January 27, 2024 • 20 mins
In this episode, Dr. Little delves deep into the habit of asking 'why' — a habit that, while seemingly innocuous, can often lead to an unhealthy spiral of suffering when left unchecked.
Discover how introspection can turn into a problematic loop, leading to anxiety and distress when answers remain elusive. Learn about the profound power of radical acceptance, the importance of coping with challenges instead of seeking elusive root causes, and focusing on the 'how' rather than the 'why.' Dr. Little shares valuable insights through patient stories and personal experiences.
Suffering is optional. And this episode is all about breaking free from unnecessary suffering fueled by incessant questioning and uncertainty, whether the issues are physical or psychological. Learn the difference between pain and suffering, and how to accept, manage, and live a fulfilling life despite inevitable pain.
Be it a physical ailment, a mental health issue, or an emotional crisis, Dr. Little encourages us to shift our perspective and redirect our energy away from the endless search for answers and towards solutions. She encourages us to accept our reality and work with it rather than against it.
Discover the long-term healing benefits of radical acceptance - a journey from pain to acceptance to empowerment - and the critical role it plays in easing our suffering. This episode is an invitation to a more powerful, effective approach to mental and physical wellness, making it a must-listen for anyone seeking holistic health and peace of mind.
Want to find more ways to reduce stress, anxiety and perfectionism?
Get my free guide: “Five Steps to Finding Calm in the Chaos”
Join my tribe at www.laurielittle.com OR Inner Healing Intelligence Private Facebook Group to connect, ask questions or suggest topics.
Music: https://www.purple-planet.com
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Welcome back, everyone. Today, we're going to be talking about a topic that
I see so frequently in my patients.
And full disclosure, I struggle with a lot myself in my own therapy and my own life.
So I'm coming to you today talking to you, but just as equally talking to myself.
(00:20):
And in fact, in most episodes, if I'm being really honest, are always an equal
balance of talking to my listeners as well as talking to myself.
Today we're going to be talking about asking the question, why?
Why do I feel this way? Why do I act this way?
Why am I the way that I am? We're going to discuss how some amount of asking
(00:45):
the question why is appropriate,
but what we're really going to discuss is how can we ask ourselves why too often?
Can asking why actually have a drastically negative impact on our mood and our
behaviors and it can really actually keep us in a spiral of suffering?
(01:08):
Today we're going to review how to know if you're asking the question why too
much and what you can do instead. So stay tuned.
Welcome, everyone. My name is Dr. Lori Little, and I'm a clinical psychologist,
mindfulness coach, psychedelic therapist, wife, and mom.
(01:30):
My passion is helping people learn to listen to and trust their inner healing
intelligence, that part of us that is always moving towards health and growth.
Ultimately, when we allow our inner healing intelligence to be our guide,
we can stop looking outside of ourselves for answers.
(01:51):
We can experience more joy, more peace, and more connection with others than
we may have ever thought possible.
Although it may sound simple, it is by no means easy.
Join me as we discuss the many challenges and opportunities that listening to
your inner healing intelligence can bring to your life.
(02:16):
You,
All right, let's get into this one today. Take a moment to ask yourself,
how often do I ask myself the question, why am I the way that I am?
For those of us who are naturally inquisitive, and we just like to learn new
things, or we are introspective,
(02:38):
maybe we've been in a lot of therapy or coaching in the past,
then you might find that you ask this question of yourself often.
In general, of course, it is helpful to a certain point to ask,
why am I feeling this way?
So for example, if I get a sore throat, a fever, and a runny nose,
(03:00):
it really would be helpful to ask why.
Why? Because then I could find out maybe I have COVID and need to stay home
and isolate, or maybe I need an antibiotic in order to get better.
These are valuable whys.
But what if you have an illness or a pain that is not so easy to figure out why?
(03:24):
What if there could be a hundred reasons why you're feeling the way that you're feeling?
And what if your pain is actually more emotional or behavioral instead of physical?
