516. Wisdom vs. Trauma

Hello my friends, and welcome back to Better Than Happy. I am your coach, Jody Moore, and today we’re talking about something really important: painful experiences that we’ve gone through in our past.

Now, when we go through painful experiences, a couple of things can happen. Those experiences can live within us and continue to create pain, or they can develop us into a stronger, wiser version of ourselves. So today we’re going to talk about how to turn our past pain into something powerful and useful instead of letting it keep on hurting us.

So if you’ve ever had something hard happen and you’re not sure what to do with those big feelings, this episode is for you. This is episode 516, Wisdom versus Trauma. Let’s go.

Welcome to Better Than Happy, the podcast where we transform our lives by transforming ourselves. My name is Jody Moore. In the decade-plus I’ve been working with clients as a Master Certified Coach, I’ve helped tens of thousands of people to become empowered. And from empowered, the things that seemed hard become trivial, and the things that seemed impossible become available, and suddenly, a whole new world of desire and possibility open up to you. And what do you do with that?

Well, that’s the question… what will you do? Let’s find out.

Sometimes, listening to a podcast is enough. But sometimes, you’ll feel inspired to go deeper. If you hear things that speak to you in today’s episode, consider it your invitation to a complimentary coaching workshop.

On this live, interactive Zoom call with me, you’ll get a taste of the power of this work when applied in real life. You can participate, or be a silent observer. But you have to take a step if you want to truly see change in your life… two steps, actually. Head to JodyMoore.com/freecoaching and register. Then you just have to show up. Your best life is waiting for you. Will you show up for it? JodyMoore.com/freecoaching. I’ll see you there.

Hey there, my friends. Welcome to the podcast, and thank you to all of you who are on the ‘gram with me who voted because I had a few ideas of what I was going to do this week for an episode, and this one won, although it was a close tie. The other options were to play a coaching session and dissect it a little bit for you, as we’ve been doing from time to time here on the podcast, and or to take some of your questions that you’ve left on our podcast hotline and answer some of those. And it was a very close win, this one, Wisdom versus Trauma. And so I’m guessing you would like to hear all three of those. So those things will be coming up.

So, if you have a question you want answered, give me a call at 1-888-HI-JODY-M. That’s Jody with a Y, and M as in Moore. 1-888-HI-JODY-M. Call and leave me a voicemail. I love to hear your voice, and you never know, we might play your question on the podcast, especially if it’s one that you think a lot of people have. If you have a topic you’ve been talking to your friends about or something, or there’s something going on in your community or what have you, give me a call. I’d love to dive into it for you here on the podcast.

But today we’re talking about wisdom versus trauma. So, in coaching, coaching differs from therapy in a lot of ways, but one of the main ways is that we do not, at least the kind of coaching I do, we do not spend a lot of time diving into the past. We are not trying to diagnose your past or even understand maybe some of the people in your life and take some guesses about maybe their diagnoses. 

And that’s not to say that can’t be useful work, the work that happens in therapy. It can be. It can give you some compassion and a greater understanding of yourself. But what it does, I find for many people, is give them an understanding of why they’re maybe stuck or struggling or in pain and then leave them going, okay, but now what?

So we understand the problem now. We maybe have diagnosed the problem, where this came from, but for many of my clients anyway, who come to me after therapy, and they do find therapy in most cases to be somewhat helpful, but then they get kind of stuck, if you will, in how to move forward. And that’s where coaching can really pick up and accelerate creating the life that you want.

So, with that, in coaching, I don’t spend a lot of time in the past. Although, the truth is, we’re kind of actually always talking about the past. So here’s what I mean by that. We don’t dive into your childhood and specific things that may have happened and how you were raised and maybe what was going on for your parents and all that kind of deep dive into the past. We don’t really do, I don’t do that in coaching because there’s not really a purpose for that in the work that I do.

