Exploring the Power of Fearlessness: From Shame to Gratitude

Fear. Shame. They're powerful emotions that shape our lives more than we often admit. This episode of the Amanda Quick Show promises to guide you on an enlightening journey, confronting these emotions head-on. I, Amanda Quick, will tackle these topics, helping you understand the concept of fearlessness as a tool to face fears and judgment and stand tall in your truth. We'll explore how our past wounds and judgments can often be the root of our fears and how understanding them can reduce their hold on us.

Our voyage continues into the territory of collective shame and its significant implications for individuals and society throughout history. Have you ever felt the pressure of societal judgment? You're not alone. We'll take a deep look at how our inherent need to belong to a community can lead to the imposition of collective shame. Yet, there is hope. We'll discover how vulnerability and transparency can help release our shame and the freedom that comes from understanding that we are responsible for our actions alone, regardless of collective opinion.

Finally, we'll delve into the transformative power of direct experiences and how they can serve as our greatest teachers. Trauma can take a toll on our body and mind, but learning from it can offer a deeper understanding and even find gratitude and opportunity in our pain. Let's explore together the beauty of creating a safe space within ourselves and for others, and how our experiences, painful as they may be, can lead us to gratitude. This is a journey of personal growth, pushing through fear, releasing shame, and embracing the lessons of our experiences. Don't miss out on this powerful exploration.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:36

Hello everyone and welcome back to the Amanda Quick Show. I'm your host, amanda Quick, today's episode. I want to talk about something that one of my friends and listeners asked me to talk about and really how the journey of unraveling all of that happened. Because what she asked me to talk about on a show was this concept of fearlessness. She wanted to bring more of that into her life and she wanted to know my thoughts on what that might look like, and my intention was to focus on that, but I have to bring in all the rest of the ordinances that have unfolded since, because this idea of fearlessness this it feels like a permission slip. It feels like if we become fearless, then we can stand up and face our fears, face our judgments, face others, and not worry about some level of safety or judgment from people or what ifs or maybes or all of those things that can wound us up emotionally, mentally, physically, everything. And so this idea that we want to be more fearless, we want to be more courageous, we want to be more willing to step into the unknown to me comes from a handful of different things. It comes from a set of woundings and a set of judgments about how we have shown up in our lives thus far. Because if you're asking, how do I be more fearless, you're saying that I'm very fearful. And so when we break that down and we look at, okay, what does that mean and what am I actually afraid of?

Speaker 1: 2:27

One of the exercises that I like to do is kind of ask myself what am I so afraid of? What's the worst thing that can happen here? And I do this for a few reasons. I do this so that I can first of all put a name and words to whatever it is, and sometimes, when it comes out of my mouth, it sounds ridiculous. One of the most recent fears that came out of my mouth was I'm afraid I'm gonna be normal. That's a pretty ridiculous fear, and yet it was true. It was how I was feeling in that moment. And sometimes, when we voice it, it can. It can take out the weight of it, it can make it less charged and sometimes it actually brings up more. Sometimes it's oh, this is a big one and I am really afraid and my body is responding and I don't even know that I can talk about it.

Speaker 1: 3:19

And when that happens, that's when we really found something. There's some meat in there and my suggestion isn't to then go sit in that fear, but to recognize there is one here and we're humans and a human body and fear comes from a very real place. The way that we are formed is humans, that our brains create the fight-or-flight response to survive. That is, that is what we're doing here. We're still somewhat animalistic and a fear response is our predator is coming response. Fight-flight, freeze, hide, run, fight back. That's where all that's coming from and that's our nervous system and our adrenaline spiking to tell us something isn't safe. And so when we're in a fear response to a possibility, a what if, a perhaps even very real current situation, our body is talking to us saying we're not safe, you gotta do something, you're gonna change something, you gotta take action, you gotta run away, whatever it is.

