Episode 294: How to quiet your spinning mind (without alcohol)
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If you find yourself in a lot of mental tailspins, overthinking, overanalyzing, trying desperately to understand why you’re feeling this way so that you can make it stop, this episode is for you. What I’m gonna share today might challenge everything you’ve been told about healing, because the truth is your spinning mind isn’t a problem to solve, it’s a messenger. And until you learn how to listen to what it’s actually telling you,
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you’re gonna stay stuck in the same patterns. This is deep work, but this is the work that actually creates lasting change. So get comfortable, grab your journal if you wanna take notes, and let’s talk about what your spinning mind is really trying to tell you. uh
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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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Today, I want to talk to you about that spinning mind that won’t shut up when you’re triggered. You probably already know that that’s actually what’s keeping you stuck in the old patterns. You just don’t know how to turn it off. And you’re doing everything you can. You’re making progress. You’ve gone to therapy, maybe for years. You’ve read the books. You’ve listened to the podcasts. And you understand your trauma responses intellectually. You can identify your triggers. And you know exactly where your wounds come from. But your mind is still spinning.
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Maybe it happens when you meet your new partner’s family and suddenly feel like that kid who never belonged. Or maybe it’s when you’re trying to make a difficult decision about the direction of your life. You’re going to get a new job or change careers or change where you live. And your brain just goes into overdrive. The more you think, the worse you feel. Maybe it’s insecurity in your existing circle of friends where you still have old abandonment fears that get triggered and you cannot stop the mental loop when it starts of
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I’m too much, I don’t fit in, I’ll never be loved. And you find yourself thinking, why can’t I just get over this? I’ve done so much work, why am I still here? And here’s what I want you to understand. Your spinning mind isn’t something that you need to fix or stop or control. It’s actually communication from a part of you that needs your attention. I know this might feel frustrating.
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because you’ve been trying so hard to manage your mind, to think your way out of this, to use all the tools and the strategies you’ve learned. What I need you to hear is that when your mind is spinning, you’re not solving any problems, you’re creating them. It’s kind of like your car tire is stuck in the mud and the more you push on the gas, the deeper it goes. What’s really happening is that you’re trying to think your way out of a feeling and feelings
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can’t be solved by thoughts. Feelings aren’t rational. Here’s what the pattern looks like. See if you recognize it in yourself. Something triggers you and your nervous system activates. Your mind starts spinning, trying to make sense of what’s happening, trying to figure out how to fix it. And then when you can’t, getting sidetracked with psychoanalysis about why you’re feeling this way. Why are you responding like this when you should know better by now?
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That spinning, that is not your adult self, higher level, problem solving, cognitive brain. That spinning is telling you that a wounded part of you, your inner child has been activated. You are living in the past and you are reasoning with childlike reasoning skills. When you are emotionally wounded as a child, there’s a part of you that gets stuck.
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in that experience because you don’t have the cognitive skills to process it from an adult perspective. Children are naturally egocentric and narcissistic. They think everything is about them. They are also hardwired for survival purposes to believe that the adults in their life know what they’re talking about. And they are also hardwired to side with the adult so that if mommy and daddy are fighting,
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The child’s brain thinks, have I done? And what could I do different to prevent this in the future? And because you are not able to call a spade a spade or an asshole an asshole or a bully a bully, you don’t have the power to do that. You don’t have the right to do that. Your survival depends on making the caregivers and the people around you happy. That’s how you stay safe. And this is how your
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childlike beliefs that something is wrong with you or you’re not lovable or that you’re bad or gross or disappointing. This is how those beliefs get internalized and encoded in your nervous system because you’ve never processed them from a healthy, whole, autonomous adult perspective, which is how you end up being a grown ass adult and still walking around thinking that something is wrong with you or that you’re broken and unlovable. And I think we can all admit at this point,
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that there really are no grownups in the world. Most people are walking around wounded, unaware that their childhood fear and shame and guilt are controlling their behavior. Because as children, how do we try to fix our feelings? We try to behave our way out of them. We try to think our way out of them. We try to figure out how we can do better, be more, and do more so that we can prove that our fear and shame and guilt are wrong.
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We grow up thinking that our feelings are telling us the truth and that we have to work really hard to keep other people from finding out that we suck. And as condescending as it may be to say that there really are no adults because most people are walking wounded children, I want you to hear that there’s nothing wrong with having wounded parts. We all have them. There’s nothing wrong with the fact that you still get triggered. There’s nothing broken about you.