How can asking why actually make things worse?
Today, we're going to explore the negative aspects of asking why as it relates
(03:45):
to both our physical and our mental well-being.
And we're also going to talk about what we can do instead. did.
First, let's talk about our physical ailments with a patient example.
Take my patient Mary, of course, not her real name.
Mary was entering menopause and was starting to notice all sorts of changes in her body.
(04:09):
So she noticed some of the typical night sweats and some mood swings,
maybe changes in her energy.
But the most worrisome issue that Mary was struggling was her significant changes in her sleep. sleep.
Mary reported that she'd always been a pretty decent sleeper,
(04:30):
never had much problems with her sleep, but out of nowhere, she started to have
difficulty staying asleep at night.
She was able to fall asleep, but it was really the staying asleep that started to become problematic.
So she reported she would wake up at one or two in the morning and just lay
in bed for hours, doors staring at the ceiling and really asking, why? Why can't I sleep?
(04:57):
She had heard that menopause, of course, could cause sleep issues,
and she certainly was having some of those other symptoms, but it just seemed so out of the ordinary.
And she started to worry that something else was wrong with her.
So Mary made an appointment with her primary care doctor doctor who couldn't
(05:17):
find anything wrong and suggested that she seek out a sleep specialist.
So she went to the sleep specialist who recommended that she get a sleep study.
And unfortunately, this sort of kicked off a series of months and months of
going from one specialist to another specialist to find the,
(05:40):
what I'll call the root cause of her insomnia.
And she found that the more doctors that she saw, the more differing advice
and medication she was prescribed.
And those medications either didn't work or they worked for a little bit but
then stopped working. They gave her side effects.
(06:01):
And she started to really feel hopeless that her sleep issue was ever going to resolve.
She started to get panicky like, oh my gosh, I'm 50-something years old.
What if this is how it's going to be for the rest of my life?
And it seemed as though her whole world kind of started to revolve around her insomnia.
(06:22):
And she would be researching it, reading books.
And of course, she started to feel depressed because you're scared and you're hopeless.
So she was crying all the time.
And then she started avoiding her friends and isolating. And it just really
trickled down into this huge spiral, which started really because she was asking the question,
(06:48):
why can't I sleep the way I used to sleep?
So again, to be clear, I'm not implying that Mary made a mistake by ever asking the question why.
It's normal. It's understandable and appropriate whenever you have a new symptom or something comes up.
You never struggled with before, of course, we want to ask why.
(07:12):
But notice what happens when the answer why is not readily available.
Mary ended up going down this medical rabbit hole.
And I have to say, in the medical community especially, this is really easy to do.
I'm not picking on physicians or the medical community. Hell,
(07:34):
I'm part to an extent of the medical community.
But even we, even physicians will admit that we don't all see a single symptom
with the same perspective.
So it's very common for three different providers to have three different recommendations
(07:56):
about what's going on and what the patient should do.
So it can be so confusing as a patient to know where to turn and what to do
when they have a new symptom.
By the time Mary got to me, she had been struggling with this for probably over
a year of just depression and anxiety caused by the insomnia.
(08:21):
So what did Mary and I do together that helped her to reduce her suffering,
I encouraged Mary to actually stop asking why and just focus on how she could
better cope with her insomnia.
Sleep in particular is a really funny thing.
There are just so many variables that impact our sleep, both medical and psychological.
(08:46):
But what we know for certain is that anxiety and rumination and stress,
all of these things worsen our sleep.
So the first goal was to just try to reduce those aspects.
So we talked about the importance of noticing when she was asking herself why
(09:10):
she couldn't sleep and shifting that to accepting the fact that she couldn't sleep.
So remember, acceptance is not the same thing as agreement or the power of positive thinking.
It's not pretending that she liked the fact that she couldn't sleep.
It was really just noticing radical acceptances, noticing our reality and letting
(09:36):
go of the need to fight it or to change it.
