The TMST community takes center stage again as Laura tackles some universal questions on facing down shame and regret. In this episode, we explore the ways our mistakes, our successes, our disappointments and our growth can’t be compartmentalized if we’re going to be free. It’s a VERY hopeful and energizing AMA. We’re continually blown away by the candor and courage TMST listeners bring to this space. And THEN…we have a major show announcement to share, plus a taste of next week’s guest - the brilliant and witty Jill Louise Busby. Show notes: TMST LIVE at SXSW site: https://schedule.sxsw.com/2022/events/PP1140837 Jill Louise Busby: https://jilllouisebusby.com/ Episode link: https://www.tmstpod.com/episodes/35-laura-mckowen-ask-me-anything Spotify playlist for this episode: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6n0cP0PuSjGh0IW5tF9VOk?si=47f8ccf2da064067 Tell Me Something True is a 100% independent podcast. There are no corporations or advertisers backing this community. We are 100% funded by the TMST community. Support TMST today so you can hear the uncut interviews, attend private events with Laura and help keep TMST ad-free: https://tmst.supercast.com/
Tell Me Something True with Laura McKowen
AMA with Laura on Rising Above Shame & Regret, plus a big show announcement!
[00:00:00] Laura McKowen: Okay. It's Laura. Welcome to another episode of TMST, another day, another week. If you're new, thank you for being here. And if you're coming back, welcome back. So today I'm doing another AMA, ask me anything episode where I answer your questions and I'm answering two beautiful big questions today. I spend quite a bit of time on both of them.
[00:00:38] And they are around themes of regret, shame, and vulnerability and sharing your story. So I will leave it at that. We'll get right to it. I just want to make the caveat that I will make every time I do this, that I am not a mental health professional. [00:01:00] I am not a therapist. I'm not licensed to give mental health advice and quite a bit of this falls into that category.
[00:01:08] It's all based on my own experience and should not take the place of professional help. Again, thank you for being here and we're going to start with Shayna.
[00:01:20] Shana: My name is Shayna and I am from Tampa, Florida. My question to you is how to be vulnerable. Your book was definitely life-changing for me, as I know many of us that have read it feel that way, and your vulnerability has been so inspirational and sharing your story. It's so commendable and I found that during my alcohol free journey, I'm not able to be [00:02:00] vulnerable and share my story, not with people in real life or those that I've made in the sober community through social media. I am a TLC member and I've been on this journey since November of 2020, and I’m still not able to share my story, I've been asked to do so.
[00:02:17] And I just, I can't. So I'm just wondering how does one get to a place where they're just ready to make that jump? You've helped so many of us and I would, I would like to share my story if even if it could just touch one person, but being vulnerable is so difficult. So that is my question. How does one become vulnerable during this alcohol-free journey of ours? Thank you.
[00:02:49] Laura McKowen: Hi, Shayna. Thank you so much for writing in or voicing in your question. It's a question I have been asked a lot in the past [00:03:00] five years, and I'm really glad you asked because it gave me a chance to really think through a response because my initial response is always to be a little confused by the question.
[00:03:12] Because I never really saw myself as someone who was being brave or vulnerable or having any particularly strong courage, big courage rather. And so I had to really think about that and hopefully in the thinking and in what I'm going to say, there'll be something for you. So in some sense, this could be a ten second answer because the answer is actually simple, but I won't make it a ten second answer.
[00:03:49] The short and long answer is shame. Shame is why you don't share shame is why people remain secret about big parts of their [00:04:00] lives, because we're ashamed, you probably I can say with near certainty, cause I've been there, you've got a very narrow and mistaken view of what your story actually is. So I'm going to guess you're probably caught up in the details of what happened when you were drinking, right.
[00:04:23] What you did do, what you didn't do, how it impacted other people, how it impacted yourself. And you think these parts, these shameful parts, the ones that you feel bad about that make you feel weak and immoral and whatever else you tell yourself that these are actually these parts of the most important parts of your story.
[00:04:48] And we tend to also think that these things are unique to us, even though we can hear otherwise, you've read my book. You've probably read lots of other books. You've probably heard a [00:05:00] ton of stories if you go to meetings, but you still believe that you're the actual worst, that there's something special and uniquely terrible about you.
