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Welcome to the Overwhelmed Brain Podcast, helping you navigate the difficulties in your life and relationships. These are my personal opinions. Always seek a professional when you're making choices about your mental health and well being. Well, I am in a pickle right now. I am actually recording in my vehicle in New Hampshire, not Georgia, where I usually record on a laptop with no microphone, no sound, what do they call it? Noise cancellation. So nothing like that is occurring. You're not going to get the highest quality audio today. This is the reason I'm doing this right now is because I have no choice. I traveled to New Hampshire. It was a very quick, very surprising reason. I had to travel here, my wife and I, because we lost our brother in law. And so we have been here for days helping my sister clean out her place, sell things, and she's getting ready to move and move on with her life. She's doing something I'm so damn proud of. She is starting her healing while she's grieving. That's not easy. It is not easy. And I tear up thinking about it right now because I'm just so proud of her. And I'm so, I admire her and I also, I feel bad for her and her kids and it's a very, very tough situation. If you heard last week's episode, that's what I was talking about. How we lost that very beloved member of our family and we attended the service a few days ago and my sister, she just said, let's do this. Let's clean up the house, let's sell his stuff, let's get moving. Taking action and moving things along just so she can stay busy and get her life together. I, I'm telling you, I'm proud of this. I'm saying I'm proud of this because this is what I did after my divorce. I didn't lose a spouse. Of course, that's an entirely different situation altogether. And I'm not saying that she shouldn't be grieving. She absolutely is. I asked her today, how, how are you holding up? And she said, I'm doing good. As long as I stay busy, I do good. And when it's quiet and I'm alone, I feel bad and I cry. I think that's so healthy. It's sad. It is very sad. And I am here for her 100%. In fact, this has been the trip that my wife and I dropped everything to come up and help her with everything. And I'm loving every minute spending time with her. And I don't care who else I see honestly. And I've seen people I love and I love seeing, but right now, I'm all about her. So, again, coming back to where I started. I'm on my laptop. I don't have a high quality microphone. I don't have my home studio set up. You hear all kinds of background noise. The traffic, the wind. Sometimes you just have to do things raw. Sometimes you just have to do things on the fly because you have no other way to do it. I didn't want to miss a week. I know I could have said, hey, there's no episode this week. I am dedicated to this show. I am dedicated to you. And I just. I show up. I think that's so important. I dedicate myself to doing this. I just show up. There's not even a sponsor for today's episode, so it doesn't pay for itself at all. We do have patrons who I am so grateful for that help pay for times like this. And I don't know, I'm talking about my sister, and I'm talking about how she's taking action while she heals. And I just think that's so important. After my divorce, my last marriage, my previous one, my divorce was what happened, let's say she wanted to get a divorce. And I said, okay, you know, I wasn't going to fight it. I wasn't going to convince her to stay with me. She fell out of love. That was it. She was done. And I said, okay, well, what does this mean? And she said, I don't know. And I said, does this mean we're getting a divorce? And she said, I guess so. It was hard. I was bawling, I was crying. And I thought, okay, if that's what you want. I, you know, we've had the conversation like, let's go to therapy. Let's. I talked about that. I mean, with her, I said, let's do this. Let's try to fix this. But she was done. She was done trying to fix it. She had been trying for years with me. Yes, it was me who caused the problems in the relationship. And I have talked about that in the past. I used to be a different person. I used to be critical and judgmental, and I had to heal that in myself. And she had to get away from the criticisms and the judgments and the guilt trips. And I think that was the best decision for her and for me in our relationship and for her future and for my future. Sometimes that has to happen. Sometimes we do have to experience a loss to move forward. Yes, there's some minuscule Similarity to what my sister is going through. She's experiencing a loss. She's actually moving forward into a place of. She's moving. She's literally moving to another state, to a place where her and her husband visited a lot. And she loves. And I'm doing everything I can to help make sure she gets there. And so I'm looking forward to continuing to help her do that. But my point is, she's experiencing this loss and gaining a part of her future by starting as soon as possible. I don't know if today's episode is solely focused on that one point alone, because I'm not very prepared this week because of all these missing items that I don't have with me. I don't