SUMMARY KEYWORDS

people, highly sensitive person, alcohol, empaths, drink, feel, life, emotions, struggle, coping, coping strategy, grown, highly sensitive, sensitive, trauma, learn, emotional, nervous system, bully, world, boundaries

SPEAKERS: Casey McGuire Davidson + Nikki Eisenhauer

00:02

Welcome to the Hello Someday Podcast, the podcast for busy women who are ready to drink less and live more. I’m Casey McGuire Davidson, ex-red wine girl turned life coach helping women create lives they love without alcohol. But it wasn’t that long ago that I was anxious, overwhelmed, and drinking a bottle of wine and night to unwind. I thought that wine was the glue, holding my life together, helping me cope with my kids, my stressful job and my busy life. I didn’t realize that my love affair with drinking was making me more anxious and less able to manage my responsibilities.

In this podcast, my goal is to teach you the tried and true secrets of creating and living a life you don’t want to escape from.

Each week, I’ll bring you tools, lessons and conversations to help you drink less and live more. I’ll teach you how to navigate our drinking obsessed culture without a buzz, how to sit with your emotions when you’re lonely or angry, frustrated or overwhelmed, how to self soothe without a drink, and how to turn the decision to stop drinking from your worst case scenario to the best decision of your life.

I am so glad you’re here. Now let’s get started.

 

Hi there. Today, we are talking about highly sensitive people empaths and alcohol. And my guest is Nikki Eisenhauer. She’s an International Life Coach and a Psychotherapist, a Licensed Professional Counselor, a Yoga and Meditation Teacher and the host of the wildly popular podcast, Emotional Badass.

 

Nikki is on a mission to help others heal from the wounds of their pain. So, they no longer have to live in the shadows of their past. She is committed to teaching others that Being emotional is a sign of strength, not weakness. And through her work, Nikki helps highly sensitive people, survivors and paths healers, see that is not only acceptable to feel, but that’s how we will change the world. So, Nikki, thank you so much for being here.

 

02:17

Oh, thank you for having me. And I’m excited that we share network.

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  02:20

I know I am too. We actually if people are listening to this, I know a lot of you are listened to Jill Titas podcast. So, we’re powered. And that is how Nikki and I met.

 

02:33

I am very grateful to be here. I’m so grateful to be part of the network. And it’s always so humbling to hear that kind of introduction. I’m like, Yeah, I have done all that stuff.

 

02:42

Oh, my gosh, you have done all that stuff. And I mentioned, before we jumped on that, I’ve been listening to your podcast, and also listening to interviews with you on other podcasts because I like to get really prepared. And I was so excited to talk to you about this because I know that so many women tend to drink to sort of turn down the noise on their emotions in this sort of stimulus around them and also feel things really deeply. And I think, that by understanding more about what it means to be a highly sensitive person, what it means to be an empath the challenges and the benefits of having that in their lives. It’ll help them navigate the world without feeling that they need to turn to alcohol.

 

03:32

Oh, yeah, absolutely. And I am. I am definitely a highly sensitive person. And I didn’t know that for a very long time. I’m an empath. And the difference really is just that a highly sensitive person can have a more highly tuned or fine-tuned nervous system. And then an empath is sort of like highly sensitive person. Next level, it’s we also sense what other people are feeling so that that can be more sensory, like our sensory system of how different fabrics feel, we might have auditory sensitivity about sound, some of us might be really, really sensitive to smell, sort of our sensory system. I’m an emotional Empath, where I can feel what other people are feeling. There’s different schools of thought on how that happens to us why that happens. And I think it’s a combination of both schools of thought, I think I was born this way. In large part I just like we have differences in hair color and hair texture and the size of our bones. I mean, just all these different differences that we have naturally, I think very naturally, we’re gonna have differences in some of us being born more deeply, feeling more highly tuned in that sensory system and our nervous system. So, when I started my work as a therapist, I had no idea that that’s what I was, I just felt weird most of my life and OD and had grown up hearing a lot of the things that I’m sure a lot of your listeners have grown up hearing over the years. It’s like, Oh, you’re too sensitive. Why are you crying again? Why are you reading so deeply into that thing? Oh, you’re so weird. And I just really thought I was weird. And it was anxiety. And it was just things that I had to figure out.

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  05:20

Yeah, you get such negative reinforcement for having deep emotions, and not going with the flow and not being easy to be around. And so, you’re taught to like, push it down, but then that suppression is deeply uncomfortable, right?

 

05:38

Totally uncomfortable. And, and sort of the kicker, for those of us that are born with high sensitivity, if you buy into that camp is that trauma increases our sensitivity. And so, I grew up in a very, very dysfunctional home. My mother, I believe, is a sociopath. And every sociopath is a narcissist. My biological father wound up abandoning me fully by age 10, but kind of started abandoning me at about six. And so, I had years of deep, deep attachment wound, and struggle, and then my mother married a pedophile. And that’s part of my story, I grew up and I put him in prison. And so, I also almost died when I was born. And so, when we look at that through the lens of sensitivity, and nervous system, it means my little nervous system was just in a heightened response constantly. And the thing about our nervous systems is that that’s what they’re supposed to do. So, when we have danger, or when we have too much stress, or struggle, or even just chaos as children, we don’t get enough nervous system regulation, we don’t get enough peace, and enough calm. And oftentimes, when people hear my story, they go, oh, you know, I wasn’t molested, or nobody beat me with bricks, I shouldn’t be like this, I shouldn’t have this much sensitivity, I shouldn’t have this much anxiety, I don’t have those big giant traumas that are so easy to point out. The more that I’ve gotten older and healed, I have so much more compassion for that, because in some ways, and this is gonna sound backwards. In some ways, I’m actually grateful that I had some glaring traumas, because as I entered therapy myself, it was like, oh, yeah, I definitely have to work on that. And that you don’t need a psychology degree to know that, you know, that has some baggage with it.

 

But what I’ve learned through my career is that it’s a weird, twisted kind of blessing at a point, because it’s those of you who maybe had safer parenting, but parenting that was maybe really immature, that makes a lot of us over function. And “parental fide” makes us little mini adults, that makes us miss our childhood. That’s a really hard thing to put your finger on. If you were neglected, if your parents were just too busy. If you had a sick sibling, you know, that was very, very sick. Your parents, their energies were taken away from you in ways that we can have compassion for and understand.

 

But that’s really difficult to understand well then.

 

What happened to me? Nothing bad happened to me. Why am I so sensitive? And especially, I think, with women in the present day, I’m in my 40s, we’ve all grown up with these, you know, great empowerment messages that we can do whatever we want, right? And we can, but so many women especially seem to be taking on trying to do absolutely everything. And I think that’s such an interesting warping of that message. Oh, you can do whatever you want has somehow turned into Well, you better do it all. So, I think our our overwhelm, our stress, our struggle – all these things are kind of coming at us from our childhoods, from the present day, from all the things that we take on as, as women who have big goals. I’m very ambitious. That’s not an easy thing to be ambitious, and then also manage our stress while we’re highly sensitive.

