Goddess Nadine is the best-kept secret of successful entrepreneurs and celebrities. She is the founder of the Level Up Your Life! program, the author of 9 metaphysical self-development books to date, and an expert at helping people develop self-mastery for conscious manifestation.
For many, the holiday season is a delightful opportunity to spend time with family and loved ones, while for far too many others, it is a tense and dreaded time.
Whether due to mismatched family values, family dramas, and traumas, loneliness due to a loss of loved ones, horrible job experiences as the "holiday crunch" applies a heavier workload, or simply poverty as parents "fail" to deliver the expected commercial miracle of being "Santa" for the kids which, by the way, is one of the most successful marketing campaigns of all time or even just down to enduring these cold and gloomy months, many of us feel less than jolly when this time of year rolls around.
I've experienced all of these scenarios at various times in my life, and here's what I've learned, not only about the emotional states of people during holidays but the neuroscience of emotions and how knowing this can help improve every aspect of our lives, from mental health to relationships, to business, and beyond.
It's ironic how powerful a role emotions play in our daily lives, yet how misunderstood our emotional capabilities are.
In this article, I'll show you why your emotions may not even be your own, and then I'll share three tips for better mental and emotional health.
Debunking cultural myths
Our world is overflowing with information about mental and emotional health, so it can be difficult to figure out what is most helpful or applicable to us.
Before healing begins, it is most helpful to remove any debris from the wound. In this case, we want to clear the junk beliefs from our minds so we can make room for new, supportive information.
Let me start by dispelling the top three myths about mental and emotional conditions.
Myth 1: All emotions are natural or instinctive
This first myth is the idea that the emotions that we feel are normal or natural.
The truth is that the emotions we feel are largely shaped by our beliefs, which in turn are often formed by strong emotional responses, creating a feedback loop. It may be thought of as a "chicken or the egg" problem, except.
Studies have been done on infants to determine what, if any, emotions are instinctive or learned.
It turns out that babies only have two instinctive negatives, i.e., fearful emotional responses to loud noises and the chance of falling.
No, they didn't drop any babies to test this; rather, they observed that infants would not attempt to crawl over a glass section of flooring.
I'm not sure if that second one even necessarily qualifies as a genuine fear response, as the research doesn't describe whether these babies were freaking out and crying or simply being cautious and unwilling to crawl on those sections of flooring.
That said, we humans do seem to have an instinctive, or perhaps unconscious, fear of the unknown.
Outside of these one or two apparently instinctive reactions, all of our emotions are learned responses to stimuli.
Sometimes, these emotional responses are consciously, if inadvertently, taught, such as when a parent intentionally creates a fear of danger by slapping a child's hand away from a hot stove, trading the infliction of what the parent perceives as a small and inconsequential pain, for the potentially very large and damaging pain if the child burned themselves on this unfamiliar object.
The child may perceive this pain quite differently, however, and using such techniques unconsciously can lead to the still-developing child's brain forming psychologically damaging beliefs, such as a deep-seated feeling of being "wrong."
Which beliefs are formed are largely variable and impossible to predict because so much depends on every aspect of the interaction, before, during, and after, as well as the child's state before the slap occurred, as well as the overall parent-child relationship up to this moment.
More often, these emotional states are unconsciously learned through observation and modeling of parents, peers, and societal emotional responses, such as mourning rituals and behaviors, dating and courtship traditions, and, more modernly, how emotions are portrayed and conveyed in media, from songs to movies to online social networks.
Those who are unable to feel certain emotions (or at least, what they may assume those emotions feel like) also get labeled with diagnoses from psychopath to sociopath, to narcissist, and more, and are often also feared.
We honor and uphold what is familiar, calling it "normal", and we subsequently demonize whatever doesn't fit into this limited mold of "normal". For evidence of this, see the DSM, and take a look at the history of mental illness and treatment as practiced in this country (context: I'm writing from the United States).
Basically, we literally torture those who don't fit into our safe, little, and very limited concept of "normality", whether it's through social ostracization, locking them up, forcing them to take pharmaceutical concoctions against their will, and even electrocution and involuntary brain surgery. In some countries, emotional or mental differences can actually result in being executed!
To me, these types of "treatments" are horrifying. Little better is the widely used forms of talk therapy, which can often, unfortunately, retraumatize an already wounded psyche.
Such is the outcome of "brainwashing" or, as many know it, cultural conditioning.
