Transcripts
Well, Carol, welcome back to the Accrescent Podcast. It's so fun to get to have you back on. I think it's fun to share even right from the get-go for the audience, because then it might just lend to how they listen to this conversation that since having you on the podcast the first time, there was just such rapport. felt like I just felt so aligned with you that you were just generous enough to reach out and offer me a gifted session, which I swooped on so quickly. And then...
Carol (:Finally, and...
Leigh Ann Lindsey (:since then have been working with you one-on-one in EFT tapping sessions and it's been such an amazing resource and gift. I've referred a couple clients and friends to you so that's a little bit of behind the scenes that we've actually been working together one-on-one since our last recording and so I think it's going to be fun to bring some of those elements to this too.
Carol (:Thank you. Happy to be here again. Happy to see you.
Leigh Ann Lindsey (:Yes. So what I actually wanted to start with, because I always listen to a few previous episodes the guest has done on whatever the topic is. And in those episodes though, I didn't get the answer to this question, which is really what prompted you've written a book, The Yes Code. What prompted this next book, Thank You Yes, on gratitude? I'm sure there are a hundred different things you could write about. And deciding which one you want to dedicate, you know,
few years of your life to is a big commitment. so clearly gratitude had enough of a pull that you were like, I'm dedicating a significant chunk of time to this.
Carol (:Thank you for the question. Yes, thank you has been in my mind for a while. The yes code I had to get out. That was like my first big composition and book around my coaching practice and EFT. But yes, thank you about gratitude has been swimming around for a long time because I started using gratitude in combination with the tapping, with EFT tapping. And it changed a lot and it combined
really two superpowers, is gratitude, what happens when you're grateful, what happens in your physiology, and EFT tapping, which also has outstanding statistics and research. So they both have what I would say is superpower qualities, like really, they're free and you can do them by yourself if you want to, and you'll have whopping results and combining them really changed something for me.
Leigh Ann Lindsey (:Hmm.
Carol (:Part of the problem was that I too, like a lot of people, viewed gratitude as this cute, nice, fun little self-help technique and not the powerhouse that it truly is with scientific research. And, you know, so I wasn't as good, I wasn't as consistent, I wasn't doing it. And when things were hard, I wouldn't do it. was, I don't feel like doing my gratitude today. But combining them is something that I did in the field of tapping.
And I think everybody needs to know about it.
Leigh Ann Lindsey (:I love that. So it sounds like though it started like many of these things do for us, a personal inquiry of I understand that gratitude can be impactful. Maybe I haven't found it that impactful for me. So what might need to change? How can I make it more impactful for me?
Carol (:Yes.
Carol (:Yes, and I'm somebody who needs to be convinced. I was completely skeptical in the beginning of tapping. I was the worst skeptic. What do you mean tapping on acupuncture points can make you feel better? This is insane. I'm a traditional psychotherapist. Don't tell me that you can tap on your face. And with the gratitude, I had to be convinced by the research. So everybody talks about it. Everybody says they do it. Right. Everybody says they have a journal.
but not everybody is doing it. And so it's certainly been around forever and ever. Famous people talking about it, I wouldn't start my day without gratitude. And then you find out that a lot of people are like, it's a nice practice, but they're not really sticking to it. When I read the research, when I did research for the book, it was like, this is serious. We're not just talking about it might make you feel better. We're talking about a 23 % drop
in your cortisol levels. You can't get that from any other free technique. How is that possible? It reduces your risk of hypertension. Hypertension is one of the leading risks of death for women in this country. It improves your sleep dramatically with percentages. They've done studies, right? So instead of like, it makes you feel better, they have done studies over the last couple of decades on what
consistent gratitude practices do for your physiology and your mental health. And we're in a mental health crisis right now, as you know, I know, and we believe in this country, the world, and we need more tools. Anything that we can use that will help us. But that was the convincer for me, the same way I was skeptic. I wasn't skeptical about gratitude, I just thought it was nice.
Leigh Ann Lindsey (:Maybe not understanding just how powerful it could be, but to that end, what I'm so excited to talk today about with you is the difference between gratitude as another tick on the to-do list versus really embodying it, experiencing it, living it in a different way. And I think there's a big difference there. But what actually makes me even more excited about that research you're referencing is two things. I'm curious what type of gratitude practice is, not that you need to tell us this,
were doing because my hunch would be they probably are just doing pretty basic practices. And so what you and I are gonna be talking about today, an embodied lived experience of gratitude could be even more impactful than what those studies are suggesting. Then you compound that with the addition of EFT tapping. It's like, my gosh, what if all of that together actually reduced cortisol by 50 %?
Carol (:Thank
Carol (:So most of the studies, it's a great question, most of the studies said traditional journal writing about your gratitude produced these results. So the sleep studies are about that, the hypertension, I think the cortisol and the stress levels are about that. And what we do, what I do, what I started in the EFT field with a tapping is combining, reducing your stress. Like if we call the EFT tapping just a stress relief technique, that would cover a lot of areas, but.
It does post-traumatic stress disorder. takes care of anxiety. It takes care of cravings. It takes care of depressive symptoms. It takes care of all sorts of things. So to call it a self-help stress relief technique is a little bit light. I think it's much more than that. But the thought of doing that, reducing your stress, reducing your agitation or your tension, then while you're in that state and you've brought the numbers down and feel better,
really get into the gratitude practice, not by writing, but by using the tapping on the acupuncture points, which is used already to calm down your fight or flight response. What I found from not research, but just talking to clients and talking to people and knowing my own story is that people are distracted. So they're writing a gratitude list, but the TV's on in the background. The dog is barking. They're thinking about their to-do list.
