The Outrage Effect: Transmuting Anger into Action

00:00 - Speaker 1
It feels like everywhere I look there is something to be outraged at or people getting outraged. It really doesn't take long to see that much of this outrage is warranted. However, when is this outrage actually leading to something constructive, or does it just decimate our nervous systems and increase both our physical and emotional pain and suffering? Welcome, welcome, welcome to the Unweaving Chronic Pain podcast. I am your host, dr Andrea Moore, founder of the whole self-integration method, and I am here to help you stop your life from shrinking, so you can get back out and live the expansive life that you dream about. And go live that full out, a life where you get to wake up and know that you have the personal power to decide what it is you want to make of your days. And if you're not sure where to start because this journey can feel quite overwhelming without a roadmap then the first thing I recommend you do is to take the pain response assessment, because how you respond to pain, basically your pain response archetype, is going to very much impact the best next step. That is right for you, because every single person is their own unique individual and, while there's many overlapping parts of our paths, it is also essential to make sure that you are acting in a way that is right for you and your nervous system and your phase of life, and the pain response assessment is going to help you identify that. You will walk out with clarity of how your response to pain is actually impacting your pain and then give you specific next steps to move forward with that. And if you ever want more information about that, you want more personalization to it, just go ahead, email me with your results and I'm here to help you customize your journey even more. All right, getting into this episode, unless you've had your head stuck in the sand for the last I don't know years, there is outrage everywhere and I really want to help bring clarity to the way I see outrage and the many sides of it the productive sides, the unproductive sides, the helpful sides, the harmful sides and, like most big, important things, you're going to be left with more to explore. There aren't simple answers here, but I think this conversation is absolutely crucial because if we as a society, or even just you as an individual, struggle with managing outrage, or even managing response to outrage that we're seeing, we're going to stay stuck, and not just stuck. We really actually are going to create more challenges and more suffering. So before I dive into the effects of outrage and what it has to do with chronic pain and, of course, how we actually move forward in a productive manner and to me the most interesting piece is the incredibly overlooked function that outrage serves our nervous system I want to tell just a little bit of background on my personal experience with outrage, because outrage is something I'm very good at. 

03:30
In fact, at one of my first jobs I was working in a clinic and outrage was practically part of my daily uniform. At least once a day I would have a patient who had been at the receiving end of some uninformed, unfair, sloppy or just straight up shitty medical care and seeing their suffering that they had to endure because of something that was oftentimes very avoidable, like ate me alive, I would often burst into the staff room in outrage, sharing the latest injustice I heard or share the next doctor who belonged on my blacklist. I eventually got into trouble for this. I got called into multiple meetings because I was bringing down staff morale and I was kind of like the problem child of the clinic and things like that, and at the time I just remember being outraged at that, feeling like how can nobody care about these things like, why are they getting mad at me when I am not the problem here? I was full of righteous indignation and felt compelled to speak up about the crappy medical care patients received, and my outrage wasn't limited to the clinic. 

04:39
Often small mishaps that just happened as a part of life felt like a personal attack. I mean, someone parking their car crooked and blocking the space I wanted could destroy my day. An unexpected traffic jam, a miscommunication or just really other normal life occurrences could leave me feeling victimized and outraged. Over the years I did learn many tools to manage this. I learned how to work with my nervous system to see the bigger picture and for the most part, I took myself out of feeling outraged on this daily basis and especially out of feeling like things were a personal attack on me and also that it was my job to fix everything. That was a big one. It would pop up here and there. I mean, don't get me wrong. 

05:22
When I was on the receiving end of shitty medical care after my car accident and when I had post-kinclusive syndrome, I definitely felt the outrage creeping again due to shitty care, due to insensitive comments from really probably well-intentioned people, but I eventually really just learned that it wasn't getting me anywhere, and so the intensity shifted to more productive things. Or maybe at the time I was just too exhausted, who knows. But in 2020 it felt like there was this pent-up rage energy inside of me, and after the death of George Floyd and the aftermath, it felt like there was finally the societally acceptable outlet for my rage. I, along with millions of others, could finally publicly be outraged and basically be rewarded for it. In social media culture, if you weren't outraged, you were demonized. This outrage was very much rewarded. 

06:26
I say this all just to say I know what it's like to be an outrage. I know what it's like to be so deeply in it that it feels like there's no other option. I know what it's like to feel your outrage isn't being seen or heard, or maybe it's even being belittled. It's a vicious cycle that feeds itself, because having your outrage go unvalidated and feel unseen only leads to more outrage than it is going unrecognized. I speak from experience when I say it's a really painful place to live. It creates massive suffering At least it did for me and, like every single emotion we experienced, I realized it was up to me to decide what to do with it, because outrage alone does not solve problems. 