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And it is possible for you to heal your wounded parts. But when you try to think your way out of what’s happening, you’re actually abandoning the part of you that’s asking for help because you’re agreeing that she needs to be fixed. You’re agreeing that these shitty negative feelings and runny mind that you have, it’s all telling you the truth. It’s confirming what the feelings are telling you, which is that you’re broken and also crazy. So
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What has to change is not actually your feelings themselves. What has to change is your relationship with your feelings, your relationship with your wounded parts. You have to stop seeing your wounded parts as awful and bad and something to be ashamed of, something that you are inconvenienced by, something that you wish didn’t exist. You can’t heal your relationship with your inner child as long as your attitude
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is that I wish you didn’t exist. There is a massive difference between being triggered by a part of you and mistaking your whole identity as that part of you. This is what’s known in IFS, Internal Family Systems, parts work, as blending. There’s blending and then there’s unblending. Think of the difference between a fruit salad where you can see all the components of the salad
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and a fruit smoothie where it’s pink, it must be strawberry, and there could be a shit ton of other fruits in there, but it all kind of looks the same and tastes the same. When you are blending with your wounded parts, then when those parts of you are triggered and activated, you think that’s the whole of you. You are no longer seeing the fruit cocktail that you are. You are no longer seeing and acknowledging.
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the whole of you, the intelligence, the passion, the creativity, the fun, the serious, the innocence, the kindness, as you don’t have a healthy relationship with all aspects of yourself, which all humans have a full range of human emotions. You got the VIP package. You get to feel stupid and lazy and weak and broken and also intelligent and rock star and awesome and passionate.
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and capable and unfuckwithable. You are never just one thing, but because you don’t have a healthy relationship with your parts, when you get triggered, then you forget who you are. And you go into just seeing your identity, your brain gets hijacked by the wounded child, and you embody that. This is what is happening when your mind won’t stop spinning. You’re not observing your inner child or your wounded parts.
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You are that part. You start thinking her thoughts, feeling her feelings, and making meaning of your current situation from her childlike perspective that’s frozen in the past. So instead of being an adult who notices, oh, there is a young part of me that’s scared right now, you become that scared kid thinking, I don’t belong here. I’m too much. They’re going to reject me. And of course, that sends your brain into a tailspin.
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because you’re trying to use your adult cognitive abilities to solve a child’s emotional experience. You’re trying to rationalize feelings that aren’t rational. You’re trying to think your way out of something that needs to be felt and comforted. Think about this for a second. If a five-year-old came up to you spinning and scared, would you hand them a self-help book on emotional regulation and tell them to go fuck and figure it out on their own?
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Would you explain the neuroscience of a trauma response? Or would you get down on their level, maybe put your hand on their heart and say, sweetie, I’m here, you’re safe, tell me what you need? You gotta understand that your youngest, most wounded parts don’t speak the language of logic and reason. Some of them may even be nonverbal. So you have to learn how to communicate on a visceral level.
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You have to learn how to communicate safety and acceptance and presence. You have to use your energy to create a safe space for that wounded part of you. This is why you can’t think your way into healing these deepest places. Your inner child doesn’t need you to explain why she’s not thinking correctly or what is wrong with the way she is feeling. She needs you to be safe for her.
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She needs you to soothe her fear with patience, compassion, and unconditional love. She doesn’t need you to analyze why she’s triggered. She needs you to say, I see you. I’m not going anywhere. What do you need me to know right now? You have to accept that the healing doesn’t happen in your head. It happens in your nervous system. You don’t heal through understanding.
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you heal through experiencing safety. It doesn’t matter how brilliant your insights are about your patterns. Those insights are not going to stop you from getting triggered next time because insight without that embodied experience is just more information for your brain to store. The healing work, the real integration happens when you learn how to drop out of your spinning mind.
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and into your body, feeling the chaos and the overwhelm and the shame and the fear and just staying present with it and for it and energetically communicating unconditional love that doesn’t need to fix or change anything. So here’s the question. What if your spinning mind isn’t a problem to solve, but an invitation to show up differently? What if
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Instead of trying to climb the ladder all the way up to the top of your head trying to think your way out of what is a body-based trigger You learn to drop into your body and ask who in me needs my attention right now The moment you catch your mind spinning that is actually the exact moment that you get to practice the most revolutionary act of self-love Showing up for your own pain without trying to fix it
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not trying to make it go away faster, not looking for a spiritual bypass where you get to skip the part where you go through these feelings, not trying to use the right tool or to think the right thing or to figure one more goddamn thing out because there’s nothing to figure out. You’re going to have to feel this out. Emotions are energy and energy is information.
