Danielle Ireland (0:00)

Foreign hello, hello, this is Danielle Ireland and you are listening to don't cut your own bangs, a solo cast. And this is our Relationship Episode Part 2. Why am I dedicating two episodes to relationships? Well, it's because we are products of our environment and we are the sum of our parts. And we are hardwired for connection and community. And relationships are the building blocks of our community and our families and how we come to understand ourselves as separate and also interdependent to everyone else. We are made up of relationships. Looking back at the history of our world, we look at people's influence and impact on other people. When I think back to my own life history, I mean, I can certainly break things up maybe in terms of school and the grade I was in and things like that. But I mean, emotionally my memories are connected to relational experiences. Making new friendships, losing friendships, falling in love, heartbreak. I mean, those are the chapter, the chapters of my life. And I know through listening to hundreds of people bear their soul and their pain with me professionally, that that is, that is. I don't want to say that's what we all do, but I think that's what a lot of us do. And so we're dedicating two episodes to relationships because it's a big topic today. We're going to talk about how relationships are like mirrors and also the relationship fear loop. This is a concept that, that I use a lot in therapy. A lot, a lot, a lot, a lot. And I think I want to just add a preface before I kind of dive into the meat of the episode. That there are so many directions that anyone could take. The topic of relationships, communication, boundaries, trauma, pleasure, identifying needs, advocacy, when to step away. Right. There's so many directions anyone could take. The reason why I'm choosing these particular topics is I'm a big, big advocate and proponent for empowerment theory. It's a theory perspective in the training I had to become a therapist. And it sees the individual as a part of a system that can also be connected to internal family systems and systems theory. But essentially I, in this format, with this precious time we have together, want to. Want to offer not just all the perspectives, but what are things that you could potentially begin to use to reflect or apply to potentially feel better sooner? I think boundaries are a great conversation. I have a couple of podcast already on that topic and I think that's definitely one to build on. But these particular ones that I'm focusing on are what can you do to look within to better understand yourself and by extension your relationships? And let's start with the. The idea that our relationships are like mirrors. If you were to take and rank your most valued relationships, and maybe ranking doesn't feel good to you, that never felt good to me, particularly when I, when I got Marri married. Like picking the best maid to honor, right? A maiden. It's such a silly kind of archaic tradition. But ranking friendships feels very awkward. So maybe, maybe if you don't want to rank, you could think, okay, who are my core five? I think Brene Brown uses language where it's like my post it note. My post it note people. You're lucky if you have names, at least enough names to fill one side of a post it note. And that might be, depending on how big you're writing, two, three, four, maybe five. But for sake of simplicity, let's just say five. So if you were to think of your top five core relationships and think about who these people are, the role they play in your life, and then we're going to start to understand how is this reflecting something about me? The only common denominator between you and everyone you've ever met is you. You were the only connective thread from your greatest love, your greatest heartbreak, your dearest friendships, and the people that you don't like. Right? Because you, you are what connects them all. You are what binds them all. If you were Harry Potter, we would be looking, we would be looking at everything through the lens of Harry Potter's relationships and Harry Potter's adventures and friends. But instead we're doing insert blank your name. So your top five people. And if you were to say that, let's say their top three qualities, if you were to list them out, my guess is, and I'll call it an educated guess because I've actually done this exercise with people and I've done it myself, there are going to be common threads. Even if they are wildly different people. It might be what they value, it might be how dedicated they are to either work or family. It might be a religious background that you have in common or a sexual orientation. Like there, there might be something more external that you could identify. But chances are more than likely what these people have in common, other than you, is the way they make you feel. And when we really get down to the bedrock or the heart of these really important, trusted, valued relationships, it's usually bottled down to, they make me feel loved, they make me feel seen, I feel safe, safety is huge. But these people see me and I feel seen by them. And you may not use that exact language. You May use different language, but if you kind of think of this exercise like a funnel. So you start with the names, maybe you list three of the qualities that each of them have, and you might have a lot of synonyms, right? This person is really funny. I laugh a lot with this person. This person makes a lot of jokes. Okay? So there's some overlap there. And it's easier to see when you're actually writing this down and you have it kind of visually in front of you. But understanding what the people that you value, that you treasure, that hold space in your heart, understanding what they have in common, this is what it does for you. You start to understand what motivates you, what drives you into connection. And you also, if you were to imagine you were holding a stick, on one end of the stick is what you want, on the opposite end of the stick is what you don't want. We could call it desired and feared. Anyone out there who is maybe a fan of the Enneagram knows that the Enneagram types have the conceptual understanding that what you're identifying in these types is what motivates and drives you and what you fear or what you avoid. And I might be slightly misinterpreting that, but I think the point still stands. So if what I desire or what I feel the most supported in with my core relationships is I feel seen, I feel loved, I feel safe, then more than likely what we avoid or what we fear on the opposite end of the stick would be your own personal interpretation of the antithesis of that. So for me, that would probably be