So when Mary started shifting her mindset to, I may never fully know why this
is happening, but it is happening.
How can I manage it? She really noticed how much more empowered she felt.
One of the things that can also happen with a physical symptom as we go from
(10:00):
doctor to doctor is that we start to lose our sense of feeling empowered and
all of the power, so to speak,
shifts to the doctor or the medication or the treatment,
and we can become this sort of passive recipient.
So it was really empowering for Mary to start focusing on all the things that she could do.
(10:24):
So we practiced breathing exercises.
We practiced mindfulness exercises.
We practiced practice progressive muscle relaxation before bed.
We talked about the importance of increasing her daily activity during the day,
getting more physically active,
going to the gym or taking walks, and socializing, reconnecting with her friends
(10:51):
and the people in her life.
She found that over time, she became more re-engaged in her life.
And so, of course, her mood improved.
When she had nighttime anticipatory anxiety about falling asleep,
which is very common, we talked about the importance of being kind,
(11:14):
being compassionate with herself.
Taking a hot bath or having herbal tea, reading a book, all the things that
she could do to help mind and her body relax.
In time, Mary continued to have mild sleep disruptions, but they were not as
(11:35):
bothersome to her anymore.
And that really was the ultimate goal. As a psychologist,
I'm not going to be able to address any of the medical issues related to her
sleep, but I absolutely helped helped Mary with the more psychological aspects of insomnia.
And when you think about it, there are so many ways that we can feel physically
(11:59):
just shitty, and we don't really have an answer for why.
On a personal level, I struggle with fatigue. Why do I struggle with fatigue?
Maybe it's because of my age. Maybe I don't exercise as much as I should.
Maybe I eat too many carbs. Maybe it's perimenopause.
(12:20):
Maybe it's anxiety or a low-level depression.
Maybe it's my job and work stress. There could literally be a hundred reasons why I have fatigue.
And I, of course, did ask why's to make sure my blood work was okay,
to see if there was anything that my doctors could find out that explains fatigue.
(12:46):
I don't want to ignore a new symptom. I wasn't having this much fatigue before.
So of course, I'm going to start my journey with making sure there isn't an underlying issue.
I am missing. But I know that if I continued to search for the root cause of
my fatigue, thinking that there was one cause,
(13:09):
I would end up seeing a hundred doctors, getting a hundred prescriptions.
And frankly, I just, I really don't want to do that.
So what I'm trying to do now is is shift away from the question of why and focus on radical acceptance.
I don't have to like my fatigue, but I can accept that I just don't have the
(13:33):
same level of energy that I used to.
What can I do health-wise to manage my fatigue to be as healthy as I can be?
And so, of course, that comes with trying to increase my exercise,
trying to increase my nutrition.
It also has a a lot to do with just accepting my limits.
(13:53):
I have new limits now that maybe I didn't used to.
And so when my friends give me shit that I don't feel like going downtown for
dinner on a Wednesday night, because that means I'm going to be home after 10 o'clock.
And I know for regular people, that's not a big deal.
But for me, that exhausts me. And I know that the next day, I'm going to feel exhausted.
(14:17):
So I don't feel guilty about it. I just say, yep, this is who I am now and that's okay.
So if you are struggling with some sort of physical issue, maybe it's a pain,
a physical pain you're having, insomnia or an energy problem,
any kind of physical symptom that you have not yet yet been able to identify a root cause.
(14:41):
Consider if asking yourself why is serving you anymore.
Is asking why only leading you to suffer, to go around in circles like a hamster
on a wheel, is it making the issue worse?
Could learning how to just accept and manage the symptom benefit you?
(15:05):
And if so, ask yourself how.
Another area that we often ask ourselves why is related to our mental health.
Why do I feel depressed? Why am I anxious?
Why do I end up in abusive relationships?
I hear these questions for hours a day, every day as part of my work.
(15:27):
And again, a certain amount of asking why is okay, is understandable, and helpful.
