How to reconnect with yourself

Video Transcript:

Hello. I’m Dr. Diely Pichardo-Johansson, board certified physician, author of eleven books and life coach. I’m also a happily married wife to my soulmate, mother of four children, including kids with special needs and cancer survivor.

Welcome to video number two in the series of self-reinvention. You do not need to watch these videos in order. The first video was just an introduction to let people know about my story— meeting my soulmate against all prognosis after being a divorced mother of four and all that.

The three steps of self-reinvention. To refresh your memory. Those three steps are: First, you need to reconnect with yourself, with your truth. Number two, you need to know exactly what you want and gain clarity. And number three is removing the blocks you may have to achieve those dreams or goals.

First of all, why is so important that we reconnect with ourselves? Why do we need to learn about this? Isn’t it natural that we’re connected to ourselves? Not really. Over time, as we grow up, we need to suppress who we really are. We need to get into roles in order to fit in, to be loved, to be accepted by our parents or, or the significant figures in our lives.

We may take the roles of good girls who have to be the achievers,and perfect girls who have to do everything to a standard, and we live through checklist of milestones we need to accomplish. We make, take the role of Amazons. “I don’t care. People cannot hurt me because I do not let people into my heart.”

We may take the role of nurturers who sacrifice everything we ever want to do on behalf of someone else. And the bottom line, you would be surprised—I know by my own experience—how much energy does it take and steals away from our lives when we are constantly telling lies to ourselves.

What lies do we tell ourselves? We lie all the time about what we want and what we don’t want. My favorite type of lie used to be the lie of omission, when I would refuse to accept something in my life wasn’t working. I was a good girl, you know, I didn’t complain. I had to be thankful for what I had. I grew up in a third world country. I was lucky to eat!

But the truth is that when we don’t speak the truth to ourselves, that takes a huge amount of energy to be able to keep that under control on the wraps.

The other type of lie we tell to ourselves all the time is suppressing things we don’t want to remember. And a piece of warning here, there is an extreme level of this that is called dissociation. People who have completely forgotten big chunks of their past, or people who live in a state of detachment (when you think that whatever is happening to you is not really happening to you, is happening to someone else and you’re witnessing it from a distance). The extreme version often can be a sign of trauma. And if that’s your case, I strongly recommend that you seek professional help.

An Exercise on reconnection:

I want you to close your eyes and ask yourself the first question. How do I feel? Am I sad? Am I scared? Am I angry? Am I regretting something? What is the predominant feeling? Imagine that your whole body is a storage container and one of the compartments of that storage container is joy, one is sadness, one is anger in one is fear. Where do you feel those? In my case, I feel most of my feelings in my chest.  Joy, I feel it in my heart. Sadness, I feel it as a band around my chest. Anger goes more in my throat while fear goes more in my stomach. Can you feel those four feelings? Sometimes you have them all simultaneously.

Can you score those four feelings? I would say that right now my joy is at an eight. I have some sadness at about four. The same can be said about anger and fear.

And now we are going to call that your Inner Thermostat. Your homework number one is going to be to create a habit of every day—ideally twice a day—to stop, pause whatever you’re doing and ask yourself, “How am I really feeling?” The only way we can solve a problem is if we know what the problem is. So first we need to find out what is your favorite feeling. Is it a negative feeling? Is it a positive feeling? What is the baseline of your life? What is the background music of your life?

(Speaking of Music): Tuning yourself with music:

I have music that’s soothing, for when I am stressed out and anxious. Actually, I start with high music that matches my level of anxiety and then the music slows down and brings me down. And that’s just an example. There’s music that can bring you up to a more joyful state. There is, there is music that matches anger, so you can express it as opposed to suppress it.

Please grab pen and paper:

This is the moment when you want to take some paper and pen because the rest of the video is an exercise.

We cannot go anywhere if we don’t know where we are. In this exercise, you’re going to get to know yourself a little better, and you’re going to ask the following questions and write them down.

How do I feel? Your four storage, compartments. What is my score of joy, anger, sadness, regret? Is there a predominant feeling of guilt or shame? What is my baseline? You want bonus points? How am I feeling in the different areas of my life? You may be very satisfied in your career level and not in your love level, or vice versa. So you’re going to ask yourself the truth. How is my level of that is fashion in all the different areas of my life.

And then the step number two, we’re going to train ourselves in this art of speaking the truth to ourselves. You may want to take COVID, or you may want to take something that is less important. Make sure it’s not the biggest trauma of your life. But take one situation of your life that’s botherering. It could be a conflict with a coworker, could be a conflict with your partner. You’re going to write on the top of a page in your journal: “The truth and nothing but the truth.” And you are going to write there exactly how you feel; all those truths that you have not dared to tell anybody? Exactly how you feel. Are you angry about what happened now or are you really carrying resentment from 10 years back? Are you upset about this mess or are you upset about 500 messages you didn’t process before? Are you responsible for part of this? Is there anything that you wish you could have done different?

Be brutally honest and answer what do you really feet. What do you really regret not having done? Only when we are speaking the truth to ourselves, we can free all that energy that’s trapped there, to be able to move to our goals, our dreams; what we really want to make happen.

And before we fix anything, we need to admit what’s not working.

So that’s your homework for today. If you’re having trouble doing this by yourself, feel free to send me a message. Send me a message if you think you need help, clarify, reconnecting with yourself, clarifying what you want.

So what’s on the menu for the following videos? In the next video, we are going to talk about what we really want. If you want bonus points for this homework start, when you are talking about what you don’t want and speaking the truth in your journal, translate that to positive. What’s the opposite of that, what do you really want? And that can help you get jump started for the next video.

So I. I wish these videos were longer. I have so much to tell you there’s so much that I could share with you. If you liked this video, please repost it. Help me share it, spread the word. And if you need more help send me a message. I’ll see you in two weeks. Bye.