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  08:54

Yes. Yeah. I mean, it is a lot to take on. And I think a lot of women are just incredibly hard on themselves. I mean, I know that I used to go into work, and obviously I was drinking a lot at the same time, which makes your nervous system more stressed and makes your sleep terrible and hard too hard to honestly remember everything at the same time. But I used to look around me and be like, how can other people cope with this? What is wrong with me? You know, how can other people like, clearly get criticism because I was so sensitive to everyone else’s mood and everyone else’s words in the messages, you know, underneath those words, and not basically completely break down. You know what I mean? Like I was trying so hard to like, make everything okay.

 

09:50

I think if we come from struggle, that’s what we figure out how to do like, that’s the compensation.

 

Yeah. Which makes sense. Like, it’s like, ah, if things were hard when we were young, we learned to over focus on everybody else outwardly, it’s like, Oh, I’m gonna figure it out from my little kid logic, I’ll make everybody else “A okay” and then, they love me and I’m safe. If I make everybody feel great around me, nobody’s going to abandon me. Nobody’s going to lash out at me. Haha, I’ll manage everybody in the world. That’s how I’ll get through life. And then, it blows up. I think, I think one of the biggest tragedies and I’m hoping it’s changing for younger people now, but for my age, I graduated high school in 1998. And I’m from New Orleans, which is like the vice drinking capital of the entire planet. And when you grow up there, you kind of know that but you don’t know that. Because whatever you grow up in is your “normal”. So, I grew up going to bars at 16. And it wasn’t until I left the state that I realized, Oh, that’s not everybody’s story. Other places actually uphold those laws and don’t let you in and actually card. And I think it’s such a tragedy that for so many of us, alcohol is one of the first things that we use as a coping skill and a coping strategy of trying to numb out our rawness or numb out our struggle. Because historically, I don’t think we do very well in the human condition with passing down real coping strategies, person to person generation, a generation, which is kind of wild and crazy for me to say out loud, because we would think logically that, that would be the main thing, we would be passing down generation to generation.

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  11:33

Yeah, I mean, I, I completely agree. And people are sort of, you know, even if you have positive parenting, sort of thrust out in the world to kind of cope from for themselves. And that manifests in in very, very different ways. I was smiling when you were saying about, you know, you grow up and you figure out like, this is how I’m going to be safe. And this is how people are going to love me because my parents grew up moving to different continents, actually, and countries every couple years. So I was in Paraguay, in South America, when I was 6 and 7 years old. And Zambia, and in Southern Africa, when I was 8 and 10. And both my parents worked a lot. They were diplomats in American embassies overseas, and their job was very, you know, “important”. It was very important, but it was clearly more important than parenting small children, you know. And so, we had a lot of like housekeepers, you know, who basically took care of us. And so, on Saturdays, when I was seven years old, in Paraguay, we, my parents would go play tennis, and I would wait till the minute they left, pretending I was like lounging, jump up, and clean the entire house for two hours, and then hide. So, they would like to come home and be like, Who cleaned this? You know what I mean? And I only say, I mean, that’s ridiculous. I have an 8 year old daughter, and she would never consider doing that. Like, I know how crazy that is. But not only that, like, we literally had a live-in housekeeper because we lived in South America. And that was a thing. So, like, beyond ridiculous.

 

13:17

I think that’s where the people pleasing really grows in us. And yeah, I love that you share that. Because I think so many people who have maybe an abundant background, really struggle, it’s because the narrative of the day is oh my goodness, like poverty, like but you know, that’s kind of what gets the compassion or the understanding. But when you grow, I grew up very poor. And when you and when you grow up poor, you understand that that’s your struggle. And I think for people that have more, it’s a lot harder to figure out. Where’s that struggle? It’s like, really, I had struggle, we had live in help. Right? That’s what you just said. But when you really pull back from it and go,

 

Oh, wow, like little you must have been trying so hard. Like, just to figure out. Like, where she fit and what she could do and how to make her parents happy and trying to get some of that attention. And those people pleasing parts. I, of course, we can’t have statistics on this, right. But I am willing to bet that almost every highly sensitive person struggles in some way with people pleasing and codependency and one of the ways we define codependency is self-love deficiency. And I think that, that term, that way of describing it really sets in it’s really shows us what we’re doing when we’re trying so hard to please people or to get approval because in those moments, we abandon ourselves.

 

I think alcohol becomes the balm for so much of that, especially because almost all of us start drinking so very young or start drinking in that in those first stages of, Oh, I’m getting into adulthood. And so, we wind up pairing this adult freedom and this sort of acts citement slashing anxiety of getting into our adult responsibilities with drinking.

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  15:05

Yeah. And you’re right about the coping mechanisms. And I love that you said that because I know about sort of everybody, you know, struggling with some of this, because a lot of people are like gun “first world problems” or I went to my therapist and was like, I have anxiety. And I have no idea why, like, nothing happened to me, what is wrong with me? That, you know, I’m, I’m not okay.

 

And, you know, she, she took me back to imagining, you know, my daughter at age three, and some of the stuff of just being absent and not important. And you know what I mean? It’s interesting, because you feel like, you should be okay. And that goes to the narrative of like, why can I cope?

 

15:56

Yeah, well, that alcohol gets us in such a vicious cycle, too, because it makes us more raw, especially if we’re sensitive. I didn’t know that when I was younger. And I think this is an important part that I don’t want to miss. And I don’t think we said it earlier. But I do have a and an LCDC. I used to have an LIC it’s a licensed addictions counselor, or a licensed Chemical Dependency Counselor. And I started my career in addiction. Oh, interesting. But the truth of my story is that I don’t like making alcohol bad. I don’t like making drugs bad either. Because the truth of it is that I was so raw and had so little coping that I don’t know if I’d be here today, if I hadn’t numbed out at times with drugs and alcohol. And I don’t consider myself a fully sober person right now, I, I might have one to like three drinks a year. So, I’ve never had to do like a full on sobriety or so when I was getting through school, I was a bartender in the French Quarter, there is no crazier drinking scene than that I drank while I worked, I would check in, get on my bar ice up and open up three drinks for myself, because I started when in New Orleans, you have three for one happy hour. That’s how we started shifts. So that’s basically if you’re trying to become alcoholic, like exactly what you would do, right? It’s like when you really step back and look at that. It’s like, oh, geez, where’s this gonna go?

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  17:25

It’s a crash course in how to develop a significant alcohol problem.

 

Yes, yes. I was so raw at the time. And when I look back, it’s so sad, because I really had no other coping. But that did get me through. When I was finishing college, Hurricane Katrina hit. And so, my counseling program was just blown up blown out, there weren’t professors, there weren’t classes, it was another trauma, another tragic struggle. But it was divine for me, because when I went back to New Orleans, that same year to finish my graduate program, I needed an internship. And because there weren’t any more internships because there just weren’t any people. I had to take what I could get, and I had a friend working in addiction. And I remember going, I don’t want to work in addiction. I had been working in bars, like I want to get away from drinkers, I really do. I need to get away from drinkers for me. I was still a heavy drinker at the time, getting into that program. To finish my master’s degree. That place hired me. So, I wound up working there for some years as a Counselor from the trauma of Katrina plus New Orleans being one of the hot beds because of Katrina, for the opioid crisis. Once Katrina hit, they were passing out opiates to everyone. I mean, like it was candy.

