#1538 The Five-Easy-Steps-Myth - Amy Molloy

sides of it. And so much of my adult life and my healing and my therapy has been about rediscovering that early version of myself, the one who was like so confident in her voice and who she was and showing up in the world in this really true to

herself way. And it's been about like going back to that and like most of us, right, Like the bridge between that version of myself and the later one was of course, trauma and things happen that, you know, especially for me early on, made me really like question the world around me and really shook up my self confidence. So I think part of my work as a journalist, definitely as an editor, has been how to help people to find their voice and really feel confident in sharing who they are.

And I'm really interested, particularly at the moment, about memory and the truth of our memories, you know, especially when you're talking about childhood, because so many of us stories we tell about ourselves and then tell the world about ourselves, especially if you're a writer, or someone who has social media is all based on so much of the story of our childhood, but our memories can be so inaccurate.

And you know, you look at two siblings who brought up in the same home, experience the same experiences, and one is traumatized by them and one isn't, and you know, it's really and then that informs who we become as adults, or who we think we are as adults, and then that informs how what we tell the world about ourselves.

So even you know, I work a lot in the mental health space, and you know, saying I'm a person, you know, I'm an anxious person versus I'm a person who experiences anxious episodes or like what we pathologize in terms of our behavior. You know, I've experienced health anxiety, which is a very normal reaction to events in my life.

Like I was widowed when I was twenty three, my husband died very suddenly of cancer when I was a teenager, and my dad was paralyzed from cancer and had to learn to walk again, And my very understandable response to that was to develop health anxiety as a way to

feel safe. Now I can spend the rest of my life saying I'm an anxious person, or I can say no, I had this very understandable response to a set of circumstances that I experienced, and how I see that is going to inform how I go and live the rest of my life. Am I living the rest of my life as an anxious person? Personally? I choose no, because I don't see myself as that. Am I going about in my writing writing that I'm an anxious person? No?

But you know, you can see the difference in like such a small, like one sentence, I'm an anxious person or I experienced an anxious episode as a result of my life experiences. And I think that's the power words and storytelling and non fiction right based on lived experiences, it had such power to change how we see who we are.

or is it about my individual response and interaction. And as you said, my stories, you know, it's like if you believe you're in danger but you're not, or your body will respond as though you are actually in danger despite the fact that in the real world here there is no threat. So I guess it's trying to understand on a physiological, psychological, emotional level that like the intertwining

of anxiety. You know, It's like when I believe something bad, even if the belief is flawed, then I have that experience. It's like our body doesn't know when we're dreaming. That's why my heart rate goes up and my blood pressure increases and my sympathetic nerve system switches on and all of those things happen despite the fact that I'm not actually running away from a bad guy down a dark alley.

My body doesn't know that's not real, you know. And there's this, yeah, I guess, really trying to understand I think with anxiety and depression and mental health, not that it's a solution, but opening the door on understanding it is definitely part of a.

they deal with their triggers. And I think in particularly in media and reporting of mental wellness, it's that mixture of the academics and experts and the lived experiences which is really going to move the needle on how we understand mental wellness and the spectrum of all of it and how it really looks in life. Because when I wrote my first book, I was twenty three and I'd just been widowed, and at the time it was a super controversial memoir about how I became very promiscuous and

use sex as therapy. So the daily Mail the headline read and it was all about like young widoweddom and loss and grief and how it shows up in very different ways. And at the time, all the self help books around grief were just very like ten steps formulaic, and they certainly didn't include sex, addiction, or eating disorders or you know, all the very different ways that we

deal with grief. And it's because of the telling of lived experience that we can see, like there isn't this cookie cutter way of self help that is like going to fit everybody. We need to look at the full spectrum of how we cope with adversity to actually help people to overcome it.

ten step formula that's universally optimal for every individual. And so, as you said, it's like, I think it's good to open the door on the science and the research to a point, and I'm a researcher, but also to go, yeah, that's good in theory and in you know, but like, here's what's happening on the ground with real humans who are going through real stuff, and try to, you know, see what resonates in the middle of all of that. Have you heard of a lady called what is her name?

