Welcome to The Daily Ascent. I'm Molly Carmel, and this is the podcast I always wish existed, a bite-sized on-the-ground spiritual note that can shift your thinking and your outlook on life, to help make us all a little bit more awake, alive, and ascending. So I wanted to talk about something that a client said to me recently that just like cracked my heart wide open, and a principle from one of my greatest teachers that I think might change the way you see yourself. So I've been working with this new coaching client, and she came to me because she was struggling with her eating and her relationship with food, which is one of my specialties.
And it was really honor that she chose me to walk alongside her in this work, as I am with literally every beautiful human being that I get to work with in my career. And as it goes a lot of time in the relationship with food work, things were going swimmingly in the beginning, right? She was showing up and she was doing the work and making progress, you know? And then as it goes in change, we had a little shift, and I found this shift to be incredible because she started to let me see the real stuff, right?
The harder stuff. The binging, the shame spiral that follows that, the patterns with food that she'd been managing on her own for a long time before she ever picked up the phone to call me. And in a really vulnerable moment, you know, one of those moments in coaching where you can just feel the air change in the room, she looked at me and she said, you know, quote unquote, joking, right, half joking, but I think completely serious, you know, I'm so worried you're going to fire me because I'm not doing this perfectly. Oh, a sender's my heart just expanded.
I just so get that, right? I've so been that person. I've sat across from coaches and teachers and mentors and sponsors and just so deeply convinced that if they saw how messy I truly was, you know, they just walk away that if I didn't show up looking polished and progressing and put together, right, like I would just be abandoned and that love, even professional love, even therapeutic love was conditional on performance. And what she was really saying underneath that joke, and I use that term loosely, was something that I think so many of us carry.
If you see the worst in me, will you still stay? If you see the worst in me, will you still stay? And I mean, and I assured her without hesitation immediately that I was not going anywhere that the whole point of the work is to show your wounds to bring the real stuff to the room, to be imperfect and still held in your imperfection and to stumble and not be abandoned for it. I mean, that's not a disruption to the healing process.
That is the healing process, actually. You know, and then I shared with her something that the woman who trained me largely in my therapeutic career shared with me, and I've spoken about her on the show a lot, Marcia Linahan, she created dialectical behavior therapy. And she spent her career working with people in some of the most painful places a human being can be. And she says this and this is what she raised me on.
We don't fire someone for the problem they came in with, right, and I really want you to hear that. We don't fire someone for the problem they came in with. So if you come to me because you're struggling with food, I'm not firing you for struggling with food, right? And if you go to a therapist because you're depressed, they're not going to drop you for being depressed.
Certainly they shouldn't drop you for being depressed. And if you go to a doctor because your knee hurts, they shouldn't refuse to see you because your knee still hurts, right? They're a knee specialist. But that's what we're terrified of because somewhere along the way, so many of us learned that our problems make us unlovable, that our struggles make us too much, that if we're not healing fast enough, we're going to be left behind.
And so that brings me to our pocket stage today. This is one of my very first teachers on my spiritual path and still one today, Tara Brock. And she wrote a book called Radical Acceptance. It's such a goodie, especially again in the beginning of your spiritual process, Radical Acceptance is a wonderful read, highly recommend.
And Tara Brock is a psychologist and she's a meditation teacher. She's really a spiritual leader. And she just spent decades and decades helping people undo the belief that something is fundamentally wrong with them. And she calls it, I love this.
She calls it this thing, this belief that we're not enough and that something's wrong with us. She calls it the trance of unworthiness, the trance of unworthiness. So anyway, here's what she writes, imperfection is not our personal problem. It's a natural part of existing.
And then she writes about what she calls that trance of unworthiness, that state that we walk around in where we believe something is fundamentally wrong with us. She says that this trance keeps the sweetness of belonging out of reach. And that as long as we believe we're defective, we cannot let ourselves be held. Let me read that again to you.
Imperfection is not our personal problem. It's a natural part of existing. And then she talks about this trance of unworthiness, the state we walk around in where we believe something is fundamentally wrong with us. She says this trance keeps the sweetness of belonging out of reach.
As long as we believe we're defective, we cannot let ourselves be held. You know, and I love that. Imperfection is not our personal problem. It's a natural part of existing.
