Allison: Please welcome JJ Flizanes.

JJ: Thank you, Ally.

Allison: So glad to have you on.

JJ: It’s been a while. I feel like I’ve missed you guys. I haven’t been on your show for… It’s been too long. I know that I’m one of the reoccurring people who have been on multiple times, so I really should be very appreciative. I do love you and your community and the conversations that you and I have, so I’m happy to be back, and I’m looking forward to today’s conversation.

Allison: Amazing. I mean, even a month of not talking to JJ is too long. So, we’re glad to have you.

JJ: Thanks.

Allison: So, today we’re talking about anxiety. I know how passionately you feel about this topic, and you actually teach all of these incredible tools at both of your events for overcoming anxiety and even falling in love with yourself. So, what are some of your best tools and tips for overcoming anxiety and depression?

JJ: Well, first, I like to educate people in a different way to think about anxiety. I think too often in our culture, we want to diagnose things as being separate from us, like “It’s a condition that I have, not something that I attracted or something that I’m creating.” And what happens is that, especially with anxiety, it’s a scapegoat for, I think, a lot of times, not dealing with what it truly is. So, in my world, anxiety is not a feeling. Anxiety is a body sensation letting us know that there’s some emotion that needs to be processed and released. Not thought about, but actually embodied and then released through either anger or tears or screaming or something physical.

Allison: I throw a pillow.

JJ: You could throw a pillow. I’ve been guiding people through what I’m calling an emotional detox day, and it has to be individualized. It’s not a “one size fits all” kind of thing. But I’ve had clients recently who I’ve been doing it to help them identify and express their emotions, because many times, a lot of us, everyday we’re having emotions and feelings and interpretations, and we’re containing it in our bodies, and we’re not actually doing anything with it. Like if you think about food, like a calorie, and you eat lots and lots and lots of calories, you overeat what your body needs. Your body is going to store it, unless you use it, a.k.a. exercise or creating more muscle and increasing your metabolism. So, feelings and emotions are like little energy bubbles that are the same thing. Let’s say you get angry and you stuff it, and you hold it inside of you. It’s not going anywhere. It’s inside of you, and now it’s waiting to be released. And that’s what can create cancer, it’s what creates anxiety, and it’s also what creates depression. So, anxiety, if you start to look at it as you holding in and trying to contain all of these emotions that need an outlet, that need to be expressed, it’s like air. You can’t hold your breath forever. And you really can’t hold onto emotions forever. So, if we look at anxiety differently and don’t just think, “I have anxiety. It’s an issue, and there’s not really anything I can do about it except numb myself somehow or take some drugs.” That’s not true at all. I think we take our power away when we think of anxiety as a condition versus a body sensation, giving us information about what we need to focus on next.

Allison: Well, it’s like when you play the victim of your circumstances, or you take your health into your own hands and you empower yourself to do something about it.

JJ: Absolutely. So, if my body is saying, “Hey, I have all this energy and I need to do something with it. I need to express this,” then it is your job to mind for that emotion to be able to bring it to the surface and release it out of you, so it’s no longer residing in your body. And then, all of a sudden, you’ll have less anxiety, you’ll have less stress, you’ll have less nervous tension, because all that is is you just trying really hard to hold it all in. And we are not taught in society how to process emotion. It’s definitely one of the things I teach at all my events. I’m going to be teaching it all over the country very soon, in a sales training program, because it goes hand in hand with trying to connect with people in every aspect of business, of personal life, of ourselves. And so, I think that if we start to look at anxiety a little differently, we will have more tools to actually deal with it versus just… I know there are other alternative medicines and things that you can do that will hold it at bay and you’ll feel a little bit better, but you’re not actually solving the problem. You’re not actually getting to the root of the problem. Therefore, it’s probably going to keep happening.

Allison: And so many of us are taught in childhood to suppress emotion, like “Don’t cry.” And recently, I was having a conversation with a friend of mine, and he was telling me about what his grandmother said that always stuck with him. His grandmother was dying, and she was crying, and she was very upset about the things that she didn’t get to accomplish. And she looked at him, and she said, “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to carry on in front of you. I would never carry on like this.” Because she was always taught not to carry on like that. And so, he said to me, “I always knew not to carry on in front of people, because that was shameful.” And it’s just ingrained in us sometimes, and to let that go can be so transformational. I know it for myself because I used to be a suppressor. I don’t even know why. I don’t know what memories. It’s not like my parents were like, “You are not allowed to cry.” I don’t know. But I would suppress because I didn’t want to deal with the feelings. And that led to all kinds of things: overeating, avoidance of things, drinking alcohol, things that were unhealthy, because they gave me a release from having to think about the thing. And then, when I learned the practices that I now carry into my life and I preach, I’m able to constantly release, release, release, and not hold it in.

JJ: Yeah. And as I’m sure you’re not going to be surprised by this, I bring in astrology into this conversation.

Allison: No way.

JJ: Well, I have to, because there are people who… Let’s say I had a client once. He was a mortgage broker, I believe, and he was a Scorpio. Scorpio is a water sign. Water signs are about emotion. And he was super high-strung, and he talked very fast, and he would say things like “My therapist asked me when do I get to shut down. What did he mean, ‘shut down’? I don’t shut down.” That would be how he would deliver himself.