They're trying to, as you said earlier, check it off the list and it doesn't have the same feeling. I know because I've done it both ways. Trust me, I have been distracted and done it to try to get it off my list. But when you're really in it and doing it, it's a different, completely different feeling in your body.
Leigh Ann Lindsey (:Yeah, this is what I want to start with because I find in my practice in general, but especially with the individuals I work with experiencing cancer or chronic illness, there is a huge push for gratitude and positivity. And what I see all the time though is gratitude and positivity being used as emotional bypass.
And you've talked about this in previous episodes you've done. And this is why I love pairing it with the EFT is so powerful because EFT sort of built into the flow of a practice or a tapping session is acknowledging what is first. But I really, really want to talk about this because I think this is going to distinguish it from so much of the other conversation on gratitude out there. is not, don't feel the bad feelings. Don't sit with the heaviness.
switch into gratitude, dismiss it, bypass it. It really is. No, no, no. Let's actually, and you kind of mentioned this really briefly, let's actually sit with the heaviness first. In fact, let's do some tapping around the heaviness to bring that level of activation down from maybe an eight or a 10 to, you know, a four or five.
And then you're actually able to receive the impact of the gratitude and sit with it. And it's less of an intellectual knowing and more of an actual embodied experience.
Carol (:in the body. There's got to be space and room for it, which is why when people are just doing it at the end of the night quickly, it doesn't sink in. It's just on the surface. And I always tell this joke about when I had flown 21 hours to Australia and we're just so close, right? So close. And the pilot announces that we're going to circle the airport for a half an hour because they don't have a gate for us. And it was like,
you must be kidding. Because there was no place for us to go. You don't just land a plane in Australia. You have to have a place to go. You have to have a runway to go. And you need a gate that is designated for you and your airplane. need a place. We need the receptors to be open to the gratitude. And when you're distracted watching TV or in so much pain that if someone suggested a gratitude list, you might be annoyed and irritated, that's not useful.
So the validation that comes with EFT, that comes with the tapping, the validation, knowing, acknowledgement, and saying, accept myself is a huge piece of saying, this terrible thing happened or is happening, or this annoyance is in my life, and I'm not running from it. I'm not pretending. I'm not sweeping it under the rug. I'm there. I am fully acknowledging it. It's got a place to go. And
when you get those numbers down, when you get your level of activation or dysregulation down, deep breath, then you can start really focusing on gratitude, which doesn't mean the bad thing didn't happen or you're not anxious about a meeting at work or something's going on in your family. What it means is, and this is happening, and I'm also quite grateful for these other things that are going on. And I'm grateful for how I can do it and I appreciate
what I've been learning about it. So there's that place to go like the airplane, and it just sinks in in a deep way.
Leigh Ann Lindsey (:Yeah, completely. think something I get frustrated with a lot of gratitude rhetoric because it can feel very dismissive of the parts of us that are really hurting, of the parts of us that are scared, that are grieving, that are overwhelmed. And I actually hear this from clients all the time where they'll beat themselves up of like, I'm just so afraid of this PET scan coming up, but...
Carol (:Yeah.
Leigh Ann Lindsey (:I know I shouldn't be thinking those thoughts. I really should just be grateful and positive. And I'm like, look, that part of you that's scared is real. And that part actually needs support. She doesn't need your dismissal. She doesn't need, in fact, your judgment and your criticism. She needs you to come to her and be like, you know what? It kind of makes sense that you're scared of that PET scan. I'm going to sit with you in that. And then once I've sat with you in that and you feel safer and you feel seen and witnessed and acknowledged,
I'm going to bring in some of those expand, what I would call expansive thoughts. And in this case, it might be those gratitude thoughts.
Carol (:You said the right word, should, right? That people say, I shouldn't be upset. I should be more grateful. And people throw it around. And I don't know if that's included in the toxic positivity that people are talking about these days. You shouldn't feel that way. You should feel something else. You should feel positive, but it's destructive. It's one, it doesn't work, which is very important. Two, it's destructive and counterproductive. So we need to own, validate, acknowledge where we are.
Leigh Ann Lindsey (:Yes.
Carol (:And then if there's room for gratitude, I highly encourage that we use that. So I don't start with a gratitude practice with a tapping. I do my tapping every day, no matter what. Like how can you, you you've been tapping for 25 years. What else do you have to tap on? I live in this world with a family, with people in New York city, with human beings. Like there's a lot, you know, there's a lot that goes on, right? So I make sure I do my tapping and I notice that I don't feel like doing the gratitude tapping.
Leigh Ann Lindsey (:You
Leigh Ann Lindsey (:you
Carol (:until I've addressed some serious concerns that maybe I feel happened today or something I tuned into or got triggered by. I don't really feel like doing, I can feel the difference between check it off the list gratitude and I actually am grateful. I'm not doing an exercise. I'm feeling motion and having an attitude and there's just a huge difference. And I think that's part of what excited me because
Leigh Ann Lindsey (:Mm.
Carol (:The other part that happened in my life is I looked back and thought, well, why would I have been grateful when my sister died? What? It was not right. And probably felt some pressure back then, but I'm looking over sort of the history of my life. Why would I be grateful when that bad thing happened? Why? I couldn't get there and that's gotta be acknowledged. And there's gotta be room for that. You can't get there sometimes. So making it a practice at the end of the day that you have to do one, two, three. I have clients who call it.
I didn't do my gratitude last night. call it a plural or one, two, three. It's not effective. You know what? I don't recommend doing it just as a rote exercise because you then feel kind of, you can feel kind of empty doing it.
