We don’t listen to ourselves - How People Mess Up Their Lives and How to Not Make the Same Mistakes: Part 6 (Episode 73)

Brent and Janis talk about the mistake people often make by not listening to themselves- their intuition, self-talk, their inner voice and possibly the voice of God. They discuss learning to pay attention to our inner world and finding the good and helpful values that lie within.

Transcript:

Welcome to Life and Love Nuggets, where licensed therapists Brent and Janice Sharp share how you can thrive in your life, your love, and your relationships. Hello friends, welcome back to Life and Love Nuggets, where we try to help you live kind of your highest level of life as an individual and also in your relationships. And to have fun. And to have fun, which obviously, if Janice is on the program, that is the key here. We're going to do that. And so we cover lots of different topics. We talk a lot about marriage, but we also talk about just our individual lives, and how do we thrive as an individual, and express ourselves to the world in the best and clearest way.

We believe we're all made in the image of God, and we're reflecting part of Him to the world. And so today we're going to continue a series. We're kind of popping in and out of the series, and I don't know how many of these we're going to do.

Which is good for you, because it's stretching.

It is stretching me. These are good practices for me to not do things sequentially and in order. It gets me out of my comfort zone. But we're talking about how people mess up their lives, and how to not make the same mistakes. And I think this is part six. JANICE And so, again, don't know how many of these we're going to do, but there's a lot of ways that people mess up their lives.

They do. And being therapists for so many years, we kind of hear them all.

Yeah, so we might keep doing it, going in and out of this for a while. And so this is what we're going to talk about. Well, I'm going to let you talk about what we're going to talk about. So last time, we talked about we don't listen. We don't listen to others around us.

This time, we want to talk about how we don't listen to ourselves. We don't listen to our own thoughts, our own feelings, and our own instincts, because we're surrounded by sound. And I won't even go into the technology thing, because we've talked about that forever. But lately, I've been thinking about something that we were told in grad school, back in the dark ages, before electricity, when we went there in covered wagons. I remember hearing, pay attention to people who constantly need to have the TV or radio on. They don't want silence. They're probably running from their own thoughts.

So with everything we have going on around us, you can run from your thoughts all the time. So we're going to talk today about what are you thinking? We'll go into what are you feeling, what are your wants, but what are you thinking? We can get so busy rushing through life that we kind of live life on automatic pilot. We don't stop to listen to our own self-talk, to our gut reactions to things, to our instincts, or maybe even to the voice of God. The busyness gets in the way.

Most of us dismiss gut responses. We have that feeling, there's just that something there, but we talk ourselves out of them. So it's like, oh, I'm kind of uncomfortable with that guy. Oh, is that bad of me? Maybe I'm just biased towards them. Maybe I'm judging them, but there's something there that we're not quite comfortable for. Comfortable for?

Comfortable with, four, five, whatever it takes. And sometimes we have to ask ourselves, if I'm feeling some kind of feeling I can't define, is it maybe that I'm feeling pressured by somebody to do something that I don't want to do? And I don't know how to say no to, or I maybe don't even know how to put words to that. It's listening to what's going on inside us. We can get so used to discounting our inner thoughts that we can't hear them anymore, that we just brush them away. But oftentimes those are the very things that we need to be paying attention to. I hear often clients saying that they do have this inner voice, they do have this sense about something, but they find themselves responding according to what they think they should think or feel, or say, what will make other people happy, or how it will make them look good as a person.

And I often say that God designed these inner instincts to protect us and keep us emotionally and sometimes physically safe. So if you don't listen to yourself, you're actually going against these very important protection mechanisms that God designed for you. One young woman said to me, I know I should be okay with my husband by now. He said he's sorry, and he's really trying, but I just don't feel comfortable with being real vulnerable with him yet. And I told her that, as I tell everybody, that these shoulds and oughts are just not good mechanisms to follow. They generally lead us down the wrong path. I said, there's just hasn't been enough time for trust to be developed.

And so you're supposed to feel hesitant. That I encourage people to welcome those feelings and pay attention to them. And now, again, we can go to the extreme of that, or we're just hypervigilant about everything, and we're overanxious and overstressed. And I told this one person, I said, it's okay to keep working on healing. It doesn't mean you stop just because you don't feel it yet, or you don't feel that sense of security yet. Keep working on it, but let there be enough time for trust to develop. And I think that particular situation is probably infidelity.