Oh, and let's not forget the cultural prohibitions of our perfectly natural sexual drive, which has been perverted to be deemed sinful or worse, yet then is co-opted to sell us everything from aftershave to Zenith watches.
Interestingly, a cross-cultural study of 400 different cultures around the world showed a clear correlation between the highest acceptance or permissiveness of bodily pleasures and the least amount of violence in a society.
Sorry, I'm sure you didn't expect such a dark turn in this article, but please have patience. There is hope!
Myth 2: You must fully feel all your emotions to be healthy
The common belief is that emotions are an instinctive part of us that we must allow, accept, fully feel, and properly process and that the more "in tune" with our emotions we are, the healthier we are.
While it is true that it can be very unhealthy and damaging to suppress or deny our emotional states, that's not the full story.
This second myth is partly an extension or expansion of the first myth, specifically the idea that all our emotions are valid.
The common belief that we must experience all our emotions fully to achieve healing is incorrect, and, in fact, doing so may even damage us further.
I hope I've sown some seeds for introspection about why our emotions may not be as normal or valid as we thought, so let's talk about neuroscience and biology and why fully experiencing every emotion may not be the healthiest option for us.
Clinical research shows that there is a strong correlation between unresolved trauma and autoimmune disorders. In addition, it is widely recognized that stress plays a huge role in all diseases and health conditions. Of course, unresolved trauma often contributes to much, if not all, of our stress.
Neither feeling these emotions nor repressing them leads to a healthy outcome.
In fact, neuroscience has shown that every emotion we feel produces a biochemical response in the body.
Happiness produces serotonin, and stress produces cortisol, anger produces adrenaline, and so on. This is a very simplified explanation, but it's not necessary to know the full production of each emotional state to recognize that it is this biochemical cocktail that produces health or disorders in the body.
Our body becomes habituated to these biochemical responses, and as a result, our subconscious mind develops seeking patterns to accommodate the bodily craving for specific emotional states.
This subconscious seeking, in turn leads to unhealthy memory review, such as ruminating on our past mistakes, heartbreaks, or conflicts, as well as unconscious patterns that have us "dating the same person in different bodies", or generally having similar conflicts or problems in life, over and over again.
Most, if not all, of these biochemical habituations, are diagnosed as mental and emotional disorders, and while chemical imbalances do play a role, attempts to treat them with pharmaceuticals do not address the underlying causes, which is typically the unresolved trauma, the natural biochemical habituation, and our subconscious routines.
Other therapies designed to discover the root causes by having patients analyze themselves and use a deeper understanding of themselves often fall short because such methods do not address this biochemical habituation.
Some therapies attempt to address both, using pharmaceuticals to treat the chemical imbalances and different forms of talk therapy to delve into the mind for clues. Some treatments are successful, but in most cases, such treatment takes a severely long time, making it both difficult and costly to achieve full healing.
Myth 3: Mental and emotional disorders are incurable
Perhaps the most insidious myth is the belief that mental and emotional disorders are incurable, or at least very difficult, time-consuming, and costly to heal from.
This myth plays a role in social ostracization, the need for special accommodations, and how we view and treat each other across all spectrums of society in general.
"Don't talk to uncle Ned, he's crazy."
"I need everyone to stop (being themselves in some way) because it triggers me."
"Don't give money to the homeless, and they'll just spend it on drugs."
"I have _____, and I can't ______." (Fill in the blanks with your own diagnosis and limitations)
We also tend to disregard the lived experiences of others whenever they fall outside our own limits of understanding, which breeds fear, contempt, and conflict and ultimately harms society at large.
However, what most fail to realize is that we are never taught how to best utilize our own minds, let alone how differently each of our brains functions.
Schools are largely set up to accommodate just two of the most common brain types, and as a result, any children who don't fit well into those narrow categories fall through the cracks, often believing in themselves or being told that they are failures, and/or being diagnosed with any number of "disabilities" or "disorders."
On the flip side, many adults seek diagnoses in later years so they can better understand themselves and find peers who can relate to their lived experiences.
But.
What if all these various diagnoses boil down to one simple fact: we don't know and were never taught how to best use our own brains?
This concept is one of the biggest game-changers in history!
Changing history & herstory
The elephant in the room when we're talking about mental health is that the majority of treatments are based on theory rather than any empirical evidence.