 

There’s a documentary on Netflix called The Pharmacist, and I was treating people that were getting pills from that pill mill. But what I started, where I started my career, was in Intensive Outpatient Treatment. And then I moved into the trauma program for dual diagnosis of trauma and addiction. And what I started really realizing, despite the teaching of, you only can do 100% sobriety. And I think that’s a big problem in the field of mental health, that there is still a lot of that mindset that you need to be 100% sober and some people do. But a lot of people don’t, or a lot of people are not going to go from full on inebriation to full on sobriety. They at least have to test out before they psychologically wrap their head around fully giving it up if they need to. But what I saw was that when we started giving coping strategies, and treating the trauma, some people just didn’t have that addictive tendency. It just became sort of a reasonable piece. When you sort of distribute your coping to healthier things. You don’t go for that main and coping strategy anymore. So, I’m a big believer in just, instead of trying to drink less initially, let’s add to your coping. Let’s just add to your coping, let’s get some coping in there. Let’s get some muscles around some other ways of being.

Casey McGuire Davidson 

Hi there. If you’re listening to this episode, and have been trying to take a break from drinking, but keep starting and stopping and starting again, I want to invite you to take a look at my on demand coaching course, The Sobriety Starter Kit®.

 

The Sobriety Starter Kit® is an online self study sober coaching course that will help you quit drinking and build a life you love without alcohol without white knuckling it or hating the process. The course includes the exact step by step coaching framework I work through with my private coaching clients, but at a much more affordable price than one on one coaching. And the sobriety starter kit is ready, waiting and available to support you anytime you need it. And when it fits into your schedule. You don’t need to work your life around group meetings or classes at a specific day or time.

This course is not a 30 day challenge, or a one day at a time approach. Instead, it’s a step by step formula for changing your relationship with alcohol. The course will help you turn the decision to stop drinking, from your worst case scenario to the best decision of your life.

You will sleep better and have more energy, you’ll look better and feel better. You’ll have more patience and less anxiety. And with my approach, you won’t feel deprived or isolated in the process. So if you’re interested in learning more about all the details, please go to www.sobrietystarterkit.com. You can start at any time and I would love to see you in the course 

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  20:16

Yeah. Yeah, because I think that, like you said, a lot of reasons that people drink is because it’s the easy button of coping mechanisms of numbing out of tuning down the noise. So, I’ve read that as many as 15 to 20% of the population are thought to be highly sensitive. Do you think that’s accurate? Or is that just a number that’s out there?

 

20:44

I do think that’s accurate. And I think it comes into focus when I actually flip the numbers. So, if you’re highly sensitive out there, that this is what makes it make sense to me. And something about this soothes me, it means that, if it’s 15 to 20% of us are highly sensitive, and even less of us, I’d say probably like 7% would be my guess, would be empathic, then that means that for all of the days of my life, all of my development, or whenever I was getting advice, whenever I was in a group of people, it means 80 to 85% of them are different than me. It means all that advice that I got or direction that I got, or hey, you should do this, you shouldn’t do this that we get when we’re growing up, was really from people that were totally not wired like me. Not emotionally, not physically, not mentally, they were just, they don’t move through the world, like me. And I do believe that that’s a big part of why I felt crazy at times in my younger life, because that 85% really seals it for me. It’s like, oh, yeah, and lots of group activities or events or classrooms, you know, the things we do in life. That just Sue’s me, it makes sense. It’s like, yeah, that’s how it’s felt that I am that different. I am, I am the weirdo that I have made peace with. So, I say that with a lot of love, that I’m weird. And I embrace that fully. I like my weird. But when we don’t know that we’re weird, or we’re allowed to be weird, or there are other people successful with our particular flavor of weird in life success. We do think something is wrong with us. And if I think my magical superpower, I would like at this stage of my life would be to be able to pull accurate statistics out of the air. Like, you know, like, I would like to know. Like, how much time have I spent in my life wondering what’s wrong with me?

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  22:43

Yeah. Well, so question for you. If someone’s listening to this, and they’re like, am I a highly sensitive person? Can you tell us sort of what they might be feeling what they might be experiencing? How do they, you know, know if they’re on that spectrum? Or might be just like, what’s wrong with me?

 

23:03

Okay, so high sensitivity, we can look at it through our sensory system. So, we’ve got sight, sound, smell, touch, okay, like I’m pretty sensitive to the wind hitting my skin. Okay, temperature, I want to be comfortable. I do not like being cold. Even though I live in a cold climate, I like getting snuggly. So, there’s the sensory aspect. And some of that may even sound like Oh, am I on sort of the Asperger’s or the autism spectrum like we used to have. And we might be there are some people that can make the argument that we might be very, very, very, extremely high functioning, autistic. So, there’s that lens to and I believe less at this point in my career in diagnosis than lenses we look through, because we change, we evolve, we let go of what no longer serves us. So, there’s the sensory sensitivity, then there’s emotional sensitivity, I can sense emotion, I have a lot of emotion inside of me. If I’m out in public and a baby smiles at me, that can make me tear up just the beauty of it. So, we have really high highs and lower lows because of our emotional intensity. If we think we are an emotionally, highly sensitive person, that’s really important to consider. Because hearing me say that you may hear it easy to maybe think that we’re bipolar, or to get some bipolar diagnosis because oh doesn’t that sound very bipolar? My highs are high, my lows are low. So, you might not be able to see me right now because we’re on just audio. But if there’s a range, okay, sort of sort of a range and I have my hands kind of in a little rangy position here. It’s like the normal average person and yeah, okay. None of us are normal and average. But yeah, you know, the normal and average person that’s not a highly sensitive person. It’s like their highs are going to go to a certain height and their lows are going to go to a certain low and ours are just we just have a wider range. So, we have to learn how to work with that.

 

That’s why working with things like our self-talk. If we’re using self-talk that scares us more, we’re gonna push ourselves into more intense fear. So, we’ve got to learn how to take responsibility for our sensitivity. So, we have a broader emotional range, as a tribe has been working specifically with highly sensitive people. For a long time, I can tell you, there’s some surprising things that we tend to have in common. We tend to have high achievement. And as in us as an individual and as a tribe. Because if we see and sense what’s going on in the world, it’s another way that we’re sensitive where the observers and we can see how we learned to be the observers. I think you shared a story today that shows that observer like you were little you were seven, you were watching your parents waiting for them to go. And even though you knew you had a mage were watching and to be able to clean up the house fully top to bottom at seven, you’re observing a whole lot of stuff and you’re paying attention to so many details. So, we are very observational. I could make the argument that almost every highly sensitive person I’ve known will admit with a little bit of Glee.

 

Yeah, I love people watching. Oh, yeah, like it right. Like, that is something. That is some good shit. So of course, we are. We’re more finely tuned in our nervous system to be observant. Not just observant of nature, but observant of each other. Some of that is surely trauma induced, okay, my mother was a rager. If you if you come from a household where someone was raging, damn sure for your own survival, you’re gonna develop finally attuning to how they walk through that door. Okay, so that’s another sign of high sensitivity. Let’s see. Another one is that we tend to be spongy. Alright, that might be the best word I have for it. So, we soak up what other people are feeling. And when we’re really wounded, I talk a lot about things coming from our wound or coming from our healing. When we’re coming from our wound sensitivity can feel really burdensome. Most people start this work with me going, alright, how do I turn it off? How do I end it’s like helped me minimize this shit. Because like I’ve had quite enough of feeling. And that’s understandable. That’s her anger at it. And sometimes it’s our grief at it. Because we look out at other people and we go, hey, you know, Joe Blow over there? Seems like he’s having a much easier time. Because he’s walking through life, not overthinking. We tend to be over thinkers for all these reasons that I’m naming. Joe Blow over there is just thinking about 10 thoughts to my 10,000. That looks easier. So, because we’re sensing more, we’re taking in more, we’re sponging up more from other people. We’re also overthinking, we tend to not know the difference between processing and over processing, we wear ourselves out, one of our universal tribal complaints will be we’re so tired, we’re so worn out. We try too hard. Perfectionism.

