”Shame is a Weapon” | 4 ways SHAME is part of CBT

What’d we say? | Podcast Transcript

(00:00):

What’s good. Thank you for joining me. I’m Johann Francis CSCS and welcome to my show Ego Killer! It’s right here on this show where we cover all the topics that go down inside the gym so that you can literally move and live better outside in life. Inside the gym is where we test the physical limits of our body, where we test, how far we’re willing to take ourselves. We’re able to see what our perceived limits is, move through all of that and learn about ourselves. It’s when we put ourselves to the test and find out what we’re willing to accept, and then how much we’re willing to take on that’s. I mean, I think we learn a lot about what we’re capable of about ourselves. This is where we kind of like you go on a date to learn about somebody that you want to care about, right?

(00:52):

You take ’em out on lots of dates. The gym’s a date for you for yourself. It’s the lab, my friends, it’s physical, physical therapy in a lot of ways, more than the traditional sense. And that’s what I hope to, to bring about this is where we check the ego in order to make the ego, the process of having one work for us. And to do that, we gotta identify like what we’re made of. It’s important that we think about how we know how we think a lot of the times inside the gym. If I ask you guys to do some exercises, right? If I ask you guys to do the deep squat hold, which is helping you be more mobile, I’ll have you guys hold it at the bottom. I want you to look a certain way to form a particular shape at the bottom, cuz it’s where I know that you’re checking your body and getting more mobile.

(01:43):

You guys have another idea you guys know about your body a little bit. You know what your limit is. And so maybe the shape doesn’t look what I need it to look at that point. But you guys are just because you know your body better. And the idea is that we together get you into the best position, but it’s all about you. Don’t listen to me over your own instincts, right? Whenever I see that inside the gym, I always compliment you guys. I go, yo, it’s good that you know more about your body. In fact, a lot of good coaches will like step to you and be like what our training is gonna be about. Not just how many pushups am I gonna ask you to do in five minutes, but it’s gonna be about us learning what your body can and cannot do. Right?

(02:26):

All of our bodies are kind of made to do certain things anyway, but we have limitations based on our lifestyle. It’s that great story that the body tells man. And it’s cool to learn how different it is knowing about yourself, knowing how you think even more so is tested right here in the gym is tested in a lot of ways, but no other place puts physical demands or where you practice putting physical demands more than when you’re in the gym doing your gym therapy when you’re in the lab. Right? And so one of the ways that we switch it is by thinking literally about how you think, if I ask you, if I share my opinion about something and then I go, what do you think? Right? I’m asking you literally to share what you’re thinking, how you’re thinking, your thought process. That part of us, the thought process that pertains to our own being is the ego.

(03:31):

You know, when your ego doesn’t like, doesn’t like being told what’s what? No, no, no, no, no. The ego’s not for that at all. The ego’s there to protect. It’s there to coddle, right? The ego’s there to keep you familiar with what’s going on around you. Everybody knows this. And of course where change happens, it’s not in the most familiar place. That’s why you guys are so dope when you come and work out. When you come and train really, really hard, because this is actually where we get to see that happen and break down the Eagles, you know, kind of myopic limits. And that’s the truth.

(04:10):

Remember a long time ago I was training with somebody and she was telling me about her trials with quitting the cigarettes. Yeah. That nicotine on knock you down a little bit. She is telling me about how she got over it. And while she did a, she read a few books by Alan Carr. She was telling me about those books by Alan Carr. And I actually had read that book before and the way that she mentioned to like how it changed her life. It did not do that for me at all. To me, this was just like something you read while you’re on the toilet or something. It wasn’t that, you know, skill the book I kind of saw right through his methodology in inside that book and I didn’t find it effective at all, but she was telling me about it. I said, yeah, I tried that.

