Reprogramming Unconscious Stories: Transformation and Understanding Stuck Patterns- Ep. 256

Speaker 1: 1:25

Welcome to today's show everyone. This is a follow-up show and this is gonna be all about how we unwind our psychological stories. I'll give you a little bit of review from the last episode, but I do suggest you go back to the last episode before you listen to this one. But let's do a quick review. Last time we talked about the idea that it's not behaviors and habits, it's beliefs and identity. If you want to change, the whole world says, hey, change your habits, change your behaviors and you'll automatically change. But the fact remains that if we can't change our beliefs and the person who we think we are, our identity, habits and behaviors flow out of those things. So we'll constantly be running into a brick wall with our change, which, from my perspective, is the reason why most people can't make change in the realms of finance, in the realms of health and fitness, in the realms of their personal relationship dynamics and being able to have a life of purpose and meaning and fulfillment. Now what, though, is behind beliefs and identity? What is behind beliefs and identity are stories, and that's where I want to take off today. Now, when we typically think about stories, we think about Hollywood movies, and we think about books we've read and those kinds of things. Those are not the stories I am talking about in this episode. The stories I am talking about are the stories that we write ourselves or wrote in our unconscious. Let's go through this really quickly.

Speaker 1: 3:12

The analogy I like to use is an analogy of what I used to do when I was a young boy. I would be bored in elementary school and I would find strings of yarn or a string or an old shoelace on the floor and I would pick it up and, because I was bored, what are you gonna do with a big long string? Well, you're gonna tie a knot in it. That's what I would do anyway. So I tie a knot and then I tie another knot and another knot and another knot A knot on top of a knot, on top of a knot, on top of a knot until I had this big ball of yarn or this big wadded shoelace or this big sort of ball of knotted string. Now, if you understand that that initial knot that I tied right is deep down buried in that ball of yarn or that ball of string, that knot is a metaphor for the stories that we believe or we tell ourselves about the world. For example, when I was a kid.

Speaker 1: 4:09

I remember one episode that my mother and father they had four children and they were running back and forth constantly taking us to football practice, soccer practice, basketball practice, band practice, all these different practices, four different kids, only two parents, and I happened to have gotten left when I was pretty young for a period of time at a ballpark. It was started to get dark. I was young enough to get a little bit afraid. Now, of course, my parents, who are older they probably got home for dinner and was like where's Jade? I thought you were picking them up. No, I thought you were picking up. And then, of course, they jumped in the car and were stressed out and went to get me. But that story that I wrote at that point in time was a story of fear, right, a story of not being loved, a story of being left behind.

Speaker 1: 5:01

Now, sometimes we write these stories and sometimes we don't. I talk about the story of having a pretty volatile mother when I was grown up. She was an incredibly loving mom, but she was dealing with issues in her own life, so she was volatile emotionally. That made me write a story, in my subconscious that female emotions are not to be trusted. I had a brother who was what I considered a bully to me when I was young. That made me write the story that I need to be tough and stick up for myself.

Speaker 1: 5:31

These stories that we write in our subconscious, especially in our early development years. Developmental years influence all other ways of seeing the world that come next Now. Add to that stories that our culture gives us, stories about God and the devil, stories about good and bad. Stories about being a good boy or a good girl, or a bad boy or a bad girl. Stories about what is expected of us being a good boy. Stories like children are meant to be seen, not heard. Finish all the food on your plate. Treat your elders with respect. All of these kinds of things are stories and these stories determine how we see the world. Many of these stories we did not even write ourselves. They come from our culture, things that we just accept and perhaps have never questioned. Now, if you understand that, you begin to understand where these things that are blocks to us getting the change we want and being the humans we want might come from. Now, if you understand that whole piece about stories, now understand this If you're reading a book, let's say a story or watching a movie, that is a story.

Speaker 1: 6:51

What is that movie or that book meant to do? It's meant to make you feel a particular way, isn't it? A good movie elicits emotions from you. A good book elicits emotions from you. Well, the feelings come from what. They come from the story, and so now we're painting a picture that the very first thing you need to look at is stories, because out of stories become feelings. Out of feelings and stories come beliefs and identity, and out of beliefs and identity become actions and choices, and out of actions and choices develop habits and behaviors. And so the idea here is is that we tend to focus on habits and behaviors when really, that is at the very surface of change, but deep down in our core, where change really matters, is the stories we tell and these stories at least when we look at all of these stories in totality which determine all the ways we feel about the world, which determine our beliefs about the world. They also demonstrate our identity to us. So the idea is that our identity is something that is derived from our stories, and our habits and behaviors is something that is derived from our identity.

