Listener Q&A Vol.3 Resisting Trusting Myself & Ingrained Feelings
In today’s episode, I am answering two more questions from our listeners. Can I really trust myself? & How to release old emotions that keeps coming?
The answer to both of these questions will reinforce the importance of mindset work and body image.
What you’ll learn listening to this episode on Listener Q&A Vol.3:
- The answer to the question, “I know in my head what I’m doing is right but my feelings towards myself are so ingrained. I feel like I can’t change them. Help!”
- The answer to the question, “I don’t know if I can trust my body: What does it mean? Where is it in my body? Can I really trust my body?
Mentioned in the show:
Undiet Your Life Coaching Program
Episode Transcript:
Listener Q&A Vol.3 Resisting trusting myself & Ingrained feelings-Ep 349
This is episode 349 of The Beyond the Food Show and today we're gonna answer two listener's questions. The first one is about the difficulty of releasing emotion, and the other one is the difficulty in trusting ourselves. Stay tuned!
Welcome back, my sister. It is the third installment of listener Q&A, and I'm getting some good feedback thus far about this series of podcasts, but I would love to hear from you. If you haven't listened to the first two, perhaps do that and then shoot me a DM on Instagram or an email at [email protected] and let me know if this is a format of podcasts you're enjoying and at the same time, if you do have a question, please submit it on the email, and we will add it to the list of question we have upcoming for the other listener Q&A that we have lined up.
Just a quick reminder to everyone about active listening. So active listening is a principle that I teach to anyone who joins me in group coaching program where you are exposed to other people being coached, to direct your mind to benefit from other people receiving coaching around you.
So there's two intentional thoughts that I want to give you as I am coaching those two questions. Number one, focus your brain to think, "I always hear what I need." And the second is asking yourself a question, "How can I apply this coaching to my life, my situation, and my current problem?"
With that in mind, we're gonna start with the very first question, which is this one.
I know I'm in my head. And I know what I'm doing right now towards my feelings and my emotion is not working for me because I cannot let go of some of the emotions I have been experiencing nearly all of my life. Some of my feelings towards me feel like they're ingrained, and honestly, I had to look up the definition of ingrained as a French person to make sure I understand it. But ingrained literally means built-in. So this listener is having feelings about herself that feels like they're just embedded in her. She can't release them. She cannot let them go and she says, I can't change them no matter how much I try. Please help me.
So if you are in a position where you say, Hey, Stephanie, I can't release, I can't change my feelings, you are 100% right. I could stop here, but I'm not.
100% right, you cannot change directly your feelings. And I know some of you're gonna be like, what? You've been talking about this for like 300 episodes. I know, but I never said to you, change your feelings. I said over and over and over. Change your thoughts. And your thoughts create your feeling, and when you change your thoughts, when you change your mindset, your thinking, that results in you having a different emotional experience.
We cannot change directly our feelings. So I'm gonna give you a short lesson in anatomy here, in nervous system anatomy, particularly. So your brain is part of your nervous system, right? The brain is the commanding officer of the entire body, including your nervous system. Your nervous system is a collection of organs and tissues in your body that commands your experience of life. Your brain being part of that, it's like sit at the top of your body, that's the starting point of your nervous system. And then attached to your brain is your spine. And attached to your spine is thousands and thousands and thousands of nerve endings that travel all the way to the tips of your finger and the tips of your toe.
The way your emotions are created in your body, it's via your nervous system. But it just doesn't start in your body. It actually starts in your brain. Your brain processes the world, the environment you're in, and it has an opinion, a perspective on what's happening in your life.
So for example, this person talks about her opinion of herself. Let's contextualize that into how she views herself. Let's imagine she sees a reflection in the mirror. As she sees her reflection in the mirror, her brain within millisecond has an opinion about that. Likely along the lines of diet culture, probably you're too fat, your belly's too big, you're too old, all the too much, right? That's what diet culture does, tells us with too much.
So she has a thought and that thought then travels to the rest of her body via her central nervous system, her spine, and her nerve endings. And then when it lands again within a millisecond in the nerve ending and the rest of the body, it's like an electric current; it has sensation. And we name these sensations as emotions. But really what emotions are is simply sensations in the body.
Most people about body image, they feel disgusted, they feel shame, and that typically shows up in the midsection of the body and heat and cold and tightness. And when you have these sensations in your body, your brain is like, Ooh, you feel a shame. It labels the sensation as shame. And that's why you say, I keep experiencing the same thing and I cannot release the shame. You cannot release the shame until you change the way you think about your body. If every time you see your body, you have the thought, you're too fat, it's gonna create shame. There's no stopping that. The only way to stop that would be to cut the central nerve, like cut your spine.
