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In this episode we talk about how complaints happen when we give a voice to our inner critic. We talk about a new way to look at it that can immediately take us out of the dialogue that is spiraling us negatively and change our thought patterns with some simple and easy tools. We all want something and when we are stuck in unhelpful stories, we can’t see the desire. Let’s work to uncover what we want and need to come from a place of curiosity, gratitude, and admiration so we can actually grow and learn and lead the life we want. Send me a message by clicking HERE or follow me and send me a message on Instagram. Workbook coming in 2020, details coming soon. Stay tuned. Enjoy!
Hello Everyone,
I hope you have had another great week. We are about to head to the mountains for a few days and I couldn’t be more excited. The whether here doesn’t get super cold, but I surely have adjusted over the years and you would laugh if you saw how bundled I am to go for my walks or even when I’m in my house. I entertain myself.
Anyway,
Today I want to talk about a scary word. I want to talk about complaining. This is perhaps a touchy subject and might have you turned off just at the mention of the word, but I promise if you stick with me you’ll hear some gems. There is an author of some out of the norm marriage books by the name of Laura Doyle. What I do love about her books is her huge emphasis on not trying to control your husband, and not trying to control anything that isn’t actually on your paper in essence. She talks about focusing on your own issues and about making sure your needs are met and she talks about how our husbands can’t make us happy, but that we need to make sure we are happy. That when we are happy, we inspire our husbands. Anyway, a lot of what she talks about is clearly my jam, but one thing she mentions in her book that is incredibly on point is complaining. She talks about expressing your desires and how important this is and that when we complain we have an unexpressed desire.
When I read this the last time it really nailed it for me. Finding new ways of thinking about challenging issues which creates for us a powerful question is so much more helpful for our thoughts than is simply going about our lives stuck passively in the story we don’t know we could change that is being told for us in our minds on autopilot.
You see if each time we start to complain we actually took this as a cue to there being a desire it will switch our brain into curiosity mode, and, as I have talked about many times before, this stimulates our brain to seek to solve the problem or answer the question.
Author Noah St. John talks about and also Kara Lowentheil (a much-quoted thought work teacher on this topic), asking powerful questions is a very impactful way to shift your thoughts quickly with results. This is because this relies on the way our brains are wired.
When we are stuck thinking about problems as problems, our brains work diligently to continue to reinforce that this is a problem. When we however, switch this problem to a question, but a question that is helpful, then our brain seeks to answer the question. This leads to something called Afformations, a term coined by Noah St. John and used by people all over the world. A powerful topic that we will get into more next week.
Anyway, getting back to it. When we start to complain, what happens is that we are taking the words that our internal critic is saying and giving it a voice. We are telling the story of the critic and we are empowering the thoughts of the inner critic in our lives. When we do this we keep ourselves stuck in the negativity of the complaint.
BUT if we use a complaint as a cue for our brains that there is something we desire, this then prompts us to ask a powerful question in order to fulfill that desire.
This can often happen for me in my personal life, with my own habits, but it can also easily happen in my relationships; most notably my marriage and my relationships with my kids. I can see something they are doing and start to complain about it. Maybe they aren’t listening to anything I am saying. And it is driving me crazy. This happens a lot for me. But the truth is that it’s not what they are doing that’s driving me crazy, it’s what I want that I don’t know I want and thus what I am making their behavior mean which is often in direct competition with what I actually want.
As a perfectionist, turned radical imperfectionist, I have struggled greatly with making taking care of myself not only as a regular habit but simply as a part of my routine. I remember reading somewhere about how self-care in theory shouldn’t really even be a thing, not because we shouldn’t care for ourselves, but because it should be something so obvious that it’s just assumed and a part of our regular day to day activities. That it doesn’t need special designation or special time, because it’s just a part of life. We have so many things that we believe at our core which our brains agreed with at some point when we were growing up and we didn’t even know about it, and those unconscious agreements govern the lens of our brain and the way we make assumptions of the world around us and how we interpret every bit of information that crosses our awareness.
That was revolutionary for me because, until more recently, until I started going down this path and journey of really changing the way I think about myself and the world and myself in this great wide world, I didn’t ever think I deserved self-care and I sort of scoffed the idea of self-care as new age hoopla. Yes, sure, self-care sounded great in theory. But it was for the privileged, the spoiled, and I was a hard-core, martyr, sacrificing my life and resenting my way through my mothering and wifely tasks into a dreary life full of negative self-talk as I resented those around me, then shamed myself for that resentment and felt incapable of accepting the offers of those who loved me.
I trained those in my life to expect me to be okay and do all that I had always done, and yet I trained myself to not know how to accept any of the help I was offered, until help was offered less and less while my resentment and shame and my self-care debt grew to such significant levels that I just felt utterly helpless and overwhelmed to attempt to face; and which felt impossible to overcome.
I have now read countless books and done incredible amounts of work searching to find what actually is changing the way I think and feel, so that my actions can fall in line. It has not been easy, but now finally feeling like I have found helpful tools that have gotten me past so much of that and helped me dig my way out of the hole I was in and I am constantly rejoicing in my newly found freedom. I now feel liberated to be able to actually get my needs met. I understand that sacrificing my health and peace and happiness in order to check all of the boxes was never really heroic or helpful for anyone in my life, although I also am deeply grateful for the experiences I had and where I have been and come from and appreciate my former self for doing the best I could with what I knew.
