Transcription
We're going to talk about emotions in a way that I think you've probably never heard them in your life described about. But if you've studied neuroscience and then like hypnosis and interrogation, then you might have thought about what we're going to talk about tonight. Something tells me that's a rare thing.
The one thing I want to say about emotions is that they do not have an expiration date. They will never in your life work themselves out. If you didn't process it, you're still paying for it. So like right now tonight while you're sitting here so your nervous system is running an open tab and that's kind of how I view a lot of these things just these tabs that are open.
So every emotion that maybe you choked it down instead of feeling it, every bit of grief that you skipped over, every rage that you maybe smiled through. Every time you said like, "I'm fine," and your chest was on fire. All of that goes somewhere. It went somewhere. Wherever it went, it started accruing interest. So the thesis for tonight: every unprocessed emotion becomes a line of credit that your nervous system is silently paying interest on. This thing that we all call personality is usually just a collection of unpaid invoices from childhood.
So the title of tonight's lecture is emotional debt. So if you think like, "Oh, I'm just an impatient person," that's not a temperament that you have. That's a bill you haven't paid. Your need to stay busy all the time isn't because you're ambitious. It's a payment you're making on something. And maybe you can't sit in silence. And when you think, "Oh, that's just a preference that I have." That's an avoidance of a creditor somewhere.
But let me give you the biology of this first so it doesn't sound like a yoga retreat. Let's go deeper into this stuff. When something emotionally significant happens in your life and your system doesn't get to complete that response, the charge of that emotion doesn't disappear or fade off. It gets stored somewhere and specifically it stays lodged in a lot of these things called subcortical structures. This is the amygdala, the insula, the brain stem, the body itself. The body is subcortical if you just take a look at anatomy, but they're not stored as memory. And that's the one big mistake I think a lot of people make. They're not stored as memory. They're stored as a state.
This is the part that people miss: that when somebody has trauma, they're not remembering something. They're not remembering some unprocessed emotion. This is re-experiencing them. And that's a huge difference. Remembering versus re-experiencing. That's when you can be, why you could be 45 years old sitting in a boardroom meeting somewhere, somebody raises their voice just a little bit, and then you're not 45 anymore. You're seven and you don't know why your hands are shaking. That's not like, "I got triggered" in the way that people talk about on TikTok. It's your nervous system replaying an incomplete response because it never got to finish.
So, here's how it actually works. Here's the real biology of this, uh, in a way that I've never in my life seen anyone explain any of this stuff, and I wish I had, uh, 20 years ago. So when a threat or some kind of emotional event happens, our autonomic nervous system mobilizes this response. You've heard the list before. It's fight and flight and freeze and fawn, friend, whatever you want to call it. If the response completes, if you fight and then you win, if you run and you escape, if you cry and somebody rescues you or holds you, the charge dissipates. So the system goes back to baseline, files the event as, "Boom, that's been resolved, done."
But if the response gets interrupted. So if you can't fight because you're a child, if you can't run because it's your home and that's your spouse that's doing the traumatizing, if you can't cry because crying gets punished in your house, the mobilization doesn't ever complete. So the energy that was mobilized, like all these resources that got spun up, they have to go somewhere. So it gets locked into the body. Maybe it's a bunch of tight shoulders or chronic jaw pain or stomach problems that you've been to 50 doctors to try to figure out and nobody knows what's going on with your stomach. So it's just kind of this little baseline hum of anxiety that's been there so long that you think it's how you are. We call it personality when it's just storage. There's storage happening.
There's this guy named Peter Levine. He created this thing called Somatic Experiencing. And it showed this decades ago. And this other guy, his name is Bessel van der Kolk. He did a bunch of actual research that confirmed a lot of this stuff. So the brain's primary, number one job, it's predicting what's going to happen next. So if an emotional event just goes throughout my life and it's unresolved, the brain starts scanning for similar conditions. You think it's doing that to heal? No, it's doing that to prevent. That's its prevention mechanism. So it builds this architecture in your brain to avoid some things. Don't get close to people like that. Don't say things like that. Don't feel things like that. Don't be in a room like that. And over time, those micro-avoidances become your entire life.
