Hi, everybody, great to see you great that you're here. I'm afraid I had a couple of weeks off recording poddies, which isn't like me, I'm normally pretty consistent, but I just need a little bit of a break from things, we had a lot of stuff going on at home. just way, way too many things. But the great thing about it is, is it just continuously reminds me of why I'm so happy and grateful to be alcohol free. Because it's so much easier to deal with the life stuff life throws, when you're able to be present to it.
Now those of you who are watching me on video will see that I have a rather ridiculous head with gear set up. And that is because I am having a photoshoot for my next launch on Monday, and I'm drying my hair. And so in the ever true authentic Emma fashion, I am showing up exactly as I am. Because otherwise we just don't get stuff done.
Right. So. So authenticity versus attachment, really, really, really interesting. And that funnily enough, I've got on my desk here Brene Brown's, beautiful book, The Atlas of the heart. And one of my favourite pages on this is her page about fitting in versus belonging. And it's so it's so meaningful to me in so many ways. So these are some of the quotes for the differences between fitting in and belonging.
“Belonging is being somewhere where you want to be and they want you. Fitting in is being somewhere where you want to be, but they don't care one way or another.”
“Belonging is being accepted for you. Fitting in is being accepted for being like everyone else.”
That's a really important one. And this one is: “If I get to be me, I belong. If I have to be like you, I fit in.”
And I mean, there's so much that we could talk about with this in regards to neurodiversity and children as well. And in Brene Brown's book she does, she does talk about questions about that. But I think that's a subject for another day. And the reason why I bring this up, and the reason why I think it's so important, it was also part of my training that I've been doing with Gabor Mate this year. And he talks about authenticity versus attachment. And there's a few different concepts in here, it can be a little bit complex, so bear with me, while I explain it.
So when he talks about authenticity versus attachment. And what he means is we're born into the world, these beautiful essences, beautiful potential of person. And the world comes along, gives us a few knocks about tells us that we're not as great as we thought we were, and doesn't validate us. And we start to build coping mechanisms, we start to build a personality, we start to build our personality. And that personality is made up of adaptations that we have created, in order to fit in, to belong to different things. But in order to fit in.
So authenticity, being authentic is being able to be ourselves, right be 100% ourselves, and many of us don't even know that is and that was certainly me. I had no idea. And I've spoken about this before, who I really was because I was being a completely constructed personality. In order for me to be acceptable in the world. I was so I thought because at a young age, I made the decision that I wasn't. I didn't fit in. I wasn't quite right, I was a little bit different. And in order to be successful in the world, I needed to change. And so I created the personality that I I lived for the majority of my life before stopping drinking and so authenticity to me it's the essence of why we're here as a human being we're here to be able to be ourselves and be okay with being ourselves no matter what authenticity is truth and the essence our essence of self, our soul, whatever you want to call it soul, blah blah
blah whatever it wants true about personality does not want true a personality is looking to avoid true so, our essence our soul, our you know, core being true our personality adaptations, our protecting parts ah kind of disassociate from ourselves from our, our true self, our precious. And many times, they double talk about addiction, or attempt adaptive coping mechanisms, whatever they might be shopping, working, first person shooter games, booze, drugs, whatever it is. They are a disconnection from self, a disconnection from self.
We move away from the truth of ourselves, because we want to fit in. And the coping mechanism is something that keeps us safe. It feels like it keeps us safe, it allows us to survive. So every adaptation that we have, is a tool that our brain and our body came up with to keep us safe.
When you're wanting to stop drinking, a good question is to ask yourself, what is this behaviour keeping me safe? From what is it that I would have to experience? If I wasn't doing this? That is such a good question to ask. And there are so many awesome answers to they're fascinating, often quite tricky, tough to deal with. Because many of us, especially women, especially people who are like I always talk about neurodiverse, trauma, chastised, sensitive again, or presenting in the same way have genuinely been in fight or flight a lot and have created ways of keeping ourselves safe because we feel threatened or frightened. So that's a little bit about authenticity.