[00:05:13] That means that you deserve to feel extraordinary shame. So here, but here's the truth I have yet to hear a unique story of addiction, not one, not the high bottom stories or the low bottom or the rich or the poor, or, you know, had nothing to lose or had everything to lose and lost it, whatever, it's all the same. It's all the fucking same, that stuff isn't actually interesting. What's interesting is how we climb out, how you climbed out. The incredible courage and strength and humility [00:06:00] and resilience and compassion and love and discipline, dedication, and surrender and mercy, all these things, what it takes to climb out. That's the great story. It's what every great story of the human spirit is about.
[00:06:27] Shana: So I'm going to offer you a storyline to consider it's something like how one woman found the courage to overcome and let go of something she used to cope, which is what you were doing. Something that is cunning and powerful and insidious and everywhere in our culture and how difficult and extraordinary it is to do that. So that's the narrative that I want you to consider. And it's not as though you snap your fingers and one day it's there and then you decide to speak, no, you speak your way into it. And that's why sharing is so critical. That's why I will always say to people who are stuck in sobriety or stuck anywhere, I just it's sobriety addiction is the space I know so intimately. It is to open your mouth, but that eventually we have to open our mouth. We have to be able to say to another person
[00:07:48] the truth of what happened and to allow our experience to be shared with them. So [00:08:00] that's the first part. Okay. So for me, for my experience, cause you had me reflect on this and that was useful like I said, for me, it was something like this. I had already been to hell I had already been there. I had already experienced it in my addiction, in the grief of facing sobriety and not being able to stop doing a thing that was killing me and ruining my life and of wanting to continue to keep doing that thing, despite everything that costs me and the mind fuck of that. And of not simply just being able to choose right. To say, be with my daughter or something versus drink. Like, I had already fallen so far out of integrity with myself and been so lost to myself and lost to what I [00:09:00] know as God and to feel such corrosive, humiliation and shame that my baseline of what to fear, because I had been in hell myself already living hell my baseline of what to be afraid of
[00:09:21] Of what was really actually scary, just changed. I had lived in my own personal hell and so I wasn't afraid anymore. I didn't have the time to be afraid anymore of the superficial hell of being judged or misunderstood by people about this part of my life. It's not that I just stopped caring. I just couldn't care and continue on and saved my life or have any life and eventually I did stop caring [00:10:00] about that. So I think if you go inside, you will find the same thing to be true for you. I have a feeling that being judged and misunderstood by people is probably what you're fearing and that stems from this shame that you're holding about your story.
[00:10:23] And that was a cage that I lived in for a long time, this fear of being judged and misunderstood of being disliked. Uh, and it was so deeply tied to my drinking, so to quit alcohol, but stay in that cage was, for me, it would have been like never having quit, really. And I'm not saying everyone who gets sober or goes through any kind of life defining experience like this.
[00:10:49] That is, you know, largely misunderstood for other, which other people will judge, which is everything, by the way, if we're really living at all, [00:11:00] someone's going to judge what we're doing. I'm not saying that everyone who does this has to share publicly or write a book like I did or anything like that.
[00:11:10] But I'm saying so long as you're owned by the shame of that story and you keep it an active secret, you will say. Privacy is very different from secrecy. And what you're talking about is secrecy. I couldn't be afraid of being judged and continue on at the same time. And simultaneously I started to realize that deeper than this fear of being judged.
[00:11:49] There was this knowing that what I was doing was an incredibly [00:12:00] subversive act. And I liked being on that side. I liked that it was a little bit bad-ass to get sober. I liked that I had a storied past in that I had decided I was going to rewrite my story, that I was going to start a new chapter, that I was going to become a person that did have integrity, that I was going to become a person that didn't try to bury this about me, but instead included it and carried on openly.
[00:12:44] I wrote about what was going on with me, because I just couldn't not write about it. And I wrote, because writing more than anything else was saving my life and I could feel it. And I think the same is true for people who decide [00:13:00] to talk about it, whether they're talking about it with one other person or in a room full of people or on a stage, because we can feel in that moment.
[00:13:13] That we are transmuting the shame, alchemizing it into something else, something life-giving something we can actually stand on and something that in the speaking of that truth, in the sharing of it connects us to other people in the way that we so desperately needed and we're longing to connect all of us. So I could feel myself changing as I was writing it. And when I do write it, um, and it's why I continue to write not because I had actually changed, although I was, but [00:14:00] because I was understanding in that process, my story differently, which is what I'm asking you to do. And it's an active part of the process.