have my microphone. I actually packed my podcasting gear, and when I got here, there was an entire piece of equipment missing, and I couldn't plug anything in. I actually have a microphone, and I couldn't plug it in. So, anyway, again, I'm proud of my sister and taking action and moving while grieving. I think that's so important. When I was getting the divorce, or actually when my wife said she wanted the divorce, it was the very next day, I went to the courthouse and initiated it. And I told her. I called her up and I said, I just wanted to let you know that I initiated the divorce. And she said, what? She said what? You did? And I said, yeah. I mean, isn't that what you want? She said, well, yeah, I didn't think it was going to be so soon. And I asked her, well, do you want to work things out? Do you want to try again? And she said, well, no, that's what happened. So I told her, well, then I guess this is how we move forward. But I did that. And here's what I'm trying to say. I did that because in my previous relationships, when I broke up, I just. They left and I just sat there. I became depressed. I just got sad. And so I stay sad. I stayed sad the whole time for months, and sitting there, hoping they would come back to me, and they never did. So I went through enough breakups in my life to realize that it's worse to grieve with no movement. I think grieving is important. I endorse grieving. It's supposed to be part of how we get through and process and come to a new understanding of a new perception of how things are going to be and feel better. It's all a release process, Releasing the negativity about the whole thing so you can move forward. I'm not saying you have to release everything. I'm just saying it's just all the processing we have to do. The grieving is important. Let's wait for this big vehicle to go by. And when I decided to get the divorce and move forward, I had something to do. It gave me something to do. And that process of something to do helped with the grieving as well, because it wasn't all grieving and no movement. It was grieving and movement. And while I grieved, actually, a couple months after I got a divorce, I Traveled across the U.S. five states. Not five states. Five days. Five days. And like however many states it took to get from Oregon to New Hampshire, I traveled that whole five days with my cat, my best friend, and we had a wonderfully spiritual, enlightening, peaceful, comfortable grieving trip. And that's what I mean is the grieving and the movement together helps to process it. The whole thing helps to process everything you're going through. Because sitting in the grief and thinking and reflecting and just thinking about what you lost all the time, then 24 7, if that's all you're doing, then the processing takes so much longer, in my opinion, from what I've been through. I mean, everyone processes grief differently. Everyone grieves differently. So don't listen to me. Just take this into your thought process that if you were sad about something, if you were working through something, if you lost someone, just remember that moving forward is a processing part of the grief as well. The moving, the movement, the momentum that you can get. Because if you're not moving, you're not getting momentum. And if you're not getting momentum, you're just stuck in a space. When you're stuck in a space, you're surrounded by nothing but negativity and grief in your. In yourself, the thoughts, the emotions, you're just absorbed by them. Or you can be just absorbed by them. So, again, I'm proud of my sister. I'm so glad that she's moving forward while grieving. I'm so glad that we could be here to help her. And other family members are also helping and doing what they can. My wife and I are in a position to. I mean, it was crazy. We got the call, and like, a couple days later, we are on the road. We literally dropped everything and came here, and I dropped my podcasting equipment. Not in. Not literally, but I didn't bring it with me, which is why you hear this kind of sound quality. So this part of. This part of the episode is, I think, complete like we can look at grief, we can look at loss as something we can sit in, sit on, sit with. But we need to balance it, we need to move forward with it in some way. And that might mean getting out that document or taking that trip or finding the stuff that you were looking for because you know you need to deal with it. Like some of the stuff that my sister is getting rid of was very personal to her and very personal about her husband. Some of his clothes, I think all of his clothes were removed from the house. That might sound strange to somebody listening right now. Why would she do that? Because every time she saw it, she thought of him and she went into this dark space. She didn't like it. So she wanted to move forward, she wanted to take action. And she told me today that's what she is doing. She is staying busy and she knows it's going to catch up with her. This isn't about skipping the grieving or staying in denial or anything like that. She knows it's going to catch up, but she also knows that she can get a lot done right now while she's in that space because it will, it will give her incentive to move