07:20
How we decide to hold it, to work with it and ultimately catalyze it into action that leads to change absolutely has the potential to solve problems, though Big problems and it takes bold, freaking action to do this. It takes a willingness to sit with massive amounts of discomfort and tension in your own body and mind, and we live in a culture that tends to prioritize giving truth to feelings, that glorifies instant results, and it makes comfort our ultimate priority. Our culture makes being uncomfortable wrong, and because of this, we have really lost our ability to actually take the time to examine our outrage, to really understand what it is actually about, because it might not be what you think it is about, even in cases where it seems so obvious, and it is only from this place that we can truly, truly understand just the next best step forward, and to know that, if it is aligned for you and you ultimately want to walk the path of creating change, that it is likely going to take time, and because outrage is often gonna be associated with much larger systemic issues, usually emotions like anger can be more isolated to like, oh, here's this thing that happened or this person I'm angry at, whereas outrage tends to be much bigger. Not always, I'm not gonna pick apart the difference between the two, but often outrage is associated with much larger systemic issues. So we have to realize and this was a hard one for me that we may never see the fruits of our labor in our lifetime, and then it cannot be up to any one person to be responsible for creating change. But if it is aligned, despite all this, that we do get to make the decision to keep taking action because it matters, so this is productive outrage. 

09:29
Productive outrage starts in outrage, but it morphs into this beautiful, aligned, intentional action. Productive outrage is the spark that fuels a possibility for connection with empathy, justice, truth and knowing that there's a better way to do something. This then gets to be transmuted into a passion, commitment to take action over and over and over again in a way that is right for you and your life, despite possible consequences and with all the uncertainty that comes with it. This is productive outrage. This is outrage that actually results in change, in productive change. But I'm not talking about productive outrage for this episode, but I did wanna make sure that we are touching on it because it's so important that it has a time and a place, and I think it is essential to know what the recipe is for productive outrage although that probably could be a much longer episode in itself in order to now look at what is unproductive and ultimately harmful outrage, because that's really what I wanna speak about today, because unproductive outrage can absolutely decimate our nervous systems. It can lead to burnout, but also be extremely detrimental at a societal level as well, and even often lead to the opposite of the intended effect. 

10:53
But on a personal level, when we are living in constant outrage, like I used to, that keeps our cortisol levels in our blood high. We are in a constant fight or flight reaction and we are training our nervous systems to look for threat everywhere, and our brains and our nervous systems are real good at that. When they get the opportunity, that is what they will see is threat. And in fact, when the more we're in fight or flight mode, the more we train that system in, the more that is all it will see. It will start to interpret situations that may have been a totally harmless situation. You know, someone trips and bumps you, for instance, and we take that as a threat, as a personal attack, when really the person just accidentally bumped into you because they themselves tripped Right. We start to see threat in everything, start to take things so personally. We get this really, really tunnel vision and we lose sight of the whole picture On a nervous system level. The more our nervous systems are trained to look for threat, the more pain we are also likely to feel, because perception of threat is going to amplify pain. The more safe we can feel, the more our system can soften, can feel safe and pain can actually decrease. 

12:22
If you're someone who is in chronic pain whether that is physical pain, by the way, or emotional pain I wanna speak to this because for me, when I reflect back on my time when I was really feeling and really sucked into this outrage, I did have chronic pain. At the time, however, it was my emotional pain that created massive suffering. It ate me alive. I was in chronic anxiety. I was stressed all the time. I remember at the time when I was dating my now husband, he started implementing a rule of you're not allowed to complain about anything at work. Like I can't take it anymore, and I remember being so offended at this Like how dare you tell me that I can't tell you about my day, and when I look back now I was like damn he was so tolerant of me. I would come home and just bitch for an hour straight at him, like nobody wants to hear that day after day, here and there, sure, but day after day, I don't wanna hear that. No one wants to just hear how shitty your day went for like an hour straight, over and over and over again. And so it, you know, affected my relationship with him. I didn't know what else to talk about. I didn't know how else to connect with someone if not over to something to be outraged about. 

13:40
And the reality is is things I feel like in our world have just gotten worse. I mean, we've always had a fear driven nervous system, don't get me wrong. We have always been primed to be in fear, to be triggered. However, this mass outrage at this really collective societal level is, in my opinion I don't have the research to back it up, but I would imagine it is true much worse. Because news now is all about the clicks, social media is all about the clicks, and what gets the most clicks? Things that are outrageous, rage producing, because that gets people to click on shit. Why? Because we are primed to look for fear and rage and outrage and threat. Right. This creates more divisiveness, more distrust, mass burnout and erosion of critical thinking and, most importantly in my opinion, at least with my biases it creates a disconnection from self. 

14:40
If you've ever gotten sucked into like a mob, like mentality even maybe it was over something really silly Like you're at a PTA meeting and a new dress code is brought up and Sally Sue's outrage was incredibly powerful and inspiring and she speaks really well and really knew how to just like light a fire in you, only for you to relate or realize like Wait, her argument actually like really didn't make any sense, or maybe it did, but I actually just don't even agree with that. Now that I've had time to sit and reflect Right, once you've had some space to really think about things. Or maybe you've seen like a super inspiring motivational speaker and you're like yeah, yeah, yeah. And then you like step out and you're like wait a minute. I actually don't agree with that at all. Right, you'll understand what I'm talking about. 

