Go Dark Transcript

Rhea: Somewhere, my parents are throwing a party because it turns out they weren't the ones that fucked me up.

Liz: I still remember in your first session, your guides had mentioned something had dimmed your light. That was a very important moment, probably more so than we could acknowledge in that session because that was a truly defining moment of trauma for you.

Rhea: At thirteen, I wasn't one of the cooler kids in school, which I know many people that would be shocked to find out. But, there was a boy that I liked and one of the girls told me that he liked me. Then it turned out that it was all a cruel trick.

Liz: Well, it started you on that path of needing validation, the fear of exclusion, that it became sort of a crippling fear. While you had friends, you were often the one who changed herself in order to keep friends.

Rhea: Yeah, totally.

Liz: So you changed yourself. You went from being this authentic person to being this other Rhea, so that she did not feel or experience the pain of that moment ever again. We can go through a lot, a good portion of our lives having constructed the story and just having it just continue to play out, and at what point do we just stop?

Rhea: The more you run away from it, the more it's going to come up because it's shouting to be heard. It'll get louder and louder and louder until you listen to it. But at the same time, I was also so scared at that moment that I kept recreating it in lots of different situations subconsciously. So that feeling of trusting someone or thinking something was going to happen and then finding out that I was wrong. On one level I was acting out the avoidance of that fear, but on the other level also I feared hope. I feared trust. I feared love.

Liz: And you gave up on yourself.

Rhea: It wasn't even just giving up on myself. I just gave up. I was like, fuck that shit. I'm not doing it anymore. I'm out.

Liz: When you're younger, you have a lot more energy and you have the energy to keep up those defenses. So that you don't get hurt or so that you can ensure you fit in so you don’t experience rejection. You sort of had this opposite approach of you sort of shut down because you got tired, but then you thought, well rather than continue to burn myself, I'm going to take time off and I don't want to engage with anyone that I don't trust. It's just going to be me and my knitting. 

Rhea: Yeah, and my parents.

Liz: And your parents. If you had a cat, you would put the cat in the equation.

Rhea: Oh no, we've got three cats. Oh my Lord. We think we bought a new one during that period. I still went out and partied and did my hair and all the rest of it, but it was a façade.  Inside I had switched off.

Liz: So you went dark, but then you decided you were ready to come out.

Rhea: Slightly pushed.

Liz: You want to say you were pushed, but you still made the choice.

Rhea: Yes, I agree with that.

Liz: But then you were hurt.

Rhea: Many times.

Liz: You did confront some unmet expectations and you thought, I'm giving up again. I'm done. It's time to get another cat. I don't deserve this.

Rhea: I was like, come on guys, I've been working really hard. Why is it still the same story?

Liz: Why is this happening to me?

Rhea: Yeah, regardless, universe, science, whatever. If I believe that I'm putting the effort in to look at the core fears, to look at what's going on and to try and address them and elevate myself, why are the echoes of my thirteen-year old self still coming up. I thought I'd dealt with them. I thought they were done. There was a lot of anger.

Liz: It built, because at first you really wanted to be understanding. All right, let me run with it. So you wrote. You wrote a lot.

Rhea: It was one of actually the most amazing lessons I learned where initially someone said to me to start writing and burning. Because if you imagine you have a lot of feelings inside, let's actually just get them out. Promise yourself, you don't have to reread it and just as long as it's coming out, that's what matters. And then once it's all out and you're done and you're tired, burn it, rip it up, throw it away. It doesn't matter. All my old shit was being retriggered and I was like, but I've written it all and I've burned it all. Why is it not away? The second time this all came up, I was angry, I was frustrated, I felt betrayed. I felt furious, but clearly there was a small part of me that was hopeful one day I wouldn't feel that way anymore.

Liz: Because hope is what keeps us going. It's what keeps us alive. It's what keeps us waking up in the morning, even if we don't like how our day is going to look.

Rhea: What the writing allowed me to do. It allowed me to own all my emotions, but at the same time in keeping the writing, own the hope that it could change and in sending it to you, own the trust in someone else to read it. By hoping maybe one day I would share it, that's love. My writing really was embodying like a whole spectrum of emotions, just the act of doing it.

Liz: That entire spectrum of emotion. All of those things that you had experienced from the time you were thirteen onward.

