DTD 173
===
[00:00:00] This is the Drive Time Debrief, episode 173.
Hey guys, welcome back to the podcast. I'm Amanda. I'm Laura. And I'm Kendra. And this is a continuation of our Byron Katie series, her book, Loving What Is. We've already talked about meeting your thoughts with understanding, staying in your business, and the last one was [00:01:00] arguing with reality.
Today we're gonna talk about becoming aware of your stories and then looking for the thought behind the suffering. So here is a passage from the book and then we'll discuss. She says, I often use the word story to talk about thoughts or sequences of thought that we convince ourselves are real.
A story may be about the past, the present, or the future. It may be about what things should be, what they could be, or why they are. Stories appear in our minds hundreds of times a day when someone gets up without a word and walks out of the room. When someone doesn't smile or doesn't return a phone call, or when a stranger does smile before you open an important letter or when you feel an unfamiliar sensation in your chest.
How about when your boss invites you to come to his office? Anyone? Mm-hmm. Or you get a text from the boss, we need to talk, right? Mm-hmm. Or when your partner talks to you in a certain tone of voice, these are all stories. Stories are the untested, uninvestigated theories that tell us what all these things mean.
We [00:02:00] don't even realize that they're just theories. I will say that the switch from phone calls to texting has been the death of me because it turns out I read into things so much more. I mean, I've asked those close to me to please include an emoji with it because otherwise I just naturally come up with a story about what the person's thinking or what they really mean or whatever.
That's, gosh, it's dangerous for me. Yeah. And it's like our brains do it. Our brains are good at recognizing patterns. And if it says, oh, someone who spoke to me with this tone of voice in the past, it was terrible. Right? And it's happening again, so it's going to be terrible again. It really does require some.
Prefrontal cortex to override that and say, okay, let's be curious. Let's see if they really meant what they just said. Jefferson Fisher is one of my new favorite [00:03:00] people, and he says, when someone says something rude to you, I'm gonna need you to say that again and. Letting them say it again if that really is what they wanted to say.
Or allowing them time to clarify and clear up our story that we're having. So I definitely tell stories. My brain tells a lot of stories. When I was first dating my husband, my brother was getting married and I just nonchalantly on the phone was like, hey, do you wanna go to my brother's wedding?
Which, you know, we were in med school. We had lots to do and at first he was like I'll probably skip that. You know, whatever. Well, of course I made this whole story about how I mean, I made a big story. We're not like on the same page with this, blah, blah, blah.
And I'm telling my roommate who was in law school at the time, and she's like, well, did you, did you tell him that it was important to you? Or like ask him like if he could, you know, switch around his schedule. I was like, well, no. I mean, and then I was like, I guess I could do that. And he was like, oh, I didn't realize that it was important.
Sure, yeah. I'll go. [00:04:00] Oh my God. Like, thank God she made me. Because I had a whole, a whole devastating story and I don't even know where it came from. Yeah. But it was a simple, nonchalant question that was like, yeah, no, I have something else going on. And I turned it into, we're breaking up. We were never meant to be.
I mean, what the drama. Yeah. Yeah. It's fascinating what our brains do. Here is another quote. She says, before I found inquiry, and I would say curiosity is the word I use. Yeah. Before I found inquiry, I had no way to stop this kind of thinking. Small stories bred bigger ones, bigger stories bred major theories about life.
I see this in some of my family members, and I too have indulged in the occasional conspiracy theory, everyone, yeah, how terrible it was and how the world was a dangerous place. I ended up feeling too frightened and depressed to leave my bedroom. When you're operating on uninvestigated theories of what's going on and [00:05:00] you aren't even aware of it.
You're in what I call the dream. Often the dream becomes troubling. Sometimes it even turns into a nightmare. Rather than understanding the original cause of our stress - a thought. We try to change our stressful feelings by looking outside ourselves.
We try to change someone else or we reach for sex, food, alcohol, drugs, or money in order to find temporary comfort and the illusion of control. It is easy to be swept away by some overwhelming feeling. So it's helpful to remember that any stressful feeling is like a compassionate alarm clock that says you're caught in the dream.
Caught in the dream, we try to alter and manipulate the stressful feeling by reaching outside of ourselves. We're usually aware of the feeling before the thought. That's why I say the feeling is an alarm clock that lets you know there's a thought that you may want to do the work or inquiry on. Investigating will always lead you back to who you really are and [00:06:00] invites us into the awareness of the internal cause and effect.
