How to Start Unbreaking Your Heart

Hi hi there everybody, thanks for being here with me today. 

I’m Dana, I’m a mindset consultant, and you’re listening to The Revolution Within Podcast. Here is where you’re learning how to revolutionize your relationship within yourself. 

And how are we doing that? We are getting unstuck! We’re practicing self-kindness, unlearning people pleasing and discovering what we want to do for ourselves rather than what other people want us to do for them.

Let me tell you how you can find more information about working with me and how to get on the waitlist for upcoming courses and all of the things: My website is revolution-within.com, I’m on Instagram @revolution_within31, and you can email me at dana@revolution-within.com. 

Okay, so…if you’re new to the podcast, let me welcome you. Welcome! My name is Dana Walker Inskeep, and I’m a life coach who specializes in teaching people how to be profoundly kind to themselves because from there all manners of tiny miracles can bloom.

I actually call myself a multi-hyphenate consultant rather than a coach because I reach into so many corners with my experience. I’m a writer who also does editing work for other writers, I’m a songwriter who also writes with other songwriters, and I’m a coach who also coaches other coaches. 

So my purpose, really, is to guide people toward healing themselves or bettering their work in all sorts of milieus. I teach people how to have better relationships with themselves through mindset shifts, journaling, mediation, etc. which then flows out into their relationships with everyone else. 

When you practice self-kindness, that wonderful ripple effect begins where you become super-aware of how you’ve been allowing other people to take advantage of you and your time and energy, and you start cleaning house, so to speak. And you don’t do it with any sort of bitterness or anger, it’s more like - matter-of-factness.

So if you’re dating and someone is breadcrumbing you, you’re like - “This dude is a drain on my energy - block.”

Or relatives who make you want to hurl yourself into Grand Canyon rather than sit with them at the same Thanksgiving dinner table - you don’t go. You don’t owe anyone anything just because you’ve been born into the same group of people.

Maybe, if you’re surrounded by friends who take advantage of your kindness and always let you pick up the check or you’re always the one who everyone calls on moving day because you have a truck, you’ll at least start asserting yourself and asking for gas money.

Because relationships are supposed to have reciprocity. It’s not always going to be 50/50, that’s unrealistic…but when you’re aware of and practicing self-kindness, you’re able to recognize imbalances and self-correct more and more easily as you go along. 

Now, the process of “healing yourself” can be misunderstood as a destination rather than an experience or a journey. The emotional healing process is never done; neither is growth. It’s not supposed to be. Practicing things can make them become second-nature, become more a part of muscle memory. And it can become quite comfortable to assert yourself and to walk into a room with confidence…but that takes practice, just like everything else.

And when we’re healed, there’s evidence, right? But scars don’t have to be ugly. Like kintsugi, the Japanese art of gluing broken things back together with gold… (God I hope I said that right)…we don’t have to walk around, wielding our painful experiences like we’re looking for a fight, expecting our next partner to be exactly like the last cheating bastard! or gold digging slut! We can be beautiful. 

We also don’t have to walk round hanging our heads like kicked puppies or saying, no one will ever love me again because x-y-z.

Scars can be gold. 

If we allow ourselves to feel the emotions from the pain of loss, the pain of betrayal, the pain of disappointment over what we imagined for ourselves but didn’t happen because we can’t control what other people do, no matter how much we want to - we can only control ourselves. 

If we don’t feel those emotions - which yeah, I get it, those emotions are so painful. When my mom died I didn’t let myself really feel it for a long time, it was too much. But those emotions ended up in my body and, nine years later, I’m still working on it. I’m still working it out. Emotional pain can feel worse than physical pain to some of us.

But if we don’t feel them, we can get stuck in them. That’s often where comfortable misery begins, and that’s what I talked about in last week’s episode.

And in order to really be effective in this, you…you have to go back to the beginning. Meaning your childhood, okay? I’m sorry not sorry to those of you who are like “you woo-woo bitches and your inner child crap can fuck right off!” That’s where the bulk of your negative patterns were born into your unconscious mind, okay? 

Not to give Freud and his pervy mind too much airtime, but this is his concept and he was on to something with it: Think of your mind like an iceberg. 

The conscious mind is the part sticking up out of the water, and that’s where the thoughts we’re fully aware of are. 

The subconscious is the part right beneath the surface; where we’re aware of something when we think of it, but its not necessarily in our full consciousness yet.

The unconscious is the deep part of the iceberg. Your unconscious mind is where our biases are, and a lot of our trauma lies…in the deep recesses of our memories and our past.

Certain beliefs can become submerged into our unconscious minds, and that’s why, even after paying attention and bringing it up to our subconscious mind - it’s still not easy to just let go of.

It’s difficult to change things that we have believed for so long. The human brain is wired to find evidence for what it already believes. That’s why you can actually come to someone with factual evidence disproving something they believe, and they’ll come back at you with a reddit post from some fucking wackadoo who lives in his mom’s basement that “proves” what they are choosing to believe. 

This also explains the divisiveness we are currently culturally immersed in today. But I’m not going to get into that or I’ll end up crying in my cereal for a month.

So my point is that if you don’t go back there, dig that shit up, look at that little kid with love, kindness and compassion and say, “Awww, five year-old Dana…I forgive you for being such an explosive brat. You were modeling behavior that you saw around you.” If you don’t go back there and do that, you’re gonna carry that shit around with you still.

In my case…I had a parent with an explosive temper and another one who was doing her best to try and keep the peace. Both doing their best to raise three kids in the 70s without a manual, because who the fuck knew how to raise kids with any sense of emotional awareness 50 years ago? 

I’m not blaming anyone here…I’m pointing out that I’m a sensitive person and was a sensitive child with parents who didn’t know how to raise a sensitive child and had zero tools at their disposal to do so. 