Leigh Ann Lindsey (:Yeah.
Leigh Ann Lindsey (:It doesn't land, it doesn't sink in and then maybe that even adds to the shame or even in fact the kind of disappointment of like I'm doing this thing that people say is so good for you. I'm not really feeling that experience so something must be wrong with me. But it's so good for you so I'm gonna keep doing it and just keep writing down here's this, here's this, here's this. But you said it's not a thing to do, it's a state of being.
Carol (:Okay.
Leigh Ann Lindsey (:But to that end, the bypass can't happen. And this is what I hear clients say all the time is like, I keep reading the affirmations, I keep journaling out my gratitudes, I keep bringing in the positivity. And you kind of already said this, it's not sticking.
Carol (:Yeah.
Leigh Ann Lindsey (:It's not sticking because we haven't listened to those parts of us that are really hurting, scared, whatever it might be. It starts to stick. Yeah, it starts to stick when we actually listen to the heaviness first, which I just think is such a powerful thing. I was kind of thinking about it as like a...
Carol (:It has not landed.
Leigh Ann Lindsey (:because I think in metaphor so much, I was like, the difference between listing out things we're grateful for versus experiencing it is like if you had 10 different pieces of cake on your table and you were listing it out, I have a piece of chocolate cake and I'm so grateful I have a piece of red velvet cake and I'm so grateful I have a piece of butterscotch cake.
versus looking at all those and like taking a bite of each and being like, wow, that's so delicious. it's, I can't believe I get to eat this right now. It's a completely different thing.
Carol (:Right.
Carol (:take a bite of each, right? It's the same, it's what I was saying about landing. It's gotta land like the airplane has to land somewhere. And if you're too full with anxiety and stress, and like I feel my anxiety and stress from here to here, right? If you're too full of it, where's it gonna go? There's literally no place. If you thought of it as something physical, another book, and you've got a pile of books up to here, there's no place and it's gonna fall off the top. It's gonna slip off.
Well, my work has been to help people say and acknowledge what's really going on. And even if they say, I feel shamed because I'm not doing my gratitude list, there's another place that we need to validate. There's another feeling and experience that needs to be given some airtime and some space. I hear everybody talking that I should do gratitude and I'm not there. Then you're not there. Then you're not there.
Leigh Ann Lindsey (:Yeah. Yeah. And to that point, try it with the acknowledgement of the heaviness first. And then you might be like, wow, this is a whole different type of gratitude. Gratitude as a practice versus gratitude as a to-do.
Carol (:as a to-do list, right? A practice, well, it's like, this is interesting, with meditation, I don't get immediate benefits. I am doing daily meditation and have for years because of the research and what people say about it and what they promise about it, right? I don't feel that good after I meditate, but I do get it done, right? But I'm in it and I try and it is a practice. With gratitude, it feels totally different. I get, and same with tapping,
and have from the beginning, which is what changed the skepticism in me. It's like, I feel it. I get what's going on. Like it's something that I can't deny. Whereas meditation, 20 minutes later, do I open my eyes and feel a lot better? Not necessarily. So it's a real encouragement that I feel something right away. That really helps me. But then we get to the deeper issue, which is if something is so good for you, gratitude, tapping.
Leigh Ann Lindsey (:Yeah.
Carol (:completely changes your physiology, your nervous system, regulates your nervous system. Why aren't we doing it every day? Why aren't people saying, clients coming back, oh, that's, yeah, I got a little busy, so I didn't do my tapping. Five minutes of tapping a day. That's all, I'm not asking anybody for 25, 35 minutes of tapping. Five minutes a day. So we need to get under the why when something has now been proven.
Leigh Ann Lindsey (:Mm-hmm.
Carol (:The EFT has been proven, the research has been done for over a decade. It's incredible. All the research on gratitude, incredible. Why aren't we getting to it? Why are we YouTube instead? Why are we eating instead? What are we doing? So that's another piece that's down the road, but that's also going on.
Leigh Ann Lindsey (:Mm-hmm.
Leigh Ann Lindsey (:Yeah. Yeah. Well, you talk about, I think, three main blocks to why even if someone's listened to this whole episode, they've reframed how they might want to create a gratitude practice or a gratitude ritual or a lifestyle of gratitude. And they do it for a little bit and then they kind of stop doing it after a week or two, even though they felt great. What are those three blocks that might be contributing to why they can't maintain that practice?
Carol (:So I go through in the book my three blocks that were key. And the first one was when I was much younger, I was so concerned about what was going on in my family and trying to fix my family. Gratitude, no one had taught me to do gratitude. No one told me it was a good idea. So it wasn't like I was rejecting it. I was just focused, hyper focused on trying to fix my family. Lots of alcoholism was going on. Then when you grow up like that, you tend to have low self-esteem.
So at age 10, you don't think your parents drinking because they're drinking, you think that you haven't been a good enough child. We can't get around that as what happens to the brain under age 12, right? But the most important block is that we can't tolerate and handle feeling that good for that long. Now, I can say that that third block comes from number one and number two, and everybody's one and two is a little different, but ultimately the self-sabotage behavior
Why would we not do something that is so good for us every day? What's the comfort zone that it's bumping up against? What bothers us about feeling that good? Because if you do it, both the tapping to reduce the negative feelings and the gratitude tapping, or just your gratitude list, you are going to feel dramatically different. That's not a question anymore. We can't argue that. So why wouldn't you do it? What's in it for you? What's the downside of feeling that
much better every day and having that build on itself.
