(00:02) we have been duped by feminism sexual Liberation and anti-depressants we have been told that we are powerful and free now as women but we feel tired wired and bitter we’re mostly eating right exercising and meditating wrangling to-do lists and arranging playdates and yet there’s a haunting hollowness beneath the huge complaint what if I told you that there is a huge Storehouse a reservoir of energy inside of you that has not been tapped that you could feel light and pulsing excited and alive in ways that a wellness lifestyle
(00:49) cannot deliver that you could trust yourself that the world could feel safe and that unexpected and expected Delights could start to illuminate your path no coach therapist doctor or Guru required just you learning to get real present and attentive with you I feel like I’m here to matchmake your inner parts for the greatest love affair ever written I want to help you learn first where you’re buying eggs from the hardware store which is the source of all pain I want to help you master entering through the upset which is the
(01:27) only spiritual practice You’ll Ever Need and to get real comfortable putting on your villain Crown which is in my opinion the key to True power and then you’ll attune to your inner yes so you can live the life defined by the specific pleasure of who you are I am so excited to announce my latest book called The reclaimed woman which is available for pre-order now so if you head to the link in show notes you can learn more about bonuses events and companion offerings and I cannot wait to see your gorgeous face on the
(02:07) [Music] path I’m Dr Kelly Brogan you may know me as a New York Times bestselling author of a book with an exploding pill on the cover Renegade psychiatrist pole dancer or honorary member of the disinformation dozen what can I say I’m a born provocator I’ve spent most of my recent life exposing deceptions connecting dots and discovering the secret places my inner victim is still waiting to be liberated and now I feel called to help you reclaim all of your parts your health your sexuality your power and
(02:44) your expression so that you can finally truly own yourself I want to ignite in you that inner knowing and the pulsing Vitality that lives beneath your disempowerment disconnection and resentment so that you can audaciously courageously and playfully alchemize your struggle into the specific pleasure of who you are this is Reclamation radio a soulfire production welcome to Reclamation radio I’m Kelly Brogan and today I would love to talk about one of my favorite subjects which is what I call the villain crown and how to wear it so the
(03:27) reason that shadow work and personal Reclamation of the inner variety is so empowering is because it brings you to this place of recognizing the Boogey men that you were fighting didn’t actually ever exist so as I endeavored to end controversy in my life and to resolve the patterns of struggle and warfare and fear-based relating I found that the initiation was for me to get comfortable sometimes in very big instances and sometimes in small little ways with wearing this villain Crown so what I mean by that is getting comfortable with
(04:17) being perceived as bad and wrong in the eyes of somebody that I care about and of course it’s a little easier with somebody you don’t even know or a stranger but to begin to allow other people to have their perspectives have their opinions and to resolve the endless efforts toward reputation management right when you get to this place where you just let yourself focus on what it is that you want to create what lights you up what brings you aliveness and what interests you what do you want how do you focus
(04:58) your Gaze on that instead of backwards managing the elements that are fundamentally beyond your control of others perceptions of who it is that you are how it is that you’re being and wrestling with the you know impossible to tame Dragon of someone else’s perception so there were a couple of cardinal examples for me or instances rather of where I was able to test and explore the limits of my nervous system to hold the shame so shame is a social management emotion right so when it comes up it is meant to organize your
(05:43) behavior to redirect your behavior and to ultimately get you in line with whatever it is that you believe makes you a good girl or a bad girl so to sort of come back into your lane and so the the shame that comes up that feeling for me it’s like deep heat in the core of my being that tracks all the way up my throat and my head under my arms and that shame is a sensation that is often compounded by other Sensations and feelings you know it shouldn’t be there this is you know scary what’s happening that you can grow
(06:23) the capacity to be with you can grow the capacity to hold in because beyond that shame wall is a Terrain of really curious exploration so I had two experiences one of which I’ve spoken about publicly already actually both of them I have but so you may have heard one of them that really helped to initiate me to my capacity in this realm which is a nervous system capacity so that’s why I’m such a huge believer of getting the foundations I call it like the chopping wood carrying water of your nervous
(06:59) system rehab and recovery and restoration and regeneration under your belt through some sort of a health protocol obviously I’m biased towards my own vital mind reset and then to begin this work because this isn’t just a Will based like you know I am going to commit and choose to do deep Shadow work if your nervous system can’t hold those States yet you won’t do it or you will you know recruit a self- flag relating part that says why are you not able to do this what are you a coward you know so one of
(07:33) the instances was with my daughter I was inspired to ask my daughters two questions that I had been really asking myself in reparenting exercises that I was engaged in and one of them is what do you need that I am not offering you right now and the other was what did I ever do you know in the past to hurt you that you still feel hurt around now when you think about it and my daughters shared with me their feedback and in one particular case my daughter’s feedback which she shared in written form thankfully because it gave me the
(08:13) opportunity to really alchemize a lot of the emotional material before I sat down with her but one of the points of feedback that she provided me was about our shared history and her childhood and you know here I am like so many of us women thinking I am ending all of these cycles of abuse and Trauma in my motherline and I’ve been so committed for so many years to my you know spiritual integration and personal empowerment and expansion and I’m just doing things so differently than they were ever done for me and you know what
