Episode 51: How to deal with subconscious guilt

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Hello everybody. Before we talk about managing our subconscious emotions, I want to invite you to the free master class that I am doing later this week on emotional sobriety. The hardest part of quitting drinking is not giving up alcohol, but figuring out how to enjoy yourself sober in the evening. How do you spend time alone without feeling lonely? How do you take care of yourself without feeling guilty?

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Most of my clients are high functioning perfectionists who have performed under pressure for years, and they’ve burned themselves out, taking care of everybody but themselves. And the biggest mistake that we all make, me too, is that we think that over drinking is about our relationship with alcohol. And so the solution is to quit drinking forever because we’re alcoholics. But that’s not what it is. This is about your relationship with yourself.

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What’s happened after years of chronic stress is that your brain is stuck in fight or flight. Your nervous system is dysregulated and your baseline levels of dopamine are way down. So you literally do not have the energy or the motivation or the willpower to do something different at the end of the day. And so you’ve gotten into the habit of worrying and second guessing and berating yourself, which.

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pushes you deeper into the hole, making you want to drink or eat chips out of the bag or watch endless amounts of Netflix. Your challenge now, if you choose to accept it, is to look at the big picture so that you can see that it’s not what you’re doing or not doing, specifically drinking, eating, watching TV. Those aren’t the things that are making you feel bad. It’s your negative thoughts that lead to paralyzing emotions.

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that are keeping you stuck in the cycle of self-defeat. And if you want to restore your personal power, you need to get emotionally sober. And that is what I teach. So I’m putting a link in the show notes. Register now for my free one hour master class, where I will teach you what it’s going to take for you to get out of your head and get on with your life. OK. So let’s start with an understanding of what a subc...

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conscious emotion is. By breaking apart the difference between a thought and a feeling. Thoughts are words in your brain. They are language based. And feelings are the felt sense of thought. You feel whatever you’re thinking. You feel because you think. So that’s why a two year old doesn’t usually have

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existential crisis because his identity is not language-based. He is much more present in his body. He knows what he feels, he knows what he wants, and it’s very very simple. You don’t see many toddlers that have dark depression or horrible anxiety because they don’t think. They’re not really deep thinkers. But as we grow,

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and we start to incorporate the ideas around us of who we are and who we’re supposed to be and the difference between right and wrong and good and bad, and we’re programmed to seek rewards and fear, punishment. All of the beliefs that we have about ourselves become hardwired into our nervous system. The difference between a thought and a belief

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is that a belief is a thought that you have accepted is true and you no longer question. Most of us are under the impression that we believe what we believe because we have decided and chosen to think the way that we do. But in reality, we tend to believe whatever thoughts we’re exposed to the most. Think of the cable news channels. We all know that people that watch, say, Fox News or people that watch CNN

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you could predict if you knew which channel they watch, you could predict what they believe. And we all tend to believe that we watch the news that reflects our beliefs. But in reality, the news creates our beliefs. We’re not watching, let’s say, Fox News or CNN because we believe a certain way. We believe a certain way because we’re watching Fox News or CNN. The more you hear an idea.

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articulated and explained in different contexts, the more it becomes familiar to you, the more it makes sense. And sense is our feelings. When things make sense, we have a feeling of knowingness, of clarity, of certainty. So the more you hear something, the more you’re exposed to ideas, the more you believe these ideas. And for most of us, that feels threatening because we think that we’re choosing our beliefs and our stances.

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Really, we’re choosing from a multiple choice list of preordained ideas that we’ve been exposed to. For example, your beliefs about say masks during the COVID pandemic. You picked aside for masks or against masks based on what you were listening to and the other people that were around you. Your beliefs are a reflection of your environment, not so much your critical thinking skills.

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because you are only as strong as your weakest argument. So it’s the arguments that you’re listening to that you’re basing your thoughts and ultimately beliefs on. And that’s not to say there’s no room for critical thinking or high level analysis or outside the box thinking, but when you are stressed and busy and you’re not thinking about your thinking, you tend to just choose a side whichever side makes the most sense with you.