But we do always take past scenarios, if you will, circumstances, things that you’ve experienced, things that the people around you have said, and it tends to be a more recent past, right? In order to examine then your mindset, what you are thinking, what you are making it mean. And we do this in order to get leverage over ourselves, over our thinking. 

It is a skill to redirect your brain and sort of be the leader of your thoughts, to decide intentionally how you’re going to think about a situation, whether it be from the past or the present or the future, how you’re going to think about it in your mind in order to best serve yourself.

I don’t even think it’s something we can do all the time. And I don’t think you need to. But I think if you can do it a little bit, a small percentage of the time, and then the rest of the time let your brain just run on default, you can create a much more extraordinary life. You can find lots of relief, lots of joy, and lots of success at anything that you want to go try and accomplish. And so, that’s the work we’re doing. 

But in order to do that, like I said, commonly it’s, okay, I feel frustrated, or I feel overwhelmed, or I feel afraid, or I feel resentful, what have you. It begins with some kind of discontent usually, or sometimes it’s noticing I’m not taking action in the way I want to, or I am taking action and have certain behaviors that are not serving me. I want to start or stop certain behaviors in order to create what I want in my life, right?

But then we’ll go to, okay, when was the last time you did that thing you don’t want to be doing? Or when was the last time you were supposed to do the thing you wanted to do, like go for the walk, work on your business, et cetera, and you didn’t do it, what were you thinking? So in that realm, we are actually always talking about something that happened in the past, right? But again, not your way back past, your recent past in order to understand your current thinking patterns and then choose what would serve you best in the future.

Okay? So that’s just kind of, I want to get clear about that because I am going to dive in today to talking a little bit more about your past, which is not something I do typically. But the reason why is because I was really inspired by a quote I heard recently from Dr. Joe Dispenza. And of course, I was on a walk when I heard the quote, and so I didn’t stop and write it down. And so I hope that I’m getting it right. 

This is as close as I can recall it. But what he essentially said was, a past experience, and I should say a painful past, this is true with any past experience, but let’s just keep it about painful past experiences, okay? A painful past experience without the emotional charge becomes wisdom.

And when he said that, it really landed for me. And I realized that is the work I’ve been doing with clients for 11 years now, is helping to turn the dial down on the emotional charge. It doesn’t mean that we lose the wisdom. It doesn’t mean that we pretend it didn’t happen. It doesn’t even mean that we want to think positively about what happened. What we simply want to do is turn the emotions down in order to turn that challenging experience into wisdom.

Now, the alternative to this is to leave it as what is commonly known in the world today as trauma. Okay? So I’m going to give you the definition I like for trauma. This is what I think of when I hear the word trauma, is an experience that rewires the brain. Now, that’s a pretty broad definition, but I like it because I do think that it is a pretty good descriptor. 

And so trauma can happen in major ways, right? We can go through a really difficult, acutely painful situation. We can experience something like that’s extremely emotional, extremely challenging, and your brain, as you go through that experience, will start to rewire itself. This is called neuroplasticity. We all have it. Our brains are neuroplastic, meaning our brains are changing constantly based on experiences we’re having and the emotions that we’re experiencing as we go through it.

So, if I experience something very challenging ongoing, my brain starts rewiring itself to try to protect me. It starts believing that certain situations and scenarios are dangerous, certain people are dangerous. It starts seeking coping mechanisms, protective mechanisms, and trying on different things. And so it rewires me to view the world a certain way, to view people a certain way, to view myself in a certain way. You can see why this is a useful adaptive thing, right?

It doesn’t have to be an experience that painful though. It can be simply like lowercase ‘t’ traumas. Everybody has trauma, okay? Something happened when you were a child. Like, I still remember being in 3rd grade and we were playing basketball in PE, and I didn’t really understand basketball. I knew the basics, try to get the ball in the basket, but I didn’t understand the other rules. And what they said to me was, “It’s okay, you don’t need to understand. Just see that girl right there? She’s your girl. You’re responsible for defending against her. So stay on her, try to prevent her from getting the ball or shooting the ball into the basket by, you know, putting your arms up in the air and all that, right? That’s all you need to worry about.” So I was like, okay, got it.