15:20
We're social beings with a desire to fit in and be understood and I think a big part of this is that we want to then connect to the person speaking and when we understand them right, we feel that connection, and so I think it's really normal, especially for people who know how to speak, who know how to grab a room, who know how to use these words, whether consciously or unconsciously, that really pull at our heartstrings. We just create this connection that leads to this like, oh, yes, yes, whatever they're saying, yes, as much as we love to think, that we do think for ourselves and that we have critical thought, please, we will all get swayed by that person that, ultimately, is just talking out of their ass. Look, that's always going to happen at times. All right, I think we can get better at it, though, the more we do this work, but it'll all happen. We'll all take that time to reflect on something and be like wait a minute, actually, you know what? I don't agree with that anymore. Never mind, that's fine. Changing your mind, having the flexibility, being able to step back in reflection and really think about something and mull it over and spend time with it and try it out, and you know, and get to know the thought, get to know the belief, and all of that is essential. 

16:36
The issue is, when we don't do that, when we can't see that when we get sucked in and never come out or worse, we kind of actually realize we're wrong at times but we double down because we're too embarrassed or too prideful or too stuck in our egos to admit. Actually, you know what that was wrong. I mean, my husband, are constantly having like deep political or philosophical conversations, and so often I'll start out things like this is an unformed thought, like I'm about to just speak out of my ass right now and I'm just gonna like I'm just gonna say something and I don't actually know if I believe it yet and I say it and he gets to respond to it. Maybe he gets outraged at it. And then I'm like, oh yeah, actually I don't even agree with what I just said, or ooh, I'm gonna adjust it in that way, right, we need that ability to be flexible with our own thoughts and also with other people's thoughts. Maybe you would agree with half of what someone said and that helps you form a better thought of your own. And it's getting a little bit off track here, but I think it's really, really relevant, because I think what happens with outrage is somebody is outraged and we latch on. It is allows us to feel part of a group, people can get outraged at things they don't even understand. Because it serves as a way to bypass not just their own uncomfortable emotions, but often uncomfortable realities of their own lives that may have nothing to do with the issue at hand and, in fact, most of the time have nothing to do with the issue at hand but it also serves as a way to avoid having to do the hard work of figuring out your own thoughts and beliefs. If you can just latch on to someone else's outrage, you never have to do the work of discovering and reflecting about. What do you stand for? And this is really where a lot of the problematic outrage I am seeing more and more on social media is going. 

18:36
Now, before we continue on, I just wanted to take a brief pause to mention something. Obviously, while we are getting into a little bit more of an existential, broader level, societal discussion here, I don't teach solutions on world peace that is obviously not what my program is about but I do know that to move towards that, there has to be an increase in our own individual capacity to connect with ourselves and to hold tension and discomfort in our bodies. Why? Because that is required to then take aligned action and move forward. Whether your goal is world peace or a better home life, a more harmonious work or community environment, or whatever it may be, to be a functional part of this society and have harmonious relationships, it first takes being able to be with tension and discomfort in our own bodies. That is the prerequisite to much of aligned action, and that is my area of expertise, because that is also exactly what is needed to heal chronic pain. 

19:50
So if you are someone who cares about having healthy and robust relationships and you are not someone who is really into the whole culture of hey, someone made me uncomfortable so I am just going to call them toxic and cut them out of my life, I mean time and place for that, but it is much more rare than I think we are allowing that to be the case for. Or if you are someone who cares about making the world a better place you want your community, your home, to be a better place, but you can also see what I am talking about here and see where this outraged culture is just not doing that and you happen to be also wanting to heal chronic pain as well, then I got you. The pain to power program is exactly what you are looking for, because in the pain to power program you receive neuroscience backed and a trauma informed approach to chronic pain. But, more importantly, you also learn exactly how to connect to your own authentic wisdom, especially if that is something that has felt unnatural to you or even unsafe. And, of course, you absolutely also receive an entire toolbox of troubleshooting tools, because, of course, there's going to be all types of barriers that come up along the way, and that's what we're working with Within the program. You are getting my whole self integration process, the step by step process, all the tools to use along the way to transmute your pain into power, to actually learn how to trust that voice inside of you. Your authentic wisdom that you know deserves more attention. Or maybe you hear it and don't know how to act on it, or maybe you don't hear it at all. Either way, this program is for you, because if it feels like you are blocked from taking action, that you have just been stuck and stuck and stuck in this process of healing, inside the pain to power program, you will get the tools to work. With all of that, you will also be learning how to identify your personal desires and values, and you'll also be getting an entire toolbox to work with every barrier that your body and society is going to throw in your path from taking steps towards them. Look, here's the thing we get one life, and if pain, anxiety, stuckness and fear is getting in the way of living yours, it is time to join pain to power. In 12 weeks, you will completely change the trajectory of your life from one where you are shrinking due to pain to one where you get to expand. You will learn how to work with your pain, how to work with the resistance you feel in your body, how to work with deep core wounding and trauma, and how to take aligned action, and along the way, you will be integrating in your whole self so you can live a life that is full out, in whatever way that means for you. If you're wanting to learn more and wanting to get into this program, then now is the time to start. Go ahead, sign up for a free energy up level call, where we're going to make sure the program is a right fit for you, and I'll give you the exact next steps you need to get on in All right. 

