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Hello and welcome to this week's episode of midlife A F. This week we're going to be talking about emotional safety and why safety actually is one of the most important goals in being becoming our coffee
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over to me
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if you're a woman in midlife, his 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 acknowledged the Bruner and people of the Kulin nation as the 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 ceded. I am committed to listening to the Aboriginal community, and learning how I can be an active ally in their journey to justice. This week, we are going to be talking about the idea of safety is so important, I think in this work that we're doing. Personally, for me, safety is a massive, a massive, it's really front of mind. For me at the moment. I've been doing a lot with my group, be the lighthouse, which is my membership group for people who are wanting to be alcohol free, longer term. And we've been talking about safety. We've been talking about a lot, because one of the things that I always say is that in order for us to not drink, it has to feel safer for us to be with ourselves
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than to drink. And so this morning I
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we've been through and I'm sure many of you know, but we've been through a pretty tough stretch. And I'll go into more detail about it when I'm able to right now I can't. But what it has led to is a feeling of not being safe. Not being safe in our home, not being safe in our home, just not being safe in our world, in our community.
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And
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one of the things that we talk about a lot in the alcohol free journey is this idea of you have to it has to feel safer, to stay with yourself than it does to abandon yourself without God. And every time we choose to abandon ourselves with alcohol, there's usually an incredibly good reason why. And that's why the work that I do is so difference, you know from the purists, you know, go back to the beginning, you had to drink Hi, Jess. Because we've been so conditioned in this society to think that the world is all very bright binary and black and white. And, you know, it's a bit like self care practices. I, for one often fall off my self care practices. Routine, especially when I'm in a state of distress, or stress. And when I'm hurting and sad, sometimes I and I was having conversation with a friend of mine today about this move saying you know, it's always when we there's one of this this sort of stuff Stories that goes round is always when we need our self care practices the most, that were most likely to drop them. And I was interesting, I questioned this statement for the first time. Because I know historically, when I have become very overwhelmed or had been dealing with something that was very big, I've, I've often dropped myself care practices. And what I've forgotten to do in those times is realize that sometimes the hibernation the hunkering down is the self care practice. And I was talking to my friend about it. And it reminded me this sort of requirement that we are trying to be resilient and pulling ourselves, our socks up and getting out in the fresh air and having a jolly good walk,
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there's something so pure
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and quite
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dismissive of self, and when I talk about safety, I think being it being safe to be you, exactly as you are, is the ultimate safety. And being willing to be with yourself, exactly as you are, is the ultimate in self acceptance.
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And these things are really hard. You know, I
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hear in the business groups that I'm part of much more so than the, the more,
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I don't know.
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Personal development groups,
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there's often this, you know, and I hear it a lot. And I would say, it's a reason why why a lot of women drink is
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I'm angry, I'm annoyed,
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I'm stressed, I'm
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hormonal, and
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I shouldn't be.
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And so I'm going to meditate, have a gratitude practice, do this certainly other. And to me, this is a form of spiritual bypassing, it's almost we're denying our experience, I'm not willing to be with the discomfort, I'm not allowing myself you know, as a society, it's all you know,
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you get what you get, and you don't get upset.
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You know, and it links into this belief that it's very puritanical belief, again, it goes back to early Christianity, Calvinism that we have to be busy, to be okay. You know, if we're not, if we don't fill our time, with busyness that we will get up to bad stuff. But this idea of safety, and safety and self, you know, you hear so many people who are struggling with alcohol, saying the reason they they drink is boredom.
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And often
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it's very interesting when you dig into what boredom is. And boredom tends to be vast expanses of time, with ourselves,
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with our thoughts with our judgments.
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Is being still is being is not filling our brain with activities and chores and work and, or alcohol or whatever. Because our inner world is unsafe for us to be in, right. And, you know, sometimes our inner and our outer worlds can be unsafe. And sometimes it's unsafe, because the people around us are unsafe. And sometimes it's unsafe because of our interpretation of the world around us. But either way, it's, it's unsafe.
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And for many years for me,
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drinking alcohol felt safer than having the difficult conversations. Drinking alcohol felt safer than being in a room where I was very aware of what everybody was thinking and doing and the impact they were all having on each other. And I felt responsible for it. This is such a common thread.
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We were talking about this in our group
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this week, talking about you know, the frustration that we have with we're not allowed to have it we don't let ourselves I shouldn't be having that I should be all upbeat and fun and should be exercising Things should be funny in light. And we should never delve deeply in anything we should always. It's always about surface and appearing to be a certain way.