So I follow this girl around the court, and I’m all up in her face with my hands and my arms, right? And I think I’m doing a good job. And suddenly, I’m told that I need to clear the court because somebody had shot a basket and there was a rebound, and now we were going down to my team’s basketball hoop. So I don’t need to be guarding this girl, and in fact, I need to get out of the way so the person throwing the ball back in has space. And everybody kind of, you know, in my mind, the kids all yelled at me and sort of laughed at me. And I felt really stupid for not knowing that I was supposed to do that and just sort of being embarrassed, right?

That rewired my brain. It’s a little thing, right? I’m not saying feel sorry for me. I’m just saying we all have little things like this that rewire our brains. My brain immediately went, oh, be careful about playing group sports because your team won’t count on you. You’ll probably make a mistake. They will be upset. You’ll feel terrible. Maybe we don’t do team sports. Maybe we just avoid team sports altogether. That seems like the safer route, right?

And I just decided from that day forward, I’m not an athlete. I don’t do team sports. I liked jogging most of my life. I’ve done individual sports where nobody else is counting on me. I’m not going to let anyone down. I’m not going to mess it up, right? It’s just me counting on me. And okay, that’s fine. Maybe that’s not too bad. Maybe it’s not a big deal. 

My point is that my brain rewired itself based on that one experience. And I guarantee probably right now you’re thinking of many, many experiences like this. Some may be bigger, more capital T trauma, some smaller little interactions at which your brain went, oh, the world works like this and people are like that.

Okay? Now, again, this is an adaptive protective mechanism that our brains have. So it is not a bad thing, but I want you to have some understanding and some leverage over your brain because we are so driven by the way our brains have rewired to these past experiences that most of us don’t even realize it. It becomes ultimately our personalities. It becomes just the way we are in the world. And people come to expect us to be a certain way, and we usually are that certain way.

And certain experiences, my daughter and I were just talking about this in the car the other day about how powerful music has been in both of our lives and how each of us said this, that we could hear certain songs and immediately be taken back to the feelings that we had either at a certain time in our lives or associated with a certain experience. 

But that music, for some reason, like imprints it on my soul, and I’ll hear a song and it will remind me of a time or a person. And sometimes it actually brings me to tears because I will miss the people, I will miss that time of my life, I will miss having that experience. It’s beautiful but also painful for me when I hear certain songs, right?

The same is true with certain smells. Do you have this experience where you can smell something, maybe like a lotion that I used to wear during a certain phase of my life or a perfume or, you know, something that reminds me of someone in my family that I miss or something? And same thing. It’s like a bizarre mix of love and gratitude and appreciation and a longing and a missing for that time. So for me, music and smells tend to be really associated with mostly positive emotions for me, although I’m sure like if I had more capital T trauma, some of those things would probably trigger the negative as well.

But anyway, my point is, this stuff is wired into our brains, right? And it’s happening on a subconscious level. Now, when I smell something and I feel the emotions, it is because I’m having thoughts, but I’m not conscious of those thoughts. I’m much more aware of the feelings first, and the thoughts are happening on a very unconscious level because my brain has rewired itself to have this subconscious view and belief system driving me.

So, trauma, that’s what trauma does, right? So back to what Joe Dispenza said. If we can turn down the emotional charge, then trauma doesn’t have to be something that limits us. And this is what I find, and I’m going to talk to you in just a minute about how do we turn down the emotional charge, about the strategies anyway that I’ve found and my clients have found to be useful. 

But here’s the thing. If we don’t, if we just leave that trauma as is, and we don’t pay attention to it, we don’t address it, we don’t work on it, on turning down the emotional charge, then trauma will cause our lives to get smaller. We will shrink, right? Because trauma is, that’s bad, that’s dangerous, this is a real thing that could go wrong. We should avoid all of that stuff.

