Let me tell you, if you’ve ever felt like you just can’t shake off a past hurt, you’re in for a treat. We’re diving into the fascinating world of trauma—what it really is and why it affects us all differently. I’m talking about the sneaky ways that emotional pain can manifest in our daily lives, from the tone of someone’s voice to the way silence can feel like a punch in the gut. It turns out that our brains are wired to keep us safe, but sometimes, they misinterpret signals and lead us down a rabbit hole of anxiety and fear. We’ll unpack why trying to simply ‘think’ your way out of it is like trying to use a spoon to dig a hole—it’s just not going to work! Instead, I’ll share some insights on how to work with your nervous system to create a sense of safety and stability in your life. Plus, I’ve got a brand new free class coming up that’s perfect for anyone feeling stuck in the cycle of overthinking. It’s time to learn how to prioritize your feelings without guilt and start living a ‘fuck yes’ life—one that’s truly yours!

Takeaways:

1. You might think you're overreacting, but your brain is just processing trauma differently than others.
2. Replaying conversations is not a flaw; it’s your brain's way of trying to create safety after emotional pain.
3. Feeling anxious or reactive isn't a logic issue; it's a feelings problem that needs to be addressed with care.
4. It's crucial to realize that your needs are just as important as everyone else's, not optional.
5. Suppressing emotions only makes things worse; you need to learn how to process feelings effectively.
6. A 'fuck yes' life is about prioritizing your own desires and needs, not waiting for others to validate you.

Links referenced in this episode:

1. amandahest.ca/bookacall

Hey, I'm Amanda Hess.

I'm a certified life coach.

But what you need to know is I'm a sensitive woman just like you.

And I'm going to help you understand yourself better so that you can approach your life differently and feel really good about it.

Let's go.

Hey, hey, my beautiful friend.

Okay.

A fuck yes life starts with making yourself a fuck yes.

If you haven't guessed already, this is going to be an episode that is definitely rated R. All right?

But when I was thinking about what do you need to know?

What do you need to hear?

It's that we need to start going for a fuck yes life.

I was thinking about this and.

And one of the things I realized is a lot of the women that I talk to will not even necessarily identify with wanting a fakya's life.

And I think that what happens is that we become really just desensitized to our life and to what we want.

And so most women, when I talk to them, when they come to me, they'll say to me, amanda, I want a problem free life, which is that, you know, your husband or your wife gets it, your boss backs off, your kids cooperate, and everyone around us finally changes.

So we can feel good, we can feel like we're enough.

And until then, we're just tolerating.

We're tolerating everything.

We're managing.

We're slowly dying inside, but we're fine.

Everything's fine.

And what I find when women are in this state is we believe, right, that there are only two options.

Number one, tolerate everything and just slowly die inside or burn it all down, be a total bitch, risk losing everything.

And today, what I want to offer you is a third option.

You don't have to just have a fine life.

You can have a fuck yes life.

And the truth of the matter is it doesn't have anything to do with other people.

So where I want to begin is talking about how we've really built our entire lives around other people's actions and reactions.

Being a sensitive human, we have gotten very used to constantly adjusting, constantly managing, constantly waiting for something outside of us to change first.

We are on the lookout for how others are acting and reacting.

And we are adaptable.

We adapt ourselves to this.

And in doing so, what we don't realize is that we have jumped upon a hamster wheel.

And we're on this hamster wheel really looking for how other people see us, how other people view us, how other people react to us.

We're doing this so often and we're Doing this, even without oftentimes actually realizing that that's what we're doing in doing so.

What we end up experiencing, because we are trying to ensure that other people are content with us, what we end up being on is this hamster wheel where we feel disappointed, where we feel frustrated, where we feel resentful.

We are constantly running through these emotions and we can't figure out how to get off.

And the reality is, is that the faster you run, the faster you go, but you're actually not getting anywhere.

How I see this really showing up is women are getting more and more busy.

Women that I help have all the plates spinning, and they work very hard to spin them.

Because if you're busy spinning plates, if you're busy running as fast as you can, that at least feels like something.

It feels productive.

It feels like we're doing something, and that feels like maybe the place we want to be.

But at the end of the day, it's not sustainable, number one.

And number two, it doesn't really create anything that you want.

The other part that I think we really need to look at is that when we're scanning, when we're doing that, we're not just, sorry, let's start over.

The part that nobody really talks about is that we're not just managing everyone's needs.

That's not just what we're doing.

We're not just managing everyone's needs.

We're scanning for them.

We're walking into rooms and we're reading the energy, we're watching faces, we're monitoring tone, and we are adjusting ourselves in real time.

And we've done it for so long that it just feels like our personality, this is just who we are.