Also, it was the 80s and I’m GenX, so no one gave a fuck anyway.

I spent a lot of time overlooking the emotional trauma, or even just flat out denying it, that I experienced as a child because I judged the fuck out of myself for even having it in the first place. 

Because what did I have to be depressed about? It was pointed out to me quite often that I was the spoiled one and always got my way…there was no physical abuse, and everyone was ignored, bullied, or whatever back then. Get over it. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps.

Regardless of the comparison to other people’s circumstances, because I certainly grew up with a lot of privilege, I’m aware of it. I still had emotional trauma that I had to examine and work on healing in order to keep from gaining back the weight again or falling back into depression over and over again.

And if you don’t at least explore the possibility of it, you’ll keep repeating patterns and wonder why you’re continually hurting yourself with the same old bullshit over and over again. Why you keep regaining the weight. Why you keep going back to drinking every night. Why you keep dating the same type of person who only seems to use you and leave.

Harsh but true. 

If you don’t work on that dark side, aka your shadow side - you won’t be able to  unbreak your own heart. You won’t be putting your pieces back together with gold…they’ll just be falling back to the ground again.

AND ANOTHER THING. If you do go to therapy or get coaching or whatever but don’t do the journaling or exercises during the week, you slow down your progress significantly. 

Believe me, I know this firsthand. It’s like with piano lessons. If you don’t practice between lessons, you’re not gonna play like Chopin. (I’m talking to you, 15 year old Dana.) 

Same with manifesting. If you don’t practice moving your focus away from the negative, or whatever you’re focusing on that you DON’T want, you don’t open up for the positive to come into your life or whatever it is that you DO want.  That’s how law of attraction and manifestation works.

And it takes practice, patience, and persistence. Because you don’t get it right the first time, or the second time. Or even the fifth time. Just like everything else; just like everyone else.

Like having trust issues in new relationships. Trust issues with relationships are also a reflection of how you trust yourself, just sayin. I’ll get to that on a future episode. 

I’m not saying to just walk into every encounter wide eyed and gullible, but not everyone you date is going to cheat on you automatically if you’ve been cheated on in the past…unless you BELIEVE it. Then you’ll create the circumstances to make it happen. I’ve seen it where someone gets accused so much by a jealous partner that they just go ahead and do it because I’m getting accused of it anyway so why not do it? Terrible. And then everybody gets hurt.

Your energy will attract what you believe you deserve. If you’re into “bad boys”, then you’ll only attract walking red flags and you’ll convince yourself that he’s actually a good person underneath it, “he’s just hurt.” (No, he’s not.)

I mean yeah, he is a hurt person and “hurt people hurt people” but he’s gonna hurt you. It’s not that he’s just hurt…yeah, he’s hurt but he’s ALSO gonna fucking hurt you. You’re not gonna change him. The only person who can change someone is that person. Only you can change you. Only a willing person can change. And you’re not gonna talk anybody into changing. 

But practice shows you, it teaches you how to notice red flags in someone else  sooner. Learning self-kindness makes it easier to recognize and enforce boundaries or even walk away from the walking red flags after you’ve already been in a situation or relationship and have feelings for someone who’s “just hurt” without taking their emotionally abusive behavior personally. 

Because whatever color you want to paint it, if someone is bread crumbing you - that’s when they “string you along”, they  it act you a lot in the beginning and the. You think you have a connection or a relationship, and then the contact gets further and further away and you see them less and less and just as you think it’s over then they reach out with “was just thinking about you” or “I miss you” or whatever - that’s emotional manipulation. That’s emotional abuse.

I’m not saying that everyone who does this is aware of it, because it’s done from a place of deep insecurity, usually by addicts and/or people on the narcissistic spectrum (or both) - and they might THINK they’re being “friendly” or it’s innocent - but that’s because they haven’t gone back to their Freudian iceberg and done their fucking work.

This is all wayyyyyy easier to do logically than emotionally, of course. But I’m telling you, it’ll save you a world of hurt down the road if you even just start becoming aware of this.

Example: I have a friend of a friend who’s aunt lost her husband quite suddenly, and she just…didn’t grieve. 

Buried him, got rid of his stuff, and moved on with her life, almost as if it never happened. Within a few years she developed multiple health problems after having been healthy her entire life and still struggles with them because the grief just buried itself in her body.

People, WE NEED TO GRIEVE. What the fuck is up with not allowing ourselves to mourn the loss of something? Death of a person? The end of a marriage? The loss of a career? It seems like the only things we’ve deemed acceptable to grieve are getting cancer ot the worst thing imaginable-losing a child.

When my first marriage ended, I was devastated. 

After three weeks my boss was like, “Enough with the crying, get back to work.” I mean, I was there, I was working. But I was crying at my desk and I was making everyone uncomfortable. So because my emotions - which were valid, as my 9 year relationship and the marriage that I’d up until a few weeks earlier I’d believed would be “til death do us part” had just ended - were too much for everyone around me, I was shamed into suppressing them. And I don’t blame my boss, she was just doing her job. That’s what we’re told to do in society. Don’t grieve…just get back to work.

But that’s a story for another time. I’m still flabbergasted that we had a global pandemic where millions of people died and then everyone just went back to work, nothing to see here. WHAT?!? No wonder we have such an astronomical mental health crisis.

Well. I’m here to do my part in supporting the healing of those willing to do the work for themselves.

That’s my twenty-eight cents for this week, my darlings. If you have any comments or questions, there’s an option in the show description to text me with your thoughts so please…feel free. Also, it really helps the show to leave a good review (hopefully you like it enough to leave a 5 star one) and share it with everyone you know. Thanks, and I’ll talk to you next time. Take care and remember - all will be well.