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And why do things make sense? Again, the thought creates a feeling and the feeling feels positive or good, or at least right, is because that thought or point of view goes and resonates deeper with a belief you have about yourself, about who you are, and how you identify as a person. And who you think you are and how you identify as a person are also

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belief based, but they are beliefs that were formed in childhood. So you are no longer conscious of them, meaning that you aren’t having words in your head that go with that feeling. Beliefs that are so old and you’ve accepted them as true for so long that now the only remnant left is the feeling. So let me explain how this works. Circumstances and situations

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trigger your thoughts. Your thoughts are your feelings. They produce sensations in your body. Once the thought becomes a belief, then the brain habituates the way you respond to the situation. That’s what the brain does. It’s always looking to create shortcuts. It automates our processes so that we don’t have to think so much, so that we don’t have to make so many decisions.

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because obviously that frees up our bandwidth to focus on other things. For example, when you drive to work, you’ve taken the route so many times that you no longer think about it, which means your subconscious is driving the car, which allows you to have a conversation with somebody with you or problem solve some other problem or listen to the radio and focus on music. You don’t have to focus on what you’re doing because your brain has automated the process.

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The first time you drove the route to work, you came to each intersection and made conscious choices about which way would have the least traffic or be the fastest flow. But once you make those decisions and they work out well enough, then you stop thinking about it and your actions become automated, which is how we come to the mistaken conclusion that circumstances are what generate our feelings and completely miss the fact

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that there are thoughts involved. For example, I may think that my husband being late is why I’m upset. But in reality, my husband has been late in the past, and I have had thoughts that when my husband is late, it means that he has no respect for the fact that I made dinner, he’s not a good communicator, he doesn’t manage his time, and on and on it goes. And so in the future, when my husband is late, I automatically

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get upset without really discerning whether or not the situation calls for me to be upset. I’m upset because I’m always upset when he’s late. That’s how it works. My brain has just automated my response so that it appears that my husband being late is causing me to be upset. Emotional sobriety is understanding that I am making the fact that my husband is late mean something.

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I’m taking it as an insult. I’m taking it to mean my husband is a doofus. I’m seeing it as a problem. The reality is the time my husband gets home has nothing to do with my feelings because if I didn’t have thoughts, I wouldn’t have feelings. If I wasn’t home to have a response to my husband getting home at a certain time, there would be no issue. So it’s not what time my husband gets home that’s upsetting me. It’s my thoughts and therefore feelings about it.

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But because our thoughts become automated and move into our subconscious, we’re no longer really aware of why we’re upset. And or we assume that the reason we’re upset is just true because we’ve never questioned, we’re no longer questioning why we feel the way we feel. But the key to emotional sobriety is realizing that most of your emotions are simply conditioned responses. Kind of like Pavlov’s dogs,

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where they learned to salivate at the ringing of the bell because that meant dinner was coming. But as you already know from other times in life when you’ve broken habits or changed the way you respond, those habitual responses can be broken, but only by introducing consciousness, by pulling up the subconscious response and examining the feeling and the thoughts that are underneath it and the beliefs that are underneath the thoughts, bringing those into consciousness.

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and deciding to change how you are responding. And the reason that’s so difficult is because our willpower is a limited resource. It goes away in times of stress. In fact, it’s inversely proportional to our stress. So if you remember from seventh grade math class, inversely proportional means that as one goes up, the other goes down. The more stressed you feel,

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The more your body is in that fight or flight or busy chicken with your head cut off, distracted, the more you are in a state of stress, the less ability you have to operate consciously. Because when you’re in a state of stress, your brain is focused on whatever the story of your stress is and you are not able to shift out and see the bigger perspective. Because biologically, stress is a survival response.

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You don’t have time to worry about tomorrow if you’re not gonna be alive tomorrow. You have to focus on what’s right in front of you. So the more stressed you are, the less able you are to be conscious of the feelings that you’re experiencing and then also be able to tolerate the discomfort long enough to examine what’s going on and to take the actions necessary to break the conditioned response and to choose a new response. This all takes a lot of energy.

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But it’s so powerful to do this because when you learn how to control your emotional response, your emotions are no longer controlling you. And let me give you a simple example of how your emotions control you. So I like to ride my bike. I have a mountain bike and for years, I’ve gone in the woods and I love mountain bike trails. And ever since I got my dog Gretchen, I have quit riding my bike.

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That wasn’t a conscious choice. I still have the desire to ride. I like to ride, but I just haven’t been going. And this season, as spring rolled in, I decided I was gonna go take a bike ride. It was five o’clock at night. I was getting done with my work. I’m like, oh my gosh, this would be amazing. Well, I go to the back door and Gretchen is standing there looking at me like, where are we going?