(08:49) I encountered in her feedback which is essentially her memory of a particular moment of our you know history with my larger family of origin and she essentially painted me as the villain right and said that you know she remembers me being selfish and mean and here I am thinking of my version of the story I am the hero in this same story that she’s you know recollecting and when I read that from her the part of me that was very attached to her appreciation of my efforts as a mother was exposed right and one of the ways that you can be sure
(09:34) that you were doing something always for yourself which is of course in My Philosophy why we do every single thing one of the ways you can know that you were always doing it for yourself is that if somebody doesn’t appreciate what it is that you did for them you’re enraged or resentful or disappointed or hurt that means you were doing it for a tacit exchange that they did not consent to and it was always for you it was always so you could get that thing right so that was smoked out for me right then
(10:05) and there because she didn’t appreciate you know my my mothering Excellence my mothering efforts and you know here I was a failure and to fail at mothering has very deep implications for most of us right it’s not an easy one to you know just sort of walk off so for me I also saw that I had linked my success in mothering with much of my life purpose right and here she was robbing me of my life purose so essentially I was able to see the ways in which I was still interacting with my children as narcissistic extensions and I can do a
(10:50) future podcast on this I wrote an article on emotionally immature parents and how it is that many of us in our generation would like to think we are resolved and there’s still probably a lot of those Stigmata you know visible so I was able to see how I needed her to conform to certain expectations of mine in order for me to feel like a good mom which was essential to my sense of safety my sense of self-identity so I wept I mean like sobed over this and was able to really allow that part to experience the
(11:27) failure that the other parts were you know protecting her against that failure that was already in there right that belief that was already being held and so all of these protector parts are trying to keep me from ever feeling that degree of failure right through self- defensiveness and rationalization and continued efforting so I moved through this and I recognized oh here’s the you know the Poetry of it is that actually this is my opportunity to not fail and here it is this is the opportunity to not fail and
(12:04) when I sat down with her to you know talk more about this I was able to say those magic words tell me more tell me more I want to know more about your experience more of what it was like and I was able to validate you know and empathize with what it was apparently like for her you know at that time in our shared experience and there was of course that defensive protector that was saying well but she needs to understand what really happened she needs to know what happened and because I have grown the capacity
(12:44) through microtitration and small practices of holding the sensation of my incompletely held reality right so all of the dangers that come with recognizing I’m in the presence of somebody who cannot and will not honor my reality except now it’s my kid so I am the adult right so could I hold that part of me and soothe that part of me and honor that part of me and recognize and validate that part within me that was saying this is not fair this is horrible you know she doesn’t get it I have to try you know to make her see
(13:26) remembering of course that as a kid I didn’t give a what my parents story was I didn’t care why they were doing what they were doing it couldn’t have been less relevant to my experience I was interested in my story and I was able to to remember that right and channel that and visit with her experience and listen and I did not offer one word of this is what I think happened I hear you but you know here’s what really went down I did and so now on the record is her story and that’s when I was able to see you
(14:06) know it’s not actually about in many cases The Narrative right this was all about an opportunity for her to assess how safe I am as a parent how much room is there in this connection for her to have a different reality and specifically a different narrative about me and one that doesn’t look so hot right one that does not frame me in the light that I prefer and after that point from my experience our relationship entirely changed and there was affection and togetherness and openness and trust that came online that somehow came from
(14:52) my being characterized in this like really shitty way like how could that possibly come from that place well because if I can wear the villain Crown it means that it’s not her job to make sure that I don’t right it’s not her job to caretake the part of me that is terrified of wearing that villain Crown which is how she becomes the narcissistic extension where it’s her job to maintain my self-concept so that was very very empowering very difficult example that is also it’s kind of like taken the piss out of like being wrong
(15:28) and like doing the shitty thing as a mom I say all the time and I’ll say it again and I have an entire master class on this subject of victimless mothering that it is never ever too late to own your it is Never Too Late to Apologize you know think about whether it’s been five minutes or 40 years and your mom comes to you and says you know what I was really thinking about that thing I did when you were five and I’m so sorry who would not receive that deep I mean I don’t know everybody’s situation but obviously for me it’s
(16:03) never too late there’s no statute of limitations on this so it’s also liberated you know that there’s like more flexibility more fluidity for me to own when I just like don’t do the right thing when I don’t I didn’t know how to show up openhearted when I did the defensive reactive irritated thing right to go back and circle back and say well there I there I go again I’m sorry so we’ll pause here for a message from our sponsor my membership Community vital life project so if you want to
(16:34) hang with me ask me questions in live coaching get free access to my master classes curated content discounts and to the incredible humans that I attract my membership vital life project is where it’s at it’s the only membership of its kind and you’ll shed your struggle transform your victim story and level up your Reclamation game with others who get it join at the Lincoln show notes and at Kelly Brogan md.
