Heroes in Business - Healing Fear of Change and Losing Control

Episode Date: March 6, 2021

Living with the Fear of Change and Losing Control; The consequences of avoiding; Reassurance that everything will be alright; Everything is literal and part of the process in this episode of Fearless Living with Dr Andy Hahn www.eliances.com

Hi. My name is Andy Han, and I am a licensed clinical psychologist, and I am the founder of the Life-Centered Therapy Training Institute. And I want to welcome you today to the second episode of the podcast, Guided Self-Healing, Fearless Living, and today is March 5th, 2021. In this episode, I want to review some of the things that came up in the first episode, and then I want to read a letter from one of our listeners that really touched me, and I want to respond to some of what this person said and asked. Again, if you want to reach me, you can go to our website, lifecenteredtherapy.com. My email address is A-H-A-H-N, like Andy Hahn, at lifecenteredtherapy.com. If you're interested in our trainings, you can go to go.readyforamiracle.net forward slash free dash training. So that tells you sort of like all of

our contact information. And again, there are many of us who do this work and we do it remotely. So if you want to experience it, you can do that. Just go to our website, lifecenteredtherapy.com and go to about life centered therapy or about LCT. And in the dropdown menu, you will see all of our certified practitioners. And the last thing I want to say is please do email any questions you want to ask, because I consider that a great gift that you're taking the time to do that and I will respond to your questions. So let me start by reviewing what we talked about last time. So we started with a simple question, which is why do people come for healing?

And we said that no matter what you're coming for, because it could be something physical like chronic pain or fibromyalgia or autoimmune disease or allergies or anything like that, or mental like anxiety or emotional like depression or the same pattern of bad relationships or alienation, it doesn't matter whether it's physical or mental or emotional or relational or spiritual. I think when you're suffering, there's only one reason, which is that there was something that couldn't be handled and integrated, something that couldn't be taken in stride. And so when something can't be taken in stride what happens is you essentially get stuck right in that moment or or you could say there is a stuckness right in that moment and so we then

start reliving echoes of that moment in order to try to remember it in order to heal and grow. That is the idea here. So if that's why people come for healing, because they are suffering, which just means that they've had some kind of trauma, because my definition of trauma is simply something that can't be handled and integrated or taken in stride, what then is healing? And from my point of view, it becomes very easy to say, which is healing is just mastering what couldn't be taken in stride. Okay, that's nice. So how do we master it? And that is also easy to describe, but as this reader was going to show us, it's not necessarily easy to do, but it's easy to describe. So let me do that. When there's something that can't be taken in stride, in that moment, a discomfort is born. And eventually, that discomfort creates symptoms that

you don't like, is the simple psychological term for it. You don't like them. And they could be any of the things we talked about, physical things that you don't like, or emotional or mental or relational or spiritual things you don't like. But really, while on the ego level, we don't like these things, on a soul level, they're an invitation to remembering what couldn't be handled so that we could then be in a different relationship with it and be free. So we don't automatically relive the original situation over and over and over again. So I gave you an example. I said, let's suppose like a motorcycle backfires and you have a panic attack in my office. You know, you start to cower and hyperventilate and whatever. So I would say to you then,

let's say the sensation was hyperventilating. We're breathing fast. Then I would say it's not you that's having a panic attack. It's someone whose name is hyperventilating or out of breath or whatever it's going to be. And your job as the person who wants the healing is to choose to bring all of your awareness to the sensation, which we'll call hyperventilating. So you're going to choose to become hyperventilating. And when you do that, you no longer automatically unconsciously relive hyperventilating, you're going to find its story. And the beauty is that you not only are going to find its story, but you are now going to identify with the one who chose to become hyperventilating, who chose to bring all their awareness there and focus there so much

that they became hyperventilating from the inside out. So you then become more identified with the mindful hosting witness, who's just saying, I'm here with you, whoever you are. And that is, on the simplest level, the way to freedom and freedom is what is uh the intention here so you could get to anything eventually and say you know what i could take anything in stride from the very most awful thing to the greatest thing i could just take it in stride and not be reactive not not be judgmental, not compare ourselves with others, not compulsively need to understand why it's happening. We could just say, I can just respond. I won't react. Okay. So healing becomes simple.

