Transcript

Hi and welcome to the Somatic Coaching Academy podcast. Hey, Brian. Hey on, get your formal wear on today I formal I’m wearing your on your black t shirt, black tie, black t shirt. How are you? This is the closest I’m going to get to a black tie in black T-shirt. I’m doing well. How are you? I’m good. I’m really good.

What’s up? What are we talking about today? All right, so, hey, you know, I thought we chat about a topic that was occurred to me a few weeks ago, actually, when I was traveling, and I had an experience, and I thought that would be kind of interesting to talk about. Okay. And so the the idea is, is let’s just kind of maybe unlock maybe a little key to better tolerating unpleasant situations.

This is about the moose. No, that’s a whole different thing. Oh, really? No, no, this is a different one. Yeah. Oh, okay. Maybe we’ll do a different podcast on how I almost hit a moose in the middle of the night, in the dark, on a deserted main road. Okay. No, this was this is a different situation. Okay, okay.

Wait. What did you say? What did you say the topic was? How to better tolerate unpleasant feeling situations. Okay, okay. Yeah. So we all experience unpleasant situations from time to time, right? Holidays with extended family, perhaps. What the heck? Gravel. Travel with your children. What? Know there’s that funny. You know, there’s this. We love Jim Gaffigan talked about the time on vacation with his kids, just fighting somewhere else.

Yeah. Jerry. Jerry Seinfeld as a bit too. Like, our favorite thing to laugh at is so funny. Good stuff. So, you know, or, like, work, state parties at work or work meetings, like, we all have unpleasant situations that we have to deal with from time to time, and sometimes they feel more intense. Right? Really unpleasant. And so I was having this experience.

I was in California a few weeks ago and I was teaching in the LA area, but I flew in a couple of days early and I drove up to the sequoias. I had never hiked in the sequoias before. And by the way, that was mind blowing. The size of those trees is just otherworldly. I mean, I know other people have seen this occasionally, like, yeah, yeah, yeah, Brian, but the first time you see a tree that big, it’s really you don’t even know how to compute it in your brain.

And then you see lots of trees that big and it’s you just start taking pictures of all the really big trees, and you realize how many big tree pictures can I take? Because I’m pictures. They all look like normal size. Well, you sent them to me and I was like, you know, no big deal. But then you did that video where you videoed yourself walking towards the tree, and you just kept getting smaller and smaller and smaller a little.

And I was like, whoa. Yeah, it’s pretty crazy. Like the scale of trees is just amazing. Anyway, so if you’ve ever been to Sequoia National Park and you enter in through the south entrance because the northern entrance is through Kings Canyon, but the south entrance is through Sequoia National Park, there’s a road that you have to drive up and it is nauseating.

Windy. It’s a 16 mile road that you gain about 5000ft of elevation in 16 miles, and it’s like hairpin turns. Climbing up and up in the scenery is amazing, but it is if you’ve got any car kind of a stimulus stuff at all, it’s like it’s just nauseating. And you’re climbing at about, I don’t know, you’re only going like ten miles an hour or 50 miles an hour, but it’s like turn after turn after turn, and then you’re on the size of cliffs and, you know, so again, the views are amazing, but it is just like it’s disturbing just listening to you.

So the first day. So I was there for two days. In the first day I was driving up this road and I was like, when is this ever going to end it, just because you’re just climbing and climbing? And by the way, you’re not seeing any big trees yet. You’re seeing a lot of vistas of the Sierras and the valley down below.

And it’s just it’s beautiful. But like, where are the big trees? Like, what am I going to get to them? Because you come in the gate of the park and you don’t get to big trees for like an hour, driving up this like, nauseating winding road that has a lot of traffic on it and stuff, too, because a lot of people in the park, which, you know, that’s that’s just par for the course with national parks.

But the first day I’m driving up at, I’m like, when is this ever going to end? And it was it was pretty unpleasant. It was pretty unpleasant. And I was really I wanted to hike in the trees, but I was getting kind of like just sick to my stomach and like, just. And plus you’re going up an altitude that fast to.

Yeah. So that that can also add to the nauseating ness of the situation. My sinuses are kind of popping and my ears are plugged and all that kind of thing. And, and and so I got up into the trees and was blown away. I hiked like all day that day. Hiked like 12 miles along the Sierra Trail and through the Sierra.

It was just through the sequoias. It was amazing. And my plan was, was to go back up again the next morning to hike for half of the day and then drive down to LA to teach. And so after you drive up that road, you got to drive back down the road. And so driving down it was it was also challenging, but for different reasons.

It wasn’t as nauseating going down. But my legs were so tired and I had this like eight tip spasm. That happens. It was like hard to like put my foot on the brake, on and off and on and off and on and off and on and off. And that’s a little going steep downhill. I’m like, wow. So anyway, so I get to the bottom of the hill, I stay in a hotel, and then I’m like, do I really want to go up tomorrow?

