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Welcome to this week's episode of midlife A F. This week we're going to be talking about the felt sense and how important that is in being alcohol free over to me. If you're a woman in midlife, his intuition is telling you that giving booze the elbow might be the next right move. There. 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 teams, 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 if we didn't have to keep drinking. Come with me. Together we'll find our group without booze.
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I lovingly acknowledge the boomerang 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. Hi,
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everybody, how was your weekend? How was your long weekend, if you were in certain states, not long weekend, if you're in others,
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we have been packing up our house because we are planning to sell it. So that's been fun.
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Talking to estate agents going and looking at houses.
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And it's been really interesting. And and the reason you know, I wanted to talk a little bit. So we're also in week two of the great Ozzie alcohol experiment. And we've got a wonderful group this time. We always have wonderful groups actually. And every single group is different because there's a different date. So I'm trying to make my head less crazy. There's a different dynamic isn't there for different people in the group. And the my membership group be the lighthouse, they're always there because they get to be part of the greater seattle experiment as part of their membership. So it's always really nice to have them there. Because you've got some people who are in all different levels in their relationship with alcohol and people who are just starting out people who are, you know, who've been doing it for a while, people who've been alcohol free for a long time, people who are mainly alcohol free, and then have the odd data point that they're just trying to learn from. So it's really lovely, because it's almost like, we it's a little bit of mentorship, if that makes sense. And it shows you know, it lets people see that, you know, you get the change that they're looking for as possible. And everybody's the same. And so one of the things we've been talking about some quite we've gotten quite deep quite quickly this this time, which is great. We've been talking about felt sets. And for those of you who don't know, what felt sense is it is the way it is how we feel like how our felt sense is like the experience that we have in our bodies. So for example, right now, I'm not feeling that much. I'm pretty snowing there. But if I focus on for example, touching the fabric of my clothes, I can see for example, I've got jeans on my pants on my trousers, my trousers and jeans, I can feel the denim against my fingertip. And there's so there's there's a lot in so it felt senses like how you feel. And there's a lot to felt sense as well. There's a lot to feeling depending on your neuro type too, because for example, and I've spoken about this a lot of the time, it's one of the things that neurodivergent humans find quite difficult. A lot of neurodivergent humans have something called alexithymia which is a difficulty in naming emotions. And also so naming what you're feeling. And there's also interoceptive awareness. Now many of us particularly female assigned a birth or women, we have generally got quite poor interoceptive awareness, because generally, we've spent most of our lives suppressing our actual our actual situation, you know, with either it might be that we've been in diet culture. So we've been, you know, restricting our eating, we've very often been unable to be our authentic selves, for risk of rejection for genuine risk of rejection. By which I mean, you know, particularly as children, you know, if we, we talked about earlier in group, you know, a lot of us, I remember my sister, being quite what you'd call having separation anxiety from parents. And my youngest child, and into some extent, my oldest child has now two, and I think I did to my manifested itself slightly differently. This is very, very common in neurodivergent. Humans, also people who've struggled with trauma, and the reason being that we tend to be quite sensitive to our environments. And so when we experience the world, in our bodies, we have a body experience of the world, it is either very, very overwhelming and lot or, you know, we almost kind of don't feel and there's something to be said, for the concept of when we're not feeling whether or not that's actually a trauma response, as well. As in we've had an a number of experiences of things being too much for us. And so it's almost like we've shut down we've gone into dorsal, which when you if we talk about the nervous system, which I can do, because I love it. But there's a there's a particular theory called the polyvagal theory, which was developed by a guy called Steven Porges. And a lady called Deb Dinah, and they've, there's a brilliant book, which I highly recommend, if you're interested in sort of getting to know your nervous system, a nervous system is basically the ventral the vagus nerve, it runs, I