Episode 281 Minisode: Primal versus Power states
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I want you to think about the last time you felt tense, like your body just braced for impact. Maybe it was in the middle of an argument, or as you were reading an email, or you saw a number in your bank account. And before you could even think, your whole system reacted. That’s not you losing control. That’s your nervous system doing its job. It’s reacting from what I call today your primal state. But here’s the thing.
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Once you can recognize when that reaction occurs, you can learn to pause, to breathe, to shift from that primal reaction into your power state, the place where you can see clearly, respond intentionally, and remember that you have options. In today’s mini-sode, I’m going to explain how to tell the difference between your primal and power states. Because emotional sobriety isn’t about forcing yourself to think positive thoughts.
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when inside your nervous system is on fire. Emotional sobriety is about reclaiming the awareness that lets you choose how you show up no matter what’s happening around you.
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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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We do a lot with nervous system regulation and studying the states of trauma and stress. You know, there’s the freeze response and there’s the or flight response. And then there’s fawning or flocking or figuring it out and fixing. But we can really simplify this to understand that there are really only two states of being that you need to learn to distinguish between. One is a primal response.
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which is your reaction mode, your auto responder. It’s emotional. You’re not consciously choosing it. It’s just the default being selected for you. That’s the primal response. And the primal response is however your subconscious has been programmed. All of the emotional hurts and baggage and fears and trained responses with the rules that dictate who you are and how the world works.
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what’s good and bad, right and wrong, and all the expectations for how things should be or shouldn’t be. Every idea that you’ve ever been exposed to, every experience that you’ve learned, air quotes around learned, you’re always learning, even if your takeaway is traumatic and self-limiting, the information and beliefs of the past are stored in your body. The lessons of the past dictate your primal response. The other state of being,
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is a power response. It is when you are consciously aware of the effect of the past on you in this present moment, and you are able to interact with your own thoughts and emotions from a place of options. You are not being controlled by your mind. You are in control of your mind. You are consciously aware of, outside of, the thoughts and emotions that you’re experiencing in your body.
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And you are operating from a bird’s eye view, big picture of how the thoughts and emotions would affect you. You’re able to predict the future. If I continue to think this and do that, then this is what’s going to happen. And instead of allowing the past to control you and just simply being a puppet or a parrot of the past, you realize that you have the power to think different thoughts, to use your mind as a tool
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that allows you to get what you want in life, to live with joy and ease and abundance instead of being the victim of your mind. What you need to realize is that your mind is your personal assistance. It is always trying to solve problems. And your body doesn’t speak English, it speaks energy. And so your mind’s job is to solve energetic problems and all problems, every single one of your problems.
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is emotional. It’s an energy. Every problem is produced by your primal response. This is where the mindset that sees the problem cannot solve the problem because the mindset is what is interpreting it as a problem. In the larger world, you just have circumstances, situations, and the less emotional you are when you observe a situation, the more clearly you can see it. Emotions distort your reality.
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Remember that all meaning is made in the mind. Nothing means anything. Meaning does not exist in the three-dimensional world. And the more you insert your own interpretations and meaning onto a situation, the less you are able to see what else could be true. What details are you leaving out? What are all the options you have in terms of response? And which response will get you the results that you want to live in that reality in the future?
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You need to understand that the habits that you need to pay most attention to, the habits that you need to be most dedicated to changing, are the habits of thought response that you have. You may think that your mind is running the show because you are very dopaminergic and you have ADHD or you are an all or nothing person with an addictive personality. You may think those thoughts, but they are just thoughts.
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This is just the way you have trained your mind to think of yourself and of your mind. You can also untrain and retrain this tool that you have. You can learn how to use it so that it works for you instead of against you. And the basic tool that you need in order to begin this journey into your own power is to learn how to recognize the difference between primal state and power state. And it’s a feeling.
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It’s just a feeling. When you are in your power state, that is your parasympathetic nervous system, you feel grounded, safe, calm, curious, open-minded. All other feelings can be chunked into the primal bucket. When you are agitated, upset, frustrated, depressed, low energy, panicky, hurried, overwhelmed, stressed, bothered, anxious, scared.
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mad, resentful, judgy, put out, left out. When you are feeling anything that doesn’t feel good, you are in your primal state. And when you are in your primal state, your mind feels like a magnet sucking you into a black hole of thoughts and feelings and rabbit holes of distractions because your brain is trying to solve an energetic problem and it feels urgent and in
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But if you could pause for just a moment and really let this sink in that when you have the felt sensation of urgency to fight, flight, freeze, fawn, flock, fix, or figure out when you have that felt sensation in your body, that is your superpower of awareness. Your body is alerting you to the fact that your mindset has shifted into a primal state and that you are going on.
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The subconscious is running the show and that if you do not stop pause and change how you are responding to the invitation to go up into your head and solve problems that don’t really exist then you lose the opportunity to live in your power you lose the opportunity to change and Create the reality that you want to live in that you no longer need to escape
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And this awareness can save you years of therapy and pain and repeating the same mistakes in relationships where the old story just continues to repeat itself. And in your finances where scarcity mindset or fear of risk prevent you from taking actions that allow you to create wealth and freedom in your life. This awareness can break the cycles of self-sabotage with food or alcohol or the lack of
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physical fitness and movement. Because when you reclaim your power over your mind and body, you no longer have to escape yourself. You have the bandwidth to choose what you’re focused on in your life, to remove the distractions and to create whatever you want instead of allowing all of your mental and emotional and cognitive resources to be wasted and drained, solving problems.