Leigh Ann Lindsey (:Yeah, I think that's a perfect segue because this is something I really wanted to spend some time with you on is how goodness can be dysregulating and It's so funny because literally this morning I kid you not I woke up this morning and I texted my partner and I was like I'm So I woke up so happy today. It almost hurts
And truly, literally just this morning, I was sitting in gratitude and like really feeling it and embodying it. And then I'm immediately going into grief. And a part of where my mind goes in these moments is, and I don't know if this is self-sabotage, I'd love to hear your input on this. I don't know if it's self-sabotage or something else going on, but.
This is very common for me that I feel deeply, deeply grateful for, you know, a family member, a partner, something in my business. And then I'll go to like the very, very end of it, which is like, oh, wow, you my partner's gonna die someday and I'm gonna lose them. And then I'm like almost preemptively grieving that loss because it's so, so good.
Carol (:Well, it's incredibly common. What I have found, and someone was talking to me about it the other day and said, I think a lot of people are missing this safety, feeling happy and feeling safe ends up being a trigger. We don't know that. We don't anticipate that. think a lot of people are like, what do you mean? Feeling safe is a trigger to feeling unsafe. So what we either feel unsafe immediately or bring in something upsetting to make us feel safe.
right, to write the balance there. Or literally when we grew up or in our last decade, feeling safe was followed by something negative with somebody else, right? So we end up wanting to feel happy, wanting to feel good. And when we do, the nervous system hears you're about to be in danger.
Leigh Ann Lindsey (:Yeah.
Leigh Ann Lindsey (:Right, yeah.
Carol (:when it's got and it gets stuck together. So you can't stay in that pleasant, happy, grateful state for too long without sabotaging. It is an unconscious sabotage, but it's also, remember, the nervous system saying, I'm going to protect you. I'm here. I got your back. No problem. That's dangerous. I don't think you should feel that happy for that many minutes. So we call it sabotage, and many, many people have it as a sabotage issue. But it's also the nervous system rushing in saying, hey,
Leigh Ann Lindsey (:Yeah, yeah.
Carol (:I'm here for you. Not gonna let you get hurt. We're gonna bring you down first before someone else brings you down.
Leigh Ann Lindsey (:Yeah, I think when you grew up and waiting for the other shoe to drop and the other shoe did always drop at some point, when you get to a place in life where you have created some level of stability and consistency and safety that feels comfortable, you've sort of upleveled to the point of like, you know, you're comfortable with more than what you had in childhood, but maybe not that much more.
I was really thinking about this this morning because I was like, what was that about? And I felt, and you know, because you and I have been talking about this in our private sessions, I have felt a little bit of, I think, self-sabotage coming up in relationship through triggers and through a little bit of paranoia, which is absolutely, I've never experienced that before.
in relationship and I was really thinking about that and it's, I think it's a little bit of that the other shoe to drop situation where I'm sort of like, it's so good. Life is so good right now. It's never been this good.
And that is incredibly overwhelming for me. That is incredibly dysregulating for me. And in a weird way, there's almost some, that part that's waiting for the other shoe to drop. If the other shoe's not dropping and not dropping and not dropping, it's almost like that waiting is almost untenable. So I'm going to make a shoe drop somehow.
Carol (:Excuse me.
Carol (:Absolutely. So my favorite question is, what's the downside of feeling that good for that long before you start to get spooked? Before you start to feel paranoid or feel like this is, I had a client say, well, this is stupid. I said, what do you mean? She goes, why would I feel good? You know, it's going to be taken away. Well, do I? I don't know. She thinks it's going to be taken away. Matter of minutes, matter of time, the universe is going to come take it away from me. My family's going to take it away from me.
So it is a trigger, as I was saying, safety is a trigger to feeling unsafe. Happyness is actually a trigger to feeling unhappy. Like it triggers you to say, uh-oh, uh-oh, I haven't scanned my environment in a couple of minutes to see the danger, because we're all poised for this danger coming at us. And to be fair, when we're really happy, sometimes other people are really unhappy.
Leigh Ann Lindsey (:Yeah. I mean, to answer that question, there could be any number of reasons for each of us why the downside of really fully experiencing something, in my case, at least what I was reflecting on this morning is it's more of just the tension of something bad might happen. When is it going to happen? Something bad is going to happen when I almost just want it to happen.
Carol (:It
Leigh Ann Lindsey (:So I don't have to keep waiting, but that unconscious logic is not logic. It's completely illogical for two reasons. One, the reality of life is something bad is going to happen. Hard things are going to happen.
And so in fact, when things are so good, receive it, enjoy it because there are gonna be hard moments, there are gonna be devastating moments that really like, you could turn the logic on its head and go, because something bad is going to happen, I want to receive this fully.
Carol (:It's so interesting. There's an old fashioned expression. I don't remember where it first came from, but around relationships where they say you want to quit before you get fired. So someone wants to quit the job before they get fired. They want to quit the relationship before they get dumped. And it's that thing you're talking about of like, I don't want to wait for this. Can I bring it on first? Like, just tell me the bad news. So I don't have to wait for it and be shocked. Remember, trauma involves
a surprise or a shock, right? So medical trauma, which you work with all the time. Someone thinks they're healthy and they come into the doctor's office after they've been examined and they think everything's going to be fine. They're just doing an update and the doctor says, I got bad news. That's a medical trauma, right? Whoa, I didn't see that coming. I didn't expect it. I didn't see it coming. And that's what many, many people have been raised with. Oops, the surprise, the shock, the slap.
the drinking, the relapsing, the car accident, whatever it is, and that primes our system to look for it, to expect it, and to feel stupid when we're not on the lookout. We don't like to feel stupid. We don't like to feel unsafe. And if feeling safe and happy is a trigger to feel unsafe, we're gonna make it happen. We wanna make it happen, because...