Speaker 1: 8:15

Now, what do most people do if I told you, listen, we're gonna change your identity, what would you do? Well, the vast majority of people are gonna say, uh-uh, I'm gonna defend my identity. The vast majority of people spend their time defending what they believe. They look up information that reinforces what they believe. They, uh, seek out information. They seek out people. They want things to defend their identity so they feel safe and secure in their beliefs. This is what I'm suggesting to you is the primary reason that you and me and everyone else can't make change, because we are busy defending our identities instead of thinking about dismantling our identities.

Speaker 1: 9:03

If there is a story determining your feelings, your belief, your identity, your actions, your choices and your behaviors and habits, then that needs to change. But it can't change if we're trying to defend the stories. We need to tell ourselves new stories. If I want to have a productive, beautiful romantic relationship with a woman, I'm gonna have to rewrite the story of distrusting female emotions. I'm gonna have to write a story that says I trust women, am I not? If I'm going to have a relationship with my brother, I'm going to have to rewrite the story that he was a bully to me and this happened to me early in my 20s.

Speaker 1: 9:45

By the way, I did a self-development seminar. Some of you may know this seminar called the Landmark Forum, and in that I have mixed feelings about the Landmark Education. But in that education I realized at some point during that four or five days I forget how long it was education that I was a 24-year-old treating my brother, who at the time was a 28-year-old, as if he was a 12-year-old, picking on an eight-year-old. That blew my mind, because I was acting like an eight-year-old, that he was picking on and treating him like he was a 12-year-old. I had to rewrite that story in order for me to have an adult relationship with him.

Speaker 1: 10:28

And this is what we do all of the time. How many of us are treating our husbands or wives like our dysfunctional mother and father? How many of us are raising our children the way we were raised? How many of us are actually working to dismantle these stories? So we have got to, as humans, if we want to change, to become open-minded, to begin to think about the stories that we are telling ourselves, becoming aware of them and starting to dismantle them. Now, how do we become aware of these? I repeat this over and over For those of you who are longtime listeners of this podcast, you could probably tell me what is coming next.

Speaker 1: 11:10

And those of you who are new, you'll hear this all the time. Your stories which determine your feelings, which determine your beliefs and identity, which determine your choices and actions, which determine your habits and behaviors. Those stories you become aware of them by the patterns that show up in your life, the repeated patterns, their recurrent obstacles, the struggles that happen again and again, the stuck emotions, the things that life continues to give you. Again, you have a new relationship, but it ends up being the same pattern as the old relationship. You've got a new job, you're making more money, but somehow you still have roughly the same money in your bank account. This is what I'm talking about. You try a new diet and for a time you have success and you go right back to doing what you were doing. This is what I mean by repeated patterns, recurrent obstacles, stuck emotions. Those things tell you you've got beliefs and stories that are wrong, that your identity needs to be restructured if you want to be different. So how do we do this?

Speaker 1: 12:15

One of the profound ways that I'm going to talk about in this podcast is journaling and writing. Research has shown, and I have seen in my clinical practice that there is something very powerful about writing something down and, yes, you can do this thumbing through text or writing in a note on your iPhone or typing on your laptop you can do this that way but there's something very different about putting pen or pencil to paper and actually writing things down. There is something about that physical process of writing that allows us to become more aware of our stories, and so journaling is hugely powerful, and there's no wonder that journaling is one of those things that seems to have very profound effects in helping people change and helping people overcome their struggles, and even helping people overcome their traumas, these big capital T traumas. Things like written exposure therapy and story editing these things have even been used for things like post-traumatic stress disorder. Journaling is incredibly powerful, and so one way that you can begin to do this is to spot these stories is you can think about any pattern. Let's just use diet and exercise, since many of you know that world and know me through that world.