What is her name? Abigail Shreier. She wrote a book recently called Bad Therapy. Really interesting. I think you'd like to at least have a look at it. Also a journo, a researcher. It's called bad Therapy, and she talks about the fact that for a lot of people, obviously talk therapy is great. She also said, for some people it makes it worse. Right, It's not like there's this, oh, you know what you need to do. You need to

sit down and talk to somebody. Some people and by the way, everyone, I'm not saying talk therapy is bad at all. I'm saying for some people, it doesn't seem to work or be optimal. For some people, when they sit and basically every Tuesday sit down with you know, doctor whoever, they kind of relight the fuse of that trauma, and then for the next two or three days they're

in a worse place than before they rocked up. Rather than acknowledging what's happened and not putting their head in the sand, but just saying, all right, right now where I am, what is the best use of my mental and emotional energy and my attention, And for some people, you know, just getting on with shit. Is what works for other people. Going and talking on a regular basis is what works. And I think, you know, that's the danger of any cookie cutter approach, I guess.

doesn't ever let you move on. So like I want people to write the book, but then, like I talk about, we need to close the loop on it, because if we don't and we just leave it open, like I can spend you know, the next part of my life talking over and over again about how I was widowed and that awful moment my husband died, and I can just get stuck in that trauma loop forever. But at a point I had to close it because I knew

I wanted to go on. I've got another partner, I've got three kids, and I want my life to be so much more than that. So I write work with my writers to you know, create this beautiful book about some of their hardest experiences in a way that will a help them to heal and be help the people

that read it to heal. But also let's close the loop then and find a way for you actually to move on with your life after that, because like you were saying, you know, you can sit in therapy for the rest of your life and hash over the toughest experiences, or you can find a way to close the loop and move forward.

we did a podcast on that. Even though that you might not be instructive in any way, it's just in the sharing of your experience and your journey and your therapy and your you know, revelations and insights, breakdowns, breakthroughs, all of that where someone else kind of that's for them, that's part of their therapy and healing without you telling

anyone what to do. I think sometimes it's just in the going like, oh, wow, Amy went through something that's you wouldn't wish on anyone, and oh, she's kind of good. Now she's kind of normal, she's got three kids. Yeah, and she's not sitting in the corner a broken mess up. There's okay, So it's possible. I think that gives people hope absolutely.

there I am with my kids on the beach. And they always messaged me to like, I'm so happy for you because the last thing they read was a year after my husband's death, and I'm you know, still crawling out of grief, and now they're genuinely so happy to see that your life doesn't have to end with that, you know, toughest moment when it does sometimes feel like it is going to end and they're going to be

there can be no way forward. And I also think I really want to break down shame about how we do cope because we all look back on these toughest times and we drunk too much, or you know, we were kind of selfish sometimes, or we said things that hurt other people in grief or in loss or in heartbreak,

and we can really beat ourselves up about it. And I always always talk about a letter I got after my first book came out, and it was from like a woman in her eighties who's been widowed in the war and she'd gone on to kind of sleep around and have all these affairs, and she said, I've been living with my shame and guilt for you know, forty years about how I acted to being widowed, and now I finally feel like I could forgive myself. And I

was like that, that is it. This is why we put ourselves out there, even when we're scared, and you know, we have this vulnerability hanking over and our hands are shaking as we press posts or whatever we're doing. This is why we do it because we can really have a ripple effect on someone by sharing our own story.