It's that idea of tolerating it, like how much happiness can you tolerate? How much goodness can you feel before you're afraid that that door is gonna slam on you?
Leigh Ann Lindsey (:Yeah, it's funny if I come back to maybe the cake analogy, it's sort of like, well, I know this cake is going to be taken from me at some point, so I'm not going to eat any of it. Rather than being like, you know what, if the cake's going to be taken at some point, I'm really going to enjoy it.
Carol (:It's so perfect. It's so perfect. It really is. And again, we want to be compassionate with ourselves and say, huh, where did I learn to be so darn careful? I know where I learned it, right? Where did I learn to not give myself airtime to be happy? Why is that a thing in my life? Who taught me that? Where did I learn that I shouldn't because of guilt? Sometimes guilt is the answer. I only have too much
Who am I to think I'm allowed to have more guilt and non-deserving? I don't feel worthy of that much happiness. That gets triggered too by the level of happiness. So it might trigger, someone might right away go, whoa, this is more, this is, am reaching that ceiling. I don't get this much. Why not? I don't know. Because my family didn't, because they told me I didn't, because someone didn't think I deserved it. So we have lots of, there lots of answers to that question.
Leigh Ann Lindsey (:Yeah.
Leigh Ann Lindsey (:Totally. know for me, when it comes to boundaries, that's a little bit of a block that I have to check myself on in terms of, I really don't like, I like setting up my week and my work schedule to be one that isn't me at max capacity all day, every day. I really have set up my work schedule so that I can just kind of flow through the day. And yet I'll often find myself.
you know, walking through the halls fast and, you know, sighing and not even acting, because I am stressed about real things, but I think it's a block of mind of not wanting to show and actually embody the calm, because if I'm stressed, people are going to ask less of me.
If I'm calm, people are gonna ask a lot more of me and I'm gonna have to say no a lot more and maybe ruffle feathers. But what I actually think is the root beneath all of that, that I'm seeing more and more is actually a lack of trust in myself.
And if I had stronger trust in myself, because what that part is saying is people might ask more of me and that might be true or it might not, but I think in some ways it can be true. And I don't trust that you'll be able to respond in a way that makes me feel safe.
Carol (:Isn't that interesting? Right? But you had to do the work to get there. It's not just a quick, facile answer to that. You really had to do the work and dig into that and go, wait, this is more complicated. And then it makes sense. Even if it's illogical, doesn't it make sense to you that that's what's going on? Right?
Leigh Ann Lindsey (:Totally. Yes. Yeah. mean, once we identify the protective mechanisms in the unconscious, so many of them make sense or make sense in to the extent that when you're like, if that's what you believed, it makes sense why you're acting this way.
Carol (:I worked with a client a couple weeks ago who I was saying, what's the downside of feeling that much joy longer, more minutes, more hours, more days in a row? Why is that a problem? And she said, are you kidding? Then someone's gonna come tell me why I shouldn't feel joyful, why I shouldn't be happy, and about all the mistakes, they're gonna remind me of all the mistakes I made that would make me not.
of be allowed to have happiness. And it like, I couldn't come up with that. This was this particular client's version of why it felt risky, of why feeling joyful was actually triggering the fear. So then the joy becomes paired with fear. And maybe you can do two minutes or three minutes or an hour. And then there is a point, there is a wall that we all hit. And what we wanna do is stretch that out. Sense of it logically.
and emotionally and say, a minute. Yeah, something bad is going to happen, but it's not because I'm joyful. Bad things happen. We all live in this world, right? But it's my joy is not the invitation to bad things. My gratitude does not mean somebody's going to now take away what I should be grateful for because I was gratitude, because I was appreciative.
Leigh Ann Lindsey (:Right, yes.
Leigh Ann Lindsey (:And I think following that path, also takes you to a place of if that is a reality for some, like, no, there really is someone in my life that if I embody joy and peace and gratitude, they're really going to come after me. It doesn't have to stop there. And I'm just a victim to that. It's so what's within my power?
to do about that. And sometimes it's internal mind shifts of, know what, they're going to come at me and I'm going to choose to not let them take anything away. Sometimes it's very real conversations and boundaries and requests that need to be made of this person, the role they play in my life needs to shift.
Carol (:Yes.
Leigh Ann Lindsey (:So sometimes we do the work and we identify the beliefs and oftentimes the beliefs are misguided and illogical and untrue and sometimes they aren't grounded in truth. And then that leads us to now what's within my power to do about that.
Carol (:which is the good news. I was just doing a recording about, I do a lot of work on success and abundance and I was doing a recording about the good news is that it's within our power. Success is not outside of us. It's inside of us. And if that's inside of us and our gratitude and feeling good and feeling joyful is inside of us, we can let go of their reactions and we can work on our reactions to their reactions. Cause a lot of people will say,
Leigh Ann Lindsey (:Mm-hmm.
Carol (:I'm so worried about other people's jealousy and envy. Well, guess what? People are jealous and envious. We're not going to do anything about that. The only thing we can do is take care of our response to it. How are we going to respond to it? But that's good news. It's within our ability and capability to change that.
Leigh Ann Lindsey (:Exactly. Something I was also thinking about is I'll talk to my clients every now and then when it's appropriate about play and how play is the essence of safety. A primal animal is only playing if it feels 100 % safe. And so we can use play in this sort of reverse way to communicate safety to the mind, body and spirit. And I think gratitude is the same thing.
Carol (:Thank you.