What you do is you choose to become the one who's having the thing that can't be handled in stride by choosing to become the body sensation. And what I want to say to you is it's not your body sensation. Its name is hyperventilating, not my hyperventilating, or its name is sick to stomach, not my sick to stomach. Just like my name isn't the Andy, it's just Andy, right? So my name isn't the sick to stomach feeling, it's sick to stomach feeling. It's a proper name. It's its name until it tells you its name is something else. So our job is to really tune in and then say, I want to know your story. What have you come to share with me? Breathing hard. Where are you

beginning? What's happening? And as soon as we do that, we can become free. And then what I invited you to do was to do that on your own for a second, and then to just see what happens if you take something that you're suffering about, which means that you're being reactive and you really allow it for a second. And you choose to notice, scan your body, notice what happens, bring all your attention there. So you're that sensation from the inside out. And then we're just going to say, what have you come to share? Except today we're going to add onto that. And we're going to say, not only what have you come to share, but where are you beginning and what's happening to you because really the most powerful place to change something is where it originates everything after where it originates is just an echo a reliving of the

original situation and even if it's horrendous typically it's not as horrendous as the original situation, unless there is something like you have a sense of betrayal, and then sometimes it actually can feel even worse than the original situation, but it isn't worse. It just feels worse, because you might want to know what it was like to be the one who was betrayed, so you might be suffering a lot. Okay. So this is the basic idea. You're just going to bring all your awareness, focus all your attention on that sensation. And as soon as you do that, you are that other being who was born in a moment, just like you were, and it is going to share its story. And if it needs something, it's going to share what it needs. So that is background. And then I had you do the exercise. And then I invited you to say, once you've been with it and you've chosen to be the sensation

and you've heard its story, you can then, if you want to have the other experience, you can choose to be the opposite, like it's already happening. So if your problem was that you're having anxiety about speaking in front of people which is not my particular problem thank god or i would be in trouble here um then what would happen is that you would just uh experience and imagine for one moment that you are already speaking freely and joyfully and playfully in front of a whole group of people and feel what that feels like in your body and deepen into that. So with that as background, a listener wrote this to me, which I think I would really like to respond to the whole thing.

And it's not short, but I'm going to try to deal with all of this in the next 20 minutes. She said, an interesting thing, an interesting feeling popped up for me when listening to the first episode, fear, like real deep fear. So I did the exercise asking, fear, what have you come to share with me? Now, the first thing I would say is, what I want you to do is find the body sensation that's associated with fear. So if someone said to me, fear, you know, I'm feeling a lot of fear, I would say, when you're feeling fear, what is the sensation that arises in your body? It could be queasiness, it could be pain, it could be tightness, it could be heaviness, it could be pressure, it could be emptiness, but you want to

find the literal sensation. All right. So that's the first thing I would say when you're doing the exercise, find the sensation. All right. But she didn't exactly do that, which is fine. So she says, fear, what have you come to share with me? And then what she says is, and at that point I could feel my whole body tense up. So we now know what fear, maybe that's what the sensation was in the first place, even before it shared it, that there was a body tensing. And I know I was blocking the answer. Like, I do not want to go there. No, no, no. Now this is a key part of the sentence. This is a key part of what she wrote me. And this is what I want you to know. You can't step outside of the process as soon as you bring your attention to the sensation and everything that comes to you, any words, any images, any anything, is that being story and it's literal. So what I would say is my listener thinks that in 2021, she's feeling afraid. But what I would say is if she was in my office, I would say,

it's not you that's feeling afraid. It's someone whose name is body tensing up, right? whose name is Body Tensing Up, right? And Body Tensing Up has come to share a story and the beginning of its story is literal, right? I do not want to go there. No, no, no. So what I would say is Body Tensing Up is sharing its literal story. I do not want to go there. No, no, no. And what I'd say is that story is happening in the past, but of course it feels like it's happening in the present moment. So this is what I want to say again. Everything is part of the process. Once you focused on the body sensation, you can't comment on the process, even when it feels like you're commenting. So if this person was here again, what I'd say is, you know, what I'd say to you all as my listeners, and what I would say psychoeducationally is, you think that it's you right now who's saying,