feeling cut off, being abandoned, neglected, rejected, all of the shamey, not good enough feelings that that is the opposite end. Once you know what motivates and drives you to connection and what you fear. This is in. I'll say, in a therapeutic sense. This is gold. This is gold because it would make sense. Logically, we would think we would be more driven and more motivated to move in the direction of what feels good. But this is a big butt, A big, hairy butt. In actuality, we are when we, I'll say, react unconsciously or unintentionally or without awareness. Right. Prior to this exercise, maybe we didn't have as much awareness when we don't know the fear that we're avoiding. There are more neurological receptors in our brain and body that are keenly tuned into, adapted to, and evolved to help us avoid and prevent pain, because pain alerts us to either a need for help. Right? If you step on glass and your foot's bleeding, right. If you don't know that if you don't feel the pain, you don't notice it. Right. You're going to get an infection or you could bleed out, depending on the cut. Like pain, while very unpleasant and uncomfortable, it's important to survival. Emotional pain serves a similar function, but it's not as black and white as physical discomfort is. It is the fear and anticipation of what we want to avoid is more likely what motivates and drives behavior. So this will then lead to an exercise I call the Fear Loop, which is also in the Treasure Journal. Both of these exercises are in the Treasure Journal. I pulled it directly from there. So again, you can follow along with your own blank page, your own blank journal if you want. Or if you're like, I'm following you kind of, but I'd love to see a visual reference, hop over to my website, grab a copy of the journal. It's mapped out there and also explained there too. But back to the fear loop. So this is how fear motivates and drives behavior. If we're not aware, because awareness at the end of the day is like 80% of the battle. It's like when you are aware of something you didn't know before, you now have a choice and an opportunity to make a decision that maybe you didn't even recognize that you had before. So the fear loop, if you can imagine a circle and imagine in the circle there are four dots and we're going to go clockwise from left to right. So if we were actually looking at a clock, we're starting at 9 o' clock. This is fear. Okay, so let's say for simplicity's sake, what you fear is rejection. It's a very common fear. I don't know many people. I haven't met somebody who doesn't fear this to some degree. Even personality disorders like narcissistic personality disorder, what we've come to understand is that's actually, it's layered in a lot of shellac. But at the core of someone who actually is diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder is a deep, deep rooted fear of abandonment and another way of saying rejection. So we're talking about rejection. Okay, so if I fear rejection, then we move up to 12 o' clock, right? We're moving up in the circle. So what I fear is rejection. Then what do I do to manage that fear? And again, this is going back to. Your brain and your body are hardwired to protect you, to avoid pain, to keep you safe, to keep you alive. But this is a biological function that's bled into an emotional function. So we're talking about behavior. So my fear is rejection. Then what I do is maybe. And this is all hypothetical based on experience, but again, I think this is more to help you understand the exercise. If I fear rejection, then what I might do is avoid people, or what I might do is avoid dating apps, or what I might do is I fear rejection. And so I enter relationships where I see myself having the upper hand and all the power, because what I need is control. There's a lot of. There's an infinite number of ways that people can go about trying to manage the fear of rejection, but we'll just start there. So if I fear rejection, then I move up to 12 o' clock. What I do is I avoid people. And then we move over to three o' clock. We're continuing around the circle, clockwise. The result, or another way of saying it was like, what's the outcome of you managing your fear the way you're managing it? The outcome is, well, I feel lonely because I'm avoiding people. Then we slide down to six o' clock. We're now at the bottom of the circle. We're about to complete the loop. The emotion of feeling lonely, the result of. Of my behavior, that's rooted in my fear of rejection, that confirms a story. And now we're kind of bridging into a concept called narrative therapy. It's really heavily referenced in Brene Brown's work with shame resilience. But this idea that we have a story, usually it's two, three, sometimes four stories about ourselves that were shaped through early development, shaped through life, shaped through culture, shaped through family. A story about who we are in the world and why things happen to us the way they do. And because of confirmation bias, our brains love to be right. Oh, we love to be right, because right actually feels like safety. If I feel like I can predict something and I end up being right about it, then that means that I can predict anything and I'm in control. Control feels like safety. Oh, what a tangled web, Right? So the result is I feel lonely, and it confirms a story. And let's just say again, for the sake of this exercise, the story is, I'm lonely because I'm unworthy of a deep, deeper connection. And maybe I say I didn't really like people to begin with, right? Because all they do is let you down. Which connects me right back to my fear of rejection. And so you can see how over time and again, this very basic example, and we all. We all have some Variation of this. What I like about this exercise is it helps you one see how without blaming. This isn't about blaming you like, oh, you're the only reason why X, Y and Z isn't working for you. No, no, no, no, no, no. Right. Kind of going back to the preface at the beginning of the episode. There are so many nuanced ways, there are so many directions we could take this type of conversation. But for the purposes of this episode, this podcast, this section of the journal, what I want you ultimately to feel, if I could choose for you, if I had the control to choose what to feel for you, it would be to help you better understand yourself so that in you could make choices that help you feel better. Empowering you from within. And that's what I believe insight does. Connecting these dots. It's kind of like why the hell bother with therapy? Well, I think this is the why the hell. This is. This is the why the hell we bother. We bother because understanding where I fit in my world, where