Welcome to the Bloom Your Mind podcast, where we take all of your ideas for what you want, and we turn them into real things. I'm your host, certified coach Marie McDonald. Let's get into it.
Hello, my beautiful friends, and welcome to episode number 89 of the Bloom Your Mind podcast.
Have you ever had a phone call where the signal starts to fade, like you can't quite hear each other and it's a little bit patchy, and you say to each other, like you start, the call starts breaking up. That's the language that we generally use these days to describe this. Well, my friends incessantly tease me about this because I have a pet peeve, such a pet peeve for when people, when the signal starts breaking up and now it's happening over Zoom, of course, in the last whatever five years or whatever, when we've transitioned through COVID and in all the other ways into working with each other remotely, it's both Wi-Fi and cell phones where we're dependent on these invisible signals that are connecting us.
And sometimes our conversations are weirdly interrupted in the middle of whatever we are talking about, oftentimes at very inopportune times, and I have this pet peeve when other people start shouting, you're breaking up, you're breaking up. I mean, it just makes me laugh, but I'm also like chill the heck out man, like when someone starts getting really worked up about it. But most specifically, when they blame the other person, it really cracks me up, instead of saying we're breaking up or I'm breaking up or the signal's breaking up.
Just notice how many people assign responsibility for the signal not working to the other person. And yes, we all look down and often we all have all the bars, or our internet has worked all day right. So, we feel like we are probably not the responsible one, unless it's that rare time where we realize it is us right. But most of the time you will notice that people default to us blaming the other person. You're breaking up, you're frozen, you're breaking up, you're frozen, and it really cracks me up.
So, I thought I would start on the podcast with that today, because I've gotten teased a lot about it by my friends because, of course, whenever on their phone I've made fun of myself. Enough now for having this pet peeve that now, if the signal goes bad, they immediately yell you're breaking up at me, so that it makes me laugh really hard and then it interrupts our call twice as much, because now I'm laughing about them yelling at me.
That's my little intro for you today. Something very amusing to me about current technology and as our culture adapts to all these weird ways that we communicate with each other. You know, our culture shifts, our manners shift, and that's a pretty funny, entertaining one to me. So today the real meat of our conversation is about hiding.
I was at this beautiful live event, which I have referenced, a couple episodes ago with Melissa Tiers, and one of the things that she talked about when she was on stage she's this hypnotist from New York who I was certified with in hypnosis and coaching the unconscious mind and integrative change work and neuroplasticity, and so I follow her. I've attended many trainings recently, most recently hypnosis for pain relief. I've learned a lot from her, and one of the things that she talked about that has just been sitting in my head, sort of bouncing around for the last few weeks, is about hiding and the physical symptoms that accompany hiding.
I even learned about psychoneuroimmunology, which is a study to describe the interactions between our emotional state and our nervous system, and how great stress and our psychological turmoil can actually really impact our immunity. I've talked about this on the podcast before, but all of these ideas weave together to create these real, fundamental stories around how hiding things or not being in integrity with ourselves creates a lot pretty much all of the discomfort and strife that we feel in our lives.
And as I thought about this over the last few weeks, I've not only seen these like tears of my own work, dismantling things that I was taught to hide from when I was a very young girl like I almost died from it at one point in my life from that level and healing that to these other huge levels I've had three tiers of it, which I'll share quickly today but also through my work with all of my clients.
I find that this is the core of our work. The core of our work is finding where we're not in tune, where we're not in integrity with ourselves. What are we trying to do? To fit into a group, to a relationship, to expectations at work, to a culture, versus be true to ourselves and belong to the spaces that we're a part of because we are ourselves and totally safe and comfortable being ourselves and within our culture?
A patriarchal culture, a capitalist culture, a white supremacist culture? For you know, all of these things that have created all of these hierarchies and power structures and systems that have created, how we've all been socialized. We've learned to hide a lot of ourselves and for each of us, depending on which groups we fit into, what our ethnicity is, what our sexual orientation and gender orientation all of these things, what they are, and what kinds of groups we grew up in and are socialized by this is different for each of us.
