Time Heals All Wounds - Kyle Smith

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign. [00:00:05] Speaker B: Welcome to another episode of the Worst Advice I Ever Got. I'm your host Sean Taylor, along with my producer jb and today our guest is Kyle Smith. Kyle is an emotional clarity consultant, speaker and coach. But today's episode isn't a seminar. It's personal. We're talking about a piece of advice you've probably heard a hundred times, maybe even given yourself. It sounds comforting, it sounds wise, but for Kyle, it was pretty dangerous. Let's jump into it with Kyle. Kyle, thanks so much for joining us today, dude. [00:00:35] Speaker A: I appreciate being here. [00:00:37] Speaker B: Awesome. Awesome. Well, let's jump in. Tell everybody the worst advice you ever got. [00:00:43] Speaker A: Well, the worst advice I ever got is that time heals all wounds. [00:00:49] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. I think we've all heard that phrase before. Do you remember when you first heard this advice and, and, and how you. [00:00:58] Speaker A: Took it over time? There has been more and more evidence indicating that time does not heal all wounds. And it's an inaccurate statement. So let's say, for example, when people have passed away in my life, time heals all wounds. That grief is going to just flutter off by itself. You don't need to worry about it. It's just going to be all good. The body can heal itself. It can heal its wounds to the best of its ability automatically. But I don't think from the emotional sense it's accurate. [00:01:26] Speaker B: This was personal for you in some sense. It wasn't just, you know, as a clarity consultant or trying to, you know, be a coach to others. These are just one of 15 bad things you might hear. This was personal. You were hurt personally and you were impacted personally by not dealing with something and hoping time would fix it. [00:01:47] Speaker A: Yeah, that sounds pretty good. I think it was amplified simply by what I had going on at that point in time. Although I understood that it's from a kind hearted place, it doesn't resolve the feels. [00:02:00] Speaker B: You know, I lost my father back in 2017. I mean, we're literally as we record this coming up on two weeks from the day he died. I miss him being in my life. I miss him seeing all the things that my kids are going through. Time hasn't fixed that. It seems so illogical. Why is it so common? [00:02:18] Speaker A: I think. Thank you for that question, Dan. That was good. I think that it's because we're trying to put the responsibility of healing to something else. It's like time heals all wounds rather than I heal my wounds. So it's pointing rather than going inwards. [00:02:40] Speaker C: It's the, it's that, it's that reactive as opposed to proactive. And you're just like, oh, don't, you don't have to worry about this because something else is going to fix it for me totally. When you were going through your own thing, did you realize kind of quickly that you needed to actively do something or did it take you a long time to be like, ah, no, I'm just waiting for the time to kick in. [00:03:00] Speaker A: You know, a convo of the two, combo of the two. Because before everything was out in the open, I was allowing things to play. I was allowing time to do its thing and allow chance. Then when everything was out in the open, I wanted to be more proactive and make the choice to become the character that I wanted to be, to actually feel good about myself. By choice or by chance, this thing is going to happen, or something that I don't want to happen is going to happen. [00:03:31] Speaker B: We think of somebody being in pain, we don't think of it as now they have a job, responsibility to get out of pain. We think of it as like, we just want them to be freed of the burden. But you sort of alluded to like you now have work to do. [00:03:45] Speaker A: Yeah, man. To me, this is my process of going through it. The first thing is understanding what the feeling is, where it could be and what the experience or I put as stories, what the story is. It creates space from it. So we're not in it, we're watching it. So we become more objective. And then when people feel like they see it objectively, then they can, they feel more action prone to take accountability or responsibility, the ability to respond, responsibility. And then that's when they're put into a position of power. Because now it's not the external things that are going to try to heal me, it's me going through it and then goes through the breath. So this is why time heals all wounds. Doesn't work on a emotional body scale. Emotion, energy in motion. The emotional body is timeless. It's not time bound. Our physical body is time bound. So my, my father passed away in 1999 and that story lingered with those feels for a long duration until I went into it. Not around it, not over it, not under it, into it to be able to like come to peace. The story is in our body. It's locked up. And it could be in a certain spot that leads to chronic pain. It could be another spot, leads to chronic