Welcome And Core Question
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Welcome to Islamic Life Coach School Podcast. Apply tools that you learn in this podcast and your life will be unrecognizably successful. Now your host, Dr. Gamal Abtar.
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Hello, hello, hello everyone. Peace and blessings be upon all of you. Today's episode is about nervous systems fear of unfamiliar tools. And the focus is going to be on novelty, hope, disappointment, and the brain rejecting what could help it because it is afraid to go towards a reality that it hasn't lived before. I do have to admit that when I started my coaching services, I found a lot of women skeptical of the modalities of healing, and rigidly so because they might have used different modalities in the past that did not help them. And when these previous modalities didn't work, it leads them to enter any world of healing with skepticism and concern. So in the beginning, as a new coach, I would treat this as an obstacle, and I would treat it as a wall that we came across that we had to break through.
Skepticism As A Healing Stage
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But now I'm a little more wise. I treat it as a stage. Skepticism of healing is a stage in your healing. Skepticism is a healthy response because of the novelty that healing brings. So women come to me and they engage with my work, but they might not sign up for my coaching, saying that it doesn't work, which is perfectly fine, except that they go around saying that nothing works. So then they start using skepticism as an excuse to not heal rather than a stage of healing that it is. As an example, if you don't agree with one thing or some things that I teach, then you use that to disagree with everything that I have to say, rejecting all of my ideas because there's disagreement with one of my ideas. This skepticism is born because anything unfamiliar creates an apprehension in your system just because of its novelty, even if that novelty comes with a promise of improvement. The original apprehension thoughts sound like this is not for me, who made her the expert, I don't agree with anything she's saying, or other thoughts like this can't be possible, it's not for me. Wellness, improvement, stability, joy, all of this is for other people. This skepticism is created by your primal mind in its quest of conserving energy, because coming out of the mental pathway that keeps creating pain in your life over and over again, even though it keeps you rehearsing your suffering, it is the less energy consuming pathway, and your nupti mind will keep you there for as long as it can. So the healing becomes tricky. The lowest part of your primal brain will use each and every excuse to justify keeping you in pain, to justify not spending any energy towards wellness, and keep you in skepticism and constantly looping your thoughts and keeping you in doubt. Doubting yourself, doubting coaching, doubting health care or other mental wellness modalities, it will keep you recycling the pain over and over again, and it will use your intellect, your knowledge, your experience, your degrees to justify recycling that pain and justify your position instead of actually letting you create change.
When Research Becomes Avoidance
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So imagine you finally found a coaching framework that could genuinely change how you think. So you listen to one podcast episode and instead of practicing the tool for a week, your mind immediately starts researching. You start researching Reddit threads, you watch YouTube videos, you compare it to CBT, DBT, ACT, IFS, NLP, psychodynamic therapy, attachment theory, and neuroscience. You spend three months trying to determine whether this is the right modality. And by the end of these three months you've become incredibly educated about healing without becoming any healthier. And your primal brain absolutely loves this because researching feels productive while requiring almost no emotional change. You spend enormous mental energy avoiding the one thing that actually requires energy, practicing a different way of being. Your intellect becomes a defense mechanism in this case. Your knowledge became another way to stay exactly where you are. You are educated, you are smart, you're hard working, you have the trainings and you understand physiology, psychology, pathology, even pharmacology. You've educated yourself in evidence based practice. So every time you hear a coaching concept, your mind immediately starts analyzing it. This sounds like confirmation bias. This overlaps with CBT. The evidence here isn't strong enough. The studies here are limited. Correlation doesn't equal causation. And yada yada yada, your reasoning continues. And everything you're saying may be intellectually accurate, but notice what is never happening here. You never practice observing your own thoughts that was the original invite of the podcast. Your knowledge became the shield against transformation, and you never really learned to regulate your nervous system during conflict, which was your original goal to begin with. You continue to remain the person that can't think clearly when your child misbehaves, and you're not any more successful in your business than you were before. The primal brain would much rather have you critique the treatment than receive it. It will rather keep you under the impression that intellectual superiority is the healing rather than have you actually create some change or be emotionally free. It uses your mind, your intellect, your education to protect your suffering because remaining an expert requires far less energy than becoming a beginner at something. And your lower brain does not care if you stay stuck through ignorance or intelligence. It has no preference. If ignorance won't keep you in the same emotional pattern, it will recruit your intelligence instead. It will use your degrees, your religious knowledge, your life experiences, your critical thinking skills. All of this is evidence for why you should not change. In the hands of the nafs, even intelligence becomes another tool of self sabotage. The smarter you are, the more sophisticated your self sabotage becomes.