But and it is the core work that I see in all of my clients, even when we think that we're talking about something very, very different what we find is, in our work, we're uncovering what every individual truly wants under the surface of all the things they're supposed to want, or what each person really knows they should do, knows they should do, because that should is coming from, it's what they want, it's what is true for them, it is what is in line with their value system. We're uncovering that by digging through the layers of what everybody else thinks they should do, what all their expectations of them are, what they've been socialized to do, and that is the work.
And so today I wanted to talk a little bit about these interesting anecdotes that have really described this. So, Melissa Tiers, while I was at this event, she was talking about how she used to have debilitating migraines and since then I've talked to a couple of psychologists about this and they've really talked about the example of the migraine and how fascinating it is as a bridge between the psychological experience of people and the physical experience of people.
So, Melissa Tiers talked about how she's had these migraines, and she used to have them for years and years and years and she tried every different way of relieving the pain in her migraines. Relieving the pain in her migraines she tried everything. She could not get relief until eventually she sued. Through this study of psycho neuro immunology, she found this idea that maybe she needs to express emotion.
So, she started doing all kinds of practices to relieve emotion, express emotion, process emotion. She used EFT, which I use sometimes with my clients. It's a great technique to process emotion. Eventually she got through enough of these stored emotions. She processed enough and talked through enough of the experience she's had that her migraines started to go away. And now she never gets migraines. And here's the key If she begins to feel the tiniest twinge of the onset of a migraine, she immediately looks for where she's bullshitting.
She immediately looks for where she is not being true to herself, where she's hiding how she really feels where she's hanging out with somebody that she doesn't actually want to hang out with, where she's being nice and not saying that something doesn't sit right with her, and immediately she blurts it out and says it and then her migraine symptoms go away.
And this is so true, right For so many of my clients and has been true in my own life, that when we are hiding something, when we are incongruent or inauthentic or out of integrity with who we really are, we have discomfort, either physical or in other ways. For me, my symptoms are anxiety, depression, overworking and over-focusing on whoever is upset, that was my old trauma response was fawning.
So, when I am out of integrity with myself, my signals to myself are when I'm working too much, I'm like oh wait, a minute, what am I out of integrity with? Or if I start to feel some anxiety or I start to feel some depression of integrity with, or if I start to feel some anxiety or I start to feel some depression, I'll pause and say how am I out of integrity? What am I saying yes to? That's actually a no. What am I allowing? What type of behavior from someone else am I allowing in my sphere, in my world, in my life. That is actually not okay with me. That's crossing a boundary. Where am I not holding my boundary?
If I'm over-focusing on someone else that is angry or upset or having a hard time, I just slow down and say, oh, I'm out of integrity here, what's going on? Where do I need to step away? Take space, say no, leave. These are my symptoms. These are how I know I'm out of integrity. I don't get migraines; I get those other things. So, I've experienced this three times in my life. I'm going to quickly tell you about those in case any of them help you identify where you might be out of integrity in your own life.
And then I'm going to talk about the signs that you can look for to see if there's anywhere that you're out of integrity. And, of course, I just want to say that this isn't a one-time thing. I think we go through the major experience of figuring out when we're really out of integrity, what's going on, and unraveling that, and then we start to understand what the flags are, like I just described for you. You can see what your flags are and there'll be constant tweaks and many adjustments, but once you're really out of the woods and get back in integrity with yourself, life is sweet.
I find that the work that I do is of so much integrity I can't wait to do it all day. I love seeing my clients. I love working on my podcast. I love working on my podcast. I love working in my group. I love the work that I do. It is my true passion. It's me giving my gifts to the world and I just feel called to it every day. This is how I can serve the world with my family and my friends.
I can't wait to see them when I get off of work, because we communicate with integrity, because they are my people right. So, when we do the work of getting back in integrity, life becomes very, very sweet and it becomes easy to see the things that are not an integrity, that are standing out, that are red flags. They become very, very clear, those relationships that are not in integrity.