fatigue, could be in another spot. It leads to closing up the heart and not opening it to be able to feel things that breaks up and then we get a flow of energy again. It's no longer an anchor of the past, preventing progress in the present. [00:05:36] Speaker B: This subjective versus object is very interesting because pain is subjective. There's got to be steps that are specific to be able to make a personal pain objective versus subjective. Can you elaborate on any of that? [00:05:51] Speaker A: Super simple. It's writing down the experience. If it's stuck in the mind, then it's infinite. When it's on paper or on a document, on a laptop, it has a start and it has a finish. So we're not overwhelmed. Because if a certain story or a moment in time or experience has a theme, let's say rejection, and let's say there's 15 experiences of rejection that happened once every six months, the person's not going to look at those as separate experiences. It's going to feel like one big experience. So writing it out and writing it on the side of more detail rather than less, as if you're having a conversation with someone. What happened in that very moment, not what you feel about it, it's what happened in that moment. And then reading it out loud is the second step to that. And reading at 30% slower. Third step to that. And the fourth step is reading and breathing. So at every period, insert a breath. [00:06:47] Speaker B: You've referenced breathing. What is it about breathing that matters? [00:06:51] Speaker A: I like to go with a top to bottom approach. And I think there's a lot of head heavy practices. That is two talking heads regurgitating the same information over and over again. But the body's not getting involved. So where the story is held doesn't change. And. And so the breath is the language of the body. When we're breathing high and tight, we're good to fight. When we're breathing low and slow, we're good to flow. So when we can read through a story and insert our breath, we show the story that we're in control. Each step is microdosing exposure therapy. It's a revisitation and I have four steps in this. However, the studies also say that it's only three points of exposure therapy for someone to really change their opinion or their beliefs around that particular pain. So I just take it a step further. [00:07:38] Speaker C: Is that the goal to sort of change your opinion on it? Like, how does going through all that make you feel better? [00:07:46] Speaker A: It's to change the meaning of it. And so when someone's going through a story or whenever I've gone through a story and I'm attacking an emotion by confronting it rather than just allowing it to run on the background, we're able to take control of it because we may have a story where we've adopted a meaning. So rather than opinion, it would be a meaning. It would be the meaning associated with the story. So, for example, like from my own personal one with. With my dad, when I wrote that story out, at each step, I asked questions, where. What are the feelings? Where do you feel it in your body? And on a scale of 1 to 10, where does it land? So there's metrics to the process. So people feel less intensity. They feel it move around. When they feel like things are in alignment, it's much more open. And this shows undeniable evidence that we are who we say we are, rather than passively accepting what our stories, our external environments decided for us. [00:08:42] Speaker C: Reframing the pain into something positive, a positive experience that you actually took from that, and then that helps you get over it and heal the wound. But time had almost nothing to do with that process. [00:08:55] Speaker A: Jack. Shit. Jack. Because I've seen. Sorry for same. [00:08:59] Speaker C: Oh, we can swear on the podcast. [00:09:00] Speaker A: Okay, cool. Cool. Because I do my own work on this. This is the. This is the solution to the problem that then became my passion. That's what it is. Yeah. [00:09:10] Speaker B: And so you certainly turn this into a. A life's meaning, right? [00:09:14] Speaker A: Yeah, man. Dude. Like, honestly, like, I envision it where this is it. This is all I think about. And then sharing it with people, and then it. My goal. My goal with this life's meaning and purpose is to be able to help people write a better life experience into existence. [00:09:29] Speaker B: I want to ask you a question about people saying this or giving this advice, not the person receiving it. Because we've been. This podcast is really about you receiving the worst advice you ever got. But I want to talk about who's giving this advice. Right. Time heals all wounds. It feels like it's dismissive. [00:09:46] Speaker A: I. I think it is. Questions, pull. Statements, push. If I'm in a state of conversing with someone, this is how I would switch it. I wouldn't say time heals all wounds because it would be dismissive. The way it feels. That statement is, I don't want you to inconvenience me by telling me what's wrong. I would actually go with the questions, pull. Statements, push. That's a statement. Questions, pull. How you