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And that leaves us,
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it's really hard then when you are having a hard time
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because people don't know what to do with it. I was talking to my naturopath. This week, I mentioned to get some acupuncture and a bit of loving care. And we were talking about this, you know, how, when something bad happens, and I've talked about this before, the just world theory, where the idea is that, you know, bad things don't happen to good people. And, you know, this whole idea of no smoke without fire, and it's just, it's just a very, very,
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very disturbing and systemic
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belief system that our society has around.
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We get what we deserve.
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It's kind of LinkedIn, sort of, like, everyone's got to pretend everything's okay, everything's swept under the carpet. You know, it's a bit like domestic violence, it's like, you know, that's domestic, it's private matter. And yet, like Brene, Brown said, in her book about the atlas of the heart, she was like, No, four of the young children in their street growing up, had met and talked about their experience, and what was actually happening in their family homes, what a difference that would have made to each little child who felt that they were alone. Because that's the thing, and this was talking to my supervisor, my counseling supervisor about this, this whole idea that when people are having a bad time that other people turn away, and people keep taking, oh, it's gonna be, it's gonna be alright, so good round the corner. I was getting, we could get loads of grief from this, oh, it's gonna you know, the next piece will be even better, you'll be so glad this happened. But I'm not glad right now.
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And this whole thing between
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new kind of expecting and pushing people to be okay, and we do it to ourselves as well, you know, if I'm feeling bad, I must get out and do exercise and have a walk and get myself back to feeling great again, because this whole idea that happiness is the destination. Happiness isn't the destination, it's never been the destination, it's, you know, we only have to watch inside out to and you'll see, it took, she talks about joy is like, you know, wherever I am sad to say you are too. And I don't know about you guys. But for me, I flipped momentarily, from sadness, to happiness, to joy to despair to you know, and I know that that's not the case when you know, people are suffering from depression. But for most of us, we go through life and sad and bad things happen. And we don't allow ourselves to feel them. And we'll do like, I'm going to start a gratitude practice. I'm so bloody grateful. I'm so grateful.
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It's like Ross from Friends was like, I'm fine. I'm fine. It's,
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and we're not fine. Like as a society, we're not fine. As a society things happen and they make us so sad. And when we the spiritual bypassing this, if I meditate if I if I insist, if I tell myself, I keep telling myself that I'm grateful that I'm fine that everything's okay. Then it is it's just not true. It's a bit like you know, when we keep we keep drinking and we're like, oh, what's wrong with me? I
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can't believe I'm such a you know,
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I'm so I'm so.
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No, I should know better. And it's like, yeah, you do know better, but the fact of the matter is that it's not safe for you yet to sit in the discomfort or whatever it is that you're drinking to avoid. And that is okay. How would you treat somebody who you loved? Who didn't feel safe enough to do something? Would you shout a pie Annie over you or somebody I've really wanted to eat? I hope you're well. Glad to have both yourself and Jess on here today. I was just saying you know, if we it's so funny the way that we talk to ourselves the way we're so mean to ourselves when we when we do something that we didn't want to do we you know, when when the part of us that's desperately trying to keep us safe from experiencing whatever it is that as a society because we've been told so stringently. Eat, that we are not allowed to feel sad that we have to get on that we have to move on. That we have to pick ourselves up, dust ourselves on and get on.
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And yet that's, it's so unhealthy.
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And you know, so many of us who drink we drink because we were suppressing our experience of life, we're using alcohol to suppress it. And the reason we suppress something is because it's not safe for us to feel it. And in this society, we're never taught how to feel difficult things, you know, people don't lie down next to us and hold us in our pain.
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That's not what our parents did, we'd
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be like, come on your,
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she'll be right. But they say here,
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she'll be right.
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She's not right,
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she's sad, she needs a cuddle. She needs someone to get down, sit down next to her and hold her hand and tell her that she's loved. And that there's so sorry that that happened to her, it breaks her heart. We wish we could take away the pain, but we can't. That's what we need. We don't need people telling us to.
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next great thing, I'll be around the corner.
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Go out in the fresh air gets more. But the thing that we forget the thing that drives all of this is our inner safety. And when we have all these parts of ourselves, these beautiful parts of ourselves who come to play in our world, because at some point of other, it was necessary for us to bring in a protector. So we have these, these beautiful parts of ourselves trying to keep us safe. Using alcohol, you know, one of the reasons I always say my team, my group always know that, you know, we talk about it's never that it's not the wine, which to the wine savior. wine, the wine, which we go into battle with the wine, which is absolutely the the the opposite of what we need to do.