So the first time that I experienced the huge shift was in my early 20s, where I had gone through my entire early life doing exactly what I was supposed to doing just getting all the good grades, going straight into college out of high school, being the president of the school, being the homecoming queen, you know, doing just meeting every expectation of myself. And then I went into college, and I developed a huge eating disorder, doing everything that I was supposed to do and not saying no and speaking the truth.
In all of these formative years and all through my early twenties and late teens, when I saw things happening or experienced things happening to me that I did not speak out about, that were wrong. It created a huge lack of integrity inside myself, and it turned into me developing an eating disorder and getting really, really sick to the point where I almost lost my life.
I've said this a couple of times, but I got as close as you can get, and I started over at that time. I just started over and I sort of gave up and said, okay, I'm going to relearn how to be human in my early twenties and I started from scratch and I just built my brain back up from the foundations because I realized I was just way out of integrity and I had gotten too far, too far down that path and that felt really good for most of my twenties and thirties.
And then in my late thirties I was very successful in my career but experienced burnout to an extreme degree and that was the second time where I was out of line, out of integrity, on a different level. It wasn't the foundational level of my values and speaking my truth, but it was overwork and overvaluing meeting the expectations of work, and I had to revamp everything.
I recreated my career, I recreated what I spend my days doing, what I trade the hours of my life that are work for, and that lightened everything. And then I went through a third level of this where it became like Melissa Tiers. So, once I had cleared out that real baseline, which is like my core value system, and then I cleared out that second one, which was kind of work and over service and meeting people's expectations.
The third one became just every day, all the time, saying no to anything that doesn't feel right, saying no to relationships that didn't feel right. You can listen to the episode the freedom of a hard no. I really started practicing hella boundaries, saying no to anything that wasn't a hell yes. And when that happened, everything shifted.
My whole life just started being filled up with this joy that I used to feel all the time as a girl, just this joy of life walking around in a body in the world. Once I cleared out that third level of anything that wasn't an integrity. Life became just beautiful, and it became so easy to follow the little pings of yeses and nos.
It became so much easier to know where my boundaries are and to say no, because they were the things that stood out, because everything else was an integrity and within that integrity, the little things that light me up, became very easy to feel, the pings that were like do this, go here, do this with my career, write this book. I just follow them all day, every day now, and it's so much easier on it, so much easier.
So, some of the signals that can show you if you're out of integrity or if you feel grumpy, sad, numb, kind of checked out, exhausted, all the time good signals that you're probably out of integrity, either in a relationship, in your work, in your body, who knows where. If your immunity is low and you get sick a lot, if you have again that real low energy all the time, if you can't focus mentally, those are some physical symptoms. If you have anxiety or depression, some of that's chemical and sometimes you know there's lots of difference.
There's all these studies coming out from Stanford right now about the six types of depression and how we can find that in our brain we never want to, you know, boil things down to just being out of integrity, because their chemical depression is very, very real, but it can be a signal right that you're out of integrity.
So, these are all different person to person and if any of these things are present for you this grumpiness, this sadness, this heaviness, lack of motivation, numbness, low energy, low immunity, hard time focusing, frustration, not really being engaged start to look for what you're hiding. Is there anything that you don't want other people to see that you do or think or ways that you're living? Is there anything that you wouldn't feel proud telling your kid about? Or a kid that you cared about or wouldn't be proud of telling actually yourself as a kid about? That's a part of your life.
Now, are there any habits you're engaged in in your life that you feel shame comes up when you think about what you're choosing? Look for anything that you're hiding. Where are you not being true to yourself? Where do you not feel good about just turning and looking and seeing transparently what's going on? That's where we start. There's many steps after that, many different ways of getting back into integrity.
The whole Bloom Room is built around this. You can work on it in many different ways, but the very first step is the question when am I out of integrity, where am I not being true to myself and my friends? When we ask the question, the answers come, and life just keeps getting better from there. That's what I've got for you this week, and I will see you next week.
Thanks for hanging out with me, friends. If you like today's episode and you want more of them, please take two minutes right now to subscribe and give me a five-star review on Apple Podcasts. Then send this episode to a friend. See you next time.