[00:14:09] It's not something that just happens internally, quietly. I think you're feeling you asked this question because you're at some jumping off point, you're at the edge of the cliff being asked to go and you know that you need to do it. So that's great. So in that active process of writing and sharing. I was beginning to understand my story differently, which did change me.
[00:14:39] And what was happening was that I was starting to land on the truth of the human story, the place where my story as an individual and the collective story, the true story of humanity meet. [00:15:00] I was being counted in to what it really means to be human, which is never about being good. It's about being changed.
[00:15:19] So I could feel it saving my life each time. I hit on like a deeper nerve of truth, a deeper nerve of truth then the narrative I had going that you probably have going, and that many people who are listening probably have going, which is, you know, I'm a terrible mother, substitute partner or daughter or sibling or whatever, or I'm a terrible, I'm a cheater and I'm a liar.
[00:15:48] Or I'm a morally corrupt person, or as one woman told me, I'll never forget receiving this email. I am a disgusting unforgivable woman. So every time I spoke or wrote about my story, I hit on a deeper, newer nerve of truth than those things.
[00:16:14] And what happens when we do that is we elevate above our own singular suffering above this ultimately self obsessed view that we, our individual lives, is where everything begins and ends that our pain and our suffering and our choices are where life begins. In our singular life and it blows it out into the bigger, larger, more contextual view of human life as ultimately redemptive. All the stories that I've ever been interested in and I'm guessing you too, most of us are people who have come back after getting lost. They're never about the people who like did it all right from the beginning. Those stories aren't even interesting, but they're not even real. No one wants to hear that story.
[00:17:19] The only thing I know about people who have tried to be right and good all their lives, and I do know these people is that they live in a prison of judgment and isolation. They're usually awful to be around and they never get seen and thus never feel love or give it freely. And it's all based on fear, this ultimate fear of being seen as they see themselves, whether that's a conscious fear or not, ultimately it's about not wanting to be seen as we see ourselves.
[00:17:59] And so I believe you do actually have to invite in grace into this, and that's where it begins to become not about your singular experience. What I was just saying about the self obsession, it has occurred to me more and more over time and, and I want to write about this and I probably will, but how, when we are in, when we're in shame, when we're in deep suffering and when we shut down in that sense or when we're in a loop, you know, like a loop, the next question I'll get into this, but this loop that keeps us stuck in the past, we are
[00:18:46] are so ultimately become selfish and self obsessed because we can't connect to others. We just can't. We're so mired in our own story of how big of a piece of shit we are [00:19:00] that we that's the only story we know. And so I do believe you have to, I do believe that's why we have to invite grace in, and that doesn't have to be about prayer in a religious sense, but just inviting a perspective other than your own, you know, this preposterous idea that, that your life is not where the truth begins and ends.
[00:19:29] This story that you have in your head is not, is not, could potentially not be the story of what is true, that the actual true story is much bigger and more complex and inclusive of every single thing and that's why we share. That's why we write because in that we are including other people. And as my friend, Jim Zartman says there is sanity in community.
[00:19:58] We often can't find grace alone it is done in community. It is in the relationship that we have with others, the relationship that we have with spirit, the relationship that we have with nature. And so on. So this is, this is another way I found that. Okay. That, that sort of broader view that I'm talking about.
[00:20:26] I saw it in others before I saw it in myself and I was always drawn to, you know, stories of redemption and writers. You know, I love memoir because you know that it's true as you're reading it. And so writers like Cheryl Strayed, Maya Angelou, Mary Oliver, Liz Gilbert, Joan Didion, Tony Morrison, John O'Donohue.
[00:20:55] I had to ask myself why I was so [00:21:00] drawn to their stories and why I thought I was any different. And I never found an answer. It's just when I was, it was a matter of, you know, it's like Pema Chodron says spirituality is kind of a game until the shit hits the fan. And I had admired these writers and artists previously when I was, hadn't lived into my own experience of hell or the shit hitting the fan. And then when the shit hit the fan, it had to go beyond my intellect and into my experience. And that's where I had to be asked. Could I be included in the stories of redemption? Could I be included in the larger stories of humanity and the answer was yes, but that I had to participate in that inclusion. I had to participate in that becoming, and the way that we do that oftentimes is by [00:22:00] creating something out of it, writing, story, opening our mouth, to share with one other person or maybe many people. So I want to address something that often comes up and it came through in your question. This idea that we kind of arrive at a place where we're not afraid, you know, where we feel brave enough to be vulnerable and that, that place in that place, we won't have fear. We won't be concerned. We won't shake, we won't worry. That place doesn't exist as far as I know. And the differences you just decide to do it anyway, you realize that you're not actually that special or unique, [00:23:00] and you get to be very intimate with your shame. And perhaps that's the next step for you? I think a lot of times, people in recovery, especially believe that by listening to stories that other people tell or listening to podcasts or reading a book or reading all the books, right.