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the information that is in your emotions are showing you what that precious, sweet, abandoned child believes about herself. And so sitting with those feelings allows you to decode those feelings. And if you can tolerate it without trying to change it or fix it or hurry up and make it go away, if you can just tolerate it and hold space for that belief within the context
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of the fruit salad, that that’s just one part of you that believes that. And if you can expand your perspective and remember that not all parts of you believe that, just the one part, then you can sit with safety without any sense of urgency that this has to hurry up and change because it’s not a threat to who you are. You can just be patient and ask the question, what do you need from me?
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What do you want me to know right now? How can I help you? Because the inner child is trying to help you. The inner child is trying to solve a problem, again, with childlike reasoning and it doesn’t make any sense. She’s been trying to protect you this whole time. And when you unblend and you can keep one foot in your adult perspective, you can now become the protector.
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of your inner child. You can let her off the hook. You can ease the pressure. She doesn’t have to figure this out. She can’t. She doesn’t need to because you’re the adult and you’re capable of tolerating her emotion long enough for her to feel safe and loosen her grip on these painful, self-limiting, damaging, atrociously awful beliefs that she’s been carrying around. And that’s the part that kind of gets scary.
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because you have to actually listen. And before you can listen, you’re gonna have to slow the fuck down long enough to receive whatever comes up. Even if it’s big, even if it’s messy, even if it’s the same fear that you thought you already worked through, like why the hell is this coming up again? Because here’s what’s true. Your wounded parts aren’t going to let go of those beliefs until you have built a relationship with them that they are safe with you.
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They don’t trust you yet. They’re not going to trust you with their deepest pain because you’ve been ignoring them, abandoning them, judging them, and trying to fix them instead of just being with them. The key to really doing this work and actually making progress is to have realistic expectations. There’s a myth in our culture that if you go to enough therapy, go to enough spiritual retreats,
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If you have enough insights, if you study the theories on mental health, if you do enough trauma work, then at some point, you’re gonna get to graduate from having emotional responses, emotional pain, emotional problems. Like there’s some sort of finish line where you become a person who no longer gets triggered, no longer has any wounded parts that show up, no longer has to deal with any bullshit, your baggage is free and clear.
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That’s not how being a human works. You don’t get to test out of the human experience. All of the work that you are doing is not ever gonna get you quote, there. There is no there. There’s always just here and what’s going on on the outside, what’s going on on the inside and your relationship to your parts. You don’t need to be fixed because you’re not broken. You need to develop the skills.
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to learn how to process your emotions when they come up, whether they’re from deep in the past or a grief, awful situation in the present. You have to learn how to process your emotions, to think about how you’re thinking, to learn that when your mind is spinning, it’s because your nervous system has been triggered and the problem is in your body and the solution begins with a felt sense of safety. So if you’ve ever heard yourself say, I’ve done so much work, I shouldn’t be dealing with this.
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What the hell is wrong with me that I still have so many feelings? Why can’t I just be happy and free like all the people I see on Instagram and TikTok? That’s the problem. You’re judging your own emotions. You’re also applying somebody’s Hollywood filter to one of your lowest moments and then wondering why you feel so damn miserable. Healing isn’t about becoming somebody who doesn’t need healing anymore. Healing.
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is becoming somebody who can hold whatever arises in your emotional body with compassion, including holding space for the parts of you that are still healing. So let’s get practical for a second. The real work isn’t to stop your mind from spinning. The real work is learning to recognize when you’re blended and then choosing to drop into presence instead of climbing higher up into your head.
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There’s no escape, my friends. You cannot escape your own body or your own mind. You’re going to have to learn to deal with it. You’re going to have to change your relationship with it. You’re going to have to stop trying to think your way out. Stop trying to fix or change or hurry this process. Learn how to put your hand on your heart and drop into your body and say, there’s somebody here who needs my attention and you have my attention. You are worthy of my attention.
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Just imagine the wounded child in you who felt unworthy when the adult version looks at her and says, I got time for you, babe. You are worth my attention. I’m not going to leave you. I’m not going to hurry you. And I’m not going to judge you for what you’re going through. So the question is not, how do I stop getting triggered? Oh, God, no. The question is, how do I want to show up when I am triggered?
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Because getting triggered isn’t the problem. Getting triggered is the information. It’s your system saying, there’s a part of me that needs some love right now. And when you start responding to that invitation, instead of trying to shut it down, something amazing happens. Your parts start to trust you. They start to know that when they are scared or hurt, you will show up because you’re no longer afraid to feel what they feel.