Like I feel sometimes we would rather have someone else tell us what to do rather than tap into that intuitive, instinctive wisdom that I think we all have that intelligence that I don't know, you know, that that stuff that we can't explain, that that high level of intuition.

and fork it out with everyone. But until we literally do learn to go inwards and say, like, what is my body telling me? What is you know, your physical sensations are such a guide for if you can you know you were talking about earlier about kind of the force fheares around us and our body reacting to the misconception of fear. If we can pour that back and actually go, no, what am I feeling genuinely in this moment? If I take away the chatter all around me, then

we can often find a clearer way forward. And you know, I'm the person that I didn't meditate right after my husband died. Like those those are the times when we don't want to look with it. It's really scary to sit in silence, which is why we turn outwards to all the podcasts and all the books and everything else.

But if we can find an attainable way to meditate, which is what the space is all about, in a relatable way to meditate, then you know, that's when, yeah, we can start to trust ourselves a little bit more.

you know. But I can get into a similar you know, like turning down the volume on my mind, like to get like stepping out of the mayhem and into the calm a little bit when I'm doing you know, when i'm training, when I'm working out, when i'm I've been riding motorbikes since i was five. When I'm on a motorbike, I'm very which you would think you shouldn't be calm,

but I'm extremely calm. In music, I'm very calm, and I think I think for people it's also finding the meditation or the tool that will turn off that sympathetic nervous system, turn on the parasympathetic calm the farm, you know, get them just lower all that kind of noise, be that physical, mental, or emotional noise, and not think, oh shit, I can't meditate. I can't sit on the floor with my legs crossed and meditate. I need to try harder. It doesn't really work.

religion or meditation. They would have thought it was complete bananas. And then you know, after he gets got sick, as many people do, he would have tried anything to survive, and so someone introduced him to reiki as a way to you know, just soothe the symptoms side effects of chemo, and through that he started meditating, and then he taught me as a teenager, which I'm just so grateful for because this was long before meditation was trendy or talked

about or anybody you know, really did it. And I'm lucky he taught me open eyed meditation initially, so my first experience of meditation was like just being out in the world, softening your gaze, focusing on something on the horizon and just seeing if you can focus on that site or that noise instead of all the chatter, and you know, just really take away like the multisensory experience of everything going on and see how focused we can be. And I think that's what I'd take into my meditation,

Like I rarely just sit in silence. I am normally, you know, with my kids or in the car or in a noisy cafe, And it's how you can make that a meditative experience. And like my heart, like you, he would never if I said sit down and clear your mind, which I wouldn't do because that's not what I think meditation is. But he would just say no. But he's spearfishes and to him, you know, when he's tracking a fish out in the ocean, like he's hyper focus and he's not thinking of anything else. Or when

he's surfing, that's his meditation to him. You know, when I'm hiking with the kids and you know we're just listening to the sound of our footsteps breaking through the branches on the ground, like that's meditation to us. So there's so many ways that it can be, and we really need to break away from the idea that it is sitting cross legged and aming, because you know that works for some people but not for most people.

when my husband died. And it's very interesting to be valued so highly for that and then to and in a world where you know, bad new cells and we do love to hear about other people suffering, and then to get to a place to actually place of value on saying I'm a happy person, I have a good life, this was a good day. I'm going to share that too, you know. I wrote about this on my blog recently, like the sharing of our happy times has to be

as important as sharing our tough times. And I come from a family who really rally when times are tough, like they are, you know, you want them on the day you get the diagnosis, on the day the relationship breaks down. They are bloody brilliant. My mum is serves it up with that, but they are very uncomfortable and maybe it's a cultural English thing too. They are not great at celebrating good times. And I think there's two

levels of that. It's like A it's seen as boastful or tool poppy syndrome, and B there is a distrust of happiness that has been conditioned into me because they because of again collective trauma, they are worried that if you celebrate good things, shoe the other shoe is going to drop, and that you know, something bad will be

around the corner. And I think for me, a big realization through therapy is that I want to live a life where I value happiness as much as I value suffering, where I teach my kids not only how to suffer but also how to celebrate life. I was taught from a very early age how to endure and survive, and as women, you know, we are great at being survivors. But I really want to teach my children how to

celebrate and trust their happiness. And yeah, that's kind of dictating what I'm doing in my personal life now and also in the content I share, because I don't only I actually like change the name of my business because it was storytelling for healing, and I felt like, in a way, we were getting stuck in that suffering loop of only sharing the stories of suffering, and I wanted to start to show the other side of life too, because our negative bias does naturally make us attached to

the darkness of life, and if we don't make space to the other side too, Like, you know, what's the bloody point of all of this?

