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Welcome to this week's episode of midlife A F. This week we're going to be talking about the link between disappointment and being alcohol free if you're a woman in midlife has intuition is telling you that giving booze the elbow might be the next right move. Then midlife AF is the podcast for you. Join counselor psychotherapist this naked mind and gray area drinking alcohol coach Emma Gilmore for a weekly natter about parenting quirky teens, menopause relationships and navigating this thing called midlife alcohol free. If you're feeling that life could be so much more that you're sick and tired of doing all the things for everyone else. If your intuition is waving her arms manically at you saying it could all be so much easier. We didn't have to keep drinking, come with me. Together we'll find our groove without booze.
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I lovingly acknowledge the boomerang people of the Kulin nation as a custodians of current Baroque. I share my admiration for the Aboriginal culture, I witnessed the connection that they have for each other and the land and their community. As I swim in the waters and walk on the land, I feel the power of this place. I'm grateful for the Aboriginal peoples amazing custodianship, the power, beauty and the healing potential of this place. I wish to pay special respects to the elders of the Buena, wrong people, their wisdom, guidance and support are exceptional, and felt well beyond the Aboriginal community. I honor that this is Aboriginal land, and that it has never been seeded. I am committed to listening to the Aboriginal community, and learning how I can be an active ally in their journey to justice. So we talked about disappointment, disappointment, such an interesting one, we were talking about it in group last night. So at the moment, I've got the Great Aussie alcohol experiment going on. And we every night in group coaching, we talk about the reasons why we drink and we look at them, you know, look at the beliefs that we have around what drinking is going to give us. And so we were talking about reasons we drink. And a lot of the reasons that were coming up were to do with wanting, feeling disappointed that we had and a lot of this has to do with people pleasing, right. So and most drinkers I know are people pleasers. So we go out of our way to offer a lot to the people around us, you know, in our work in our home lives. One of my members of the Basel experiment, at the moment was talking about universalism to certain extent as well even though we can be in servitude to and it was a really good word to use. Because often I think as women female assigned at birth humans, there is so much of us, it's about nurturing, you know, nurturing our jobs, nurturing our careers, naturally people around us. And you know, to a certain extent as well, some of this comes from, you know, that that was something that as, as a as a young person, and we've learned, that keeps us safe in the world, right to keep looking out for everybody else. But the expectation of people pleasing when I really got to understand people pleasing. And people pleasing, really, to me is forming. It's a trauma response. It's about Oh, hi, I am so good to see you. I'm so pleased you're here. So lovely to have you talking about people pleasing and forming. And the concept of disappointment and how how is reading can we've been doing in my be the lighthouse membership group, a little bit of work around emotions and looking at Brene Brown's book, The Atlas of the heart. And we were looking at, you know, people pleasing from what I understand I follow a really great lady, I highly recommend her called Haley McGee. I think her my personally might have a bit more in it than that. But she's really fantastic. And she's written a book called people stop people pleasing now. And basically what she says about people pleasing is it's really that we're looking, we're giving out to others. And what we're really looking for is to get that back. And what happens when people pleasing as we never do. And so in then it leads to resentment. And then and what happens is we feel like we're rebelling by drinking. We feel like well screw them, you know, I'm going to drink them anyway. And then of course the only person that we're hurting is ourselves, but You know, this is all well and good putting, you know, intellect to it. But it's not intellect that drives this behavior that what I when I was reading Atlas of the heart, the thing that I found really interesting about disappointment, how Brene describes disappointment is unmet expectations. So we have an expectation of how Hi, Joe, good to see you. So we have an expectation of how the world is meant to be, and how others around us are going to behave in it, and what's going to happen? And our experience is different to that. And then, you know, if you listen to anyone like Tara Brach, who is one of my favorite people to listen to, in her talks, and meditations, you know, what she always says is, you know, one of the biggest pains in our lives is caused by, we have a different things being different to how we want them to be. So our expectations of what things are going to be like, and things being different to that, which is where you get into this whole kind of world of radical acceptance and being in the present moment. But I'm going to take us back a step, because I know that so many female assigned at birth humans, and this doesn't necessarily just into certain extent, it can be, you know, moms, but also people who are looking after elderly parents, but also, you know, people working in jobs, you know, hi, sweet as art, nice to see you. Glad you're here. And what Brene says about disappointment is and I'll read it here, disappointment is unmet expectations. But what I loved about this is unexamined, and unexpressed expectations, right? And what she means by that, and this is why, you know, asking for what we need is such an important part of growth, you know, emotional growth growing into an adult, because a lot of the time the