Speaker 1: 4:28

And a lot of times I find especially for myself now, that I have come out of very fearful situations what I'm most afraid of is in present day, it's the what ifs in the future, the what ifs that haven't even existed yet. And something that I've been kind of unpacking in myself recently is that because I lived for so long in fight or flight, because I operated from a place of fear, I learned how to make that my normal and learned I'm a badass when it comes to being in trauma, to being backed against the wall, to being in a fear response and taking action. I know how to trauma and while I can wear that as a badge of honor, it's not actually how I wanna live my life anymore. I don't wanna live my life in fear and in trauma, and while it's somewhat easier, it's actually been more challenging to find and learn how to create outside of that fear response. And so when we look at these fears that come up, that are future fears, sometimes they're coming up and spinning us up because we only know how to operate in that fear energy. We only know how to operate as fearful beings because that's how we create, and I know that.

Speaker 1: 5:49

For me, it has meant that I have made choices that put me back into a fair response, because, okay, now I know what to do. I need to clear the way here so that I can do something with this, but more and more I'm stepping into a different place where I no longer wanna live in fear. I no longer wanna live in fight or flight. I no longer wanna live in a place of any version of judgment or shame. And what has been coming up for me since thinking through all of this is how, collectively, the judgments and shame that are imposed on us because of the way we've operated actually continue this fear loop when I start to unravel the things that I'm most afraid of. This idea that I would be normal was actually didn't have an emotion behind it. It was kind of a okay, that's what's coming up. But what has the emotion behind for me is being afraid that I'm gonna make a choice that's gonna affect somebody else, that people are gonna follow me or follow my words or my methods, or my children, who are bound to me in their own way, are gonna be hurt because of a choice I made. And where that comes from is from this exact experience, and there's a lot of other energy wound up in it.

Speaker 1: 7:12

But the fear and the shame of the choices that I've made in the past that have impacted other people and this is a big one for a lot of people. I know it's. It's been a big one for me and Just today even I I went for I went for a float. It's my favorite If. If you are somebody who is often overstimulated, a float is a really fabulous sensory deprivation thing that I like to do and Went for a float and I was thinking about all these things and all these these things coming up in these themes, coming up in my life and people's lives, and If I've worked a lot with judgments and I've worked a lot with creating safety and I've worked a lot with some of these pieces within myself and and I recognize that, letting go of the fear, we have to create safe space for self and we have to release judgments of self and we have to be radically accountable for self.

Speaker 1: 8:04

But all of that, what it doesn't actually release is this underlying shame that holds us To the fear. Because the shame is is somebody gonna find out I'm a bad person? Is somebody gonna find out that I'm, I'm not in integrity or who I see I am, or is somebody gonna be hurt because of the things that I'm doing? That's where the shame comes from. If we lived in isolation, without Friends, family, people, we wouldn't have shame because we wouldn't hurt anybody, we wouldn't or wouldn't be impacting anybody. And the shame comes from this belief that we're we're harmful, we've made choices that are harmful.

Speaker 1: 8:45

You know, there was a lot of collective shame around the COVID pandemic and and shaming people into making one choice or another and whether or not they vaccinated themselves. There's a lot of collective shame around. You know choices to to vaccinate your children, and I mean that's just one example, but all kinds of collective shame around. If you don't, you're gonna be harming other people and you know that collective shame has existed Forever. I mean that collective shame kept racism in place. If you hang out with black people, you're gonna get infected by blackness. That was a belief. People operated with that truth and the amount of shame that you would be Ostracized and and seen as a bad person and pushed out of your collective was a very, very unsafe, because the whole point of being a human and being in a collective is that you're part of a community and that's it's safe For that, because that's how we eat it, that's how we stay protected and not in the wild. You're just food and so Shame is coming from the need to belong and a need to be part of something and it's a judgment put on you by that collective.

Speaker 1: 9:54

You know that a morality pieces are shame, the, the. You know choices that we make in our lives bring shame, whether we, you know, take a career path or whether we don't Can induce shame. There we have body shame in the way we look differently than other people. There's so many, so many layers of this, and All of it is installed by this collective understanding of right versus wrong judgments of one another, but what the person receives is shame shame for Doing or not doing something that somebody else thinks is the right thing to do and that you're impacting people because you're not doing it or you are doing it, whatever version it is, and what I've noticed the people who are projecting shame are usually sitting in some shum shame of themselves. It's a mirror for them. There they feel shame and so they want to make sure everybody else feels the same. And so we all have the same collective right versus wrongs and we can see that and we can say well, I don't like that, I don't want to accept those pieces. But how do we really release it? How do we really let it go?

