Episode 265 Minisode: Country Roads Take Me Home (3): Dancing with my future self
00:00
In part three of my Country Roads Take Me Home mini-series, I take you to my turning point, April 21st of 2020, the day when I finally admitted I wasn’t okay and actually did something about it. This episode is about having the courage to feel what you feel and giving yourself permission to drop the bullshit. I’ll share how finally telling my big, scary, ugly truth
00:27
the one I thought would destroy me and my kids broke the generational cycle of shame and perfectionism. You’ll walk away with a clear understanding that it is not the truth that sets you free, my friend. It is you who sets the truth free.
00:48
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 so you can stop worrying about losing control and trust yourself again. Get happy, not sober. It’s not about the alcohol.
01:24
April 21st of 2020 was the first time in my life that I’d ever really been able to admit that I wasn’t okay. And ironically, giving myself permission to admit that I wasn’t okay was the very first time in a long, long time that I actually felt okay. Admitting to myself and some other people that I had a problem restored my power.
01:54
I was taking actions. It doesn’t even matter whether they were right or wrong. I was finally doing something for myself to change myself instead of expending all of this energy, exhausting myself, trying to change the external world or other people. One of the things in my brain the day that I decided to quit drinking was that
02:21
I was going to get a divorce. Fuck this guy. Fuck all of this. I’m out. And I didn’t want to go through that again, feeling like my drinking might’ve played a part of it, nor did I have a plan for how I was going to support myself. And I think my survival skills just kicked in. No one could save me but me. And after being saved and entering a second marriage, I didn’t want anybody to save me. The price tag
02:51
was just one I was no longer willing to pay. I had no idea what I was gonna do, but I knew what I wasn’t gonna do, not this. And once I took responsibility for the fact that I was my own problem, that did mean I would be my own solution. And I took the advice that they give you in AA, which is really pretty good advice, that you should not make any major decisions for a year.
03:21
just focus on yourself, just focus on your own healing. And even though in the 12-step AA model, that healing is all about the absence of alcohol, I see now that it doesn’t matter. The first step is the most important, just start moving in the direction you wanna go. And so I quickly decided to not pursue a divorce because now we are five, six weeks into COVID and it’s obvious that
03:50
nobody going anywhere. And I knew that insisting that I needed to change my external circumstance so that I could feel better, get out of this marriage immediately, like my ass is on fire. I knew that that would just throw my body into a stress response and my life into a state of chaos and distract me from the real work that I was finally ready to do. And of all the skills of emotional sobriety that I now teach,
04:20
The one skill that I think is most valuable, no matter what you’re dealing with or struggling with, alcohol or any other problem, the one piece of advice boils down to one word, and that’s action. I now refer to alcohol use disorder as I have to think about it disorder. And that’s how your circuit breakers end up blown. Because as you can tell from my story, you know,
04:49
Is it my marriage? Is it my drinking? Is it all the kids and all the stress? Is it my own lack of career and feeling fulfilled? Like, yeah, it’s all of those things. And by the time you think about all that shit all day long, plus doing all the things you need to do to check all the boxes to make all the people happy, there’s no room or bandwidth to look at changing your drinking habit because that’s the only form of relief that you know from your own goddamn mind. And so making the decision
05:19
to stop trying to figure everything out and just start taking care of myself like I’m babysitting a two-year-old who likes to drink freed up a lot of mental bandwidth. Because taking care of a two-year-old, even one that likes to drink, isn’t real complicated. Sleep, nutrition, movement, stimulation or less stimulation, boundaries, just basic self-care.
05:47
The moment that you shift from believing that your stress is outside of your control, therefore you’re a victim in your own life, the moment you take full responsibility for yourself, then it doesn’t really matter what action steps you take because it’s a live and learn feeling. It’s a felt experience of what works and what doesn’t work, of what you need and don’t need. Like, there’s nothing to figure out anymore. There’s what you do.
06:16
There’s what you don’t do and how that works out and then how you respond to how that works out and what you decide next. Like that’s it. And once you start trusting the truth that is your body, the felt experience of whatever results you’re dealing with, once you start trusting that and taking actions in response to your body’s needs, you realize you can’t fuck this up. There is literally nothing to figure out.
06:47
You can’t think and know. Certainty and uncertainty are both feelings, not facts. It is the present moment experience of knowing how you feel in the moment that is your truth at all times. And your truth is always changing. And the more you deny whatever the truth is in any given moment, the more it has power over you, which is really counterintuitive. I used to think,
07:17
that if I admitted I wasn’t happy in my marriage, that would mean I would have to leave immediately. And turns out, I gave it another four years before I pulled the plug with full intention of not knowing whether or not I would ever leave. Full intention of taking full responsibility for my own happiness and then slowly over time, learning to trust myself to be able to handle anything that it was always, had ever only been the fear of how I would feel.