think it runs from the base of your skull, ad all the way down, and then it goes off into your tummy. And somewhere else as well. But basically, that it stands for wandering nerve, it's a wandering, nervous, it's kind of one throughout your body. And it basically, it communicates information between your tummy and your head and your heart. And it's a survival. It's an it's a, it's a, something that's been developed for our survival, who's been around and different parts of it developed at different parts of our evolution. So dorsal which is sort of frozen. Oh, Hi, Lisa, good to see you, is frozen, which is kind of like the bottom of the ladder. If you think of the nervous system as like a ladder. And at the top of the ladder, you've got something which is called, which I think is the right names now. I think it's ventral. Ventral is the official name for parasympathetic is another term people use. And that is kind of like where you're functioning, and you're social, and you can have a giggle, you know, your nervous system is fairly relaxed. In between that there is the sympathetic nervous system or come up with another name for it. I think it's just called this I think everyone calls it the sympathetic nervous system, which is basically you're in fight or flight. And then at the very bottom is dorsal, which is basically freeze. And there's another part of that which is also foreign. And foreign is is people pleasing masking in order to be acceptable, and all of this stuff and it is so tied into drinking. Because most of the time we're drinking to keep ourselves safe from a perception of danger. Now, that's gonna sound very extreme to some of you. But if you think that anxiety is basically fear, fear of not being in control and the desperate attempt to control everything. And we do that by worrying about everything. And there's two coping mechanisms for anxiety and neither of them are helpful. One of them is worry, and the other is numbing. So numbing to numbing the worry, and both, neither of them resolve the cause of the anxiety. And it's it's so interesting because all these things that we feel all these all the stuff that we run away from, the answer is never running away from it. The answer is always going to be leaning into it. And and what we need to be able to do is make it safe for us to do so which is where, you know, you listen to there's, again, a fantastic trauma person. I'm sure many of you know this, but I'm gonna repeat it as I always talk to the person who probably knows the latest. And the rest of you can go yes, we know about this. That there's a guy called Bessel Vander cop, and he wrote a book called The Body Keeps the Score. The Body Keeps the Score is about trauma, and how we store it in our body. And there's lots and lots of different definitions of trauma by people who are specialists in trauma, Steven Porges is probably my favorite one.
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Then my brain just went blank. Gabor Ma Tei Brene Brown basically what they say is trauma now again, trauma, everyone's like, Oh, trauma units, like somebody's having an accident or somebody being attacked. Yes, that is a form of trauma. But trauma is something we all experience. It's almost a condition of living. And trauma is not necessarily just about things that happen to you, but that also about things that didn't happen for you. And those of us who are sensitive souls might be that were neurodivergent might be that we have had trauma might be that we consider ourselves to be highly sensitive people might be that we consider ourselves to be empaths to be intuitive. Generally, we feel the world in a very strong way.
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Hello,
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I've forgotten addiction big three name is but I'm really glad you're here. I love your work. And we're talking I'm talking here about the nervous system. And I'm talking about how most humans that I know that I work with who drink I'm most humans actually. In fact, every human is it like I said it's a condition of being human being in a modern world where we're not being brought up in you know, in tribal communities, where every child can be picked up and loved when they need it. And you know, we have different levels of sensitivity and lots of different reasons for that but I don't know a single person who drinks who's not very very sensitive. Oh, Amanda are lovely. Yeah, I love your your works amazing. I keep recommending you to tea, I get so many inquiries about you know, being with other people who are struggling with alcohol and I never really know where to send people but I'd like to follow addiction rates through she's great. But yeah, so talking about nervous system, talking about being a highly sensitive person. For me, I identify as an autistic human being. I'm also ADHD so we're both my children. I believe my husband also is as well. He's not diagnosed. But I didn't know any of that until I stopped drinking because I had to stop drinking in order for me to be able to be with myself enough for me to do the investigations to find out stuff right. But generally, we expect to we tend to experience the world either in a really big way. Like the world has a big impact on us we can feel other people's and it's in our in our nervous system is all about