23:05
Coming back into outrage Personally, I've noticed a massive difference in the way outrage shows up for me, and I see this happening at a broader scale too, because when I was in my prime outrage days, yeah, I did have Facebook and any Facebook. Oh, gears know that social media today is a vastly, vastly different platform than it was even two years ago, let alone over a decade ago. So the reality is is when I had uncomfortable emotions, when I was in outrage, they had really no choice but to get unloaded, either in the form of, like angry rants to people, maybe some rage screaming I don't think I did much of that or exercise I was never much of a repressor or I was repress repressor. Then, bleh, let it all out right. So it's like it was coming out. Those were my coping mechanisms. I didn't have any other ways, and the reality was since my go to was rage venting. 

24:07
It wasn't well tolerated by others, and rightly so. It was inappropriate and was immature, and because I got called out on it after a while, after people got fed up with hearing me like vent about the same shit day after day, I was forced to find more healthy and acceptable ways to figure out how to deal with it. That led me to therapy, coaching, diving deeper into self reflection, introspection and healing. So, as annoyed as I may have been and as hurtful as it may have been at the time to have others basically draw a line and be like you're done, you don't get to keep venting about this. As outrageous as I may have been for being called out on all this, I want to thank every person who was willing to tell me that I was a miserable person to be around when I was in those states, because they helped me get my shit together, for lack of a better way to say it. I needed that wake up call. 

25:01
But when the outrage explosion in my own self and obviously in the world, really exploded in 2020, it was a completely different experience, because now my outrage was being rewarded. I felt just. I felt like I was doing something right. I got to be outraged and feel good about it. So if all I did was read news articles or posts and go on rants on my social media, on my platform, and just get to enforce my own biased views by reading the same things over and over in my own little internet bubble, man, do you get some dopamine hits from that? Right? You get the dopamine hit of being right and then the dopamine hit of sharing it out there and feeling like you're doing something productive to help. So let me repeat that my outrage and unhealthy, frankly immature coping mechanism was being rewarded by social media. And I think you're seeing that now, even outside of social media, right, like the more outraged you are in person and the more you're like proclaiming your goodness and justness but I'm standing up for this cause and blah, blah, blah, the more people are like, wow, you're so amazing, you're such a great person, even if that person isn't actually Doing anything other than just talking about how outraged they are. But that reward, like most easy dopamine hits Always is gonna backfire. 

26:26
We already talked about what chronic outrage does to your system, not to mention you cannot fool your authentic wisdom and the truth. And Luckily, because I had already developed a strong connection with my wisdom, she started screaming through and I was able to see and catch what was happening. It wasn't easy, it wasn't overnight, but I eventually was able to realize it and kind of wake myself up. I was able to realize where I had replaced family time or Community action time and involvement by just being sucked into social media and the news, where I was just literally like fueling my own outrage, even it was just internal, like who needs nature when you can just endlessly scroll right? There isn't time for exercise, movement or mindfulness when there's so much to be done in the world, right, well, wrong, real fucking wrong. Doesn't work that way because, as we've covered, there is healthy and unhealthy outrage in. 99.9% of outrage on social media is unproductive and absolutely. I just made up that statistic but it feels pretty true. And look, we're not getting into social media right now and the pros and cons of it. Obviously I think there's a lot of pros to social media. I'm not ignoring those, but that's not what this episode is about. 

27:38
So let me bring it back to what one of the most overlooked Aspects of unhealthy outages in my opinion, because this really hit me hard the other day and I want to bring it to a really tangible Example that happened for me. Here's the thing is I have done a lot of Work to manage my nervous system around blatant Antisemitism, a lot, a lot to not live in like a constant threat response. I refuse to live in a world that feels like the vast majority, but the other day I saw something that was on a printed out political pamphlet that my husband had brought home. And, for those of you who don't know, my husband is running for a state representative here in Kentucky and if you want more sane, level-headed, intelligent, good, loyal, honest people in politics, well, check him out. Just Google, kentucky deserves more and you'll find him. And please support him, because we need more people like him in politics. 