This is not like serious, like for all my science geeky people, like, I'm just making an analogy here. But I'm just saying there's no way of stopping the mechanism. Once it has started in your brain, it will transfer to the rest of your body and you will experience shame. The way to release your emotion is to change the way you think about the circumstance that causes you the emotion.
So, you can do that on your own, like grab your blank piece of paper and start putting your thoughts about your body, about yourself on a piece of paper. And then decide which thought you wanna move forward and not with. Or you can use a framework like cognitive behavioral coaching, right, which is an adaptation of cognitive behavioral therapy done with a practitioner. It's arranged so you can do it on your own. It's a framework, it's a step-by-step process that allows you to figure out your thought that creates your feelings. And then you go into your brain and then you change the way you think, which will then change your sensation in your body and your emotional experience. That's how you release your emotion.
And I understand that there's different messages out into the world about releasing emotion. A couple of days ago, I was trying to explain to a colleague of mine, Mindset Coaching. And I said to her, it's very unfortunate in today's world where we are at right now with social media, we have a large number of influencers, of people out into the world who are trying to help the world and they are not instructing people on how their brain and their emotion are really working and they're saying just manifest another sensation in your body, just manifest love for your body. You should see my face as I'm saying that. Right, and it's the whole like mindset is manifestation. It is not true. Like you cannot just manifest love for your body out of a green, lush mountain somewhere. That's not how the human anatomy, the human body functions. That's not how the nervous system functions. There's more to it than that. And I'm sorry if you've had this kind of narrative given to you and that's why you're stuck today. You're saying I can't release those emotions even though they're telling me I should just be able to release them. We can't. We can't intervene at the emotional level. We have to intervene at the cognitive level. We have to change our opinion. We have to look into our belief system, and that will change our emotional experience. If you wanna do this, we're here to help you. We have an entire structure for that.
Second question. I don't know if I can trust my body. What does it mean to trust your body? Where is trust in my body? Can I really trust my body? These three questions are spinning in my head all the time. I've listened to the last 150 episodes of your podcast, and I can't seem to find the answer to those three questions. What does it mean to trust my body? Where is it in my body, and can I really trust my body? I would love your help with that.
This is a great question. So, we'll simplify it to begin with. Trusting your body is a feeling. Trust is an emotion. It's a bunch of sensations in your body. This is a perfect question following the last one. So trust is an emotion that you are experiencing in the context of your body. So when you think about your body, you are, right now you're not, but the goal is for you to experience the sensation that will lead you to think, I trust my body.
So we'll go from the last question, if it's a feeling, if it's an emotion, then that means the way that I create trust is through my thoughts. It's through the opinion that I have about my body. So to answer your question, where is it in my body? It's a sensation that you are experiencing when you think certain thoughts about your body.
That's all. That's the simplified answer to your question. Now you're saying to me, can I really trust my body? Otherwise said, can I really create the sensation of trust in my body?
The simplified answer is yes, you can. You can create any sensation in your body. You can decide to experience any emotion you so desire to experience. All you have to do is think along the lines of the emotion you want to create. So if you want to create trust, you're gonna have to think trust-based thoughts about yourself and your body. So can you really create it? Absolutely. But you're gonna have to change the way you think about your body.
What does it mean to trust your body? That's a more complicated answer, but the way that I like to experience it for myself, the way that I think about trusting my body is trusting myself. I am my body. Without getting too spiritual here, I'm gonna talk about this in terms of spirituality, also recognizing that for people who believe in God, replace the spiritual term with God, it means the same thing.
But for me, my body is a physical vehicle. It's an envelope. It's a container that I have that houses, that is the host of my spirit. Or God. Or God in spirit, however your views are. We'll talk about it in term of spirit but my physical shell is the house of my spirit, the thing I can't touch. The thing that makes me, who I am, my personality, my thoughts, my emotion, the untouchable. My physical body is what I can touch. If you can hear it right now, that's my physical body. That's the thing I can see, I can feel. That's how I show up in the world, but it's only the container of who I truly am, which is my spirit.
So what does it mean to trust my body truly is trusting myself, because I am my body. That's what it means to trust yourself. It means that, for example, you trust your body to guide you on when to eat, how much to eat, what to eat. You use the sensation that your body is communicating with you to make decision about food. You use your sensation in your body to decide when you should move your body, how you should move your body, what type of exercise or movement you enjoy, you like, that makes your body feel good. You trust your intuition, your gut feeling about who you should connect with, the people that you get along with, that should be in your life.