Jung's theories about self-identity and archetypes, Tolle's theories about ego, Freud's theories about sexuality, and many more have shaped our discourse about who we are and how our brains work.
We also have a bad habit of labeling anything that falls outside of societal norms as a mental disorder. For example, prior to the Emancipation Proclamation in the United States, slaves who wished to be free were diagnosed with mental illness! Don't believe me? Look up drapetomania. Yet these norms themselves are based upon a very narrow percentage of the population.
The emerging recognition of our vast neurodiversity has been a two-edged sword. On the one hand, all this neurodiversity shows us that there is no "one right way" to how our brains function, yet anyone who still fails to conform to the narrow societal norms must now be labeled and, if not diagnosed, cannot be accommodated by societal systems. Not to mention, the accommodations were very minimal and often unhelpful.
This paradigm collapses when we truly understand how our brains work and how to best operate them ourselves.
Evidence-based treatment
In 2009, I was introduced to the concept of NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming), first through reading books by the developers of NLP, and then later learning how to use NLP myself from video training by the co-founder of NLP, Richard Bandler.
While many experts have debunked NLP and labeled it a pseudoscience, I have found the principles and techniques of NLP to be extremely useful in my own life, as well as in the lives of my clients.
The thing I found most fascinating about NLP is that, rather than theories about how the human mind works, it was based upon empirical evidence gathered and synthesized into many successful approaches, not only to therapy but to communications and human behavior in general.
NLP, by itself, is simply a modeling method that seeks to understand how our minds work in order to teach others how to model successful ways of doing things. These processes are compiled into a repeatable structure, which can then be delivered by an NLP trainer and utilized by another person.
For example, modeling successful communication skills, modeling successful time management strategies, or modeling how an artist successfully paints realistic images.
The founders produced a repeatable technique by examining people who had already successfully overcome phobias through any method.
They gathered self-reported information about how each person mentally performed this feat, then synthesized all the commonalities of their mental experiences and codified an approach to remove phobias that work, effectively eliminating a phobia completely, typically within a single session.
Elements from the Fast Phobia Removal technique were later incorporated into a longer and more complex technique to deal with unresolved trauma and have been clinically proven to treat PTSD successfully.
Yes, you heard me right. We have the technology to cure PTSD, and it also works on C-PTSD or complex trauma. Like the Fast Phobia Removal process, the Visual Kinesthetic Dissociation technique is fast and effective, typically taking between one to three sessions for PTSD removal.
One client, with the worst case of C-PTSD I'd ever heard of, took four NLP sessions to reach a successful resolution. She and her husband also worked with me over the course of two months to heal the conflict in their relationship, saving their formerly rocky marriage. Her detailed case study is in my book, 'Uncovering 13 Common Myths of Traditional Therapy'.
By way of contrast to most therapies, NLP techniques are very gentle. The best comparison is that it's similar to guided meditation, except it's informed by neuroscience.
Unlike any other therapy, NLP doesn't require you to disclose your trauma, talk about your trauma, or analyze your trauma. I simply walk your brain through doing some new tricks, safely uncoupling the traumatic memories from the associated emotional responses, and properly processing those memories into the long-term storage of your brain, relegating them to ordinary recall or even allowing them to be forgotten completely if desired.
Of course, while it is hugely beneficial, trauma removal is just the first part of the brain training process. We still need to address the biochemical habituation, the unconscious patterns of brain function and personal behavior, and finally, install new beliefs that support our desired goals.
I know that probably sounds like a lot of work! Yet, it actually is all much faster and easier than you'd think when you truly understand how our brains function. My brain training program, 'Level Up Your Mind,' takes just one month, for example.
I'll share more information about the program later on. For now, here are a few tips you can use on your own to begin shifting your emotional and mental health.
Tips for improving your emotional and mental health
While the purpose of this article has been to get you thinking about your emotions and mental health in a whole new way, here are a few tips for changing your emotional states that you can use on a daily basis.
Tip 1. Practicing gratitude
I'm sure you've heard it before, but practicing gratitude is a simple way to shift our habitual mental and emotional states.
There are several practices I advise my clients to do.
A. Flip it! Turn stress into gratitude
Stuck worrying or stressed out about something? Try flipping that worry or stress into gratitude instead.
For example, if you're stressing about paying rent or utilities, flip it to gratitude that you have a place and gratitude that you have utilities.