[00:23:21] That we are somehow that the process that others are speaking of is going to by osmosis occur in us. And it doesn't, it's, those things are all very useful and important and sometimes we have to do that for a little bit before we are able to participate actively, but eventually you have to participate actively.
[00:23:43] And that the opportunity to do that will always show. Right. So whether it's talking to someone in your home about how you actually feel in the moment [00:24:00] or responding, honestly, to a question of how you are, or having a different kind of conversation with a coworker, or finally telling the person who is in front of your face, whoever they are, that you are know that you're not drinking anymore and not making some other lie, excuse that you, that you've said in the past, you know, that you're on a health kick or you just can't tonight or you're on medication or whatever.
[00:24:31] We get all kinds of opportunities to jump off the bridge as it were. They don't always have to be at once. You know, I'm going to speak in a meeting. And tell my entire story to 500 people or whatever we get opportunities and I'm guessing you're going to get another opportunity today. Whatever comes your way will be the opportunity that you need.
[00:24:57] So we don't [00:25:00] ever arrive at this magical point where we're ready, quote, unquote, ready. Uh, we just do it anyway. And one way to do that and here's something that I would task you with or invite you to do and anyone else who feels called based on this question and answer is to write things down, write your shameful stories and your secrets and your thoughts down.
[00:25:26] Every one of them leaving, nothing out, do that and then you call someone or you go sit down with someone and you read them out loud. And if you don't have anyone in your life that you feel like you could do that with, you ask for that person to show up and you practice like that, and then you do it again, and then you do it again.
[00:25:56] So you decide that you want to be free more than [00:26:00] you want anything else. And you realize freedom requires immense bravery. And I don't have any more than you do. I can tell you that for sure. You decide, you want to be someone who is brave because you don't want to get to the end of your life and realize that you, that you weren't and you could have been that's something I do a lot.
[00:26:24] Would I be okay getting to the end of my life and saying I didn't do this. No. And I don't think you, you know, it's where you are in your sobriety because this, you were compelled to write this note because this is what keeps coming up for you. This is the next step. And so you take that next step and then the next time something comes up, you will think, no, I can't do this.
[00:26:51] This is too hard. This is too much. And then we take that step. And so on and that's just how it goes forever. But along the way [00:27:00] you come to realize you're pretty fucking brave, actually. That's how we build the muscle. That's how we build it. So I got this great quote from my friend, Sarah. She sent it to me. She texted to me last night and it's from Amanda Quraishi. Who I apologize if I'm pronouncing your name wrong, Amanda Quraishi. And she says, if we want the rewards of being loved, we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known. And I think that summarizes this up pretty well. It is a mortifying ordeal indeed, but it's the only way we get the reward of being loved.
[00:27:45] You said that no one in your real life or in sober circles knows about this, and that's a really, really extraordinarily lonely place to be. And on the other side of that, I promise you [00:28:00] are all kinds of gorgeous, amazing things. You might be misunderstood by people you probably will, but what I have learned is what we gain in those moments.
[00:28:16] Totally eclipses what we. So I will, I just thought of this, but here's an invitation for you should you choose to accept it? I host a sobriety meeting every Tuesday morning, 8:00 AM Eastern with The Luckiest Club and you're invited to come share as a speaker. You're qualified. You're ready. I will host you.
[00:28:42] And so many people would be thrilled to hear your story and to hear how someone who was, who said they can't be vulnerable, decides to be. So I'm inviting [00:29:00] you to submit yourself to the mortifying ordeal of being known and you can do it in my meeting and I would love it. So just email me if that's something you want to do. Thank you, Shayna.
[00:29:16] All right before we do our next question. I shared some pretty fun news on Instagram recently, and I want to make sure to share about it here too. So Tell Me Something True is going to be at South by Southwest this year. Yeah, I'm so excited. I used to go every year for work and I haven't been in many years.
[00:29:40] I don't think I've been since I've been sober and I've been invited to moderate a panel and it's with some incredible people. It's a panel on recovery. It's happening on the main stage. I will be talking to Wes Hurt, who is the founder of Clean Cause Water. Jan Rader is [00:30:00] another person on the panel.