And then let's talk a minute about attachment. So attachment is where fitting in, kind of fits in. So very interestingly so attachment for those of you who know anything about psychology, and this stuff's been around for years 50s 60s I think came up with the idea of attachment.
And so attachment theory has to do with the attachment that we have to our primary caregivers, as children, as young children, you know, like before the age of three, but also, you know, later in life as well. And what the main gist of the theory is, and I'll oversimplify it as I do, is that how secure and resilient we go into the world is dependent on how we were received into the world by our caregivers. Now, this can bring up all sorts of things in people. So for me, when I first was studying counselling, I started learning all this stuff, I was just devastated. Because I'm sure I've told you this before, like, I found that, you know, leaving your babies cry, which is what I hated doing. But it was what I was told I was supposed to do and even though it went against every instinct that I had, that was something that I tried to do with my eldest child but didn't do so much with my younger child. But my younger child, and both my children had problems sleeping. And so eventually, when we got to Australia, I was so tired. We went to sleep school, and then we did it with my youngest child as well. And we were there for a week, me and the two kids learning to sleep. And what that entailed was the little one being in a room by themselves, and crying. And being my children. Which I now know how inside know, they're neurodiverse, but they had an ability to crack around time.
And so obviously, I'm like, okay, so attachment is to do with things like, basically, the basic concept of it is seeing ourselves reflected in the eyes of our caregivers, with value. So we take our sense of our value in the world, with how we are loved and cared for.
And so if we have a parent who's sick, that can be problematic. If we have a parent who drinks too much, or does drugs, or has a mental illness, all these things can affect our attachment, right? And if it's highly, unlike it, like it's pretty unlikely that as kids, we, we, as parents, we'd get you know, we we'd have a perfect score. I think that's a wonderful thing.
And I remember seeing Gabor reading that amazing Philip Larkin poem that you queue up your mum and dad. And the beauty of that is what he said, It's no matter what we do, we are going to miss our kids. Because of the way our world is structured, not because that's what we want to do, we've gone out and we're bad people. But because that's the way it was structured, and same with our parents, you know, they did the same things and knew even some of the stuff, a lot of the stuff that our parents done, they did, because in their minds at the time, and based on the culture that they had, that was what culture culturally they were told to do.
You know, you hear it even now, you know, people being very harsh with children, in terms of their expectations, and not mollycoddling them and all that kind of stuff. It is very interesting. Particularly, a lot of this stuff comes from, because I was listening to Gabor this morning, actually. And he was talking about indigenous groups and how, and I think this was written about the indigenous Indian tribes in North America. And I think there had been, or maybe it was somewhere else, I can't remember but basically, there was an explorer. And he was saying to he was riding back home and he was writing about how the indigenous tribes never seem to raise their hand to a child and saying, you know, this, this needs to be one of the first things we stamp out because of course, that was how the British elite were treated harshly with not very much love and and so that was what they thought was appropriate behaviour. And so, when they then came to the other countries and did the terrible things that the precious did to the indigenous people of those countries. It was founded on an incredibly cruel and unhealthy cultural norm.
And so it's just a really, so attachment is difficult to get right now. We don't, we shouldn't beat ourselves up for these things because it just kind of is what it is. And knowing that in our cultural culture, we're never going to get it right. And even if we were getting it like 99.9%, right, we're still gonna get some of it wrong. Because we can't be able to things all the time, it's impossible, cannot take and it's very normal to lose our tempers, it's very normal, to not get things right to not be able to be 100%, calm and the, you know, all the things that you try to be, particularly as a parent of neurodiverse kids. But as a parent anyway, you know, we try to be the sort of, like, calm, place, soft place for them to land. But we can't always be because other things happen. We're human beings, right?