forward as well. Grieving is an incentive. It can be. Grieving can also be a reason to stagnate, a reason to, or at least I'm not going to say an excuse, but a justifiable validation for stagnation. Like if you aren't moving because you're grieving or you're sad or you're depressed, it's a justified, valid reason that you have. If you feel that way, it's hard to move forward. I remember my first breakup after my. I had a long term girlfriend for about 13 years. And after we broke up I stayed in grief mode for months and I became depressed because I kept spiraling downward about what I lost and hoping it would come back. You know, my relationship, she would come back. And I remember the very first thing I did to move forward wasn't even something, well, practical and productive. It was practicing a song on my guitar. That's all I did. It was a song I heard someone play as a classical piece and I heard him play it and I said, wow, I really love that piece. And when I hear it, it saddens me and it uplifts me. And it brought so much emotion to me that it was a step out of depression. And that's what I loved about it. It was connecting with me at a deep emotional level. And so I committed to learning that song. And I've been playing that song. Wow. It's been, let's see, 2005, 2015, 21 years. I've been playing that song for 21 years. And every single time I play it, I feel it. I think about. About that time when I was going through that depression, that sadness, that unable to let go feeling. And learning that song helped me gain traction. It helped me. Whoa. Unexpected. I don't even know if that was a siren. Oh, it was. There they go. Learning that song really started to heal me. It didn't take me out of my depression fully. I still was in grieving mode. I was also in. I was starting to get deeper into depression. But I think that's what kept me going was learning that song was doing something musically productive, creatively productive. It got me moving forward and it kept me moving forward. And then eventually I met the woman who would be my wife and I had a breakdown in front of her. That's a different story. Shared another episode. And the breakdown also helped because I got in touch with my anger and my hatred. And there were steps that I took to move myself out of depression. But it all involved taking forward steps and allowing myself to feel things that I really never allowed myself to feel. For most of my life, all of my life, I never allowed myself to feel hatred and anger. I buried it. And I think I remember having a temper tantrum as a kid. And that temper tantrum is something that adults can have too. It can just bust out of us because we hold onto something for so long that it finally releases. It finally has to get out. The pressure point is just so high. That pressure cooker valve opens up and it's gone. It's out. And when it's out, it can be destructive. And I remember just not wanting to show anger, show negativity. Learn that from my mom. Always the people pleaser. Never wanting to. What's the word? Evoke. Drunk dad behavior. What I call drunk dad behavior because my stepfather was a very violent, abusive drunk. And so I learned these people pleasing skills, if you want to call them that, that caused me to be conflict averse. And that conflict aversion lasted with me for a long time. And that caused me to never show anger. If you never show anger when you're angry, where does it go? You feel it. It's inside you. If you are the type of person who has gotten angry and not been able to express it in a productive, expressive way. Yeah, I mean express it in expressive way. If you have not been able to emote it verbally or With a train whistle or whatever. Utilizing my environment here. If you have not been able to get it out of your system, then it stays in your system, it stays there. And if it's staying there, then it comes out later in other ways, passive aggressive ways. Surprising triggers that just come out of the blue because somebody ticked you off and you couldn't handle it. Even though they may have only done it once, it may not have been a buildup. I think I better wait for the train whistle to stop here. But really takes you out of the flow of conversation here. Very grateful for train whistles. They are great warning signals. Allowing it to be. Allowing it to happen. This is something else I've learned. And I'm just going to kind of conclude today's episode because I can't continue recording on my laptop and hoping that the battery stays charged up and all that. Utilizing and going with the flow of things is like telling your resistance to take a break. Telling your resistance to take a break means if you are trying to get something accomplished and there's an interruption like there just was. This is off the cuff, but this is how you go with the flow and tell your resistance to take a break. Because I could resist it and say, oh man, come on, I'm going to stop recording and I'll just wait for this to pass me by. But I decided to go with the flow, allow it to be. Make it part of the recording and kind of finish the show with it. And I'll circle back to where we started in a moment. But this is part of life. We're going to get interrupted. We're going to have