[00:30:01] She's someone Time recognized as one of their, a hundred most influential people and the star of the Emmy award-winning film Heroine. And, oh my God. One of my favorite musicians. Oh, Jason Isbell. So I have been a fan of his for a long time. To me, he's just one of the most extraordinary songwriters of our time. And I can't wait. So if you aren't going to be at SXSW. No worries, because we are going to be recording it for the show. So we will be recording our panel and airing it either as it, I believe we'll be airing it shortly after, it’s very important you know about this because it's an acknowledgement of what we're building together on this show.
[00:30:54] The world is noticing what's happening. We have a lot of people [00:31:00] listening every week, more and more every episode, and we're doing it together. So every single person here plays a role. And thank you so much from me and Mikel. So I want you to know how much you, as a listener, as someone who shares this show with your friends or someone who's a paying member, all of you matter.
[00:31:21] We appreciate you. And we can't wait to fly our flag at SXSW. The actual date of the panel, I believe is March 18th. You can go to their website and check or you can check my Instagram. It's in one of the recent reels and stay tuned. We'll be saying more about it as we get closer.
[00:31:47] All right. Our next question comes from Kat. This is what it says. I'm wondering how you handle feelings of regret about your past and if you still have them after years of sobriety. I [00:32:00] quit drinking two years ago and that decision dramatically improved my life. I'm a better person because of it but when I look back on my twenties and thirties, I feel so much regret for lost time and big mistakes. There are things that happen that I can never fix things that would never have happened if I'd been sober and so many opportunities. I've been lost that I can never get back despite my efforts to live fully and authentically.
[00:32:25] Now I am sometimes overcome with regret. When I think about the past, I have a feeling, this is something every former drinker deals with to some extent, and I would appreciate any insight you may have. Thank you, Kat. All right. Yes, this is something a lot of people experience when they get sober. It's something a lot of people experience in general.
[00:32:51] Here's what I know. I think there's this idea that we shouldn't have any regrets that regret is this [00:33:00] sort of wasted space altogether. And I'm not sure that's actually honest. It seems pretty disingenuous for someone to say they don't have any regrets. Because how is it possible to not feel regret when there are only a certain number of paths our life can take, right?
[00:33:22] Every time we choose something consciously or unconsciously, we are by definition, not choosing everything else. So unless you are the one person who is completely satisfied with every choice and turn. Choice you've made and turn your life has turned your life has taken I don't know that it's actually honest to say we should live with no regret.
[00:33:52] I think it's how we hold it. And I say that I really had to think about this because I'm not someone who [00:34:00] generally spends a lot of time caught up in the energy of. And I had to question if that was true and if it is true, why? So I think that some of it comes from this very purely practical side of me that knows I just cannot change anything that's happened in the past, period.
[00:34:27] So spending time in regret is, is useless. I think that's definitely part of it but as I thought about it more, I have some other thoughts and maybe they're helpful. This is what occurred to me. Regret seems to me a lot like blame. Like it's something that can feel useful when you're in it, but it never really is.
[00:34:58] Because it keeps us [00:35:00] stuck in the past and removed and inert in the present moment. So regret seems like a sort of, I don't know, like an emotional Botox and I have nothing against Botox by the way. It freezes us in time okay it renders us sort of immovable and pinned to the past, like in one moment or many moments and it looks like it's helping and it might even appear that it's helping, like it's a superficial mask, a sort of protective barrier of sorts.
[00:35:35] So what is it protecting us from? So let's go back to blame when we get stuck in blame, it’s always about pointing the finger at others and ourselves and trying to define why something happened. It's this sort of grab for control. And instead of acknowledging that it [00:36:00] happened that whatever, whatever happened happened, and that regardless of whose fault it is, we have to bring ourselves into the now and take responsibility for the kind of life or the kind of experience we want to have.