 

Ooh runs high in this tribe. Okay, so fine line between high integrity and perfectionism. And that’s one of those lines, I try to walk and help my clients walk. So that’s another thing we have in common. We get overwhelmed very easily. Our nervous system is finely attuned. So, if I have Joe Blow hanging out with me, Joe Blows nervous system. Yeah, he’s picking up a few things like, yeah, maybe the sky is turning and it’s gonna rain. I am sensing so much even on a subconscious level. So, we get more tired more easily. And instead of being angry at ourselves about that, instead of listening to the 80 to 85% of people who are like, Why are you tired? I don’t get it. I’m not tired. We have to do a lot of what I call radical acceptance of who we are. And we grieve, we really do grieve a lot. If I look at what you shared, when we’re gratified that way, when we’re like little mini adults, and we’re taking things on like that. We miss out on childhood, the essence of childhood is that it’s carefree is that we’re safe enough to be able to be carefree that we our emotional needs are met, so that we don’t have to worry about them or fret. When those aren’t met. We wind up over functioning. So, we’re overtired. So, you can hear as I’m going through this, all these little bitty things kind of connect. If we’re spongy, and we sponge up things in the world. My goodness, American politics in the last few years. Don’t need to sponge any of that shit up, but damn near impossible not to right. So, we need coping strategies. And if we don’t have them, we’re going to pour alcohol over them.

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  29:42

What do you feel like is I know you work with people on this all the time. And when you were describing different people, I was like, I feel like everybody needs therapy to process like how to negotiate the world. But what are the first coping mechanism? skills you think highly sensitive people need to work through or empaths.

 

30:06

And I’ll use it right now. See, years ago, I would have beat myself up for having a brain fart and losing it. And it’s Friday. We’ve had a busy week, you know, my brain might lose it. Sometimes I don’t always track before I worked on my critical voice that would have eaten me alive. I would have spent hours after this interview going, what’s wrong with you?

 

Yeah. All right. Like, why did you do that you put your foot in your mouth. Oh, Lola, she’s gonna have to edit that now. I gave her more work to do, you know, just berating ourselves. And in the absence of getting what we needed in childhood, whether that’s because of neglect, or abuse, or just really busy parenting, whatever it is, it seems like our human psyche fills in with negativity and critical illness. So unfortunate. So many of us have these absolute inner bullies in our heads. And the thing about the inner bully is that it’s not super obvious, like my inner bully doesn’t walk up and go, Hey, shithead, that would be kind of obvious. I could go hey, the I know, that’s nasty. I’m gonna not therapy to know I’m not gonna do that with myself. If we’re really smart, okay, so is an inner bully, so is that inner critic? And so, our inner critic, and our inner bully is like, Hey, what are you going to do? Really, you’re going to go to bed early? Really? Or the inner Gremlins from addiction go, Really, don’t you think you deserve a drink today. So, we have to really learn how to identify these voices.

 

I utilize what I call wise woman and wise men. We want to cultivate this wise woman and wise man, part of ourselves. I want to make sure all the time that my wise woman is driving the bus of my life, if you will. And if I’m really paying attention to myself mindfully So mindfulness is the own coping strategy, then I can be in-charge of tapping in that wise woman understanding that I have an inner adolescent, I have an inner child and me, as we all do, I have this inner critic, if we don’t understand our complexity, and start to really invite ourselves to understand our complexity, then we think things like, why should think one thing about this? No way, my wise woman like, even if I think about food, my wise woman goes, Yeah, let’s eat really healthy. My inner child goes fried chicken, macaroni and cheese, please, I have to negotiate that inside of me. And if we’re observing more than the average person, and that’s leading us to think a whole lot more than the average person, then we have to really manage these inner parts. And no, I’m not talking about multiple personalities, I’m not talking about dissociative identity disorder, that’s, that’s a different realm. This is just if you’re a smart, and emotionally emotional intelligence counts to not just IQ, but a well-rounded kind of intelligence, then we have to understand these different parts and understand what’s at play, when. And that’s a big part of taking care of ourselves.

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  33:01

I mean, I think it’s interesting in a couple of different ways, because in some ways, we feel like that inner critic voice is protecting us, right? It’s, oh, my God, if I let go of this voice, that is pushing me to do more, be more not slack off, I’m going to be safer in this world. And then at the same time, you’re filled with anxiety and talking shit to yourself and doing all these things. And it’s such a push pull. One of the things my therapist helped me with and told me to do is I started working with her right when I quit drinking, my daughter was too. And she like, is a mini me, like looks exactly like me. But thank God is way more of a badass and less sensitive and less of a people pleaser and all that. But she, you know, when I was feeling that way, she’s like, imagine your daughter, would you say that to her? If she felt this way? Would you tell her to suck it up and what the fuck is wrong with you and get it together? Or whatever it is. And that helped me. You know that idea of like re parenting yourself or being kinder to yourself.

 

34:19

I think that’s one of the most powerful techniques anybody can share with anybody else. And really, the most powerful techniques to me are very simple. Because when we start to get in the struggle, if it’s complex, we’re not going to do it. We’re not even going to be able to find it or grab it. So, we need simplicity, that might be part of the coping. But what she asked you to do, I said it, I had sessions before I had this interview with you. I’ve said it three times today to three different people. And I’ll say this strongly to people, if you will not say it to a five year old, don’t you dare say it to yourself. And that’s the truth about almost every highly sensitive person I’ve ever known.

 

I could pick some random child doesn’t even have to be your own. and go really say what you just said to yourself to this child? No, no, not only wouldn’t you, you couldn’t. And when, and that’s self-love you guys, when you actually basically look at yourself and go, oh, oh, this is how I need to love myself. So, if you’re not going to say it to a five year old, you cannot say it to yourself and really a lot of our healing is the re-parenting part is healthy discipline. And in healthy discipline, we discipline that part we go, No, that’s not okay. The same way, if we saw two small children, and one was bullying, the other, most healthy adults would step in and be like, hey, that is not okay. Or we would empower one child to be able to say that to the other child, we have to do that inside of our own psychology. And this, this is why we work with good fit therapist, y’all. And why it’s different than just kind of talking to a friend. The training that we have as an understanding, a lot of our psychology is so paradoxical. It’s so backwards. That part of ourselves like you need that the inner bully and the inner critic is really trying to protect us. Yes, all of our stuff is attempting to protect us. But a lot of it is backwards, and it bites us in the ass. Because the very thing that winds up hurting us after I left my childhood and became an adult. My parental abuse didn’t come with me because I left. But their programming in my head came with me. And so that critical voice, hey, don’t you think you should work a little bit more? Very easy to be a workaholic?