I understand, where do I have influence, where do I have some autonomy, where is my movement able to be applied in service of me? This insight that I have now that maybe I didn't have five minutes ago now like a fork in the road splitting, I unconsciously or with very low little awareness, maybe even denial, I'm reacting to the same thing over and over again. And when I react, just like kind of a mouse, a mousetrap just springing shut, the same result's gonna happen if I just react, react, react, react. Insight then gives me an opportunity, right fork split in the road. I now have new information. And this new information now presents me with an option that wasn't there before because I just couldn't see it. So now knowing if we look at the loop, we have fear, then we have what we do as a result, then we have the end result or outcome of doing the thing we do, the story we tell ourselves about it and then the loop continues. Where we have the most influence to create change immediately is in what we do. We God, we could tell ourselves all the positive self talk we could speak the affirmations. We could have friends breathe life into us and tell us everything that's amazing about ourselves. And those fears will likely still be there. I maintain hope. I have hope. I'm an optimistic person. I have hope that the beliefs that we have about ourselves, the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves of the world, that those can change, that fear can change. I believe it, I believe it. I believe it. But it's like Ugh. That work takes a lot longer and it's harder. And so what we do, because we, we are naturally cynical and our own experiences, we're more likely to believe what we experience than what we're told or what we even try to tell ourselves. Right. It's a little bit kind of like that expression, action speaking louder than words. I don't always believe that's entirely true, but I think in this case, if you do something different and you have a different outcome or result, what that does is it challenges your story. It challenges the confirmation bias that this is the reason why X, Y and Z always happens. So go back to it. If in my earlier example, if what I do is I avoid people and as a result I feel lonely, not avoiding people, putting myself out in the world, getting on a dating app, calling a friend, or reaching out to someone that maybe I have a desire to have a friendship with, but I don't really know that well. What someone would have to overcome to actually do something different is incredibly vulnerable. And vulnerability is just another way of saying terrifying. It's terrifying, it's uncomfortable, and it's also not a guarantee. But. But this is again, another big hairy but do you want to be right and confirm your belief? Do you want to be right or do you want to feel better? And if you do what you've always done, you're going to get what you've always gotten. And I believe it was Maya Angelou who said that nothing changes until you do. So doing something different, even if it's a micro speck of dust, amount of change, like smiling at a stranger. And again, this is your exercise. This is your journal that we're talking about. This is your life. You can choose how big or how small a step you want to take, but the change and the potential for the change, the really big shifts, is in doing something a little different. Going back to that metaphor of your, you know, the stick, the stick of at one end of the stick holds what I want most, where I feel most safe, what makes me feel the best. And on the other end of the stick is what I fear most. What's going to help you really tip over to the other end of the stick. That feels good, is trying something a little different, a little 1 degree shift in the direction of what you want. You don't want to feel lonely. No one wants to feel like whatever our fear is convincing us is true. And whatever that story is telling us, none of that feels good. None of it. None of it. None of it. None of it. So this is essentially a big call to action, to love yourself into making one tiny, heroic step in the direction of what actually feels really good to you. That's pretty much. That's it. That's the whole. The whole enchilada, the whole meat and potatoes there. I don't know why I'm referencing food so much right now, but maybe that's because I'm hungry. And maybe if you're listening too, and you find that you need to eat, go do that and then do this exercise. Thank you for listening. Thank you for showing up here. Thank you for investing this time in yourself, because that's what I thoroughly believe this is. These exercises that I'm referencing, they're not just fun little ideas. I've actually led and walked people through these and seen really powerful shifts happen. I've walked myself through them many times. The great thing about these, you might do it a couple of times, forget about it. Remember it maybe a year or so later or even six months later, and you're like, oh, yeah, huh? And then you revisit it and it's. It's always humbling. Very large dose of humility for me, especially because I do this work as a therapist. I think it's easy to kind of, I don't know, trick myself into thinking that because I help people do their work, I don't need to do mine. That's never a good spot, never a nothing, never a healthy spot for any quote unquote expert. But the point is that these exercises can grow with you. Because as your fears and your feelings and your wants and your desires and your goals and your dreams and your relationships start to evolve and shift and change, so will the outcomes of these exercises. And it can continue to grow with you. There's really no expiration date and there's no end point. It can serve you as long as you need it. With that said, your time, your care, your attention, your presence means more to me than you know. Please remember to rate, review and subscribe to this podcast. I don't understand in the algorithm interwebs how and why, but I know that it helps the podcast grow. I know that it helps it reach other people. So that much I know. And if this helps you at all, if it benefits you at all, share it with friends and loved ones. Please rate, review, review and subscribe. And if you are interested in grabbing a copy of the Treasure Journal for yourself or a friend, just hop on over to dnlireland.com or the show Note links. It'll all be linked for you there. You can grab the journal. You can grab the meditation series. It's a companion meditation guide that actually has its own meditation for each section of the journal. And you can also use it by itself. But, yeah, it's all there for you. Thank you for being here, and I hope that you continue to have a wonderful day.