[00:36:13] And God, that can be really fucking hard. It can be so hard, but it's the only way through in the end. So but blame often feels like it's protecting us. Right. It feels like whether we're blaming ourselves or others, it feels like it's protecting us. Okay. So similarly, when we get stuck in a regret story, we're stuck back in the past, asking how things might be different if we hadn't done this or done that, or like you said, if you'd been sober, And what occurred to me is that perhaps like when blame is cuing us to take responsibility, [00:37:00] because that is where it's pointing and responsibility can only happen right now in this moment, I can be responsible for the experience I want to have. I can be responsible for the energy and bringing into this room or this conversation. I can be responsible for the way I respond. I can respond with my ability that in this moment, when we're talking about regret, maybe regret is cuing us to feel something we almost never want to feel, which is grief to feel what’s lost
[00:37:47] And. Like responsibility. Grief has to be felt if we are to metabolize it and to allow it to become [00:38:00] useful, it can only happen right now. It's a feeling we have to stop evading, trying to evade, protect ourselves from, avoid all those things. And we have to allow it to submerge us as Karla McLaren says in the river of all souls, that's what grief does.
[00:38:27] So because when we're talking about grief, when we're talking about regret, especially as it pertains to sobriety, but it really could be about anything. Grief is present. Grief is this acknowledgement that we've lost something of value and to allow ourselves for grief to move through, which is it can be tremendously uncomfortable, unbearable, or [00:39:00] seemingly unbearable to allow ourselves to actually feel the pain of that loss, to feel the choice we didn't take to feel.
[00:39:09] The moments that we missed to feel the sorrow and the complicated emotions and the ambivalence about it all in the confusion and everything. When I think about my own path, there are things that I do regret. I don't have shame about them anymore. And maybe that's a big distinction, but I do feel regret. And I think that's normal. I think it's healthy.
[00:39:45] I don't stay in that energy, but I feel regret about things. Like, for example, I feel a lot, I feel sad about the time that the times I haven't been present with my daughter before I [00:40:00] got sober. And after I feel regret about that, I feel regret about handling things the way I did sometimes with my ex-husband, because I was really hurtful in moments.
[00:40:14] And I feel regret about times that I wasn't, I didn't spend more time with my grandmother before she passed away. I was able to spend some really precious moments, meaningful moments with her, but I wasn't there enough. And I feel a lot of regret about that.
[00:40:39] I have in sobriety allowed myself to feel the grief of those things. And I think that's perhaps why I don't hold them so heavy.
[00:40:52] So I wonder if regret is really like a defense mechanism against grief. The way blame can be a defense [00:41:00] mechanism against responsibility, a way to shut down our hearts so that we don't have to feel what we've lost or that time has passed, or that we are ultimately mortal. That every time we've chosen something again, consciously or unconsciously, we're not choosing other things and that we there's no other way that equation goes in that sense. I don't know that it's possible to live a life without regret.
[00:41:35] So perhaps there's something in there for you, perhaps what is being asked of you is to feel the grief of what was not what will not be as far as you know, and why would you, you know, let's, let's explore why we might protect ourselves from grief. Why would we stay engaged in regret when it seems so unhelpful. I'm sure you don't love it. I'm sure it's not your favorite place to be. So why would we do it? I think it's because we don't, when you're in that, you don't have to be awake to now and all that means you don't have to be awake to the direct experience of life that is now in all that might mean that you might have some grief going on. You might have some regrets that you might have. Some shame might have some, some deep sorrow and okay, fair enough. Who wants to feel that? But in the meantime, [00:43:00] you're also robbing yourself of all the good stuff that's here.
[00:43:09] Laura McKowen: And when we aren't here, we can't act in ways that will create a life that we won't regret in the future. When we are tangled up in the past, we can't be effective and present in the now.
[00:43:32] And that does have a payoff, whether we realize it or not just like drinking, how to pay off that payoff is incapacitation. It's one of the best sort of descriptions I've heard or theories I've heard. Steven Pressfield talks about that. How drinking is ultimately this like form of resistance [00:44:00] in a way, because it incapacitates us.
[00:44:02] And sometimes we need to be incapacitated because we can't necessarily survive what we're going through. And once we remove it, then we're faced with what we were going through. So somethings to consider what might be there What might be underneath. Perhaps it's grief. It requires an open heart and admission that if we choose to live, we will be heard again when we decide to be here now open.
[00:44:36] So Pema Chodron, and all of Buddhism really talks about when we're faced with pain, we have two choices and one is to shut down our hearts. And one is to keep our hearts open and it seems like shutting our heart down is the wise thing to do. And it's our [00:45:00] natural instinct and the way of the Bodhi Safa, the brave warrior is to keep our hearts open, despite the fact that we will no doubt get hurt.