Absolutely can be helpful to understand the nature of your family dynamics growing up.
What did you learn from your role models?
How did you make sense of your experiences as a child? And how is that impacting
(15:49):
how you see the world today?
In fact, many would say that is actually what therapy is, trying to understand
how our past affects our present.
But I would argue that this This is really just only a tiny slice of effective therapy.
I could explore for years, years, the question, why am I the way that I am as
(16:14):
it relates to my childhood?
However, at the end of the day, there are probably a hundred,
maybe a thousand reasons why I struggle with certain issues.
Imagine if by some miracle, I actually could identify all thousand of the reasons
(16:35):
why I struggle with abandonment, for example.
Would that really bring me any closer to my goal of not having fear of abandonment? Probably not.
What I have really found is that understanding why is interesting and mildly
(16:55):
helpful, but it isn't actually very effective at solving the problem.
What's most effective is shifting the attention away from the question why and
focusing more on what am I going to do about it?
How does this issue present itself in my life today?
(17:15):
And what can I do to start working on that?
In order to do that, in order to make that shift, we have to first practice
radical acceptance of whatever the issue is.
As a reminder, radical acceptance is the complete and total allowance of reality.
(17:37):
It's our willingness to give up the need, to let go of the need to make our
reality different than it is.
I don't have to like it. I don't have to approve of it, but I can accept it.
And this is ultimately the path to ease our suffering.
(17:57):
Remember, there is a difference between pain and suffering.
Suffering pain is a natural part of
the human existence pain is unavoidable and
it just comes along with the territory of being
human in fact pain when we think about it is what helps us to learn and to grow
(18:20):
suffering however is optional suffering is when we experience pain pain and
we insist that we shouldn't be in pain,
we insist that we must get rid of it, that we can't tolerate this pain, that's suffering.
By letting go of the need to find an answer, to get an answer to the question of why.
(18:47):
We're moving towards radical acceptance, which is allowing us to be more effective
in dealing with whatever that pain is.
The pain is still going to be present, but we're not going to suffer with it.
Now I'd love to hear from you. Are you a why asker?
Do you notice that you suffer because you spend too much time asking yourself
(19:12):
why and not enough time asking what can I do about it?
I hope that hearing about these ideas can bring you just a little bit bit of
peace into your life, maybe reduce your level of suffering just a tiny bit.
And as always, if you find this difficult or too challenging to make these changes
(19:34):
on your own, please consider seeing a good therapist who can help support and guide you.
Until next time, take good care and I'll see you soon.
Thank you so much for joining me today. If you'd like to learn more,
you can reach me at laurielittle.com where I share additional free resources
(19:54):
and lots of information.
If you enjoyed this episode, it would mean so much to me if you could write a review.
Music.
Welcome back, everyone. Today, we're going to be talking about a topic that
I see so frequently in my patients.
And full disclosure, I struggle with a lot myself in my own therapy and my own life.
So I'm coming to you today talking to you, but just as equally talking to myself.
(00:20):
And in fact, in most episodes, if I'm being really honest, are always an equal
balance of talking to my listeners as well as talking to myself.
Today we're going to be talking about asking the question, why?
Why do I feel this way? Why do I act this way?
Why am I the way that I am? We're going to discuss how some amount of asking
(00:45):
the question why is appropriate,
but what we're really going to discuss is how can we ask ourselves why too often?
Can asking why actually have a drastically negative impact on our mood and our
behaviors and it can really actually keep us in a spiral of suffering?
(01:08):
Today we're going to review how to know if you're asking the question why too
much and what you can do instead. So stay tuned.
Welcome, everyone. My name is Dr. Lori Little, and I'm a clinical psychologist,
mindfulness coach, psychedelic therapist, wife, and mom.
(01:30):
My passion is helping people learn to listen to and trust their inner healing
intelligence, that part of us that is always moving towards health and growth.