Once we recognize this, suffering begins to unravel on its own, and this is, to me, it's. Moving from judgment or resistance against reality into curiosity and wonder. Why I think like this, I wonder why I told that story. Is there a reason? Is there something in the past that looked like this, that my brain is trying to alert me to somehow?
Mm-hmm. Yeah. It's just I, I think we've all experienced this awareness. The three of us of things I thought were absolutely unequivocally true about life and the world in general. Turns out was just my theory of life and the world in general that had never been investigated or questioned. Mm-hmm. I believed everything I thought.
Mm-hmm. Turns out some of the times I am still in agreement [00:07:00] with what I used to think. Some of the times I'm way off. Yes. But you never know unless you on purpose, look at it, think on it, question its reality. And even if it's real, is it helpful? Right. Is it making me better? Is it making somebody else better?
What is the point of this thought? Yeah. I've used this when I feel anxiety because sometimes anxiety just pops up for me and I'm like, I don't even know what's why. Like what? What is my brain trying to do? And is it real? And ultimately, it's never real, almost ever. It's my brain just doing its thing, trying to keep me alive and out of harm's way.
And sometimes its gauges are off. And so being curious, why would my brain think I'm not safe right now? I'm safe and I love what Mel, [00:08:00] she says I'm safe and I'm loved and that. To me helps so much with all of these things. No matter where I investigate and find crazy stories, everything can boil down to, you know what, I'm safe and I'm loved.
Yeah. Yeah. One of my favorite things to do is looking for evidence. Mm-hmm. As a scientist, I loved when I learned how to fact check, right? Looking for evidence or looking for the facts, like what are the facts here, right? Mm-hmm. Because you can pause for a minute before pressing the panic button, and.
That's what I tell myself is do I have all the information I need right now to actually mm-hmm. Push panic button, or do I, you know, just like Brené Brown says, do I have all the information I need to freak out? And so as I get better at that, my brain is looking for evidence, it's looking for facts.
When I. Think a thought, and I don't like the uncomfortableness it brings, I'm like, wait, let's pause and let's see. And it's actually helped me to [00:09:00] sit in the discomfort a little bit better because now my brain's like, okay, I don't love this feeling. What is happening? And do I need to fact check here?
Mm-hmm. I think this is especially helpful for like. Anger. I, I do think that you feel the anger before you have any thoughts about it sometimes, or at least for me. But just noticing that any feeling like that if you can sit with it, like yeah. But why? To try to get to the bottom of it and then that's when you can start questioning.
But, you know, that's definitely not taught, I don't think very often and it's just something that I think is fascinating to start to investigate on purpose, to get to the bottom of what's really going on. What are your stories? Yep. Right? And just calling them that makes you realize the stories that may or may not be true.
Or even if they are true, may or may not be helpful to me. Yeah. Yeah. Byron Katie, I saw her in a YouTube video or something. She's like, we tend to [00:10:00] just put a post-it note on people or situations like they're bad or this is dangerous or something like, that's just the whole of the entire story.
Right. I mean, of course our brains do that 'cause it's easier to generalize and it doesn't take as much effort to actually think thoughtfully about things. Mm-hmm. Start to question like, who would you be without stories? Like, that family member's a bad person. Mm-hmm. Or I had a bad childhood. Mm-hmm.
Or, I'm not as good of a doctor as he is. Or a story like, I'm just a kind of person that doesn't know how to relax. Mm-hmm. I'm unlucky. I'll never have enough money. I'm unlucky in love. I'm a terrible parent. I'm too fat. I'm not living up to my potential. These stories that a lot of us never question, you might, there were parts of your childhood that were bad.
There were probably some parts that were good. It can be both. Yeah. With this list, even as I hear them, I'm a huge believer in the power of words. I would like for us to [00:11:00] show the afterthought and I notice this a lot of times when working with a client, when we pull up the unintentional thought, you can feel the negative energy in your body.
Like I had a bad childhood. Like you can just feel how it feels 'cause. You know, I had that story for a long time. I have a very high adverse childhood events score. Mm-hmm. So a lot of bad things did happen to me in my childhood, and I am the person I am today because of it. And it has given me so many opportunities to do good in the lives of other people because.
Of the experiences I had in my childhood, and my parents did better than their parents did. So there's so many additional stories that you can have instead of the one that is going to keep us stuck. Yeah, like the other piece that I thought of as you were reading this list is as [00:12:00] I've learned more about what emotional maturity is.