Identity Fear And Hope Avoidance
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So while skepticism is a normal stage of healing, when you first hear a new framework and your brain says this doesn't work, skepticism is your nervous system asking for familiarity. You might think you're evaluating the work when your body is evaluating the discomfort of the change. The question you should be asking is not is this true? The question you should be asking is in the process of this, will I have to become someone that I've never been before? When you ask this question with genuine curiosity, you start to realize that your skepticism might not be healthy after all. You start to realize that you might have been more loyal to your pain than you thought. If pain is your identity where you identify as a woman who nobody understands or the woman who has to be strong, healing threatens that identity. Not because pain is good. We know pain is not good, especially if it's unnecessary pain, but your brain would rather be right in the name of efficiency every time than be free in the name of novelty. If you come across a framework that works and helps you heal, then there's a chance that your old story will lose its power, and to the lower brain that is terrifying. Because this would mean that now you're not helpless, now you have agency, now you can't blame your childhood or your circumstances. And this agency requires action. And you might be protecting yourself from hope by calling it skepticism. And sometimes you do not want to believe healing is possible because hope makes you vulnerable. If you hope and it fails, you will feel crushed. So you stay skeptical to avoid the grief of wanting something and not being able to have it. Skepticism is also you rejecting simple tools because your pain feels too complicated.
Simple Practices That Transform
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Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala often places transformation inside repetition and simple tasks like salah, dhikur, wudu, fasting, daily practice. Healing may be simple, but simple does not mean shallow. You have left healthy skepticism if all healing modalities feel suspicious. You have to question why your brain rejects everything that could heal you. This is how you come back to healthy skepticism. This is how skepticism becomes a stage of healing rather than a destination. All of this is an invite for you to create a better relationship with your skepticism. You do not need to shame skepticism. You don't need to coach through it. You can say, of course, I'm scared. Of course, because this is new. You can say I am allowed to question, but I'm asking you to not allow yourself to use doubt as a prison. You are allowed to test a framework through practice. You're not allowed to have endless mental debate so you never get to practice any framework. Healing begins when you become willing to experiment. Constant skepticism is a loyalty test to your old identity. You are not constantly skeptical because the framework of healing is weak. You are skeptical because it works, and as a result of it you will become someone new, and that is terrifying. If you have spent ten years being the one who is always misunderstood, the one whose husband never changes, the one whose family doesn't support her, the one who is always criticized at work, then healing does not only ask you to feel better, it asks you to loosen your grip on the identity that you've formed. And these identities give you a strange sense of belonging. Even painful identities become familiar, comfortable homes. You may at times hate this home that you're living in, but it's familiar to you. You know where all of the light switches are. You know that you like the temperature in one shower area versus the other. So you've become really familiar with this home even though at times you hate living here. You have to also question your skepticism because the mind confuses complexity with truth. And you reject simple healing because if you think your pain is deep, the solution must be complicated. If someone tells you notice your thoughts, regulate your body, just choose the very next action, your mind will say this cannot be it. I want a nine hundred page manual of healing. It demands a complicated route towards your well being because your injury has been complicated. But I ask you to be mindful that sometimes the most powerful truths are simple enough that the ego feels insulted by them. So I encourage you to try the simple things. Your ego would always rather be right than free. If you stay skeptical because if the work is true, then you have to admit you had more agency than you ever wanted to believe, and you start to blame yourself, but that in itself will keep you stuck. So the freedom is in practicing your agency, not self blame. Blame will say this