 

It’s the other thing about our tribe. Okay, we might struggle with workaholism. We also might get fired more. Yeah, I should have said that earlier. And fired more might get fired more and laid off because we are the squeaky wheels. When we come into a situation because we are the seers, we are the observers, we see how everything can be better. And so, if things don’t run smoothly, and someone values this and wants us to do this, or we want to smooth that out, we want things to Ron all oiled up. When people don’t want that from us, we tend to have a very hard time. And they don’t say thank you for it. They’re like, hey, just No, no, thank you, we’d like you to just stop trying to make it better, and just do what we want. Despite how crazy it might work. It’s part of why corporate America can be really hard for highly sensitive people, because there’s so much red tape, there’s so much struggle.

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  37:30

Well, I was gonna say it was interesting, because when I was in corporate America, it was great when I was, you know, an individual contributor, I was very detail oriented, I was very sort of hyper vigilant, I was very productive, you know, all those things. And as I sort of moved up the ranks, you know, team building all that stuff that works for a while, once I was a director, my VP gave me the direct feedback that I needed to be less caring for the people on my team and less caring for the people who worked with me and less empathetic basically more of a hardest, and that she thought I was being you know, giving people too many chances. And I was very, you know, when stuff came down that I thought would hurt people, you know, emotionally or their workload, or this person has this person in their family who’s sick, or this person is these kids are, you know, I would really struggle emotionally with it. And, like you said, Be the squeaky wheel be like that this isn’t okay, you know, we can’t do this. And, yeah, it was hard, you know?

 

38:41

Yeah, I think it’s really, really hard. And that’s part of why I teach boundaries, I teach a boundaries course, once every year I just finished it. And boundaries are just going to be an art that we’re always working on as sensitive people because with our big giant hearts, we really are the natural caretakers where the natural, the natural born sort of therapeutic years, like people want to come with us, they want to come and share with us finding those boundaries for ourselves, our own hearts, our own spirits, and then how that meshes up against something like what your boss wants. And that directive, that caring, less there, there is some wisdom in that. Because when we walk the world kind of you know, turned up to level 10 caring, we probably do benefit I would say we do about learning how to dial that down so that I can have control over turning that on and up or down and less. So, we learn all of that and that’s why I think it’s such a layered kind of thing. And that’s part of why I wanted to do my podcast was, it’s like I learned the most from people that would be real and honest with me and respected my sensitivity. But most sensitive people walk the world wanting other people to give them the acceptance for their sensitivity they want to hear from other people, you’re okay, this is all right, it’s not so weird that you’re sensitive. I don’t, I don’t mind when you cry, and then they want to accept themselves, that it will never work that way. So, we have to really work to accept ourselves, love ourselves through who we are, and then sort of lean into the world. So that we’re leading with an energy where we’re like, Hey, I accept me. There’s so much power in that. And it’s always going to be a struggle to find those boundaries.

 

When you’re in a position when someone’s asking you to be a hard ass. There’s also something with sensitive people, I’ve had to work on this hard and it has shot me in the foot a lot. I think as a tribe, we are very motivated by generosity. I think if someone is generous with us, it motivates us we work or hard, like we work hard, like we show up, we’ll give extra. And one of the things that I’ve learned about highly sensitive people is we can project some of our own ways of being onto other people in ways that don’t help us at all. When I’ve projected that that generosity, motivation, it’s actually blown up in my face, because other people are not so motivated, when we’re very generous with the average person, they take advantage, that doesn’t motivate them to work harder, or to have more skin in the game that actually motivates them. And then I’ve had my feelings hurt. How do I do this? Because generosity motivates me. We also do that with understanding, we tend to really value understanding, I say this to a lot of sensitive people. If I explain the purpose of something to a highly sensitive person, they’re like, likely to walk to the ends of the earth to make it happen. So, we love understandings, we paint the picture, it makes sense to us. We got it, we’re on it.

 

Okay. What a lot of us do is we try with narcissistic dynamics, with low intelligence dynamics with low maturity dynamics. We try to make other people get it, other people who don’t want to get it. And that’s another way we wear ourselves out. We are over explainers that way. And so, that’s another way we can start to boundary our own energy and start to say to our own inner psyche, our own inner child, hey, they didn’t ask for that understanding, they don’t seem like they want that from me, let’s just hold it for us. It’s enough that I understand it. I coach and counsel people to work on becoming their own authority figure. Because when you start to become your own authority figure as a coping strategy, you are less desperately driven to get that approval elsewhere. And that desperation, that setup of I need your approval, oh, what if I don’t get it, then we’re gonna go to some of those other unhealthy coping strategies until we reach for the wine.

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  42:53

I love that you said that, because everything you talked about, apply so much to the skills that women need to develop when they stopped drinking, like the boundaries, figuring out how to take time for themselves, how to not get overwhelmed how to not, you know how to lower the bar so that they’re not strong, so thin, that they have nothing left is huge. And when you talked about becoming your own authority, and not desperately trying to get acceptance or permission, or whatever it is from other people, you know, if you don’t do that, it is really easy to succumb to people pleasing, or what’s easier for everyone else. And a lot of times the social pressure we get is to drink, you know, and we so desperately don’t want to be others that we’re willing to sort of easily get into, like, what makes everybody more comfortable. If I drank or, you know, they want me to because I’m more fun, or when I drink, I have fewer boundaries, you know, shuts off my mind. And so, I don’t have to process these emotions with, which therefore makes people more comfortable with me.

 

44:04

That’s a big piece of what we learn when we heal is allowing other people to be in their discomfort is very, very important. Because our discomfort as human beings, that that is part of what motivates us to grow, to change to evolve, if it does. And so, when we try to protect somebody from their own discomfort, we’re actually thwarting their own growth process. So, there’s lots of ways just to learn and to teach yourself, why it’s wise to let go of that, why it’s even loving to allow somebody to be in their discomfort when you drink less or decide not to drink and you’re in a social gathering and you say that you own that, and you be that in front of somebody. What you’re doing is you’re holding up a mirror and the human ego does not say thank you so much for holding up that mirror to me. We would be a much healthier society if it didn’t do that, but it doesn’t. It goes Hey, fuck you, I don’t want to see that in myself, you’re not drinking makes me look at my own drinking, like there might be a problem. How dare you do that to me, I would be so much more comfortable if you would just drink, please drink, drink, drink. So, I don’t have to think about this and feel about this. And so, if you can know that that’s the process, you got to really hold that line there and become your own authority figure, be your own self support, tap in that wise woman to go, Hey, this is that moment stand tall. That’s another very simple coping strategy I can offer actually. And a lot of us when we feel a little sheepish about what we’re doing a little like, oh, yikes, I’m bracing for it, people are not going to like but I’m holding up this mirror just by standing here breathing, I’m holding up this mirror. That’s the thing, it’s nothing you’re doing. You just stand in their breathing. And they feel that that reflected back at them. One of the things I see a lot of women in particular do is they go small, they go little girl, their shoulders hunched, they look at the ground, they get about five inches shorter, they try to go a little invisible. And what happens there is to my way of thinking your inner child looks up at grown up you and goes, oh shit. She’s shrinking. And basically, that’s the adult self-leaving. And then we feel very little kid in that moment. And I think that’s a very big trigger, to get to get people to pick up a drink, because then they need coping for that in the moment. So, one of the simplest things and it’s kind of like taking a breath, it sounds almost too simple to be useful, is get big in your body. When you feel like you want to go small, spread your clavicles apart, let your shoulders be wide. Let your heart space, be wide, like reach up through the crown of your head get tall, take up space, let your voice be a little bit louder than it might be naturally. And then your inner child looks up at you like, wow, I grew up into a big grown up. And she gets to take up space. She’s not shrinking. I have a right to stand up here. She’s taking care of me.