I’m like, well, I’m here. And I’ve always wanted to be here. So obviously I’m going to go up again tomorrow. So I got up very early and I started driving up the road again, and at first couple of turns I’m like, oh, but you know what? It wasn’t so bad because I knew when it was going to end.

So I knew after about 45 minutes the the winding was going to stop and I was going to come into the trees after about 45 minutes. And so even though I was still experiencing some of the same sensations of kind of like, you know, insistent unpleasantness, I knew it was going to I knew it was going to end at a certain point in time.

And I realized, isn’t that interesting, that I’m experiencing the same sensations, but I’m not as attached to them now because I know, I know when they’re going to end. Right. And so it occurred to me that there’s a the confluence of unpleasantness and uncertainty. Yeah, yeah, is so much a different dynamic than the confluence of unpleasantness and certainty.

Yeah. With uncertainty. It makes the whole experience so much worse. The sensations are so, so heightened. Right. So that’s that’s what I wanted to kind of chat about, because you might find yourself in a, in a situation that’s really unpleasant. And here’s the thing with the subconscious mind, right? Is the subconscious mind. We’ve talked about this in other podcast doesn’t tell time.

So the subconscious mind is programed to, I guess, assume or believe that whatever you’re experiencing right now in the moment is how it’s going to be forever. And so when you experience unpleasantness, like right now, it’s very easy. It’s easy to go to your your conscious mind, affirming your subconscious belief that it’s going to be like this forever.

I mean, so have you ever been in a had unpleasantness and you’re like, and it’s so intense because you’re like, oh my God, like this. It’s going to be like this forever. Well, actually, I think my mind goes to really persevering on when is it going to end. So it might have the assumption that it’s going to last forever, but when is it going to end?

Is the predominant thought pattern right. Yeah. And so that’s when is this going to end. Yeah. So it’s kind of like the same. Yeah I get you and I’m like I’m kind of I think they’re the same kind of facets of the same kind of thing. I’m also kind of thinking about last spring when when Wyatt, our son, was, had a bacterial infection in his lungs and he, he went to the E.R. to have a, have a chest x ray.

And after the x ray, they threw him into isolation in the hospital and basically locked the door and said, you can’t leave because you might have TB. And we have to we have to rule that out. And that’s going to take a few days because it was over the weekend. And so I drove down there to be with him.

And he’s like, when is this going to end? He was in isolation that it was during finals, and he had a trip coming up to Australia that he wanted to be able to go on, which he’s gone on, which is great. But for him it was the same thing. It was like, when is this going to be? When is this going to be over?

Just know when it’s over. It’s almost like it becomes more tolerable. I’ll tell you exactly what I’m thinking about when you’re talking about unpleasant situations. I’m thinking about when the kids were a little younger and they would eat their food and get up from the table every single time we had a meal and not grab their dishes to do their dishes, even though they were old enough to do their dishes.

And so the thought in my mind was, it was so uncomfortable for me. It was like just the most uncomfortable part of the day, for whatever reason. And so the thought was, when is this ever going to end? And day after day it would get more unpleasant because I was like, this has got to end, this has got to stop.

And they’re too old to still be doing this. And so the thing that finally brought me peace was actually to flip it on myself and to say, this is never going to end, because what that did was it gave me a certainty. I just hit on your okay. So it gave me a certainty to be able to cling to, to be able to tolerate the unpleasant sensations, because then every single day when I showed up, I knew that the expectation was it was never going to be over.

Right? Yeah, yeah, it was, to be honest, kind of fair. Because as the person in the house who is most likely to notice when dishes are being left around, even though the house is full of it’s now, dishes are still left around. Sometimes it’s just like what I noticed. So it actually really makes sense. It doesn’t bother me anymore.

It’s not pleasant anymore. I know that for the rest of my life, I’m going to be a person who recognizes that there’s dishes laying around, you know? But it’s that certainty around the ending that allowed me to relax, right? Yeah. So that’s kind of the punchline. And so we’re going to wrap back around to that. The subconscious kind of we have to remember in its programing it has some it has a binary nature.

It’s like is this thing a threat or is it safe. Right. So that’s a lot of the way the subconscious kind of just moves through the world. Is it is it safe? It needs to know if there’s a threat and is this going to stop? Uncertainty is really always a threat to the subconscious, right. Because certainty is safety and uncertainty is a threat.

So if you’re kind of thinking about the binary nature of the subconscious processing, those uncertainty, uncertainty kind of fit right into that binary framework, as uncertainty almost always is a threat for the subconscious, which makes sense because the subconscious is job is to run the show on patterns over and over and over again. So anything that comes in is like, whoa, yeah, anything unpredictable, anything that’s out of out of control.