(16:59) com so another example was when I received an email from somebody that I care very very deeply about and the email was of course in a context of Greater contention and disruption in the relationship and in the email was the phrase you are a deeply injured Soul incapable of love and I remember when I read that it was like an absolute punch in the gut obviously well I shouldn’t say Obviously for me it was it was a punch in the gut and took my breath away because it felt like so huge an indictment that there was like no way
(17:46) around it right like I don’t even know what rol itex to pull out of facts validating why that is wrong it was just crushing and because I have this practice you know under my belt of putting on this villain Crown I was able to really explore that and it was almost like big enough that I was able to drop the effort of correcting it and defending myself against it and really explore it and to really assess whether or not it’s true and so I’ll talk about some of the points of inquiry that can be helpful in
(18:27) this Arena and then of course you know I experience public criticism often all the time constructive feedback I like to call it and it’s also an opportunity you know to be seen and I have learned like I thought I was you know obviously I love polarizing topics and continue to find ways to push the envelope into uncomfortable territories apparently for others and I have found that most people you know in totally different Realms of expertise encounter on social media you know trolling and hating and unsolicited criticism and
(19:06) feedback so it must be that it’s just a projection space of our own and the ways in which we imagine that we know better how somebody should be right which is the ultimate place of the Shadow hides so when I have the opportunity to explore and I would invite you to consider when you have the opportunity to explore critical feedback or negative feedback from somebody else it may also be from yourself although that’s typically we’re so blended with that that it’s hard to really catch yourself but in the beginning it’ll come
(19:40) from you know outside if you fundamentally don’t have a part that agrees with the criticism that you’re receiving then it’s going to roll off your back and I really don’t have to support you in any way right if you don’t agree who cares it’s over there’s nothing to see here right however if it hurts if it is triggering if it inspires some sort of defensive reaction I know that the way my defensive structure is wired I don’t even feel the feeling that’s how effective it is so I often
(20:16) don’t feel the sense of you know formerly I wouldn’t feel the fear I wouldn’t feel the shame I wouldn’t feel those inner experiences I would just go straight to my litig right straight to the here’s why I’m right and you’re wrong you know so it depends how effective your defenses are but if you feel triggered if you feel upset I call it entering through the upset because it’s an opportunity to go exploring your inner terrain and if you feel that then there are a couple of points of inquiry that I
(20:51) will offer that are helpful for me whenever I’m you know encountering this opportunity so one thing you’re going to try on is what if they’re right what if they’re right what if that person was right that I am a deeply injured Soul that’s true very true right what if that person was right that I am incapable of Love well at the time a couple of years ago you know that was also true I am just learning how to love because I am just learning how to collect all of the parts of myself that I hate that I would otherwise project
(21:37) outside of myself and fight with out there until I collect them in a sufficient quantity I will not be capable of offering anyone anything other than control and manipulation to secure the satisfaction and fulfillment of my basic emotional needs so that’s also true so if those things that sound so condemning and so slanderous are actually true then it’s sort of like okay cool moving on right so sometimes you can really take the piss out of it by just trying it on and to seeing like is it possible that it’s true but
(22:20) sometimes there’s something that somebody is saying that is like o like it’s it’s just too tender it’s too too horrible to imagine so you know in that case it’s good to also expand the inquiry to Beyond is it true is it possible that it’s true to you know what is the thing I am most afraid could be true right like of all of the criticisms I have received what is the one either from this person or in general that I am most afraid could be true and how can I visit it with what comes up in me who
(23:01) shows up if I sit in the mindscape and explore the associated feelings of that dread reality being true right so usually this is going to take you know the form of something that you have coupled with existential Annihilation like what is it that you imagine there’s no recovery from if you were to do or be this thing you would be branded for life right that you are you know selfish attention seeking you’re a bad person you know it’s usually these like really basic polarities right like in the bad category what in the bad
(23:46) category could you possibly be branded with that you imagine would be so horrible you’d never recover and you’d be left on the side of the road for Dead Forever right because it’d be merciful if you just died but instead you’re just ding forever so what would be that bad and often we are presented the opportunity to explore that through especially romantic relationships especially breakups where there is a narrative spun that is so painful and difficult to recover from because it cuts to the core of our greatest fears
