Let Go and Be Free Podcast: Episode 38 (Live a Healthy Life: Part 3)

In this episode, I review the first four steps to living a healthier life and then round out the last two.

Step 1

Embrace all of who you are.

Step 2

Keep a growth mindset.

Step 3

Ground yourself. Build small habits into your daily routine that act as the checks and balances to help you grow.

Step 4

Get out of your own head. Go out and help others. Volunteer and interact with others. By giving of your time, it helps you see the world as a larger place and how we're all connected.

Step 5

Be creative and have fun. Garden, paint, write, find what your creativity is and embrace it. 

Step 6

What is your life’s mission? Why were you out here? What are you meant to do? Maybe you don’t feel that you have a purpose, but what drives you? 

When we put all these steps together, we have the skills to start our journey on living a healthier life.

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I’m not a medical expert. If you need help, please reach out to a medical professional.

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Transcript

Welcome to the Let Go and Be Free podcast, a podcast for those who grew up in an alcoholic or dysfunctional family. I'm your host, Ron Vitale, author of the Let Go and Be Free: 100 Daily Reflections for Adult Children of Alcoholics series. If you'd like to learn more, feel free to visit, letgoandbefree.com. And with that, let's get on with the show.

Hello, and welcome to this week's show, I wanted to conclude our live a healthier life. So this is part three, the show, I wanted to kind of break into different parts, what steps you can take to live a healthier life and kind of chunk it out in a way that it doesn't feel overwhelming.

So this is the third episode. And just to kind of go back, in the last two episodes, we'll go through step one, embrace all of who you are. The Good, The Bad. The darkness, the parts that you're, you know, embarrassed about. Embrace all of yourself. So that way you can learn how to be comfortable in your own skin. Step two, keep a growth mindset. Always be willing to learn, always be willing to open your mind to a different perspective, to seeing a different outcome for yourself, that doors will open for you. opportunities will present themselves to you.

If you have that growth mindset, instead of being fixed in the past fixed thinking that you're a victim of what happened to you as a child growing up in an alcoholic family or dysfunctional family or where there was addiction, or sexual abuse or violence within that family. That growth mindset helps you break out of that and see from a different perspective. For step three, ground yourself, this is this practical aspect.

Throughout each day, what are the small habits that you can learn and implement over time to help you deal with your emotions, process memories, learn how to be on a path that's going to be healthy for you. For example, you know, daily journal writing, going to 12 step meetings for adult children of alcoholics, speaking to a therapist, going to church praying, you know, there's a bunch of different things that you can weave into your daily routine that will help you over time.

I believe that it is important for us to not deny our past or deny our feelings, but to focus on processing them not to get stuck with that, but to grow beyond who we were when we were children, and learn new skills so that we're not trapped in the past. And for step four, get out of your own head, go out and help others, you know, volunteer, interact with others. And when we give of our time to other people, it helps us see the world you know, as a larger place, and how we're all interconnected. It also allows us to see what we're grateful for in life that it isn't just, you know, oh, I have these problems. I have these weight weights on my shoulders.

I'm I'm just stuck. I'm never going to be you know, a better person. I'm just am who I am. And I'm very upset about that. And I'm stuck. That might have been when we were children, we felt trapped because we could not get out of the situations that we were in, you know, if there was a unhealthy marriage, you know, between your parents or if there was divorce or abandonment or whole list of things.

I've heard a bunch of stories over the years of attending adult children of alcoholic meetings of what people have gone through and you know, some of the atrocities that I've heard people live through. And it breaks my heart to hear those stories, because those children have grown up to be adults. And often, no one gave us the tools of how to process and grow beyond and heal from trauma. You know, we're we're basically told, just brush it off and go on with your life and you're going to be fine and That's not the case.

You know, often I just kept walking around and thinking like, what? What is wrong with me? Like, why don't I fit in in places? Why do I have all these, you know, thoughts and feelings about what happened to me, why are other people, their families looking to be so normal, and I don't know what that even is. So when you get out of your own head, and you learn from different perspectives, it can help, you know, put you on a path toward healing.

So today, we're going to focus on the last two steps. And when I say the last two steps, the last two steps that I'm deciding at this time to create in this podcast, you know, obviously, there are many other just just do self help book, search, and Google or Amazon or Barnes and Noble wherever, and there's going to be tons of people telling you, you know, all the various steps of things you can do, I wanted to focus something on six steps, that would be kind of breaking things down in a way that would be manageable, and helpful for you, you know, over time and things that I've used for myself, that helped me on a day to day. So step five, just getting into that I wrote down is a thought about this, what this actually has meant for me over the years, be creative, and have fun, you know, and the examples that I wrote are garden paint rate, find what your creativity is, an embrace it.

