(00:00) Hi and welcome back to Reclamation Radio. I am Dr. Kelly Brogan and what I love about my containers is that the women I attract always have some audacious questions to ask me. So, it’s my intention for the musings that I share on these topics to grow the permission field of what’s possible and also to offer relatable reframes that can jailbreak you from your victim stories.
(00:28) So, you might notice that I’m a bit more familiar and free when I’m answering these questions in our private spaces. So, take a listen and I hope you’ll take the opportunity to submit your questions to me in my membership Vital Life Project. And today’s audacious ask is around the topic of endless self-improvement and the hamster wheel of personal growth or at least effing toward it.
(00:53) So she says, “Despite all my efforts in personal growth, I keep facing the same inner struggles, and I’m starting to wonder if real transformation only comes through surrender, not more self-improvement.” Wow, I love this question. I love this question. I had the sense that maybe it’s time for me to pause with my coach who has been, as most of you know, a tremendous lifeline to me in this past year and a half.
(01:22) And that is indicative of this very fine balance between what in the in the literature is called eustress like EU stress which is like a beneficial stress right like it’s like a an experience of capacity expansion rather than you know sort of familiar contraction right so in many ways this was the very uh paternalistic I would say gaze that I offered my patients in practice which was you can do this.
(01:51) You can do I know you can do this. Right? It’s the gaze that a a midwife or a birthkeeper offers the woman you know birthing. It’s a strong certain invitation you know into the expanded place and it involves structure, discipline, commitment and choice. Right? So because we are so conditioned around that coming from the outside that expectation coming from the outside I am a big believer in beginning there that’s why I’m a big believer in vital mind reset because it’s a very expectationheavy ritual right so the expectation is to do
(02:32) it do it and do it as it’s described right so it’s this very sort of like almost rigid in ways dogmatic container And part of why I think that is my bias is because we’re already conditioned that way. You meet yourself there and you are put in touch with your own impulses. Right? I always say like after vital mind reset, that’s when when and how you know what’s next.
(02:58) You will know. You will know. Is it time to explore plant medicine or shamanism, energy healing, sound therapy, homeopathy, essential oils, right? like you will know because you’ll be put in touch with the power of your choice and you will reclaim that at least begin to reclaim and heal that relationship because the extrinsic motivation right so when you see when you work with somebody you’ve placed in a position of authority which you know maybe your facilitator healer coach is why I like coaching because it’s it’s more
(03:27) egalitarian by nature but you know with with my credentials that’s part of what goes on when you interact with me it’s in your sub- or semi-conscious um arena that I may know more and have more experience and some of that may be true. I certainly have more experience I imagine than most in certain clinical arenas.
(03:47) However, it’s meant to be like a baton handing experience, right? So the extrinsic motivation that comes from somebody else is part of how we engage the realm of should, right? Like I should be doing this, I should be doing that. when you express should there is a subtext which is you’re wrong right like how you are doing it is wrong and so the transition from I should do this to I want to to I will is one I think that can really only be facilitated by restoring the relationship to your own impulse and what I mean by that is the native native emergent wants and desires
(04:34) that come through you right so in my practice for example if you know there was the container of the diet let’s say and then within the diet if you felt like dark chocolate let’s say if you felt like a craving for that I would say eat as much as you want literally 10 bars eat it right because there is a way that we can continue to participate in the field of our upbringing, which is your native vital force, your desire, your impulse is wrong and worse, shameful.
(05:08) And we continue to self-domesticate right around that. And so sometimes the restoration of trust in that impulse involves honoring the wants that we think are the worst ones to follow, right? The desires, the impulses, right? So this can range from the biological to the creative. And I will share that some of the biological impulses that I have begun myself to restore are again checking with myself.
(05:34) If my feet are cold, I stop what I’m doing and put socks on, you know, or adjust the temp, you know, thermostat or whatever. Whereas I might have otherwise just powered through and prioritized whatever I was doing over what signals my body was giving me. If I am hungry, I eat. If I am thirsty, I drink.
(05:53) Right? And probably the most powerful practice I’m I’ve mentioned this before and I’ll mention it probably again many times that I have engaged in terms of restoring trust in my own intrinsic motivation and desires is peeing. is like literally when I have to pee, I drop everything and I go, including if I’m in the middle of an interview or at an inconvenient time and I work to to really um resolve the language that I’ve habituated around it, which is to say, you know, I’m going to go pee quick or I’m going to run and pee, right? Like
(06:31) why? Why? For a good reason. I say that because I come from a many year entrainment around enshrinement that suggests that my inability to meet the person in the room’s needs at all times diminishes my worth and therefore safety, right? So, I’m going to go do it quick. I’m going to go meet my needs quickly because I know they’re at odds with my meeting yours.