fight or flight. It's all about survival. We've got these different layers in there. We've got dorsal which is like frozen, we've got Forney We've got a sympathetic nervous system fight or flight. And then we've got ventral, which is having a lovely time communicating, feeling sociable. And, you know, we move up and down the ladder, as human beings, there's nothing wrong with any of those states, they're all perfectly normal things for us to, to be in. What happens for many of us, and certainly for me, my experience was, and this is where I'm cautious to use the word resilience, I don't like it. Because I think it can be used in a in a way that is about making people compliant. Not letting people have their experiences. And I think it can actually certainly for the neurodiverse virgin community, it has for years been used. It's been weaponized as a word resilience. Because what it says is, if you're not able to do what we consider to be the norm, then you're not resilient. And resilience in itself is not it's just it's been used badly. But resilience is our ability to bounce back and grow. It's our ability to have some, some stretch in ourselves. Like, for example, for me, at the moment, I've been going through some stuff with this, someone in my life has not been that great. And it has meant that my resilience is less or more brittle. Because I'm in fight or flight a lot of the time. And when I was drinking, I was in fight or flight all the time. And I think a lot of drinkers are in fight or flight. And drinking feel safe, and it doesn't feel safe to be in ourselves, right? It doesn't feel safe to be in ourselves. And this is the big one of the big pieces for me is how do we make it? Hi, Portia. Nice to see that's a nice name isn't it reminds me of that book ballet shoes written by forgetting his name now, but I loved it when I was a kid. I'm sure Porsche was one of the kids name and petita. Annette, I can't remember the girl's name is maybe one of you guys watch ballet shoes as well, you know?
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What's his name? He was a great writer. Anyway, I digress. What are we talking about? We're not talking about about ballet shoes. We're talking about the veteran worker
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service nervous system being stuck in fight or flight, not having very much resilience being very brittle. And we were talking. So last night, in my group, we were talking about the impact of an MRI. This is the reason why we when when we look at alcohol, we tend to and people want it to just be about alcohol. Like they just want it to be, it's just this thing that I'm going to do a course and I'm going to be okay, and then I'll move on to the next thing. Like another thing to tick off on our list of things that we're going to be doing to make our lives better to improve ourselves. And again, this is part of it, too. It's like, so many humans who I work with come to me and say you say to people, why do you want to stop drinking? And nine times out of 10? Especially for women? The answer is because I need to be more productive. And you know, my answer is always do. Because nine times out of 10 We're drinking, it's the only way we can stop being so fucking productive. Because our busy brains there with anxiety, worrying, making us do all the things to make us an acceptable person in society because it's productivity driven. And we're so scared of what might happen. And we don't know this, right? This is all unconscious. But we're so programmed, especially for women, you know, we have been under threat for generations. So our anxiety is very, very, it has a right to be there. It's not safe. And this is one of the things you know, I was talking about this with. Again, I'm gonna digress. Sorry, guys. I was talking with my girlfriend when I was swimming on on Sunday. And we were talking about parenting. And she was saying how, you know, she has been very she didn't say this, but she was sort of talking about how she had been quite desperate to keep her relationship you know, just that's a grass Venus that we get when our parents, our parents, when our children become teenagers and they start drifting away from us and we sort of like hanging on to them like I was saying it reminded Mi a, you know, when I was growing up with my mom, and I remember that feeling, and we were saying how, you know, grasping this is like because it comes from a place of lack, it's fear, right? Is, is quite repulsive to people. And I use that word. And I use that with my friends. And I felt really bad because it was like, it's really strong word that was actually said, repugnant. Because I remember feeling that is, you know, because we want something and, and I was talking to another lady that was there. She's a comedian, very clever lady. And she was saying, you know, we're talking about this whole idea of the sort of myth of a fair world. And the reason why, you know, people don't respond well to desperation, is because it's, it shows a person's pain, doesn't it? Like we see their pain. And when we see a person's pain, we have to acknowledge that the world is not kind, and pupil are in pain. And they're lonely, and there's a lack and it's just terrible for them. And if we do that, then we have to open our minds to the idea that it might be like that for us, too.
