Episode 266 Minisode: Country Roads Take Me Home (4): “I don’t have a voice.”
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In part four of my Country Roads Take Me Home mini-series, I finally realize as I’m driving out of West Virginia at the end of the trip that I no longer felt like I was leaving a part of myself behind. The grounded, wide open, deeply alive version of me was right there in the car with me. So this episode is about self-discovery and what happens when we finally stop believing that it’s other people or places
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that we need to see us or save us or change us or fulfill us. And we just turn our attention inward to that quiet presence that’s always with us. I’m also going to tell you a deeply personal story about my dear sister-in-law, Laura, whose life and heartbreaking death show what can happen when we silence our truth for too long. What happened to Laura is a wake-up call. Because if you don’t give your voice a way out,
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It’s going to find one and that can cost you everything.
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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.
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As I was heading out of town from West Virginia after the trip was complete, I realized that the separation between the version of myself that I feel when I’m there was in the car with me. As much as I love the people and the place and the way I feel when I’m there, I’m no longer dependent on those external triggers, if you will, to create
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the sense of connection and expansive joy and self, the sense of self that I feel when I’m there. I’m no longer dependent on those external conditions. And that’s what I’d like to focus on in this episode, that if I had one piece of advice for people who are wanting to change, it is to set your goals on the emotions
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that you want to feel, the energetic state that you want to exist in, and then experiment with what behaviors and external conditions promote those emotions, but not getting so attached to the strategy that works. Everything changes over time. Every strategy that I’ve ever had in my life has shifted. And I can imagine this one probably will too.
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I’d love to believe that I’m there, but I now understand there’s no such thing. And when I look back, every iteration of myself has been precious. And every difficult time that I found myself in has been exactly what I needed in order to move forward. It is not what happens to you or what is happening in the present moment. And that includes
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your thoughts and your feelings. is not what is in the present moment. It’s how you respond to whatever is in the present moment or has been in the past. And this is the difference between living your life from your heart, trusting your felt experience to guide you.
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Instead of living in your brain according to rules that either you made or somebody else made that worked in the past based on how things were then and what you wanted then, or even what you think will work now. Like you can’t think and know. You have to do and feel and experience and then decide how you want to respond. This is how we keep the connection open.
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to ourselves, this is how we give ourselves a voice. When we stop and process our emotions as awful and as scary and painful as they may be, when we stop and process them, we are bringing the truth of the past into the present moment and deciding how we want to respond to move forward. All emotions are from the past. If you have a feeling about something,
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It is because something happened in the past and you responded or didn’t respond in a certain way and your brain learned, oh, that was a good idea. That was a bad idea. They got me what I want or that totally screwed things up. And in that moment, a rule was formed in the brain. That is what an emotion is. Emotions are not the truth that will apply in this moment or the truth that will get you what you want in the future. Emotions are simply memories.
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of whatever has felt true to you in the past. And when you ignore your emotions, you are preventing new truths from coming into your consciousness. And those truths are there anyway. Your body is always taking in information. Your body takes in over 11 million bits of information per second, and you’re only able to process about 40 bits per second.
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in your conscious mind. All of the other information is simply being tagged and cataloged according to past beliefs. And if you don’t process those emotions and bring up whatever it is that you’re feeling, you can’t ever see that 99.9 % of the negative emotions that you are suppressing in any given day are tied to beliefs that when you bring them into conscious,
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you would laugh at and be like, well, that’s silly. Why am I holding on to that? Yeah, exactly. The only thing you’re ever really afraid of is either what you think or what you think about what other people think, which is still what you think. Allowing all of your thinks into consciousness so they can be examined, so they can be challenged, is how you keep that connection between yourself and your body clear.
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And the more corroded and toxic the connection is between yourself and your body, the less mental health you have access to because you get stuck in your head believing everything you think, which makes you a hostage and a victim of your own emotions. And I want to tell you a story. While we were in West Virginia, we got the word that my dear precious sister-in-law, Laura, passed away.
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She was 45 years old and she was an artistic, creative, beautiful woman. The mother of two children, sister to my ex-husband, sister to me, daughter to Nancy and auntie to my daughters and all of the nephews. But towards the end of her life, she got caught in this trap of constantly overthinking to the point where she couldn’t even leave her own home.
