BSB 115
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Speaker: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Bite-Sized Brilliance podcast. I'm your host, Dr. April Darley.
One thing I tell my clients all the time is that how you frame it is how you're going to feel it. And all of us walk around with a subconscious playbook that we don't always know what is written down inside that playbook. It's kept a secret even from us, and we allegedly wrote the playbook. And this is what makes situations and reactions so frustrating because how many times has something happened to you and you reacted in some way, but you don't fully understand why you did it.
And it's only when you're thinking about it later that you realize it was maybe too blown out of proportion. You overreacted, you lashed out in anger, or you had a meltdown. You said something [00:01:00] you're not proud of. So many times that has happened and we don't truly understand why. And because we don't understand why the pattern has an opportunity to repeat, and the longer it lasts, the deeper it sinks.
This is what I want you to understand, that a lot of problems are really about framing and perception and not recognizing the pattern or truly understanding the pattern for what it really is. And I'm gonna give you a couple of examples or stories about this today that you might be able to relate to, and this is going to help you really see yourself inside this concept and maybe connect some dots to how you might be doing this in your life as well.
So first up, many years ago, I was attending a seminar and I was learning how to do this particular mind body technique. The instructor at [00:02:00] this seminar happened to be the creator of this technique, and he was telling the story of one of his most memorable moments throughout his many years of teaching and practice was this one.
He called an audience member up to do a live demonstration on his particular technique. And the man's issue was that his dad attacked him for no reason when he was 16, and it was so traumatic for him that he carried that inside of him. It upset him so deeply and affected his relationship with his father for decades.
And he went on to explain that this happened when he was at a camping trip. And he was putting a marshmallow in the fire or something for s'mores, and then he said all of a sudden his dad jumped up, tossed him to the ground and [00:03:00] just started hitting him, and he just never understood why.
So the instructor cleared that trauma from the brain and the body using that technique, and then he called for a break. And while he was on break, another man approached him and he said, you know what? I'm that guy's brother. And what he told you happened isn't what actually happened. Here's what really happened.
When he got up to put the marshmallow in the fire, he got too close and his pant leg actually caught on fire. So what are you supposed to do when you catch on fire? You stop, drop and roll. But the boy had no idea that he was actually on fire. So his dad saw it jumped up, tossed him to the ground to do a little stop, drop and roll, and was trying to put out the fire by kind of hitting him a little bit to get the fire out.
His dad was protecting him. It was like an act of [00:04:00] love, but to the boy, it was an act of trauma and violence. And this is what I mean by perception is we don't always see or feel things in the way they actually happened in reality. We create something called an _emotional reality_ and we create an entire story with thoughts, with beliefs, and that sinks into our mind and our body and becomes true.
It becomes our emotional reality that may or may not correspond to actual reality. And this is why you can have siblings that have the same parents grew up in the same household with the same circumstances, have two completely different views on the way they were treated as children or different perceptions about the same incident.
Even twins don't have the same playbook or experience. Your brain is bespoke and [00:05:00] your playbook is completely unique to you. And one thing that I do for my clients is help you understand the plays that you are running. To help you open up that playbook and to see your version of reality and then hold that up to the mirror of actual reality.
Is it true or do you just think, feel, and believe it's true? Now, the longer things last, the deeper they sink. I mentioned that earlier, and this man who this camping example was about, he didn't seek treatment for this trauma for decades. So it had plenty of time to filter down into the subconscious and create all these different connections like tree roots.
And I wanna give you another scenario that I mentioned to a client of mine just recently. This perception and our personal playbook [00:06:00] is exactly why two people have the same experiences. One encounters a trauma with it, the other one brushes it off. Here's how that happens. Now, if you have been driving for a while, if you are above the age of 16, however many decades that is, you have at one point in time had to slam on your brakes to avoid hitting someone. Whether they pulled out in front of you or someone ran a red light, you had to suddenly pump the brakes. Now, person A will go, _"wow, that was a close call. I'm super lucky"_, and go on about their day. They might even start to think about other ways of why they're lucky.
Because they have framed the experience as, yes, it was a close call. I feel my blood pumping, my heart beating. You get that adrenaline. This is normal. [00:07:00] This is what's supposed to happen. Your brain and body are doing what it needs to do when you had a sudden reaction to something that was dangerous. All that is normal.
But because they didn't feed that danger pathway, they said, I'm lucky. I'm so lucky, and here's how your brain perked up and went, oh, they think they're lucky, and you know what? Let's show them more evidence of how lucky they actually are. And that's person A. Person B had the same experience. And when they slammed on the brakes, they also said, _"wow, that was a close call. I could have died. And what would've happened to me if I died? What would've happened to my kids if I had died? How would they live? How would they function? How could my spouse raise them? What kind of hardships will it be?"_ And then it goes over and over in the mind, [00:08:00] and they have now created a pathway that says driving is dangerous.
And so now every time they get in the car, that playbook gets activated. That program that says driving is dangerous, and you could really die at any moment. And so person B develops long-term anxiety. This is how that happens in real time. And when you think something long enough, when you keep replaying that incident, you just sink that trauma or that experience, those beliefs, those emotions deeper and deeper and deeper, and they will express themselves eventually. And you may not even connect generalized anxiety anymore with that car accident or near miss. You may have had decades earlier, but your brain doesn't forget. And it has created this entire program [00:09:00] and playbook on what an appropriate response is.
Get in the car, heightened anxiety, heightened threats, keep the nervous system pumped up, keep the thoughts on negative, and let's repeat that. This is why it is so important that when something big happens in your life that you get in and seek some kind of resolution from your practitioner, whether that's if you actually had a car accident, go see your doctor, go see your chiropractor immediately, because they will tell you, get in while it's fresh and the body doesn't freeze and lock up.
Not just physically, but emotionally with the trauma. It doesn't sink in. It's still acute. That is when you want to take care of it quickly, because once it goes chronic, we have to pull it back up from the depths again, and we often have to do that bit by bit, by bit by bit. If you're a [00:10:00] gardener and you have ever pulled weeds out, you know that sometimes you have to tug really hard and you pull those roots out and you see how many connections they made, and it's a clump.
And so the longer you wait to treat something that's bothering you, either through coaching, through your physician, through your primary care provider, or other practitioners in your life, you are giving that thing a chance to burrow deeper and deeper and deeper, and then it makes the cleanup and resolution longer. When something is bothering you, address it quickly to avoid it going deeply. And this is how easy it is to create problems in the mental emotional landscape because the brain is not logical. Like there's a piece of it is, and we would love our entire brain to be super logical, [00:11:00] but the truth is it's mostly unconscious, subconscious. Emotion and survival based, and 97% of the time it doesn't make sense.
And what I do for my clients is to teach them how each of these three brains looks at life. That there's a perception each piece has, and when you understand the logic of each piece, you can connect the dots and really pull these things up a lot faster without the pain. It's easy to let it go when you just dissolve it instead of having to find every single connection and root. And this is what I can help you do, is to help you actually understand the conversations that your mind and body are having underneath the surface that you don't even know about. But they're making some pretty big decisions [00:12:00] about your life. If this sounds pretty good to you or you resonated with these examples.
Go to aprildarley.com and you can book a free consultation and I will connect the dots for you. After I listen what's going on in your life, I can show you how your subconscious is creating a perception that's harmful instead of helpful for you, and exactly how we can get rid of that. All right, my friends perception is everything and it's so important to address things as they happen to avoid those deep roots.
I'll see you next time my friends. I hope you have a great week. Bye-bye.