reasons why we're drinking is because we're stuck in behaviors that are, we learned as children that kept us safe as children, you know, looking after everybody, making sure everybody was okay, being highly attuned to any kind of emotional drama, those things, you know, which we like to think of ourselves as empaths. And I've often wondered, you know, whether or not you know, being an empath is really just a trauma response. And I don't mean that as ingest, because there's a certain level of sensitivity, and some of us are born with sensitivity, and some of us become more sensitive, because we have to be in order to survive in our, in our situations that we are in. But what I think is really interesting about this is unexamined, an on an unexpressed, so when we're disappointed, it's that we haven't looked at what our expectations are of the situation, and we haven't shared them with other people. And again, it's this whole reliant on the world outside of ourselves in order for us to feel okay, you know, and many of us would say, Well, I'm not I know, I don't seek external validation, or I'm not. I try to think of the things now but there was so many that I would have been like, I'm not that I'm totally like a tough Rs. I don't need any of that stuff. Or I'm not I'm not looking for external validation all the time. But once you realize, you know, as human beings were born to this world as these great deeds wonderful, you know, the absolute opposite of original sin, do you know what I mean? It's like I was reading yesterday. What's the book called No Bad parts. By Richard Swartz was one of my favorite books. And he was talking about, you know, his whole sort of Calvinist puritanical belief and Christian and Christian and Catholic, you know, that the human being is born back. And you know, it needs to be controlled. And it's so interesting that that comes into how we think about ourselves in relation to alcohol. And you know, how we automatically go to shame we automatically go to I am bad, you know, rather than the situation that I'm finding myself in is untenable is unacceptable. And drinking is the only way I know how to manage him, which is nine times out of 10. The real situation. A disappointment I just, I just found it really, really interesting because it also plays into resentment. And resentment is another way that the brain start we start to blame other people, making other people responsible for our DIS appointments and things being different how we expect them to be. Because we have an expectation that other people will treat us the way that we want to be treated. And I so remember listening to a podcast by a very famous life coach, I forgot their name now. That's my perimenopause, ADHD brain going, I'm not feeling too well stay at it as well. So just please excuse me, if my words aren't coming into my brain as as as well as I would like them to. But there's a really famous coach life coach, and she, she said, it, it takes a lot of work for other people to be proud of you. And we were talking in group last night, the night before last about pride, pride. And we found out it was very interesting, we were looking actually at shame and guilt. And you lose the feeling of shame when, you know, things aren't how you want them to be like, so we were talking particularly about, you know, working really hard and then not getting the recognition for it.
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But equally, it could be you know, I've been I've been running around all day. And you know, I want to be, I just I just want somebody to say you've done a great job. And a lot of the time for women where we're going to alcohol because it feels like a warm hug. It feels like a pat on the back, it feels we were talking about the idea of it being a reward. We we've seen, it was kind of interesting, because the definition of reward was a hotel, I can't even remember, I'll have to look it up in a minute. But it was, it basically was, you know, getting validation and praise for a job well done. And I think for so many female assigned at birth, humans, we're running around working really, really hard. And nobody's saying you did a good job. And so what's then happening is we're drinking. Because it fills that hole in our heart, that we want to be filled by another person's recognition of what we're doing. And again, but it's again, it's this whole idea of looking outside ourselves, for the love that really we can only give to ourselves. And so therefore, it's like, well, if we are going to do these things for other people, either let it be for its own sake and not be expecting anything in return. Or looking at why we're doing them, you know, why are we doing this? And what is it? What is it fulfilling for us? And anyway, I don't know about you, but I grew up with, there was a lot of martyrdom about being a woman, you know. And people used to be nasty about women saying, oh, you know, she's such a martyr. But I think what what she really was was a woman who was doing everything she could to try and show the people that she loved that she loved them, and perhaps not getting the love back that she was giving out. So it's a really interesting one. So how do we deal with it? How do we deal with resentment? How do we deal with disappointment? How do we deal with unmet expectations? And I guess, the first thing I would say is that we first of all, we need to look at what our expectations were and and understand that the reason that we're upset Oh, hi, how are you? Are you please free dad, my brain is gone completely. I'm so sorry. I know, we've met loads of times, and I'm being hopeless, but my brain is I've got like a bit of a headache. And I'm feeling a bit off today. My brains not working. And words are just failing me today. So my apologies for not remembering everyone's names. We're just talking about disappointment. And we're talking about this whole concept of you know, resentment and, and how so many of us end up drinking because it feels like the warm hug of validation the reward that we so desperately are looking for somebody to give us to say