This is just how we are.

And what that really is is what I call hyper vigilance.

Hyper vigilance of how everyone else is doing.

Perpetually being on alert for if everybody else is okay.

And that hypervigilance, it really costs us everything.

Because when our attention is pointed outward at other people, nothing is pointed at yourself.

And what happens is we're so burned out.

Not from the doing, not from the actual things that we're doing in life.

We're burned out from never once being a consideration, not even to ourselves.

Now, what I want you to know is that this isn't a character flaw, right?

It makes complete sense.

Sensitive.

When sensitive women have been told their whole lives that they're too much, they have been told they are too emotional, they have been told they're too sensitive, they have been told to Toughen up.

And a lot of times our sensitivity makes mistreatment very difficult on us.

We have a hard time bouncing up from it.

We personalize it, we internalize it.

So what happens is when we're out in the world and it's being reflected back to us, that somebody doesn't like something that we've said or something that we've done, or maybe this has happened in the past and somebody has actually mistreated us.

Because of something like this, we learn to override ourselves.

We are so good at managing everyone else that we honestly forget that we.

We were doing it.

We are so good at it, we don't even know we're doing it.

Our brains essentially have been programmed to learn that other people's needs are urgent and that our own needs are optional.

So what happens when this goes on again and again and again over years and years and years is our brain doesn't even offer the question, what do I want?

It skips it entirely.

And so what happens is we feel lost, we feel purposeless.

We feel like we're going through the motions of a life that doesn't quite fit and we can't figure out why.

And I need you to know that this is why.

This is where this is coming from.

A fuck yes.

Life isn't about other people finally showing up differently.

We don't need that.

What it actually is, is it's about stopping the whole frame.

It's about completely dismantling it.

The one where we revolve entirely around everyone else's actions and reactions.

And we must learn that skill.

And here's the hard part, in all honesty, is that it's going to feel wrong at first to do this.

It's going to feel like you're doing something wrong.

Your brain is going to call it selfish.

Your brain is going to say that you're making things harder.

It's not going to like it at all.

It's going to say that other people aren't going to like you, that you're going to be alone, that this isn't appropriate, that we're supposed to be kind, that we're supposed to be giving, that we're supposed to care about what other people think.

But the truth is that guilt isn't telling you the facts.

The feeling of the wrongness, of really deciding.

I'm going to change how I approach my life, myself, my relationships.

And it's going to start with caring about what I want.

That feeling of wrongness is just how Unfamiliar feels.

It's not a sign that you're doing it wrong.

It's not a sign that you shouldn't be doing it.

It's a sign that you're something new.

If you think about muscle memory, right?

If you drive the same way to your house every day from work for five years, when you move houses and you go to drive to a new house, lots of times you'll find yourself driving to the old house.

It will feel unfamiliar, disconnected, weird to drive to the new house.

Does that mean that you don't want to go to the new house?

Of course not.

The question that I feel starts everything is when was the last time you actually took care of your own needs and wants?

Not just food and water and sleep, but something that is fun, something that is frivolous, or maybe even something that is hard, that other people disagreed with, and you did it anyways.

When was the last time you did that?

Or have you ever done that?

For myself, you know, I remember when I moved here, so I live in Kamloops, British Columbia, in Canada.

I had this desire to live in the mountains with my family, to have a different lifestyle.

And it felt in opposition of what my family would want and of what my friends would want.

And also, I didn't know how we would do it or what that would look like.

But what I will tell you is that that unfamiliarness turned into adventure and that adventure has turned into a life I deeply love.

We can do fun things, we can do different things.

We can do frivolous things.

All of them are needs, in my opinion.

Sometimes I think as women, we are told that our need for beauty or fun or lightness or pleasure, that those aren't needs.

What I need you to know is they are needs.

They're needs.

And they need to be elevated.

They're being treated as afterthoughts.

So let's talk about what making yourself a fuck yes actually looks like.

Because what I believe I've shown you here is that probably for a long period in your life, you haven't been one and you're waiting for somebody to give you permission.

You're waiting for somebody to say it's okay.

You're waiting for someone to give it to you, but you actually have to take it.

What making yourself a fuck yes actually looks like is not.

It's not a big dramatic life overhaul.

You don't need to become a different person.

It's actually just asking yourself what you actually want and letting yourself sit in the discomfort of not knowing the answer.

It's not editing yourself before you even open your mouth.

It's not waiting for someone to give you permission, even if it is just with their expression.

It's letting yourself be a priority.

It's letting yourself be a priority before there's a crisis that actually forces it.

It's deciding that your opinion of yourself is the one that counts.

Not your mom's, not your partners, not the Internet, yours.

