Making Friends with Our Villains

The infinitely wise Brooke Castillo says some mornings are just like waking up carrying a heavy purse. I think we can all relate. Whatever negative emotion fills your heavy purse, sometimes, in fact, about half the time, those emotions, those villains are going to be with us. It’s just being human. We experience a range of emotions, that’s what our brains do!

Today, as I rushed around holding babies, trying to finish putting laundry away, dropping things, comforting screaming kids, probably not being all that nice to my husband, attempting with all my will to keep my commitment to myself to sit at my desk to work by 9 am, I slowly became aware that I was carrying a heavy purse. Today it felt like tightness in my chest.

Thank goodness my best friend is a life coach and I was due to catch up with her anyways. She is a phenomenal coach and such a supportive friend. It didn’t take long for us to be talking on the phone until we got around to some coaching on the heavy purse, the villain that had been weighing me down.

She encouraged me to describe the tightness, what color it was, what it looked like.

It felt like really tight leather. It felt like someone was pulling ruthlessly at both ends, like if you flicked it it would make a very loud noise.

I could feel the tightness creeping up my throat, it came out as tears.

She asked what that tightness was trying to tell me, what it needed.

I knew in that moment, it was fear and it just wanted to be heard and allowed.

It reminded me of my three-year-old when I am trying to talk with an adult. Inevitably he ends up screaming because I am not listening to him. That’s what was happening. The more I didn’t listen to my body, to the fear, to the tightness the tighter and tighter it got. I think it’s been building for days.

We just sat with it. I let it be. I acknowledged, yes, I am afraid.

It lightened. It was still tight but less so.

I said that I thought I just needed to allow it. As a coach, I know that there are only three things we can do with our emotions: allow, resist, and react. I had been resisting the fear and now I gave in to allowing it.

Now that I was allowing my fear I was able to see that it was coming from the incredible weight of my thought that “I need to figure out our financial situation right now”. I have been pushing for weeks I think with this immense pressure and time deadline slowly building in my head. That thought pattern, the villain, slowly building on itself, reinforcing itself.

My coach encouraged me to be curious and ask if that was really true, did I need to figure it all out on my own? What did figuring it out mean anyway? Does it need to happen right in this moment? What will happen if it doesn’t?

Of course, these questions revealed to me that this villain, this sentence in my brain of needing to do everything myself and do it now or else, is not serving me. As I take a step back from them, let them go, the fear, the villain morphs.

It’s so funny because, like many villains in fairy tales, when they finally are able to be heard out, to receive some love, they morph into something not so scary.

It’s somewhat strange but the leather is more like a soft yellow blanket now that a childhood version of me is holding for comfort. That version of me does represent a kind of childhood fear and allowing that version of me to be 100% ok and to practice radical self-love by loving it too because it is part of me, the tight leather has turned into soft safety for that part of me that will inevitably be afraid of things in the world.

I feel comforted by my radical love for all of me. Fear is ok. It’s one of the villains of every fairy tale. Yes, I will learn from it. I want to create a sustainable financial situation for my family. In reality, the best way to do so is out of love not fear. I will reinforce my heroes, the thought patterns that will build the dream, and go from there. One of those heroes is that I love ALL of myself, even my villains.

Thanks to my coach and best friend for journeying with me.

I want you to know, you don’t have to journey alone! Please don’t! Reach out and let’s explore your whole fairy tale, especially your villains!