And so it takes time to rebuild that trust. It's not you left the top off the toothpaste. When there's a deep hurt like that, it takes time. Yeah, I tell people, if there was a button that we could push that would instantly cause us to trust somebody, most people would be pushing that button. People don't wait longer than is necessary to be able to trust somebody. They want, it's horrible to not be able to trust somebody. We would be hitting that button over and over and over again, but God didn't design it that way.

And there's good reasons for that, that it takes time for healing to happen, for trust to be built. And we just have to allow ourselves to respect that inner voice. That's right. That God put that in us for a reason. You will know when you're better. That's right. When you feel more secure, you will know. That's right.

I've seen people over and over again that have trusted their gut instinct and they're really glad they did. It'll be like, oh, I shouldn't do that. I'm so glad I didn't do that. They listen to that. But I've also seen, you and I have seen, people who have known something isn't quite right or it just doesn't settle well with them and they do it anyway and then they're sorry. So how often do we see people before marriage that have all these red flags, but they dismiss them or where they talk themselves out of it or their partner talks themselves out of it, if it talks them out of it. They just had that sense, but then it's like, oh, but everybody's about their plane tickets.

And how embarrassing would that be to call our wedding off and we put so much money in this wedding that's non-refundable. How can I do that? And so they go into a marriage that they deep in their heart, it was like, oh, I don't feel good about this. And then later on they go, oh, that's why. It's not listening to really that voice within them. So we've got to do that. You know, sometimes that's our intuition.

Sometimes it's the voice of God that is warning us. But I always tell people, just know what you were talking about earlier. Just know if it comes with guilt or fear or pressure, that's not the voice of God. God always leads with peace and calmly. So I want to say something, maybe a bit of a sidebar here to all the guys listening at this point. I spent a lot of my time trying to help guys get more comfortable with listening to themselves. Helping guys learn to be self-aware of their own feelings.

I can always tell there's a bit of resistance. I have some, I talk about this, it looks like they are like literally in torment. That they're like, oh no. Oh, that's a part of my brain I can't access. I can't imagine doing this. That there's a resistance to that because in our culture, some of the standards that we have, it feels like this is weakness somehow. This idea of vulnerability is not a strength. And so I can tell there's hesitancy there.

And I know the feeling. I was raised by a wonderful man who happened to be a colonel in the army. I had two brothers and no sisters. I oftentimes think, my poor mother. Yes. A life just full of logic and thoughts and just do it anyway. Doesn't matter how you feel.

There simply wasn't a place for feeling. So I picked up the idea that feelings were simply not important. Or they just, there's something wrong with them. Their weakness. There's, and I, you know, somebody would be sharing feelings and oftentimes it was you, unfortunately.

I stuck with you, babe. I know, it's pretty amazing. And, and I would internally, and I didn't say this, I'd internally be going, okay, we'll get past this stuff. Get past this silly stuff. Let's talk about something that's logical. Okay. Just the facts, ma'am.

Just the facts, ma'am. And so I didn't pay attention to them. And therefore I didn't pay attention to them in me. And I oftentimes then discounted them in others. Now this really limited our relationship in the beginning. And we've talked about this before in previous episodes. When it comes to the impact on relationships, but for today's purposes, it also caused me to go deaf to my own inner world.

So I was just very limited to what was going on internally in me. Now I'm not saying that our feelings should rule the world or rule our life and decisions, but they are designed by God to give us very important information about our life. I've had to, over the years, be very purposeful and for most guys, it's going to be very purposeful. This is not a natural, intuitive kind of thing. As a matter of fact, you may have resistance to this. So we have to be very purposeful and stopping and being able to identify my feelings and then get comfortable with opening up to some key people in my life. I'm not saying everybody, but some key people in my life.

This has helped me listen to myself better and respect and validate other people's feelings. We often encourage couples in communication to have a feeling wheel in front of them when they're talking and when they're trying to develop this and really learn this, particularly for guys, and talking about really important things. And I've also found this is helpful for women sometimes, particularly when it's really important things because there's nuance there. There's something different between, I had a frustrating meeting and I felt unheard in the meeting or I felt taken advantage of or disrespected or discounted. A whole lot of important difference there. And a lot of times we just give this generalized kind of feeling. And so this practice has helped me eventually develop more of an emotional vocabulary and pay attention to my own inner world.