got to deal with it. We want to heal all of that. But at the same time, let's get the fuck on with it, because you've got a life now, You've got potential, you've got days, you've got time, You've got you know, like, how do we is there? I know that's a hard question, but what's the point where we go? Like like you kind of the way that you acted after your husband died, some people would have gone I understand that some people would have gone no,

and you moved on. I don't know, is there a is there a I don't know what am I asking? I'm asking, I guess how do we not get trapped in self pity and still move on without totally of the experience?

to us. And like it's funny for me as like, you know, a so called like media person media personality, because I do so many interviews and I write books about my life, like I can get stuck on like, oh, you know, and then my husband died, and then I did this, and my I was paralyzed, and then I

had needing disorder and blah blah blah. But I start to hear myself when I'm just reeling off the script that I've said hundreds of times, and I catch myself and it's not even about not about like not telling that story. I'm really happy to talk about my first husband and everything that's come after it, but I really want to update it to truly who I am now. And you know, my current husband there was a moment in the pandemic when he turned around to me and said,

you know, you're so attached to your trauma. And at the time I was so affronted. I'm like, well, what are you talking about? But he's really right in that moment, you know, in the culture of the pandemic and everything that had been, you know, happening, and all the bad

news in the world. I had started talking about my first husband a lot more than usual, and I'd almost started to use that story to make myself feel better, to give myself more value, and even like to win an argument with my current husband, like if he said something, I'd say, you know, if you don't understand, like you don't know what's happened to me, or you don't know

what I've a seen. And though it doesn't happen often, that's probably been the only time in this current relationship in fifteen years, but it's that moment when I go like, oh, like that victimhood and again coming back to using our suffering as a way to boost ourself ESTEEME. That's something I really try and be hyper aware of because we are in a world that glorifies suffering, and we have to be careful not to get stuck in that cycle.

It's really interesting, like you probably know the word the work of Gaboron Marte and all the work he does in trauma, and I heard him say, you know, so many of us being everyone who has experienced any kind of trauma, so you know, I'm so grateful for it because it's made me an empathetic person, or this is a gift it's given me, and like I've done that. I say, like, the reason I'm such a good journalist is because I've been through so much so I can

connect with people. And Gabor says like, no, no, no, that's your trauma, lens speaking, you would have been that anyway like me, I would have been. I have to realize I would have been empathetic, and I would have been had this skill, and I would have been able to connect with people whether or not I was traumatized

or not. And I have to stop giving my trauma credit for giving me that gift and actually saying, hey, do you know what, I don't have to say, I'm so grateful that happened to me because it made me the person I am. I can realize that I have value regardless of what happened to me. So yeah, I don't know if I answered that question or not, but there's something in that for people.

to have an audience. Like one of the one of the catches these days, I think is that like there's a social currency almost in being a victim and going oh no, let me tell you my story. It's worse than yours. Yeah, And I'm like I get it, I get it, but there's got to be a point also, yeah, here's the bad news, but also here's the rest, here's the rest, and like trying to you know, everyone's been through stuff to different levels, and you've genuinely been through you know.

because there's too much chatter around us. And so, you know, like with I think a lot of this like trauma virtue signaling and trauma bonding is because our self esteem is so low. And I'm talking to myself now, like I will find myself every now and again, if I'm having like a tough week as a parent and I have to go to an event or you know, meet a new person, I will find a way to like wangle in my past story because I'm like, well, this is something I can fall back on to talk about.