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So here’s what I wanna leave you with. Number one, your spinning mind is not your enemy. It’s a part of you that’s asking for attention in the only way it knows how. Number two, you don’t need to fix your wounded parts. You need to build trust with them through presence and patience. Number three, healing isn’t a one-time event. It’s a lifelong.
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practice of showing up for yourself with unconditional love Number four the goal is not to stop having feelings The goal is to become somebody who can feel all your feelings without abandoning yourself and number five Every time you choose presence over spinning through it in your mind every time you ask What do you need of the part of yourself that’s wounded instead of saying how do I fix you and shut you the hell up?
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You’re not just healing old wounds. You’re creating new neural pathways of safety and love. You think you should be past this by now because you’ve done some of the work, but what if the work isn’t something that you ever complete? What if the work is kind of something you become? Because a person who can hold space for their own humanity, for their own complexity, who can show up for their own pain without trying to rush through it, uh
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person who can cultivate trust with all of the wounded parts of themselves. That’s what we’re building. That’s what we’re working towards. So you’re not ever behind. You’re not ever taking too long. And you’re not too much. You are learning something that most people never learn. How to be a safe place for yourself to land. How to be your own best friend. How to be 100 % Team You.
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24 seven. There is nothing greater that you could aspire to be than to be safe with yourself because then you never have to be afraid of your own damn feelings. You never have to be afraid to take a risk or to fail or to make a mistake. You never have to be afraid to try something because you don’t think you can handle how you’ll feel if it doesn’t go well. Imagine what will change in your life if you are no longer afraid of your own damn feelings.
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It is liberating, my friends. So that’s it for today’s episode. And I know it was a lot. And if some of this landed kind of hard, like give yourself a minute. That means that something in you recognized the truth in what I was saying. Here’s what I want you to do this week. The next time you notice your mind is spinning, just pause, try this, put your hand on your heart, take a deep breath. And instead of asking, how do I make this stop? How do I fix this? Ask.
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Who in me needs my attention right now? That’s it, that’s the practice. You don’t have to have all the answers. There’s really nothing to figure out. Again, you gotta feel it out. So you don’t need to do this perfectly. You just need to show up. Because every time you choose presence over spinning, you’re creating new neural pathways of safety and love. You’re teaching your wounded parts that they can trust you. And that’s how healing actually happens.
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So if this episode resonated with you, please share it with somebody who needs to hear it. Also, make sure you’re following the show, hit the follow button. And then if you have a minute to leave me either a review on Apple or rate the show on either Apple or Spotify, I would be so grateful. Thank you for that. And finally, if doing this work, learning about parts work and nervous system regulation.
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and emotional goal setting and mindset and all the things. If doing this work feels overwhelming and you are struggling with a drinking problem, you’re drinking more than you should, you’ve tried and failed and made a lot of promises to yourself that you have broken over and over and you would like support. Understand that asking for help is a sign of strength, not weakness. You don’t have to figure this all out by yourself, my friend. It’s enough to do the work.
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without having to figure out what that work is. I can give you a roadmap that will for sure move you through alcohol use disorder where you are drinking more than you should so that that becomes something in your rear view mirror. So you can add that to the list of things that you have overcome without worrying that you’re gonna slip back into old habits. You know, that’s really what the obstacle is. It’s not the behavior change itself. It’s not building of new habits.
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It’s conquering the fear that you’re gonna fall back into old habits. That’s what we do inside my community, inside the program called The Next Chapter. It’s a one-year immersion into the skills of emotional sobriety. And there’s unlimited one-on-one coaching. There’s more content than you can ever possibly listen to. And there is a kick-ass community of women, all of whom are sharing the same common goal. We’re getting happy, not sober.
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so that we can regain our confidence and our own ability to take good care of ourselves. There is nothing more important as a human being than the ability to trust yourself, not to be perfect, but to trust yourself to learn and to grow and to expand. So if you are wondering about what coaching would look like, get into the show notes right now before you change your mind and just schedule a discovery call.
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It is not a high pressure sales call. We do not take everybody who applies. We know exactly the demographic and kind of the zone of our genius. And we’re not gonna take your money if we can’t guarantee your results. But no matter what, you will walk away from that call with clarity and a big picture understanding of where you are, where you want to be, and what you’re gonna need to do to get there. So schedule a discovery call if you’re even curious.
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And otherwise, thank you so much for listening. Thank you for being a part of this community. I absolutely appreciate your time and listening and silent participation and support and all of the things. I do this because I have been where you probably are and I know the path out and it is my privilege and honor to bring you this podcast every week. Thank you for listening. I’ll see you on the next episode and happy Thanksgiving.