can't be.

00:28:34.601 --> 00:28:36.287
And, and yet it felt like it.

00:28:36.287 --> 00:28:37.520
And I thought, what did I do?

00:28:38.280 --> 00:28:39.590
So I'm like, I gotta get.

00:28:40.346 --> 00:28:41.195
Control.

00:28:41.375 --> 00:28:43.486
I've got to get this into my own hands.

00:28:43.935 --> 00:28:45.976
And that's when I started down this path.

00:28:46.026 --> 00:29:02.215
And I've talked about my first book The Perfect Heart: Creating and Maintaining Love Life Balance, which was just the, the, the baby steps to start to look at my time in my relationships and, and communicating what I needed.

00:29:02.536 --> 00:29:05.215
The other thing I wanted to do was not hate him.

00:29:05.931 --> 00:29:14.211
And so I was determined that I was not going to let the end of our relationship dictate our whole relationship.

00:29:14.780 --> 00:29:16.570
So to do that, what do you do?

00:29:16.601 --> 00:29:18.461
You push down feelings, right?

00:29:19.351 --> 00:29:29.721
And it took me a long time to come to grips to hate what he did and partially, dislike him for it and think of him as a horrible person because I couldn't do it.

00:29:30.480 --> 00:29:34.441
And he's not entirely horrible, but what he did was majorly horrible.

00:29:34.990 --> 00:29:52.165
So that is what got me to this point where emotions are so important because, a life of stuffing them, I have to say it, it fucked me up and willful blindness Is probably one of the worst things that you can do.

00:29:52.986 --> 00:29:55.806
And I was willfully blind younger in my life.

00:29:55.875 --> 00:29:59.336
I was willfully, well, that was a coping mechanism.

00:29:59.796 --> 00:30:09.336
Some of this other stuff that happened with my parents and seeing the alcoholism in my mother, you know, not being able to really come to grips with that.

00:30:09.506 --> 00:30:15.056
I think that was a little bit more willful blindness because I wasn't a kid, but I had learned it right.

00:30:15.086 --> 00:30:16.506
That was how I had coped.

00:30:16.865 --> 00:30:20.665
And then I was definitely willfully blind with my ex husband.

00:30:20.665 --> 00:30:24.405
I said, I will never do that again.

00:30:25.336 --> 00:30:27.445
And it's still a work in progress.

00:30:28.290 --> 00:30:33.540
Because we're all human, but this is why I do what I do.

00:30:33.980 --> 00:30:36.371
This is why I'm trying to help people.

00:30:36.671 --> 00:31:01.355
Because, oh my god, the difference in my life Now, from when I was in my twenties, from when, in my early thirties, when I got married to my first husband, to my early forties, when I got a divorce and really, really learned to try and carve my own way to like, really learn how to feel.

00:31:02.006 --> 00:31:03.016
It took a while.

00:31:03.115 --> 00:31:16.178
I don't think I really had the guidance And it's when I got the book that I always talk about because, when I say this was my life changer, it was, and it's called How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain.

00:31:16.587 --> 00:31:20.688
And it's, it's so much a part of what I write about and talk about.

00:31:21.077 --> 00:31:28.000
She came up with this theory of constructed emotions It's a book that gave me process and procedures.

00:31:28.121 --> 00:31:30.580
I like to understand how things work.

00:31:30.921 --> 00:31:45.340
In my business world, when I implemented a system, I needed to understand all the bells and whistles of how that system worked, what the backend configurations are, if there was integrations, what are all the components?

00:31:45.371 --> 00:31:56.510
Because the more you understand how something works, the better you are at helping your client, but also crafting a result that is best for them.

00:31:57.111 --> 00:32:09.770
And that's what I try and do now is help people to understand this repeatable process, but also some of the nuances around the predictive nature of the brain.

00:32:09.770 --> 00:32:17.026
The predictive nature of the brain means, in case you didn't know this everything we experience in life is in our head.

00:32:17.076 --> 00:32:21.105
Our brain doesn't get anything new if we don't supply it.