And what is God saying there? Which has helped me stay healthier as an individual and in our relationship. You know, when we went through our podcast on grief, we talked about encouraging people to listen to themselves and what they really need or what they want to heal. Sometimes it's something that may feel silly or weird. You know, I have people, I've talked about before, I have people that go, I don't know, I just have this urge to go swing. I had one woman who had a swing installed in her backyard to help her through difficult times or color in a coloring book, not the fancy ones with the little tiny pencils, but like a kid's with Mickey Mouse or something because it helps them feel free. It helps them feel a sense of whatever.

But I hear that kind of thing over and over again. Sometimes people will like plan a trip, whether they go on it or not. It's just planning helps them feel better. Getting outside can be helpful for people too. When they're trying to heal from something, I mean, we've talked before about, you know, when we went through miscarriages, I remember a time that I would go, I would spend every lunch hour shopping for very feminine clothes. I would, I don't know that I bought that many of them, but I looked at a lot of them. And I later realized that because I was going through infertility and miscarriages, there was something in me that was doubting my femininity.

And so that sense of, I have to find something helped me feel better, whether I bought it or not. There was just that period of time. I think it lasted less than a week. And then I'm like, oh, that's weird. Okay, I'm done with that. And I could move on again. But we really need to look at or listen to our brains, our thoughts, our feelings, our emotions, our intuitions.

Go, what do I need to heal? Or what do I need to feel better or to get a deeper sense of where I'm at? And so some of those physical practices, I think I'm hearing you right. Yes. Helped open some of that up for you. Absolutely. Getting outside, going and looking for feminine clothes, helped you pay attention to, okay, there's something emotionally going on here.

There's something going on. Why do I feel that need? And generally it's that there's a hurt or something that needs to be healed. Thank you for clarifying that. I usually tell people when they have those intuitions, as long as it's not illegal, immoral, it's not gonna hurt you or somebody else and it's not gonna bankrupt you, then it's okay to do it. It has to go along with your internal beliefs. You know, our culture right now says, oh, you're struggling.

You just need some wine. You need wine or you need to go buy something. Retail therapy. Now, obviously I'm not against shopping since my last example was just that. But we have to ask ourselves, am I avoiding some type of feeling or thought? Am I avoiding some inner thing by having a quick fix? Something that I want to get this feeling over with or I wanna cover it up.

I don't wanna deal with what's going on here. We call them counterfeits. Or is this something that's moving me towards healing? But it's really trying to discern that in the midst of it. And so to really know that, you have to go deeper. You can't live a surface level life. You have to go deeper and you have to listen to you.

But we oftentimes, like I've said before, we get caught up in what am I supposed to think? What am I supposed to feel? How often do we have somebody in counseling that goes, is it okay if I feel this? And it's like, yes, you just feel it. It just is. Back to the shoulds and oughts.

They just aren't helpful. It really needs to be real, honest, organic, natural. And that's what we're trying to identify here. What are our real, honest feelings? Not what should I be feeling or shouldn't I be feeling. And there's no formula for knowing that. I wish there was.

I mean, some people will go, oh, just go take a warm bath and you'll relax and your feelings will come. And yeah, just a shower is better for me. Or being outside is even better. It helps kind of balance my world and helps me listen more and get more in touch with me and with God. So how do I hear me? I think the most important thing that I'll say over and over again is it takes time. We have to slow down. We have to be still. We have to be silent.

And silence is hard. I mean, not just because there's so much noise around us, but to silence our own mind. It really takes practice to do that. A lot of times I have clients write things down because between appointments or your busy schedule in life, you don't really have time to go deeper. You have to pull. Pull back and have some time after work or first thing in the morning where you really write down so many of the things that are going on in your brain. And that helps you bring some of that up again.

We have to be away, alone, to really hear. In the church world for so many years we've heard the idea of quiet time, which is what we need. That be still and know that I'm God. And that listening to your voice and the voice of God, but we've changed that or it's morphed over the years into quiet time means I have to spend this much time in prayer and I have to pray for other people. And there's even great formulas for how to pray for myself and others. I have to spend this much time reading the Bible, spend this much time in my devotional to where it's become a guilt or obligation thing. A function, yeah.

