Hey Everybody, welcome to the Clouded Compass podcast. This is Laurie, I'm your host, I am a social worker, in a lot of other things. And I'm here to talk to us today about one of my favorite frameworks for understanding what to keep and what to let go of. And it's I frame it in the terms of shedding, not shoulding.

So if you look back at your life, and I want you to ask yourself how you arrived at the beliefs that you have? In other words, where did you learn these things from? Then I want you to ask if you agree with them or not. Because most of the time we live our lives in the land of Should: Should do this, I should do this, I should do that option, do that, shouldn't do this, oh, my God, I should I should really pay attention to my own mental health, blah, blah, blah.

Yep, we should do a lot of things. Guess what, The world ain't perfect.

But where did those values come from? The reality is, if you really set an intention, and were meaningful and purposeful, and those things had value to you, it wouldn't be a question you would do them, there would be no shoulds. The disconnect is between I should get use my rational brain that yep, that's a great idea.

And where you're actually ready to go in terms of your readiness, willingness, and skill level, I believe I can't and I, I'm getting them wrong, but but your readiness and willingness often don't match the should. When that happens, we beat ourselves up. What if we, instead of shoulding, What if we start shedding, stop, shoulding.

Start shedding the belief that I'm only going to be okay, if I do what I should stop, start shedding the belief that I can only be successful because of what I should do, stop shoulding, start shedding the belief that I should do what's best for everybody else, start shedding the belief that I should do it because X, Y and Z told me to, start shedding the belief that I should do these things because I want to be a good person. That is a motivator. It is not the most successful motivator because like I said, you beat yourself up. And that's really not how behavior change works, you are not going to get to where you're going if you don't give yourself a little bit of support.

So what if we started shedding all of these things? What if we started asking instead: Do I want to? Do I have to? Do I need to? Do I want to get out of bed today? Because my depression is bad. And yeah, I know it's gonna be good if I go out walking, I really should do my physical activity. But my mind and body are saying something completely different to me today. And I'm not listening. Well, somebody with chronic illness should be able to walk around a mall for two hours!?, if you have chronic pain, and it is screaming at you, why the fuck would you? Why should you? Why should you exacerbate that?

That is not to say and more importantly, when you don't force yourself to do things you don't want to do, you're not as resentful. you don't betray yourself, you actually start maybe considering that your own internal compass has some value, you listen to yourself and when you are then in a safe place to change internally it will happen as a byproduct of your nervous systems regulation, your thought processes etc.

But when we look externally for option x y&z we need to really get clear and match that up with what we what we're ready to do, what we're willing to do and what we're able to do. Because if you should get a college degree and you've never graduated high school, okay, maybe, but what is it that that thing, again whatever you 'should' be doing, what is the meaning that that has for you? what value does it have that you should have and so let's take for example weight loss you know, I should lose 10 pounds, why should lose a lot because I had a whole year of PTSD where I ate all year because of my emotional dysregulation even if I'm not happy with my weight now I'm actually a health at every size person. I particularly am just not comfortable physically with the si

Hello, everybody. Thanks for joining Clouded Compass. Welcome back in last week's episode, I spoke about women in prison. And I want to talk today about our own internal prison, which most people I have met in life have. And it's such a fascinating thing for me to talk about. Because there are so many angles to discuss it from one of the angles that I will jump into is the fact that so many people are living in prison like conditions in their brain.

Here's how I know. It looks like playing small, it looks like self doubt. It looks like low self esteem. It looks like depression, anxiety, pick your diagnoses, it looks like chronic pain, it looks like fear, it looks like people pleasing, hyper vigilance, etc, and so on. And often, the internal prison is a result of very, very, very good survival skills, skills that taught us how to survive in threatening environments. And I'm not, we don't need to all be living in a war, but I'm talking about emotional threads. And so this would this is another way for saying internal censorship, in case but I call it internal imprisonment. Because it is because we're held hostage because we're in the basement of the floor of shame, basement of shame on the floor, without our own blankets, and our own heat in our own windows and our own life and light in sustenance and nurturing and nourishment.