I don't want to go there. No, no, no. But I would say somebody else is here. And they're saying, I don't want to go there. No, no, no. And then the next thing we would want to do is say, so we would say, that's right. You don't want to go there. No, no, no. And what's next? And believe me, if you do that, you will find out that body tensing up has come to share a story.

And the first line of the story is I don't want to go there. No, no, no. Okay. Then she says, I could feel so we that's what I would do if you're my client is to say, you're exactly in the right place. Because we can feel here she is. And someone is there and they're saying, I don't want to go there. But they're going to be forced to go there, right? And so the next thing that comes up, she says, is I could see in my mind's eye the word control. Now, again, she's going to think that that's happening in 2021. But what I'm going to believe, and in my experience is invariably true, is that the control has to do with something about the person's story. Like, I don't want to go there, no, no, no, but I don't have control.

Someone else is controlling me would be my guess, but I'd have to have them speak out the whole thing. All right. So the first key thing you have to know when you do this is everything is part of the process. Everything is literal and it feels like it's happening now. But really what it is, is you are just reliving the echo in the here and now of something that happened someplace else. Typically in the past, It may have been something that happened to you when you were a little girl. It may have been something that, you know, someone is being forced to do something and, you know, they're, just think of a story, you know, they're being forced to walk off of a gangplank, you know, and they're saying, I don't want to go

there. No, no, no. But someone's pushing them and they have control. I mean, I'm just thinking of that story because it actually came up in a session I did as a demonstration, right? So this is what you really need to know. Everything, part of the process. Okay. But now let's go to the here and now, because that's where she goes next she says it makes sense what you ask when you ask people to open to all of life and what life has for us we relinquish a sense of control even if that control is false now of course um all of us have a, what we might call a directional filter. And we like to keep things under control because we don't want to open to painful things.

But of course the only problem with not opening to painful things is if you don't open to painful things, you can't open to happy things. You can open to what feels like happy things, but if you won't let yourself feel anything, unfortunately, that means on some level, you won't let yourself feel everything. So if you won't let yourself feel despair, you can't let yourself really feel joy. It's really, you know, interesting that these reciprocal things, they like need each other. So the more you are willing to, they like need each other. So the more you are willing to, let's say, I'll just be with whatever is, even if it scares me, the more you'll be free. All right. So, so she then says, you know,

it feels like being open to being bombarded with any and all bad things in order to grow. Now, what you need to know here is we have judgments obviously about things, but from a point of view, let's say you were thinking about it right now as something is just trying to reveal itself to you when you were a little girl or when you were in another lifetime or one of your ancestors or whoever you were, right? So bad only means here that it was something that couldn't be handled and integrated. Bad, of course, is something that we project onto a situation, right? So the one thing we're going to have some control over is we may be set, our classrooms may

be set, but how we respond to the classroom is the one thing that we actually do have choice about. It's called free will. And the only thing that I believe free will is, very interestingly, it's only one thing. Do we choose to say, I will be with whatever it is, or do we choose to avoid it? That's free will. Because even though you think you're avoiding it, you're not avoiding it. You're just not aware. So the question is, are you going to choose to become aware? Or are you going to choose to not be aware? But either way, you're still going to suffer. It's just in one case, you will say my suffering is chronic back pain. And in another case, you'll say, oh my God, my chronic back pain

isn't the thing that I'm suffering about. It's that I get stabbed in the back in another lifetime because I was not paying enough attention. And I spent my whole life being afraid I'll be stabbed in the back. But now something has opened me to an awareness that it wasn't really me that's being afraid of being stabbed in the back at somebody 2,000 years ago who got betrayed or was betrayed and got stabbed in the back. And then you'll say, oh my God, I've been living out that story without being aware my whole life. But then of course, you'll be in a whole different relationship with that story. All right. So she says, I don't want the bad things. I don't want