07:46
if a certain external circumstances occurred, the fear of how I would feel about it, not the circumstance itself that kept me from action. I was afraid of my own feelings. And it turns out that when you’re suppressing your emotions and denying a truth that is in your body, that truth becomes more and more powerful the more you deny it. And that’s why we end up in this game of whack-a-mole and ultimately end up manifesting
08:16
circumstances in our lives that cause us to feel the emotions that we’re trying to suppress. Because the more you suppress it, the more powerful it gets. The more powerful it gets, the more you project it into all the new circumstances. Because it is the emotions you’re suppressing literally become the eyeglasses of which you’re focusing through. It’s like rose colored glasses or shit brown glasses or shame colored glasses or anger or resentment.
08:46
You just start seeing the world through that because you don’t want that. And so you’re looking for that so you can avoid that. And that’s how we manifest, you know, not so much the external reality, it’s the internal reality that often then does create external realities. I’m back in West Virginia right now and my daughter and I were driving last night and she was sharing with me some observations that she’s made about herself.
09:15
And she’s been a mini me and she’s lived her childhood painfully insecure, hyper focused on how she thinks she looks to other people and obsessed with what other people think. And she’s starting to come into herself, which is the most beautiful thing, like watching a rose bloom. She’s 19 years old and she’s getting ready to move out and go to college. She finished a two year degree at the community college and
09:45
Now we’re packing her up to leave. And so this road trip is especially precious to me. But yesterday we were out by the cabin, in front of the cabin, and I was talking to an old friend, the guy that owns it. And she said hello and then was walking back to our cabin and all of a sudden picked up for a run. She started running. And that’s not her. I mean, again, painfully aware of how she looks and not a big runner.
10:14
And she mentioned later that being here makes her feel more connected to herself, makes her want to not care as much. And she goes, mom, I just felt like running. And like, this is such a small thing, right? But it was meaningful to her. I noticed it was meaningful to me. She goes, I just felt like running. And she goes, I realized that when I’m at home, I’m worried when I walk to the mailbox, who’s looking at me?
10:40
And yeah, like even trying to get her to go to the Y or something in high school, she wouldn’t go even walk around the track because what if someone sees her? I know like, yeah, what if someone sees you? Like, what’s the problem with that? But she’s been painfully tied up in this little prison. And so we were driving in the car last night, going by our old house and driving the roads we used to drive on. And she was recalling how she stopped.
11:07
playing the ukulele and singing or playing the piano and singing when her friends were around because she noticed the look on their face. She’d have a group of girls over and she just felt really insecure like they didn’t appreciate it or she thought they were stupid and how she wants to take this West Virginia version of herself to college where she feels free to run if she wants to run or play and sing her ukulele if she wants to play. And I pointed out how
11:37
when her friends were looking at her in that way and she felt judged and I told her your thoughts about their thoughts, still your thoughts, your feelings about their feelings, still your feelings, but how she wasn’t inaccurate in picking up their energy, but how the reason they had that energy is they too are worried about what other people thought and they weren’t looking at what you were doing as something they would give themselves permission to do.
12:07
And therefore, the social cues or the subconscious cues were that you should stop doing that, you’re embarrassing yourself. And I said, this is then how you attract crowds and friend groups of people who are all judging and critical of themselves. And I pointed out that it was her own fears that were manifesting into reality because she was attracted to other people who were also critical.
12:34
and hyper-focused on how they look to other people and then judging other people. And I said, so you manifested those type of people as friends. I said, in this moment, you can see that. I go, would you like to go to college and attract the sort of people where it’s perfectly normal to break into a run or to break into a song? I said, that’s the purpose of processing your emotions is because they tell you who you are.
13:02
both who you want to be and also who you’re afraid to be. And once you learn how to move through the feeling into action so that you are giving yourself joy, then you attract the life that reflects joy. You attract the people who also value joy. And that’s how you end up living an authentic life and not waking up at 46 like your mother did with a raging drinking problem.
13:30
And then I said, honey, the most important goal you could set for yourself is asking, how do I want to feel? I go, your whole life you’ve been taught to figure out what you want to do so you can get the stuff and the money so that you can feel good about yourself. I go, it’s all wrong. You have to decide how you want to feel and then show up feeling that in whatever circumstance you’re in.
13:56
And I go, and if your goals are emotional and your goal is to feel abundant and peaceful and confident and happy, I go, then your actions will align with that. And I go, your life’s actually gonna work out. Instead of setting the goal of I can’t feel abundant until I have a certain amount of money in my bank account, how about if I feel abundant now, regardless of how much money is in my bank account?
14:23
And then that’s how I show up and act upon the world. That is what creates the abundant. It is the emotional energy and the intention of that energy that manifests into the external reality. And for me in my life right now, that’s my big goal is to feel abundant and free. And I showed her a TikTok reel and I’m going to put the link in the show notes for you. If you don’t have TikTok, don’t go get it. But if you do click, it’s just a simple. m
14:52
image, imagine a woman, an old woman, an old woman, my future self, my future self is in this TikTok reel, an older woman dancing on the beach with the waves, just dancing to her own music. And of course, there’s a Stevie Nicks playing in the background of the reel. And so it kind of inspires you to go dance yourself. But I said, that’s how I want to feel. That’s my future self. And everything I do every day aligns
15:21
for me to be her. I’m setting her up for success so that she can dance in those waves. I’m taking actions to be a woman who dances in the waves like no one is watching, no matter how old I get. And I said to my daughter, I want that for you too.
15:40
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.