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What we need to do is welcome the way in which
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sit down at a table with her and ask her what she's trying to save us from. Because she's not the problem. She's a firefighter, she's there with her hurt, she doesn't care, all she cares about is she doesn't care about the damage or destruction, she doesn't care that we know that we have a hangover, we know that's gonna upset our children that we know. She doesn't care about that all she cares about is protecting us from the pain that we feel. And usually the pain that we feel is, is something that's we can learn to be with. The problem we have is that we've been terrified. And I was talking to my friend this morning. And we're saying his idea is that if we lean into our feelings, the concern is that they will completely overwhelm us. And we will never come back from them. And it's just not the case. But it's what happened when we were children. That led us to believe that and that often comes from and again, you know, this isn't to make anyone feel guilty because I did control crying as well with my kids. But you know, you learn from psychology, I can't believe that even in the 90s and 2000s, that we were still doing this shit. Because we've had this information since the 1950s. But when we leave a child to cry, and it's not that they learn to self settle, is that they give up.
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They give up because they don't think anyone's ever coming.
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And this is what we have to teach ourselves. We re nurture re parenting ourselves. To understand that we are here for ourselves, in our distress, someone is coming and the pain will end. Because what we never had was an adult, a nurturing adult who could hold us in our distress and say, hey, it's gonna be okay. I see you crying, I see you sad. I witness you, I validate you. And we're gonna get through this. An emotionally regulated adult, is what we need it. And nine times out of 10 we either had an emotionally dysregulated adult, or we were just left to cry until we gave up. And so we learned this terrible fear of this. If this Pain is pain, no one's ever coming to save us.
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And it's not true. But we have to reparent
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ourselves through that. So when we feel distressed when we're angry because we've had a bad day at work, when we're powerless because the people around us are treating us badly when we feel resentment because it's unfair that our load is such that our partners sitting around having a beer Um, we're having to, you know, be the, the the remaining adult, we're holding the load of the world. All of those things, though, the, the, the meaning that we make about those things in our brain, which is, you know, a person who is treated like this is xy and z. And we don't want to feel like that because it makes us feel sad. And makes us feel depressed. And what we need to be able to do is hold ourselves and say, okay, so what is it that I'm, I'm wanting to drink because I'm trying to, to escape a set a feeling? Be it boredom, be a monotony, be it resentment, beer, anger, beer, sadness, big grief, trying to escape that feeling because some, somewhere along the line, I've been told, it's not good. This is not a good feeling. And in a way, it's almost like we feel a bit shamed of ourselves. It's overindulgence. I mean, you hear it in the US a lot. With this whole, you know, I remember when I was working in the snake in mind groups a lot, and people are having a pity party, I'm not having a pity party. So frowned upon have J, you have a pity party. You know, often this is like, when we've lost somebody, we're grieving, we've lost a house we've broken up with. Or I'm just sat there having a pity party. It's so it's so symptomatic of the society that we live in that we cannot tolerate discomfort. And the really sad thing about it is, if we could tolerate it, we could actually find out what was going on, and work to resolve the problem. And this is what the problem, the biggest problem with alcohol is, we think alcohol is a, it's like, oh, it's an escape from this pain, but it isn't, it actually is actually keeping that pain there for you. Because while you keep drinking to avoid the pain, you don't deal with the pain. So you can never move forward. It's like being in a abusive relationship,
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you know, the drinking,
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to pretend it's not happening, but it's happening. It's like, you know, when we disassociate from so many of us, I mean, for me, I disassociate a lot, I thought for years, I thought I didn't have any feelings, it's just that I am very skilled, I have a protective part that allows me to dissociate quite quite well. And, you know, it's not that we don't feel things, it's that our body has enabled us it's a protective mechanism to kind of split off to compartmentalize. And that's kept us safe. It's a great skill to have. As you know, the problem that we have, and I remember learning this from my psychologists, actually, is it your nervous system is still going through this is still suffering. So even though your thoughts you've managed to disassociate, your body is still going through the stress and pain. And so when we are even when we're numbing out with alcohol, it's the same thing. You know, we're having a bad experience we don't like when a lot of the time it's about
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I don't want to be restricted. So it's like, fuck it.
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I don't want to be restricted.
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I'm not I don't want people telling me what to do. Of course, you don't,
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nobody wants to pay that.
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But then we think, Oh, who's who's restricting me.
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And we realized that the person who's put a restriction on ourselves in terms of our callers ourselves, because we don't want to drink alcohol because it makes us feel sad.
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And it makes us hate ourselves.
