Welcome to the couples healing podcast where you’ll get the tools for him to overcome his addiction for her to find healing from the pain that it causes her. And for you to heal your relationship and come back together after porn addiction, I hope that you enjoy and subscribe. Hi, everyone, This is Sam Tielemans. And I want to welcome you back to another episode of the couples healing podcast. And today I want to share with you a trick that I was thinking about today that can help you heal from addiction and trauma without work. And I know that’s kind of a strange title for this episode, I couldn’t think of a better way to describe this. And I want to help you with this little shift that if you made it would change your experience in the process of healing. So the point that I want to make here is that the words that we use matter, and they affect our experience. In fact, there was a study that I heard about where they took two groups of people who watched a car crash. And the researchers went to the one group and said, How fast do you think the car was going? When it ran into the other car, and the verb that he chose was ran into? And the people said, I don’t know, about 35 miles an hour, they took another group of people who watched the same exact car crash and they asked that group of people, how fast do you think the car was going when it smashed into the other car, there was only a one word difference, I guess, too. And the first one ran into one verb difference ran into versus smashed. And the group of people who heard the word smashed, rated the speed as being higher than the group who heard the words ran into. It’s a fascinating study, because it describes perfectly. The concept that I want to share with you today is that words truly do matter. And they affect our experience. And so often we don’t recognize the words that we tell ourselves, the way that we describe things, changes our physiology, it changes our emotional experience of an event, just because of how we are framing the event or the experience in and of itself, doing nothing else. So how do you heal from an addiction and trauma that it causes the spouse and improve the relationship without work? It all comes down to a single little strategy that I want to share with you right now. And it’s simply changing the lens through which you see these events, or in other words, using different words to describe the experience that you’re going to be going through to describe the path. So does it take work? Or does it take action? I prefer to think about think of it in terms of action, it’s not frantic activity. It’s not overwhelming amounts of work that you have to do. But it takes thoughtful and deliberate actions. And so this is crucial in my mind in terms of helping people make this very small shift in the language that they use. And this is just one example. There’s lots of different little language patterns that you can change how you talk to yourself, how do you see certain events, the way that we speak to ourselves and others, again, changes our experience. So this is one very small tweak that you can make, they can change how you feel when you think about walking down this path. So if you think about this idea, does it take work to sit there quietly for 10 minutes and meditate? No, I don’t think it does. I think it takes planning. It does does take hard work to that No. But if you think about it as this is going to be so difficult. This is going to be a lot of work for me to meditate, then your experience of meditation is going to be less fulfilling than if you approached it in more of a neutral frame. If you think about meditation as something that you can do to unwind, I’m going to go meditate to unwind, I’m going to go meditate to be more centered. Instead of I got to go work to do this thing. There’s a completely different experience of the same event. So does it take work? No. Does it take planning? Yes. Another thing you might say as well, okay, if somebody say going to eat healthy, good meditation is massive. I think it’s so helpful for people in not only in the healing, addiction and trauma healing space, but like anybody in general, I think meditation is so critical to help us to recenter to get clear on what’s going on inside of us to then be able to take appropriate action to help us move forward and what other whatever path we’re on. If somebody’s thinking about, well, I want to eat healthy. Does it take a lot of work to sit down and eat a salad? No, I don’t think it does. Does it take planning to get the right things at the store? Yes. Does it take planning to prepare the meal? Yes. But using the word planning instead of work again changes your experience while you’re doing the process.