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  47:06

Yeah. You don’t like take care of yourself, right? Yes, yeah. Yes. You know what’s interesting, you talked about letting other people sort of be in their discomfort. What about I know myself I am. I really like harmony, when there are negative emotions around me. Anger, frustration, whatever it is, I’m very, very uncomfortable when I go into that font responsive, like let me do whatever I can to make it okay for you. And I see this same thing in my son, like when my husband gets upset by font, and my son fawns, and he’s 14 now. And I’m just like, how do we move through that discomfort for ourselves?

 

47:52

I think naming it is important. And at 14, what I would name it with him was hey, I noticed we both do this. And then if you’re if your daughter or your husband has some intensity, or even if you’re watching a movie, and something starts to get uncomfortable, knowing that you get to model for him can become your motivator. But I say a lot like um, it’s almost like we have to learn how to sit on our hands and bite or bite our tongue. So, it’s like, Nikki, like a lot of people laugh with me, like during our work now like, Am I really paying you to learn how to do less? And just be still and actually do nothing? Yep, you are? Because it sounds so easy to do. And it is easy. Like it’s simple. But it gets easy. You’re just the more we practice, just like anything. So, the first few times, I could say I think you can say to him things like, hey, let’s actually have some fun with this. When we catch some natural intensity in the world, some uncomfortable feelings. Let’s just practice both doing nothing going still. Maybe we actually sit on our hands and just let it happen. Because part of what we get to show ourselves is this impulse to run and save. Yeah, we have to show ourselves enough times. Wait a minute, we’re not going to save them. And then we have to see that they don’t die because we’re not Superman or Superwoman. That’s like coming to save the day. We have to basically go oh, look what happened when I sat on my hands. Oh, they actually figured it out. Oh, wait a minute. Wait a minute. They did better there. Okay. They got their emotion out and then they kept on living. Wow. Okay. And then we might notice more of the real deeper emotions that are there. Because in that because a lot of times of what that is under the surface is I don’t know my role. I don’t know what to do with myself. When somebody else has intensity or emotion and the truth is not thing, there’s nothing you have to adjust about you because somebody else is struggling. Here’s another little piece. If you’re highly sensitive, I highly recommend working to separate the difference between empathy and guilt.

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  50:17

Interesting, tell me more about that.

 

50:20

Empathy is like an equal it starts with an e, okay, empathy equal, that is an equal. Hey, I see you, you’re in struggle, I empathize with that. That is really tough. Okay? Guilt is about I did something wrong. And guilt is a very important human emotion. And of course, we don’t ever want to feel guilty, but you kind of do because if you don’t have guilt, you’re sociopath. narcissists have very low guilt. So, when we look at it that way, it’s like, oh, yeah, I’m really supposed to have some guilt. That guilt is our moral compass. If I stomp on your foot by accident, that initial just little guilty feeling is there to goose me a little bit to go, Hey, Nikki, correct that with her. Don’t just step on her foot and keep on going. That little Oops, I’m sorry, I hurt you. That little flash of fast gilt for a moment like that is our moral compass. It tells me Oh, turn around to casing I’m so sorry. I didn’t see your foot there. Are you okay, that I heard you. And make sure you my sister in the human experience is okay. That’s a very important part of how humans are wired to socialize. That’s why it’s so problematic. If we’re deficient or missing that part, we do bad shit in the world.

 

Okay. So, for highly sensitive people, we have smushed up and enmeshed guilt and empathy. So, and you’ll hear people say it, they’ll go, Oh my gosh, and they’ll start to have empathy and they’ll go Oh, feel so badly for them. So, we have to learn how to just equally empathize and let go of the I did something bad feeling. Because that bad feeling that guilt says, Hey, Nikki, do something about this. That’s part of what is getting sort of trip wired inside of us when we see somebody else have a motion. And our empathy and our guilt are intertwined. When they’re not supposed to be, we go, Oh, I must do something. I must fix something about this. And that’s wrong. It’s actually kind of like just to be witness. We need people to witness us. Wow, that looks really hard. I’m so sorry. You’re struggling with that. Here’s another way to not fix it and go into guilt. Hey, this is so hard. I don’t know how this is going to work out. But I know you’re going to figure it out. You are totally capable of figuring it out. If you need any help, I’m here. That’s another piece when we’re people pleasers or codependent. Easiest check in is Did anybody asked me to do this?

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  52:59

And I’m laughing as well, because I did a podcast episode on boundaries and how to be a boundaries boss. And I swear to God, like, every time someone you know, she or you is talking about this, I think of my husband and I’m like, damn, I keep getting the same advice. And I’ve got to work on it. Like, why do you know what the right answer is? Who asked you to fix this, you know, like, just wanting to take away them being unhappy. So, I love my free weekly therapy. Like dammit, I got to work on this.

 

53:35

Oh, yeah. And it is work. Like it takes intention, it takes coming back to it over and over again. I know all this stuff, you know, I can write you papers about it and talk for ages. I still have to practice and keep the muscles of these things strong. And it’s just like going to the gym. It’s like realizing, okay, I haven’t done leg day in a while. It’s like, Alright, I got to tighten up those boundaries. It’s why I have people come back like year after year to my boundaries course. I mean, this is in terms of emotional relating to ourselves and each other. We’re going to be working on this. All the days of our life really, for those of us that are seekers that are mindful.

 

54:13

You know, it’s interesting when you talked about feeling and feeling things really deeply. One of my favorite essays of all time is something that Ian Doyle wrote way back in her carry on Warrior Book. And it was sort of, to my sober friend on her first day or, you know, it was titled something like that this chapter. And she talked about the process of getting sober being like recovering from frostbite, that you’ve been numb for so long and at first, your emotions come back as tingles you know, like when you’re when your foot is coming back from being asleep, and then suddenly they feel like daggers you know, loneliness and anger and fear and all these things and it’s really hard. You know, a lot of people when I’m when I’m working with them in early sobriety, they’re like, Why am I crying? Like I haven’t cried in years? What is going on? You know, what do you have to say about that? Any thoughts on sort of that process?