Why? Because we withhold it from ourselves.

Why? Because that's what we were taught to do.

Why? Because we live in a culture that says to the individual, you only have worth if you can do something for me. And that's a really blatant way to put it. But when you think about the systems we work in, we're in a very capitalistic society. And I have no issues with capitalism, when I have issues with though, is rampant gross, dehumanizing capitalism.

I have issues with a patriarchy not because I hate men, but because it dehumanizes men and women, I have issues with racism, not because it dehumanizes a certain population, but because it dehumanizes us all. And with those conditions, we I have issues with white supremacy not because I hate white people. I am a white person, and I am surrounded by white people, I love many white people. It is the fact of what that system does to us all.

And so let's talk about that. Let's talk about what freedom is there. When we continue to allow conditions that try to erase us. If you go on social media, what is the big? What's the big? How do we know we've made it in the world? Well, we've got a viral social media posts. Ladies and gentlemen, that does not mean that what that person had to say had value. That means that it had a collective vote of affirmation, much like intellection, it does not mean that you're suddenly more valuable to the world. In fact, in many ways, you might be less valuable. But that's neither here nor there. And no, you're never less valuable. Kim Kardashian has no more value than you do. And furthermore, I wouldn't want her life. There's not I don't want to live on camera, I just have zero interest.

And so when you're trying to push to be, quote, unquote, successful, I want you to ask yourself what that looks like for you. What does success look like for you? So I asked my clients when they come in? Where do you want to be in one to three months? What do you want your life to look like? What do you want it to feel like? How do you want to be different? So that we have an intention. So if success for you is getting a financial goal, we've talked before about goals and expectations, set the goal. But let's let go of the attachment to the expectation because that is where we start to have shame.

If your goal is a million dollars, and you make it there and you think you're better because of it. That's I don't know if that's really the value of the million dollars. If you make a million dollars, and you make 100 towards that million, and you feel a shift in yourself, within, and you can pay off your debts and all that stuff, that's, that to me, I wou

Hey everybody, thanks for joining the Clouded Compass Podcast. I'm Laurie, your host, social worker of 20 years. Today, I'm going to talk about the criminal justice system and the women in prison. At the time of this recording, it is Martin Luther King Day. And I'm not sure how much you know about that person, but he risked incredibly great things, to share his message with us. And I think his message is relevant to all of us. So it isn't just a black person's holiday, it's a holiday, inviting us to pause and and look at, you know, are we getting the results we want, and can we do better? We can do better. And here's how.

So yesterday, I went to a rally at the Huron Valley Women's Correctional Facility, I always get that name wrong. And I have been wanting to work with women in prison for a long time, I'm involved briefly on the outskirts with a project called the Compassionate Prisoners Project. And I learned about that through Gabor Mate's work and they go in and they do trauma informed classes that are healing for the for the prisoners. And that's a wonderful thing, I want to be involved in that. So I've been looking for ways to be involved with women in prison.

And the other reason I wanted to be involved with women in prison is because I don't know who knows this about me, but I could very well have been there at any point in my life, had one circumstance been different, mostly the color of my skin, my socioeconomic status, my social location, my skills, or lack thereof, etc, and so on. There are very many reasons that I could just as easily have been behind those bars. I'm grateful that I'm not, but that does not make me a better person. I'm gonna say that again, because I know what some people say. Because I'm not in jail doesn't mean that I've done life any better.

It means that I had resources, and I had support. And I had direction. And I had somebody showing me the way on how to do things differently. But you know, many women in prison are in prison for protecting themselves. And we don't talk about that. We don't talk about these women in domestic violence situations with complex intergenerational trauma behind them, not to mention environmental degradation and dehumanization. Say they're in a domestic violence situation, and they pull a gun on a guy to protect themselves. And then there's 30 to 40 years. Not only that, not only are you then punished for protecting yourself, you are thrown into a system and given a number and thrown away behind closed doors.