And sometimes when people hear this kind of an idea of like, Okay, well maybe it does take work, or what if it is hard to go to the store to plan to get the kids in the car seat to do this thing to do that like that takes a lot of work. Another little trick mental trick that can be helpful is to isolate these things and focus on the step that’s in front of you. Because again, if you break this whole thing down and think, Okay, I need, does it take work for me to sit in my air conditioned car and drive for seven minutes to the grocery store? No. Does it take work for me to take my child out of the car seat, put her in the car, put her on the cart, and push her into the store? No. But if I think of everything that I have to do in the entire process, then it’s very easy to feel overwhelmed. And to feel like it does take a lot of work, instead of just simply isolating each event, mentally and focusing on the step that’s in front of you. So it is when it comes to improving our relationship, overcoming addiction processing, through trauma, all of these things take energy, they take focus, they take action, and framing it in terms of action instead of work again, makes the process so much lighter, because it does require intention. And we do have to act. Let me give you another. Let me give you one more example of this. This was like a fascinating study. It’s in the book called switch. They took two groups of people, two groups of women who were housekeepers at hotels, and they took one group of women and said, okay, we just want you to monitor your weight over the next four weeks, we just want to see, we’re just doing a study on on people’s weight and does it fluctuate, we just want you to pay attention to your weight over the next four weeks and just notice any changes and mark those down? And then the women said, Okay, and then they took the next group of women and said the same thing. And they said, By the way, did you realize that when you come to work, when you show up at your job? Did you realize that you’re actually exercising your body because your heart rates get up above, and I can’t remember how many beats per minute, but they get up above 90 beats a minute, or whatever they said. And once you do that you break into this realm of you’re actually exercising your body when you do that. Did you realize that, and all of them are like, No, I didn’t realize that at all. And so what they did was they monitored these two groups of women. And over the course of four weeks, what they found was that the women who were told just pay attention to your weight and see if it fluctuates, they didn’t lose any weight. They didn’t ask them to change anything in their schedule. They didn’t ask them to exercise or didn’t do anything differently with their eating habits. They just said, notice your weight note track your weight. The second group of women didn’t do any additional changes, either. All they did was when they went to, to their work went to their job. They simply kept in mind, I’m exercising right now. And as they did what they did on on their shift. Over the course of the four weeks, they actually lost weight. And the researchers attributed this specifically and solely to the fact that when they thought about going to work that they were exercising their brain and their body responded in kind, our mind has so much power has unbelievable amounts of power, the way that we think about things, changes our feelings in our body, they’ve actually done this with exercise as well, where they have one group of people lifting barbells, doing curls with barbells, they have another group of people visualizing lifting barbells. And the difference. While there was some difference, the people who were actually lifting the weights, of course gained more muscle mass, but the people who didn’t even touch a weight, gained muscle mass through their visualization of the activity. It’s so interesting to me. And the reason is because our brain can create an experience by simply thinking about it and visualizing it, it releases the same neuro chemicals in our body into our body from our brain by thinking about an experience. This is what happens when people get triggered into trauma, the event isn’t actually happening. In many cases, they’re re experiencing an old event by watching the movie of it play out in their mind’s eye. And as a result, their heart rate increases, their palms get sweaty, they start to breathe more shallow, their body physiologically changes just by thinking about the event. And so what I want to leave you all with the purpose of this episode I was thinking about this morning, I just wanted to jump on and share a very short episode with a little tactic that can make a big difference.
The way that you think about and consider and frame experiences will change how you experience them. And so going back to this grocery store analogy, or if you think about Okay, in order for me to heal from my addiction, or in order for me to heal from the trauma that I’ve experienced or for us to improve our relationship. If you think to yourself, it’s gonna take a lot of work already. you’re setting yourself up to feel a certain way while you do the process. But if you think to yourself, this is going to take intention is going to is is going to take some planning. And I’m going to need to take some actions with this, the feeling that I get when I think about the word work, the feeling that I experience in my body is it feels heavy, there’s a connotation to any word that we use. However, when I think about I’m going to take action, that word inspires me, I feel motivation when I think about taking action. Or if I think about planning, I have this kind of a mental picture or this internal image of very precise, deliberate decisions that I’m making. That will have a big difference in my day to day and my week to week. Again, it has a totally different feeling in my body. So what I want to encourage all of you to do, as you’re thinking about your process, wherever you are in the process, it’s simply a matter of taking the next step that’s in front of you. Going back to this silly analogy, or the the example that I used earlier about, okay, going to the store, getting your kid in the car seat, taking him out of the car seat, getting the salad at the store, or coming home, putting the crotons in it, like if you put too many things together at once in your mind, it becomes overwhelming. So instead of thinking about all the