So, we say like, "Oh, you need to step out of your comfort zone." You don't have a comfort zone. What you call a comfort zone is this perimeter around your nervous system that's built around the things that it couldn't finish processing. That's it. That's your comfort zone.
So, and what happens to debt over time? It compounds. So now we have compounding debt. And what we're looking at, this isn't a metaphor anymore. This is the math that your body does. This is real. And four things happen neurologically when emotional debt accumulates. I promise you biology. Here it is.
Number one, you have this thing called the amygdala. This is a big emotion center, but it becomes hyper-sensitized. If I have several events happen, the threshold for activation for the next event can trigger my amygdala even easier the next time, especially if it's within like 90 days. So, it takes less and less over time to set you off. So, you used to be able to handle criticism, and now just a little, somebody's tone is a little bit off, and it ruins your day, and you think to yourself like, "Well, man, I'm getting weaker." That's not weakness. You're accumulating interest, that's all that's happening.
So the second thing that happens is the prefrontal cortex starts losing ground. It starts losing its ability to dictate what's going on, to think. This is our executive function, our planning, reasoning, impulse control, perspective. And you see chronic emotional activation literally reduces prefrontal cortex engagement. So the amygdala starts running more and more of the show. So you become more reactive, less reflective, more impulsive, and less patient. You're paying compound interest on a debt that you just didn't know you had.
So the third piece, this is something called the HPA axis. This thing stays activated. So HPA stands for hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis. Your stress response system is what this thing basically is. So when emotional debt accumulates, the cortisol stays elevated. And what you're thinking might be crisis, it's not a crisis way. It's in a background hum kind of way. So chronically elevated cortisol suppresses: what's the first thing that it shuts off? Immune system function. Second thing is your, the architecture of your sleep, the quality of your sleep. The third thing is your ability to consolidate memories. Fourth is it increases what's called visceral fat storage, which automatically, as a cascade, accelerates, uh, something that scientists call cellular aging. It's a fun word for dying. That's your body paying the bill. When you have emotional debt, it doesn't just make you feel like it ages you. It makes you sick and it kills you, probably, I would say, at the same speed as cigarettes.
And there's the fourth thing that happens here. This debt doesn't act like a financial debt. Now the debt starts turning into a recruiting agent. Unprocessed emotions don't stay isolated. They start pulling other systems into the payment plan. They're going to get co-signers on the loans. They need more payment. So your relationships become debt servicing arrangements. Your career becomes a distraction strategy. And what about all the habits that you have? They're interest payments. The collateral, it's your identity. So everything starts organizing around the debt. And from the outside, and even in the mirror, it just looks like, "Oh, that's me. That's just how that person is. That's just their personality." That is a nervous system drowning in a load of compound interest and building an entire life around staying just one payment ahead.
Now we get into servicing the debt. How do we service the debt? So if emotional debt is a compounding thing, the system needs a way to manage all these payments. So it can't process the original emotions, right? That window kind of closed. Debt servicing never reduces what you owe. It just keeps you from defaulting today. This is the most common payment plan on earth: numbing. Some kind of anesthetic for what's going on in my life: alcohol, weed, scrolling, pills, food, shopping, binge-watching TV shows. If you're very, very honest, we're not doing those things because we really deeply enjoy them. We do it because feeling nothing is cheaper than feeling everything that we owe, than thinking about the debt. And the thing about numbing, it works. It works. And that's why it's so hard to stop. And everybody thinks, "Man, I wish I had some more discipline in my life. Then I'd be able to stop. But I'd be able to stop smoking crack." It's not discipline. It's a successful short-term debt management strategy.
The debt is patient. Like every debtor is patient. They wait for the vacation that you can't enjoy. The retirement that you will never sit still in or feel any kind of purpose in. The weekend that's going to fill you with absolute dread instead of the rest that it's supposed to fill you with. That's the bill.