Really, that sentence stops me because my client was treating her imperfection as a personal failure, as evidence that she didn't deserve to be helped. But Tara Bock is saying quite the opposite, right, that our imperfection isn't the thing that disqualifies us from belonging, it's actually the thing we share with every other human being on this planet. It's not what separates us. It's actually what connects us.
And so our word of the day is belong. This is the word underneath everything she was asking me. She wasn't asking me, are you going to fire me? She was asking, do I still belong here if I'm not doing this right?
And that question runs so much deeper than coaching because it's really the question we carry into every relationship and every friendship and every room we walk into. Do I belong here if I'm struggling? Do I belong here if I'm not performing well? Do I belong here?
If you can see the version of me that I've been hiding. You know, Tara Bock, she says that the trance of unworthiness keeps the sweetness of belonging out of reach. And I think that is spot on. Because when we're trapped in the belief that we have to earn our place, if we're trapped in the belief that belonging is conditional on being good enough, then we never actually let ourselves land, right?
We're always auditioning, we're always proving we are never arriving, we're never allowed to settle. But belonging isn't something you earn, it's something you actually allow, right? You allow it by showing up exactly as you are, not the highlight reel, not the PowerPoint presentation, not the positive progress report. And when you show up as you actually are, you discover that you're still helped.
So here's what I want you to sit with today. So many of us walk around believing that we're only level when we're performing well, that we're only safe in relationships when we're easy to be around, that the price of belonging is perfection, or at least the appearance of it. And I mean, this belief does not just show up in coaching and therapy, promise you that. It shows up everywhere, as far as I'm concerned.
It shows up in friendships where you never let anyone see you struggling. It shows up in marriages where you pretend everything's fine because you're terrified that if you're honest about the hard stuff, the other person will decide you're too much work. It shows up at jobs where you never ask for help because you're convinced that meeting help means you're failing. And Marshall in a hands principle that we don't fire someone for the problem that came in with.
It sounds obvious when you say it out loud, like, of course, a me doctor doesn't fire you for having a hurt me. And of course, or hopefully a coach doesn't fire you if you're struggling with the thing you hired them to help you with. But how many of us live as though the opposite was true, like how many of us perform wellness and perform progress and perform being okay because we believe that if anyone saw the real death of our struggle, that they take a hike, right? And that's what Tara Brock is calling that trance of unworthiness, that belief that who we are not the curated version, but that real struggling imperfect version is fundamentally too much to allow us to belong.
And listen, there is one exclusive way out of that trance, I hate to tell you, and that is letting yourself be seen, that letting bringing the real stuff into the room and not performing and just starting to tell the truth and be your most authentic self. And, you know, that client's bravest moment wasn't when she was doing everything right. I mean, we all know how to be on a diet, we all know how to perform well for a certain amount of time. It was when she looked at me and said, I'm afraid you're going to fire me because in that moment she was finally showing me the thing that she was most ashamed of.
And that was bravery on a platter, you know, and it's honestly when the real healing began, not the work of fixing her, right? The work of realizing that she didn't need to be fixed in order to belong. So, you know, you're not too much. I hope this is not news to you.
Your struggle is not a reason to be abandoned. I hope that's not news to you. The parts of you that you're hiding, those are the exact parts that need to be brought into the room. Imperfection is not your personal problem.
It's actually the most human thing about you, the most human thing about you. So here's our reflective question of the day. What are you hiding? Because you're afraid it will make someone leave.
Oof. And listen, if this episode is hitting close to home, if you're struggling with food and you're afraid to ask for help because you're convinced you'll just mess it up or not do it perfectly, oof, I want you to hear this directly from me, right? You can't be fired for the problem you came in with, or you shouldn't be fired for the problem you came in with. And in my stop starting over system, we don't do that.
That's the whole point. You belong here with all of it. The binges, the setbacks, the hard days because that's where the healing happens, not in the performance of being perfect, but in the willingness to be real. So if you're interested, if you're ready, if you just want to have a chat about it, I'd love to talk to you.
And there's a link to have a call with me in the show notes, or you can learn more on my website, mollycarnall.com. And I am right here with you, as senators. I too am learning that belonging doesn't require perfection, it just requires showing up as you are. And if this episode moved you, send it along.
Let's gather some more ascenders, the more the merrier. We rise together. Until next time.