you've done a great job. Yeah. Because as human beings, we're all born and we want to be seen of seen as good. You know, of course we do. We want to be seen as good humans. And we want to be loved, want to be loved. And, you know, the more I study, the more I learn about psychology, spirituality. You know, the people I follow, and I know a bit of a controversial character sometimes particularly with the neurodiverse humans of which I am one is, you know, Gabor Ma Tei. trained under gaveau motto for the last year which was absolutely amazing finished in February. Really hard work, but really, really good and loads and loads of Practice work. As we went through the program, and the people that he was influenced by, there's a guy called Michael. Michael Brown, I always think it's Michael Green. But Michael Brown, he wrote the book called The Presence process, which is absolutely phenomenal. And then there's another guy called a omise. And he wrote a particular type of spiritual psychology approach called the diamond approach. And it basically it basically all of these approaches basically come from the same concept that, you know, the human being is at heart good. You know, and at core good. And so similar to telephony systems, same thing, no bad parts, you know, all of the parts of us are good, they mean, well. So for example, we were talking about parts work in group as well. If, for example, let's say, and so many of us have this, we've been conditioned to be all about the doing right. We get our validation from our house being tidy from everything being an order from being organized in particularly people like me, who have ADHD, like for me, as a kid, I was pretty disorganized. And then no one was ever mean to me about it, it was always done jokingly, lovingly. But I very much got the impression that being disorganized was not, you know, how, how the pupil, the successful people in the world, or the, the normal people were and so then I spent a lot of my adult life trying to pretend to be wearing a mask of an organized person, put my nervous system under quite a lot of stress, to be doing all the things to mean that I was acceptable in the world, in my, in my mind, which puts, you know, this stuff puts so much pressure on us. But talking in group, you know, one of the reasons people drink is because they cannot sit down without a glass of wine, or a beer or whatever you drink in order for it to give permission for them to stop trying to do all the things. Because we've been productivity, capitalism, and I know, I sound like a bloody hippie, but is true. So productivity, capitalism. A culture is all about, you know, the devil makes work for idle hands, it's, you know, we are, we talk about, you know, you look at how people are rewarded numerically for the work they do, you know, you see the rewards that the stay at home mom gets, as opposed to the person working, as you know, is something that society deems to be of value. And so we put all our value into, you know, what we do? And I remember, in my book club, we were talking about this, and we're talking about, you know, what is my purpose? And we're talking about what's the purpose of a tree? And everyone's going, oh, you know, the purpose of a tree is to, you know, to create, to take carbon dioxide and create oxygen, or the purpose of the tree is to Revit live or whatever? And the answer is, no, the purpose of the tree is to be a tree, I thought was really amazing. And it relates to this work as well. Because we, you know, and people say, and it always sounds a bit trite, you know, we're human beings, not human doings. But in reality, I know for me, I have had to change my work considerably. After I left corporate, and also because my kids need me more now, as teenagers, one of them has. Both my kids are autistic, and that one of them has been struggling with school. And so she needs me around to help her through autistic burnout and chronic fatigue. And, you know, suddenly the person that I thought I was the sort of corporate marketing career person, I'm not that person anymore. So who am I? Yeah, and so same when we stopped drinking, who are we? And so it's part of this journey is finding out who we really are. Underneath it all, underneath all these different layers that we put on, you know, so I was talking to one of my, my precious clients in the alcohol experiment last night, and we're all today. And we were talking about, you know, this whole idea of needing a glass of wine feeling that we cannot have permission to sit down and have a glass of wine, and if somebody gives it to us, yeah, because we're so about doing because it doesn't feel safe for us to stop doing because safety comes from being all the things that we're supposed to be in order for us to be this If that's deemed to be acceptable to be living an acceptable life, by society, and the reason we have that there's nothing wrong with us for having that with just trying to keep yourself safe in an environment that potentially wasn't very safe as children, you know, and I don't mean safe as like someone was gonna, like, bash it in the head, what I mean is safe as in, we were going to be approved, we were going to be loved, we were going to be treated kindly. You know, because a lot of the time it's not even about what we didn't get. It's about, you know, it's