Carol (:I'm sorry.
Leigh Ann Lindsey (:a deer that's being chased by a tiger is not gonna be like, I should be so grateful in this moment. It's running for its life. It's a silly analogy, but the point being in a primal sense.
We would only have brought in gratitude in a place of safety. And so we can also use gratitude in that reverse way to communicate safety to the mind, body, and spirit. Being able to go, there are stressful things happening right now. It might be normal everyday stress, or there might be really big things like a heavy diagnosis, like a family tragedy, like a career issue.
And I think our nervous systems love to extrapolate. This hard, bad, scary, heavy thing is happening over here. Therefore, everything is hard, bad, and scary. And I think that gratitude is allowed to sort of settle that extrapolation and communicate a deeper sense of safety.
Carol (:Thank
Carol (:Well, and also this relates to what we talked about earlier, where when people are heightened in stress, dysregulated, and then they're just doing their one, two, three gratitudes, it's not doing any good because the person is so stressed out, they don't feel safe. And when you don't feel safe, it's like all the studies about kids, they can't learn. So kids who have too much going on at home or something's going on in the classroom or they're hungry.
They can't learn because everything else is taking over that's about safety, surviving our instincts, right? So that relates to that earlier part of the conversation too. It's like, how do you get yourself feeling safe enough to then have a place for the gratitude to land and then have it feed on itself in a positive way where gratitude makes you feel safer? Sometimes, sometimes it doesn't. Well, then what do you need to take care of?
What do you need to address and give airtime if gratitude is triggering you? What is it? What's more questions? What is it triggering you to feel? Why does that trigger you? What is it about saying gratitude, feeling it, journaling, walking while you're saying you're gratitudeless? Why does that feel odd or off or uncomfortable?
Leigh Ann Lindsey (:right?
Leigh Ann Lindsey (:I think that's this added layer of really important nuance, which I experienced in real time this morning where I wake up, I'm so happy, I'm so grateful, and probably within 10 seconds of actually feeling and receiving that this deep grief comes in. And I think that's interesting for especially the audience to sort of observe themselves as they start practicing tapping with gratitude.
Carol (:Thank
you
Thank
Leigh Ann Lindsey (:not just is there resistance to doing it in the first place, but after you do it and you settle things and you bring in that gratitude, what's possibly the response that comes after that?
Carol (:Thank
Yes. And some people will say to me, well, how do I know if I'm sabotaging my happiness or my gratitude practice? Take a look at your life. Take a look at your reactions when you're feeling good like you did this morning. my gosh, 10 seconds before I'm feeling grief? Whoa, that's not a long time, right? How do we stretch that out? But many people are only feeling the reaction and not putting a lens, not taking a look at it. So all they know is, whoot, some feeling spiked.
and they turned the corner and started thinking about something negative, but they're not analyzing it in a healthy way. They're not saying, wow, that was short. Wow, I felt that difference. I changed lanes very quickly. Huh, what's going on? They're just changing lanes and feeling like it's better for them to be in a dark low place. We have to ask ourselves, why does that feel better? Where did you learn?
to feel safer anticipating, scanning, waiting for the shoe to drop. A lot of people, I mean, it sounds like something we talk about all the time, but a lot of people have never asked the questions. they know is they can tolerate about 10 seconds of gratitude. That's it. That's their threshold, right? That's all they can manage, right?
Leigh Ann Lindsey (:Well, and that's where I think to the unconscious comes in because in that moment, I'm not having conscious thoughts of, my goodness, this is too much gratitude. It's overwhelming me. My life is so good and that overwhelms me. those thoughts aren't there. It's just that instinctual automatic reaction. Then when I sit with it more, that's, that's the unconscious narratives that then start to be able to come to the surface. So it does, it takes a different level of attunement.
and attention to those reactions.
Carol (:Sometimes it's really easy to ask someone and have them ask themselves, why does feeling good feel bad? Why does feeling better make me scared? Like very simple questions. Maybe gratitude is too strong for some people. They say, I never go there. Okay, why does feeling better put you on high alert? Why does finally feeling relaxed, instead of relaxing and you get to enjoy the parasympathetic response in your body and feeling good.
Why does that then make you immediately go on high alert and look around and scan your environment? Just that question could help someone say, never thought about it. But that's true. I have a one, two punch. I've got a this, A is followed by B very quickly. I'm afraid someone's gonna say something. I'm afraid someone will say, what do you have to be grateful about? I'm afraid someone will say, there's nothing good going on. World's falling apart. Why are you happy? Why are you singing? Why are you whistling?
And you can't have that fear if you haven't had that experience. If you have not experienced someone smacking you down emotionally for feeling good, looking good, sounding good, skipping, right, feeling great, if you haven't had that experience, you won't develop this automatic reaction. That's why it's important for everyone to kind of find out what is yours? Where did yours come from? So mine from the earlier ages, under 20,
were from relapsing, my parents relapsing. And just as I'd feel happy and grateful and knowing and my mother's sober, it's like boom. And there was no telling when it was gonna happen. Don't talk to any addict. There's no prediction. Sometimes it's an obvious prediction if someone is nibbling around the edges and going back to bars but having diet coke or hanging out with their friends who they used to do drugs with. And that's pretty obvious, but.
In general, a lot of people will say, didn't see it, they didn't see it coming. Forget the family members seeing it coming. And if I was 12, how was I gonna see that coming? But I learned the hard way to not stay in a sustained place of happiness and joy and ooh, things are good. Kids are supposed to feel like they're safe with their parents. Well, in two seconds, I could be unsafe.
