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In communities across Canada, hourly Amazon employees can grow their skills and their paycheck by enrolling in free skills training programs for in-demand fields. Learn more at about amazon.ca. This is Optimal Living Daily. This is your biggest psychological blind spot by Dr.
Kelly Flanagan of DrKelliflanagan.com and I'm your narrator Justin Molick. Welcome back or welcome for the first time of your new year. This is where I read to you every day of the year from the best blogs on the web. We have other shows where we do this covering different topics.
Just search for Optimal Living Daily and your podcast app to find our other shows. But with that, let's get right to our next article as we optimize your life. This is your biggest psychological blind spot by Dr. Kelly Flanagan of DrKelliflanagan.com.
The car almost blindsides me. I'm exiting the interstate on the way to my office, having just passed through one of two adjacent tol lanes which are merging back into one lane. When someone who sped through their lane enters my blind spot. His horn alerts me to the danger.
Disaster averted. Six hours later, during our weekly staff meeting, it's my turn to share about the ebbs and flows of my career. Why I got interested in psychology and why those interests have shifted and evolved. I'm explaining the experiences that shaped each of my significant career decisions when someone asks for the why behind the why.
The common denominator. The theme. My struggles come up with an answer. Then another six hours later, I'm on my way home passing through the toll booths again, merging back onto the interstate when I remember my near miss from earlier in the day.
Blind spots. That's my why behind every other why. I became enthralled with psychology when I first learned in high school psychology class about multiple personality disorder, as it was called at the time. Essentially, one of the ways we all cope with emotional pain is to segregate it from our consciousness to tuck it away into some forgotten place within us to keep it outside of our story and our sense of self.
In extreme cases, the individual develops multiple personalities, each tasked with keeping a part of the pain hidden from the other parts. It's a rare and tragic affliction and is defined by dramatic blind spots. I was blown away. We don't just keep secrets from other people.
We keep them from ourselves. This was fascinating to me. We have an unconscious part of our mind where we store intolerable or inconvenient truths. Why?
That's really? What is stored in my unconscious? There are things we know about our life that we don't know that we know. I was hooked.
I wanted to learn everything there was to learn about human blind spots. In undergrad, I went on to discover that our blind spots, while intended to be the solution to our pain, create even bigger problems for us. Turns out pain isn't a bad thing and it can't wreak havoc on our lives unless we're unaware of it. For instance, the car that came into my blind spot wasn't a bad car, but it would have been a disastrous car had I continued to drive as if it wasn't there.
Yet that's how most of us live all the time, ignoring the things in our blind spots and crashing into them over and over again, then wondering why we have a penchant for wrecking things. Most of the suffering in life isn't the result of our pain, but of our tendency to pretend as if our pain doesn't exist. Wait, really? We can dramatically improve our lives without doing anything to the world around us, but by simply unhiding the world within us.
That. I want to help people do that. So I went to graduate school where I began to learn about some of the most common secrets we keep from ourselves. Amongst them, the reality that if you didn't reinforce your parent's self-image, you never get the love you so desperately desired.
The rage you sensed beneath the surface of everyone and what you needed to do to make sure it didn't come out toward you. The you that you needed to become and the things you decided you needed to do in order to survive. I learned about it all and wiped my brow with relief. Thank goodness I've never had to deal with anything like that.
Thank goodness I'm the professional and not the patient. Then, the depression hit. My blind spots way of honking at me. Hey dude, we can't carry the load of your life much longer.
We need a little attention here. Then my marriage started to suffer from all my finger pointing. Then career burnout. Then massive parenting fails and on and on.
Eventually, you have to stop learning about blind spots and start looking at them. So I became a patient. Ten years ago this month, my therapist was 30 minutes late picking me up from an otherwise empty waiting room and he had the wisdom to ask what it felt like to wait for him. I said, well, it doesn't make any sense because I was alone but I felt sort of embarrassed.
He nodded as if this made all the sense in the world. Then asked, do you think another word for that might be shame? Boom, one of the biggest and most common blind spots of all, shame. The sense that I'm not worthy of love and belonging exactly the way I am.
The mother load of pain. The doorway into almost every other blind spot. Indeed, shame is eventually the doorway into the biggest blind spot of all. Not a painful one though.
A beautiful one. A worthy one. The soul you were given. The unquestionably lovable thing at the center of you.
The part of you that you forgot about long ago when all the other blind spots began to pile up. It turns out if we do the work of taking through some of our other blind spots, we discover at the bottom of them our biggest and most beautiful blind spot of all. Our truest, worthiest, most lovable self buried right there within us all along. What a lovely surprise.
You just listened to the post titled, This is your biggest psychological blind spot by Dr. Kelly Flanagan of Dr. Kelly Flanagan.com and I'll be right back with my commentary. Things are feeling a little less human these days, aren't they?
But isn't the whole point of progress to make things more human? That's why. At TD, when we design a product, whether it's an app for making trading easier or monitoring your account for fraud, we ask one simple question. How does this help people?
That's how we're making banking more simple, more seamless and more intuitive. But most importantly, that's how TD is making banking more human. They get a Dr. Flanagan.
At the end, he said, Shame is eventually the doorway into the biggest blind spot of all. Not a painful one though, a beautiful one, a worthy one, the soul you were given, the unquestionably lovable thing at the center of you, the part of you that you forgot about long ago when all the other blind spots began to pile up. And Pile Up reminds me of the theme of minimalism that comes up on the show at least once a week on minimalist Mondays, if not more. These blind spots pile up just like clutter in our homes, sometimes out of view stacked in the garage.
But confronting it while it isn't easy can create some amazing changes for us leading to more awareness and growth. But baby steps, right? It's not about perfection, but small steps towards our best selves. It'll definitely be uncomfortable at times, but certainly worth it.
So how do we find these blind spots? Again, not easy. Working with a professional can definitely help. But I think the spot cats can also shed light on them if there are areas that come up that we quickly reject or dismiss or think isn't possible for us.
That actually might be a place to investigate. And without appreciate you being here and investigating along with me. Have a great weekend and I'll see you tomorrow, where your optimal life awaits.