This is something that's interesting if they know that I wrote a book about this, or I went through this, And so when you kind of we use it as a way to like one, connect with people, and you also prop up our own self esteem to just go, oh, yeah, I'm worthy of being here because I went through this thing, which proves that I'm worthy of being here. And like, I think, if we find the way again, we could go inwards that old cliche again and realize that our worth is in just to who we are the day

we were born. We were born with this incredible worth and that hasn't changed and will never change. And if we can find a way to sit with that and who we are without the clothes and the job and the house, that's where like solid, genuine self worth comes from. And then we don't need to tell these stories. Like we can tell the stories because they genuinely help people, but we don't have to because we know we have value without them.

right of course. But then the other message is that's everything what you look like, what you own, what you own, earn, where you live, what you drive. They are like, it's not spoken, but it's obvious, like through social media, through media, through and we tell people that, but it's it's like, yeah, that's well and good, it's all well and good, say it doesn't matter what you look like, but have you been in the real world, It actually fucking does matter.

It does matter. It shouldn't, but it seems to.

under the umbrella of me looking like this. So I have an incredible privilege to go out and kind of say, yeah, I behave badly, I did this, I did that, But look at me and I know I will be accepted in most places and spaces, but you know it's safe for you because I know a bit about your backstory, like how people interacted with you, and especially being like in the media when you were heavier versus now, or different parts of your fitness journey, like you would have

felt people reacted to you differently, and that's how the level of how people gave you a voice and listened to you and valued what you had to say would have been differently, you know, absorbed, depending on what you look like at the time.

controlled myself. So I'm just wearing bigger and baggier tract suits and hoping people won't notice, you know, And it's like.

I want to be connected. I wanted women to think that I was not horrible to look at all that stuff all out of insecurity and fear and shit self esteem. And over time it wasn't an overnight revelation, but over time I kind of recognized and realized how I was creating my own emotional and psychological prison. I built this prison for myself to live in. That meant I literally couldn't be happy or fulfilled or connected unless I looked a certain way. And I don't have optimal genetics, so

it was always an uphill battle, you know. So yeah, I think for me, the liberation was in starting to try to figure out who I was beyond a body, which for me was a spiritual, emotional, sociological, and psychological journey. And I'm still on that path, and I still, you know, I still sometimes care too much about how I look. I still sometimes care too much about what you think

me right now. I still have all that human bullshit, but it's you know, I kind of have bigger and I guess better awareness around it.

I've told before. Do you have that voice?

about me. I'm happy to talk about me, but yeah, I don't and I don't want it to be self indulgent, you know all of those things. But yes, yes, but that that kind of who I was and the experiences and stories that came out of my childhood and teens was kind of informed you know a lot of my life.

used to be the traumatized anorexic girl. When we're just rattling off without consciousness of what we're doing to ourselves and our own nervous system, you know, because every time you go back to like or when I was, you know, bigger and felt lonely and afraid like we are, our nervous system can't really differentiate between an event happening now and one that happened ten years ago. So it's also about being aware of like, when I'm telling that story, how does it feel to me? Is it expansive or

is it constrictive? Is you know, do I want to kind of hide in shame or does it make me feel like I'm opening up and connecting with the world. And I think as long as we have that awareness, we're okay as storytellers. It's when we just start, you know, rattling off that script without checking in with ourselves that to me, I'm thinking, like, Okay, let's you know, let's pause and see if this is still relevant and purposeful in repeating this story.