(24:23) and it only hurts because there’s a part of us that fundamentally agrees so how can we let this source of judgment and critical feedback actually be right how can we release them to their Sovereign experience of reality inclusive of all manner of trauma informed you know perception and woundology and projection that’s their experience that is their business we are playing a role they’re the main character in their own show right so how can we release them and allow them to have their experience the
(25:03) way that we can is to hold and contain and soothe and explore with curiosity the part of us that is them right take it back focus inside because they are ultimately giving us this opportunity setting the conditions to get to know a part that we might not ever know was there the part that is terrified you know that if you are this thing if you do this thing and probably already believes that you are and you know you’ve made the mistake so how can you be with that part and develop curious intimacy how can you
(25:45) listen to what that part has to say and not try to correct it convert it or spiritually bypass it into some sort of self-confident whole you know self- validated space no you just listen and learn about it right so if I am you know like in in my previous cast on PO dancing right so if I am you know accused of being an attention seeking how can I visit with the part that actually believes that well first I have to ask the part who says that’s absolutely not true how dare you right that protector that is defensively reacting to soften and then
(26:31) I can interact with the part that actually believes that might be true and then I can learn what I think is like the last Salient point of inquiry which is what am I making it mean for that to be true right so if that part believes that I’m an attention-seeking wh well so what it must be a big so what you know if this part has been so exiled so hidden from my awareness that I would only ever engage with a protector Defender who says no I’m not absolutely no I’m not how dare you and then I go on in my real life to judge attention
(27:11) seeking all over the place right as I project that hidden part onto other people so what am I making it mean to be an attention seeking right what am I making it mean to be attention seeking and needy when did I learn that being needy was bad when did I learn that being needy means you lose love when did I learn that being needy means that you are not a good girl and being not a good girl means that you don’t get you know cuddles and it might mean that you do get smacks or whatever it is right so and what about the hor bit right like so
(27:50) what am I making it mean what does that mean really what am I making that mean right that I am to be burned at the stake am I making it mean that I did the wrong thing with my sexuality right and I’m hearkening back to the early shame coupling with my Sexual Energy and that I could invite like Mortal retribution right in that Electra edible Dynamic so what am I making it mean how can I be as curious as possible make as few assumptions as possible and begin to explore as I allow the feeling state to Simply exist in my body so the practice
(28:36) of putting on the fill and Crown is to recognize the opportunity to be bad and wrong and to know that we all are you are too I am too I have the capacity for all the Badness and wrongness and it’s already in there I already believe it is so why don’t I just allow somebody else to do their projecting thing have their experience or maybe have a very valid reason that I happen to agree with you know for why I did the bad and wrong thing why at this stage in my adulthood I would need to consistently be perceived as right and good is because I
(29:16) fundamentally am terrified that if I am not if the other shoe drops right if the mask starts to slip figuratively then I could lose it all and I would be cast into right out of this the positive split cast into the negative split cast into the realm of the predestined unlovability worthlessness and isolation that I always knew was coming because I couldn’t fake it well enough right so there’s such a Liberation there’s such a relief in just owning it right there’s such a relief in just saying yeah maybe
(29:53) that’s true you know another phrase I like to play around with is yeah you might be right because it’s true you might be right and you might be wrong but if you’re wrong and I know you’re wrong then I wouldn’t feel anything about it right it’s like there’s so many criticisms that can come our way that are just sort of like really who cares that’s stupid right like they don’t land on fertile soil because we fundamentally already um have resolved whatever might have been receptive to that belief so I
(30:25) love Shadow work for this reason because it ends up it begins as one of the most perilous paths we could potentially walk into sovereignty and personal Reclamation and then it ends up being the most enjoyable ultimately delightful and liberating to get to the place where you can just be all the things and whatever it is that Delights you and turns you on and excites you is actually what now matters my creative impulse is reclaimed because I’m no longer in the realm of putting out all of these little fires focusing backwards on making sure
(31:09) everybody’s version of History you know features me as the hero or heroine there’s so much energy that is drained and when we can get to this place not that I have arrived by the way it’s a practice but when we can get to this place where we have more facility with allowing people to have their experiences and not needing to micromanage and control their perception we taste you know what it is to be led by our own inner desires so I hope that’s helpful talk to you soon