And the reason for that is, I believe that if it weren't for creativity, and my imagination that I would not be here, where I am today, that the creativity, of writing, and being able to tell my story, the way I want it to tell my story, not how others wanted me to be, has allowed me to find a path of healing, that I can write down ideas. And imagine places that don't exist. And I can infuse that with emotion, and build characters, who are shards of, you know, maybe aspects of my personality or things that I've seen growing up in life.

And I can play that all out, as though I'm this, you know, historian, building out these layers upon layers of new worlds and imaginations. And for me, that frees me, it allows me to go back to when I was a kid. And I remember some of the first stories that I wrote that I could escape in my head, in my imagination, through words and the power of language, to some place, and somewhere, the no one could hurt me, no one could bother me.

And I could be away from the chaos that was happening around me. And I wanted to be clear. It I'm not saying that I wanted to escape forever, and to live in a fantasy land 24/7. That's, that's not what I chose to do and would not have been very helpful for me. What I wanted to do is find a way at first it was this escape. And then I realized that through the power of language, I could process and overcome my feelings, by tying a word to an emotion to a memory, and find a way to overcome that by letting it go. The power of writing, casting it off of myself or embracing that memory, and owning it was a powerful tool for me, creativity.

Now, that doesn't mean that writing will be your thing. Maybe you hate writing, maybe it's gardening. Maybe it is something that you haven't allowed yourself the opportunity to explore. It could be dancing, it could be hiking, it could be fishing, I don't know, I don't know what it is for you. But the purpose of this step is self discovery. That we are not simply machines that work. We are not simply what other tell us that we should do or should be in either work, or in our family life. We may be trapped in those environments thinking, we're just a worker, we're just a parent, or we're just a husband or a wife or whatever our roles are.

That's the only thing that we can see. But again, going back to one of the earlier steps of the growth mindset, what can you grow beyond who you are Today, and build and grow through creativity, what can you create? Why do you want to create? Again, it could just be you like bike riding, and you find that enjoyable. The purpose of this is, again, tied into the previous step of getting out of your head. By trying this new hobby, or activity, or second career, whatever it is for you. You know, there are some people that maybe they work full time and there, isn't there an accountant.

And then on the side, they like to go to poetry readings, or they like to go to stand up comedy, and they give a bit, it doesn't matter if you're good at it, or you're an expert, or you're just flailing along, the important thing is, is that you're taking the opportunity to be creative, and have fun. I look back, you know, at a lot of my early memories, and they're, they're not infused with fun, they're infused with fear, weary anxiety, concern. This overbearing oppressiveness of I don't know what's happening, and I don't know how we're going to get out of it.

So with those early memories, kind of woven into my brain, the choice that I have now as an adult, is that I can just live that, and stick in my mind that way, and always have that low level anxiety and fear, guiding me throughout life, or I could choose a different path. And I could choose to be creative, I can, I can choose to embrace those memories of the past. And for me, I can empower them through language, and create characters and stories. I wrote my first novel, when I was 16 years old, was part of a French class assignment in high school, and I got to create worlds and characters beyond compare. And at the time, my French teacher, she had said to us, every night, write a page in French, like a journal. And for whatever reason, I translated that into, I wrote a page every night in French, and decided to write a novel.

And when the assignment was finished, I kept writing, I did stop the translation in the French, but I kept moving forward, and finished thing it was like about 110,000 word, novel. And over the years, I rewrote that many, many, many times. And that became my first novel. And I look back at that novel, I have a lot of fond feelings about it. And it's something that I look at. And I see how naive I was in my writing. And, you know, how important it was for me to grow from where I was at that, that mindset of understanding the techniques of a writer and storytelling. I just didn't know I just saw the movies and read the books around me and I emulated that I did the best I could. And so when I see that first novel, I don't, I don't necessarily cringe at edit being quote unquote, bad. I, I look at it as that was my first effort to put my heart and soul out into the world that I wanted to be something that I was told I could not be.

I wanted to be an author. I wanted to be someone that wrote books. And for the longest time, from the year years of like, 16, up until, I guess it was my mid 30s. I tried to shop that book up and down the block, and it just failed. And then I decided became the indie author and went down that path. And with the Kindle store, what is it Kindle select, was able to get the book up, you know, in Amazon and a bunch of other places like Barnes and Noble, Google Play, Kobo, etc. And from there, over time, I have gone on to write I forget, I think it's close to 15 books, fiction books, I lost count. I just you know, every year I do one or two You know, and just knock them out.