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And we don't want to do that. Because we're all performing, aren't we, we're like, we're all performing.
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It's all fun. Because our house is clean.
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Hello, Mrs. Jean mom of three, good to see you talking about performing, performing ourselves masking, right. So we're also desperately trying to be okay, to be regarded as good to be seen as, you know, to be loved, to be okay to be worthy. And, you know, so we all feel that we have to perform this dance. And this is why you know, this whole concept of authenticity over authenticity overcome on brain authenticity over attachment. So we always pick attachment over authenticity, because it's about safety. So when we were children, if our parent was mean to us, we internalize that or shamed us, or, you know, told us we couldn't have our experience. Let's say we were. We had separation anxiety, and we didn't want to go to school and stay at home with our parents.
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We would conform
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because otherwise they withdrew their love. And it's not again, we talked about this in Group A lot. It's not a blame thing. They will get quite sort of tied up in this whole idea that when we talk about our experience children, if we say that it wasn't good enough, if we say that it hurt our hearts, HYDrive
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wave saber events. I love your stuff. That's so cool.
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I guess because I'm from England originally, and I used to be a raver as well. So I love your stuff. Hi, Nick Jonesy. Hi, Deb.
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people's names a planner.
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So what Sorry, what was I talking about? I get so distracted.
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Oh, hi. See, Trisha, sorry to see you there. Nice to see you.
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What was I talking about? Very got completely waylaid by exciting rate ideas of raves. We started off to we were talking about. We're talking about felt sense. And we're talking about fight or flight. And we talked about the nervous system. We talked about the sensitivity of human beings. And we were talking about masking and we were talking about performing ourselves. And I was referring to this this idea that we sort of divorced aren't we from our from our bodies, and yet our bodies the nervous system, the reason we drink most of the time is because of fear. Most of us are struggling in some way or other with anxiety, fear of the future, looking back at the past, wanting to control things in order to feel safe. And we reason we drink and we drink because it feels safer to put a poisonous, carcinogenic substance that's going to disassociate ourselves from ourselves. It feels safer to do that than to be with ourselves and under stress. And that's okay, right? It's okay that that we do that, because we have to make it safe for ourselves to be with ourselves first. We can't just be Like, Oh, you know, you have to be with yourself and sit with your feelings. And you know, that's just not okay, that's not going to happen. That's not going to be nice for us, it's not going to be safe for us. So we have to start creating practices that make it safe. And I was talking to my group last night about, I went to a yen, and I've been doing him for a while, because I can see in yoga I'm talking about here, and when Bessel Vander Kolk, and and, you know, the trauma specialist to Steven Porges. And I'm trying to think of other ones, there's so many, right, but the big ones, you know, they talk about, you know, what is what is what is trauma, trauma is an experience that we have, that was too much for our nervous system. And the reason that we end up with trauma impacting us is because we didn't have ourselves witnessed, we weren't witnessed with by an empathetic human. And so much of this stuff is about CO regulation, you know, being safe and other, you know, being safe with other people, co regulation being that you almost get your sense of safety from being around other safe people. And which is weighing in from a parenting perspective, when you stop drinking, it's so good, because you start when you start working on yourself and being able to regulate your nervous system. And we're not saying that you're always going to be regulated, of course not, that would be insane. You need you know, there's a right to be we have, we have good reason, sometimes to be frightened. And you know, we have good reason to be on high alert, often, you know. But but but once we start to understand it a bit more, once we start to realize why we're having the reactions that we do to certain situations, the meaning that we are making about ourselves because of the situation in the present moment. But generally, because something's happened in our past, or a belief that we've made up about ourselves based on a set of circumstances. So for example, if you talk about like little T traumas, the things that happen to every single human being you cannot live in a western I like I don't think there's anywhere in the world, that you could grow up and not have little T trauma, because you're not being picked up constantly by your parents, you know, you're not an only child with a, you know, stay