things that you ever have to do, whether it’s in this area of your life, or in another area of life altogether, instead of thinking about everything that needs to be done, it’s so helpful to do two things, number one, use different words. Number two, break up these two dues into a break up and isolate these two dues in your mind. Because if you can simply unpack them, and sort through them and say, This is what I need to focus on right now, then the task becomes so much more manageable. I can personally attest to this, that when I think about something that’s on my plate, and all of the sub categories and the related activities that go with it, sometimes I just feel like I don’t even want to start this, I’m going to push this off, I’m going to get on my phone, I’m going to just watch some video, I’m going to delay this, because I see it as too big of a task. So number one, using different words is crucial. Number two, separating out the tasks that you need to do. So they don’t feel overwhelming. So if you think about, Okay, today, what I want to do to build my relationship, you might be able to think of a handful of things. But if you think this is the one thing that I want to do next, when I come home, I’m going to tell my wife that I’m really happy to see her, it’s good to be home, because I was looking forward to coming home and spending time with her. I just want to give her a little bit of positive, just like have a positive conversation. That feels doable. And then if I think about after I do that, okay, what next might I want to do? Well, maybe I’ll just sit on the couch, and we’ll spend some time together. And then maybe this, maybe I’ll do this for myself individually, maybe unwind in this way. But breaking things up into little tasks can go such a long way, especially when you use different words to describe that task. So I hope this has been helpful for you. And what I would encourage you to do is think about what are the actions in front of you, that will lead to the results that you want in your life. So if you’re picking the category of addiction, or trauma or the relationship or personal growth, or spirituality, or whatever the case may be, I would encourage you to think about what’s the next step in front of you. I want to leave you with one more experience one more little personal story. for about eight months now I’ve been thinking to myself, I need to spend more time doing spiritually related things. So I want to do more reading prayer. I’m a Christian. So I believe in God, he’s a it’s it’s a pillar in my life yet, I found myself not really spending that much time doing the things that I wanted to do, but I just wasn’t doing, whether it was reading scriptures or praying or reflecting and pondering. And I identified the reason why I hadn’t been doing it was number one, because I did not plan out when I was going to do those things. I always thought to myself, okay, at night, when I’m done with the day, when I’m laying down, that’s when I’ll pull out my my book to read. Well, that’s when I’ll do such and such activity. But the problem is I never did it at night.
So I would invite you to think about what category of life that you want to focus on. Whether it’s addiction or the trauma or healing your relationship or any other category, whether it’s spirituality, or financial or personal growth and development, whatever the category is, I want you to think about what’s the outcome that you want? What do you want life to ultimately look like? And then if you reverse engineer the path, let’s say I want to be free from addiction, okay, so let me think about all the things that are necessary for that to happen. And then I’m going to start with one of them. I’m going to pick one thing. And the way that I’m going to think about that thing is when I do this activity like meditation, I’m going to recenter and I’m gonna focus on being able to calm the noise in my mind. So I can find peace. If you frame it in that way, in a benefit driven way, you’re much more likely to follow through on that thing. But if it’s like I got a carve out this time, and I don’t know, I’m going to do this. And this is going to be a lot of work, because my mind is never calm. And it’s hard for me to, it’s hard for me to just not think that that is creating this like resistance in and of itself just by how you’re framing it. So I’d encourage you think about what’s the next thing that you want to do. If it’s really healing from the trauma, same thing, maybe it’s meditation, maybe it’s journaling, maybe it’s speaking with a friend, maybe it’s having a positive conversation with your spouse, whatever the thing might be, I want to encourage you to just focus on the one thing, think about it in terms that will empower you and excite you in terms of, or at the very least something that’s neutral. But ideally, we’re finding words that describe these events, or these things and how we want to feel in positive ways. And then once you follow through, you’re going to be able to make it so going back to the story or the analogy with the, with the the housekeepers, just by thinking I’m going to work and I’m exercising me going to work is exercising my body, the mind will make it so. And if you say I’m going to meditate for 10 minutes, so I can find peace. Just putting that intention out there. And keeping that in your mind while you’re doing it, your mind will make that experience happen in reality, because that’s the intention that you’re putting out there. And that’s the focus that you have. So I would encourage you guys to give that a shot over the next week. I hope this has been helpful. This is a small little, I don’t know, tip strategy that’s been tremendously helpful for me. And so I wanted to pass it along to you guys in hopes that this small little thing can help do something will help make things easier for you as you’re on a journey of getting yourselves into a better place and healing your relationship. So thanks for being with me today. I look forward to speaking to you guys next week. Take care. Wait before you go, I’m offering free access for my podcast listeners to a course I created. So make sure you go to couples healing.org so you can get some tools to start the healing process individually and in your relationship. Or if you want even more support and you’d like to work with me directly. You can contact me with the info that’s on that website as well. I’m excited for you to make progress on your journey.