Speaker 1: 11:06

And I was really thinking about this, because what I try to do and what's really supported me as being transparent and vulnerable to write a book about the most shameful time in my life and speak it out to the world. To talk about my ex-husband being arrested for human trafficking, for trying to have sex with children. There's a lot of shame wrapped up in that and inviting him back into the home and reigniting our relationship while I did so. There's a lot of shame wrapped around that, and that was the most shameful time for me, not that he made the choices he did, but that I made the choices that I did. That later impacted my children, and understanding that, understanding that those pieces were the hardest because of the impacts that they had on other people, I think to me is how we start to unravel this for self.

Speaker 1: 11:59

Because, yes, there is a responsibility to be accountable to self. We're not responsible for the co-creation that other people are participating in, and so we have to understand that everybody has their version of lessons, everybody has their version of choice, and we not only can say this isn't my shame to have, but we don't need to project our own judgments of what their choices are not. And as long as we are true to self and we are honest with self and we are standing in our truth, there is no need to be shame. We don't need to be shamed for who we are, for making the best decisions we can with the information we have. It would be kind of silly to shame us for that. We're doing everything we can and I truly believe that the vast majority of people out there are doing just that. They may not know what they don't know. They may not understand why their emotions are the way they are. They may not understand why other people respond the way they do, but they truly think they're doing the right thing for themselves and I don't think anybody should be shamed for that. I think if we can instead start to look at shame itself and fear itself differently, that's where the opportunity lies.

Speaker 1: 13:21

And what occurred to me is in my float today and as I was thinking through all of these various pieces, is that shame isn't the problem. It's not that we have to release it. And just as fear is also not the problem, fear is our body's response that there's a wrongness, a predator, you've got to take action. It's an adrenaline response to move. That's not bad. If we don't want to release that, we want to think it and honor it and say appreciate the lesson, it's time to go get the safety. And honoring our body's response to fear helps us recognize that it's not fear that's the issue. And becoming fearless if it means that we're no longer in sync and listening to our body's innate system, that would be kind of defeating the point, right, because you still need the message that this is unsafe. You still need to know what that is. You just need to take action.

Speaker 1: 14:23

And so I think what actually my friend was asking wasn't to become fearless and remove fear, but to become fearless of the unknown, and fearless when it comes to taking action through the unknown, when her body does have a fair response, and if that's what we're actually after, and if we're actually afraid, not of our body's response or whatever predator thing is in front of us, but if we're actually afraid that we're going to make the wrong choice, and we're going to make the wrong choice that's going to hurt somebody else what we're actually afraid of is more shame. We're actually afraid of more shame on self and more. How did you not know? And how are you doing this again and why are you still wrapped up in this? We're actually afraid of that, not of the predator themselves. We're afraid of our inability to take action and how that's going to impact the people that matter the most to us, and so it's not actually fear we're trying to get rid of. It's not actually even judgment that we're trying to get rid of, because judgment is the projection, and judgment is makes it much more challenging to accept another perspective.

Speaker 1: 15:46

But if you can see that perspectives are there and you can see this bigger picture, in this case, it's not that you're judging the situation or you're saying I'm judging the predator. You're saying my body's saying I gotta run, but I'm scared because I don't know which way. I don't know which way is the right way. I'm at this ten fork road and there's a predator behind me and I don't know which way to go, and so I'm sitting in fear of taking the wrong step. And I'm sitting in fear of taking the wrong step and the wrong course of action, and there's going to be something bigger, even on the other side. Or I'm going to bring my kids with me and they're going to get lost, or there's going to be a worse thing ahead, or they're going to find me, because it's a clear path instead of a more hidden one. Whatever analogy I'm using here.