28:35
But anyways, the point of this conversation just since I brought up politics right is not to go into politics. I'm just sharing how I worked, with some outrage in my system, and what I really uncovered in the process. So I am not gonna go into details about what this thing said, but I think there was something about the fact that it was like printed off and brought into my home From someone who is like a real human being that lives so close to me that my husband was having a conversation with you know, in real life, which he obviously had no idea. She had this thing on the pamphlet, by the way. Anyways, it set me off, not fear, it was outrage, like so much outrage into, like her audacity to intentionally choose, pay for and print off pamphlets and print off pamphlets that would contain such blatant and vile anti-semitism. I was outraged that she could just smugly walk around feeling confident about herself and good about herself, while I struggle, wondering if I'm doing the right thing, saying the right thing, and worried that someone might I might be offended by something that I say. Yes, even me, someone who talks about speaking the truth and developing nervous system safety around this. I am Often worried about how others are gonna perceive what I say, and then I get to choose to say things Anyways, but it is something that I actively manage, pretty consistently, to be able to do the work that it is that I do in this world. 

30:05
But anyways, as I stewed and it bled into the next day, which really surprised me, I was kind of expecting because I like ran it about it to my husband, who listened to it with so much compassion and validate, validation and kindness, I thought I'd just be able to like sleep it off and it it was not started like really consuming my mind, and it's been a while since something's like consumed my mind on that level where I can't like just Let it go from like a thought level, and so I knew there was something more here. So I started asking myself different questions because I knew the outrage was warranted, right like my response and Having anger and outrage to what was on that. I stand by that. I think it was perfectly acceptable, but it was also mismatched. The level and intensity of it was not warranted. The way it consumed me was not warranted. There was a clear overcoupling reaction happening and if you haven't listened to my episode on overcoupling, I highly suggest going back and listening to that if you're not sure what I'm talking about here. 

31:16
And so I noticed that all I wanted to do was like I just want to post this and rant about it, right, like I just wanted to talk more, like let it all out. But it's like I had already done that to a certain extent and that wasn't satisfying the itch. Like I noticed, I really wanted to descend to some of my friends who I knew would be very validating of my outrage and would be absolutely furious and fuming as well and validate me even more. But luckily I was able to pause and I realized that all it would do was set off their nervous systems nervous systems who are just as delicate as mine is and are already super hypersensitive to antisemitism. Like why would I want to do that to them? They're already. They're already seeing it everywhere. Why would I add to that to people I love? That is just, it's just cruel. 

32:07
And so I really sat with that question of like why is there this urge to so desperately share this with people I love so they can have that same shock and awe, fear, outrage response that I did? Duh, I was trauma dumping, right. It's like dumping your shit at someone else's door so that they deal with it, not yourself Not cool at all. And unlike physically dumping shit at someone else's door where they really might have to be the ones to deal with it, that does not work for emotions. You can dump them on someone else and now two people just have to deal with it, or they just give it right back. If they have really strong, energetic and personal boundaries, trauma dumping never works. 

32:48
I might receive a very temporary relief because my feelings would have been validated. Then you have a shared experience of outrage which just brings in, like this community and the connection piece that humans love Because we are social beings. But here's the thing is I didn't need anyone to validate my emotion. I knew I was right in being angry at what was written. I didn't need further validation. That was not going to give me what I needed. It was just going to hurt people I loved. So what I really realized in that moment was I was just trying to bypass my own emotions. I didn't want to deal with my emotions If I stayed in outrage. I didn't have to deal with what was underneath. 

33:29
Right, and I think this is the most overlooked thing when it comes to why people stay in outrage. And especially now, I think this is a much newer, widespread phenomenon. I don't think it's new to those who receive constant validation and connection from outrage, and I think everybody's experienced that when you have like a circle of people where you bond over, just venting about stuff or being like pissed about something or all like hating on a boss or things like that, right, that's that like group solidarity, that happens, that gives you the social connection. But like man, it's, it's harmful to our nervous systems to keep to stay in that. And now in social media you just see this at such a broader, more widespread level, because eventually you hope that if you're engaged in that type of behavior, people will call you out like they called me out. But that just really doesn't happen on social media. Or if it does, you can just choose to ignore it. 

34:24
So the question became what was I avoiding feeling? Clearly, I felt the outrage. That emotion got felt, that was clear, but it didn't move right. It was staying cycling in my head, which means there was something else here, something underneath, that was keeping it stuck to me. And so when I asked the outrage to move back which you can do with your emotions it's like you just ask it to like hey, can you like take a step back? Please Give me some space. I just want to explore what is underneath. 

34:55
The second I moved it back, what came gushing through was grief intense, intense grief. That is why the outrage was here to protect me from feeling this intense grief. Now, as someone who's been in this work a while and I work with a lot of grief with my clients and with myself I'm a pretty comfortable feeling grief. My nervous system, though, still likes to protect me from it. So the good news is is, once the grief came in, I was able to feel it and allow it. That is something I have built up capacity for. That took time. That was not always the case. So I just want to say sometimes grief can come in and kind of shut people down or send you into a freeze response, but for me, I was able to be with it. This is what my work is about being able to be with these intense emotions so we can move them through and get to the other side of them. 

