Midland, a Sailboat and a Can of Chicken à la King

Kim speaks about her troubled adolescent years and her return to Midland as an adult to live the summer on a sailboat. Also shared are some insights about journaling and the connection between what we write and how it translates in the neural pathways of our brain.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to Emotional Health Matters. My name is Kim Sargeant. I'm the clinical director of Canadian Family Health Counseling and founder of Neural Network Therapy®. It's been a really long time since I've done a podcast and I'm doing something a little different today. I've decided to actually film on my Google Meets, which I don't know what that's gonna look like in terms of sound. And the quality is really not terribly great. I have a lot of overexposed light in behind me right now cause I'm sitting a cottage on Stony Lake in the middle of a snowstorm. So this is really just because I've decided to put away the frustrations of trying to sit in the perfect conditions and record a podcast to continue on with the Emotional Health Matters programming that we're doing. And so instead what I'm gonna do is just record where I am and it's going to sometimes be great and sometimes it's not gonna be so great.

I wanna talk about why I haven't done a podcast in a little while. So I was living halftime on a sailboat in Midland, and I wanna talk a little bit about what happened in that. My mother as some of you know, was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. She was in the midst of sailing around the world when that happened, and she and her partner came back to Midland. And I guess, , this is where they'll be through until my mom's passing. Part of what she seemed to still understand, and it's a strange thing, Alzheimer's, it seems to pluck these really strange parts of the brain away and you don't know necessarily what those might be. So she and her partner maintained their sailboat in Midland and they're at a club. It's not something you can easily join, but there was a neighbor marina, so I decided to buy a sailboat of my own and I could literally look down my dock through the Chamberlain fence and down their dock, and I could see my mom's sailboat. And bit by bit also, rather than driving a few hours to see her having a brief visit and then turning around and coming home and putting a lot of pressure on those little visits, I decided that going and spending a few days or a week, allowed me to actually build a much better connection with her so the first visit was fine and it was, you know, good to connect, but the second she'd be on the porch waiting and could barely get out the door fast enough to go on whatever adventure we'd go on.

Even ice cream can be an adventure so, every day I go for a long walk, and I get this great amount of inspiration and multiple times over I would to sit down and that would be a great thing to share on a podcast.

But not having the right setting prohibited me from doing that. So we're gonna do away with that and hopefully we can just reach more people and provide some more options for listening to interesting things about the brain.

On that note, I'll talk a little more about my story. I actually spent quite a bit of time in Midland over the years. But it was really many years ago. So I had a bit of resistance that I didn't realize was there in going back to that town. There's a piece in my original story that was not deliberately vague or obtuse. I just knew that if I tried to unpack any of that in the first podcast, it would just be all too much to listen to, really. It's not all too much for me, but there's just a lot of details in it. So I'm gonna do what I can to be succinct and that's not a skill of mine.

So we'll go for the ride. When I lived in Midland I was a teenager. My mom and I did not get along at all. It was a really struggling, very difficult relationship, and she'd finally had enough, and I suppose I had to, and so I was on my own really from 16 on. I had lived away, I lived in Kitchener and um, Erie Beach, Len area.

And then I returned to Midland , so I lived there from grade seven to part of grade 10 the first time, and with my family and my mom and my brother. And then years later I returned to go to grade 12 and my o a C year. And those were actually really incredibly difficult years of my life.

you know, I've made a lot of mistakes in my life and those are easy to make and it's not that I don't, acknowledge that they were mistakes, but they're not a deep regret. If you have anything in your brain that sort of regurgitates itself, we talk about the brain being a bit like a radio station and you're listening to these songs and they play the top 40, and those are the things you think about every day or you worry about every day.

The shopping lists, all those. And then you've got the oldie, you know, the golden oldies that are there, that every once in a while something pops up to the surface and you find yourself listening to that song. And it's the one song that I can't um, when I say I can't I've massaged it by bit to do some work on it, but it's such a deep regret I think because of a lot of my life, even though I've made lots of mistakes, they are really from the heart mistakes. I tend to do things in a big way. I'm very passionate about things and I can kind of make sense out of even where I was or what my thinking was at the time. But there's this window of time, for sure in my teen years, and I'd love to say, well, I'm gonna, blame it on the fact that I was 17, 18 years old.

So my brain was not fully developed yet. And there's lots of things I could say, but the bottom line is that a family kind of took me in during part of that, it was my best friend and her family, and they were very wealthy and I was very poor and and sort really just struggling to be able to survive, but proud. So I didnt have a lot of conversations about that. I just held it all together in a way that I think my heart was always pounding. I remember living on pancakes and you could buy these boxes of pancakes that just needed water. So it was a great meal to be able to have and pretend syrup and then living Largely on carrots and potatoes, cuz you could buy big bags of those.