Again, now there can be positive associations, but the negative plays such a stronger role in our brains. We are so biased towards the negative, which again, makes sense from a survival standpoint because if I’m going to miss out on something pleasurable, that’s not going to kill me. But there are painful things that could ultimately limit or end my life. And so of course, the negative plays a much more dramatic role. So, if I don’t turn down the emotions on the negative trauma, my life will shrink. I will be less willing to be vulnerable and honest and tell the truth, which will minimize the amount of connection I can have in my relationships.

I will be less likely to pursue goals. I will be less likely to think big and go after big things because that’s scary. Going after big things brings up all kinds of fear for us for all kinds of reasons. Even with completely healthy brains, non-traumatized parts of our brains, still brings up fear because we don’t like rejection, we don’t like failure, we don’t like overwhelm. 

So if I have trauma on top of it, right? Meaning thoughts and beliefs about that it’s bad for people to judge you or that it hurts when people don’t support you, or that money can run out and then you’re left with, you know, overwhelm and maybe even hunger, basic survival needs sometimes not even being met, right? If I have all that on top of it, there’s no way I’m going to consistently override that and go do the big things that I’m capable of doing and maybe on some level want to do in my life.

So trauma without being treated, without turning down the emotional charge, makes us shrink and get smaller. But if we do the work on it, then it becomes wisdom. And wisdom helps us create a bigger life. It makes our lives better and easier, and gives us more opportunity for joy, growth, fulfillment, and contribution. And so we want to take these experiences and turn them into wisdom. That is ideal. Now, how do we do that? How do we turn down the emotional charge?

I’m going to tell you my favorite way. It’s all the work that we are doing in The Lab. Those of you in The Lab know that this is exactly what we’re doing. We’re turning down the emotional charge. And I’m going to break it down into four kind of strategies that we use. But I highly recommend that you have a way, whether it’s coaching or maybe you prefer meditation, maybe you, I don’t know, whatever works for you, find a way because there is no escaping trauma in this life. There’s no one going to go through life without pain. You cannot manipulate the world enough to not have any pain. So the alternative is you shrink and get smaller, or you use it to grow bigger.

Okay, so the first tool that I use a lot in coaching, and I talk a lot about this here on the podcast because it’s difficult and we still are not doing it very consistently, so I’m going to keep on talking about it until we are, and that is to process the pain. To just feel the feelings. It is a difficult thing to teach. It is a difficult thing to put into words, and it’s a difficult thing to do. I think there’s many, many, many right ways to do it.

Okay? So, my favorite strategy that works the best for me is to get out of my head and into my body. To just try to find where the pain is. So, let’s say I have a lot of fear. I’ll just use an experience that I’ve played with a little bit here before because I feel like this is a lowercase ‘t’ trauma, but I’ve been able to, I feel like, turn this into wisdom, which is a few years ago, I was driving to pick my kids up from school because it started snowing right about the time the school buses were supposed to get them. 

It was one of those weird snows that falls pretty fast, but then the sun’s going down at the same time. So literally every street in the area where I lived was an ice rink. Not just like icy spots here and there, but just like a sheet of ice covering all the streets. That’s why I was going to get them because we got a note saying the school buses can’t get to the school. Please come and pick your kids up.

And so, in order to get to the school, I have to go down off the hill where we live. And I was driving down this icy road without a guardrail on the side of the road for some unknown, odd reason. And I was in my husband’s truck, but it doesn’t matter if you’re on ice. And I started sliding. I was with my teenage son at the time. And we started sliding towards the edge of this drop off. And I did not know how to stop the car. I couldn’t. I was pumping the brakes and doing whatever, and I was freaked out, let’s just say. And so was my son. 