You don't get a fuck yes life and then start counting on yourself.

Okay, it goes the other way.

We actually need to make ourselves a fuck yes to be able to create that fuck yes life.

Here are a few questions for you that you could answer that I think could really help you.

Number one, what would change if you stopped waiting for everyone else to agree that you are a person worthy of rest or love or excitement or fun?

What would you do more of if you didn't have to manage everyone's reactions and instead could just be with yourself emotionally and move through to the things you really want to do?

What is one thing you would do today if you didn't have to worry about somebody else being mad?

What would your life look like if you started building it around the things you deeply desire rather than what other people supposedly need to be?

Okay, these are big questions and what I want you to know is it might be really challenging to answer them, but it doesn't mean that anything's gone wrong.

I was coaching several clients today and this was kind of a theme that we were discussing was the hyper vigilance, the noticing of other people, checking to see if they're okay, checking to see if they like us, checking to see if they feel weird about something we've said.

And if we clock that reaction, then we can change how we show up.

The thing that we don't realize when we're doing that is that we are essentially shutting ourselves down.

And what we don't realize is that's fear.

All that is is fear.

We are afraid of how we're going to feel if the other person rejects us.

So we will instead amend the way that we are going to show up Now.

This creates a whole lot of dissonance because we'll do that in the presence of that person and then we will be frustrated because we didn't speak up.

And then a lot of times what we will do is we will make it their fault.

Well, you don't ask me what I want.

You don't ask me what I need.

You interrupted me when I was speaking.

But the truth is, actually, if you believed that you were worthy of attention and respect and love and that the other person wants to be there with you and actually, really and truly is interested in you because they are there and you believe that you were worthy of all of those things, you would show up differently.

You, if you believe that you were a fuck, yes.

You're not defending that, you're just embodying it.

When you decide you're a fuck, yes, you do not need to prove yourself to anyone, including yourself.

You don't need to prove yourself because none of this needs to be proven.

The truth is, is that when we can lean in to our lovability, our worth, our ability to be present, if we can lean into I am an amazing, awesome, flawed, incredible, imperfect human and show up as that version of ourselves, you will ask for what you want.

You will ask for what you need.

But when we deny that from ourselves, when we tell ourselves that we're not worthy of what we want or that the world needs to tell us that we are allowed to have it, we will tiptoe around and then at the same time we'll be this reactive animal inside of it as well.

Angry, defensive, lashing out, shutting down, being passive aggressive.

What are those things?

They're reactions.

We're simply reacting to what's going on in our life and the way that we're experiencing it.

But the truth is, it's because we have, without even realizing it, erected a filter.

If you think about putting a filter over a light, it changes how we see everything.

This is the filter.

The filter of I'm not enough.

The filter of I'm unlovable.

The filter of I need other people to show me that I'm allowed to speak up before I can.

The filter of I need somebody else to meet my needs.

The filter of if you don't meet them without me asking, then something's gone wrong that shouldn't happen.

I was joking with a client today that, you know, when we're in a relationship with somebody and we decide that we really want something from them, but then what we do is we write it in invisible ink and then we hide the key somewhere around the house and we don't even tell them that that's even in existence and they don't do it.

And if they don't do it, that means that they don't love us.

What is the purpose of that versus what if you just wrote it out?

What if you just said it out loud?

What if you understood that I am worthy and lovable and an amazing human?

And so I know that you think that about me too.

I'm going to lead with that so I can show up just with love and warmth and openness.

What will that create?

Well, you're giving them a roadmap.

They're giving you.

You're giving them a roadmap of how you would like to be treated.

And then more than likely, a lot of the times the people that we have in our life will rise up.

Now, sometimes they won't.

And maybe we do need to erect a boundary or maybe we do need to break up or whatever it is.

But what I find is too often when we don't have a fuck yes life, we're looking outside ourselves because that's what we've been trained to do.

And the real work is learning how to look inside and build up our own foundation so that we feel solid.

A fuck yes life isn't problem free.

It's not everyone finally showing up the way you need them to.

It's learning how to truly show up for yourself finally.

And that's what is going to change everything.

So, my friend, if this speaks to you, if it's turned on the light bulb, if you're like, oh my God, yes, let's get on the discovery call.

You can go over to amandahest ca bookacall.

We can talk about this, we can talk about implementing in this, we can talk about implementing this in your life.

I promise you, even that conversation could change everything.

Bye for now.

Thanks so much for listening today.

If this podcast is helping you, please follow wherever you listen and consider leaving a review.

It truly helps this community grow and allows me to support more women like you.

I'm excited to see you back here next week with a brand new episode.

Until then, take care, friend.