The next most popular thing is performing. And these people become the funniest person in the room, the most charming, the most helpful, the caretaker, the most agreeable, the most "fine." So when we see a lot of performance, that's servicing a debt. And I want you to view this as both, like this is how you can change your own life, but this is also how you can profile people that you speak to every day. Everyone's servicing debt. Loneliness. Massive, like 27% APR loneliness. And it's not the loneliness where nobody's near me, nobody's around me. I'm at home with my cats. And this is a kind where everyone's around you and no one knows you. Not one person truly knows who you are. That's the most expensive loneliness that you could ever experience. So they think that that edge is like some anxiety from their life. The edge is what? Now that you know it's debt.
The substance is the only payment method that they found that works fast enough to keep them functional. So self-medicating is also about speed. Speed to normal. If you take the substance away without addressing the debt, you're not going to get somebody that's like recovering or anything like that. You get a person drowning that has nothing to hold on to. One is like, 90% of addiction treatment fails. It confiscates the payment method without acknowledging the debt.
And then there's the relational version of debt servicing that everybody mistakes for love. The person who can't stop giving in relationships. They overfunction. "I'm going to anticipate every single need that I possibly can. They're going to sacrifice. They bend over backwards." And they're like, "This is what I'm doing right now. That's love." That's just debt servicing. But they're thinking like, "If I'm really needed by somebody, if I can make myself so necessary." You're not attracting into your life what you want. You're attracting what your nervous system recognizes, whatever it grew up with. If love came with anxiety, you're going to feel most alive around people who make you anxious. If being close to another human came with control, then you're going to feel safe with people who dominate you. If you were 8 years old and love or affection or appreciation came with conditions, you're going to grow up feeling that the only love that's real is the kind that you have to earn. You're going to walk past the person who offers you peace.
Trauma is an event. An event that breaks through my system's capacity to cope with it and finalize a little loop. That's all it is. You can point to it. You can name it. Clinicians can give it an ICD-10 code or a DSM code from the psych manual. Emotional debt is an accumulation. It is not an event. A thousand probably small moments where something was felt and not finished. You needed to be angry or you needed to kind of vent, and you learned it wasn't safe. You were six and you had to grieve something, and somebody forced you to be strong, to look strong. Times you needed to be a child, and your parents made you be the adult. They ruin your life worse than PTSD. And none of them are trauma in a clinical sense. But all of them created debt.
And I'm not trying to blame your parents for anything. They probably did their best, as most of ours did. Why'd your parents do this to you? Because they were in debt also, big time. They can't give you something that they never got. So they passed the balance of their debt forward without knowing it. And now that's in your account.
Financial systems have this. There's a point where the payments can no longer cover the interest, and the structure collapses, right? That's bankruptcy. So, emotional systems have the exact same threshold. And when you hit it, the results are very predictable. You have a breakdown. You have a health crisis. Your identity collapses. Sometimes all three of these things happen at one time.
Everything that works to resolve emotional debt: therapy, somatic work, TR, trauma releasing exercises, psychedelics, breathwork, meditation, maybe just one of those seminars where you like stare people in the eye and never speak to them, and it's like some a little culty. They all share one active ingredient. It's perspective. Not perspective like you have to look on the bright side of things. And I also don't mean it's perspective like other people have it worse than you. That's not perspective, by the way. That's comparison and contrast wearing it like a little self-help costume. I'm talking about perspective as a mechanical shift in vantage point. Meditation, DMT, mushrooms, LSD, MDMA, perspective shift, cognitive behavioral therapy. Really, really long, long time, but at the end of it, there's some perspective shift that happens. But that single shift, the shift in perspective is the how emotional debt gets processed. And I will go out on a limb and say that it's every time. And there is no exception. There is zero exception to this.
Think about what happens in therapy when it actually works. It's not the advice. Even therapists will tell you this. It's not the diagnosis that they get. It's a moment where you say something out loud and hear it from outside of yourself for the first time. You've been living inside of a story for maybe 30 years, and suddenly you're looking at the story instead of from inside of it, from above.