And once we did finally stop just before getting to the very edge, suddenly I was like, what do we do now? There’s a line of cars in front of me. Everyone’s slipping and sliding down this hill. There’s a line of cars behind me who want to get down the hill. There’s a line of cars trying to get up the hill. Everyone’s just sliding all over. And I was like, what do I do?

We did get down the hill. We got the kids. We eventually got home, but it was dicey. And that experience rewired my brain to be totally afraid of driving in the snow. I didn’t love driving in the snow before, but I was freaked out, especially on any kind of hill or road like that.

Okay? So, when I feel the emotions, and by the way, thank goodness I knew this work because as I was in my husband’s truck sliding towards the edge, I just kept saying to myself, just do fear. Just be afraid. It’s okay to be afraid. And I just like felt my heart beating really fast, felt my temperature rising, felt the knot in my stomach and the pressure in my chest. And I just took deeper breaths and was like, going to do some fear now. We’re going to do some fear. Okay?

Now, after that experience, every time my brain replays it and thinks about what could have gone wrong and what did go wrong and what, like all the, your brain will keep replaying it, right? Because it’s trying to tell you to remember this, don’t forget this. This could have ended terribly. That felt painful even in the process. Let’s try to avoid that at all costs. Every time I replay it in my mind, fear again. Okay? 

And I would just, again, all right, we’re doing some fear again right now. Same thing. Deep breaths, find it in my body, notice the changes it creates in my physiology. Like the literal change in my body temperature, the literal tightness and knots and the movement or the lack of movement, like the heavy brick that sometimes it is. And you just notice it, relax, keep breathing, and it’s gone again until the movie starts in your head again, and then it comes back. Okay? So that for me has been really powerful work in just processing and allowing fear.

Now, when I say to process pain and allow pain, I don’t mean run away in your head with thoughts and create more drama to the story. That might happen. Again, the brain’s going to offer it to you at times, or mine does anyway, but I’m not saying fuel the thoughts. I’m not saying you even need to talk about it at length. I’m not saying go Google and research stuff because before you know it, the internet’s going to start showing you all kinds of horror stories about what could go wrong. 

And you start telling your friend about this near accident and they’re going to go, oh, you know what happened to my cousin. And before you know it, we’re fueling the story, the painful story, the thoughts. That is not the same as processing the emotions, you guys. Processing the emotions is a embodied experience where you connect with you, you slow down your mind and drop into your body, and you just breathe and be with that experience of pain.

Again, that’s the best way I can describe it. However you find is useful to do it, I’m all in for, okay? The second tool that we use a lot in coaching that will turn trauma into wisdom is to reframe the story. Okay? I don’t usually do this with clients if they’re still in the thick of feeling a lot of emotions about it. We have to experience the emotions, process them a little bit until then we’re ready to go now back into the head and take a look at the story that you’re believing, okay? And reframe it. 

Reframing the story doesn’t mean just thinking positively about it. It doesn’t mean trying to fool yourself or pretend that it didn’t happen. It’s much more complex than that, which is why it typically requires for me and my clients a little coaching, because we have to understand the story you’re currently believing. We have to find some other things that you also already believe, you’re just not focused on those things. And then we have to craft a story that still feels believable.

I’m going to give you a few thoughts and stories to play with that might be relevant to you, but again, this is a personal and individual experience. Listening to a lot of coaching or listening to anybody that has a really useful worldview will help you to find stories to borrow from. But I’ll give you a few here today.

First of all, when it comes to your past, I want you to remember that nothing has gone wrong. Nothing that you did was wrong. Now, this is one that not everybody loves because some people say, well, I want to think that thing that I did was wrong so that I don’t do it again. And I don’t want to do it again. And maybe it goes against your morals or your values, or maybe it just feels like a mistake, like choosing to drive down that icy road at that time, maybe that was a mistake. I should have gone a different way, right? 

