Ep #26: Pain Vs. Suffering

You are listening to the Weight Loss for Successful Women podcast with Shannan Christiansen, episode number 26.

Welcome to Weight Loss for Successful Women, a podcast for women who are ready to break the diet cycle and end their struggle with weight for good. Here’s your host, Fortune 100 executive and Certified Life Coach, Shannan Christiansen.

Hello loves. I am so excited to be back today. I just love the podcast and I love all you ladies. And I just feel honored that I even get to spend this time and that I’m in your ear. So last night we were having a team meeting and we always do this over video.

My granddaughter Jackson was in rare form. She of course was with my son and daughter-in-law, and she wanted to be the center of attention. So at first, she put on these costume earrings and she tried to join us on the video, and then she went and she put on her princess shoes. I mean, all to be part of our meeting.

And we were not giving her the attention. So then she went and she put on her scary mask and she came and tried to scare all of us. She wanted attention, and she was going to try anything to get it. I was thinking about this and thinking about how the little girl inside of us is screaming for attention.

Our bodies, love. Our core selves are crying out for us to pay attention, to stop trying to disconnect. When I was on the diet rollercoaster, I was doing anything I could to disconnect from my body. I was at war with it. When I started to pay attention, started to love my body, and myself, the lizard brain, it started to quiet.

That is what happens, love, when we just give ourselves a little bit of attention. And we all finally stopped the meeting and we gave Jackson five minutes of our undivided attention. And then she went in her room to play. It was simply really that easy.

Okay ladies, it is time for our listener shout-out. This is where I read a review of the podcast in each episode. This week’s shout-out is to Melissa Brew. “These past few days have been motivational. Learning about my lizard brain has truly opened my eyes, and planning is a fundamental I am using every day.”

Thank you so much Melissa. I loved your review and thank you so much for leaving one. I really appreciate it. So loves, let’s get into today’s show. When I was 19, I fell in love. I mean hard. I was so in love. We got married and we then had our son. I mean, it was a rocky relationship, we’ll say, at best. I mean, we were young.

I mean, we split up a lot and we got back together a lot. I actually moved to Germany and then came back home and then went back to Germany. I thought I loved him so much. And then he cheated. He was not that in love with me and we decided to end it.

I was devastated. I could not believe that I was 22, going through a divorce, and I was going to be a single mother. I did not know much about divorce. My parents were still married, my aunts, my uncles, my grandparents. I had not seen much of it. I thought I was a failure. I thought I was not good enough.

It was a dark period for me because I continued to feel the devastation of losing my husband. I keep suffering over it. I did it over and over again for years. I kept suffering. I thought it was my fault. I thought I was not pretty enough, thin enough, sexy enough, that I was not enough.

My ex-husband lived out of state and he had come to visit my son many years later. And we ended up actually spending the weekend together. I felt all the feelings again. And then it was over. He went back home and I was left with all the pain again.

I decided that night after he had left to let him go, to let the pain, the suffering of that relationship be over. I remember I cried until two in the morning. I felt all the pain, all the feelings. And then I decided I was not going to suffer anymore. I had suffered long enough and it was time to rewrite the story.

I have all of my clients do this, to go back and rewrite their past. It is so powerful. The past only lives in our minds. We all have pain but we choose to suffer. Yes, I know loves, we choose it. We can change our stories and how we want to think of the stories.

We can fall victim to our past or we can become powerful because of it. And I choose power, love. I did not want to suffer anymore because of my ex, and it had nothing to do with him. It was all me. I was the one who was suffering. It all lived in my head. I decided to find the good in that relationship. The good in him.

What did he teach me? How did I become the person I was at that time because of him? And not to mention, he gave me the most precious gift of a beautiful son. I had a good relationship with my ex through the years. I did not have anything but love for him. I wish and still do him all the good in the world.

Honestly loves, I don’t think of him. My son is grown, he lives in another state, and I don’t suffer because of him. I am grateful for him. I am grateful for all the gifts he gave me. Loves, this is total freedom. This is the power of this work. We can have pain but we can feel it, learn from it, and move on.

We do not have to suffer. We can take our power back. When we suffer, we feel like victims. We lose all our power. And then do you know what we do? We eat. We buffer to avoid our feelings. We push them down. Then we carry this extra barrier around ourselves that keeps us from truly getting close to anyone.

I have released the barrier that I carried around myself for so long. I am more close to my husband than I have ever been with anyone in my life. My husband knows me. I am vulnerable with him, I let him in. I let him love me. And loves, I love him.

This work is so much more than losing weight. It is honestly life-changing work, so we can show up as our best selves, so we can let go of all of the suffering. Because love, we are powerful. We are unstoppable. We are love.

And so the transformational questions today, what pain are you carrying with you that has turned into suffering? And what are you ready to let go of? And the last one, how can you take your power back? So good, loves.

If you love this work and want to go deeper, take my free course. You can learn more about it at bflycoaching.com/free-course. Bye for now, loves.

Thank you for listening to this episode of Weight Loss for Successful Women. If you love what you heard today and want to learn more, come over to bflycoaching.com. That’s B – F – L – Y coaching dot com. See you next week!