Your debt actively prevents you from gaining the one thing that could resolve it. The avoidance, numbing, busyness, whatever you want to call it, caretaking, none of that is random. It's a defense mechanism against what? Perspective. Telling somebody in massive emotional debt to just feel your feelings. Imagine one of your friends comes to you and calls you and is like, "Hey dude, I just found out I'm $400,000 in debt." And your advice to your friend is, "Well, just start saving." Then you're a right? It's technically correct and absolutely useless.
So, what actually works here is a series of perspective shifts. Step one is to see the payments from unconscious to conscious. Most people that are in emotional debt, they don't know they're in debt. They think they're just tired or they're stressed or, "I'm getting older. That's how life is." The first move is learning to see the pattern. If you react disproportionately, that's debt. That's the first big, big thing that you need to become aware of. When you avoid specific feelings with predictable behaviors, that's debt every time. If rest feels dangerous, that's debt. When you can't be alone in silence without reaching for something, that's debt. When your body has like weird tension in it and like weird where you feel like all the time like you've got to go get a massage, but it has no physical explanation, that's debt.
So, you don't have to know the original event. That's the good news here. You don't, you don't even have to know what the hell happened. You could have amnesia for your whole childhood. You'd still be fine. You only have to see the payments that you're making. That's the first shift from inside the pattern to slightly above it, even if it's an inch above it.
The second step is to name your debt servicing behavior. This is the second shift. So from embedded to observing. So everybody has a go-to. So what is your debt servicing behavior? Numbing, anesthetic, overworking, performing, controlling, helping, self-medicating, withdrawing, whatever. Don't judge it and don't try to stop it. Even more good news, you don't have to give a about stopping it. You just name it because naming it creates distance between you and the behavior. This is a big thing for your brain. And like coming up with a name in your mind and saying, "Oh yeah, I got it now." It's different than like writing it down, printing it out, putting it somewhere where you're going to see it. Distance is where all choice lives. And I want you to remember that. And that's just when I talk about "scops." If you sum ups up in like three or four words, it would be closing distance. If I close distance, well, I eliminate choice. I just make you live inside of the thing, and you don't know the difference. So, the moment that you see all of this and that your behavior isn't just who you are, then the thing starts to kind of stutter a little bit. And it's not a stop, it's a stutter. You're going to start experiencing little stutters because you're going to be hyper-aware of all your debt servicing behaviors. So that's perspective really kind of doing its work. You move the vantage point one more inch, and the whole system flinched a little bit. That's really good.
So step three is let your body finish what it started. So all the emotions stored in your body are maybe some kind of incomplete motor responses, right? You never got to fight. You got to run away and escape. The scream that kind of maybe stayed in your throat. The collapse you never got to surrender to. You think those are memories? Hopefully by now you know better. Those are not memories. Those are unfinished moments, unfinished movements. And the body has to finish a lot of those. And I don't mean intellectually. I mean physically. This is where we have shaking and tremoring and crying without a story attached to it. I would highly recommend you look into these neurogenic tremors, or there's like 90 brand names for neurogenic tremors now, even though it's just a natural response of your body. TR is the most common brand name. That's like branding the word migraine. Maybe it's rage. You get out of your body through movement. Letting the body do what it was never allowed to do. But you can't do this from inside the activation. That's just re-traumatization. You do it from the shifted vantage point. You never do it from inside the system. It's like a fish swimming faster and faster to try to not be wet anymore. You can't do it from inside the system. You have to be out first. So present enough to feel it, aware enough to be able to watch it move through your body. That's the window of tolerance right there. It's a perspective. Close enough to feel, far enough to witness the thing. And this is where we have somatic work. There's all kinds of, uh, people that do all of this: structured breathwork, vagal toning, these extended exhale protocols, cold exposure is one of the best in the world. Cold exposure. And I don't think these are random like wellness trends. Our ancestors have been doing this for like 10, 15,000 years. They're the tools that expand the window. This is what our ancestors did. Our brains haven't changed in 200,000 years. And we have so much narcissism in our culture that we think we're going to invent a medication and outsmart these ancestors who built like pyramids and like figured out reality. They knew what they were doing. And a lot of this comes natural to us, but we suppress it. So, we want to teach the nervous system that activation doesn't have to mean emergency. And I promise you, you will not ever think your way out of debt. You have my word. It's never going to happen. You have to feel your way out. You have to always feel your way out of debt from a vantage point where feeling isn't drowning. Which is why we've got to get out first.