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(08:24) So, and it spans all the way to the creative, right? So in the earlier parts of last year when I started to feel compelled to create like little video skits or video choreographies or whatever there was a very very strong impulse to do that and also a very uh strong part manager part that said don’t do that you’ll ruin yourself right so trusting that impulse creating the container for the expression of my you know desires when they show up is a process that can help you to recognize when it is that you actually want to do something versus
(09:01) when it is that you are powering over yourself, domesticating yourself and you know as my coach would say shoulding on yourself. Right? So the other point I would make about this question which again I love is a recognition that I’ve had that I really haven’t changed at all in some ways.
(09:23) Right? There has been a a journey I’ve gone on and the only difference that I can perceive in who I was, you know, when I was at any early part of my adolescence, you know, all the way over to who I am now, is that I have uh more awareness, right? And awareness sounds like a nice idea. It sounds like maybe even a cognitive thing or an intellectual thing, but it’s truly a function of I think a nervous system capacity, right? So, I’ll give an example.
(09:57) Some of you might have have seen that I posted and shared as I do the beginning of my my a new journey that I’m on with what might be called like vocal reclamation, right? So, exploring my singing voice. So I uh started to have calls and sessions with different coaches as I do because I want support and guidance and you know one of them was this lovely woman and I start we start a call and within you know I don’t know 10 minutes of the call she’s like okay I’m going to set a timer and for 5 minutes and you are just going to sing like whatever whatever you want. I
(10:33) was like, I’m like paying you because I don’t know how to sing, so what are you talking about? And so I did it. I did it. I did it for 5 minutes. And I walked around the room and I sang and made sounds to this stranger, to this woman, right? And I thought to myself, “Wow, I have the same voice I’ve had my whole adult postpubescent life.
(10:58) ” Okay, that hasn’t changed. Uh I actually have the same thoughts, right? like you’re about to humiliate yourself. You have no idea what you’re doing. Why did you even, you know, open up this can of worms. It was better just sticking to the things that you know. Does this woman know what she’s doing? Why is she making me do this? If she knew what she was doing, she would know how humiliating this is.
(11:16) Whatever. Okay. The same thoughts were there that might have been there 10 years ago, 15 years ago. And the only difference was that I was aware. I had a meta-awareness such that I could create a container for myself and hold the discomfort and fear that was coming up that I was feeling so I could create a container right that’s literally the only thing that’s changed is that I would I could do it now uh whereas I might not have felt like I could do it before and the only thing that has changed is my awareness. So
(11:52) what I would say is if you are the type of person who is wired to engage self-improvement out of a fundamental self-rejection right so some of us engage self improvement because we long to be the better version of ourselves to get somewhere to finally feel the thing right and some people don’t engage any self-improvement because they just want to be loved for who the hell they are now and they don’t want to have to change a single thing it’s the same woundology right So, if you’re the type who has this this sense that if I
(12:26) stopped working on myself entirely, never learned, healed, or fixed another thing about myself, I would not be fundamentally okay. Then I would say the first place to focus is making what you actually experience yourself as now totally okay. And the easiest point of entry for that is your impulses, making them okay, reclaiming them.
(12:50) You know, from the experience that most of us had in our childhood, which was that everything you felt that was at odds with what was convenient or acceptable in a given context or environment was deemed wrong at best, punishable at worst. So, restoring that trust in yourself will allow you to make contact with that intuitive desire to expand and grow cuz that of course is there.
(13:16) It’s there and it can be like leveraged from a place of a lot of self‑recrimination and rejection and it’s also important to recognize that the goal here is not to become it’s not even really to change right like I embrace change obviously I actually find it delightful to become you know that which I have formerly thought I was not uh however I’m still in so many ways the same person and I actually think this comes up a a lot in romantic relationship where we imagine that if if you do the work with your partner that they are going to somehow
(13:52) change into somebody better, right? And how you know one of the tenets of family constellation is the the three yeses of relationship, right? And one of the yeses is that you accept your partner entirely 100% as they are. Why? Because fundamentally and this is my belief our defenses don’t change.
(14:18) They don’t you know they in different contexts they might you know be foregrounded one over the other etc. What changes is our awareness and our nervous systems capacity to hold felt experience. So the more you can get curious about the part of you that says you should be doing these things and the more you establish a deeper connection with the part of you that knows exactly what you should be doing, right? Because it’s wanted, right? I think the more we can start to get out of that dynamic with our life experience that is really for parentifying. So people love to ask
(14:53) me questions and I love to ask questions of others because inquiry is play. But some of my interviews and answers are too hot to handle for Reclamation Radio. So in my membership Vital Life Project, I have created a private podcast that gets delivered to wherever you listen to podcasts where I answer your questions that arise because of my provocative subject matter.
(15:18) And I also share interviews that might otherwise be censored that I call the Sovereignty Series. So, you’ll get access to these private podcasts and a private chat by joining my membership, Vital Life Project. I’ll see you in there. [Music]
