Episode 230 Minisode: Processing The Background Alarm
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Hello everyone. So I do a daily podcast called Coffee with Colleen inside my emotional sobriety coaching program. These are short, sweet mini-sodes that either give you an inside look at something I’m going through in my own life or a simple, easy strategy that you can implement or both. You may hear me reference other content that only my clients have access to. So if you’re interested in learning more about my program,
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get in the show notes and schedule a discovery call with me or my team. My name is Colleen and I’m a mindful drinking coach helping high achieving professional women permanently reduce their alcohol consumption by 80%. Join me each week for evidence-based holistic strategies to regulate your nervous system, balance your dopamine and activate the growth mindset that makes you so powerful in other areas of your life.
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so you can stop worrying about losing control and trust yourself again. Get happy, not sober. It’s not about the alcohol.
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The super cool realization when you realize your background alarm is on is that you can relax because it’s not about the money, the alcohol, the problems, the superficial concerns, the issues, all of the things. It’s not about that. In fact, the perceptions that you have of your problems
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are coming from the past. You are projecting the rules, the hurts, the past traumas, the fears, the shame from the past into the current situation. And that’s what the discomfort of anxiety is brilliantly designed to do, to get your attention so that you understand that this isn’t about what you’re making it out to be.
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And the moment you realize you’re running a pattern, you’re running a play out of an old, dated, shitty playbook. The moment you realize that, things start to fall into place. You get clarity. The energy gets released from everything that feels so overwhelming. We had a call the other day and someone was sharing that
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they wanted to talk about sleep and boil down to kind of two beliefs. Number one, I hate to go to bed. And the other one is I’m afraid of the demons in the middle of the night when she wakes up and her thoughts just flood and she can’t control it. So let’s just break that apart into I hate to go to bed. When you hear those words, what’s the first thing that pops into your mind? Let’s be honest, a little bit of judgment.
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It sounds really immature, right? And it is, it is, it is exactly what it is. What has happened is that the child version of you at some point didn’t want to go to bed and was either forced to go to bed or had bad experience because they were going to bed or it meant something, rules were formed.
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And from the child’s mind, the only takeaway was, don’t want to go to bed. And that got lodged in the body. And now as an adult who’s very tired and actually really enjoys going to bed, you end up suffering with all of this resistance and self-sabotaging behavior because there’s a belief down in there, I don’t want to go to bed. And it sounds like an eight-year-old not getting their way because it is.
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And it’s bigger than that. It’s not just like a spoiled child. Usually there’s trauma attached to it. And that belief was the takeaway. But when you realize that your self-sabotage-er is the child version of you who made sense of the world and made sense of yourself through the eyes of whatever cognitive abilities they had at that point and the role models or the leadership that
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that was available to them, and that was the takeaway. That’s why that inner rebel that wants to stay up late and get a drink, it’s believing and mistaking that that inner rebel is a version of you is only partially true. What you’re actually dealing with is unprocessed emotions that were formed at a certain age level. That’s why it feels so.
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immature. That’s why it’s embarrassing to say some of this shit out loud. But get comfortable with that. Because all of our unresolved traumas 99 % of them are coming from childhood. They are coming from the child version of us who did the best they could to be safe and to get love from their people and to please the people around them. And those beliefs are now the ones
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that are in our playbook, which is why it’s so sad when you think about how much we fear anxiety and we go to the doctor and we swallow pills or we drink our faces off because we’re so afraid of this feeling when if you just stop long enough to examine the belief, you’ll see, first of all, it’s not even about the situation that you’re applying it to. It is a relic of the past. You’re running a habit.
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You feel this way about this thing because you’ve always felt that way. And one of my favorite questions to ask as a coach is, first of all, how old do you feel in this emotion? That’s very telling. It’ll take you into the timeline. And then the second question is, do you remember when you started feeling this way? And often you can pinpoint a specific memory or at least a specific situation.
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that you had in your life where this belief formed. This is how we breadcrumb ourselves down into the subconscious. Okay, well, what was the belief that was formed? Start with, how did I feel? Why did I feel that way? What did I make that mean? And then once you get to it, it doesn’t go away. Bringing it into consciousness doesn’t make it go away. However, it allows you to put it on the table
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with all of the other things that could also be true. It allows you to re-story what happened in that situation so that the truth is no longer this boiled down, collapsed one takeaway. The truth is kind of infinite. You can always expand a story. You can always see things from a different perspective. You can always ask bigger and better questions about things in the past or in the present moment.