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And I realized in that moment, the reason I haven’t been riding my bike isn’t because I don’t like to ride my bike and I’m lazy, but because I feel guilty when I leave my dog because I love my Grotchi. And if I’m going to go somewhere and have fun outside, I want her to be able to come too. And so over years, my dog trained me to not go on bike rides, but instead...

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to take her for usually the second walk of the day because I usually walk her in the morning. And that’s an example of how guilt was driving my behavior and actually working against me because often I didn’t take her for a second walk. I just didn’t get on my bike and I lost out on going and being outside because somehow I was too big of a wussy to tell my dog I’d be back in 45 minutes and I didn’t wanna deal with the guilt of that.

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Like, isn’t that insane? And with that realization, I realized I should probably get a t-shirt that says, like, powered by guilt. Like, oh my gosh, I was noticing things that I was doing or not doing out of guilt all over the place. It was actually quite liberating. I shared on social media that one night, my husband got home right when I was going to bed, and I was frickin’ exhausted. But I felt bad going upstairs and sleeping in our guest room.

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knowing that he was going to, you know, be up another hour and then he was going to come into the room and, you know, husbands are never as quiet as they think they are. And indeed, that night, he right as I was falling asleep, he comes into the bedroom. And let’s just say he was asleep before I was. And then the next morning, his alarm went off a whole hour before I had to get up. So my guilt caused me to lose.

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two and a half, three hours of sleep that I otherwise would have gotten and desperately needed because I had had my own big work week, but I had allowed my guilt not coming from my husband, but I had allowed my guilt from my own subconscious to make a stupid decision about what time I was going to bed and where I was sleeping. And in the first few hours of the next day, when I was super tired, I was pissed at my husband because he had ruined my sleep. And...

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My husband had nothing to do with my decision to not make the best choice for myself. And we do that all the time in our lives. When it comes to subconscious emotions, we make decisions. We fail to set boundaries because we’re afraid of how we’re gonna feel if somebody doesn’t like what we’re doing or not doing for them because we’re busy taking care of ourselves as all humans should.

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But once you realize that the thing you are most afraid of is your own mind, the call is coming from inside the house, this allows you to untangle the deep-seated beliefs that you have first and deepest, the layers of who you think you are, who you’ve been told you are, what your parents taught you about what’s good and bad and right and wrong is acceptable and expected of you.

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Like all of those beliefs are just beliefs. They’re not even true. Your self-criticism comes from the exposure you had mostly in childhood to the ideas that became beliefs about what type of person you are and what behaviors are expected for you to be able to be acceptable and lovable. And pulling those beliefs into consciousness

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and taking the time to decide if you want to keep those beliefs and allow those beliefs to drive your behavior, only pulling them into consciousness is going to allow you to break those subconscious responses that have become habituated. And this doesn’t happen overnight, but it absolutely is possible for you to change the way you respond and react to yourself. It absolutely is possible for you to become a person.

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who thinks highly of yourself, who respects yourself, who is able to set boundaries and speak your truth and ask for what you need. It is absolutely possible to reprogram your brain so that you believe and feel that you are likable and that you are worthy and that you’re not an outsider, but wherever you go, that’s when the fun happens. People love you. It’s possible to feel.

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like you deserve to take up space and that you don’t have to be perfect and productive and pleasing to everybody around you. But in order to feel and think that way about yourself, you have to be willing to deal with the feelings that are telling you otherwise. And that’s the contradiction, that’s the paradox, that actually leaning into the feelings of shame or guilt or fear or self-criticism or whatever, that leaning into those feelings

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and allowing for them is the opposite of accepting them as true. And that’s what we’re never taught in our culture, that the way we feel isn’t reflective of the truth. We all love to throw around the saying that feelings aren’t facts, but in reality it’s our thoughts that aren’t facts. Our feelings are just the felt sensation of the thoughts that we are thinking and the beliefs that we are believing.