imperfect moments and we're going to have loss. We're going to have loss and we're going to find ways to get through it. This is the challenge, right? We find ways to get through it. And one of the ways that I've been practicing for at least 20 years now is that when the resistance comes up, then instead of sitting in that resistance, instead of sitting with that resistance, I transform the resistance into forward momentum, into progress, into some sort of action, step forward. Because if you can't do what you want to do, then you have to do something else. Or you could just sit there and maybe complain. Damn train whistle. Or you could say, that's life. That's what happens. This is the kind of stuff that will continue to happen for the rest of my life. I will experience interruptions, I will experience imperfect moments. I will experience loss. And I will be okay. Because once we pass that problem or challenge, we're fine. I remember being homeless. That was a huge challenge. And at first, it was a lot of resistance. In fact, the most resistance I've ever experienced is before I went bankrupt many, many years ago, did not want to do it. And the more resistance I gave it, the worse it felt. And then when I finally let go and I finally decided to do it, I felt great. I was able to get through that moment. And believe me, I'm the kind of guy who says, no, I'm loyal, I'm committed. I will pay my bills. But it was overwhelming, and I couldn't do it. It was the mortgage crisis, and I was losing a condo, and there were so many things going on. I lost my job. My wife at the time, lost her job. We went through the hardest times. Not harder than a lot of other people, but very hard times. We didn't have a place to live. And I resisted, resisted and resisted. And I finally said, that's it. I'm done. I'm going to let go. As soon as I let go, I felt better. So what? I'm broke. I'll figure it out. I'll go to the soup kitchen. And that's what we did. We went to the soup kitchen. We slept in her mom's apartment, and we found ways to get through it. And times like that remind me that as long as I'm alive on the other side of all that, as long as I make it through, then everything is fine. Because I'm still here. And sometimes we lose people. And sometimes we are the ones left behind. And that doesn't mean it's all bad. It just means we have more left to go. We have more time. And if we take that time and utilize it and take action and move forward, just like the people that we've lost might want us to do, or maybe they don't. Some people just leave us because they don't like us. It happens. Some people don't want us in their life anymore. But we shouldn't stew about it. We shouldn't just sit there thinking, well, I'm terrible. I'm worthless. I'm not lovable. That's not it at all. Some people just move on. And sometimes we move on. And we have to. We always have to move on. To my sister, if you ever hear this, I love you. And I want you to have the most amazing life. And I want the best for you and your kids. And wherever you end up, I will support that. And I will do everything I can to help you through it. And I just want you to Be happy. That is how I define love. When you love somebody, you just want them to be happy, even if their happiness doesn't include you. My sisters includes me. That's just how we operate here in our family. We love each other, but some people, you know, they don't want to include us in their life. So we let them go and we can love them even though they don't want to be with us. So a lot of subjects I'm kind of conflating here and I apologize about that because I'm not as organized as possible. So I'm gonna leave it here. I appreciate you listening today. Thank you for listening to another episode of the Overwhelmed Brain. I want to thank today's patrons, Shannon, Angel, Crystal, Brad, Ashley and Stephen. And I am so appreciative of your support so I can continue doing this show and especially in times like this. Thank you again, patrons. I appreciate each and every one of you. If you value the show like these patrons do and you want to give back, head over to MoreToB.com there are options to do that over there. And for a show on how to navigate the difficult relationship, listen to my other podcast called Love and abuse over@loveandabuse.com and you can listen to the show over there. If you are the difficult person in the relationship, the one I often talk about@loveandabuse.com and you want to change that about yourself. If you are the one who is controlling or manipulative or maybe you don't know if you are, head over to healedbeing.com and figure it out. That's my program over there that helps people change and heal their emotionally abusive behaviors. Again, that's over@HealedBeing.com and with that, again, thank you for joining me. Thank you for taking the time to listen to this lower quality, at least audio wise episode today. Just remember to always keep your mind open because that's how you make the best decisions and be firm in your decisions and actions so that you can create the life you want. Always take steps to grow and evolve. You are powerful beyond measure and above all, and this is something I absolutely know to be true about you. You are amazing. Sa.