35:49
What my grief was really about was for all the suffering that is happening in the world, and especially specific to the hostages that are in Gaza right now intense grief at the neglect of the world to remember them, to acknowledge that they are still there to fight for their release. There's so much intense grief for all the innocent in Israel and Gaza suffering due to Hamas. There's intense grief that this is happening to the Jews yet again. This is what was underneath my outrage, and once I identified it, I also immediately realized why it came through so strong. Because pretty much every single day since October 7th, I had been spending time, even if it was just a small snippet, to really honor and remember the hostages, and this was usually just prompted by post because I would see it come up on social media. So I take a moment to just look at their faces, to allow the grief to move through, say a quick prayer, and it just became this ingrained in not really intentional habit. I wasn't really like setting aside specific time. It might just be, you know, 30 seconds that I was doing this, where I was just taking that moment to have it be felt. 

37:05
But I recently took a huge step back from social media even more than I already have and when I did that, that practice just stopped, and so I realized there had been no outlet, no acknowledgement of this grief that my body really needs acknowledged and benefits from having acknowledged, and so I realized that there was a way to bring this in very intentionally, and so I'm just sharing for myself. What I started doing was lighting a candle every day and just taking a few minutes to honor, remember and say a prayer for hostages and any innocent people that are suffering right now. It's only been a few days, but there was such an immediate lift of the outrage and the overcoupling that was happening once I gave space to what was underneath and have carried that through to a daily process now. Now for me. 

37:58
Taking time to grief suffering in the world is also not a new practice for me. It was just one that I fell away from. It might sound super counterintuitive, but it has helped me walk through my days without having to carry this massive existential grief because I get to like contain it in one practice and, like many things, we just forget about things and stop doing them. We forget how helpful they are, and so now that I've brought that back, I've noticed this a soothing in my system throughout the day and I think, under many people's outrage is a grief of some sort. What you personally need to do to express it or to move through it is something that's going to be really individualized and if you need tools, I'm here to guide you through that. Some grief just might need moments to feel it and not actually have any external action that goes along with it, but for others, feeling the grief might be exactly what you need to then transmute the outrage that was protecting you from the grief into the actual productive, aligned action to bring change into this world. This is for you to explore and this is going to be different for every circumstance, and you are allowed to receive support in that exploration because it can be a really big one. 

39:11
I really feel like the vast majority of outrage is from an unconscious bypassing of deep, uncomfortable emotions that someone either has not built up the capacity to feel, so there's like a literal protective response that the body's going to be like oh it is not safe to feel these, these are too big, so we're going to like, shove them down instead, stay in outrage so you never have to look at what's underneath. Or we might have the capacity like myself, I do have the capacity to be with it. They're just uncomfortable and my body's knee jerk response is to throw up a protective mechanism, and so I have to work through it, remind my body it is safe to feel and then feel, because here's the thing it's far more comfortable to feel a part of a group, right, like we often can, while outrage bonding to get dopamine hits from social media, or even like attending a rally or latching onto a cause or whatever it might be then deepening into yourself. Now there might be time and space for all of those things. Right, there might be a rally that's really incredibly productive or a cause that really is very much aligned with your values and passion. 

40:19
However, if you haven't taken the time to truly reflect on if what you're participating in is actually bringing about the actual change you want to see in the world and is also aligned to your personal values, then something is being missed and this can create such a massive tension in your body or be a way of repressing deep wounds and ultimately does lead to ongoing chronic pain. And this right here brings in another really loaded topic. Outrage is a big thing, so I was reflecting on this. That's just like oh, no wonder people are so in outrage right now, because it is so protective from looking at these deeper issues that are hard, because outrage is a great way to protect, from actually examining what you actually stand for, which might seem really counterintuitive. But again, if you just stay in this superficial, unhealthy, unproductive outrage, you're never really needing to really ask that question. So so much of outrage is all about what people do not want, which is a really helpful place to start. In fact, it's where most people are going to start with most things. 

41:34
But if you don't know what you're moving towards, what you believe in, what you stand for and if you're a Hamilton fan, let me quote if you stand for nothing, what will you fall for? If you only stand against something or you hyper focus on what you do not want in your life? Things like pain, maybe. It's even something like I never want to work a nine to five job or I never want to have a confronting conversation with somebody. Well, unless you know what your core values are, you risk actually going further from them in the names of standing against something. So let's say your core values are freedom and family and creativity. Let's bring this back into pain. I'm going to move away from outrage. You want to put that aside for just a minute. So you want to move away from pain, understandably. 

42:21
But if you don't actually know or you haven't taken the time to intentionally connect to what you truly want, here's what I see happen all the time People manage their pain by avoiding things that create it, that they think created Actually, let me put that word in there. So maybe you realize. Okay, these, you know. Last time I was at this like event that required a lot of standing around or whatnot, like, my back was really hurting. And here's this family reunion that's coming up and it's going to require, you know, a long car drive and then I probably have to be standing around a lot. So I'm just not going to go Right. 