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And let’s discuss the difference between a belief and something that is true. And I’d like to distinguish between big T truth and little T truth. Whatever you believe is true for you, and actually probably leads to self-fulfilling prophecies. If you believe that you’re a procrastinator or you believe that you are an outsider, the actions that you take because you believe that and feel certain ways and then do or don’t do certain things will

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create the results that you are a procrastinator and also an outsider. So that is little t truth. But big t truth is something that is objectively true. Big t truth doesn’t change with your mood. It doesn’t change based on your perspective. Big t truth doesn’t need words to be explained. It just is what it is.

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Any judgments you have about a situation, that it’s right or wrong or good or bad, those are coming from your thoughts and your beliefs, not the external observable objective big T truth. And so let’s take the example of you think you’re a procrastinator. And I guarantee you that even if you can point to tons of evidence that you are a procrastinator, and here’s all the situations where you are,

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If somebody probably that didn’t even know you very well combed through your life, they could probably find just as much evidence that you are not a procrastinator, which means probably you’re a procrastinator in certain contexts and not others. For example, you procrastinate doing your homework or maybe doing the laundry, but you’re first in line when the open bar opens, so you’re not procrastinating there. And if it’s not true 100% of the time,

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then it’s not true. And ultimately your thoughts that you procrastinate your homework, that belief is generating the feelings that creates the results that you are procrastinating with tasks that you don’t wanna do. So to heal subconscious emotions and be able to manage them, you have to be willing to address the beliefs that are creating them and have the belief that none of your beliefs are true unless you believe them.

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And that’s a hard thing to wrap your mind around, because you’re using beliefs to combat your beliefs. And you have to be willing to let go of beliefs that are deeply emotional, that deeply resonate as truth in your body, and that are attached to emotionally painful memories. But if you can see that the emotional pain is the result of your thoughts about both the situation and who you think you are, and that you can think

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new thoughts that you can choose what you believe on purpose, well that is how you resolve subconscious emotions. And like I said, this doesn’t happen overnight, but it really is just about creating new thinking habits, which can take 21 days, 63 days, I don’t know, there’s all sorts of stuff out there. The bottom line is if you set the intention to think new thoughts and to resolve old emotional wounds, you can do it. But that’s going to require

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you give yourself the space and time to do it. I love the analogy, you have to learn to crawl before you can learn to run. And changing the way you react to your emotional responses where you’re not believing that the emotions are telling you the truth, but you stop, drop, and feel, and deal with the underlying beliefs, pulling them into consciousness, choosing what you wanna think on purpose, and acting according to that thought is the only way to free yourself.

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of all the subconscious baggage. And that’s why my next chapter program is a 12 week long program. Because it takes a lot of energy and a lot of focus and trial and error. And if you’re a real human living a real life, your life doesn’t just stop. And it’s very hard to practice emotional sobriety 24 seven because life is busy. And again, you do get distracted and the more distracted and stressed you are, the less access you have.

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to this rational conscious thinking that allows you to choose something different. But I tell you what, I am living proof that you can create new habits in your brain and new ways to respond. I love realizing that I am either overwhelmed or stressed or angry. Like I love confronting my negative emotions and I will stop, drop and feel. I feel like.

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dealing with my emotions is always the first problem I have to solve. It is the only problem I need to solve so that I can get a new perspective on the situation. And while I can’t say I’m perfectly emotionally sober and I never react in anger or accidentally eat too much granola or watch TV for too long, I can’t tell you that, but I can tell you that I can walk, talk, and feel at the same time. I feel like

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This is a skill that’s akin to learning how to eat with your non-dominant hand. Once you practice it and get through that awkward frustration of the actual application of it, once you know what you’re doing, then it gets easier and easier and you want to do it more and more. Because truly, your feelings are your biggest problem. Your feelings are your only problem. What could be possible for you if you weren’t afraid to address your feelings?

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What would be possible for you if you didn’t have to spend so much of your time avoiding your feelings or numbing your feelings or escaping your feelings? Like once you clear and solve for your emotions, like then life just becomes, you know, pretty simple. I mean, maybe not simple, but at least you’re not making it harder than it has to be. And when your subconscious emotions,

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are leading you to take actions because you have guilt or because you have fear or because you are highly critical and have low self-esteem for yourself. When your subconscious emotions are inflaming your decision-making processes with that kind of mind garbage, well then your life is always going to be so much harder. When you clear for your emotions you’re able to accept things at face value