Rhea: And I'm a feelings person, so there was a lot in there. I remember the day I finally broke and I think since then I haven't really written and I was done. I was done being patient. I was done writing for all the different spectrum of emotions. I was just fucking angry and tired. And then I remember I sent it to you, not for you to read it, but I didn't know who else to send it to so that the universe would receive it. And that was when the anger came. And it's funny because the anger was wanting to come from the day I was thirteen. Along the way, I had picked up more and more unsaid anger as I was going. So I was angry about incident one and then everything else that happened, I was getting angrier and angrier and angrier. And even though the whole time I was writing, I wasn't allowing myself to be angry. So eventually, when I finally just went, "fuck it, it's got to come out" and I let out all the anger. That was when I saw what was really wrong.

Liz: Well, anger is will, and I had like you struggled with anger because I grew up in a fairly passive-aggressive household because Asians don't get angry.

Rhea: See, for me, everyone else was angry so I never felt I had the chance to be angry. Sometimes anger is showing you something because you're angry for a reason.

Liz: Absolutely, and the reason why we fear anger, we fear the consequence. Anger is short-lived. It directs us and shows us exactly what we need to look at and burns through that issue quickly. But because we're often taught to suppress anger, by the time it comes out, it's ugly, it's hard, it's painful and we don't know what to do with it. So we often will push it outside of ourselves.

Rhea: By the time I'm going, guys, that's fucking not cool. What's wrong with you? I wouldn't have needed to wait twenty-five years to confront it.

Liz: What people are getting really uncomfortable with is there's a lot of anger, a lot of anger on the surface.

Rhea: So much.

Liz: And it needs to be there because it needs to burn itself out and that's the only way. So while people fear it and they think that's not okay, how are we going to have peace if people are so angry? You won't have peace until you burn that out.

Rhea: Until you hear why people are angry. Anger is telling you something. Listen to it.

Liz: Because ignoring it is what stirs the rage. Anger is not the same as rage. Rage is anger ignored.

Rhea: Almost. Annoyance is anger muted. Right. Okay. And this was my last ditch attempt at stopping the cycle. It's like I have tried avoiding. I have tried pretending. I have hidden away. I've come back out again. I've hidden away again. This needs to end now. It's like this needs to finish and if this is the only way to do it, I have channelled all my OCD, obsessive nature into figuring out what was wrong so that it would no longer be wrong.

Liz: And so you took your suffering and you turned it into something positive.

Rhea: Because for me personally, I was always really comfortable when I was pretending everything was okay, but it actually wasn't. So writing something that showed that I wasn't okay and sharing that with people who I cared their opinions of was a really good way of embracing my shadow. When I was sharing my emotions, I was expecting to be rejected as a result of having them, but in fact, I became closer to the people I was sharing my emotions with. So I learned the most important lesson, which allowed me to start learning the beauty and vulnerability. You said what I've been feeling but couldn't put into words. It brought us closer in lots of different ways. So it was really nice. So yeah, suffering doesn't always have to be needless.

Liz: No, it's not because you finally allowed it. There are some that will just say, well, when you're confronted with a problem and you really don't know what to do, surrender to it, or you have all these feelings, just surrender to them, but surrendering is about letting go of your power. The idea of surrender is accepting you have no power in this situation and I struggle with that because I'm not into that. What I prefer to say is allow it. Allow the feelings, allow the anger, allow the thoughts because they get worse if you don't let them through.

Rhea: Surrendering to my anger would be to, I don't know, throw things against a wall, allow it to take away my agency and that would take away my choice. Allow it to replace me and to just become my anger. Whereas allowing my anger is finding a safe outlet for it and letting it out, giving it its space within the context of all your other emotions. Instead of saying I am angry, a part of me is angry and that is allowing, whereas I am angry is surrendering. I am the emotion of anger rather than I have experienced anger. One allows you to look at why; one allows you to look at it a little bit more objectively and one engulfs you and those are two very different things.

Liz: When you're surrendering and you're giving up your agency, you're then saying, I'm too small to handle this. I'm not strong enough to handle this. When you're allowing, you trust that no matter the outcome, no matter the consequences, you'll still be standing at the end of the day. Once you've burned through the anger, perhaps you're left with sadness.

Rhea: I was, because I remember just crying going "now fuck what?"

Liz: Oh yes, exactly. We've limited our emotional range for so long. We've been taught to fear our emotion. Yeah, I mean we have allowed ourselves this tiny emotional box in which to exist, that when we awaken to the spectrum, we realized, wow, I can be angry. It's not even that bad. Part of living on this earth plane, part of this human existence is to experience daily frustration because things aren't always going to go as you want them to.

Rhea: We don't feel like we were allowed to have emotions. We must only conform to what other people, the emotions they want us to have.

Liz: It makes everybody feel safe. Yeah.

Rhea: So owning all your emotions is really an act in loving yourself.