Speaker 1: 13:43

So let's say that you're struggling and you've struggled with being able to change your diet in any significant way. Okay, that's your recurrent pattern, that's your struggle, that happens again and again, that's your stuck emotion around food. So the idea is you would say, okay, I've got a story here related to food or related to dieting, or related to my body composition or related to the way I look, that I need to untangle, and what you would do is break this down into a process. First, you would write about the struggle. So let's use me as an example. I'm one of these people that has a sweet tooth. I'm very freedom oriented around food. I like to be able to eat what I want to eat. I don't like being controlled. Already you can see that I'm somewhat aware of the stories I've told.

Speaker 1: 17:10

So I would begin writing the first phase of this journaling technique in regards to my dysfunctions around food. I would start writing about something. So I might say you know, I started a new diet and I'm gonna write about it as it's in the past. I'm gonna choose something that happened in the past to me. So I'm gonna say you know, I started a keto diet. I was four days into the diet and then I binged, and what I want to do is I write this story. I want to just be very simple in the beginning, to say here's what happened. Again, I'm writing this down with pen and paper. I went on a keto diet. I lasted about three days. Right before I got in ketosis I got incredible cravings and then I binged. Okay, so I write that down.

Speaker 1: 17:54

Now, most people, when they write like this, they're gonna want to stick with the logical, linear sequence steps. This happened, that happened. This happened, that happened. Instead, I want you to get very clear one sentence, maybe two, on the context, but next I want you to start writing about the feelings. So in this particular case, I'm gonna start writing about the feeling.

Speaker 1: 18:16

Now, when you write about a feeling, you don't write about it in a linear, logical way. You write about it in a metaphorical, symbolic way. Feeling and the unconscious mind do not think in logic and linearity and language. It thinks in metaphor and symbol. So we need to give this feeling around this keto diet some context to make it more logical, so our unconscious brain can communicate with our conscious brain. You can do this by giving the emotion a location, a temperature, a texture, a personality right about it, as if it's a separate conscious entity. So I might say, three days in, I started to get this nagging feeling in my solar plexus.

Speaker 1: 19:05

It was almost like my gut was angry at me, it kept yelling at me, it kept gnawing at my stomach. It was this gnawing, empty, angry feeling and I want to write about it in this way. It was in my solar plexus, it was just to the right of and below my stomach. It was gnawing, it was painful, it was angry. And then I want to write about it as if it's a personality talking to me and it was telling me that it does not like this. This does not feel comfortable, it does not like being controlled. It's like a wild stallion that's bucking and resisting being tamed. And I'm getting very clear about this. Now, that's part one, and so I get very clear about writing this story. But more the emotions of what happened and what this is analogous to is me probing this knotted ball of yarn, and so I'm probing this, looking for the right knots.

Speaker 1: 20:12

Now, in part two, I began to ask what the story is behind this. So I might ask this gnawing, bucking stallion, uncomfortable feeling, what it's trying to tell me, and I might say this story, this feeling, is telling me it does not like being controlled, it wants to not have to worry about diet, it wants to do what it wants to do. And that might bring up for me the fact that when I was a kid, I always resisted being told what to do. I felt, as the youngest of four, that I felt like my parents were constantly telling me what to do and my older siblings were constantly telling me what to do, and I was one of these people who just resisted that. I was like, no, I'm not doing it and I would cause a lot of upheaval in the family because I would resist, and I might, in this part, write about this as a young kid, I would resist being told what to do. I couldn't stand it. I was very freedom oriented and so I'm writing this idea of like I wanted control. I didn't like being told what to do all the time. I wanted to just do what I wanted to do. I just wanted to be left alone. And now you're starting to see a theme right that, this story and this emotion around this thing that has to do with diet and exercise, and this emotion around this thing that has to do with freedom and control wanting to do what I want to do. Now I'm beginning to dig in and uncover a little bit about these knots, these stories that might be causing me issues in my health and fitness.

Speaker 1: 21:54

And then, in part three, I write about into the future myself, writing into the future about my future self. And I write in the present tense where I might say something like I used to have an issue with food, where every time I would go on a diet go on a keto diet I would binge. I would go on a fasting regime, I would binge, I would try to eat more protein and vegetables and then I would binge, and this was related to my need for control. This was related to my need for freedom. And now I do the turnaround. Just like every story has an arc right First there's this sort of painful struggle and then there's this insight and realization and then there's this sort of completion. So right now I write about the insight, and then I realized that I did not have to struggle with food, that I could just become a taster of food and eat everything and not feel like I had to control myself around food. I realized that this control issue stemmed from people trying to control me when I was young and now I eat what I want. I eat to 80% filthfulness, I eat only when hungry and I don't worry about food in the ways I once did and I maintain my health and my fitness as a result of that. And now you can see that the story arc has come full circle.