But when we do this kind of arguing with the past, what we do is we keep replaying and generating more pain that we have to then go process. I don’t want you to create any more of it. We want the brain to settle down and stop creating it. Okay?

So every time you replay that in your head, you create more of it. At some point, you can decide I was absolutely supposed to go down that street and have that experience. How do we know? Because that’s what I did. Okay? And that doesn’t mean I have to ever do that again. I can make a different choice in the future. Doesn’t this sound like wisdom, by the way? Yeah, this is what wisdom is. Wisdom is, okay, you know what? Apparently, I was supposed to learn that going down that street on an icy snowy day is not ideal in my husband’s truck, so that I cannot do that again next time if I can at all avoid it.

The other thing I learned is, okay, don’t laugh at me, you guys, but I didn’t realize that in every automatic car, I think most automatic cars anyway, you can shift it into manual and then you can just downshift the engine and slow down by changing the gears in the engine. Is that right? Is that what’s happening? I’m not a car person. Anyway, instead of having to use the brakes, so that if it’s icy, the engine slows you down and you’re not stepping on the brakes causing more slide. 

Why did I not know this? I don’t know. I’m sure my dad or somebody taught me this at some point or driver’s ed when I was 16, but I have zero recollection of that. And all of a sudden I learned at age, this was a few years ago, so maybe like 46, how to drive on icy roads. I thought I knew that. I didn’t. But I turned that into wisdom instead of just leaving it as trauma. Okay?

So, this is my point. You reframe the story of your past by deciding, wait, nothing’s gone wrong. I had to have that experience in order to then learn how to drive on icy roads because guess what? Even though I moved to California to try to get away from it, there will be times when I’m driving on icy roads again, I’m pretty sure of it. But now I know. So it’s not that I shouldn’t have gone that way, that I shouldn’t have had that. No, I was absolutely supposed to have that experience, even if it was just to learn what I learned. 

Like I said, my teenage son was in the car with me, and I watched him, you know, do his best to support me and to encourage me and to be there with me. And so maybe that was like a bonding moment that we needed to have together. Who knows? My point is, when we argue with the past, we lose because we don’t have a time machine, and it will just keep that traumatic experience creating more suffering for you. We don’t want to do that, okay? So, nothing’s gone wrong. Now we can let go of replaying the past.

For some of you, the trauma is not a decision you made, but it is mistreatment that you experienced at the hand of someone else. Okay? And so in that situation, I want you to explore if there’s any part of your brain because this is common with people who have been victimized like this, I notice, is that they believe on some level that there must be something wrong with them now, that they are damaged for some reason, or that maybe the reason that happened to them is because there was something wrong with them to begin with. And this is just the brain’s way of trying to wrestle with finding meaning. Why did that happen? Why me? Why have I had this experience? It must be because there’s something wrong with me. Or there’s something wrong with me now because of what I’ve been through.

And I just want to offer to you that a possible reframe you can try on is that was never about you in the first place, and it doesn’t have to define you today. And this is something my teacher Brooke Castillo used to say. She said, I just take all of the ick and give it right back to the perpetrator. I just give it right back to them in my mind, right? Like it was never about me, and it’s still not about me. That was something they chose and they did. That was about them, their drama, trauma, pain, et cetera. That was never about me, and it’s not about me today. Okay? So, again, that might take a little working through, but that’s a story I wanted to offer to you if you can relate to that type of a situation where you’ve been victimized in your past.

Another one that I love is this thought that whenever something really painful or scary happens, we can use it to think, oh my gosh, the world is scary and dangerous. Or we can use it to believe I’m clearly protected. Okay? So this one helps me a lot with my kids because I’ll hear about experiences they’ve had that would not be the experiences I would choose for them, right? Have put them in danger or something along these lines. 

And it sort of freaks my brain out going, oh my gosh, I can’t believe that thing happened, and you didn’t stop it at some point, or you didn’t know it was going to happen or whatever. Something could happen to my kids. That is a scarier thought to me than something happening to me even, right?