And I have a lot of fun with them. In my head, yes, I would love all my stories to sell lots of, you know, copies. So that way I could, you know, make some more money and provide more for my family. That is not the case at the moment. But I keep trying. And so that creativity, for me, the importance of it, is that I can tell stories about my characters. And anyone who knows me at all can look at those characters and be a little bit in the know, because if you look at the Cinderella series that I wrote, you can see that Cinderella came from, you know, a dysfunctional family. In fact, I just wrote a short story about her mother. And her mother has an addictive personality.

And it tells a story of why she abandoned you know, Cinderella, when she when Cinderella was young. And I had so much fun in writing those stories, because I got to play around with, you know, the real life emotions that I've seen, experienced, you know, myself, not that I'm playing out the same stories that I've seen. But I've allowed the creativity to blossom within me, and to embrace that. And so what I say to you, is, what is your creative aspect, you might think you don't have any creative aspect at all. But have you ever tried, again, why?

Fine, the creative impulse within you to grow beyond your past, I don't know how else to say it. And it doesn't matter. If you fail it what you try, it doesn't matter. If you decide over time to try something different, and, you know, move on from something else. It really doesn't matter. What matters is, you keep trying, you keep being creative, you keep growing. And with, you know, the world that we live, there's so many things, you know to do. I'm recording a podcast, which meant I had to learn how to do that I had to not just come up with the ideas, which, you know, thankfully, I can do.

But the technical part, you know, taking the recording and exporting it as an mp3 and connecting it to a website and putting it into an RSS feed and getting it out building web pages, and a graphic for the blah, blah, blah, the whole thing. That's all creativity, and I love doing stuff like that. What is your thing? You know, do you want to build models? Do you you know, into car driving, horseback riding, whatever it is, embrace it, and grow from it. And tie it into? I would recommend, like if you do daily pages in journal writing, how do you feel when you try these new things? Does it give you this excitement of wow. You can grow beyond and be beyond what you thought you were ever going to be? Again, you know, friends mind years ago had said, Well, you know, run a 5k with us.

And I'm like, I could never do that. And I did. And then they were like, well come with us and run a 10 miler, I'm like, that's impossible. That's three times as much as a 5k. And I did run a half marathon 13.1 miles I did and then eventually run a marathon. And I did, your brain might think something is impossible, because you were told it was always impossible. But you can try. And you can move forward and experiment and grow and be creative.

You know, become a musician, a singer, comedian, like, do something that's going to bring you joy, and embrace that. So that's step five. And then step six, this one might be a little trickier. It's essentially, what is your life's mission? Do you know what you were meant to do? And that's a heavy question. You know, I guess when we tease this out, you know, why are you here on this earth? What do you meant to do? You know, if you don't feel like you have a purpose, what drives you? And again, taking in Know, the spiritual God aspect out of it, if if you don't believe that there is a God, you might say, Well, I wasn't put here, I was just, you know, born from my parents, you know, I have no special, you know, God that came down and said, You will do this, I don't believe in that. Got it. I'm not saying that you, you need to believe that. But what I am saying is, I think that each of us have unique skills.

And as we explore them, we could find our way of how we can fit into the fabric of society, and the people around us. Some people are naturally good at certain things I like to write, maybe you don't like to write, maybe you can sing better than I can sing. Or you have a mind that's more analytical with dealing with like accounting and finance, and you'd love that. Whereas I'm not into accounting, you know, I'm not in the finance world. Or it could be anything. What is it that you were meant to do? What is it that you can do for good to help others? Help yourself? Help move the world forward? What is it that drives you? And I don't mean to focus on, you know, the negative aspect, you know, you could look back in history, and some people, you know, became leaders of, you know, dictators and such, I'm not saying to take a path that's going to be destructive, and hurt others, I'm saying, what can you do to be of service? What can you do to fit in to your role? And what is that role?

And you might say, I don't understand that, what does that really mean? Well, we all have labels that are applied to us, you could be a loner, you could be a father, you could be a son, or daughter, a wife, you could be a single person, you might be labeled all sorts of things. What are the roles that you enjoy and play in your life? Some people choose to be parents, some people choose not to the roles that you've chosen. One, did you have the ability to choose them? Or were they imposed on you, either by your socioeconomic class, your level of education, or your age limit? What were you told you couldn't do? But maybe you really wanted to do. So if you can think through those.

Again, this is where I think the daily pages and writing and therapy all comes in handy. And, you know, adult children of alcoholics meetings, where you get to tell your story, you get to write them out, you know, if you're doing those daily pages, you can talk to your therapist, you know, maybe when you were younger, you always wanted to grow up to be a what, you know, I wanted to be an astronomer when I was younger. And I look back at the path and I decided to go through the route of being an author. And I wonder about that. I wonder in that, I always believed that I wasn't good at math. And I don't know if that's necessarily true. But I found that my brain gravitated much more toward words. And again, creating stories and characters and novels and books and plays. I just war naturally gravitated toward that.