Speaker 1: 16:31

Yes, of course, but whatever the fear is, it's not that you're, it's not that you're afraid of the predator, it's that you're afraid that you're going to make the wrong choice and you're going to hurt somebody. You're afraid of more shame, you're afraid of the pain that's going to be caused by the reality that maybe you caused more pain and if we're going to unravel this one because it's heavy and there's all of the examples in your lifetime and past lifetimes and future lifetimes if that's the way that you look at your universe but there's all of these examples of where that's been true. I know for me it certainly is. There's lots and lots of examples where I have not known what to do. I've sat in fear and I've made a choice that hurt the people that mattered the most to me, and I've done it more than once and I stayed stuck in it for a very long time. It's a good portion of my book and sitting in fear of movement and sitting in fear of I'm going to make the wrong decision and I'm going to hurt them even worse.

Speaker 1: 17:44

For me, this fear that my children are going to be raised without a father and the shame that I felt because of that and the choices that I made as a teenager because of that and I'm not wanting that for my kids kept me stuck in my marriage. Despite his offense, despite his deviant behavior. I was more afraid of that because of the shame I felt, and so I was holding on to that and projecting my own wounding onto the situation, making me unable to pick a path. I hired all the help I could get, saying I don't know how to do this, I don't know how to put these pieces together. I believe children and their father, but this is not safe and I don't know what to do. You tell me what to do, you make me safe, you tell me which direction to go, and when we do that, we're just projecting this further fear onto somebody else and saying, okay, you're in charge. Now I am not the creator of my reality, you fix it. Except when you do that, you've got married yourself to this other person with their own expectations and woundings, and sometimes a safe place is supportive for a period of time.

Speaker 1: 18:52

But at least from my lending and my direct experience, that didn't solve anything. It only made things a little worse, truthfully, because it really wasn't about which path is right. It was not about the correct path, but it was about me taking the opportunity to finally step into my power and choose for myself. It wasn't about doing what the lawyer said. It wasn't about doing what the friend said or anybody else. It was about saying I want the safe path, that I trust myself to create it. And when I stepped into that place, the path forward was clear. It was that way and we might take some turns and we might get some help and we might take some some. You know, we might go over some stumps and some rocks that weren't helpful, but we know the direction we're going and we know where we're going to and I trust myself to get there and to guide us.

Speaker 1: 19:55

And sitting in that energy taking action from that place, allowed me to create safety for myself and my children in a way that I never had directly experienced before. I had never created it for myself in that way. I'd never been courageous to face this predator head on like that. It wasn't that the path was to run. The path was actually to take some steps and turn around and face the bully for what it was, and the bully back down and took off, and for me, I had to trust myself to gather everything that I needed in order to stand up and do that. And everybody's version of this is going to look different, of course, but sitting in that energy.

Speaker 1: 20:43

Taking the opportunity that presented itself to me and knowing I created that stepped me into this place of courageousness and vulnerability in a way that I hadn't had, but it didn't. I'd still had some lingering shame of the choices that I made in the past. It didn't stop me from creating safety in that moment. But until I looked back and understood that the choices that I made the whole time even the quote wrong choices were for me they were all exactly the right choice that I needed to make. For the choice of experience that I am creating today, I would not be the person I am today. I would not be talking on the show, I wouldn't be sharing my messages, I wouldn't have written a book had I not had that experience. And while I didn't consciously say this is what I wanna do when I grow up no, of course not, that would be ridiculous I can truly say that this has been a massive opportunity for me to take back my power, to use my most shameful time in my life as my greatest power.

Speaker 1: 21:57

The opportunity that presented itself to understand with deep compassion what people and why people stay in abusive situations, why people stay so long, why it takes, I think, an average of seven times for the abused woman to leave. I think that's the statistic. But it takes a long time. People come back and they come back for all kinds of reasons for financial safety reasons, for fear of the unknown, of no place to go, of children. There's a bajillion reasons people come back. Our bodies literally become addicted to this cycle and we have to figure out how to unravel that. There's so many reasons people stay and come back to trauma situations. It's at some point. It's all we know.