42:56
All of a sudden, now you're avoiding missing out on a family event in the name of. I just want to be away from my pain. Maybe you stop painting, because I can't sit for that long or I can't stand for that long, and so you lose the creativity. Or maybe you must new, maybe you maintain a very rigid routine, or like you're only limited to 10 minutes in the car at a time, so you lose all your freedom, right? So it's like, in the name of trying to move away from pain, you've actually stopped moving towards and are moving actually away from the things that you want most. 

43:31
Most people will never realize this because their focus is all on tunnel vision, must get rid of the pain, and a few select people might actually take that a step further and at least recognize Well, once I get rid of the pain, then I'll spend time with family and with creativity and finally have freedom again. But even if they're recognizing that, like they've actually acknowledged their values and named them and stated them, If they're waiting for pain to be gone first, it'll never work, it'll never be resolved. Okay, so what does this all have to do with outrage? Let me bring it back, because I think it's very similar with outrage. In the name of being outraged at something, people tend to forget what they are moving toward. Instead, they have lost sight of what they believe in, because when the average is about something they don't want, and to believe in something, you need a clear vision of what that looks like. 

44:26
And what is so important to understand, and how this links so much to chronic pain, is that, while we may lose our path, right, we're all going to get sucked up and just trying to move away from something we don't want. You know, I gave the example of someone who's just like I don't ever want to work in a nine to five job again. Well, what if that nine to five job is actually going to give them more freedom and family time and creativity than being an entrepreneur is giving them right now, right? All of a sudden it's like, oh wait, a minute, maybe I need to reevaluate what I'm moving away from. Maybe it made sense at one point, but for this phase of my life, maybe it doesn't make sense. Maybe it doesn't make sense when I really look at what my values are. You know, who knows? 

45:04
There's so much nuance, there's endless nuance to this. It requires really hard, tough conversations with ourselves that often don't have an easy answer, which is why we avoid it, which is why it's so much easier to just stay in outrage or whatever other emotion. Okay, I'm obviously using outrage here as as the thing that people are staying in or getting caught in so they never have to do this deeper work of reflecting on their own lives. But our soul always knows the truth. You can't hide the truth from your own self. Even if you're not even aware of your own truth, the body knows there is a disconnect and that there is tension there. And the point I really want to drive in, especially in this outrage topic I know I'm bouncing like between like chronic pain and then like big societal things, but to me they're related. 

45:53
There is so, so much action that gets taken in this world by really well meaning, goodhearted people that is well intentioned, and the action is taken out of outrage at one thing or out of wanting to move away from something, and this is going to be problematic when it does not have the deeper reflection component that is crucial. That requires sitting intentions and uncomfortable emotions within our own cells, having uncomfortable conversations with others. Right, when we just take action from the outrage or the like oh I don't want this, so I'm just going to take action, there are pretty much always going to be consequences, and so I wanted to find an example that was like not super loaded. So here in Kentucky, there was a new regulation that was passed, like last summer, that said that all pools have to have a lifeguard. Seems super common sense, right? You're like, oh, that makes sense. 

46:51
Now I was unable to find any information on, like, what spurred this or who started it or who brought this bill, and so I am going to make up a very realistic scenario of how this bill may have started or how this regulation may have started. I honestly don't even know the difference between a bill and a regulation. So sorry, husband, who's in politics? Okay, so chances are, either someone had a really close call or they had a child, a family member, a close friend that drowned in a body of water, and it happened when a lifeguard was not present, right? Usually, when there's just this big change, it's because someone realized something was wrong and they wanted to change it. So, understandable, they took action. 

47:36
Now for this person, again, we're making up a scenario for them. What may have happened is they had that, of course, massive, intense emotions that felt incredibly uncomfortable to be with and, like most people, when they're facing a deep loss, they go to anger, right? Let's call this outrage. Outrage at the fact that this pool that their loved family member or friend died in did not have a lifeguard Right, can you see where? If I just direct all of my focus on this thing that went wrong and this injustice that happened, then I never have to look and be with this grief that is so painful to be with underneath Right. And everybody does this. This is really normal. It's just noticing and making space for it. 

48:25
So, anyways, in an understandable outrage, this person then took action to ensure this never happened to anyone ever again. So, let's say, they got this bill passed. Now again this seems like wow, this is great, right. But like many things, even seemingly common sense ones or things that sound great, have massive negative consequences when they're taking out, taken out of outrage, and they're never followed through with, they're never really like ooh, what are the actual implications? Now, the only reason I'm even aware of this is because this happened right around the time that I signed my kiddo up for swim lessons, so he in fact would not drown, because at the time I was terrified he would drown. I have a whole podcast on that. 