And, you know, I look at my role and the place that I have in the world. And I always wanted to use stories to tell that we can heal from our trauma by telling these stories, like that's what I'm, I kind of believe I'm meant to do in this world. It's taken me a long time to figure that out. And I look at it as if I want to be happy in my life, then I know that it's important for me to write those stories. And again, that might sound really strange to people like well, I don't know what my purpose is. When you're creative, the previous step, you can discover over time, as you're going out on that journey on that path. What do you naturally gravitate toward? And what do you not? Or what do you might want to maybe push yourself out of your comfort zone and try something different?

It's just there's a lot of pain and suffering happening in the world. I feel like every time I turn the news on, there's been another shooting in the United states and people have died. There's, you know, wars. Throughout the world, there are people that are dying, there's people that being abused, I mean, there's just a lot of bad news that's happening. And maybe we see that more because of the interconnectedness with the Internet.

And news is instantaneous, you know, you could be pretty much anywhere in the world, take a picture of something with your phone, and some words and share it out. In instance, you know, like, seconds, and it can go all around the world, and we can see good things, bad things and everything in between. And there's pros of that, and cons to that. So, we might hear and see a lot of the negativity.

But what I'm asking of you is to challenge yourself to see what difference can you make in your part of the world? In a positive way? What were you meant to do? Do you like to cook, maybe you could cook, maybe you could cook some food? And, you know, share it with local home homeless shelter? Or set a, you know, a table up at a local farmers market? What is it? What is it that drives you, that you say, I wish I could have done? Whatever? Can you try that? Can you experiment, and go down that path.

The reason why I wanted to end with this step is that, I think many of us that when we were growing up our our childhoods were kind of cut short, you know, we we got to see and experience pain in our families, some of us physically experienced pain. I mean, I was lucky enough not to experience that, but I know many who have struggled to overcome some horrible backgrounds, and stories that they have shared, you know, they feel broken.

And it's taken them years, to know that they are worthy, that they are loved, that they love themselves, and that they have found their purpose in life by moving forward step by step in a positive direction. And they've chosen to break the cycle of addiction, and alcoholism, and dysfunction in their families, and in the future families that they want to grow, and they want to build. That is a pretty powerful statement.

If you think about someone realizing where they came from embracing all of that, choosing to go on different path and not to replicate the same cycle of dysfunction. And then to either again, choose to have children or not have children, but to pass on what they have learned with their friends, their family members, their co workers and their loved ones, I think there is nothing greater in life, you know, then to love. And that love starts with yourself, you know, looking in the mirror and saying, I love all of myself, you know, the quirks, the you know, lumpiness, the whatever you got going on, you know, all of it.

And I think many of us don't take that opportunity to really embrace ourselves, and to be comfortable, you know, with where we are in life. It is hard to grow beyond how many years that we may have suffered, you know, as kids, it was, like, just burned into us. And it's what we knew, but it's not necessarily what was right. And as adults, each day, we have an opportunity to choose and do something different. To go on a path that's going to positive, to embrace that path, to be able to say, I choose something different. I want to move forward. I'm going to choose myself and love myself, and then to allow that to grow around me and to share that.

And it doesn't matter. what anybody else says is what we choose to do in that positivity of moving forward. So with the six steps, I wanted to take the time to tell a story to kind of piece these out over the last several weeks, so that you can look at them. Have some time to think about them and choose what do you want to do next? What's going to make you happy? How are you going to move and live for your rest of your life? I can't answer that. I can only tell you what I have done and my missteps and stumbling forward stumbling to the side stumbling back.

Day by day, I choose to move forward. And I choose to love. And I hope and pray that you choose to do the same. So thank you for listening to this episode. I hope it wasn't meandering too much. And I do hope that these last couple episodes for these six steps have been helpful for you as you move forward and decide what you want to do with the rest of your life. If you want to learn more, you can visit let go and be free.com. On those web pages, you can find the other books that I've written for the let go and be free series. Again, if you want to help support the podcast, I'd appreciate it. Anyone who buys one of the books, the four vines books, and again, they were written to be daily reflections. Each book has 100 days. So you know, you buy one book for the next 100 days, you could read a daily reflection and think of that. So all that exists. And then also, you could subscribe to this podcast through sub stack.

And then you know, there's an option if you're on the mailing list to basically subscribe. All fees that are collected help go and pay for the hosting for this podcast, and for the transcription service. So if you go to the website, like go and be free, you go to the podcast section. Each episode, there is the transcript of the show. It's artificial intelligence created so it's not perfect in its translation. But you can take the 25 the 30 something minutes, and you can read through the script, which I think is helpful for some people so they can go back through it. So again, thank you for taking the time to listen. I appreciate each and every one of you. And as always, be well.

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