If you're stressing about a conflict, try flipping it to gratitude that this person or struggle exists. Often, our conflicts show us either places we need to grow or that we are going in the wrong direction.
Practicing gratitude and asking for discernment about which aspect of ourselves this conflict is showing us may be the better part of valor in such situations.
B. Find 5 new things every day
Find five brand new things to be grateful for every single day.
Write down these five things into a growing list, and review your list at the start and end of each day.
This trains your brain to seek reasons to be happy. Do this for a month, and see how much different you feel!
C. Thank the negative people in your life
Dealing with negative friends or relatives who don't seem to support your goals, question your aspirations, or otherwise bring you down? Try thanking them instead!
Often, the most hurtful negative emotional impacts come from our well-meaning friends and family, who unconsciously project their own fears and worries onto everyone else.
While this can, perhaps, be perceived as abusive, consciously shifting your own intake of such words and actions, from taking things personally to understanding that they are projecting can help you tremendously, and simply thanking them often shuts this type of projection down.
Here's one of my favorite phrases for this:
"Hey, thank you so much for caring about me! I'd like to take your thoughts into consideration and process everything you've said, so how about we continue this discussion at a later time?"
Sometimes, you also need to set a firm boundary, especially if they are verbally (or otherwise) abusive, which brings us to the next tip.
Tip 2. Set & maintain healthy boundaries
Women are almost never taught how to set boundaries, and while more men are taught some boundary-setting skills, typically, this is only utilized in the context of their work environment.
There is also a common misperception that boundaries are supposed to manage or control the behaviors of others. In truth, we can only choose the boundaries of our own behaviors and our interactions with others.
There are three steps to creating effective boundaries:
Deciding on your boundary
Communicating your boundary
Enforcing your boundary
Step 1: Decide what your boundary is
This step is all about determining what you truly want to experience or participate in.
Sadly, many people have suppressed what they actually desire due to family and societal pressures or unwitting beliefs about their own capabilities or worthiness, and it can be difficult to express our authentic needs and choices. So here's a four-part process to guide you.
Part A. Make a choice
Ask yourself, "Do I want to experience this?"
If the answer is no, proceed to Part D
If the answer is yes, proceed to Part B
Part B. Assess your resources
Ask yourself, "Do I have the resources to experience this?"
Resources are time, energy, money, or anything else needed for the experience.
If the answer is no, proceed to Part D
If the answer is yes, proceed to Part C
Part C: Define your conditions
Ask yourself, "What do I require, or what conditions must be met (if anything) to experience this?"
If the requirements or conditions involve others, proceed to Part D.
If the requirements or conditions involve yourself, return to Part B (if needed)
Part D: Define the consequences
Ask yourself, "What are the consequences if my requirements or conditions aren't met or if someone crosses my boundary?"
Once you have determined these factors, it's time to communicate your boundary.
Step 2: Communicate your boundary
The methods for this are going to vary based on what the boundary is, who it affects, and what you've determined the consequences to be.
The important things to remember are that, when communicating a boundary, it is important to say that it IS a boundary, and it's also important to communicate the consequences of trespassing your boundary.
Here's an example:
"Aunt Jane, I haven't said anything about this in the past because I felt too ____; however, I recently decided that I'm not going to allow people to critique my appearance anymore. This is a hard boundary, and I'm asking you to respect it. If you can't help yourself to stop saying things like that to me, then I'll have to end our conversation."
You can choose to eliminate the first half of the first sentence (everything up to the ellipsis) if you want to or need to, depending on your assessment of the person's response to having that information. It can be helpful or harmful to communicate the feelings that either kept you from or prompted you to make the boundary.
Step 3: Enforce your boundary
Where boundaries often fall is when we fail to follow through on the consequences that we have already communicated. Enforcing the boundary means you have to follow through and do what you said you would do if your boundary is violated.
Typically, it may take a few times for you to enforce your personal boundaries so that others remember and respect them, so I advise some patience, depending on the severity of the infraction.
"Aunt Jane, please stop criticizing my appearance. I'm ending our conversation for now."
If Aunt Jane tries to argue or anything other than apologize and stop, simply exit the conversation, whether that means walking away (in person), hanging up the call, or stopping yourself from responding to a message.
After two or three enforcements, most people will have learned the boundary and stopped crossing it.
For those that don't, I recommend that you stop engaging with them in whatever ways that looks like for you. With modern technology, we have the block button for a reason, and you can and should use it to protect yourself!