Liz: And when you do that, that's when you find your ultimate power. When you love yourself, you touch upon your divinity, and that is where all your power resides. Your power to manifest. Your power to co-create. Power to connect to your true heart's desires. When you own all your emotions, you are in your truest power. And the reason we've been so conditioned over lifetimes to box those in was to limit our power, to make us small, to turn us into sheep, so that way the few who had power could maintain their power.

Rhea: Give up, give in.

Liz: Don't own it.

Rhea: It is the way it is. It is the way it has to be. It is the way it's always going to be. So you might as well just get on board.

Liz: Exactly. We all have to get along. That underpinned okay, well deny your emotions because that's not going to . . . It's not going to work otherwise and we won't be able to coexist.

Rhea: If you look at the traditional gender roles, male, female, men are told they have to deny all their emotions that make them more feminine, and women are told to know all their emotions that make them more masculine. So women aren't allowed to be angry and men aren't allowed to cry. 

Liz: That’s right.

Rhea: No one is allowed to access their full emotions.

Liz: No, not at all. We need one another as outlets and that also perpetuates a sort of co-dependence. Nobody's honest. I think there's a lack of honesty, but it's in order to, again, to maintain this peace, but it makes everybody very afraid to express themselves.

Rhea: Yeah. So are you saying when we allow the emotions, we connect to ourselves?

Liz: Absolutely. Completely. In the biggest way possible. I am feeling all of my power. It's all the circuitry. Everything is suddenly lined up and turned on.

Rhea: So even feeling really sad is feeling in your power?

Liz: Absolutely.

Rhea: How can feeling hopeless and helpless be powerful?

Liz: Because it brings us to shadow.

Rhea: And then once you bring your shadow into the light, which we were talking about in the last podcast, then you bring that to the light and it makes you more powerful.

Liz: Precisely.

Rhea: So there's always a root to your power, whether or not it feels like it.

Liz: Exactly, but we forget that that's the purpose of our emotions is to always bring us back and to help us remember our power. When we're sad, we want to be happy and so we tend to consume things, partake in things, drink things. Numb, and that's not happiness. That's just a numbing and so the sadness never goes away.

Rhea: It's like, “insert coping mechanism here”, yeah.

Liz: Exactly. All we've done is just cope with our emotions rather than give them space.

Rhea: Because that's what I've noticed is that when emotions come up, they're very negative and if you allow yourself to just be in them, they tend to just dissipate. They just flow out when they're ready, when they have done what they needed to do and they have shown you what you needed to see and that's not a spiritual thing. Emotions are our guiding light psychologically, physically. They're there to tell us how we feel.

Liz: They're our gauge for our human existence. Sometimes they run so deep because they involve such a painful trauma that it isn't enough just to kind of . . .

Rhea: I mean, I had a real crew of people to help me through what we can all agree now was quite a small story at thirteen.

Liz: It takes a lot to unpack grief. It takes a lot to unpack trauma sometimes. If we tried to do it all at once, we would probably die. It can be so overwhelming, especially if we spent decades, years or decades denying them and suppressing them. And so I find that in the most gentle way possible, working at it layer by layer, which is what you did, but in a short time. I mean you had a compressed time, but you still had to go layer by layer and you were very impatient with yourself, and I had to keep reminding you you're not there yet, but it's okay because you didn't want it. If you were cracked open, you probably would have cracked up, you know?

Rhea: No, honestly. To be honest, in my case, the biggest lesson wasn't acknowledging the core fear. It was acknowledging the anger. It was allowing the anger to be.

Liz: That was the insecurity that supported the story of your core fear.

Rhea: Instead of saying to yourself, I shouldn't feel angry, say why am I feeling angry?

Liz: Because I think most people will say they've been sad, they've been depressed, they've cried or they’ve been frustrated, but they are rarely willing say I was angry. Anger is not violence either. Anger brings light to dark. Violence is pain and trauma. I think as we're moving through these emotional periods as we're talking about love and relationships and heartbreak, it's just one of the many emotions that we've experienced, that we may continue to experience or we have not yet allowed ourselves to experience.

Rhea: At thirteen, I had an experience. I then wrote a story and as a result after that I basically kept reinforcing that story until I acknowledged that the story existed.

Liz: Well the story persists. The story continues in different versions with different people until we get to the lesson.

Rhea: Happiness isn't the antidote to darkness. Peace is. Accepting it is.

Liz: Exactly. And you can only do that once everything's come up.

Rhea: Because you can only find peace once you've explored all the different aspects and emotions that you hold. You just need to allow them their space.