doing? Are you okay? Or my personal favorite, this is my frame. Do you want solutions, support or space? That way I know what to do. And so by having support space, like. [00:10:19] Speaker C: The questions, the pulling versus the pushing, you know, What? I mean, it's an interesting way that you put it because we've heard that, you know, we want to give people advice on, you know, and this is. [00:10:27] Speaker A: The worst advice you ever got. [00:10:28] Speaker C: What do you do? And it's like, I don't even give advice. I ask questions. Because all advice is sort of pushing your own narrative onto somebody. But to Sean's point, it is very dismissive. [00:10:37] Speaker B: I do think it's dismissive from the person giving the advice and then flipping it back to the taker, the receiver of the advice. Right. Time heals all wounds. If you buy into that and agree to that, you're basically dismissing having to do the work. Right. It's. It's almost a. Okay, I'll take that excuse. No problem. [00:10:59] Speaker C: And great, I. I don't have to do anything. Sounds great. [00:11:03] Speaker A: That is the best solution. That is exactly what I wanted nothing to do. [00:11:08] Speaker B: I think it's a false sense of hope. And what happens there, I guess, is what my next question would be, is, are we creating a false sense of hope in people by giving them your worst advice? [00:11:18] Speaker A: Yeah, there's a line out of Best of you by the Foo Fighters, and it says, hope kickstarts the broken heart. And so if you're able to provide hope, then then the person has power. And in that, in that point, by saying that you don't need to go through it, you're also slapping the power out of their hands too. [00:11:39] Speaker B: Time heals all wounds just seems like a pause point, a time phase process anyway. Like, is it okay to just let a little time go by without immediately going to work on something? [00:11:50] Speaker A: Oh, I like that question. I think that when things settle in a little bit more, then that's a good time to be able to go with it. Because if you're already at a heightened state and you go into something where you're trying to go through it as quickly as possible. I think that there is a time and a place where one feels ready to go into a story or an experience. I think the problem with time heals all wounds is at first it's fine. Over time, it crock pots, it stews, and it can linger and it could just build on itself. And at one point it's either going to explode or it's going to be processed. And I think that's when there's a good. That's when choice or chance comes in for sure. [00:12:33] Speaker B: Choice or chance? What do you mean? [00:12:35] Speaker A: So let it keep going and hope that it resolves itself or make the proactive decision to Handle it. [00:12:42] Speaker B: Time heals all wounds is essentially leaving it up to chance that it's going to work out versus processing it. Doing the work is a choice to proactively make yourself better. [00:12:52] Speaker A: Totally. [00:12:53] Speaker B: Is there a difference between emotional pain and physical pain here? You know, if you got a cut on your arm over time, it's going to scab up and go away. I think people are trying to associate a physical wound to an emotional wound. Is that part of the problem here? [00:13:07] Speaker A: Yeah, 100%. They set the same expectation. [00:13:11] Speaker B: Yeah. And where physical wounds may heal over a period of time, emotional wounds are. I mean, they could show up 30, 40 years later. I mean, we were. Jamie. We had a. An episode we recorded with a young lady. I think she was impacted by the worst advice for three decades, something like that. Right. [00:13:28] Speaker C: And a long time. [00:13:29] Speaker B: And it never went away like it drove her whole life. There isn't a shelf life to emotional wounds. Kyle. Would you say that's a fair statement? [00:13:39] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. It'll linger there for as long. As long as it takes for us to decide to do something about it. [00:13:46] Speaker C: That's what you were talking about, kind of like flowing over and boiling up and doing the side. So outside the obvious, what would you say? What's the. What's the damage in me just not dealing with this and letting time heal all wounds? [00:13:58] Speaker A: What it means. What it means to me, because that's. I'll put it on my end. What that means to me is, bar to let time heal my wounds, I would feel incongruent in the long run with where I want to go. I'll think that there's this proverbial cap on what I can do because I have to let this heal itself before I can go do this thing. So I would. I would say that if I continued listening to that advice, the side effect of that would be I would not have a very good opinion of myself. I would not have very much respect because I wouldn't be doing the things I say I want to do. I would feel frustrated and impatient. I imagine if I just. Oh, just gonna let things happen as they go. Like, let's say someone doesn't go with. Doesn't handle it now, then it becomes landmine, so you don't