Spam Filter For Your Brain - Episode 90
Something that I hear quite a lot from people, is the phrase, "They really hurt me." or "They did this thing to hurt me." or "They said that thing, and it really hurt my feelings." And I want to suggest today that maybe we unravel that a little bit together. Say together. I'll just be planting seeds; you can go away and brew on this.
The idea that someone else can cause you suffering takes away your agency in this situation. It hands all the power over to the person you're saying causes your emotions. Now, if we were to zoom back just a little bit and ask ourselves what emotions are, what is feeling hurt? It's a sensation in your body. Your emotions are sensations in your body that travel up to your brain. And we give a job title to. We've got nice little name cards that they are greeted with as they plonk themselves down at the table, and we then have a whole load of stories about them.
So maybe happiness feels quite light and, like, a little bit giddy, and I want to smile. It makes everything seem a little bit more in focus and a little bit more sugar-rushy, the way that I'd describe my happiness. So, these sensations pump up to my brain. They pop themselves down at the dinner table, and I go, "Oh, happiness. I like that. That's really nice. I wonder what else might be going on. How can I make this last a little bit longer? Oh, hang on a minute. It might not last very long. It might go away very soon. Happiness is really fleeting." And suddenly, I'm into fear or scarcity or a little bit of nervousness here. Now, what nervousness feels like for me is a sort of sinking in my stomach. I feel heaviness in my entire body. I feel generally like a melting pile of ice cream. Everything feels very slumpy. Feel like my posture goes to shit. I'm talking to you and being like, oh, I feel lots of that sort of out-breath sighing, like, here we go againness.
So that rolls up to my brain and I'm like, "oh, well, of course, happiness doesn't last very long. And here are all the other things that have gone wrong, and I should have been, oh, how silly of me to have thought that I could possibly be happy for longer than a few seconds..." And those thoughts lead me to a whole load of judgment. Now, what does judgment feel like for me? And on we go around about 300 billion times a minute. (That's not an actual scientific fact. That number, I pulled that from my brain).
And all of these stories, sensations in my body up to my brain, giving it a name, writing a story about it, that story, those thoughts I'm having about it causing another emotion, the emotion it's experienced in my body, it travels up to my brain... This massive loop is not influenced by anybody else. It's influenced by the stories that we tell about our interactions with anyone else.
Saying that someone else hurt me. I'm assuming we're talking emotionally here. Let's not dabble in the physical because it's a completely different story. Someone does have the capacity to stick their foot out, and I trip over and break my leg. But let's look at loads of other ways they could hurt me. Let's not go there, brain.
See, just watching my brain fire off into a million different directions and going, oh, yeah, that's what brains do. I've literally just told it, oh, there might be danger. And my brain that was busy in the middle of a sandwich was like, oh, shit, let's go and look for. Someone could slam your hand in a door or leave something for you to drip. Like, my brain has gone off on a million different ideas as to how I must look for all of the danger now. Just notice the way that our brains work and go, and see what you're doing there? Nothing's gone wrong here. You're just out there braining exactly like you were designed to do. Thanks for keeping me safe.
We're going to go back on track now because we're in the middle of a podcast. I think before I started any of this work, I would have looked at that and been like, what is wrong with me? And the truth is, there's nothing wrong with this. Our brains are designed to keep us alive, and that involves looking for a lot of danger. But before I squirrelled off down some little rabbit hole there, mixing my metaphors, I was talking about the idea that people do not have the capacity to cause those physical sensations in my body.
Someone telling me that they don't like me, they don't like my work, they don't want to be around me, doesn't have the power or the capacity to make my stomach feel particular sensations. Someone telling me that they're really into me or they love what I'm doing and they're really proud of me doesn't have the capacity to make the muscles in my throat tighten; their words cannot cause that. My thoughts about it cause it. My thoughts of, like, oh, my God, that's really amazing. Or my thoughts of like, oh, my God, this is awful. And I really like, even if you find this quite a hard concept to get your head around, have a think about it. We know that it is not the thing itself that causes the responses; it's our thoughts about it. We could change that scenario and have exactly the same thing going on, but it is perpetrated by a different person.
So if, for example, my sister says to me, "I'm really proud of the work that you're doing", I'm like, I really value her opinion. She's an amazing human. I'm so grateful for her, and I love that I'm giving her something that feeds her soul, too. That makes me very, very happy. My thoughts about that, all of those things I've just listed make me feel very happy. If Donald Trump were to tell me that he really appreciates my work and everything that I'm doing, I would have been like, man, I am so off here. This has all gone horribly wrong. What on earth am I putting out in the world? It would make me feel awful because of my thoughts about it.
But actually, the sound waves that were received into my ears were still the same thing. The words that were said to me were still the same thing, but my thoughts about them are very, very different.
But when I think it is in the power of the other person to be able to create emotions in my body, what I do is I sidestep my accountability to be able to look at what stories I'm telling myself and which ones of them I want to keep and which ones of them I might want to do some work on.
I lose any power to be able to have any kind of introspection to be looking at. If I like the results that are showing up in my life and if I like how things are panning out for me, and if we just reflex into thinking it's other people's fault and it's all their responsibility to try and cause emotions for us, which they can't do anyway, that actually all we do is end up getting more of the same of the stuff that we've got. And sometimes that might be really nice, but if we are constantly thinking that we are responding to what is in our environment, it's quite choppy out there on the waters. It's like waiting for the next wave to allow us to feel something and hope that we're sort of sailing in the right direction. What we can actually do is set a course for ourself by noticing the kind of thoughts that we're having and choosing which ones we want to emphasise and which ones we want to engage in, which ones we want to grow and strengthen, and which ones we want to notice and go, "yeah, that's not useful. I'm not going to be doing that anymore. I'm just going to let that bit go".
And that's the way that we map our own little routes to more of the stuff that we want in life. We need to make our lives more enjoyable, take more control over the emotions that we want to feel, and have more of them in our lives. And if you are able to feel more of the stuff that you find enjoyable, I'd say that's probably worth investigating.
Rather than telling myself that other people have the capacity to hurt me, what I do now is just look at it and think, wow, you just highlighted where some bruises might be for me, for the stories that I'm telling myself, that might be some areas that I want to do some work on. And from there, I get to map out my own story.
I hope this has been a lovely little episode with a few little squirrely diversions for you. I'll speak to you next week.
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