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At three o'clock in the morning, when we wake up, and we wish we hadn't drunk him. And we wish we hadn't done what we had set up. We wish we had done what we set out to do. We wish we hadn't done that thing that we want happens every, every day when you're in that sort of drinking cycle of waking up in the morning, regretting the night before, swearing, off swearing off drinking, and then by five o'clock you find you're pouring yourself another drink and making all the excuses as to why that might be. But the answer to all of this is not for us to be mean to ourselves, and is not for us to be like ah, so
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what's wrong with me? I
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better do another gratitude press.
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The answer is we need to look at what is making us so upset. And we need to deal with it. We need to work it out and we need to process it and we need to you know we need to if we're angry if we're upset if we're and I mean a lot of the time we don't even realize we're angry and upset. We don't even realize we're unhappy.
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We were talking about in our group.
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We were talking about you this idea of fun So where's the fun because,
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you know, alcohol used to make everything fun. It was the thing that made me fun. I'm not fun without alcohol. And then we start playing around with it and you realize that actually, your life wasn't fun. You're drinking, because you're trying to make your life fun using alcohol. But if you have to drink in order for it to be fun, it's not fun. So then it's not that the alcohol is making your life fun. And that without the alcohol, livestock farm is life and life wasn't fun. It's not fun. So we need to make life fun and work out what fun is. And as women? Generally we don't, we have got no idea what we think is fun. If it's not about conditioning our body for somebody else.
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exercise, healthy eating,
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doing our nails getting our hair done. What about external validation?
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What sparks joy?
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I mean, I would have said, if somebody said to me, what was fun?
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When I was drinking, I would have said drinking.
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And I would have said that I didn't need anything outside of work and drinking. They were both coping mechanisms for a life that I wasn't enjoying. But that's difficult thing, isn't it? Because then when we have to look and we're like, Oh, I'm not actually enjoying my life, then I've got to do something about it. Yeah. So this is why, you know, one of the main things is building this safety inside ourselves. So working on understanding, you know, when we've got that voice of judgment, who's being mean to us telling us what we should have done, looking at what we've done in the past, being an awesome to ourselves about it, filling us with regret. And giving us a million chores, second guessing the next five moves for the next 20 years. You know, these are all parts of us that are just trying to protect us. So what are they keeping us safe from?
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And what do we need to tell them in order for them to feel safe,
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it's never gonna be fuck off. judgey part
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it's always gonna be more along the lines of I can see that that you might be fine about that I can understand why you know, in your past is felt really, really scary when that happened. It might be about financial control, it might be about not having a tidy house, you know, as a kid, you might get hauled off for having a messy room, you might have only got rewarded when you worked really hard. And there's all these different reasons why things are the way they are. But what we have to work to create the safety for ourselves is to not only allow ourselves to fuck up, and it be okay to love ourselves unconditionally, whatever we do, because we've never done that. So we're, we're building a relationship with ourselves. But also that those judgey parts all those parts of us that so many people just just ignore them, push them down. Oh, gratitude practice.
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It's sometimes gratitude practice can be quite toxic.
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We've got to be grateful.
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I say yeah, there's a place for gratitude. But there's also a place for
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allowing ourselves to have our experience. You know,
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I think suppression of self is such a dangerous thing for our health and well being
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pushing things down depression
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so how do we make ourselves feel safe? We have ourselves like, unconditional positive regard. validation, empathy. It's so hard for us. I listen to my group and my friends and myself even. You know, we like there's always we're always trying to sort of always dismiss ourselves you know, put our mind on other things. And look, there's a place for that for sure. You are up retention is one of my favorite sayings. You know,
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if you're thinking things are going to be awful they will be
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but there's also a place for this everything, you know, it's always that and you know, it's never one thing and other thing. We always think it's so binary, the way our society works. But how do we create emotional safety inside ourselves? We start So, validating our concerns and nurturing ourselves. So if we've got a little part of us that's really frightened and really wants to have to be tidy, really worried if we don't, if it doesn't badger us all the time, the bills aren't gonna get paid and nothing's gonna get done and the whole world is gonna fall apart. We're gonna descend into chaos. And it's just anxiety. Yeah, so just like, what would you do if your child was feeling anxious? Hey, he,
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I get it.
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And
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we're gonna be okay. Because you're not a child anymore.
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You're grown up, and you have agency.
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And this is our only job
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to create safety for ourselves and our families. And safety doesn't mean boring. Safety means that we can go on these incredible adventures
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safety means that we are home wherever we are.
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That we don't have to escape ourselves.
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Safety is cultivating
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it ability to ground ourselves
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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 cuddle to you and yours for me and mine and remember to keep choosing you
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