[00:45:18] And we do that because the alternative shuts us down to everything and regret seems like a really easy story to fall into like shame. A very sticky story so that's what I have to offer. What I, what I will say and maybe this is something that is useful for you as it, as a practical thing to do. Write down what you grieve, write down every single thing. Or if you want to [00:46:00] frame that as regrets, write that down and notice, this is what I recommended for the last person to, because a lot of times these things just live in our minds and we have to get them out onto paper and into the world and out of our bodies. And that's where they start to take, to take on a different shape and to lose a lot of their power, make a list of all those things.
[00:46:24] And then something I think about a lot is the fact that I don't know that things could be different. We really don't know. You don't actually know what drinking kept you from in a good way. You don't know that had you not been drinking or that you had, you made a quote unquote different choice. Assuming that you could have, which you, you couldn't have [00:47:00] because you didn't right.
[00:47:02] It's like that Byron Katie question, could it have gone differently? No. And how do you know that? Because it didn't. So when we argue with reality, we lose all the time. So you don't actually know. We really think that life is like this decision tree that we, you know, if this and that and that we can predict with a good degree of certainty, how things would have turned out.
[00:47:29] Would we, you know, if we'd ended up with a certain partner instead of the one we have, if we would have had children, instead of not having them, if we didn't have children, instead of having them, if we would have chosen this job or this degree, or this career path or, or whatever. And we really just don't know, we only know what we have and we also don't know what could be.
[00:47:52] So if you're looking back on your thirties and your twenties, That tells me you might be in your forties. And I started [00:48:00] an entire life in my forties, an entirely new existence. So you also don't know what's to come. But one sure way to pull yourself out of the magic of what could be is to stay locked in this pattern of regrets, this story of regret.
[00:48:21] And it's okay that you're there but you do have to make a conscious choice to move through it. And I think I have an instinct that the way to move through it is to allow yourself to feel some of the grief of the things that were lost to name those things. Allow them to do what grief asks us to do which is to let go of things completely and allow for rebirth renewal.
[00:48:55] Thank you for asking. I hope that's helpful.[00:49:00]
[00:49:01] All right. Thank you so much for those who sent in questions. If you'd like to submit a question for a future episode, you can do that by going to our website, TMSTpod.com and clicking on submit a question. We're going to do these episodes every month or six weeks or so. I love doing them. I love hearing from you.
[00:49:22] So go ahead and submit questions if you would like before we wrap up, I want to do something I've never done before. And I want to tease who we're having on next time. Our guest will be Jill Louise Busby. She wrote a phenomenal book called unfollow me essays on complicity and her book, which is an evolution of her Instagram alter ego Jillisblack is one of the smartest funniest, most pleasingly complex things I've encountered in a long time. I loved, loved, loved talking to Jill. It [00:50:00] was I wasn't prepared for how funny she is in this really crackling, dry way. I can't wait for you to meet her. And that's why I'm going to give you this little tiny slice of next week show right now.
[00:50:20] Jill Louise Busby: My intention today is to make fun of us in a loving way. That's what my intention today is. So that it is not taken so seriously that we can't joke about where we are. I feel like people need some humor right now, and I think we want it to be very specific. I think we want it to be a little more relevant to what's happening right now.
[00:50:42] Let's joke about this social media that we're on all day. Let's talk about what it means when someone launches their new brain. You know, and then you go onto someone else's posts where they've launched their new brand. You've got to figure out how to support both of them. These are the kinds of videos I want to be making, because I think right now I don't want to contribute [00:51:00] to any more stress. I don't want to be the person who's trying to remind you that everything is on fire. You know, it's on fire, but that obviously can't be the point. If we can't, if we can't stop that, then that's clearly not the point. How do we regroup when everything is on fire? And I think the only way I know is humor. So I'm going to use that.
[00:51:24] Laura McKowen: Humor is serious business though. It's serious business in, in like the best way. I mean, I've always had this obsession with standup comedy. I mean, I'm the least actually funny person. I don't write funny. I'm just not funny.
[00:51:50] Jill Louise Busby: But that’s funny.
[00:51:56] Laura McKowen: Well, thank you. Yay. There you go folks. The delightfully [00:52:00] enigmatic Jill Louise Busby next week on Tell Me Something True.
[00:52:14] Alright, thank you so much for being with us today. If you want more TMST head on over to TMSTpod.com and become a member. Members get access to the full uncut versions of these conversations. Previews of upcoming guests, invites to join me for members only events and access to our members. Only community where I hang out a lot.
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