 

55:18

Yeah, I so when I got to graduate school, I was really pissed off. Because the things that I was learning that I realized, Oh, we’ve known this about psychology since at least like the 50s. Why aren’t we teaching this more to the population? Like, why isn’t this more available, I should not have to get to a master’s level of education, in psychology, and then in counseling, to learn some of this stuff. So, I think really understanding that this stuff is not really rocket science. But if somebody had taught us when we were in second grade, or fifth grade, or when we were 12, that emotions are okay. Even gratitude around emotions, I mean, even the language like thinking of emotions, like some of them are bad, or some of them are good, very problematic. We need our entire range of emotions. So, when I am down, I can even have a gratitude practice about the uncomfortable feelings. Like I know a lot of people who have died for multiple reasons illness, addiction, accidents, suicide. I’m so glad to be having this uncomfortable feeling right now. I don’t have to have the answer right now. I just have to feel this and breathe. And because we don’t just see anybody do that when we’re younger. We don’t hear language like that. It is so foreign. We’re like, Whoa, what is this feeling shit? What am I supposed to do with it? Most of us have seen people drink and buried over a lifetime. So, our inner psyche is looking up at us like, Hey, this is the time you go get a drink. We think of that as triggers. But it’s also pattern of just hey, everybody you’ve ever seen you think about if even if you just watched madmen if you were a little green alien, and you just came down and watch madmen. You would think everyone just that’s all they drink. They don’t drink water; they just drink alcohol. That’s really what you would think we have all these subliminal messages inside of us.

 

So, dealing with the rawness when we start to deal with, Oh, I’m not some kind of machine that’s just supposed to operate in some feeling less vacuum. Ha. Interesting that I’ve had that expectation. I’ve never ever thought of like that. But really, I’ve had that expectation. So, it’s making peace with our humanity. That’s the way I put it a lot of times. And, and I am, I am sick of the messaging that has been and continues to teach women that they are supposed to move through this life as if there’s some kind of damn robot. You’re not a robot. You’re a human being you need rest. We think some women treat their phones better than they treat themselves. Because you stop and plug in this phone. You don’t look at the phone like God, what a piece of shit. I can’t believe you need to be plugged in right now. Right? How dare you? Just you should keep going. You should be able to do more than you were charged to do. No, you just stop, and you plug the phone in because you’ve accepted that that’s what it needs. You don’t have some kind of emotional struggle. Should I plug it in? Should I not plug it in? does it deserve to be plugged in?

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  58:32

Yeah. Oh my gosh, I love that. I’m gonna think about that all the time now.

 

58:36

So, there’s like a radical simplicity we can start to offer ourselves as we start the journey of getting to know our emotional selves. I’m a yoga teacher in training, I haven’t thought in some years. But I remember early on them saying oh, you store emotions in the hips. And I was like, What kind of bullshit is this?

 

Yeah, right. And lo and behold, we would get in the hips, and I just cry in embarrassment. Shame. What’s wrong with me? Thank goodness, those teachers would say things like seeing me tear up, let your emotions out. Stop trying to cram it down. And that’s what you start to notice when you start to attune to yourself. And that’s an important shift that outward observational style that we have developed by giving it all away, be hyper vigilant, pay attention, pay attention. And I had severe PTSD symptoms most of my life, that that hyper vigilance was so strong in me. And the truth is if you’re looking outwards so intensely, you don’t have the time, space, energy, or musculature, if you will, to look inward. So, we if we stopped drinking, and start to look inward, it is it’s almost as awkward as a baby learning to walk. Because you’re starting to deal with your real human adult emotions and every baggage that has been shoved down in there. And you just kind of give yourself permission to be in the messiness of it. It is okay to be a messy human. It’s not okay to dump our shit on other people. But it is okay to be messy. And starting to really deal with us feels kind of like emptying a closet that we’ve just crammed shit into for a really long time. And I don’t know about you, but for me, anytime I try to organize something like that, there’s a point at which everything is kind of out. And it just looks like absolute chaos. And it’s like, Why did I do this? Why did I do this, and I just want to shove it all back in. And in those moments, those are the moments where we have to just breathe, and slow down internally, and just go one thing at a time. Because if you start just, if you run that, cause it is going to stay a shit show. And now it’s all everywhere.

 

And so, if you if you just breathe and lean in and go just pick up one thing, just put this one thing back, it’ll start to have order, and it’ll start to make sense. But it’s not going to feel like that until you get to the sensemaking part, to the organization part. And you got to be willing to go through that. What the fact that I do moment, why am I looking at this? Why is this so messy? There’s no way this mess can all be cleaned up. And you have to kind of tap in almost like a faith. Even if you have to say to yourself, like I had to do this with my healer, it’s not about the person. It’s about having somebody as an anchor in your mind. And if you can’t believe it for yourself that it’s figured out double, then lean into the people who know it’s figured out double for you. I used to feel messy at times in my healers, Lisa. And I’d say to myself, Lisa believes I can do this. Lisa said she will believe it for me until I can believe it myself. All right, I don’t I don’t think Lisa’s foolish it I don’t I don’t think she is alright, maybe I can do it, maybe I can let me just do this one thing, and you just have to be in it with yourself enough to start to prove to yourself, oh, I can because you tame that closet. And then there’s another little closet or another little shelf.

 

And it’s the same in our physical realm that way as it is in our emotional realm. And your down emotions are not wrong. And I’m gonna say this too, because the suicide rate is insane in this country, and only rising. Okay, if you don’t manage that inner bully, you cannot escape yourself. And so, people try to hit the Escape button of suicide, because if I’m being an asshole to myself, in my own head, I don’t have anywhere else to go. And that’s when that suicidal ideation of well maybe I should just kill myself, maybe people would be better off without me starts to take over. And it’s the perfect scenario for the inner critic, the inner bully to grab. I am convinced that anyone who has successfully suicided was running from their own inner bully. That’s why when we reach out and talk to somebody, that the suicidal tendencies that that inclination that that impulse goes away, because when you’re talking to somebody else, you’re not listening to your own inner bully.

 

So please, please work on letting go of being your own asshole. And so many people go to therapy for years and years and years. And they don’t tackle that inner asshole. And that’s really what’s going to make life be better life, life has never gotten easier for me in terms of things coming at me. I made peace a few years ago, I was still holding on to if I can just get to a point in my life where it’s smoother. And there’s so much freedom and accepting a Life Is Organized Chaos, it’s going to keep sending me waves. It’s not going to get smoother from this external place. It’s going to get smoother when I’m smoother internally. It’s going to get smoother when I’m kind of myself when I go, Hey, good job. You know or take a break from the closet. You can come right back.

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  1:03:55

Yeah. Yeah. Oh, and I’m glad you said that about the suicide rate and how prevalent it is and how scary it is because it really does emphasize how important this work is. And I know that when I finally stopped drinking, it was it was mostly because I was very worried about my mental health. I was just like; this is going nowhere well. I feel doomed. And you know, just pulling yourself out of that and getting clarity and going to therapy and, and all the stuff really, really helps. But your inner asshole gets really loud when you keep telling yourself, you’re going to stop drinking and then you don’t and then you wake up with a hangover again. And you know, I mean, when I was working, I was never, you know, actually suicidal ideation. But the most common phrase that would come to my mind when something new would come up when I was drinking was, I want to shoot myself. It was like reflective and reflect saved, and automatic. And you know, since I’ve stopped drinking and done a bunch of work, I never think I want to shoot myself, I think this bucket sucks. I don’t like this, you know, like, whatever it is. But my automatic thought pattern is never I want to shoot myself. And that’s, you know, that’s why this work is so important for you, what I would say is, I love one thing you said in the middle that I wanted to mention was you said, I shouldn’t have to get to a graduate degree to need to be able to learn some of this stuff, some of these concepts. And in listening to one of your previous podcast interviews, you also said that one of the reasons you started this podcast was because you kept saying the same things to clients teaching them the same lessons that so many people needed to learn this, who don’t have access to therapy, or, or that kind of thing, or graduate school. So, I would love you just to talk a little bit about what you do in your podcast in your work, because I think it’s going to help so many people,