Speaker 1: 23:28

First part I write about this struggle with the keto diet. Again, it could be any struggle I've had around diet and exercise, but I just choose an event and I write about it. Most importantly, I write about the emotions that are behind what happened. Then, in part two, I really go looking for the emotion but, more importantly, the story that's behind the emotion. Where else have I seen this show up that might have nothing to do with health and fitness and food? And then, in the third part, I make the turnaround and describe for my brain, as it's watching me doing this journaling technique, that I overcame this story.

Speaker 1: 24:08

Now, what's powerful about this is the brain will begin to change to some degree once you do that, and you don't do it once, you do it twice, you do it three times, you do it four times, you do it at least five times over the course of five days or five weeks, depending on how you want to do this. I like doing it over the course of a very short period of time of five days and then from there, the final thing you do is you go out and be it until you see it. You go out and you start to become the taster. You stop going on diets in the first place, right? Can you see how my identity around food? All of a sudden, if I have a new identity and I'm someone who is buying into the third part of my story, that I no longer stress about food, I no longer fear, feel control around food, that I won't have the need to want to go on a diet ever, and so I resist the temptation to go on a keto diet, to go on a paleo diet, to do any of these things, and I instead enjoy food in a normal way. And my brain now gets to see me doing that and I can go back and read in my journal as often as I need to to remind myself, but then I have to go out and be it until I see it.

Speaker 1: 25:28

Now, over the last several episodes and really over the last year of this podcast, you've been hearing a lot of this. For some of you it may sound like the same podcast on repeat, just describe a different way, and the reason for that is when we are trying to unpack our stories, we often times, in order to spot those deep seated knots, what I call seed stories, the initial seed that grew the negative habits and behaviors, when we are digging down into that. Not, we need lots of repetition. Many people will resist doing this. What they don't understand is that if you don't give your brain direction in the form of this journaling technique, you're not gonna be able to make the change. There is something about writing this stuff down to unpack the story. So your brain sees that you know. So your unconscious mind goes oh wow, they are becoming consciously aware of what is unconscious.

Speaker 1: 26:30

And this is another quote that I bring up, a lot from carl young that says if you do not make the unconscious conscious, it will follow you around and you will call it fate. Basically, that's just another way of saying if you don't get to the bottom of these unconscious stories, you're gonna have repeated patterns, recurrent obstacles and stuck emotions and you're gonna think that that's just the world doing its thing and you're not gonna realize that you're the problem. Right, the taylor swift thing, it's me. Hi, I'm the problem, it's me, this is what we're doing. It's ultimately helping. You see that it's your unconscious stories that you refuse to dismantle that are causing the feelings, then building the identity, that are then causing the choices and actions that are again leading to the habits and behaviors. This is how you uncover this and this is the work that I've been doing in many, many of my events.

Speaker 1: 27:20

In fact, I have an event coming up In september, october of this year. It is an event that is gonna walk you through. This is an in person event that's gonna be held in charlotte, north carolina. Make sure you are on my email list. Go to the next level human list of the jeta dot com website. Get on the email list if you want to know about these events.

Speaker 1: 27:43

But that's what these events are, when the experience event, the journey event, the awakening event, they are all about Unpacking the stories to free you from the identity you have been defending. This is why this is important. Journaling is a piece of this, which we just covered. Meditation is a piece of this, which we have just covered. Cognitive behavioral therapy, or the be it till you see it actions this is also part of what we are talking about here.

Speaker 1: 28:13

So I want you to begin to explore this in this way. I am going to be running these events. I want you to be a part of these events and if you're on my email list, you'll start to learn an awful lot about these events. All you have to do is go to Www dot drj dot com slash events or www dot next level human dot com slash events. Thanks so much for hanging out on the podcast. I hope you like this episode and I hope you're ready to do the work To dismantle your old identity, and I will see you at the next episode will come back to some metabolism stuff, because many of you have been asking me about some of the things in metabolism that I am going to make sure I cover for you in the next few episodes. Thanks so much, everybody, and I will see you next time.