Ultimately, when we allow our inner healing intelligence to be our guide,
we can stop looking outside of ourselves for answers.
(01:51):
We can experience more joy, more peace, and more connection with others than
we may have ever thought possible.
Although it may sound simple, it is by no means easy.
Join me as we discuss the many challenges and opportunities that listening to
your inner healing intelligence can bring to your life.
(02:16):
You,
All right, let's get into this one today. Take a moment to ask yourself,
how often do I ask myself the question, why am I the way that I am?
For those of us who are naturally inquisitive, and we just like to learn new
things, or we are introspective,
(02:38):
maybe we've been in a lot of therapy or coaching in the past,
then you might find that you ask this question of yourself often.
In general, of course, it is helpful to a certain point to ask,
why am I feeling this way?
So for example, if I get a sore throat, a fever, and a runny nose,
(03:00):
it really would be helpful to ask why.
Why? Because then I could find out maybe I have COVID and need to stay home
and isolate, or maybe I need an antibiotic in order to get better.
These are valuable whys.
But what if you have an illness or a pain that is not so easy to figure out why?
(03:24):
What if there could be a hundred reasons why you're feeling the way that you're feeling?
And what if your pain is actually more emotional or behavioral instead of physical?
How can asking why actually make things worse?
Today, we're going to explore the negative aspects of asking why as it relates
(03:45):
to both our physical and our mental well-being.
And we're also going to talk about what we can do instead. did.
First, let's talk about our physical ailments with a patient example.
Take my patient Mary, of course, not her real name.
Mary was entering menopause and was starting to notice all sorts of changes in her body.
(04:09):
So she noticed some of the typical night sweats and some mood swings,
maybe changes in her energy.
But the most worrisome issue that Mary was struggling was her significant changes in her sleep. sleep.
Mary reported that she'd always been a pretty decent sleeper,
(04:30):
never had much problems with her sleep, but out of nowhere, she started to have
difficulty staying asleep at night.
She was able to fall asleep, but it was really the staying asleep that started to become problematic.
So she reported she would wake up at one or two in the morning and just lay
in bed for hours, doors staring at the ceiling and really asking, why? Why can't I sleep?
(04:57):
She had heard that menopause, of course, could cause sleep issues,
and she certainly was having some of those other symptoms, but it just seemed so out of the ordinary.
And she started to worry that something else was wrong with her.
So Mary made an appointment with her primary care doctor doctor who couldn't
(05:17):
find anything wrong and suggested that she seek out a sleep specialist.
So she went to the sleep specialist who recommended that she get a sleep study.
And unfortunately, this sort of kicked off a series of months and months of
going from one specialist to another specialist to find the,
(05:40):
what I'll call the root cause of her insomnia.
And she found that the more doctors that she saw, the more differing advice
and medication she was prescribed.
And those medications either didn't work or they worked for a little bit but
then stopped working. They gave her side effects.
(06:01):
And she started to really feel hopeless that her sleep issue was ever going to resolve.
She started to get panicky like, oh my gosh, I'm 50-something years old.
What if this is how it's going to be for the rest of my life?
And it seemed as though her whole world kind of started to revolve around her insomnia.
(06:22):
And she would be researching it, reading books.
And of course, she started to feel depressed because you're scared and you're hopeless.
So she was crying all the time.
And then she started avoiding her friends and isolating. And it just really
trickled down into this huge spiral, which started really because she was asking the question,
(06:48):
why can't I sleep the way I used to sleep?
So again, to be clear, I'm not implying that Mary made a mistake by ever asking the question why.
It's normal. It's understandable and appropriate whenever you have a new symptom or something comes up.
You never struggled with before, of course, we want to ask why.
(07:12):
But notice what happens when the answer why is not readily available.
Mary ended up going down this medical rabbit hole.
And I have to say, in the medical community especially, this is really easy to do.
I'm not picking on physicians or the medical community. Hell,
(07:34):
I'm part to an extent of the medical community.