the suffering. And unfortunately, either way, you're going to have the suffering. If you don't, suffering just means that there's something that you can't take in stride. So what I'd say is, then what happens, of course, is the outside can control you because you haven't faced it in yourself. So you project it out into the world and you say, you haven't faced it in yourself so you project it out into the world and you say oh my god it's a bad thing and i don't want to experience it but it's not like you really have a choice all right so when i was listening to the podcast i desperately wanted your reassuring voice to reassure me that would be okay, safe, even good for me to go there. So I again want to say, the key here is that it is safe to do it if you do it in my experience.

This is my experience. I've been doing this now for 27 years. It's safe to do it if you choose to become the body sensation and you have any witness function whatsoever. And by that, I mean, you know, if you're totally delusional at that point and you can't account for time, that may, you may not be able to have any witnessing function, but pretty much all of us have some witnessing function. So, um, um, it's safe to do it because we are not regressing you, which is what usually happens in therapy, is that you get regressed by somebody. But in fact, what happens is you're just choosing to be with somebody who's here right now. And the way we can know they're here right now is you can feel that sensation. So we're not bringing you back to something. Whoever it is, is here right now waiting for your attention. They've been waiting for your

attention forever. So since we're not regressing you to being age two where something terrible is happening, we're just inviting you to choose to become the two-year-old by becoming the sensation while you identify with the one who's saying, I'm here with you. I can hold you. I can be with you. So I desperately want your reassuring voice to assure me that it's okay, safe, and even good for me to go there. So I want to say to you, if you do it the way I'm describing, it is okay. It is safe. And it's good. And good and by good i mean you will have more freedom and less reactivity so what i'm saying is good i want you to know what i think good is that's what i think good is right so i want to know that there's goodness and joy and more love there

now what does love mean? Love means I can accept what is, that's love. Love isn't always easy. And we may be on the opposite side of it. We may not know that it's love, but it still is love. If you're a parent, for example, and you have to hold your child down while they get a shot and they're screaming and they're saying that they're saying, I hate you. What is love? Is love saying, all right, you don't have to have the shot? Or is love saying, I know that it really is in your

best interest to have that shot. And even if you hate me, I still have to be here in my love saying I will not only have you take the shot but I will love you enough that I will let you say that you hate me and be understanding about it as opposed to being reactive like saying I am so sorry because you have nothing to be sorry about and say I can I feel bad that you felt so much pain and it it's understandable that you'd say, I hate you. It's understandable. But I don't have to defend myself. I can just say, it's understandable. You may not understand.

But I may understand things you don't understand. And you wouldn't say that to your child, but you would know him. And I would say the same thing is going on here. We're all sort of like children. And we don't want to go to things that are good for us and good by good I mean they free us. So we avoid them and it's understandable because we have this filter that says get away from anything that's

too painful. So we have to do something really counterintuitive and go into the thing that we most want to avoid. But amazingly, when you do it, the very problem, the sensation, everything begins to go away. Because you said, I will be with you as opposed to I hate you. Because when you say I hate you to that sensation, really what you're saying is, I'm hating a part of myself. So I would say, really what life about here is about self acceptance, which means you have to accept everything about yourself, even the things that you find most uncomfortable, or you have the greatest feeling about are bad, you just say, I will say yes to you. And the things you think are worst about you, and the things you're most

afraid to experience, typically are the greatest teachers and open you to more and more freedom. So this is what I would say about this. So she says, you know, I want to know if I do this, that there's goodness and joy and more love. And I think the word joy is really important. And what I would say is if you want more joy, say is if you want more joy, you have to have aliveness. There's a joy in aliveness. And there's a numbness in deadening. So if you want real aliveness, you have to be able to experience everything. Otherwise, you'll be using what you think is joy in order not to feel something else. And then you never really fully get to experience the joy because you're doing it to protect yourself from something you're afraid of.