So first of all, put aside the guilt for your own children, and also give your parents a break, too. And I'm not saying if they, you know, if they did terrible things to you, then obviously, that's not the thing, but I mean, just don't, don't make it mean a load of stuff, you don't you're not being disloyal to parents, if you recognize that at some point in your life, they didn't necessarily mirror your value back to you. They might not have been. So I mean, so many of us have stories, don't we, you know, somebody was mean to us at school, or a teacher was mean to us, or somebody, you know, all these different things. I mean, it's gonna be, and I've talked about this before, it can be as simple as we require for something and our mum was tired, and she didn't pick us up, you know, these sort of things, we don't always get the perfect response. And so, as a child, what happens is, we being the narcissistic development age, we take that upon ourselves, and we make it mean, there's something wrong with us, because it's impossible for us. And I was talking to a friend of mine today about this. And she had been through domestic abuse at home as a kid. And as a kid, it's impossible for us to believe that our caregivers like the world are screwed, right? Our caregivers weren't able to look after us properly, society is not set up to look after us properly. It is income passable to a small child's brain that that can be the case. And so what we do instead is a narcissistic child, which isn't it, which is a development stage, not a narcissistic personality disorder if we make it something that's wrong with us. So we don't get the love that we need. In a moment, we don't get the support we need, we don't get our value thrown back to us, we don't get our value shined back to us in the eyes of another person.
As a result of that, we make that mean that there's something wrong with us, because that's a much more palatable way of looking at the world, then there's something wrong with our caregivers, or the world is screwed. And so it's much more plausible for us to think there's something wrong with us because we think that we can fix it, right? And so we spend the rest of our lives trying to fix it. And it's impossible for us to fix it a lot of the time, because we don't have the right tools to do it.
And so we're trying to make everything that was never ours it was never a problem to fix in the first place. impossible for us to fix it. So, you know, there's so many adaptations in our society that are considered to be good. So if it's productivity, if it's exercise, it's good. If it's tied in to obsessive tidying. It's good.
But if drinking and drugs are bad, but they're all part of the same continuum, you know, it's all things that we're doing to escape ourselves. We get something from it. It's a way of running away from ourselves or not being with ourselves in our distress. And the harder people find it to stop drinking, usually the more work that needs to be done, around how we feel about ourselves. And so to take us back to and I know this is a complicated concept. And I will dig into this more as we go through. I hope it's interesting to me, give me some feedback on this, by the way, because I'm, I love this subject, it might be weird for you guys, it might be interesting.
So if attachment is having somebody, attachment is being connected to our caregivers. And so when we choose attachment, over authenticity, what we do is we choose to fit in, in order to be loved, in order to be taken care of. So where we might be a sensitive kid, and we might be crying about stuff, someone says, don't cry. Whatever reason we make that mean, that if we cry, we won't be loved. So we stop crying, and we start making crying bad. We start making quite bad. And so we start to construct this personality, it's like we talk about shadow work, I'll talk about that in another episode. But it's basically often the things we judge others for are things that we've made bad in ourselves, based on this construction that we have, at a very early age, because of something that we did, and we got into trouble for and then we suddenly have, like, we become the opposite of that. Like, I came to the point where I'd have Myers Briggs testing to incorporate. And I was an ENTJ, which is kinda like the, like the corporate boss, leader, not very caring, judgmental.
person, I mean, that's what I became in order to fit into corporate life. And my body was struggling against it. Like I, I was getting so many messages that I couldn't listen to, that this wasn't actually me. But I didn't listen to them, I couldn't listen to them. Because then who the hell was I, and this is your thing.
So often, we've made ourselves bad. We are trying so hard to fit in. So if our parents were like, really, really particular about tidying, or really, really particular about dieting, or really, really, or being slim. Or, you know, all of these things will impact us and will have, and will become almost our coping mechanism. We construct a personality, I'm very controlled, I'm very organised, I'm very, you know, my, my house is really tidy. So we construct these things in order for materials to be set acceptable. And what happens often, there's really big underlying reasons why it's really important to us. Because culturally, as a tribe, we need to fit in because we don't want to be thrown out by the tribe. Because originally, we were supposed to be this nomadic. We were these nomadic people. And we've evolved massively in the last 100 or 200 years. But before that, for years, and years and years, we were these nomadic people. And we haven't evolved, like biologically and in our brains at the same speed, as we've evolved as we as our kind of environment has changed. So we now live on our own and we don't have family around.