You trust your intuition, your gut feeling, your thoughts about the next decision of the next move in your life. That's what it means to trust yourself. Now, as I'm saying that, probably makes sense, and then you're gonna say to me, what I don't have that. I always doubt myself. And to that, I wanna say, it's 100% normal. By the remainder of the question that was given to me that I'm not gonna share here, you are a woman and you are in your fifties. You have been dieting, as you said most of your life, so you have learned to not trust yourself.
Without directly implying it, saying, I don't trust myself, you've learned probably in your twenties to not trust your body for feeding yourself. And then somewhere along the line, you started to overexercise and you started to feel pain or a non desire to go to workout, and you overridden that because the diet gurus and the fitness guru was saying to you, no pain, no gain. You gotta be in pain, right? It's gotta be painful for it to be worth it. So you started to discard all your intuition about movement and you discarded about food. And then everywhere in your life, the structure, the conditioning, the social environment, we're telling you no, you're not good enough to decide. Like you don't know, need validation externally.
So everywhere you were repeated over and over, not to trust yourself. So that's why today you are on this journey of trusting yourself and it feels so foreign. It's normal.
My advice to you in the way that I coach women through regaining self-trust is with first of all, food. We start practicing self-trust in one tiny area of your life. We go through a journey, like a process to trust yourself with food, and then you build self-trust with food, and then you build, you build, you build, and then you go to another area of your life, and then you rebuild your trust. Perhaps it's with movement, perhaps it's with relationship or career, or your body image or your health. Pick one area of your life and focus on that one tiny part of your life and start getting familiar again with self-trust. And then, once you've understood how to create a trustful relationship with your body in which yourself in that one section of your life, then expand the other area of your life. That's what has made me successful in my life. That's what has made my clients successful. Not try to change your whole life at once, and focus on one area.
That's my advice to you. I hope the way that I've explained it to you, it made it more concrete so you can connect with self-trust.
I know many of you listening to this podcast needed that message here. Somehow I have this intuition, and I'm gonna trust it to say, as you listen to me talk about self-trust, I guarantee you that your brain has more questions. Please bring them into us so I can do a part two self-trust, listener Q&A in the upcoming weeks. Simply send an email to us at [email protected]. Tell us you've listened to that podcast episode and you've got more questions. And then I'll build on that, to give you more guidance on self-trust.
Until the next podcast episode. I love you, my sister, and I'll see you next week.
Listener Q&A Vol.3 Resisting trusting myself & Ingrained feelings-Ep 349
This is episode 349 of The Beyond the Food Show and today we’re gonna answer two listener’s questions. The first one is about the difficulty of releasing emotion, and the other one is the difficulty in trusting ourselves. Stay tuned!
Welcome back, my sister. It is the third installment of listener Q&A, and I’m getting some good feedback thus far about this series of podcasts, but I would love to hear from you. If you haven’t listened to the first two, perhaps do that and then shoot me a DM on Instagram or an email at [email protected] and let me know if this is a format of podcasts you’re enjoying and at the same time, if you do have a question, please submit it on the email, and we will add it to the list of question we have upcoming for the other listener Q&A that we have lined up.
Just a quick reminder to everyone about active listening. So active listening is a principle that I teach to anyone who joins me in group coaching program where you are exposed to other people being coached, to direct your mind to benefit from other people receiving coaching around you.
So there’s two intentional thoughts that I want to give you as I am coaching those two questions. Number one, focus your brain to think, “I always hear what I need.” And the second is asking yourself a question, “How can I apply this coaching to my life, my situation, and my current problem?”
With that in mind, we’re gonna start with the very first question, which is this one.
I know I’m in my head. And I know what I’m doing right now towards my feelings and my emotion is not working for me because I cannot let go of some of the emotions I have been experiencing nearly all of my life. Some of my feelings towards me feel like they’re ingrained, and honestly, I had to look up the definition of ingrained as a French person to make sure I understand it. But ingrained literally means built-in. So this listener is having feelings about herself that feels like they’re just embedded in her. She can’t release them. She cannot let them go and she says, I can’t change them no matter how much I try. Please help me.
So if you are in a position where you say, Hey, Stephanie, I can’t release, I can’t change my feelings, you are 100% right. I could stop here, but I’m not.
100% right, you cannot change directly your feelings. And I know some of you’re gonna be like, what? You’ve been talking about this for like 300 episodes. I know, but I never said to you, change your feelings. I said over and over and over. Change your thoughts. And your thoughts create your feeling, and when you change your thoughts, when you change your mindset, your thinking, that results in you having a different emotional experience.