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not about Sorry, what we did get, it's about we didn't get, and everyone's like, oh, people don't want to talk about child and I'm like, fuck it, we have to talk about childhood. It's this. It's our cultural conditioning. That means we're dealing with the cultural conditioning, that we weren't allowed to have our experience, that it was inconvenient. And again, it's not and everyone's like, Oh, we didn't talk about childhood, we don't want to play my parents. Talk about blaming your parents, right? I remember when I started the Gabor Ma Tei course. And he's he read this poem, by Philip Larkin, who's a British poet, called, they fuck you up, your mom and dad was absolutely brilliant. It's basically be the, you know, unless we were born into a sort of tribal, really perfect community, we're going to suffer trauma. It's like condition. It's like part of our conditioning as a human being. And part of our job is to, is to work our way through that and to sort of find out what's real and what's not real, because most of us are living these, these constructed personalities that aren't actually who we are at all, but they're the personalities that we've created in order to keep us safe in the world. And masking like, that is hard. You know, even recently, a lady that I met another group, she said, Oh, you know, oh, no, I wasn't masking I was just trying to fit in. And I'm like, Well, what's masking, then, if it's not trying to fit in? It's exactly what masking is. It's exactly what this whole charade that we're all playing is it we don't want to be rejected by the crowd. And so we can't be vulnerable. We keep everything brushed under the table, we sit in shame. It's like, we've got to stop this, some of us have got to got to start talking about so I remember listening, listening to Brene Brown's podcast on the Atlas of the heart, she's got three and Amir might be the lighthouse membership group are listening to these and talking about them at the moment. But if you go into her unlocking new podcast, there's three with her Barrett and I can't remember the other ones name, her other sister. And she talks about, you know, as young people, you know, we didn't talk about it, everything was shoved under the carpet. Same with drinking, same with arguments, same with everything and everything that's shoved under the carpet in this society in order for us to just pretend everything's okay. And it's not okay. And we all think we're alone. And we're not alone. You know, everybody has had traumatic experiences, every family has had some kind of, you know, domestic violence, alcoholism is so And yet, if we could all turn to each other and say, you know, these things happened. You know, it might be shouting, it might be arguments, it might be, but whatever they were, you know, we might have had a mom with a mental illness, we might have had a tsunami, but everything's just brushed under the table, and we will have to pretend it doesn't happen. And then we wonder why we're drinking. And this is what gets me nervous. Everyone's like, I don't want to talk about this is too heavy. Fine, don't carry on. Carry on, like Britishness just like tend to bum cheeks and carry straight solidly on because you're just gonna keep repeating the same shit all the time. And, you know, we need to, we need to be the change makers. That's what we're here for. Yeah, we're here to understand why we can't sit down without a glass of wine. What would it mean about us? If we sat down without an excuse? And if these are the questions, what would it mean about us, and you'll be surprised the words that will come up, it'll be selfish, lazy, as his conditioning, and what we're so afraid of being judged, not just by others papaya internal dialogue, and this is what I was talking about in parts work. It's like, you know, we have the part of us that's unsafe, so I'm safe. So I'm busy. I'm trying to do all the things to make sure that everything's going to be okay. Because if I don't keep control over everything, it's all gonna go too far. And I'm, I'm, it's all gonna go to shit and I'm fat, right? So we're holding on holding on grasping, grasping coming from place of scarcity. And what we don't realize is that we're creating this situation for ourselves because We are so afraid of what might happen. For so many good reasons, right? We're afraid of being rejected. We're afraid. We just like the idea of the chaos of the unknown, right is too scary, isn't it? But yet, everything's unknown. We've never had any control over any of it. We've never had any control over any of it. And the only time we have is right now. And the way that anxiety works is we, the two coping mechanisms, one is worry. And the other is numbing. Neither of them are helpful, because what we need to do is address what we're worried about. Why are you worried and not be like, Well, you shouldn't be pull your socks up. All that shit is like, No, I get why you were worried treasure. This lot going on, you know, and people can be assholes and the world can be me. But hey, you know what? You've got me. I'm here. We've got this. You're gonna be okay. We're gonna handle this. And it's that and it's that's why I always say, you know, sometimes it is safer for people to stay drinking. Because we have to be able to ask for what we need. We have to value ourselves enough. That everything that we might lose as a consequence, because our brain will always go to the worst case scenario, I'm gonna have to go in a second
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is worth it. Because losing ourselves is so abhorrent. Being mean, and shaming and hurting ourselves is so painful to us. We can't continue to do it anymore.
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I remember learning that from my friend Jay. It was like my teacher J feels she's amazing to podcasts with. I have to go.
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It's been a joy to be with you all. I hope that's not too in fact, I don't care if it's too heavy or too heavy, or too heavy.
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There we go. All right. I'm interested to hear what you guys think I'd love to hear your thoughts and take care. It's really nice to see you thanks for tuning in to this week's episode of midlife AF with Emma Gilmore. If you enjoyed it, please share on Instagram for your friends and tag me at hote rising coaching. If you want to help me grow the podcast please review the episodes for me on Apple podcast that really helps. If you would like to work further with me please go to my website www Haute rising coaching.com for my free and paid programs or email me at Emma at Hope rising coaching.com sending a massive catalog to you and yours for me and mine and remember to keep choosing you
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