So, anyway, when we want to complain, we can first think about it in this new way; that complaints, or stories about what is bad and wrong in our circumstances, interpreting what those circumstances mean for us, are there because we have a desire that is not getting met. We want something deeply or need something and we are making our circumstances mean something for us that is unhelpful and keeping us from meeting those needs.
When attempting to figure out our desire underneath a complaint is usually an emotion. Our motivation for most things in life is a desired emotion, breaking down the why of anything enough, you will get to an emotion you wish to have. Love, joy, peace, satisfaction, confidence, a sense of worthiness, acceptance, whatever the emotion or feeling is.
This topic really is connected to another parenting book I am reading and the way it talks about collaborating with your child. In parenting it can be so easy to complain about how our children are, to compare ourselves or our children to others and yet the truth is there is an underlying difficulty. And though you’ve likely heard that struggles or problems are an opportunity, that is just another way of thinking about what I am talking about here. It is an opportunity to learn. Well, you are also complaining for a reason. Your expectations are not being met. So you can cling to your expectations in life, and you can continue to tell your story from the perspective of a victim, that your life is frustrating because your expectations are not being met, but the truth is that your expectations are always being met. You complain, you are talking about how things are and your brain is continuing to find evidence as to why life is that way. Then you continue to act in ways, thinking, feeling, acting, and so on through the cycle; that reinforce this way of being, and so you are expecting more of this and setting up life for this.
But when you step off the wheel you are on of thinking, and you recognize that you can choose to get curious you will find powerful change. What you are complaining about never really has to do with other people. It has to do with what you’re thinking about other people, their actions and what you’re making it all mean in the way you tell the story. You can stop that story, put it on pause and ask yourself some powerful questions and stop asking negative questions.
You see your brain will answer your questions. If your questions are “why is my life so difficult? Why don’t my kids ever listen to me? Why does my husband never care about me?” and so on and so forth, it not only acts on a level of distorted thoughts, but your brain will answer those questions. Your brain will give you evidence in the form of story for why this is so. This is so not helpful, and we don’t even know we are doing it, we just know we feel like crap and it feels terrible to feel stuck there and keep acting in ways we don’t want because we feel like crap and we act out of our thoughts and emotions.
So, instead, change the questions you ask. When you’re thoughts start offering up complaints for you to regurgitate and reinforce, like I said, step off the thought wheel… or the movie playing of your life, and recognize that there is an underlying desire or opportunity here and ask yourself a question. This intertwines with a gratitude practice and is different from affirmations, because it’s asking your brain to come up with positive thoughts that you actually believe, as Author Noah St. John talks about with Afformations (an awesome topic for another episode)…
So maybe I would tell myself “I want something deeply right now and it is hidden. What is it that I want?” However, why statements are much more helpful initially because they are linked with the motivation, not the process by which they come about. So you can state something you positive in question form and see how your brain responds: “Why do I love my kids so much? Why is my marriage amazing? Why does my husband love me? Why do I love my husband? Why do my kids listen to me? Why does my husband care so much?”
A lot of times, when asking why, it works layer by layer. By this, I mean that you ask why, and the result is a superficial response, but you keep asking why until you get to a belief that is actually helpful. And the cool thing is that even if you’re having a hard time asking yourself these positive questions, you can dissect your thoughts by just asking why 7 times, as I heard a speaker talk about in October, and it is really powerful. You just continue to ask why until you get down to a belief that either feels good if working with positive questions, or until you uncover a hidden belief that is unhelpful if working with negative questions and then you can see what’s affecting you.
So, in summary, complaining can be a huge struggle but instead of getting down on yourself for struggling, utilize tools to turn this into a cue for your brain. Stop shaming yourself for having complaining thoughts, and simply work not to give the complaining storyteller a voice, so that you can see and hear the thought and use it to remember to ask powerful questions. The questions you ask will turn around what your brain is thinking about and take it from judgement, comparison and resentment to gratitude, curiosity and admiration. This is where we actually are able to learn and rewire the thought patterns in our brain.
I only talk about things I have had huge struggles in, and I am not an expert in the sense that I have a fancy degree or certification. My authority on these topics comes from experiencing these struggles first hand regularly my entire life, and finally reaching breaking point until I was able to discover what actually works and works on the spot to turn my life around. I hope this is helpful for you and I can’t wait to hear from you. Click subscribe, send me a message on my website theradicalimperfectionist.com or Instagram and check out other resources. If you keep doing this work, you will grow in leaps and bounds and see so much dramatic change. Just a few minutes a day will make an impact. You are here for a reason, but you need to know what it is you want in life. Noticing your story so that you can figure out what you want is a blessing even if it has not seemed so for a long time. I hope you have a weekend that is full of laughter, fun and taking each moment with gratitude and space to see the truth and empower yourself. You will never be perfect. That’s never been the point. Until next week my friends, this is Holly Ann Kasper, the Radical Imperfectionist.