But even we, even physicians will admit that we don't all see a single symptom
with the same perspective.
So it's very common for three different providers to have three different recommendations
(07:56):
about what's going on and what the patient should do.
So it can be so confusing as a patient to know where to turn and what to do
when they have a new symptom.
By the time Mary got to me, she had been struggling with this for probably over
a year of just depression and anxiety caused by the insomnia.
(08:21):
So what did Mary and I do together that helped her to reduce her suffering,
I encouraged Mary to actually stop asking why and just focus on how she could
better cope with her insomnia.
Sleep in particular is a really funny thing.
There are just so many variables that impact our sleep, both medical and psychological.
(08:46):
But what we know for certain is that anxiety and rumination and stress,
all of these things worsen our sleep.
So the first goal was to just try to reduce those aspects.
So we talked about the importance of noticing when she was asking herself why
(09:10):
she couldn't sleep and shifting that to accepting the fact that she couldn't sleep.
So remember, acceptance is not the same thing as agreement or the power of positive thinking.
It's not pretending that she liked the fact that she couldn't sleep.
It was really just noticing radical acceptances, noticing our reality and letting
(09:36):
go of the need to fight it or to change it.
So when Mary started shifting her mindset to, I may never fully know why this
is happening, but it is happening.
How can I manage it? She really noticed how much more empowered she felt.
One of the things that can also happen with a physical symptom as we go from
(10:00):
doctor to doctor is that we start to lose our sense of feeling empowered and
all of the power, so to speak,
shifts to the doctor or the medication or the treatment,
and we can become this sort of passive recipient.
So it was really empowering for Mary to start focusing on all the things that she could do.
(10:24):
So we practiced breathing exercises.
We practiced mindfulness exercises.
We practiced practice progressive muscle relaxation before bed.
We talked about the importance of increasing her daily activity during the day,
getting more physically active,
going to the gym or taking walks, and socializing, reconnecting with her friends
(10:51):
and the people in her life.
She found that over time, she became more re-engaged in her life.
And so, of course, her mood improved.
When she had nighttime anticipatory anxiety about falling asleep,
which is very common, we talked about the importance of being kind,
(11:14):
being compassionate with herself.
Taking a hot bath or having herbal tea, reading a book, all the things that
she could do to help mind and her body relax.
In time, Mary continued to have mild sleep disruptions, but they were not as
(11:35):
bothersome to her anymore.
And that really was the ultimate goal. As a psychologist,
I'm not going to be able to address any of the medical issues related to her
sleep, but I absolutely helped helped Mary with the more psychological aspects of insomnia.
And when you think about it, there are so many ways that we can feel physically
(11:59):
just shitty, and we don't really have an answer for why.
On a personal level, I struggle with fatigue. Why do I struggle with fatigue?
Maybe it's because of my age. Maybe I don't exercise as much as I should.
Maybe I eat too many carbs. Maybe it's perimenopause.
(12:20):
Maybe it's anxiety or a low-level depression.
Maybe it's my job and work stress. There could literally be a hundred reasons why I have fatigue.
And I, of course, did ask why's to make sure my blood work was okay,
to see if there was anything that my doctors could find out that explains fatigue.
(12:46):
I don't want to ignore a new symptom. I wasn't having this much fatigue before.
So of course, I'm going to start my journey with making sure there isn't an underlying issue.
I am missing. But I know that if I continued to search for the root cause of
my fatigue, thinking that there was one cause,
(13:09):
I would end up seeing a hundred doctors, getting a hundred prescriptions.
And frankly, I just, I really don't want to do that.
So what I'm trying to do now is is shift away from the question of why and focus on radical acceptance.
I don't have to like my fatigue, but I can accept that I just don't have the
(13:33):
same level of energy that I used to.
What can I do health-wise to manage my fatigue to be as healthy as I can be?
And so, of course, that comes with trying to increase my exercise,
trying to increase my nutrition.