And so for me, driving up the winding road, the unpleasantness was building and growing. And there was a part of me that was like, just just stop the car. Just and like, get out or drive back down. It’s not worth it. Like, yeah, that kind of stuff. So there’s the subconscious is going to try to convince your conscious mind to escape the situation.

It’s not worth it is such a huge one. When you recognize that you’re thinking something’s not worth it, check and see. Is this something I’ve been working towards? And is my subconscious mind trying to convince me to stop? I mean, you had a great time in this. Oh, it was amazing. And it was really important to actually to go hiking, not just to go hiking there, but you had a great experience going hiking by yourself like you had such a wonderful time.

So it makes sense. The subconscious is like, hang on a second, not worth it. It’s such a classic. Yeah. So think about you know, think about for yourselves the family dinners that you’ve been at that are just like really important. And you’re like, oh my god. Like is this ever going to end? Like, when is this going to be over?

Or the meetings that you’ve been in that are like, oh my God, this is ever going to be over like and think about how as you as you go on in that experience, if the as the pressure builds, the subconscious is like, just get out of here, just get out of here, it forces you to try to convince you just to escape.

Yeah, just to get away from it. It’s only until 8:00 or whatever, like, and that, you know then that your subconscious is reading it as a threat because it’s it’s kind of like gearing you to get out of there to escape from there sort of thing. And, and that’s as and that’s as the unpleasantness. But here’s the other thing.

It’s the unpleasantness doesn’t necessarily you can be in a situation where whatever you believe is causing the pleasant ness, that’s not actually getting worse. What’s happening is you’re sensitizing more to it because of the uncertainty. Right? Again, like me driving up the road, the road wasn’t getting windier. It was still just as windy the whole way. But it was.

But as I’m going up, it was getting more and more unpleasant because I didn’t know when it was going to end and get more sensitive, so the stimulus wasn’t any different. My my sensitivity to it was different. The uncertainty because of the uncertainty. Yeah, yeah. Which is hilarious because uncertainty really is like the only thing that’s happening, like there’s just that is the world.

The world is uncertain, but we try to make it or we try to think that we can make it as certain as possible. Well, we do we do try to make it as certain as possible again, because that brings some level of safety. And and in some ways our subconscious needs that. So it’s always trying to orient itself around what it can depend on, what it can count on what’s happening.

And this is actually a functional tool you can employ when you find yourself in situations that are extremely unpleasant, just like you did. You employed the idea of certainty, right? I would say, though, probably if we were going to go kind of like bottom up with this, because employing certainty uses your conscious brain function. And if you’re overwhelmed by sensory unpleasantness is going to be very, very difficult to wrestle your cognitive, your conscious brain out to help you figure out how to make it certain, right?

Yeah, it’s probably awful because of the sensory flooding that happens. So if we’re starting to just kind of tap into what are some what are some keys that you can employ in situations that are unpleasant, tell if you regain control and to help you have them feel less pleasant and more certain. I think some of the first steps are how we basically talk about get centered, right?

So things like, you know, centered breathing is one that people use a lot of. And here’s the trick with standard breathing is that tap into the sensations of the breathing. When when you’re experiencing unpleasantness, it’s really important when you come at it from a somatic level or a sensory based level, to inject another sensation into the experience. Yeah, right.

And so let me back off from the breathing for a second and just share kind of what I did when I was driving up the road. So one thing you can do is you can actually inject a stimulus that is also unpleasant but not as unpleasant. So what I did. So as I’m driving up the road, I’m starting to feel nauseous.

And those kinds of things. What I did was I took my fingernails. Yeah. And I dug my fingernails into my fingertips as I’m driving so that I felt something very sharp in my fingers, which isn’t necessarily pleasant, but it was enough to flood my nervous system with an alternate stimulus that then I would not continue to key on to and make the and then make the nausea even worse.

More certainty, because nausea like, I don’t know what’s going to happen with this. Right. And I had more certainty because I was causing the stimulus. So I’m gaining certainty by giving myself another unpleasant stimulus that I was I was in control of. And that really helped to just like, stabilize how I was feeling internally helped me feel more focused, more grounded, more present, all that kind of stuff.

So that may sound kind of funny, but, you know, there was a joke when we were a kid. If you’re if your foot hurts, hit your hand with a hammer and you won’t notice your foot anymore. It’s kind of the same kind of thing, but it’s something you’re in control of. So you can so you can evoke a stimulus that is also unpleasant but not as unpleasant.

So you can do that. A neutral one would be something like a, like a centering breath. But here’s the trick with the centering breath, breathe deeply enough where you feel the expansion of your diaphragm and lungs so that you’re also not only fueling your system with all the stuff that breath does, like, you know, oxygen, carbon dioxide exchange, all that sort of stuff.