It's very hard for us to give constant care and attention to our babies to be holding our babies all the time. Because we don't have the support network around us. We don't have all the mothers and grandmothers and neighbours and everything else. is also interesting too. And there's so many different sorts of reds around this but there's something I mean, there's something for Every research proven around attachment theory. And the more I read about it, the more and more I work with people in this way, it becomes so clear to me that, especially women, I can't speak for men, I don't know what it's like to be a man. But fitting in as is a way of surviving.
For years, I mean, we have had intergenerational trauma, not just from our own families, but for our sex. Agenda. Fluid just that might be now but we have had to be other than we are, in order to be safe. And so this is another reason why it's so important to me that we don't make ourselves bad. We're using a coping mechanism to keep our precious little self safe. Yeah.
This is why this work is so important in why we need to stop this, this conversation with this whole alcoholic problem drinking thing, because none of this is actually about that it's not about alcohol. It's not about anything that we use to escape ourselves. And it's about what happens to us, when we have suppressed our needs over a period of time. And it's where books like The Body Keeps the Score. I think I've always got another one that body says no, and suppressing our needs like I did when I was drinking, I was continuously drinking to escape the fact that I was not. I was not in integrity with myself. I was out of integrity. I was doing things that didn't feel right to me, I felt my relationship was not good. And I felt like I was having to live this life that I didn't want to live. And it felt really, and funny enough thinking about it now. You know, my little feisty, 13 year old, felt really out of integrity with who she was. Like I didn't know not standing up when I saw things were wrong.
Allowing bullies to bully in the workplace. And there's something about midlife that I think we just get this big wake up call just going for it. You know, that's that inner knowing that little knock on the door that goes, Hey, there's something not quite right. I think you might need to do something about this. And then all of the personality and all this other stuff is going no, no, no, it's fine. And the little voices going on. This doesn't feel right. I feel like me, I was like 1000 paper cuts is what suppression of self does to people.
And I would love to do a PhD on this one day, because there's a whole load of stuff in eating disorders, but the eating disorder world around it as well. And if couples work to suppress themselves, it causes a lot of harm. And most of us don't even know that we're suppressing ourselves because we don't even know who ourself is right? We have no idea because we've constructed this personality to keep us safe as a very young child. And I think our role is as an adult to unpick that so that we can rest leave them live the rest of our life as an authentic human being really, really shining our freakin fucking light. Stepping into our potential.
I mean, last night I went to ecstatic dance. I met Lou who works with me and he spoke to my programs. No, no, she's divine. Both of us have been going through a lot of stuff lately. And we danced our arses off, it was a completely cyber environment. It starts off and you will feel a bit uncomfortable and you'll be a bit like oh, look at that one or look at that one. But you just I've been going quite a lot now and I've set up monthly meetups. So if anyone wants to join me, if you go into either Cuppa Community or you go into Untoxicated I've posted them for the rest of the year until October so definitely come along it also means that I go as well so but there was just this great potential of humaneness there that night. And what it was is this community and it was just lovely there's no substances there at all so no one drinks, no one is under the influence, there's no phones, you're not allowed to talk. So you start off and you're all you know you've brought your sort of cultural baggage in with you and then by the end of it you're just you're smiling and everybody and just loving each other like you're on drugs but you're not and the experience of being together over a night and dancing to big tribal beautiful dance space and starts off slow and gorgeous. And it goes into slow and gorgeous and I you know, I spent the last five minutes just lying on the floor just feeling the vibe Anna sounds crazy, but it's so and the goodness of people is there like a people they're great. I don't don't mean goodness as in life. They've got a really nice house and they are perfect children. I mean, like the dirty, messy, sweaty. Goodness of community and humaneness and vitality and potential is there, unsullied and beautiful. And that to me is what this journey is all about.