It also has a a lot to do with just accepting my limits.
(13:53):
I have new limits now that maybe I didn't used to.
And so when my friends give me shit that I don't feel like going downtown for
dinner on a Wednesday night, because that means I'm going to be home after 10 o'clock.
And I know for regular people, that's not a big deal.
But for me, that exhausts me. And I know that the next day, I'm going to feel exhausted.
(14:17):
So I don't feel guilty about it. I just say, yep, this is who I am now and that's okay.
So if you are struggling with some sort of physical issue, maybe it's a pain,
a physical pain you're having, insomnia or an energy problem,
any kind of physical symptom that you have not yet yet been able to identify a root cause.
(14:41):
Consider if asking yourself why is serving you anymore.
Is asking why only leading you to suffer, to go around in circles like a hamster
on a wheel, is it making the issue worse?
Could learning how to just accept and manage the symptom benefit you?
(15:05):
And if so, ask yourself how.
Another area that we often ask ourselves why is related to our mental health.
Why do I feel depressed? Why am I anxious?
Why do I end up in abusive relationships?
I hear these questions for hours a day, every day as part of my work.
(15:27):
And again, a certain amount of asking why is okay, is understandable, and helpful.
Absolutely can be helpful to understand the nature of your family dynamics growing up.
What did you learn from your role models?
How did you make sense of your experiences as a child? And how is that impacting
(15:49):
how you see the world today?
In fact, many would say that is actually what therapy is, trying to understand
how our past affects our present.
But I would argue that this This is really just only a tiny slice of effective therapy.
I could explore for years, years, the question, why am I the way that I am as
(16:14):
it relates to my childhood?
However, at the end of the day, there are probably a hundred,
maybe a thousand reasons why I struggle with certain issues.
Imagine if by some miracle, I actually could identify all thousand of the reasons
(16:35):
why I struggle with abandonment, for example.
Would that really bring me any closer to my goal of not having fear of abandonment? Probably not.
What I have really found is that understanding why is interesting and mildly
(16:55):
helpful, but it isn't actually very effective at solving the problem.
What's most effective is shifting the attention away from the question why and
focusing more on what am I going to do about it?
How does this issue present itself in my life today?
(17:15):
And what can I do to start working on that?
In order to do that, in order to make that shift, we have to first practice
radical acceptance of whatever the issue is.
As a reminder, radical acceptance is the complete and total allowance of reality.
(17:37):
It's our willingness to give up the need, to let go of the need to make our
reality different than it is.
I don't have to like it. I don't have to approve of it, but I can accept it.
And this is ultimately the path to ease our suffering.
(17:57):
Remember, there is a difference between pain and suffering.
Suffering pain is a natural part of
the human existence pain is unavoidable and
it just comes along with the territory of being
human in fact pain when we think about it is what helps us to learn and to grow
(18:20):
suffering however is optional suffering is when we experience pain pain and
we insist that we shouldn't be in pain,
we insist that we must get rid of it, that we can't tolerate this pain, that's suffering.
By letting go of the need to find an answer, to get an answer to the question of why.
(18:47):
We're moving towards radical acceptance, which is allowing us to be more effective
in dealing with whatever that pain is.
The pain is still going to be present, but we're not going to suffer with it.
Now I'd love to hear from you. Are you a why asker?
Do you notice that you suffer because you spend too much time asking yourself
(19:12):
why and not enough time asking what can I do about it?
I hope that hearing about these ideas can bring you just a little bit bit of
peace into your life, maybe reduce your level of suffering just a tiny bit.
And as always, if you find this difficult or too challenging to make these changes
(19:34):
on your own, please consider seeing a good therapist who can help support and guide you.
Until next time, take good care and I'll see you soon.
Thank you so much for joining me today. If you'd like to learn more,
you can reach me at laurielittle.com where I share additional free resources
(19:54):
and lots of information.
If you enjoyed this episode, it would mean so much to me if you could write a review.
Music.
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