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And so when you get to the root of the memory of when this started, sometimes it started as an adult, but when you go back to why you responded to the way you did as an adult that then created the trauma and the habit and the playbook, often it’s, you will go back into childhood as to there’s a reason why you responded that way. And it’s usually because your inner child was
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reactive in that moment and it exceeded your capacity to process in that moment, look at things from more perspective and as an adult and ask what else could be true. And so you just sealed it off, blocked the energy down in your body. And then whenever you were in a situation that triggered that same familiar feeling or pattern or thought processes, the whole thing happened again. And then the habit just rolls down the hill like a snowball.
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And then pretty soon we think it is who we are and it’s always been this way. But when you stop and really look at this and see the habit, you know, your personality itself is a habit. And when you realize that you can break the habit of being yourself whenever that habit that no longer serves you, you will get excited to notice that your background is alarm is going off.
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Often, you know your foreground alarm goes off because of situation and the thoughts and the beliefs and that triggers because it’s connected to the background alarm and then your whole body goes haywire and you go into high levels of anxiety and even panic attacks and it’s just a surge of energy that cuts off your cognitive function and your amygdala takes over your emotional
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processing system is in charge and you’re living like a child, a hurt child from the past. And if you don’t deal with this energetically, which most of us don’t, that’s why we’re here, then you end up trying to make sense of what’s happening to you using just the superficial surface situation that you’re looking at and
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thinking about it and thinking about it and thinking about it because you don’t want to feel and allow the subconscious beliefs from childhood because you don’t understand that they have anything to do with it. Then you just further disconnect from your body and stay up in your head and then that becomes a habit where you’re trying to think your way out of a feeling problem. The truth is that once you realize your alarm is going off,
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and you stop and you get present with the feeling, it doesn’t even hurt. Like anxiety and excitement feel the same in your body. And yet one you skip into, you know, with songs and dances and the other one cripples you and sends you into a panic attack. But the sensation in your body is really the same. And once you get out of your head and thinking all of the thoughts and invite the energy
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into consciousness, first of all, inviting that energy into consciousness and asking those questions, you know, how old am I? What was the belief that I took away from this? That allows you to go, oh, so now the pathways have opened and the energy is still there, but you can redirect the energy. know, energy is not created or destroyed. It is transformed.
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which is why when I was going through my divorce, which was big, I felt like I was trying to eat an elephant energetically. I had to do it one wave at a time. But it only took me like two weeks because every time I brought the energy up into consciousness and I invited it to be there, I made sense of it, and then I felt it in my body. I didn’t think about it in my brain and I claimed that energy. This is my energy.
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This is the gas that I’m going to need to go leave this marriage and create a new life for myself. And as I shared in the last episode, I must not have processed all of it because I was still running full speed with the gas eight months later, and I needed to stop and go deeper, which I did. This is life. You’re not perfect. You’re never going to get all of it, and there’s always something new to uncover. But in the
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The weeks after my divorce where I told my husband I was getting a divorce, it wasn’t final, of course, every time I felt that horrific pain and overwhelmed, I felt it. I felt it. I felt and I made friends with that sensation. This is my energy. That’s how you turn off the background alarm. You make sense of it and then you claim the energy and you can allow it to dissipate.
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you know, bubbles and bumps and movement and light and color and breath and all of that, you can let it go. And also you can reroute it. You can put it into a different circuit because you’re no longer thinking that the old circuit that it was in is this true story. You’re using that energy to create a new story. And so your takeaway is as important as it is to do the mental work.
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The primary step, the step number one always is to feel. Yes, step two might be to make sense of things, but the first thing is to stop shying away from the feeling because when you put your attention and focus on the feeling, that’s what allows you to use your brain to create a different story. But if you try to think your way out of the feeling and not feeling it, you’re never gonna get
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the whole thing, you’re not going to be processing the energy. The energy will remain stuffed in the background and that background alarm will then still be going off. So it is a two part process, but feeling is the most important thing. And so I just want to leave you like, how, how do you feel your feelings? What does that mean? Colleen go into your body right now, put your awareness in your big toe.
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Move it around. There, you’re feeling it. Put your awareness into your belly. Expand your belly and take a deep breath into your gut. Feel it. Just feel the sensations. Then put your awareness in your heart. Take another big breath and expand your test. Feel that. All right, find a pain or a tension or a tightness somewhere in your body. Put your awareness there.
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Just feel it. Don’t think about it. Just be there with your conscious awareness. That’s all it means. That’s all it means. And then as you make friends with that sensation and then get curious, then you can do the cognitive work of pulling it into consciousness. So your takeaway is to start feeling. Get into your body. Get out of your head. Get into your body and just feel.
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All right, thanks for listening. And if you’re a high achieving, coachable woman who is ready to commit to manifesting your best life, and you’re going to need to reduce your alcohol consumption by about 80%, so that alcohol goes back to being a pleasure instead of a soul sucking problem, get in the show notes and click the link and schedule a discovery call with me or my team.