at home mom with no anxiety, who's just literally there to kind of like, be there with you know, your comfort your every knees, it's just not possible, right. And this is where it's really important that, you know, saying that we didn't get what we need in order for us to thrive is not us blaming the people in our lives, because everybody in our lives has their own trauma, their own intergenerational indoctrination. And part of our job and I was talking about this again, in group today is, you know, to to to go okay, well, are we are we going to keep this going? Or are we going to try and change it? Do we want to try and unravel some of this stuff? Do we want to become less reactive? Do we want to become less unconscious? Do we want to be making decisions based on the reality of the situation? Or do we want to be making decisions based on interpretation of a situation based on some information that is stored in our body since we were three years old or younger? You know, to me, the purpose of of living is to connect to source and by source I mean self. Hi, hi. JD Alexandra. Hi, Sonia. Nice to see you all. And so to set to connect to source and to nurture source, so self right, to build self love. And you know, we talk about compassion, fatigue, for example, we talked about not having, you know, not being resilient we talked about, and these are things that happen because we've not been putting into self we've been giving out to other but not putting into self and again, it's all trauma responses because we've been conditioned to believe that if we are not giving out to others, then we're selfish. And it's also a safety thing to you know, in for a lot of particularly female assigned at birth and women in relationships, you know, there's a lot to be lost, potentially financially. which is safety, right? Safety for your children for you, you know, having the difficult conversations, putting yourself first can feel very unsafe. And this is why we have to have so much sympathy and empathy for ourselves, as we learn to do these things, and we make mistakes. Yeah, we don't get it, right. And this is why it breaks my heart that the alcohol industry and you know, bodies like drink wise, which is funded by the alcohol industry, have words like drink responsibly on bottles of drink, and on point of sale and on advertising, putting the blame on the human being, as opposed to on the substance society, because what that keeps us doing is pointing at each other and hiding ourselves who they've got a problem. Oh, they're an alcoholic, drama, drama, drama. I'm not an alcoholic, oh, you know, just such a distraction. So irrelevant, but created great marketing created to keep us all alone. Brushing everything under the table, not talking about things. Like this, it's like,
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love are all fine. We're
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not fine. Like this, if we're not fine.
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We're all drinking or fucking, or working, or shopping or scrolling through social media are autoimmune diseases have
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never been higher, or we were not fine as a society and a war we're far from fine. We're not broken. But we're not fine.
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And doing this dance of trying to be fine, is is, is hard. Because we want to be accepted because we want to belong. So taking us back trying to bring myself back around to where we started, which was on the somatic side of things, talking about somatic experiencing, talking about the felt sense talking about the importance of the body, talking about how tricky that can be for those of us who are neurodivergent, or who have had trauma, because there's very good reasons why we've disassociated from the body. And there's nothing wrong with disassociating from the body as well. But there is there needs to be an all of the greatest trauma theorists talk to the way the weight out is always through. But it's how do you do through safety. And so, you know, things like practicing interoceptive awareness skills, which I always show, you can do it in your foot, you could design a shoe, you can do it. And it's like, stretching out your fingers hold of 30 seconds, really noticed the webbing, and then an anchor scrunch your hand into a fist. And you know, really keep it like that 30 seconds, then stretch it out again, for 30 seconds, really notice like the actual sensations of your body, the sensations of like pulling your fingers apart. These these are things that if you do them on a regular basis, they increase your interceptive awareness. Now interoceptive awareness is being aware of the sensations that you're having in your body. So for example, for me, I have very poor interceptive awareness, I had lots and lots of eating disorders kid. And I've also suppressed a lot of things about myself. So for me, you know, the safety thing my body chose to dissociate. So for me when somebody says, Oh, how do you feel I'm like, I feel nothing. So I work on it. So interceptive awareness is something you can work on and do different exercises. But basically what happens is when you get mindful when you start focusing on the sensation of and so people get like, feelings and senses is quite different sometimes. But like if you're focusing on the stretch and the feeling of the stretch in that unit between
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Hi Judy, good to see you.