Step four is stop taking on new debt. That's a big step. And this has to be a daily perspective practice. Every time you are choking something down instead of feeling it, you say, "I'm fine," when you're not, you're overriding your body's signals because you've got to do. You're borrowing again. You're back getting another loan out. You're adding to the balance. So, just start with one thing. When you feel something, just stop and give it 10 seconds of your time. Just 10 seconds. And if you realize it later, take the 10 seconds right then whenever you realize it. You don't have to process all that stuff fully. You don't have to understand it. You don't have to. And the biggest thing, you don't have to intellectualize. You just have to let that stuff land. 10 seconds. That's all it is. So what you're doing in those 10 seconds is you're shifting your perspective around in real time. Instead of being the person who might react, you become the person who just notices. You can still react however you want. You just have to notice. That's it. And if your nervous system knows that maybe feelings are allowed to arrive, it stops storing them. I'm going to say that again. If your nervous system knows that feelings are allowed to come in and fully be present, it's going to stop holding on to them. It's just like how your body deals with fat.
Step five is get a witness. This is the deepest perspective shift of all. I would say this is like from isolation to being seen. A lot of emotional debt was probably 99% of your emotional debt was created in isolation. Even if there were people around you, you were mentally isolated. You were alone with something that was too big for you. A big part of what the system is still holding on to, uh, isn't just a bunch of emotion. It's the aloneness. Aloneness by itself is death. The feeling of loneliness, especially in childhood, is death. So the discharge process very often needs a witness. And here's my caveat to this, and maybe I'm wrong about this. It's not a person to fix anything. It's not an advice giver. It's not somebody who's going to like reframe all of your pain into a lesson. I mean a witness. Someone who can sit with you while something is like moving through your body and not try to make it stop. Whether you're sobbing, you have to tell this person, "If you care about me at all, you will ignore me like a psychopath during this process. Your job is to keep me safe." And that's all. The other person's presence gives you a perspective that you probably can't create by yourself. Something happens when there's people around us. When somebody's holding space for you, it's like actually holding the space without flinching and without fixing anything. They become like a little mirror, in my opinion. In that mirror, you can probably finally see what's kind of been moving through you without being consumed by it. And it's the thing that most people needed at age five and didn't get. So getting it now at age 30 or 40 or 50 or 60, it's not going to undo what happened, but it completes something that's been waiting to finish, probably for a very long time.
You didn't choose your debt. Nobody opens a line of emotional credit on purpose. It was opened for you by circumstances that you didn't control. It was at an age when you couldn't understand what was happening. And you've been making payments ever since. All the little tight smiles, all the "I'm good," the sleepless nights, maybe the relationship that collapsed under the weight of some random. And you still don't know why that relationship collapsed. That's a system doing its best with what I was given.
So, I didn't want to make tonight about fixing anything. I just want to make it about shifting the vantage point, shifting perspective because I don't want you to also think that the debt is the enemy. Your fixed position inside of the debt is the enemy. You move this vantage point, and the debt starts to move with it. And you're gonna kind of go from like, "Why am I messed up? What's wrong with me?" to "What do I owe?" And then you go to like, "How do I start paying it back?" That is perspective shifting, and it's the beginning of everything.
Authorities are reporting a citywide manhunt underway. The world is breathing. A fragile sound. No echoes here on sacred ground. A quiet pose, a steady beat. The truth we feel in simple heat. Bare footsteps on hollowed ground. A sacred rhythm we have found out. The world just breathes and I can feel it. A perfect promise. Can't conceal it. Just shadows leaning on the light. Another beautiful quiet night. The past is gone, but we remain, washing over all the pain. A simple truth, a feeling pure, a soft connection to door. The world just breathes and I can't feel it. A perfect promise. Can't conceal it. Just shadows leaning on the light. Another beautiful quiet night. Oh. Oh. Is quiet life. What pains forever and the world just breathes.