like gratitude practices and around. It's much more potent if we don't use another person or a situation to compare to, Like I'm so grateful that I'm not the one with cancer. I'm so grateful I'm not the one going through a divorce. I really try, within the work we do with the Space podcast and my own gratitude practice to not use downward comparison to prop myself up. However, within the news we do get that little high from thinking, oh, at least that isn't me. I might be going through this,

but I'm not going through that. Also, just as a human species, we are interested in like everything most of them think, we do as a self protective mechanism, and so the part of us is like we want to be one step ahead of whatever the danger is that's coming. And so we have this hunger for every risk that could possibly happen to us, whether you know, for you know, look at their crime to crime podcasts and the majority

of the huge audience for it are women. And it's because women are most at risk of domestic and family violence, male and female violence, you know, use in the dating world. Like you know, just running on my run this morning at five am in the dark, at least half of the run, I'm just like scanning around thinking, Okay, if someone comes out of there, I'm going to go and run and knock on that door. Like we just have this running commentary in our head of how to keep

ourselves safe. And it's one of the reasons they say that women are so interested in listening to true crime podcasts because as a part of us, that is like taking in information just in case we are ever in this situation. And I think the same is true for some of our addiction to bad news. It's like we think, if we can absorb every risk around us, then we can somehow protect ourselves from it, and of course that's

not true. What we do is this hyper strength in our negative bias to thinking that that, you know, ninety nine percent of everything that goes on in the world is hideous. And you know, again it's coming back to getting comfortable with other people's happiness. It's really hard some if we are struggling with infertility and our friend tells

us they're pregnant, it fucking hurts, you know. If our relationship is going for a really crappy patch and our friends have started dating and fallen in love and it's all the honeymoon period, it's really tough sometimes to hear that.

But we do need to expand our tolerance for good news and other people's happiness, which sounds bizarre, but we are not very good at it, and so like for me, I really have to push and test myself to ask people about the great things going on in their life, asking how their kids are doing, how their relationship is, what's going on with their job, and reading some of the happy news, because I know that I can be uncomfortable celebrating myself and other people, and so I just

think we need to get better at it. Yes, bad news sales, but we have to leave some space in the market and the media space for the good of life. If we are ever going to feel safe in this crazy world that we live in, we have to realize that sometimes great stuff happens.

anyone to get what I wanted. At the same time, I was a you know, high functioning anorexic. I very much thought I was in recovery, but I certainly was not.

If I had actually looked honestly about how I was eating and living my life, and I was just so proud of how disciplined I was in every area of my life life and thought, if I can just keep being disciplined and living by these rules and eating well in egg folks, and you know, following my fitness with em and working all the time, I will be great, and of course if many of us are found out that's not a sustainable or pleasurable or connective way to live for me and probably for a lot of people.

And so like moving more into a mindset of like flexibility in how I live and what I eat and what I do and how I work has been a big game changer for me, I think, and now that I have kids, it's really the only way to live. I you know, my needs are not first in this household at all, and that's as it should be with young kids. But you know, if the twenty five year old workaholic anorexic version of me would look my day, she would think it was a failure to be frank.

You know, our cancel work meeting because my kids suddenly got to come home from daycare because they've been hit with a yo yo and I haven't been able to go for a run because someone was up crying. And then you know, my dinner will be my own dinner and a fish finger off one of the kids plate. And I would have seen that as an absolute disaster, But personally for me now I really see it as

a triumph. And it's a real sign for me of how far I've come, and the fact that like I can love myself in the chaos of it all is really special.

really just got people. You know, My brief from the producers was mindfulness without the bullshit, So it was like, you know, no cliches, no kind of spiritual jargon, and also like not that this is bullshit, but like we're not going to talk about crystals or we're not going to like use the language that like the average like trade on the street is going to bullcat. So they really wanted me to break it down and just make it.

And I think we do it. I mean, it's had over nearly six million downloads now lifetime downloads, and it's just going from strength to strength. And I just love like when I hear from like friends or friends of friends who listen to it. It's never like my spiritual friends who do listen, but it's like my husband's mate who's never meditated before, or like my friends who work in the police force and have PTSD and are looking for something that they can listen to on the drive

home after they've seen, you know, some brutal scene. I love the people that are coming back to me and saying like this is a game changer for me. It's really nice to introduce kind of so called spiritual content in a way that like is really easy for people to understand and just using their everyday life. I love it.