So I'd say be with what you're afraid of, then you can feel more joy. I know it's a hard message for all of us, including me, right? So then she says, you know, what about this whole thing you mentioned manifesting your dream life? I need to hear more about that. Maybe our dream isn't what we think when we start out on the

journey. I would say that's definitely true. Our dream may not be at all what we think when we start on the journey, because usually our dreams in the journey when we start out are pretty egocentric and just wanting gratification. They're not about opening to something larger. Even for those of us who open to something larger when we're younger, often it's because we wanted something for gratification. Like I wanted to be more liked, or I wanted to be more special, or I wanted to have deeper connections with people. So I do my service, you know, but it's like, if I can be with my fear that I won't be liked, if I can be with my fear that I'm ordinary in my case, if I can be with my fear that, you know, I don't have to compulsively connect, then I can truly begin to find out what my dream is,

what really quickens me, what makes me feel alive. And invariably, it will not be what we think it is when we start out, even if it's the content is the same. So maybe we do have to go inward. Maybe we do have to go inward to do these things. And I would say, yes, that's what we're learning here is that that's your greatest dream to be able to go inward and to say, I will be with whatever's there, including the deeper intuitive knowing

that just knows what's true or including the deeper soft voice of the heart that says if you listen to me you'll know what you're truly truly what you are drawn to do here what your particular gift is what your particular opportunity is i know you only have 30 minutes in the podcast which i'm getting close to i'm sure but if you look at me as your general audience i I want to learn and grow, but I'm scared to change and for bad stuff to happen, even if you claim that I will be okay, and that everything, anything bad that comes my way, I'm not there yet. I'm okay. Now, what I would say is,

you know, there's this reciprocal relationship between stability and change. And, you know, sometimes life calls for stability. You know, stable is good. It has its good qualities. It has its gifts. But too much stability, if you cling to stability, you know, then there becomes a problem, which is that you cease to grow, you know, you become, you know, like, you stop swimming, you stop moving, you stop anything, because you're stuck. So at some point or other, it's like night and day, you know, at some point

or other, if you really like stability, you know, you're drawing more to that side. But at some point, you know, you get the high side of stability, everything is, you know, you know,'re drawing more to that side but at some point you know you get the high side of stability everything is you know you know what you can count on you know what you can conserve you know what you know you know what your life is going to be but at some point or other that runs out and then we have to go over to the high side of change because it's like it's time for something new right but if all we ever do is change now of course we know all of life is always changing but if all we ever do is change and never have stability at some point or other we can become frenetic we might not say i'm going to make a commitment to anything because i just want to keep changing things

so what i would say to you at the end of today is, you know, we have to be with both parts of ourselves and hold them with grace. The parts of us that say, I want stability and the parts of us that say, I want change. And our job is to be the one who says, I will hold you both with a really strong container so that when one of you is appropriate, I'll be able to be that. And when the other one is appropriate, I'll be able to be that too. So let's see if there's anything else I want to say. She said, I want to learn and grow, but I'm scared to change and for the bad stuff to happen. Well, the bad stuff is going to happen.

It's just a question of, are you going to go kicking and screaming? Or are you going to, on some level, smile? Because it's just part of life, even though it's very difficult to do. So but I will give you reassurance that everything ultimately, no matter what, will be okay and even joyful and even better if you can do this. And she says at the end, does that make sense? And I would say it makes extraordinary sense. So I want to thank you again and give it another shot. So if there's anything you're suffering about, again, what I invite you to do is scan your body, notice the sensation that's a discomfort, because if you're

suffering, if you're anxious, or if you're judging, or if you're comparing yourself to other people, or if you say, I need to know why this is happening to me, there'll be a sensation. Just bring all your awareness there and say, okay, sensation, what have you come to share with me? And I will listen to you because you're the expert. So having said that, there's so much here. Please email me any questions.

I'm so grateful. And until our next episode, I say thank you and goodbye.