And anyway, it's the silliest thing, I'm sure I spent money on stupid things. Like I remember I wasn't allowed to have pop growing up and I remember, running out to buy pop as one of the first things. The other thing that I wanna talk about there though that's a bit of a tangent, but I think pretty relevant is that I also transitioned.

Being a meat eating person to being a vegetarian, and I had wanted to be a vegetarian virtually my entire life. I used to cry at the table. I was the kid sitting there with a bottle of ketchup and a pork chop trying to choke it down, going, I don't wanna eat this. It was actually mentioned in my baby book about me.

You know, eating potatoes and peas and swallowing that and then producing at the end of a meal. Big wad of meat out of my cheek. I think that I really just, struggled with eating meat from the beginning, so I just stopped eating meat. Not knowing that actually that can make you quite sick.

And I was quite sick. I really struggled. I had very little energy. I didn't know as anemic at some point in there. And. It was just not a great time. I know my brain was not functioning well, and despite my spiritual commitment I have to not wanting to eat animals. I do think that a developing brain, you need to work really hard at what that looks like in terms of supplements and different things that need to happen so that, that brain development can stay strong.

Again, I'm not blaming, my moments in being a complete and total jerk, on, anything to do with being a vegetarian. I'm just saying that we see a lot of teenagers in the practice that make a decision that I think they're making similar to mine, which is I just don't want to eat animals, but they're not actually properly supplementing.

And I do think that it's a really important thing, particularly for a developing brain. You know, keep watch provides some support. There are many ways to, of course, get the protein that you need and the various other things that you get from meat. You just need to actually put a lot of focus on it.

Back to my story. So this family took me in I lived in Big, beautiful house, and they were just unbelievably kind and generous and would've done anything for me and did do everything for me. And I don't know how alcohol was involved at one point, and I was just a complete and total jerk

And I'm incredibly ashamed of that. and I've written a letter and met with the nice friend and, you know, written another letter. I realized that I was trying so desperately I would've just done anything to go back in time and to change. But I couldn't, it was just one of these things that I did that, that did Provo, a forever rift in my life that I think would've otherwise she would've been one of those friends that I had till I was, we were 90, you know, So when I went back to Midland to look after my mom or spend some time there, I didn't really realize how much

that was still lingering in me. I have this tendency to climb up into my brain and bounce it around and talk about things so that I think we're good and I kind of forgo I think it's a bit of a hazard actually for people in my field because we understand exactly what the impact is of things we can, really speak skillfully to the language of emotion and what's going on that sometimes it means that you're doing the intellectual work, but you're not doing the feeling work of what's going on.

And that's a very different thing, sitting with hard emotions and being able to not jump into your brain to be able to process them. Sit with it. So I took a lot of walks and uh, number one, I was pretty impressed that I managed to live in the town of Midland, which has a lot of big hills, if you're familiar with it at all.

I cleaned houses to survive, to put myself through high school and I just realized that I did a lot of walking and riding a bike, but it allowed me to really connect with this young person and. I was 17 years old, like when I look at my children , or look, back to my children at the age of 17, they were children.

And that helped me to see and it offered me some of, I think probably what I needed more than anything, which was. Of myself. And that's, you know, it's a typical thing. It's not something you can decide upon. I think it actually arrives when you stay with things long enough. So, Being in the town of Midland this is where my parents grew up.

My dad on the wrong side of the tracks, and from a very poor family that was a very funny family, and my mom from the Upper East side and their meeting and their life together. There also was something that I was doing a bit of processing about. They seemed like such different people, which at the time as if you've heard some of the earlier podcasts we've talked about,

so to 25 and 30, we do much more settling into who we are. And I think in that time, who we are attracted to changes quite a bit. But most people, back at my parents' age, most boomers, they got married right outta high school and , my family was no exception. And those matches, I think don't survive quite as well.

Even today what's interesting that we see is that brain development that's finishing up between 25 and 30 for both boys and girls, girls our brains tend to settle in really about 25 boys tend to be closer to the 30 mark. I don't think that's shocking for anybody.

Certainly insurance companies are aware of that, which is why, voice tend to spend a lot more on their insurance. I think that by the time you're 30 you've settled into who you are. You're not looking to complete you if you wanna do a Jerry McGuire on that, for those of you who will understand the reference you're looking instead to say, I really like who I am, and I like that I'm attracted to people that are actually like me as opposed to my opposites.

But my parents. They were two different people. And so in this time in Midland back and forth, there was a lot going on, dealing with losing my mom bit by bit. And advancing that cause each time and yeah, meeting up with my 17 year old self and sitting with what all that meant, and what did that look like.

So we've had a break between then and now to be sharing much of anything to move forward in. Any of my own emotional growth. I think emotional growth is something that needs to happen. In stages. Even running a counseling practice, I like seeing people really diving in and diving deep for, maybe three months and then taking a little break and then come on back to it in a few months.