So people often say, yeah, well I really haven't had my quiet time lately. And I go, well, how about if we work some on just being quiet? Just being quiet and hearing the voice of God. Be still and know that I'm God is over the doorpost of our study. And so it's a reminder to both of us because we can get so busy that we don't allow ourselves to be truly quiet. So when we get that time, I think it's good to go, so what am I feeling now? Am I sad, happy, joyous?

Not what's going on in my life right now, what's my schedule, but what am I feeling and what am I thinking? What are my thoughts are clutter because we can, you know, anybody that's tried to have any quiet, silent time of silence, they will sit down and immediately your brain will go, oh, I need to get that at the grocery store. Did I get that report done? Oh, I got to do so and so. Is that dust in the corner over there? I mean, our brain is filled with clutter. And so we have to work on dismissing that so that we can really listen to what's there.

Now, sometimes we can just go, okay, I'm going to let that thought go and I'm going to focus back on where I'm at right now. Other times, which I have to do, I have to keep a little notepad and write some of those things down so that I can let them go so I can stop and really try to listen. So oftentimes they're unimportant things anyway, it won't even matter if we do forget them. So I often will say also to go, okay, is there anything I'm feeling guilty about or uneasy? Maybe somebody asked me to do something and I'm dreading it. Why? Is it because I'm not comfortable with that person or I don't feel good about that particular event?

Or is it that I really should go but I've gotten used to not getting out and being involved in other things and so I don't want to? And then we have to say, is that a healthy thing? Is that a good thing for you? It really is tuning in to you. So when I was getting ready for this a couple weeks ago, I was writing some things down and so I was writing, okay, what am I thinking and feeling right now? And I thought, okay, well, I'm feeling a little overwhelmed because I have so much to do and we've got to get a couple of podcasts done and I'm tired because I think I had a lingering sinus infection. It was really driving me crazy.

And what else? And as I was writing things down and really focusing, I looked out and on our side porch, we have two stone, old, old stone lions on our side porch. And I looked out and there was a bright red cardinal that landed right on the top of one of the stone lions. And it's like he turned and looked at me and I thought, okay, I'm also feeling some amusement and I'm feeling some joy. But those are things that if I hadn't stopped, I probably would have stayed stuck in, overwhelmed, busy, lots to do. And I think what you're saying, which I've had to get comfortable with, is realizing that when we pay attention to our inner world, we're going to end up with opposite feelings, opposite thoughts at times.

When I say opposite, just different. A variety. A variety. There's a lot. I think I, you know, earlier in my life, I thought, well, gosh, the highest level of life is that we just, it's all good. You know, we get it to where we're, all of our feelings are good. All of our thoughts are good and so forth and realize, look, that's really denial.

That's not, that's not, that's not reality. And realize that, okay, I can be anxious or I can be stressed about this, but then I can also be very thankful, appreciative, hopeful. All of those things are going to be at the same time. Yeah. And so much of that we struggle with is the shoulds. I should be happy all the time, or even I should be sad. You know, sometimes we can be going through grief and we just have that spark of joy.

And it's like, oh, should I have that? Yes, you should. You should be exactly where you're at. And then sometimes I think we have to really purposely ask ourselves, what do I want? What are my deepest desires? And what are the things in my life that I have no control over? Because sometimes we have to acknowledge that too and release them into the hands of God. Yeah. So as we're talking about this idea of being more self-aware, paying attention to our own inner world, it gives us an opportunity then to share that with another.

And so in an earlier podcast, we talked about couch time for couples, something that we encourage. Kind of won't go into the details of that because we've already covered that. But kind of a few minutes each evening where we both kind of pay attention to what's going on in me physically and relationally and emotionally and spiritually.

It's PRES, P-R-E-S. And it's been a great, we've just seen it to be a great practice for couples to be able to quiet themselves, set aside the next task of the day where we're chasing kids around doing this, that or the other, and be able to share that with our partner. That has been a connecting moment. It's been, it develops emotional intimacy for couples. So it helps us as individuals give value to that inner world. And it's an incredible habit for couples to develop emotional connection. Another thing we encourage people to pay attention to is pain.