00:32:22.145 --> 00:32:24.455
And that is true of our emotions.

00:32:24.685 --> 00:32:34.705
How you felt yesterday is how you're going to feel today, and it's how you're going to feel tomorrow until you do something consciously to change that.

00:32:35.800 --> 00:32:37.851
And that's by learning.

00:32:37.851 --> 00:32:39.260
Be curious.

00:32:39.490 --> 00:32:43.431
Fear keeps us in this blinder mode.

00:32:43.721 --> 00:32:50.760
That's why it's been so successful for politicians and religious leaders and teachers and parents, right?

00:32:50.760 --> 00:32:54.000
Because your fear is where you focus.

00:32:54.631 --> 00:32:59.661
But if we can widen our focus with some curiosity, this is where the learning begins.

00:33:00.510 --> 00:33:12.230
This is where we get to craft our emotions more refined and defined, meaning we can take situations and see them differently.

00:33:12.471 --> 00:33:24.576
Even though they're very similar, we can see them differently because we are looking at it with more granularity and with more precision, that's what I talk about and it's what I do.

00:33:24.965 --> 00:33:28.955
Understanding this has totally been a life changer.

00:33:29.385 --> 00:33:31.346
I said that earlier and I'll say it all the time.

00:33:31.826 --> 00:33:32.935
It is a life changer.

00:33:32.935 --> 00:33:42.266
And while I had some real extreme things happen in my life, you may not have, and great, I'm super happy for you.

00:33:42.875 --> 00:33:45.766
I don't want bad to happen to anybody.

00:33:46.476 --> 00:33:49.796
But you still may have been taught to push down your emotions.

00:33:50.165 --> 00:34:01.516
You still may have been in a family where they didn't talk about it, or you were literally told"Don't cry.""Don't feel that.""Don't be sad." It's no different.

00:34:02.596 --> 00:34:04.566
I mean, as far as being shut down.

00:34:04.986 --> 00:34:15.195
And when we can connect to our feelings, that's the first line of communication between our brain and our body.

00:34:15.195 --> 00:34:24.576
And if we're not listening to what's going on, how can we change the recipe, the recipes for emotions that exist in our heads?

00:34:25.525 --> 00:34:26.706
I just want to say thank you.

00:34:26.715 --> 00:34:27.036
Thank you.

00:34:27.045 --> 00:34:29.115
Thank you for, for listening.

00:34:29.166 --> 00:34:45.626
I hope that this helps you to get to know me a little better so you understand now where I'm coming from, why emotions are so important to me, and why I want them to be better understood for what they are, communication.

00:34:46.146 --> 00:34:56.056
And just like we can mishear what someone says, we can missee what we think is in front of us, we can misfeel.

00:34:56.661 --> 00:35:02.911
Unless we are more curious, just like if you mishear, you say, Oh, what did you just say?

00:35:03.581 --> 00:35:07.900
Or if you didn't see something right, you focus in a little bit more closely.

00:35:07.900 --> 00:35:11.081
You can focus a little bit more on your emotions.

00:35:11.201 --> 00:35:13.251
And that's what I'm about.

00:35:13.420 --> 00:35:14.791
And that's what my book is about.

00:35:14.831 --> 00:35:22.471
And that's what my podcast is about to help you build that connection and to be comfortable with the communication.

00:35:22.740 --> 00:35:24.451
Thank you so much.

00:35:24.681 --> 00:35:27.521
I appreciate you very much.

00:35:27.740 --> 00:35:34.331
Because time is precious and never ever deny that the preciousness of time.

00:35:34.971 --> 00:35:41.280
And I hope you are taking more time for yourself in moments like this and other moments in the day.

00:35:41.681 --> 00:35:44.460
Turn off the TV, turn off your phone.

00:35:44.880 --> 00:35:54.601
I'm not saying all the time, but just make sure that you balance it out and you have time for you to just sit and think about how you feel.

00:35:55.880 --> 00:35:56.181
Bye.

The Power of Unspoken Stories: Why Emotions Matter More Than Ever

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