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No more self-sabotage. No more skipping your bike ride because you’re afraid your dog might be mad at you. No more staying up too late because you feel guilty going to bed. No more trashing your body with alcohol or a whole bag of potato chips or a bunch of cookies because somebody said something today that made you feel bad and you’re not even conscious of it because you don’t know how to tolerate the discomfort of your feelings long enough to realize they’re bullshit. And I wanna end with

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moment of clarity. Emotional sobriety is not learning how to not think things that aren’t true or that don’t serve you or getting rid of all of your negative feelings. It’s changing how you react to the thoughts that pop in your head and to the feelings that come up. As long as you are human living a life you are going to have shitty thoughts about yourself and other people and pessimistic

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and you are going to have subconscious feelings return. But when you have the skill of being able to respond with intelligence, to recognize this is a sensation in my body, there’s thoughts in my head, there’s thoughts I’m not even thinking because they’re such deeply held beliefs that I need to pull them into consciousness. When you start treating your emotions as your biggest source of information because they expose the limiting beliefs

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that are holding you back, that’s when you can shift and be grateful. You know, if you’re going into a season of anxiety or depression, you can be grateful for those emotions because they are bringing things up for you that you’re ready to let go of, that you’re ready to release. Because emotional baggage is heavy and it doesn’t serve you. And there is nothing better than learning how to let that shit go. Thanks for listening.

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If you liked what you heard, please take the time to rate and review the show so that other people can find it. I really appreciate it.

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And check out the show notes for any resources I’ve mentioned, including links to follow me on Instagram and join my private Facebook group where I connect with my tribe every day. I love it in there and we have so much fun. And finally, if you’re ready to redefine sobriety so that you can feel excited about quitting drinking, follow the link to my 10 days to spontaneous sobriety course where I will help

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obliterate, cancel your desire to drink. Because looking and feeling your best is addictive too. I’ll see you soon.

In reality, we believe whatever thoughts we’re exposed to the most. Think of the cable news channels. We can predict what someone thinks by whether they watch Fox News or CNN

People think they are free-thinkers–above bias, and that they’re watching programs for neutral information. The truth is that their beliefs are pre-ordained the powers that be at Fox News or CNN. The more you hear an idea.

articulated and explained in different contexts, the more it becomes familiar to you, the more it makes sense. And sense is a feelings…the feelings of knowingness, of clarity, of certainty. So the more you hear something, the more you’re exposed to certain ideas, the more you believe these ideas. And that’s good news and bad news. You’ll believe whatever you hear the most. But you can choose what you listen to. 

Your self-criticism comes from the exposure you had mostly in childhood to the ideas that became beliefs about what type of person you are and what behaviors are expected for you to be able to be acceptable and lovable. And the way to break the subconscious beliefs that are making you feel bad instead of powerful, you have to pull them into consciousness

And this doesn’t happen overnight, but it absolutely is possible for you to change the way you respond and react to yourself. It absolutely is possible for you to become a person.

who thinks highly of yourself, who respects yourself, who is able to set boundaries and speak your truth and ask for what you need. It is absolutely possible to reprogram your brain so that you believe and feel that you are likable and that you are worthy and that you belong–wherever you are. It’s possible to feel

like you deserve to take up space and that you don’t have to be perfect and productive and pleasing to everybody around you. But in order to feel and think that way about yourself, you have to be willing to deal with the feelings that are telling you otherwise. And that’s the contradiction, that’s the paradox, that actually leaning into the feelings of shame or guilt or fear or self-criticism, 

and allowing for them is the opposite of accepting them as true. And that’s what we’re never taught in our culture, that the way we feel isn’t reflective of the truth. We all love to throw around the saying that feelings aren’t facts, but in reality it’s our thoughts that aren’t facts. 

Self-criticism is a feeling based on ideas we learned in childhood. About who we SHOULD be in order to get love. 

The paradox is that acknowledging feelings of shame, guilt and fear is the OPPOSITE of accepting them. 

Emotional sobriety is learning that feelings aren’t “true.” They are invitations to review what’s going on in the subconscious mind–and decide if we want to believe it or not. 

It’s possible to reprogram your brain to have high self-esteem. So that you can stop trying to be perfect and productive and pleasing to everyone around you. And start demanding respect–from yourself and for yourself. 

Want to learn how? Listen to RWC episode 51: How to deal with subconscious guilt.

Comment “podcast” and I’ll DM you the link.