Tip 3: Change your inputs
Beyond the negative emotional impact that our unwitting friends, family, and work environment may have on us, there is the wider world of our mainstream culture and media influences.
Sad to say, while NLP has been largely disregarded by the health industry, it has quietly been put to work across the spectrum to subtly influence your mind, emotions, and actions.
Sales and marketing use NLP to sell you things more easily; politicians use it to gain your support for them and inflame your opposition to their colleagues, while businesses, sports leagues, and military divisions use it in their training and more.
Programmers have a saying: GIGO: garbage in, garbage out, which means if you put the wrong information into a system, you'll get the wrong information out of a system.
Our brains operate very much like computers (no surprise, given we used our brains to create computers) and so the more "garbage" you feed your brain in the form of negative information, the more "garbage" you'll get out, in the form of mental and emotional disorders, dysfunctional behaviors, and overall drop in productivity.
I advise all my clients to turn off the TV and radio, stop watching or reading the news, and you may even want to go off social media as well.
You can still consume some media. However, I advise you to only read, watch, and listen to content that (a) doesn't contain any advertising and (b) is carefully chosen to contain only positive messages.
Sorry to all you horror movies, heavy metal music, or news-stream addicts out there but just try this for a month and see how you feel!
I predict that going "cold turkey" and quitting your consumption of mainstream culture for thirty days will improve your mental and emotional states.
They say, "You are what you eat."
I say, "You are the ideas which you consume."
Seriously. Give it one month and report back!
Brain training that works
My development in this area was spurred by my love of expanding human potential and my personal practices of self-mastery for conscious manifestation.
The more I learned about humans and how we work, the more amazed I was that this somehow isn't common knowledge. So, bringing these insights to light has become my life mission, and ultimately my goal is to facilitate developing a functional utopian society, effectively increasing the net amount of personal freedom for everyone on the planet.
Yes, I know that's a huge, audacious goal, haha, and I'm fully committed to making it happen!
In aid of that goal, I began teaching my conscious manifestation practices to others in 2010, primarily working with clients one-on-one or in small groups.
This year, I'm celebrating my 15-year business anniversary with the launch of my private program to a wider group, starting with a beta program in January.
In my Level Up Your Mind program, I guide my clients, through four weeks of training, to heal from any traumas and release all phobias, reset their biochemical habituation and repattern their subconscious habits, learn how to become the director of their own brain, and finally, install new, consciously chosen beliefs. I also include bonus training on boundary setting, the best manifestation methods for your brain type, and creating a mental shield to screen out negative influences.
Achieving these incredible results in such a short time may seem quite unbelievable, which is why I offer a results-based, money-back guarantee on my work. Since I began offering the first iteration of this program, initially called 'Emotional Mastery in 30 Days'™, in 2017, I have had a grand total of zero refund requests. On the other hand, I have had many glowing reviews and volunteer case studies.
While it is impossible to deliver an NLP technique via words on a page, I offer a low-cost sample of my work in the Level Up Your Mind Starter Kit, which you can use on your own to begin healing yourself for less than what you'd pay for a typical therapy session. Or, take advantage of my new offer, save up to 55%, and experience the results for yourself with my new group program next month!
Thank you for reading, and I hope you found this information to be both interesting and helpful!
Read more from Goddess Nadine
Goddess Nadine, Spiritual Mentor for Conscious Manifestation
Goddess Nadine is a recognized genius, a determined rebel, an experimental metaphysicist, a polymath synergist, and a positivity hedonist. Her passion for human potential led her to study both science and magic, bridging the two seemingly disparate disciplines with experimentation in her own life, and leading to her development of bespoke training programs in self-mastery for conscious manifestation. She loves helping others awaken their own inner divinity, utilizing neuroscience applied to the wisdom of the ancients. Her mission: ultimate personal freedom for everyone on the planet. It’s time to Level Up Your Life!
Resources available:
Free: Uncovering 13 Common Myths of Traditional Therapy eBook
Free: Rewiring Your Belief Systems for Better, Faster Conscious Manifestation Masterclass
Paid: Level Up Your Mind Starter Kit $150
Paid: Level Up Your Mind group program $4,500-6,000, or $10k for 1:1 mentorship
Coming Soon! Level Up Your Mind: The Brain Owner’s Manual book, available