is my fault, I was not able to create change all these years. Agency and responsibility says there is something I can do now. And the ego hates that because being right about how impossible everything feels is safer than being responsible for taking the next step. Another barrier is that if you accept that healing is possible, then you may have to grieve how long you've lived without it. Skepticism can be a way to avoid this grief, so you may not have to feel the sadness of all of the years you've spent over functioning or begging and proving your worth, all of the years you've spent victim to your diagnosis or a victim to your child's diagnosis. If you heal all of that, then you will face the possibility of why didn't you do this before? So skepticism becomes a wall against this grief. There is a simple fix for this, and that is you can decide right now that regardless of what you decide to choose as a path to your healing, when you do feel better, you will not become judgmental of what you didn't do and how fast you didn't do it. You can decide right now that you will be self forgiving and will be in complete acceptance of your decisions. You can decide that what you did or didn't do happened exactly in the right time. Guidance arriving now or later does not mean that Allah abandoned you at any earlier point. It just means that this is the moment you were invited to create your change. I believe in my heart of hearts that healing exists for every woman, and some women are not skeptical of healing, they're skeptical of receiving it for themselves.
Selective Skepticism And Closing Prayer
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There's also skepticism that your mind offers that feeds your sense of moral superiority. And that happens when your brain says that you will lose the moral high ground that you've gained through suffering. A lot of times being religious, being spiritual gets confused with how much you're able to suffer. So you subconsciously continue to say look how much I can tolerate, look how patient I am, look how wrong everyone else is. Healing threatens that story. If you keep retelling the story of what they did because that story gives you a place to stand above them, you will use skepticism of the healing modalities to stay on that pedestal, even though it hurts your life and your future possibilities. Quran calls you to purification of this nafs, the Teskiathan Nuffs, this is Teskiathan Nuffs, so that you can call your nafs out on all of these lies that it's spinning. Then there's the most dangerous skepticism, and that is selective. You question coaching, therapy, nervous system, emotional healing, and you do that with a microscope with a fine tooth comb, but you accept your anxious thoughts with zero evidence. You question the modality, but you do not question the thought that says nothing will ever change. You question the teacher, but you do not question your own inner critic that has been ruining you. Coaching and other healing approaches open your eyes to this biased loyalty to suffering. Skepticism itself needs a limit. It is healthy when it investigates. It turns into self sabotage when it moves in permanently, and it starts to live rent free in your nervous system. At some point you have to question the skepticism itself. There are thousands upon thousands of healing opportunities out there. The greatest tragedy is not the lack of these modalities, it is that you will never give yourself an opportunity to find out if you stay enslaved in constant skepticism. Years from now you may still have the same marriage, the same anxiety, the same resentment, the same emotional reactions, and the same relationship with yourself, all because your skepticism kept you safe in your current identity. You became so committed to protecting yourself from disappointment that you also protected yourself from any transformation. So before you reject the next possibility, the next coach, the next framework, or even the next conversation, ask yourself with loving honesty who inside of you desperately needs this not to work? Because the answer to that question will tell you far more about your future than any framework could, knowing that your skepticism may not be standing between you and false hope, but rather standing between you and the life Allah has been inviting you into all along. And perhaps today is the day you become skeptical of your skepticism itself. With that I pray to Allah. O Allah, grant me the courage to question the thoughts that keep me trapped, and the wisdom to recognize the paths in front of me. Olah, you have opened my healing for me. Protect me from mistaking fear for discernment or familiarity for truth. Purify my enough and soften my hearts towards growth that brings me closer to you, Ya Rab Amin Yarabulamin. Please keep me in your drawas. I will talk to you guys next time.