We cannot change directly our feelings. So I’m gonna give you a short lesson in anatomy here, in nervous system anatomy, particularly. So your brain is part of your nervous system, right? The brain is the commanding officer of the entire body, including your nervous system. Your nervous system is a collection of organs and tissues in your body that commands your experience of life. Your brain being part of that, it’s like sit at the top of your body, that’s the starting point of your nervous system. And then attached to your brain is your spine. And attached to your spine is thousands and thousands and thousands of nerve endings that travel all the way to the tips of your finger and the tips of your toe.
The way your emotions are created in your body, it’s via your nervous system. But it just doesn’t start in your body. It actually starts in your brain. Your brain processes the world, the environment you’re in, and it has an opinion, a perspective on what’s happening in your life.
So for example, this person talks about her opinion of herself. Let’s contextualize that into how she views herself. Let’s imagine she sees a reflection in the mirror. As she sees her reflection in the mirror, her brain within millisecond has an opinion about that. Likely along the lines of diet culture, probably you’re too fat, your belly’s too big, you’re too old, all the too much, right? That’s what diet culture does, tells us with too much.
So she has a thought and that thought then travels to the rest of her body via her central nervous system, her spine, and her nerve endings. And then when it lands again within a millisecond in the nerve ending and the rest of the body, it’s like an electric current; it has sensation. And we name these sensations as emotions. But really what emotions are is simply sensations in the body.
Most people about body image, they feel disgusted, they feel shame, and that typically shows up in the midsection of the body and heat and cold and tightness. And when you have these sensations in your body, your brain is like, Ooh, you feel a shame. It labels the sensation as shame. And that’s why you say, I keep experiencing the same thing and I cannot release the shame. You cannot release the shame until you change the way you think about your body. If every time you see your body, you have the thought, you’re too fat, it’s gonna create shame. There’s no stopping that. The only way to stop that would be to cut the central nerve, like cut your spine.
This is not like serious, like for all my science geeky people, like, I’m just making an analogy here. But I’m just saying there’s no way of stopping the mechanism. Once it has started in your brain, it will transfer to the rest of your body and you will experience shame. The way to release your emotion is to change the way you think about the circumstance that causes you the emotion.
So, you can do that on your own, like grab your blank piece of paper and start putting your thoughts about your body, about yourself on a piece of paper. And then decide which thought you wanna move forward and not with. Or you can use a framework like cognitive behavioral coaching, right, which is an adaptation of cognitive behavioral therapy done with a practitioner. It’s arranged so you can do it on your own. It’s a framework, it’s a step-by-step process that allows you to figure out your thought that creates your feelings. And then you go into your brain and then you change the way you think, which will then change your sensation in your body and your emotional experience. That’s how you release your emotion.
And I understand that there’s different messages out into the world about releasing emotion. A couple of days ago, I was trying to explain to a colleague of mine, Mindset Coaching. And I said to her, it’s very unfortunate in today’s world where we are at right now with social media, we have a large number of influencers, of people out into the world who are trying to help the world and they are not instructing people on how their brain and their emotion are really working and they’re saying just manifest another sensation in your body, just manifest love for your body. You should see my face as I’m saying that. Right, and it’s the whole like mindset is manifestation. It is not true. Like you cannot just manifest love for your body out of a green, lush mountain somewhere. That’s not how the human anatomy, the human body functions. That’s not how the nervous system functions. There’s more to it than that. And I’m sorry if you’ve had this kind of narrative given to you and that’s why you’re stuck today. You’re saying I can’t release those emotions even though they’re telling me I should just be able to release them. We can’t. We can’t intervene at the emotional level. We have to intervene at the cognitive level. We have to change our opinion. We have to look into our belief system, and that will change our emotional experience. If you wanna do this, we’re here to help you. We have an entire structure for that.
Second question. I don’t know if I can trust my body. What does it mean to trust your body? Where is trust in my body? Can I really trust my body? These three questions are spinning in my head all the time. I’ve listened to the last 150 episodes of your podcast, and I can’t seem to find the answer to those three questions. What does it mean to trust my body? Where is it in my body, and can I really trust my body? I would love your help with that.
This is a great question. So, we’ll simplify it to begin with. Trusting your body is a feeling. Trust is an emotion. It’s a bunch of sensations in your body. This is a perfect question following the last one. So trust is an emotion that you are experiencing in the context of your body. So when you think about your body, you are, right now you’re not, but the goal is for you to experience the sensation that will lead you to think, I trust my body.