see it. And then eventually you're walking and things are honky dory. And then you step on that landmine and you're like, whoa, what? [00:14:54] Speaker C: That emotional landmine you were saying? And I think that's what I think a lot of people probably taking from this episode is that there's the time heals. All wounds can work for a second. You know, it's not like the day your dog dies. You need to start talking about and processing, writing it down. But if you ever really want to truly get over that or feel better or do a thing, there's an active. [00:15:15] Speaker A: Step you have to take. [00:15:17] Speaker B: An event that creates emotional pain for someone is an invitation for personal and professional transformation if processed. [00:15:27] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, I would say, yeah, I would say yes to that. Because when we go through it, we're also recognizing ourself as more competent. And we also see ourselves as having more ability to be able to push through X, whatever it may be. So I think that as a side effect of competence, we just develop that confidence. And I also like to think of pain itself as the blacksmith that forges us into the ultimate weapon is what forges us into our Excalibur. It's not through. It's not through staying in the dirt like iron ore is through getting beaten, heated up, sharpened, beaten some more, all to be prepped to go take on dragons. And dragon is a story. [00:16:11] Speaker B: If you had the opportunity to speak to Kyle 10 years ago, 15 years ago, 20 years ago, what would you tell that Kyle to have better been able to handle the wounds that he went through? [00:16:25] Speaker A: I will often pick a specific date and it would be in January of 2016, because that was. That was where I started. The place that I would start is getting him to get his breath in check. I would get him to just relax. So get him to start to down, regulate. Like bring your. Bring your breath from up in his chest and bring it down, or else you're just not going to see anything. Because the thing that's interesting too is there's a Solomon paradox. Where the Solomon paradox is we give better advice than we give ourselves. We don't take our own advice. And I believe that most people have the solutions to the problems. It's getting them to realize that they have it within them too. They might think it, but they've never said it out loud. So it's not as real. And so questions pull statements. Push with that one. [00:17:17] Speaker B: Kyle, as we wrap up today's conversation, what would you tell our listeners would be the most important thing they can do to begin the journey of healing? [00:17:26] Speaker A: One part is a frame, is to keep up the kindness, because kindness is a practice. It's not an emotion internally, externally. Then from there, it's writing down every single problem that you perceive in your life and figuring out, figuring out which ones you actually want to Be a part of solving and then reject the rest. Healing is an active process, not a passive one. [00:17:51] Speaker B: Kyle, I want to thank you for being a part of our podcast process today. And I think for our listeners, they might be walking away today with some helpful tools about how to address a pain that they have in their life. New Orleans, hanging around for years, and get active in the solution of what to do. So very helpful. Thank you so much, Kyle, for joining us today. [00:18:18] Speaker A: Thank you very much for having me. It was awesome. [00:18:21] Speaker B: You know, jb, this one really caught me off guard. Not. Not because I hadn't heard Time heals all wounds, but because I never really would have ever thought of it as bad advice. It's just something. Something we say, right? [00:18:34] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:18:34] Speaker C: I love the ones that are, like, just kind of a cliche, you know, sort of comforting, but, you know, helpful, it feels like. And, you know, the way Kyle broke it down, you know, it's actually the way we are avoiding doing the actual work. [00:18:46] Speaker B: Yeah, that definitely sticks with me, too, especially the steps he gave us. You know, write it down, read it out loud, read it slower, then read and breathe. Right. Four steps. That's definitely something I'm going to look at doing next time something hits, you know, emotionally. [00:19:01] Speaker C: Yeah. I love the line, you're not going around it, you're going into it. You know, that's the shift and. And that's what turns that pain into progress. [00:19:09] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. This one's going to stay with me for a while. Not because it was flashy or dramatic, but, I mean, it just made me realize, you know, there's certain things that I carry around that hoping time would just take care of them and. And, you know, maybe that's not what I should be doing. I'm afraid our audience will have to wait for another week, but we will, don't worry. Have another excellent episode coming up next Friday, so. So be sure to tune in for another great episode of the Worst Advice I Ever Got.