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that don’t really exist. What if all of your energy and creative power was invested in designing the reality you want instead of trying to fight, flight, freeze, flee, flock, fawn, fix, figure, or change the reality that you don’t want? You don’t need therapy. You need two simple skills. Number one is the ability to distinguish when you are in primal state.
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versus power state. And number two is the ability to let go. And letting go is a physical skill. It is a physical mechanism. Instead of trying to think your way out of a feeling problem, you’re going to feel your way from the thinking problems. And let me explain how simple this is. The easiest time to practice it is either first thing in the morning or at night.
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Because when you’re going throughout your day, the habits are running the show. That’s how you get through your day. It’s not all bad, right? But I notice that when I get into bed, often when I check in and kind of just step outside of my head and notice my body, I’m laying there like a board. Like I’m rigid. My shoulders are tight. My head, like you could remove my pillow and my head would still stay at the same angle. Like I’m tight inside. And nothing could even be wrong.
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Right? Like I’m just living my life, thinking the thoughts, planning the plans. And when I notice that my physical body is in that rigid shape, I soften, I relax, I let go, I turn my attention to my muscles and the shape of my posture, and I invite myself to relax. You can do this as you’re listening right now. Like just scan your body.
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Notice where you are holding on to tension and tightness. This is translating to you holding on to shit in your head. And you can just go into your body and override the tension and tightness. You don’t have to figure everything out. Let your scalp relax. Unclench your jaw. Let your face relax. You don’t have to try so hard to keep your head in the angle that it’s at. You can hold the steering wheel if you’re driving or the knife if you are chopping vegetables.
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you can hold it so much softer. I often notice when I’m cold that I’m clenching in my back. And usually my arms have to go numb before I realize that I am doing this. And the more I stop and notice when I am holding on, I’m holding on physically, which means I’m holding on emotionally. The more I stop and notice that I’m holding on and manually override that attachment,
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the more I’m capable of moving through the world in a relaxed, comfortable ease that then translates to how I think. And the more I engage with this practice of letting go, the more I am rewarded because I can see, my life, my circumstances, my responses, my thoughts, my creativity.
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It’s all shifting as I become this person who values feeling peaceful and powerful. know, life is a mirror, not a movie. Everything you see, every problem that you perceive is a reflection of what’s going on inside of you. If you felt powerful and comfortable and at ease and confident in your ability,
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to navigate any circumstance because you have the power of the pause and you are letting go of the old tropes and stories and dramas, trauma bonding. You’re willing to let go of that because it is no longer your preferred state of being. If you felt powerful, comfortable, and at ease and confident, you would be living the life of someone who feels that way.
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And so if I could leave you with anything, it’s the motivation. I’m trying to sell you on a way of being. I’m trying to enroll you in being a person of power. It comes from the inside. That cliche, become the change you want to see. It’s true. When you show up to a conflict carrying a bag of peace and relaxed, it changes the trajectory of not just your life, but everybody’s life.
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There is a ripple effect in your universe. And you need to realize that you are the epicenter of your universe. Stay with me here. If the universe expands infinitely in all directions, then you are always at the center. Your universe is not the same as someone else’s. We all live in our own reality. And then we find people that agree with us and reinforce.
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the beliefs that we are projecting onto the world. So we have shared experiences. But if you’re not happy in the universe that you’ve created, the only thing that has to change is you. You have to be willing to let go of what you don’t want so that you have the space to create whatever you do want. And this power is available to you at all times in the present moment in your power state.
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Once you realize that the only reason you are not enjoying today is because of something that happened in the past or because of something you’re scared about happening in the future. You think that because you did or did not do something or something did or did not happen that you can’t live a full life today because you fucked up in the past. You cannot do wonderful, amazing, powerful things today in this moment or in the future because you were hurt in the past.
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You cannot accept love now because something unpleasant happened before. It will surely happen again because something happened that you did not like. You have to carry anger and resentment and fear or defensiveness with you. Self-righteousness. Because you’ve experienced rejection, you have to protect yourself in the future because you let a habit get the best of you. You can’t be trusted.
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or you have to worry or you have to punish yourself or you have to prove yourself. Like once you realize that the only thing holding you back is you holding onto the past and that the only person hurting you now is you. You are hurting yourself because you refuse to live in this present moment. You refuse to let go of your attachment to the past when the past no longer
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Exists the past is over and done with and the only thing you have to do to live into a different future is to stop operating thinking Figuring out taking action in your primal state All you have to do is become aware when your mind has taken control and simply pause shift and let go of whatever mental processes are going on and shift your focus
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into your body and manually override the tension and the tightness, physically letting go of that energy and allow your mind to come into the present moment. That’s all you have to do. Like all of the skills of emotional sobriety that I teach, how wonderful and important and deep they are. This is it right here. This is your power move. You don’t have to think about nothing you don’t want to think about. You just have to learn.
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that you have the power of where you’re placing your consciousness and to shift your focus out of the thoughts in your brain and into the felt sensations of your body and then soften and let go of the energetic attachments that are no longer serving you.
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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.