And if you're a woman, you have children, you have families, you have communities. And when you take a woman out of their community, you take the community out of the woman and the community. I really have no interest in where you stand on the prison justice system, the criminal justice system, whether people deserve to be in there or not. I'd rather talk about how this results and how we can do better. Regardless, I mean, if you think people need to be locked up, that's fine. Come to me with why. And then also, give me the evidence to your point of view, and if you disagree with me, I will demand that you just disagree with me in a respectful manner, instead of just saying you're full of shit, and you're wrong, and you know, you don't know anything, you know, kind of mean terms that we're taught to say to somebody when we don't agree with them.

So it's okay that we disagree, but I'm going to talk about the value that we are losing out on. So women behind bars are raising families from behind bars, believe it or not, they get out with a felony which impacts the job abilities they have with really not a lot of support because they've been isolated on purpose for many years. And believing that they are broken and not able to be repaired. And because of the experience they've gone through and because of the torture, the the the human rights violations happening inside of these places. They're coming out and believe that they're worth less and with less val

Hello, everybody, welcome back to the cloud campus podcast. This is Laurie your host, I'm here to talk about social conditions our well being, and how we relate to ourselves in the world.

Today, I'm going to talk about the behavioral health perspective of internal and external circumstances. So I'm a behavioral health specialist, I've been a social worker for 20 years, I've studied human behavior. And I have been taught to I'm not even going to say, fix human behavior, although that's what many of my jobs have required, or asked of me to do. I'm gonna say more importantly, observe, and assess, and relate and provide interventions for and etc, and so on. And that's incredible. Like, I love my job. I love the clients I work with. And I've gotten some really good results with people.

Here's the concern that I have. I'm in 2019, I was hospitalized for suicide attempt. And it was a in 2019, it's 2022. I've done some healing. I know now that that was a direct result of a provider. In fact, multiple providers continuing to neglect, what I told them was the concern. They didn't listen, they didn't hear me. And they didn't want to, because they have their own preconceived notions, it's actually called implicit bias on what my problem was, and how it needed to be fixed.

That is not how I practice today. In fact, in that suicidal hospitalization, I was in the padded room. And I'm not going to be ashamed of that. Because my emotions were so, this is what happens when somebody isn't heard and listened to him. So when you see people fighting on the streets, when you when you see, you know, gang violence, and when you see powerful men dismissing you and devaluing you, and humanizing you to the point where you feel yourself, you don't deserve to exist. That is not an individual problem anymore. That is a social condition, it is a symptom of how we are living our lives today.

So when I was in the padded room, and the nurses and the staff could not get to me, they refused to be medication. And they left me in there to in a severe panic attack. And if you've ever had a panic attack, you know how incredibly terrifying they are, you know, how explosive they can be, you know, how just emotive they can be. And so that's actually also called rape. It's also called a tantrum. It's also called, misbehaving, it's called a shit ton of things. But what it really is, what really was happening to me that was that I was in such incredible fear in I was in a fight, flight, freeze, or fawn response. And the response I was exhibiting to the world was fight. And internally, at that same moment, in my own internal navigation system, something came through, even as I was exhibiting those behaviors. And it said to me, you really need to get clear on what's going on here.

There is no one no one, no one in this world that knows what you've been through.

They don't know how you experienced it.

They don't know how you relate it to it. They don't have that information.

Therefore, they only have, let's say 50% of the information, meaning whatever assessments are being made about you, this is the voice in my head clear his day. You might want to reconsider how much value you place on other people's beliefs and expectations and shoulds because a they don't know half the information, and they do not have your best interest in mind, so you fucking better. You better have your best interest in mind because they don't have it. If you're going to survive this. You must.

You must start listening to yourself instead of the people telling you what your problems are. Now, at that point I was, I was pretty clear about what my problems are. And nobody was listening. And I propose that so many of us in this world also know exactly what our problem is. And nobody's listening. Here's why I propose that because I've been working with you for 20 years, I've been working with the public for 20 years coming to me sharing with me their deepest, darkest secrets, and shames an