But then what I remember is, well, she’s clearly protected because she’s fine. Because even though maybe that wasn’t an ideal situation, she’s still here. She’s still alive. Even if there’s a lot of pain that we need to process on the other side of it, she’s okay. I’m okay. We’re here. We can get through this. Clearly, she’s protected, he’s protected, or I’m protected. I like to picture angels, guardian angels around my children or around me. Clearly, I have angels looking out for me.

Listen, this is all just a story, although I do believe in that stuff. But even if you don’t, what serves you better? To believe that, oh my gosh, that was scary and the world is a scary place? Or clearly, I’m protected, they’re protected. We’re all going to have the experiences we’re supposed to because it doesn’t make any sense that they came away from that fine. So anyway, that’s just another thought you can try on in a reframe.

The final one I’ll give you that I love is I just like to believe that the universe is constantly conspiring in my favor. There’s a lot of people who teach this. I happen to believe it, and it brings me so much peace and helps me let go of trauma, right? Because again, if we take that example where I’m driving my husband’s truck and we’re sliding for the edge of the cliff, and I just go, huh, the universe is clearly conspiring in my favor. And I don’t know how. 

But maybe I needed, like I said, to have that experience in order to learn something about how to drive a truck down an icy hill in order to prevent something else happening down the road. Or maybe my son needed to have that experience to take away some kind of knowledge about how to drive on an icy road, and he’s going to make a better choice and do better driving on ice because of it. I’ll be none the wiser, right? But if you just decide it’s all rigged in your favor, then you can stop arguing with the things that have happened in the past and decide that in some way it’s preparing us for the best possible future.

Okay? So this whole reframe thing is really powerful. And again, if any one of those examples I just gave you, you’re like, no, that doesn’t work for me, come to the free coaching call I do, and I can help you to find a reframe because it does sometimes take some personal diving in and finding the right one for you because it has to be believable to you.

Okay. Next tool we use is to come back to the present. Okay? So, trauma is always about a past event. It’s a replay of a past event. When we’re in the middle of it, like when I’m in the truck sliding down the hill, it’s not trauma yet. It’s just fight or flight. The brain moves into fight or flight, right, in order to try to protect us. We’re out of homeostasis, we’re out of our natural rhythm, and we’re into a high adrenaline, high cortisol situation, which gives us the best chance at getting through it.

But afterwards, as we replay it in our minds, we are no longer in fight or flight. We are just in what I call post-suffering. Okay? So maybe when it was happening, I was afraid or whatever it was that happened, maybe you were in pain, et cetera. You had physical, emotional pain, et cetera, overwhelm. But now it’s not even happening. And I’m just replaying it in my head. So I am suffering again after the initial suffering I already had, as though that post-suffering is going to serve now as pre-suffering in case there’s suffering down the road that the brain thinks this might prevent it. But pre-suffering and post-suffering don’t prevent suffering. They just create even more. You see what I’m saying here?

So, coming back to the present is a really good way to get out of that post-suffering, right? So for me, it sounds like I’m just sitting in my office right now. I’m just talking into a microphone. I can see a tree moving in the wind outside my window. I see sunshine. I smell fresh air. Everything is fine. I’m safe right now. As far as I know, everyone I love is safe and fine right now. All is well right now. Like get in your body and feel things. 

Like, can you feel your clothes on your body? Can you feel certain parts of your body? Can you feel your fingers? Can you feel your belly button? Can you smell anything? Can you hear any sounds that you’ve been blocking out, like the sound of a fan or something driving by or, right? What sounds have you blocked out? This is how you come back to the present because you are probably safe in the present, right? If you’re not safe, you’re in fight or flight, as you need to be. Most of the time we are safe in the present. And that can get you out of that post-suffering.