But you’re feeling your ribs expand and you’re feeling your diaphragm contract because again, now you are flooding your nervous system with a sensory cue or marker that you have control over that actually is going to feel more grounding. Another one that I did too, was just I just felt my butt on the on the chair of the, of the car as I’m driving.

And that again helped me feel grounded and centered. So I was looking for sensory cues that helped me feel more stabilized, that I was in control of the advanced. The advanced level of this work, of course, is to find a kind of pleasant valence sensation, or even the opposite sensation of what you’re experiencing and sink into that. So now you’re flooding your nervous system with a sensory experience that is not unpleasant at all.

Right. So but that’s like that’s that’s high level because. Yeah, because for a lot of people, I mean I’ve experienced this. The subconscious mind just won’t tolerate it because it’s like yeah right. Yeah. You know. Yeah. So that’s why I usually go to is to find something that feels a little also unpleasant, but not as unpleasant. That can usually get your attention, but it’s something you’re in control of and you have certainty around or a neutral kind of sensation, like feeling feet on the ground, like when I’ve been in meetings or even in conversations with us.

Ani that that or feel highly charged or dysregulated, I’ll just I’ll just check in on my feet. Yeah. Once in a while. It does. Yeah. So what were difficult conversations like? I’ll just check into my feet, in my legs. So I feel very present and I don’t want to just run out the door, find out all these things about you on the podcast.

You know, I never knew, never knew. This never happened to me. Never happened to you at all. I’m talking to you, okay? Never happen to you. Yeah. So if you see me pinching my fingernails during my conversation, we’re having. You know, I’m just trying. I’m really trying. I’m really trying to be present and pay attention, and I want to run away.

So you got that? Great. And then. And then once, once you’ve kind of sensory stabilized, then like drawing in what you did around finding certainty like because uncertainty is the threat. So what is it that you can be certain about. There’s always something. Yeah. So you got to find it. Yeah. So for you it was this is never going to end and I’m certain about that.

And it helped actually kind of like so much peace. Yeah. It brought me so much peace. Which kind of probably feels a little paradoxical, right. Yeah. Because people might be listening to. How could that bring you peace if you if you’re admitting but just claiming the certainty around it reduces the threat, that’s amplifying the unpleasantness because I kept looking for it to end.

Yes, exactly. You know, and the other thing you can kind of tell yourself, which sometimes doesn’t work very well, but I’m just going to put it out. There is no that. No, like, you could be certain that no sensory experience lasts. Lasts forever. Last forever. Yeah, yeah. No sensory experience last forever. So sensory and pleasant. It’s not going to last forever.

And you can be certain about that because nothing lasts forever. I use that when I’m sick. Actually. It brings me a lot of peace cause it’s unpleasant, whatever the illness is. But I know it’s not going to last forever. Like it’s just going to be either a few hours or a few days. It really just settles all a lot of the unpleasantness.

Yeah, just claiming that. Listen, I’m certain this isn’t going to last forever. Yeah, I know it’s not going to last forever. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So so just kind of resource and think about and find things in whatever situation that you find yourself that’s unpleasant, that you can be certain about. And what that will do is even if you’re still experiencing the unpleasant sensations, it creates detachment from them.

Right. Because you’re like, oh, like, this is something that I can watch happen. Rather, it doesn’t feel like it’s me happening, right? Instead of instead of it feels like it’s happening to you. You kind of separate yourself from it and go, oh, wow, I’m watching this happen in my field of experience. And we can become more a witness kind of perspective from it and create some distance from it.

When we find something in the situation to really be certain of it. Yeah, that’s really the key, because when we feel like it’s us, there’s like nothing you can do about it. Yeah. Some of that detachment to be able to, to remedy it. Yeah. And that’s a trick to it. So, you know, use the sensory start at that sensory level to disrupt whatever it is that’s going on with the unpleasant sensations.

Know that your subconscious mind is probably trending towards that question of when is this going to end? Is it going to go on forever? There’s uncertainty about it that’s going to amplify the difficult sensations around that. So that’s why you want to pull in your own sensory flooding of your choice, which you have control over, and then kind of flip into the idea of what can I be certain about in dealing with this situation or what’s going on?

And that can be a really powerful key to helping you deal with unpleasant situations. Yeah, that’s really great, Brian. And hey, if this episode spoke to you, share it with somebody who makes you feel unpleasant. Just kidding. I couldn’t help myself so that when they see you pinching your fingernails into your skin, they know that you are really trying to be present with them.

Exactly. We all want to feel understood. I’m kidding. Share with a friend who needs to hear it too. And we’ll see you next week on the podcast. Bye bye.