Leigh Ann Lindsey (:Yeah. But isn't that such an interesting conclusion the unconscious makes? Because something bad will happen again, I just shouldn't be happy. I shouldn't feel it. Yeah. And I think maybe the sub-belief beneath that is...
Carol (:and take risks.
Leigh Ann Lindsey (:It hurts so much more to go from a place of joy and happiness and peace down into devastation, hurt, pain, rather than just being in sort of a constant state of neutral, it's less of a drop if we're using this sort of like linear analogy. And I think maybe that's the protective narrative beneath it is like, I don't wanna let myself get up here emotionally because it's a much farther way to fall.
Carol (:you.
Carol (:You're right.
Carol (:Who wants to fall like that? And the other thing is that the survival instinct kicks in so quickly, we don't have time to say, hmm, there goes my survival instinct. just goes, it happens so quickly, we can't catch it. And if you've ever seen someone have a reaction to other people from post-traumatic stress, like, woo, they just suddenly react, suddenly yell.
And it looks to the other people like something shouldn't have triggered them. It doesn't matter. They got triggered in their animal brain, right? They got triggered on such a deep level. There's no talking about it. There's no anticipating it. There's no trying to stop it. It just happens. And what we need to do is keep helping the nervous system calm down enough so you're not on a hair trigger. so that, yeah, life happens. Yeah, loud noises happen. Yep. People are going to slam the door. People are going to say no.
And we start to roll with it more rather than that's a disaster. Cause the communication to our brains is, that's such a disaster. I'm actually in danger. Well, you're actually not in danger. We're not in danger a lot of the time that we, our nervous system signal to us, this is dangerous. That's the mismatch. That's the miscommunication is this is dangerous and this is about your survival. And I was like, no, it's not the guy cut you off in traffic. Nobody had an accident. Everything's fine. Let him cut you off.
Right? Someone said something snarky. please, are we going to take that bait? Right? But when we feel offended and we feel like something about our survival is tweaked, then we go after them. Then we respond to some. It happens all the time. You know exactly what I'm talking about.
Leigh Ann Lindsey (:Yes, completely. You know, it's so interesting. I was working with a client recently and who's experiencing mast cell syndrome, which is where your immune system is so haywire. Every single thing is getting labeled.
as a threat, as a danger. And it's such a great analogy for nervous system and emotional triggers that we get emotionally so haywire that every single thing is getting perceived as an instant threat. That one little comment from my coworker, that person in traffic, that look that the cashier gave me, this heightened inflammatory state that is causing such a
Carol (:Yes.
Carol (:Thanks.
Leigh Ann Lindsey (:a flare and a misinterpretation or over interpretation of so many different things. And it's just interesting because I felt myself in that place a little bit, not to such an extreme, but as we've talked about in our one-on-one sessions, getting flared and triggered so easily. And even to some extent in the moment as it's happening, my intellectual self is able to go.
this is ridiculous. This is not a thing and yet almost that physiological response is so hard to counter in the moment. I know I have my deeper work because I do think a lot of these recent triggers I'm experiencing are from my past relationship and maybe a little bit of, not maybe, like for sure, unmetabolized.
hurt and devastation from that relationship that is then causing this hypervigilance in this new relationship.
Carol (:So was such a great way to say it. I love the phrase hyperinflammatory state with your client who's got the physical immune system problem. Because think of what makes us emotionally in a hyperinflammatory state. Poor sleeping habits, poor eating habits, not having anyone to talk to so it starts to build up in the week, in the month, or the year, feel so stressed out. You just want to bark at people, right? Not feeling understood or appreciated at work or at home.
Those put us into an emotional hyperinflammatory state. So if you want to help yourself, we need to have tools and methods and systems to help us debrief, feel better, have some downtime. Like you said about your schedule, you do not have yourself back to back to back with clients so that you can't even breathe in between because that's not useful. It's not helpful to them. It's not useful to you. But I know people in all professions.
who live that way, work that way. And then they wonder why they turn around and yell at their kid when they promise they weren't gonna yell at their kid again. happens all the time. So I love that hyper inflammatory state emotionally.
Leigh Ann Lindsey (:Exactly.
Leigh Ann Lindsey (:Yeah, well, it was really powerful because she said that and I was like, how interesting that this mass, this very real physical thing you're experiencing is perfectly mirroring or really I phrased it to her as a question. Does it feel like it's mirroring your emotional experience? And she was like, I could see the light bulb go on where she was like.
That's exactly what it is. Everyone's a threat. Everything is a danger emotionally. And I was like, how interesting how the body mirrors things sometimes in a physical way.
Carol (:Thank
Carol (:Well, that's the crossed wiring. So the crossed wiring for us emotionally is everything's making me unsafe. Nobody's protecting me. Everything, every little comment is a bad thing and I need to fight it. It's like, no, you don't, right? So that's what's happening in the wires being misinterpreted or crossed. We don't feel safe. We feel tired. We've been eating too much sugar. We had a fight with someone, had a disagreement where...
you know upset because someone's not appreciating us and then the next person who crosses our path watch out right we bark at them we're like we jump with them because we don't have the resources we're not giving ourselves the air time or the tapping time or the meditation time or the sleep to just get back online and say you know what things are okay that they're not perfect but they're okay and i'm gonna see if i can understand why that person is in that place right now
not, well, we're not talking about taking abusive behavior, we're talking about honestly give and take here, depending on, depending on the relationship, of course.
Leigh Ann Lindsey (:Yeah, okay, a couple final questions I wanna ask. One is, I also wanna spend a second here on why it's important to bring in these practices in maybe the more routine times in life versus, when we're in the thick of a really, really intense experience like cancer diagnosis, a family tragedy.