 

1:06:11

I think what I do is other than the education that I have in psychology and counseling, my addiction background. I’m a very authentic person. And I think we’ve, I think podcasting is bringing it back. But I think for a long time, we’ve sort of lost the art form of how humans really learn. And since the beginning of our humanity, we have learned by passing down stories like sitting around the fire and sharing with each other. And I think the, I’m certainly not anti-science, but when it comes to the human condition and our emotions and relating to each other, I don’t know how they’re really going to study some of that stuff and make it scientific. And we’re living through this time of, if it’s not scientifically proven in a study, well then fuck it. And so, what I do on my show is I try to use my own story as a teacher. And when I’m sharing my story, the truth of it is, it’s not just my story. I mean, that’s a way with me as a therapist doing a show, I don’t have to say, Oh, I’ve had clients that this and that and this client story. Because I’ve heard so many stories, I’ve worked with 1000s of people. We all have the same story, even when our stories are completely different. And learning to hold we in integrity and self-respect, is so important and foundational, that I tried to show with the sort of horrendous, horrendous parts of my history that you really can get to a place of happiness, I think. And I have enough confidence now. And I’ve worked through impostor syndrome enough to say this, I wouldn’t been able to say this a few years ago. But I think when people meet me or they hear me, I am genuinely happy. I am genuinely settled. People will tell me things like I can really feel the healing on you. Like you’re not just saying this shit. And so, for a lot of people, I think our pain isolates us. And we think we’re the only ones going through it.

 

And so, it’s been important to me to use my story to say, you’re not alone. You’re not and if and if I figured this shit out, you can figure this out. And none of it is rocket science. I never felt like I fit into academia. It was too heady. For me, I didn’t think I got it right. A lot of the time, I would look at my colleagues and think, you know, they can pull things out of the air. Like they can go oh, this theorist you know, from psychiatry and this and they taught this theory and this dates and this and I can’t do that. I can’t do that my mind doesn’t work that way. So, I had to get to a place in my own career I’ve been doing this since 2005 or six that I had to accept who I was not just as me that the personal person Nikki but as the professional that I am and really let go of all the shoulds of how I should do it. What I think a therapist typically talks like you know, like, I think I have a lot of like Fraser in my head from growing up with like a Fraser or you know, just not being that way and so I think for a lot of people I think what I’m doing is bringing like more of a humanity to what therapy is I also for, for severe trauma survivors. And for addiction to very often. I think the wall that is so typical between therapist and client, that the truth of it is that a degree is not enough to trust somebody. And I that’s a real problem I have with my profession. And I don’t think a lot of friends for saying it professionally. By I, that a lot of those boundaries were put up because it was old doctors that didn’t want to be personable with their patients, and what a convenient thing to share none of yourself. And there’s some philosophy that I just think is crap about why that is.

 

Now, there’s some reason to have some boundaries for sure. And I walked those very clinical boundaries for a long time with my clients, and then I, I started breaking them and breaking them and breaking them and seeing the success of that, what we’re yearning for, and why I think the suicide rate is so high, is because we are yearning for real human beings to learn from, really, and that’s why so much of this is a re parenting, I have so many spiritual mothers in my heart and in my psychological tool back, when I need to I picture Maya Angelou standing behind me with her, her hand on my shoulder. Because we need that kind of support we do in our private moments and in big moments of our life. So, I hope that what I offer in the show is the idea that you can take me with you too, in that way. And if you need to tap me in, you can go Nicky’s behind me, and I invite you to use me in such a way. I also hope that I’m that, I’m sharing what it is to push against the growth edge. I am truly an introvert. I’m very, very introverted. It is very, very awkward for me, if I meet somebody in real life, they’re like, Oh, I’ve listened to your show before they’ve met me. So, it’s, it’s pushing out my growth edge. And I think that’s important for highly sensitive people to see modeled, that sensitivity is not an excuse to be fragile, you’re not fragile. And I resist, I’ll even use the H word I hate all victim mentality, because it will not help you at all. It will broaden your pain, you might get a lot of attention for it for a little while, but it will broaden your pain. And so, I come from a place of absolute anti-victim mentality in all things, your powers and taking empowerment for your life and making your choices. And I hope that I that I do a good job showing that to inspire other people to take the reins of their life, you get this one precious life.

 

And so, take those reins and do it. And if you do, you can heal. And I think by people feeling that I really am healed, then we’ll never be perfectly healed. But feeling that I think that’s more powerful than swirling around our problems constantly, constantly, constantly, we have to be more solution focused. And we have to find the people that inspire us to be our best self, when one of my recent new clients said to me when I said, Okay, why did you want to do this with me? She said, Because I listened to your show, and so much of what you said pissed me off. And I thought this lady can really help me here. So, I’m very, I’m very confrontive and I am no bullshit because I want you to get to real true piece. And, you know, we talk about self-love, more and more on thinking it’s more self-respect. And when we’re in self-respect, and help up in cell phones, yeah.

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  1:13:12

Well, I think that you do a great job of rejecting that victim mentality and being empowered and showing other people that that is a way to contentment and happiness. And, you know, you only get this one life. So that is definitely coming through with everything. I’ve listened to you and also meeting you. Thank you. And how can people find you and follow up?

 

1:13:39

You can find me at emotional badass.com I did feel scattered today. I hope I didn’t leave too many questions. But if you have questions for me, you can, you can join my patreon, I have a Patreon. patreon.com/emotionalbadass. At the $10 a month level, I do a monthly live stream where people can ask questions. We have topics the very last topic was triggers. I think we did a topic recently on sex. And anything goes part of part of what I offered there. And on the show too, is just you can really ask me anything. I’ve done enough work to be really comfortable even though I’m an introvert. And if there’s a therapeutic way for me to answer a question about my life, I will answer it as a sexual abuse survivor from my childhood.

I encourage people if you have questions, all the questions you’re not supposed to ask a therapist you can ask me basically, anything I’ve really, I’ve encouraged clients even asked me about bodily things like post sexual abuse. So, I just tried to use my story to be a teacher and to help people become their own authority figure. And I think that’s part of what makes people feel safe with me is that I don’t need to be worship. I want you to give your energy to you and to learn what it is to really love and honor yourself and I haven’t encouraged people to disagree with me. You know, like that’s kind of needed in this country is being able to learn from people that were different from too. So yeah, I just I hope that that I gave some kind of service to your listeners today and help them be able to just see themselves and hold themselves just with more and more respect more “groundedness”. And that’s what we get to do as adults. You know, we didn’t have grown up, wise woman or wise man, the us when we were little, you know, but we have that now. And that’s why we’re never going to be abandoned again. You know, grown up you is going to be with you till the very, very end. And so, what a beautiful thing to cultivate that wise woman being able to take care of you and hold you. That’s, that’s my passion, basically.

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  1:15:44

I love that. I think that’s a perfect way to leave this. So, thank you so much for taking the time to come on. I know. You helped people and you helped me as well.

 

1:15:53

Thank you so much, Casey, very much lighten love.

 

1:15:58

You are too.