Speaker 1: 22:45

But experiencing that firsthand, making that become my lived experience, gave me such a depth of understanding, such a wealth of knowledge that I wouldn't have otherwise. No schooling would teach me trauma in the way that real life experience does. There's no way, no schooling could tell me what my body's response system and my nervous system's response system is to being gaslit over and over and over again, to be triggered over and over again and then have to hand my children over to the person doing so. No school would prepare me to understand the depth that I do. No school could prepare me for having my children tell me about sexual growing going on at their father's house and being told by Child Protective Services Sorry, nothing we can do, he's fine. Nobody can prepare that like direct experience.

Speaker 1: 23:40

And I'm not saying go out and set yourself up to learn this the hard way, no, but for me, there was such a massive opportunity to deeply understand what other people go through so that I can help in the only ways I know how through sharing my experience, through being transparent in my unraveling and my healing journey, and everything that I'm trying to do today to point out the systematic misses that we are currently experiencing, to be able to speak in a way that can reach people. Without all of that, I wouldn't be able to. I wouldn't. People wouldn't feel seen and safe with their most vulnerable, traumatic, shameful experiences, unless they could really deeply know that I get it. I've been there and because of that, I can be that safe place for those people and that is one of the most beautiful gifts that has come out of all of this is the ability to be a safe space now, today, for my children, for my family members, for my close friends, for those who decide to work with me and grow with me.

Speaker 1: 24:58

I get to be that safe space and I think that that's it's such. It's such a beautiful gift after all of this, this challenge. It's such this beautiful opportunity that I now see and I now can have gratitude for, and so to come out of, to come out of fearless, to come out of fear and to become fearless is to not release the shame but find the opportunity in it. To find the opportunity and and find the gratitude for that opportunity and really embody it, feel it deep within yourself, so that you actually see that there was no wrong choice the whole time, and to do it again. You might even do the same thing, because, I don't know how it's, you would learn those lessons and and the by to take a hope, taken a whole lot longer to get all of that schooling, or to learn it another hard way. And yeah, no, it kind of sucked, sure, but we made it through and we're okay and we're healing and we're growing and now we have this huge gift that we can give other people that opportunity. And I believe, no matter the version of shame, whatever it is, there's an opportunity for everybody. There's an opportunity for growth, there's a lesson, there's an opportunity to support. There there's some physical, mental, emotional, spiritual peace for you, and it's up to you to decide what it is. It's up to you to decide the opportunity that that's going to help you find the gratitude for the experience, to truly own it and not just say that you forgive yourself and let let it go with love, because that's releasing, that's still rejecting, but to actually own it as such a part of your experience that has created you today and created the opportunities for you today and the gratitude for who you are today, and shifting it into that, chifting it into that and just embodying that through your journey and through your next steps.

Speaker 1: 27:06

Nobody can throw shame on me anymore for my experience with my ex husband. People have tried Absolutely. People have thrown all kinds of accusations at me and every time I have to check, make sure I'm good. But today I have. I have shared my story on so many different public public areas, interviews, podcasts, this show, everywhere.

Speaker 1: 27:31

Nobody can throw shame at me anymore and if they try to, I know it's always a reflection back of their own shame, of their own projections of right versus wrong and they would never and all of that, and that's okay. That's okay. That's their journey to unravel. I don't need to take it on as mine. It's not relevant to me anymore. I've learned that lesson and I'm thankful for it. I'm thankful to be able to share with all of you today all of these uncoverings and unravelings and to be able to support people through that journey.

Speaker 1: 28:04

And if you're somebody who wants to go deeper with me and unravel this further and and work with me in a group setting, my brand new container, the Milky Way community, is now open, I will put the link in the show notes and demand a quick healing. Comm slash community. It's only 20 bucks a month and two lives with me a month. Going deeper into these exact same topics. We're going to go back and forth and figure out what your deepest shame is and what is the opportunity in it, and and really work together in a safe space with community, with other people, to dig in deeper. If you're called to be there, I would love to have you. That's all for this week. Lots of love everyone.