(05:00):

And then maybe a couple weeks later when I told her about, you know, what I was going through and trying to quit smoking a lot, she started to clown me. <Laugh> she’s like really did it again. Huh? You’re just not even gonna try now mind you, I didn’t even know this lady for nothing. <Laugh> I didn’t know her that long. We had just kind of met maybe a few months before she had some connections with some people I know, but I didn’t know her and for her to just start straight clowning without her really even knowing me that well was like, really? I couldn’t believe it. Usually this doesn’t happen in these types of relationships where we’re training with each other, unless you have a really good rapport with people and that can happen sometimes. And that’s all good after all, you know, I fully expect that when we’re out here training, I’m doing a lot of the talking, a lot of the demanding I’m setting the bar kind of high.

(05:57):

And you guys might not like that all the time. You wanna kind of switch it up. Even though I am a tester, turn on my, you know, outside of my job, I’m the one doing all the, you know, you guys might want to turn that around on me. And I, I respect that, but for her to just turn it all the way around and be like, basically giving me the business for what smoking a couple stogies here and there, it was unbelievable. Her heavy, heavy words hit me in the face. This heavy set woman, heavy words dropped like a brick right in my lap. I couldn’t believe it. And right when she was doing that to me, she goes, you know, one’s really good for helping you quit smoking shame. I was like, wow.

(06:44):

Shame. She said is the best way to stop smoking. Not Alan Carr, not Nicorette. Right shame now right away. I’m like, that’s silly, right? The fragile, fragile, we little ego hates contention, right? It hates contradiction. It hates like anything that it can identify the ego within all of us. It hates anything that it can identify as like new and unfamiliar. We stroke our Eagles, right? We don’t antagonize it. That makes everything way worse. Right? Eagles are like the they’re like fruit hanging high in a tree. This tree is like overburdened with fruit. And then here comes Dennis, the manes shaking the tree just cause right. And all that fruit, all those egos, right. Dennis manes comes along. He’s shame and he’s just shaking the tree and all the fruit comes down. The ego is fragile. It’s easily bruised for the most part. When we get to a point where the ego becomes our ally, that’s a little bit later in our journey, but definitely in the case of addiction.

(07:57):

And let me turn this around for you guys. Now, addiction can be closely linked to our egos, our sense of what we think we’re supposed to be out here doing a sense of what we’re supposed to be out here accomplishing. And so when she told me it was about shame to get past them barriers, I could not disagree more at all at all, because it’s a complete opposite of what the addiction and ego likes. So I was like, really? You think that? Huh? She like, oh yeah. And she was, you know, she kind of like, let that one hang in the air a little bit. And I mean, every now and a min again, when we would start training together, she would drop another one on my head. She’s just throwing like jabs, like quick jabs. And some of them I’d block some of ’em I pair some of them would catch me right on the chin.

(08:53):

She’s very quick waiting. She hit me with those. And so some of those, you know, she would say like, you’re not even gonna try, you know, man, this is gonna let this like stop you, you know, things like that. I’d have no retort sometimes no repost, like, okay. I’m like, okay, go ahead and finish up those swings. Nah, I wasn’t like that. But I mean really you’re just kind of like stunned. Well, it turns out she had a very, very good point. Shame was a powerful weapon. When it came to working with my addiction and the addiction of cigarettes, it turns out in my opinion that she was a hundred percent correct. Now I say this not so lightly. I say this with all the gravity in the world due to it, because I know that there’s some process having to do with switching up that thing of addiction and getting past it because addictions, they could really hold you back, hold you down for very latent ways that are not very conspicuous.

(10:04):

There are million reasons that folks get addicted from watching, you know, pornography to chewing too much gum to, you know, being an, being like philan, being out here, being a Philander. You know what I mean? And cheating on your, on your loved ones. And you know, all these types of addictions, gambling, you name it, alcohol drugs. They’re so deeply hardwired into our person. So it’s not just like yo shame, right? Because then in some cases, shame has starts making you run headlong into it. But what I thought about for her and why I do think that she had a very good point with that stuff has to do with C B T, and that’s just cognitive behavior therapy. And all that means is, you know how you think, you know how you think shame is a weapon, because if you know how you think you understand the outcome of your addiction is shame and don’t nobody want to feel shame all the time.

