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I've spent 25 years helping people get out of their own way. Somewhere in there, I got out of mine.
Fascinated by Design is what happens when a psychologist follows her own advice — stops performing, starts living, and has a lot of opinions about what she finds. I'm Suzanne Meunier, a 4/6 Splenic Projector coming down from the roof at 50, and this podcast is me living my design out loud.
We're going to talk about Human Design. We're going to talk about what it actually takes to love yourself, love another person, and show up for a world in the middle of a massive shift. Psychology, energy medicine, hard-won wisdom — whatever's fascinating me that week.
Glad you're here.
FASCINATED BY DESIGN
Episode 3 — I'm Invited! Why You Stay Stuck (and What It's Really Protecting You From)
Hosted by Suzanne Meunier, Ph.D.
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Hello. I want to thank everyone who has reached out so far since the podcast launched. It's been so nice to receive the warm responses and to hear about what's been resonating for everyone. One person in particular reached out to invite me.
After I read their question, I sat and meditated on it for a little bit, and a bunch of ideas started to flood in. And because of that, I decided I wanted to answer that question for my next episode. It's actually been really fun to put these ideas together, and I think this might be one of my favorite types of episodes I create.
The question was about contemplating addiction and thinking about numbing, avoidance, staying stuck, and staying small in old habits that hold you back.
There's a whole biochemistry of addiction, especially when we're talking about substances, that I'm not going to get into. Instead, I'm going to use this question to offer a framework for thinking about behavior change, especially when you feel like you've been working to change something for a long time and you're not really seeing a lot of results.
The first way that I think about this comes from my background in behaviorism. What cognitive behavioral therapists learn to do with behavior is to conduct what's called a functional analysis. And that name pretty much describes what it is. You look at what the function of a behavior is for a person, the contexts in which the behavior comes up, and what the outcomes of the behavior are. And the more you understand the variables that affect whether that behavior increases or decreases or stays the same, the more it shows you how to intervene.
The first place you look is whether you have the skill that you need to engage in that behavior. For example, I've worked with people with social anxiety who haven't learned a lot of skills about how to start conversations or deal with awkward pauses in conversation. Building competency with a behavior is necessary for success.
If you already have that competency, it may be that you have to try a different approach. And sometimes people try a bunch of different behaviors and none of them are giving them the results that they're hoping for.
The next place you want to look is at your emotions. People have different relationships with different emotions. In some families, anger is the worst emotion that anyone could express. In others, somebody's anxiety took up all the space in the family. And so we all have different relationships to different emotions. Some we accept, and some we tend to push away.
The ones that we tend to push away are the ones we're more likely to want to use numbing behaviors in order to get rid of.
I often say to people that if I could teach the world one thing, it would be to accept their emotions and to learn to hold them. Distress tolerance and your willingness to sit in discomfort is necessary to create a pause to prevent you from engaging in impulsive behavior.
This is why I created a free offering called Sacred Discomfort. I really believe that it is a foundational tool for behavior change and growth.
Once you can sit with discomfort, you may start to look at some of the beliefs that you have that are affecting the kind of discomfort that you're experiencing. Most of us are stuck in limiting beliefs and stories.
And the challenging thing for a lot of people is that they may not even realize they're doing that. The limiting beliefs and stories we've developed are often just the way that we made sense of the world as we were developing as children, as we understood ourselves and relationships and the world around us.
And this could be a topic for a whole other conversation, but once you've established a way of seeing the world, your brain is motivated to maintain that worldview. Even though you may be stuck in a story or a limiting belief, you are motivated to have consistency in the way you experience yourself and the world.
A lot of limiting beliefs come from not being able to see the power that you hold in your life and in your situation to be an agent of change. This is a lot of what I talked about in the last episode.
And stories are often other people's stories that we have taken in through our life. We may have been told that we are the troublemaker, the quiet one, the golden child. And then those identities can feel like traps, like things we're expected to live up to and embody. They may become so comfortable in their familiarity that we would question who we would be without them.
Many of us cling to beliefs because it's preferable to facing the uncertainty of becoming someone new.
So those are all the kinds of things that I explored in my work as a psychologist, and I saw a lot of people make a lot of change looking at those levels.
Unfortunately, I've also seen a lot of people trying very hard to change using that process and still feeling stuck. Now I know that that's when we need to look at the level of the spiritual, the energetic, the mythical.
I'll start with the mythical. Consider if you are living a mythical story of a well-known archetype. I shared a little bit about the victim archetype in the last episode.
One that I've explored quite a bit is the archetype of the Fool. And each archetype has both light qualities to it and shadow qualities to it. The shadow of the Fool archetype is what I think a lot of people think of — to be made a fool of, to embarrass yourself, to be taken advantage of, to be revealed as naive.
Sometimes we can get so afraid of the shadow side of an archetype that we push it away entirely, meaning we don't get to experience any of the light qualities either. The light of the Fool archetype is trust, living in the present moment, surrender.
There are some really beautiful depictions of the Fool in the light on some tarot decks. The Fool is card zero — it's the beginning of a journey.
At the energetic level, I often see things like soul contracts, ancestral patterns in the ancestral lineage, energetic connections to another time and place such as a past or parallel life — or whatever way of thinking that makes sense to you — and even connections to collective energies. This could be energies related to collective experiences such as your race, gender, or country of origin, or even your generational cohort.
And all of these energies can be operating as data in our energetic field, which can have an impact on the possibilities available to you. That idea of as within, so without, that I've mentioned before.
