Break The Rules

Katrina Mondragon, MS, LPC, LMHC solo episode!

Sponsored by Katrina Mondragon, PLLC (Est. 2016)

Every Friday new episodes are released of a podcast by I Don't Know, where we don't know what each week will hold. 

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Greetings, fellow humans. Katrina here. Quick disclaimer: I'm a professional, not your professional, so nothing I should talk about today. Should be taken with medical legal otherwise advice. This podcast is pretty for education and amusement. That is it. That's the disclaimer. You might see Sally running around in the background. I am in the backyard. And so today I thought of I'd talk a bit about breaking the rules. Oh, there she is. And I don't mean the rules that like your parents set or that are laws. I mean break the useless rules that are from our own inner experience, such as shoulds. Oh, I should do the dishes. Well, if I have that thought, I think next, can I do the dishes right now? If the answer is no, move on, is what I did. But that's not always so easy. Sometimes it's easier said than done for sure. But if we ask ourselves if a should is useful, like I should brush my teeth. This is a useful should. We brush our teeth and then we have pretty smiles, and it just takes two minutes in the morning and two minutes at night, and then changes your mouth for the whole rest of your life. Same too can be said for our behavior. How we behave throughout a day can change our entire life, whether we're active or inactive, whether we're nice inside our minds or mean inside our minds. And so I thought I'd encourage everyone today to break the rules. Maybe those dysfunctional family rules, like don't trust, don't speak, don't feel, do away with those. And then maybe you can look at what are useful things to think about and focus on. And sometimes that can be goals that are smart, like small, measurable, attainable, realistic, and within a time frame. Some people like to focus on clear goals, which I don't remember the acronym for clear except for the E. The E is for emotions. So address the emotions that are associated with something. And if you want to go outside to do something, like I'm outside right now in the sunshine, go outside and do the thing. I think there's even a reel or short or tick tock, however you want to call it, going around where someone says, say the weird thing. And while I would encourage that to an extent, I would also say question that thought. Because I don't believe everything I think. I know from experience, experiential knowledge, that my brain has been wrong. My brain has lied. And one might call something like the anticipatory anxieties, or like something that would be an anxiety would be a potential threat, right? Not an actual threat, but the potential for a threat. And that anxiety can stir up inside a person just as much as if it were real present danger. So like fear. If we feel fear, then we're gonna like fight flies. Fight, freeze, fight, freeze, I'm freezing, fawn, or flee. Those are the four. And that's from Pete Walker's Complex PTSD. He wrote that book and kind of coined that term that goes a little bit better, I think, than I've heard a term thrown around a lot called borderline personality disorder. And I do work a lot with people who have that diagnosis, but it's oftentimes an inaccurate diagnosis, and sometimes it can be an accurate diagnosis in terms of symptomology, and give that person a few years of therapy, and they may or may not still meet criteria. And so one of the things with labels is that you can decide whether or not that's a rule that you want to have for you. So we can use speeding as an example. I know I'm all over the place, but I've looked back around to a point, I promise. So let's take speeding as an example. A person might decide that to get from point A to point B, they need to go faster than the legal speed limit. And in doing so, they might get a ticket, they might get in a car accident, or they might get there on time. And that then reinforces that that behavior that was a poor choice in breaking the rules of speeding, it reinforces that that was a good thing to have done because nothing bad happened. So that sends messages to the back of the brain saying this was a safe thing to do, even though it is not safe to speed. And I don't speed, I just use it as an example because it's one of the most common rules that I hear that are broken. And so if we're breaking rules, maybe don't break that one, but ask yourself what time would have been good to leave. And then you can leave at a time that'll get you from point A to point B with the speed limit. And on the topic of vehicles, so sometimes vehicles are useful, right? But to say one should have a vehicle is not necessarily helpful because there are some places, metropolitan areas, for example, we'll go with that, not like not assuming rural, but let's assume metropolitan. And there's maybe a subway, a train, a bus, a Uber, a taxi, a Lyft I just named off over a handful of public transportation, that one does not need a car. Never mind the next one, which is family or friends given rides. And so one does not need a car necessarily, so we don't necessarily need to should on other people with what they should have or what they should do or where they should be at any particular point in their life. And what I mean by that is that some people are deemed late bloomers, some people are deemed crazy cat ladies, some people are labeled exteriorly by others for breaking the rules and just being happy with their life. I think there's a song by that girl, Madeline, and she says one something about expiration dating, and it's basically going on about would it be all that bad if I died in a mansion with all of my cats? And I think that one's hilarious because what would be so bad about breaking the rules? The rules of society, the rules set by family, the rules set by friends, and I don't mean the rules of polite society. I mean don't go screaming at church, but you might, when somebody asks you, hey, how are you doing? Be honest. I'm barely hanging in there, or well, it's another day above ground, or whatever it is that fits your preference, then maybe you are actually fantastic. So sometimes some people ask me how I am, and I'm like, I'm amazing, or I'll occasionally say fantastic, if I am doing fantastic, which I am right now. That's why that's part of the reason I'm able to extemporaneously speak as much as I am in this current moment, is because I am doing well, and when I do well with my confidence, we'll just throw that out there. That's something that some people will come back to rules in a minute. So, confidence is one of those things that it doesn't matter what you look like on the outside, confidence comes from inside, and so when you're feeling confident, when you're feeling yourself, when you know your hair looks good, you know you look good, you can be more confident on the outside versus maybe somebody who appears that they should use the rules, they should be confident because they look so gorgeous. Well, maybe they don't know that they're gorgeous, maybe they just don't know, or they don't feel it inside the same way other people are perceiving them on the outside. So somebody might be absolutely stereotypically beautiful, gorgeous, like the golden ratio, if you know what that is. And then on the inside, they might feel a self-esteem of like a two out of ten, and that's not a fun feeling for anybody, no matter what you look like. And so maybe breaking those rules about how other people should think or feel too. When we should on other people, it's almost just as useless as shouldn't on ourselves. Example I'll use for that. Unsolicited advice. So giving unsolicited advice, I know you all want this because you're here, you're still here, you're tuning in each and every week, and I really appreciate it. Next week we might have another guest. What was I saying? Oh, something about being here, and then I was talking about being here so much that I lost what I was saying. So it'll come back or it won't. But I'm definitely glad that I was here today, glad that I was able to do this episode. Sally, you want to make an appearance? Come here, Sally. I was hoping that little distraction would bring it back to my brain, but it didn't. Oh well, maybe when I re-watch it and then I can do a follow-up addendum. That's the other cool thing about extemporaneously speaking, is that you don't have to get it right every time. You can just say what comes to mind, and if what was talked about before comes back around, cool if not cool too. I call it an etch a sketch when my brain does that. When you're just going on about a particular topic and then you stop and then you can't get back to it. And I was talking about rules, so I know that it was looping back around to a point about shooting on others and not being a useful rule to have. There it is. See, that's what I was getting back to. And so that's all the time we have for today. I'm gonna go enjoy the rest of this sunshine with Sally.