Give some time to integrate. You know, it's important in our growth. We're just in the midst of developing journals to that effect that are saying, go hard for a little bit, but don't commit to a year of doing things. A year is a really long time, and if you're doing it right, hopefully it's a long time.

So hopefully you can. Big, long, beautiful days that don't just, speed on by because your presence is there. And if that's the case, make sure that as you're working on yourself, you give yourself some rest periods too. So with all of that I guess, the last thing I wanna talk about is the title of this podcast, which would make some sense

So, One of the days I was driving into Midland, I realized that here I am driving into this town that brought up all of this emotion. And one of the things I remember very desperately about that town was being very hungry, physically hungry, and realizing, Here I was as an adult driving.

And and plugging in my car and going down the dock to my sailboat and sitting on this old clunky sailboat, but this sailboat and realizing I don't think I could have imagined that I would've been here back when I was 17 years old. I think that my life trajectory was not looking great for a while there, so I had a moment of feeling quite proud of myself.

, and I think that there was a piece made at that point. But one story that occurred to me and ended up quite a funny turnaround time when I think about something or I go back in time or I've got a moment and suddenly the evidence comes to me in physical form and in the world someplace, something shows up in my experience or that.

Phone call comes in from somebody who've just been thinking about, I call it a turnaround time, and if takes a long time for that to happen, all right, okay. I'm doing okay in life, but if it's a quick turnaround time, I always feel like. I'm doing pretty well. I'm in a alignment right now.

I, I struggle with the lab attraction stuff, not the process itself, cuz it's actually explained by science, but some of the new ag card about things I think can be a little, it's not so new aging now, I suppose. But I find that the wording, I get lost in the wording, but I like the idea of knowing that.

I'm in a place of the least amount of resistance that I can have in my life at this given moment in time. The things come to me quite quickly and I don't have to spend a lot of time beating around and trying to figure things out and, you know, climbing up and all of these things we do to try to get to where we wanna be.

So I like that turnaround time. It's good evidence for me. And I remembered this time that I think Sundays must have meant that stores were closed because I can't imagine why I thought buying a can of food at a convenience store was a smart idea in terms of my finances.

But I do remember scrambling together enough money. And this meant change and all kinds of things. And I was really at this point, I think coming to the realization that my eating habits of doing strict vegetarian were not helping me in a physical way that I was really struggling. My thinking wasn't very clear.

I was definitely struggling with energy and a lot of things felt very upstream. my boyfriend at the time was quick to say, Hey, we just need to get some proper food into you. So we went down to a convenience store with all of our shared change , and we bought this can of Chicken Ella King.

And I didn't realize that was actually a meal that you could order in a nice restaurant, . I thought it was just this can of something you could get. And that's what it is. We ate hardly ate this can of Chicken El King and it was this kind of moment in time of going, okay, I'm gonna try to regain my health and feel a little stronger.

And so I went into the comedian store just this summer that I remember doing that at. And I remember specifically the hunger actually more than. So I walked into the store and just to bring it to life again, just to remember, okay. I was here when I was 17 years old and I was starving.

And now I'm here at 49 and my life looks very different today than it did then and I couldn't believe it, but they had Chicken King , so I bought that can, and I brought it back to my sailboat and I put. Beside this really cute little part that I could always just walk in the sailboat and see.

Um, And it just helped to remind me of where I was then and where I am now I think that the largest part of that, were the people that I've met in my life that have been so beautiful and so attentive and so kind. Loving the people that have put up with me when I was pushing back because I didn't feel so lovable.

The people that had been there for me throughout my career, when I. Realized I had something to offer because of the things that I had experienced in my life. So that would be the biggest part of what happened. But I think the other part, the very personal and quiet part of what allowed me to grow as a human was that from a very young age, there was this time when I would write long lists of all these things that had happened.

So the struggles I'd had moving and being a. Kid in a school, but teased terribly because of it. Going through all kinds of different things. I think and at some point I flipped that and I started writing as though I wanted things to be. And so instead of a daily journal of recording negative experiences of my life, The things that were going really terribly wrong for me, I started to flip those things, those very things, and write them in the affirmative or in a positive way, write what I wanted to have happen instead of what actually happened.

And I was thinking about this just the other day. We just had major tech issues. Um, I think it was on Monday this week, weekend every single thing went down. It seemed the computer wasn't working and my phone needed a, you know, a funny app date and my car did the same thing, and all these things just suddenly stopped working.

And of course, my level of frustration was on the rise as the day continued on. It's a perfectly reasonable thing to do that. . But by the time I'd made my way home I started into my journal. I do a journal not about the daily things that have happened in any kind of a blowing off steam way because I've learned over the years, and this is relevant to, to how I got to hear, I've learned over the years that.