One of the reasons why people feel stuck in habits or behaviors that they want to get rid of may be that they haven't found the right level of intervention for that change.
I do want to share some patterns that I've observed with addictions or self-limiting loops. When I track someone's energy body, I can see a cord that goes from their heart all the way down into the earth, and a cord that goes from their heart all the way up to the divine. Ideally, energy flows through that cord. Ideally, we're well connected to and grounded in earth energy, because we need earth energy to bring things into the physical. And we need a good connection to divine energy as well.
With addiction specifically, I often see a disruption in the connection to the divine. And once I saw that pattern, I immediately thought of AA and the 12-step program — how the very beginning of those programs involves a surrendering to a higher power.
When there's disruption in the flow of that divine energy coming in, the tendency is to look to the earth plane, to earthly pleasures, earthly matters for regulation. Many addictions and habits — whether it's scrolling through your phone, eating an ice cream sundae, drinking a glass of wine — are an effort to numb pain and/or seek pleasure.
This is another reason why developing right relationship with discomfort is so critical.
Another piece that I look at, no matter what level of intervention I'm focusing on, is also related to some behavioral principles. I've spoken before about this idea of reinforcement. If a behavior persists or increases in frequency, it is being reinforced. And there are two types of reinforcement.
One is positive reinforcement — this is adding something desirable or pleasurable. One simple example is a child says please and thank you, and you've been trying to get them to do that, and you praise them. They feel good when they're praised, and that will make them want to do the behavior more.
There's also something called negative reinforcement, and this is often how these habits are operating. Something is negatively reinforced when discomfort or pain — something undesirable — is removed. Drinking a glass of wine helps to numb feelings like anxiety.
The reason why this is all important is that if a behavior is persisting in your life, you can try to find out how it's being reinforced. And that means looking for the gift. There is some way that you benefit from the behavior.
Ask yourself: "How does it serve me to continue to do this?" And usually when I ask clients this, the first thing they say is, "It doesn't." And I say, "Well, that can't be true, because if a behavior persists or increases in frequency, it is being reinforced somehow. You just can't see the way that it's serving you yet. So let's dig deeper."
For a lot of people, the way that these habits serve them is that it gives them a perception of safety, or a sense of stability, familiarity, security — not because it's comfortable, but because it is familiar.
For some people it's a subconscious self-sabotage. Because to be big and take up space and be fully myself out in the world is very vulnerable.
And not to be a broken record, but this is also why the ability to sit with uncomfortable feelings is so critical. If we can be comfortable with feelings like vulnerability that aren't pleasant, then we won't throw up all these barriers in front of ourselves to avoid it.
I want to share a personal story about clinging to an identity that is holding you back.
Growing up, I watched my parents pay all their bills in cash. They really prided themselves on saving money before making major purchases. Every year they opened Christmas Club savings accounts. And they talked often about having really good credit and the advantages that come with that.
Those life experiences created a value in me of financial responsibility. I too strived to have very good credit, and I did for a long time.
This is way too big of a story to get into fully here, but I will share that I ended up getting into a business situation with somebody who I later discovered was a con man — which is why I've explored the archetype of the Fool so much.
But the long and the short of it is that the only way to get out of multiple legal matters as a result of that situation was to file bankruptcy. To be honest with you, when I first learned that, I was pretty sure I could find another way. I was not very thrilled about the idea of that being my only path. And the more I tried to figure out how to protect being someone with good credit, the more trapped I felt.
I'm so thankful that I do the kind of work that I do, because I realized that I needed to let that go. And that was not easy. It was not easy to let go of a part of my identity.
What I had learned was that having good credit and being financially responsible gave you value. Of course, you have value anyway. But it was one of the stories I was handed. And even though it was given to me, I made it mine. And that really challenging circumstance gave me the opportunity to let it go.
This is why we sometimes choose to stay stuck in addiction or these self-limiting loops. Because all of that work I just described is not pleasant. It's not easy.
As frustrated as you can be staying stuck in a loop, sometimes it feels like the preferable form of discomfort to face. Until it doesn't. Until you're so sick and tired of being sick and tired that you will leap into the unknown if you have to, just for the hope of something new.
So to the dear one who offered me this question — please be gentle with yourself. If you're doing things to protect yourself from your bigness, from your light, you are not alone.
What I have learned is that the more I offer compassion to myself and try to love myself without limitation, the easier it is to let go of the known and venture into the unknown.
If we beat ourselves up for being stuck, we often perpetuate the very things keeping us stuck. One of my favorite practices is inviting in curiosity instead.
Can you be curious about what level of change you may need to consider? Can you be curious about what being successful at that might look like? What supports you might need to gather for yourself?
And when you're ready to let go of your old habits, can you be gentle with yourself when discomfort inevitably arises? And remember that it's only temporary. And you can do hard things.
Thank you so much to the beautiful soul who invited me to share all of this with you. I had absolutely no idea that this was coming, and I'm so glad it did.
If you too would like to invite me, please email me at suzanne@soulbloomcoaching.com with the subject line: Invited.
I would really love to create a sense of community here as we explore all of these ideas and conversations together. Please feel free to comment about what's resonating most for you.
I'll include a link in the show notes to my Sacred Discomfort guide.
I am processing through some of the conditioning that came up for me while I created the first two episodes, and I do plan to share those reflections with you soon.
Until next time — be mindful of what you create.
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Sacred Discomfort (free guide): soulbloomcoaching.com/sacred-discomfort
Soul Bloom Coaching: soulbloomcoaching.com