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And it started really with COVID. So she had a really good life for the first 40 plus years of her life. She died at 45. And so it was about four years. She started drinking every single day during COVID as everybody listening to this also did. And her relationship with what was the love of her life got really, really toxic. They didn’t have the coping skills or the resources to deal with.
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their finances, which already were the kind of too-starving artist sort of mentality. He was a musician traveling on the road. She had an oil painting degree and kind of worked at a wine bar and never gave herself the space to pursue her own art or the confidence to put herself out there even when she did. She developed quite a scarcity mindset over the years. She didn’t have enough space.
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She didn’t have enough time. She didn’t have enough money. And it just became this downward spiral. And then during COVID, her husband wasn’t able to travel and pick up the gigs. She was not able to go work at the wine bar where she was able to pick up shifts. And they lived in a community that was shut down far longer. Like I can remember talking to her and realizing, oh my God, you’re still at home wearing masks? uh
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It was middle of 2021, a year and plus later, and she had been living in this mental torture as hell. And I have touched base with her throughout the years, but you we went through, we could go a couple years and not talking after I went through the divorce. And then we got close again. As a matter of fact, when she shared with me the drinking issue, I brought her into this program and I gave her coaching.
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And I tried to support her, you know, and encouraged her to get out of that house, come up and stay with me or come to my lake home, which I had at the time, pre my own divorce, you know, just she could not get out of her head. so everybody, me, her family, my ex husband, her husband also, at least for a while was trying to help her get out of her head and move into action. But she just had so many corrosive truths of why she couldn’t.
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that she just couldn’t. And she did have mental health support. There was medications. She also had epilepsy, which complicated things. She would have seizures. And so she had a lot of fear about having seizures. So it was just kind of the perfect storm for her, especially once she and her husband decided to separate and end what was the most horrific toxic tailspin. It was awful. In the last year, everybody was encouraging them.
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Please just get a divorce, please stop. They had two teenage children living in a tiny house and it was hell. It was absolute hell. And she did the best she could. I know her ex-husband did too, but when I was talking to my ex-husband, he was saying that in the last week of her life, she was afraid to leave uh her husband and had taken the children. Maybe his parents had paid for a trip to Disney.
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And according to Laura, she was under the impression that if she left the house and her husband came back, that he would lock her out and she would have no home. And so the one week that she had to potentially do something for herself, she was literally afraid to leave. And none of that was rational or logical, but she had passed that point. And this whole week was another.
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version of what we’ve seen her go through multiple times where she’s drinking, not eating, and afraid to sleep. Also, you know, self-managing medications without the really cognitive capacity to be doing that. And nowhere to turn, you know. They sent her through rehab at one point. They’ve taken her to the hospital and she’s been sent home. She doesn’t have the money or the insurance. And all of us that have tried to help her over the years.
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It was just like, we all thought there was just nothing we could do. We tried it all. She’s gonna have to help herself. And she didn’t have the ability to do that. And so in the end, I don’t know what actually took her life. If it was a combination of alcohol and medications, too much or too little combined with a seizure or some sort of heart failure, being dehydrated, whatever, like knowing what happened.
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isn’t gonna change the fact that she’s gone. They found her body in her car in the parking lot of a convenience store. And then the next day they found a note and all it said was, I’m tired of not having a voice. My sister was tired and I’m glad she’s at peace. I’m glad that this is over for her. She couldn’t escape.
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her own mind, the mind that was trapping her in a hell that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. And my purpose in sharing that with you is to give you the lesson that Laura leaves for all of us is that your voice is your truth. And when you suppress and deny and avoid and ignore your truth, it grows stagnant and toxic and heavy and dark. The only way to change your truth.
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is to let go of your truth. It is not the truth that sets you free. It is you who sets the truth free. I’m going to end with that, but I have one more episode where I’m gonna tell you a story of where Laura is already working from the other side to not only reclaim her own voice, but to support the women who are still here. Learn how to jump the hurdle that is our subconscious programming.
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to access their own corrosive truths and then use their voice to set it free.
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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.