(11:06):

Nope. I can’t even think of somebody that wants to feel shame. No matter how deep you are under the throws of any type of addiction, be the many types of addiction. There are out there. No one wants to come away feeling shame, cuz that is as bad as it gets for human beings. Right? And so as bad as it gets for your, you know, for your Yorky dog, it’s as bad as it gets for animals, right? Who have smaller brains than us. Shame is horrible, right? No one wants to walk around with the tail between their legs. But shame is a weapon because of cognitive behavior therapy. Okay. Knowing how you think makes it okay to accept, shame as a weapon. So what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna talk about how shame in the cognitive behavior spectrum helps you deal with daily addiction.

(11:56):

Now look, if you know, somebody that’s dealing with daily addiction and they don’t really have a very strong fortitude of constitution for this type of verbal redirection at this point in life, they will. So just give them a little bit of time and understand that there are these three processes I’m gonna talk about that are present in all cognitive behavioral therapies. That when you look at it from the shame angle, that might actually be able to help other people, but just know like don’t be out here picking on your milk, toasty like neighbor who could barely take like a joke. You joking with them. They looking at you all serious. Like don’t go out there and start like poking them in the chest. <Laugh> being like, Hey really again with the video games or whatever it might be, you know, and get them don’t we don’t wanna make people.

(12:43):

And this is what the immediate reaction to her. When she told me this was like, no, you have to protect people’s ego and then work from there. But the truth is we have to expose that about ourselves. So one of the ways is this and this is what happens a lot of times when we talk about changing our eating and even our fitness, like our workout plans is knowing how you think. So basically here’s how it works is there is something that goes down inside on the outside world could be a call from your, from your loved ones or your relatives or a friend long lost friend, whatever it could be. Something real benign that happens on the outside world, right? You’re in traffic a little bit too long, right? You recognize, you know, the scent, the smell, some kind of stimulus from the outside.

(13:39):

Well it triggers something within your mind. That’s the trigger. Okay. Now we’re talking about addiction. It could be something more odious, right? It could be something like stress. You being out here, pounding away, moving them papers, stamping them papers too long. You’re stressed out. Not enough fun. Right? Johnny’s a little cranky now, right? Could be anxious. You’re anxious cuz you’re constantly stuck in traffic. And you’re realizing how much of that time you’re wasting sitting up in the traffic. Now we got these gas prices. It’s a whole thing. Maybe it’s loneliness. Maybe it’s sadness. Maybe it’s anger. It’s all of these kind of negative ODS type feelings that are just native to human beings. Any of these can, things can be triggers for the type of addictive behavior. So what’s the addictive behavior. It’s that thing that makes you feel horrible, that you do that. You can’t stop and now it starts to have inroads in your life.

(14:33):

Right? It’s the thing it’s feeling really down about yourself right quick. And look, let me just say that the triggers, usually they ain’t like there for days. It’s like a thing that happens. It’s a blip, it’s a flash in a pan, but it makes you do a disproportionate reaction, which is called your, so now all of a sudden you find yourself in front of the computer too long or whatever it might be, whether it’s me was the cigarettes, right. Or if it’s someone that, you know, some friend of your family member, it could be too much of this, too little of that. Right? And over time that turns into an addiction. So that’s the behavior. Then the third part is after that you feel worse. So you went ahead and tried to throw a grenade at an Anthi to get rid of the ants and guess what?