49:05
But because of this regulation, that kind of like was one of those that like just got passed overnight, the pool that we were going to going to start the lessons at had to actually temporarily shut down while they figured things out because they weren't allowed to function anymore because they didn't have lifeguards, and so we actually couldn't start our swim lessons when we intended to because of this. Now, this was like at an athletic club, right Like a big gym that has a pool that people can come and swim and exercise in. This pool is mainly for adult attendees, who use this as a lap pool to exercise. They have been open for like 20 something years without any incidents. This regulation would require them to have two lifeguard on staff at all time, which is insane. 

49:48
When you look at the size of the pool, it's like a very normal sized lap pool, so I feel like two just seems like a lot, and again, it's easy to be like well, what's wrong with having too many? Well, again, let's look at implications. One, when we were there, there was usually like nobody else there, maybe like one or two other people in the pool. Okay, it's not a really busy pool. Maybe it's busy at certain times, but it's a lap pool, which means only like what? Five people. I think there was five laps, six lanes could be in it at a time, right, I have no idea, okay. Anyways, the point is it's not some like high volume, like place where, like kids are playing in, but even that is irrelevant here. Well, it's not irrelevant because the point is it's mainly adults who can swim who are using this, or kids, like my son, who are literally being instructed by a licensed swim instructor who clearly know how to swim. So if my son was drowning, then you know I am there and the instructor is there to save him. So we don't need a lifeguard. 

50:43
But here's the thing is, they estimated that for this facility to have the two lifeguards there, it would cost the business over $200,000 a year, which was unaffordable for them. They are a small, locally owned business. It would shut down their business or at least shut down the pool. All of a sudden. Things aren't so simple. Not to mention they actually were saying how hard it would be to find lifeguards to man the pool at all, that they're open hours, like they have a lot of people that are going in at like 5am to swim, right, and then most lifeguards are high school students, right? A lifeguard is not a high paying position. So usually you have high school students that are easy find during the summer. But what do you do during school hours? Right, it was. They were saying the. It was almost impossible to find somebody to fill this job. No one wanted this job. To sit at an empty pool and stare at it all day, okay. Or to watch people who already know how to swim all day Like that would be a terrible job. But anyways, luckily they were granted an extension so we were able to go ahead with the swim lessons in the meantime. But let's say this does go through. I honestly have no idea I have not looked back into this if this they go through or not. I mean, I know the regulation go in through, but I don't know if the what if the club has been exempt from it or not. So let's say this does go through. The swim school we want to can see 20 to 30 kids a day, I think, which is teaching them life saving swimming skills. 

52:07
The pool provides exercise for people and exercise classes Exercises, health benefits cannot be overstated here. We're not going to go into them. The exercise that people are getting our life saving as well. The gym probably employs I don't know 50, at least 50 people. It's a massive gym, so they actually had to close their business down. That would be a massive hit to the community. There's really no other indoor pool like this that is available around us and even if there was, they would be affected in the same way. So you potentially end up with this regulation closing down pools, a loss of jobs and an increase in likelihood of future drownings, because now these hundreds, maybe even thousands of kids that are being served by these local swim instructors cannot get swim lessons or do not have the easy access to it, not to mention now the people who swim was their go to exercise. Maybe swim is their only exercise that they can do, and now they can't exercise Life saving exercise. 

53:11
Is this really the intended effects the person of the bill wanted? I don't freaking know, but if their values were saving lives and you can see this ain't doing it right it goes in direct opposition of what their likely intention was and again, for this made a person. You can see how their outrage, when unexamined, turned into unhealthy and even harmful action. However, had they processed their grief, been able to reflect and then turned there and turned and transmuted that into healthy, aligned action, maybe they themselves would have actually become a swim instructor, maybe they would have started an organization that helps family coping with a loss by bringing them meals or something else that is actually creating effective change, that is actually aligned with their values and helping the world. 

54:02
And to me, this is the most important thing about this work is when we can pause, when we can be with our intense emotions, when we can look past a lot of the superficial stuff that is just serving to distract us from what is underneath or even just serving to distract us from doing hard things. 

54:21
Because really coming down, sitting down and identifying your values and what you're passionate about in life and like what you want to, like give back to the world, that's not a fucking easy task. It's also not when you do one time right Like it's a big, big undertaking and it's uncomfortable, and you deal with so much tension of values that can conflict or realizing that the life you're living is not aligned to the values that you actually care about. Right, like it's a big, monumental thing to do, and so you can understand why it's just easier to stay in outrage and, on many cases, leads to more chronic pain, more anxiety, more stress and also, in many cases, just leads to more harm. All right, I know that was a lot. 

55:07
I hope this episode has really, really drives you to reflect more. To reflect that is what is underneath. Maybe some of these bigger emotions, and if you're noticing of like, oh man, there is so much discomfort for looking at what's underneath, then go ahead, joint it pain to power. I'm going to show you how to do that in a way that helps you first create nervous system safety so that we can look at what is underneath and live a life that is aligned with your values and you get to live life full out and make positive, beautiful change in this world. See you next time.