So we’ll go from the last question, if it’s a feeling, if it’s an emotion, then that means the way that I create trust is through my thoughts. It’s through the opinion that I have about my body. So to answer your question, where is it in my body? It’s a sensation that you are experiencing when you think certain thoughts about your body.
That’s all. That’s the simplified answer to your question. Now you’re saying to me, can I really trust my body? Otherwise said, can I really create the sensation of trust in my body?
The simplified answer is yes, you can. You can create any sensation in your body. You can decide to experience any emotion you so desire to experience. All you have to do is think along the lines of the emotion you want to create. So if you want to create trust, you’re gonna have to think trust-based thoughts about yourself and your body. So can you really create it? Absolutely. But you’re gonna have to change the way you think about your body.
What does it mean to trust your body? That’s a more complicated answer, but the way that I like to experience it for myself, the way that I think about trusting my body is trusting myself. I am my body. Without getting too spiritual here, I’m gonna talk about this in terms of spirituality, also recognizing that for people who believe in God, replace the spiritual term with God, it means the same thing.
But for me, my body is a physical vehicle. It’s an envelope. It’s a container that I have that houses, that is the host of my spirit. Or God. Or God in spirit, however your views are. We’ll talk about it in term of spirit but my physical shell is the house of my spirit, the thing I can’t touch. The thing that makes me, who I am, my personality, my thoughts, my emotion, the untouchable. My physical body is what I can touch. If you can hear it right now, that’s my physical body. That’s the thing I can see, I can feel. That’s how I show up in the world, but it’s only the container of who I truly am, which is my spirit.
So what does it mean to trust my body truly is trusting myself, because I am my body. That’s what it means to trust yourself. It means that, for example, you trust your body to guide you on when to eat, how much to eat, what to eat. You use the sensation that your body is communicating with you to make decision about food. You use your sensation in your body to decide when you should move your body, how you should move your body, what type of exercise or movement you enjoy, you like, that makes your body feel good. You trust your intuition, your gut feeling about who you should connect with, the people that you get along with, that should be in your life.
You trust your intuition, your gut feeling, your thoughts about the next decision of the next move in your life. That’s what it means to trust yourself. Now, as I’m saying that, probably makes sense, and then you’re gonna say to me, what I don’t have that. I always doubt myself. And to that, I wanna say, it’s 100% normal. By the remainder of the question that was given to me that I’m not gonna share here, you are a woman and you are in your fifties. You have been dieting, as you said most of your life, so you have learned to not trust yourself.
Without directly implying it, saying, I don’t trust myself, you’ve learned probably in your twenties to not trust your body for feeding yourself. And then somewhere along the line, you started to overexercise and you started to feel pain or a non desire to go to workout, and you overridden that because the diet gurus and the fitness guru was saying to you, no pain, no gain. You gotta be in pain, right? It’s gotta be painful for it to be worth it. So you started to discard all your intuition about movement and you discarded about food. And then everywhere in your life, the structure, the conditioning, the social environment, we’re telling you no, you’re not good enough to decide. Like you don’t know, need validation externally.
So everywhere you were repeated over and over, not to trust yourself. So that’s why today you are on this journey of trusting yourself and it feels so foreign. It’s normal.
My advice to you in the way that I coach women through regaining self-trust is with first of all, food. We start practicing self-trust in one tiny area of your life. We go through a journey, like a process to trust yourself with food, and then you build self-trust with food, and then you build, you build, you build, and then you go to another area of your life, and then you rebuild your trust. Perhaps it’s with movement, perhaps it’s with relationship or career, or your body image or your health. Pick one area of your life and focus on that one tiny part of your life and start getting familiar again with self-trust. And then, once you’ve understood how to create a trustful relationship with your body in which yourself in that one section of your life, then expand the other area of your life. That’s what has made me successful in my life. That’s what has made my clients successful. Not try to change your whole life at once, and focus on one area.
That’s my advice to you. I hope the way that I’ve explained it to you, it made it more concrete so you can connect with self-trust.
I know many of you listening to this podcast needed that message here. Somehow I have this intuition, and I’m gonna trust it to say, as you listen to me talk about self-trust, I guarantee you that your brain has more questions. Please bring them into us so I can do a part two self-trust, listener Q&A in the upcoming weeks. Simply send an email to us at [email protected]. Tell us you’ve listened to that podcast episode and you’ve got more questions. And then I’ll build on that, to give you more guidance on self-trust.
Until the next podcast episode. I love you, my sister, and I’ll see you next week.