Emotional adulthood. The black and white thinking developed, like psychologists have a real emotional adulthood set of criteria and we should do a podcast on that at some point. It's fascinating, but black and white thinking is a very immature way of operating and it's. Like they're bad we're good is very actually emotionally immature and it makes sense for children.
They're trying to make sense of the world and having to do shortcuts, but emotionally mature thinking is much more nuanced and can see things like, oh, I can see the good. That happened in addition to the bad in my childhood. Mm-hmm. Or whatever. Yeah. So I like to force people whenever they're like, this is a terrible situation to like, okay, what percent?
Maybe 60%. Perfect. Right? It's not [00:13:00] 100%. Right. Right. Yeah. Maybe your percent badness is a lot more than somebody else. It's still not a hundred percent. Right, and this one's not helpful. With imposter syndrome and stuff of like, I'm not as good a doctor as he is.
What, what is that serving? If you would like to get better? Mm-hmm. In a particular area you can. And he said like what competition did you go on? Well, exactly for ER docs. I think it's particularly like toxic. Like, well that person's faster. Okay, but why are you not as fast? Because you like spending more time with the patient.
Yes. Well, it's not even a judgment call. It's just like you don't like to doctor in that way in the first place, there's a reason why you're not moving as fast as they are. Like, that's right. No good, no bad. But like you judging yourself negatively for not acting in the way that's not consistent with your values in the first place.
Not a logical, a good use of your time. Right, exactly. But until you like, look at these thoughts, [00:14:00] it just seems like. Oh yeah. I'm not as fast as they are because I'm choosing not to be, and I'm also gonna beat myself up over it. Okay. That's just, that's great. Right? That's, that's not helpful. Can't imagine.
Why feel bad? I don't know. I don't know how to relax. You do it, of course you do. Like you just aren't practicing mm-hmm. Right. Like to say that you will never figure out how to relax seems a little fatalistic. Mm-hmm. Like, and how can that possibly be accurate?
Mm-hmm. I'm unlucky until you are, you know, I don't have enough money and enough money for what? You don't have enough money to survive or to have like an $8 billion house. Like what? Like quantify that exactly. I'll never find love. Well, I promise you it's gonna be more difficult with that sort of attitude.
Mm-hmm. You're probably not going to events. You're probably not putting yourself out there. Right. Whenever you're feeling that way, all of these things, like it's worthwhile. First of all, number [00:15:00] one, you gotta figure out what your story is. The best way is when you're feeling terrible. What's your story about this situation?
Okay, then let's start looking at it. There is a quote that makes me laugh. It's like the brain is a dangerous place. Never go there alone. We have a free coaching session to anyone listening, if you are having difficulty with some of these things, please use it. We would love to show you how you can start to challenge your stories.
Yeah, if you feel bad, I mean, so much of the time when we feel horrible. It is stories that we're telling ourselves, and especially if we're feeling disempowered or like we have no choices. We're telling stories, and no matter how much we are entrenched in the idea that we don't have a choice, we do.
For me personally, it definitely takes a coach or a therapist oftentimes to say, do you see what your brain's doing there? Is that what you want [00:16:00] to happen? Is that what you want to choose? And it's really, really powerful how quickly it can make you feel better.
Yeah. Even if you just. Believe a little bit, like maybe your brain can't go all the way to the other side, but maybe just saying. There is another way. Your brain certainly could believe that I have a choice or there is a choice, or I can believe something else, or I could fact check here. Like there's always like this little bit of like.
You are so far over here, like I am never gonna find love. Right? So that seems an extremist thought, right? Those words always, never. And maybe you can't go to like, oh, I'm open to finding love. I, I know it's right around the corner. Like that seems like a large jump. So in order to not leap across the cavernous, you know, depths of despair, you may just need to believe that, oh, is there something else possible here?
I talk to clients all the time, like, [00:17:00] what else is possible? Okay, you can't believe that, you know, you are whatever. What is possible? And sometimes just saying, I have a choice here. Or just even recognizing that there is another option sometimes can just help you just a little bit, you know, tap into that resource called your big, beautiful brain and come up with a better story.
So well, we hope this has helped today. We have enjoyed going through Byron Katie's book. You should check it out. And also we love to get reviews. Give us five stars, leave us a review, help other doctors find us. And if you have any experiences or any stories, we would love to share them on air. So. Shoot 'em over to us [email protected] and follow us on the socials.
We have great content there and we post on the regular. So go follow us and we wanna tell you about our next webinar. Scroll down in the show notes and click the link and we'd love to see you there too. So [00:18:00] until next time, you are whole. You are a gift to medicine and the work you do matters.