Writing things down that are negative that have happened, mean that I don't live them, just the one time that they happened that I really didn't wanna have them happen. But the second time when I'm writing them down, because my imagination is so powerful, as are many of yours, I'm sure that I'd get back into the moment, I'd get back into the extreme frustration or the anger.

And while that's therapeutically helpful from time to time and I would say a guided process with a skilled therapist, , I don't think it's helpful for us personally. I don't think a. All of the misery of our lives is actually blowing off steam. I think it's actually working to reinforce the neural pathways of the negative experience that you've had.

The brain doesn't know the difference between real or imagined. You know, say that over a thousand times until it's formed its own neural network. But, What's happening in terms of creating things is this flipping process, this rewriting. And so coming home, I'm writing about, I'm so grateful for the technology in my life and all of the simplicity it affords me.

And I, really appreciate when it's all working well because the flow of my day is fantastic and I continue to do that and. Thinking about this podcast and realizing that the 17 year old me whose life was imploding from every angle was not, up to speed on how to make changes to that, that could have gone a very different way.

And for a lot of people it has gone a very different way. I think that it leads to another negative relationship and another negative experience that's happening. That's, where I think living in poverty can continue to live in poverty. Some part, some instinctual part flipped that in early days and began to write about what could be.

So the dreamer in me the kid that grew up in a little fairytale land, , thankfully, also had lots of skill and ability to see things the way they could be. We forget sometimes at the grocery store around the corner that there was a time we didn't have grocery stores.

We went to markets or we. From Farm Gate to Farm Gate and somebody said, Hey, wouldn't it be amazing if we didn't have to wait till Saturday and we could just put all these things in the same place and we could have fridges that we could plug in and we could keep things warm and clo and so we go into grocery stores.

So your brain and the creativity that you have, the experiences specifically that you are going through are all affording you the opportunity to be able to dream of what could be. And I think that this dreaming is what keeps us alive. It. Continues to fuel the energy that we have in our bodies.

It's almost as if your pen is active and you're beginning to to move along in your life, writing your own script and doing these great things that make you feel good about you, but also are creating, you're taking one non-original thought, another non-original thought. pushing them together and making something brand new.

There's something that happens energetically in that creative act and suddenly the universe yields to you and endless amounts of energy to continue on with that creative process. So there's something to be said about this flipping. And the takeaway for today for sure is that if you're journaling and you're journaling the negativity of your day and you feel as though it's helping you, I want you to.

Please don't listen to a single thing I've had to say here. But if you find that you're struggling and you're stuck and you continue to find the same experiences over and over again. What I didn't know at 17 and we do know now, is that the brain has to look for two things. It needs to know what it's looking for in order to.

Find it out there in the world. So you can do this, you can do it by watching movies. I love Disney, but something a little step up from Disney. So you can be a little more natural about what it is that you're looking to see, a relationship that you're looking for uh, something that's happening in a workplace environment that you think is really healthy and fun that you'd like to find yourself in.

But give your brain something to look, towards so that it knows what it's doing. And allow yourself to lose a bit of the realism about what's happening in the here and now. Because as long as it's happening in the here and now, it'll keep happening in the here and now. And when we look and take stock of the here and now, and it's not something that we wanna have happen we're just continuing to repeat that.

So if you're open to adjusting your journaling process or to creating a habit of actually creating, rather than just thinking about, oh, I'm gonna write down what I'm grateful for, which is fantastic, I think that's a really good thing to do. I. Saying, you know, maybe you can get playful with the idea of looking at the what isness of your life and rewriting it the way you'd.

I wanted to thank those of you who have reached out to me. To tell me that what we're talking about here is making some sense, it's landing well, you've got questions.

All of those things are really encouraging and it makes me wanna continue on with what I'm doing. So please reach out whether . That's through reviews I know there's a great thing that happens with the reviews. And that's, that it continues to. Change, the rankings of what's happening with this podcast.

So it goes higher and higher. And when people are seeking out emotional health or mental health support, I think that it's great if they've got some options of other people to listen to. We're just one of many that are beginning to really make mental health a priority and get as much information out there as we possibly can.

But I think there's a growing community of people that are in desperate need of any kind of support they can get. And a podcast is a. Free way of being able to do that despite the fact that I mostly from my own experiences. I do try to include what I can about what things can be helpful.

Even the shifts in thinking that can be beneficial. Of course, if you really need some help, you need to reach out to a professional. If you're interested in neural network therapy, we offer that, but there are professionals in your community, wherever you might be that can be of help.

and now many people are doing what we're doing. So we work with people from around the world because we can meet with them online and it's just making therapy that much more accessible, which is fantastic. And what's happened with the pandemic has been really terrible for mental health, you know, the mental health crisis was here long before.

That's just an outcome that I think more people are seeing as we go along.