Now, most people try to run away from pain or they try to cover it up or medicate it in some way. But God allows pain in our life for us to pay attention. It's supposed to go, okay, something's wrong here. It happens in our physical body. If we've got a pain in our hand or our shoulder or whatever, what is that?

Something's happening there. We're supposed to pay attention to that. And God allows pain in our life for us to pay attention, for us to do something. And even discomfort. It may not be as extreme as pain. It may be uneasiness or discomfort. And so rather than dismissing that or denying it or pushing it away, it's, oh, no, what does that mean?

I use the example of stovetops. Most of us have been a little too close to a stovetop at some point in our life. And we've gotten a little bit too close to the pan or the burner or whatever. And our natural response to that is we pull back. Oh, ouch.

We pull back. Well, God created the pain receptors in our hand to keep us safe, to pay attention. I'm too close to the stove. If we didn't have that, we would have all burnt our hands off by now. You know, we'd sit there talking to somebody with our hand on the stove. What is that smell? We would have lost our hands.

And so it actually is something that helps us pay attention. And we always say pain is the greatest motivator for change in our life. And so it's an opportunity for us to go, OK, there's something here. I need to pay attention to this. Let me sit in this. And I tell people oftentimes, and I think they look at me like I've lost my mind. Lean into the pain.

Trust that there's something in that that we need to pay attention to that we can do something about to find healing or wholeness or a new path forward, a different path forward. I had a client whose husband had been really controlling and on the edge of really abusive towards them and their language. And she was questioning whether she had really been able to forgive him or not. And she also, by the way, said her mother-in-law called her and said, if you would just forgive, he's good and everything will be OK. And I had to stop for a moment and ask, does it make sense to you that if you forgave him, that everything in the relationship would be fine? And again, it was pretty obvious to her at that moment. She was like, oh, no. You know, there's some movement in the right direction.

And we had an opportunity to stop and talk again about the difference between forgiveness and trust. Forgiveness is something that we can do regardless of whether the person changes or not. It's a one way street and we can move down that path of forgiving somebody. But trust really requires change and it requires change for a long enough period of time and that person for us to really be able to feel like that we can trust them. And so that kind of cleared it up for her a bit. And so once again, she'd gotten kind of caught in the midst of some guilt, some pressure from others on what I should be. Yeah. Again, back to the shoulds and oughts and whatever.

Instead of realizing that, no, this is real. That inner voice in her was, no, I don't feel secure yet. Now, again, there's some good movement. There's some good going the right direction. It just hasn't been long enough. And that helps settle that.

And you just can't doubt that. I mean, we all have thoughts, feelings, wants. We also all have some degree of intuition and we have the ability to hear the whispers of God. We have to be quiet to do that. We've got that sign in our house that is, let us be still that we may hear the whispers of God. We have to do that. But all of us have that within us.

We also have clutter. We have clutter thoughts that are in there that we have to clear out. The important thing is we recognize that all of us have those and to not let ourselves go on autopilot, to just live through life, not being aware of what's going on with you, not taking the time to pull away and silence and really have that self-reflection. When we go on autopilot, that just sets us up for counterfeit behavior. We're choosing something that soothes the pain right now or makes us feel happier, better right now. But it's not good for us in the long run. God has a better way for us to live our lives.

He wants us to live fully who we are. And that means being aware of everything within us and everything that he has to speak to us. But we have to be still and know that he's God. Yeah. And it really comes back to trusting our inner world. It's trusting that there's something there, being aware of it, paying attention to it, opening it up to God and to others that actually is a very healthy healing practice for us and that God can handle whatever the real is. We're responsible to recognize what the real is and open it up.

And as we say over and over again, if you ever think, oh, I shouldn't have these feelings, go read the Psalms. I mean, look at all of the feelings those writers, feelings and thoughts those writers have or wants, swallow my enemies. And know God's okay with that. And so we should be too. That's an example of being human and then depending on God in the midst of it all. Yeah. So we're encouraging you to trust the journey, this real human, honest, open, real human life and journey.

So hopefully you're able to grab ahold of something today that you can maybe nudge you towards strength and nudge you towards healing. Maybe a new path in your world that connects you more deeply as an individual and also in your relationships. So go in peace for today. Blessings as you go.