Carol (:Thank you.
Leigh Ann Lindsey (:I still think that gratitude can be incredibly impactful, laying the foundation in advance and why that might be important.
Carol (:Yeah. Well, if you only do it in crisis, one, you're at risk for not remembering to do it. And two, you don't build up any resources in your body. So if you want to get reps and you want to go to the gym and get some reps, you got to do it every day or three days a week. You don't just do it. when I feel like it. Right. So you're really at risk for having it not work. I joke with people and I say, I do a lot of weight loss work and I say, do not wait till you're in the car.
on your way to Dunkin' Donuts to do your tapping, because one, you won't do it, two, it won't work, because the train has left the station. So if we build this into our daily practices and our daily routines, we start to build resilience. We start to build the muscle. We start to build a feeling of equanimity where like, okay, that person's in a bad mood. Instead of, we have to like jump into a fight or jump into an argument at work or at home. So you want to build it consistently. The other thing
that I think is so important is our culture is obsessed with goals. I'm tired of goals. I'm tired of goals because you're not gonna get to your goals without a system. We need a system of feeling better, being better, self-care, helping ourselves rather than being obsessed with these goals that everybody's into. So you wanna really get better and feel better? Have a system. My system is I speed walk five days a week. I do meditation, rain or shine seven days a week.
Leigh Ann Lindsey (:Mm.
Carol (:And I do my tapping and gratitude seven days a week. There is nothing that gets in my way. Nothing. The speed walking, I need a day or two off. I do thousands of steps so that I don't exhaust my body. And I don't do it, somebody said, do you do it for calories? No, I do it because it helps me release energy. It helps me move, right? I don't want to be stagnant. And I have a lot of energy moving through me and I just want to keep moving it,
So a system is going to get you a lot further than having a goal and having a vision board. It's like, forget the vision board, right? We need a system. What do you do that takes care of yourself, that's loving, compassionate, and it's going to get you further inch by inch towards what you want, how you want to live, not the goal. How do you want to live?
Leigh Ann Lindsey (:Yeah, I think to your point, it's your, you know, if before there's one path we go down, creating those habits and patterns and rituals in more of the kind of regular life.
Carol (:Yeah.
Leigh Ann Lindsey (:is building that new path so that when something big does come up, there's now two paths you could go down and it's much more likely that you're gonna go down the more expansive, uplifting, regulating path versus maybe that old one. But also I think too, this is something I like to remind people is that daily tending you're doing,
is just ever so gently kind of like building your capacity, taking some things off so that when the hard stuff happens, there's not six months of stuff piled up. And so when the hard stuff happens, because it will,
Carol (:Thank you.
Leigh Ann Lindsey (:I've done this daily tending that keeps like, if we're talking about a bucket that fills up with, you know, whatever emotional content, if I'm just ever so gently kind of draining that bucket every single day, then when the big things happen, that bucket's empty and it's got plenty of room. And I'm going to be able to navigate that thing, I think, with much more composure.
Carol (:Yes. Yes.
Carol (:Thank you.
Carol (:If you have.
If you have somebody coming over to dinner and you haven't cleaned your house or the dishes or the sink for two weeks, it's going to be a lot harder when they're coming over dinner. You'd have a lot more work to do, right? So daily cleaning, daily taking care of, daily tending is super important and it works. We know it works. I don't think anybody listening would say, no, I don't think that's true. I think I can get away with doing some practices once a week. I don't think there's anybody listening, not your listeners.
who would say they could get away with.
Leigh Ann Lindsey (:Mm-hmm. Yeah. I love this. That was so much fun. Anything else that we didn't cover that you feel is really important to mention.
Carol (:Well, be gentle on yourself. Be easy on yourself. If you haven't asked the questions, what's the downside of feeling better, longer, for more of, you know, if you haven't asked that question, you don't, you may not know what's getting in your way. You just may keep bumping in to the pattern. Get underneath the pattern. Why is it happening? What's going on? Why are you, you know, why is your joy being hijacked by something else? Wouldn't you like to stretch it out?
Wouldn't you like to enjoy the good feelings before you have to quit before you're fired? So, would it up.
Leigh Ann Lindsey (:Mm-hmm. You're reminding me that after that experience this morning, I was like, you know what? I need to do kind of the tapping first on acknowledging the heaviness, bringing in the gratitude. And then I need to do like a second five-minute tapping on the dysregulation from bringing in the gratitude. Yeah.
Carol (:Yes. Isn't that interesting? Isn't that interesting? And remember, tapping works. All the research has showed it's calming down the fight, flight, freeze response in the brain. That's what it's doing. It's not just, isn't this a distraction? We're actually doing something in the brain. We're pairing something we're upset with a method that actually calms down your fight or flight response. So we know it works.
Leigh Ann Lindsey (:Yes. So one more time, I'll make sure it's linked in the show notes, the name of your new book, where people can find it, but I'll make sure it's linked below too.
Carol (:Oops, I don't have that one here. It's called, I want to give them the free, I want them to be able to go and get all the free videos without even buying, if they don't want to buy the book, that's fine. It's called Yes Thank You. And what they can do is go to the yescode.com forward slash thank you and put your name in and you'll get seven free videos and a PDF and files there where you can just practice these videos of moving what's in your way out of your energy field and then making room.
and space for the gratitude.
Leigh Ann Lindsey (:I love it. I'll make sure it's linked in the notes too. Carol, thank you so much.
Carol (:Thank you, Leigh Ann. love talking. We could talk for a long time about this. Thank you so much for having me on your show.