(15:24):

You were left with nothing but destruction intra. And that’s in essence how we identify what we’re thinking, the identification would be. What made us decide that we couldn’t just feel like crap for a few seconds. And that we had to go ahead and overreact with addiction. Pretty much knowing that is the idea of cognitive behavior therapy. And we do this when we try to change horrible behaviors. When we do this, when we try to stay up in the gym and make this kind of a habitual thing, we need to know that those fleeting feelings don’t lead us to do very destructive, subversive things with our body. And those things can make you feel real bad. And that’s the nature of addiction it’s doing too much and feel really bad afterward. What if someone let you know that you feel bad? Like man, miss SIS, you don’t look good. You don’t look good after what you just got done there. You don’t, you feel right? Cause I’m feeling like you’re taking too many LS, right? You look like you’re wearing it today. What’s going on. Or in the case of my trainee, really again, all of these things are kind of recognition that you feel like crap because of your addiction. And that’s where the shame comes in. So the shame now is the third thing I mentioned was how you feel at the end, that’s called your consequence. So someone or something helps you identify it. It’s called shaming. If it’s identified that you feel or look or smell a certain way, that’s disagreeable with what you really want at the end of the day. Well, that shame was kind of that spotlight on whatever it is to make you feel bad.

(17:32):

Right?

(17:34):

You used to hear about a lot of times when I used to have a couple folks that I had trained and one of ’em would stop working out for a couple of weeks. He’d come back and tell me, man, my wife shamed me into back, coming back into the gym in cases like that, I’m thinking, well, the gym’s not an addiction. So it didn’t really change his behavior in the long term. And maybe she’s just giving them the business. But at that point I remember thinking like that’s hilarious <laugh> but when it comes to addiction, lightweight, making somebody feel like they could do a little bit better when they should and making them remember that their ego is actually being serviced more than themselves might be shameful, but it sheds a light on the consequence. And guess what? That’s the easiest pathway to changing your behavior is shining a light on the consequence, feeling amazing in the morning after you changed your sleep cycle, to get more sleep over time, instead of capitulating to feelings of whatever you name it, anger because you’re working late all the time or stress because you feel like you can’t pay the rent, changing all that, and now getting better sleep and you feel great makes you think, oh, guess what?

(18:47):

I need to do more of get better sleep. And guess what? I don’t need to overreact to the feeling of being angry. Cuz I got I’m on the job way too long. You actually have control over that. And that’s how that works right there. Those are the steps to that game plan right there. And that’s how shame could actually be your friend. That’s how you can weaponize it to change the way that you move again, knowing how you feel after an addictive behavior, which is typically a little bit crappier than you want to makes you understand. Hey, the behavior ain’t working for me, it was at one point it’s not, I gotta switch something up. I gotta switch something up or else I’m keep feeling like that. All bad, all bad. Well guess what you’re willing to do after that, you’re gonna change the thing once you identify and that’s the cognitive part of C B T that that’s the behavior that you engage in.

(19:53):

Once you start to notice like, okay, why normally reach for, take your pick addiction when I feel this way? Oh shoot. Maybe I could change what I do in that meantime. Now we’re getting a handle on the addiction. This is always gonna be the case. No matter what level of addiction we’re dealing with. Of course there’s some addictions that require a little bit more, especially when you’re trying to break physical dependency, but shame can be a very skilled weapon in the hands of a master. So too can love, but love is what you wanna provide to folks struggling, gratitude, gratitude for those folks who are in your life, who provided at one point happy times, there’s a lot of positivity to be had surrounding this stuff. But in identifying that negative consequence, right? Shame can be a weapon. So look, I wanted to just kind of put it out there that there are more than one ways for you guys to get identified with your addictive patterns that you wanna shift, be eating too much red meat and local, you know, recent times, right?

(21:08):

Or maybe it’s forgetting to go grocery shopping and choosing to eat in all the time. Those might not be high level addictions, but maybe there’s something connected to it. Maybe you’re addicted to always staying home when you should be out there doing your thing. It doesn’t matter. But the point is knowing how we are knowing how we think it’s about looking at the consequence, the thing that you need to shift and I do mean need. And then why, why you do the thing that you need to shift in order to feel better? So that’s all I wanted to alert you guys with today was just the process of C BT. Let me know how that goes for you guys. I hope it goes amazing. You can do that by going to the website, you go killer show.com, go to the bottom, fill out that form. Let me know how it all goes while you’re at it. If you enjoyed the episode, rate me on, rate it on apple podcast. Five stars, get you a free gift. I promise. And I hope it well for time. Stay up.