And then the final tool, and by the way, you don’t have to use all of these tools. I’m just giving you lots of options, is to redirect to your future. To stop replaying the past, stop thinking about the past, start thinking about what you want in the future. This is one I’ve used a lot when I’m coaching people through divorce, for example, or some other event, and by event, it might be like something that took place over a long period of time, right? 

But as we keep replaying what went wrong in the past, it prevents us from thinking intentionally about what we want in the future. And so again, you have to process pain and all of that. But at some point, it might be helpful to redirect to the future. Okay? What do I want for my future? What do I want to create down the road? What do I want my life to be like? What kind of mother do I want to be? What kind of wife do I want to be? What kind of business owner do I want to be? Whatever the trauma is about, right? Ask yourself, but who do I want to be in the future?

Because if you don’t ask yourself that and then answer it intentionally, you will bring a lot of that trauma into what you’re creating in the future and again, play small or shrink or minimize what you actually want. But if you know that you’re allowed to just decide what your future is going to be. I was just coaching a woman this morning who’s pregnant, and she’s trying to decide if she wants to have this baby without an epidural. She’s had other babies with epidurals. This is, she’s thinking going to be her last one. She kind of wants to do it without an epidural, but her brain is wrestling with, is that a wise choice or not? Because she’s pretty wise and knows it will be painful, right?

As we talk about this, and she’s telling me about the research she’s done, what her doctor says, what her friends have said, what her mother has said, right? All these people who have experience or for whatever reason have an opinion to give her. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But I was like, you know enough now. You don’t need to research or ask anybody else. And what her brain is doing is trying to guess what will happen. What if this happens? What if that happens? And it like we’re trying to predict what will happen if we go have that baby without any drugs, right?

And what I said to her is like, let’s stop predicting and let’s just decide. Let’s decide what your experience is going to be. Now, people, when I say this to them, they’re like, well, that’s just made up, right? What do you mean we don’t get to just decide? I’m like, no, you do get to decide today what you’re going to think. And we might be wrong. 

But even if we try to predict it, odds are, we’re still going to be wrong. Like, the odds of you being wrong when you intentionally decide it and you craft a story in your mind are not any greater than when you’re just trying to predict it based on what you read on the internet and all your friends said and your spouse’s opinion. The odds of getting it wrong are the same.

And in fact, the truth is, we are most likely to create a version of what we’re thinking and believing. So if I think and believe this is going to be terrible and hard, I’m most likely to get that versus this is going to be beautiful. And it is going to be hard, but that’s what makes it so amazing. That’s kind of why she wants to do it. That’s what makes it so cool and phenomenal is because it will be challenging and it will be painful and it will be big.

So I told her, let’s just create the story you want of what that’s going to be like in your future. And even if you’ve had a rough experience in the past and a lot of pain in the past, doesn’t mean you have to take that with you into your future. You can take the wisdom, right? Note to self, shift into manual transmission when you’re on an icy road. Okay? I can take that wisdom and leave behind me the fear and the panic. And it comes over time. 

For me, anyway, in many cases, it’s not something that I can do immediately. Although sometimes I do have clients in a coaching session who make a pretty significant shift immediately. But my point is, it’s okay if it takes you some time. Okay? This is how you turn past painful experiences into wisdom rather than leave them emotionally charged with trauma.

Thanks so much for joining me today, everybody. I will be doing, like I said, future episodes as I mentioned. And if you have a request for a topic you’d like to hear on the podcast, I’m always ears for that too. Just go ahead and give me a call 1-888-HI-JODY-M, and I will see you next time. Take care.

Oh wow, look at that. You made it to the end. Your time and attention is valuable, and I don’t take it lightly that you made it this far. In fact, it tells me you might be like me; insatiably curious about people and life and potential and connection. Maybe you have big dreams but a small budget and no time. You’re tired, but bored. You’re content, but dissatisfied. Sound familiar? Come to a free coaching call and see for yourself what’s possible: JodyMoore.com/freecoaching to register. That’s JodyMoore.com/freecoaching.