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You know in between your fingers, when you're focusing on that you get out of you're not in this sort of fuzzy fuzzy thinking analytical brain. It brings you back to yourself and that's what felt senses it's like coming back to self and yes, it needs work. It's not easy. But the great thing is I remember one of my favorite teachers electrical Jay fields, who I've had on the podcast twice so if you're ever interested go and have a listen to podcast episodes with her she's amazing. She taught she started teaching me about somatic experiencing and what her what she used to refer to it as being in this would be really appropriate for dry wave sober events was she used to refer to it as being like a deck. And, you know, she would say, you know, you have, you're having this big experience big emotion. And then you come back to self. So you keep coming back to, you know, that feeling, you know, or touching a bit of fabric and really noticing how it feels, or, you know, something that brings you back to self and out of the frenetic thoughts that are creating the drama, which are creating the experience that you're having in your body. And now, sometimes that can be it's not even a thought, you know, it's places it's, you know, it can be all different things. It can be smells, it can be that create the reaction in our bodies. But what's important is noticing it. So the first step is I noticed like So Tara brach talks about rain is the technique she uses. It's recognize, allow, inquire, inquiry, interrogate, nurture. And this is the thing with feelings. It's like, it's, it's about noticing them. I'm feeling this. So last night when I was at my yoga class, because I've noticed that this is something that really works for me, because I get very tight on my hips. And I know a lot of women get very tight in their hips. But again, it's basically here, you stay in a position for three minutes. And people with busy brains find it really, really difficult, which is why it's so good for people with busy brain. Because it's, you know, you're staying in one position, and what the body is trying to do by moving you all the time is trying to get you
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distracted.
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What I, when I was lying down there, I was thinking about this particular individual who's caused me a lot of harm,
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emotional harm, and I comforted myself, I can lay on the floor, holding myself saying this was really hard. This was so hard. And we're just going to try and let go of it, let it go. It's not ours to hold. It's not ours to hope. And this is what somatic work is about. And so people like vessel like, Gabor, a lover, I'm using their first names like I've made, it's not that's why they talk about things like yoga, breathwork, walking, you know, anything that we do with our body EMDR tapping, what do you call it as a performer names that I can't remember. But havening is another really good one, you know, anything that brings us that sort of, like, brings us back to self brings us back to you know that we're this body with skin and we're wearing clothes, and we sat on a chair and we've got toes and they regal and some of us have got bunions. And it's just a regular thing, right? When I say sort of me. But it's so important, because we're drinking a lot of the time to escape the frenetic Ness that we create, by not being with leaning into learning how to, number one, be with our experience of the world. And number two, to interrogate it a little bit so that we can understand why the reaction that we're having in the present moment we're having. Because it will be based on a story that we've told ourselves from an experience that we've had in the past for and it's literally like we're all walking around like two three year olds even younger, and having these massive reactions to the world that aren't based on a reality. I think that's all I have to say on that. So anyone have any questions, please feel free to ask me. I will leave it at that. But it is fascinating and says things like yoga, breath work, you know, these are great things to do things that you can do with your body and spend a bit of time with the thing you know, but it's always about validating about you know, it's okay to feel like that. Because all the time we're trying to push it away, even by like, Oh, you'll be alright. And you can get through this. It's like I don't need to hear that. I just need to hear that. I'm, I just need to hear that you see me? You believe me? That's what our precious selves needs to hear from us not. You know, come on, pick yourself up, dust yourself off. It's like no, just bear with it for a minute. That's that is emotional intelligence. Emotional Intelligence is learning to teach ourselves so we can teach our kids so we can teach the people around us to validate before we do anything else. Nobody wants to be fixed. Nobody wants to fixing People just want to be seen and believed. And if we can see and believe ourselves that is everything
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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 home 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