Allison: Oh my god.

And again, emotions are why we live. We are here to express and to feel and to grow and to expand. And all the emotions are like all the different paints in a palette of paints when you’re painting. They’re all useful, they’re all important, and they don’t last. The negative feelings are like a storm. I always used to joke, when I talk about emotions, can you imagine being on the planet for the first time (cavemen or whatever), and you’ve had your first experience of winter, and you’re thinking, “Oh my god. Is the earth coming to…is it going to die? The earth is dying. Oh my god, it’s dying. Here comes the snow. The trees are dying. We’re all going to die.” But you know that there’s a season. You know that we cycle through these seasons. So now, of course, nobody gets nervous when there’s winter. We don’t think the earth is not going to die. And it’s the same thing for our emotions. It’s like a storm. It comes, and then it goes. It’s like air: in and then out. So, if we can learn how to be comfortable in our discomfort, if we can use tools. I use a lot of nonviolent communication and the anatomy of emotion to look at feelings and needs, and to uncover things so you can actually problem-solve these things, so you can have compassion for yourself, so you can actually transform and transmute this anxiety energy into what it wants to be, instead of trying to hold it back or suppress it or calm it down.

Allison: I love what you just said about being comfortable, being uncomfortable, because that’s why we run, because we don’t want to be uncomfortable. We don’t want to feel the feeling. That’s why I used to turn to sugar. Like you know, in 2017, I gave up dessert. I gave up sugar in my diet. I gave up using it as a tool to run from my emotions or as a reward, right? I didn’t want to feel uncomfortable, so I was suppressing. I was still suppressing even after years of learning not to do that. I had found another tool, right? And so, now, if I’m craving sugar, I know it’s emotional and I got to go journal. I have to go be uncomfortable. I have to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. Let the words flow on the page. Let a few tears come out, whatever it might be. It feels so much better, and then the craving is gone, in most cases. Now, once in a while, if it’s still there, I’ll be like, “All right, let’s go get an orange or something to satisfy the sweet tooth.” But in general, the craving is gone. This goes for overeating. It goes for sugar addiction. Most addictions can be healed by dealing with your shit.

JJ: Absolutely. I’m not a big fan of a lot of sort of 12-step programs. I’m not not a fan of you getting help and having recovery. I think they’re important to move from one level to the next level. But the reason why… I mean, I work with a lot of people, and the 12-step program becomes a new addiction. So, they get rid of the substance, but they replace it with meetings. We haven’t actually gotten rid of the addictive energy. We haven’t gotten rid of the real root cause, the real deep pain that we’re trying to numb because we’re just using other things. Or when people say, “Oh, I used to smoke, and now I’m overweight because I have an oral fixation.” I want to call bullshit on that. I’m like, “No, that’s not what it is.” It’s that when you stop smoking, you actually didn’t deal with what you were trying to suppress. And so now, instead of using a cigarette, you use food. It’s the same thing. It’s just an addiction changes what you’re focused on. And for a lot of us, the biggest addiction we have is control. And so, when you have control issues, again, that’s where the anxiety comes in, because you’re trying to control something that wants to be expressed. Your body and your subconscious mind make up more of you than 12% of your damn conscious mind. So, listen to your body and take the hint here that it’s trying to say, “Hey, I have something that needs to be worked out. Let’s go work it out, because I’m not feeling safe to express, I’m not feeling solid or peaceful, and I definitely have this emotion that wants to be expressed.”

Allison: Oh my god, JJ. Preach on. Everyone right now, if you’re listening, go listen to Spirit, Purpose, and Energy because JJ gets really deep into all these topics. So, I want to go into some solutions, so I’m like, “All right.” And at your event, you teach these so in depth, and we actually have to do the work. Not just talk about the work, not just learn the tools, but we actually have to do them in the room together. And so, can you tell us, what are some tools that people can do at home?

JJ: Sure. Well, obviously, like you said, if you listen to Spirit, Purpose, and Energy, I go over certain things on the show and have some tools that people can use. There’s a show. It’s actually Episode 118 on Fit 2 Love. It’s called the “3 Steps to Effective Communication.” And on fit2love.tv, I rarely use that site anymore, but there is a download of a sheet called the “Feelings and Needs List.” I think it’s probably one of the most effective pieces of paper I have ever gotten my hands on, and then now provide it for anyone that comes to the workshops or listens to the show and wants to do the work. I teach it in companies, doing customer service training. I’m going to teach it at sales trainings. So, it’s basic human interaction and understanding of our needs and our feelings. And so, we have to have a vocabulary and an identification and an awareness and consciousness of what’s going on for us.

So, I’ll give you the three steps very quickly. The first step is to identify your feelings. And for most of us, we have a very small vocabulary about feelings. We think we’re either sad, angry, or happy. We have actually 100 different feeling words on this feelings and needs list. And to be more specific, we’ll help you understand how to fix it. So, step one is identify the feeling. And I had a client recently. She is very good at doing, you know? You and I are good doers. There are a lot of doers. Again, if you’re a doer, control issues are probably a part of your thing if you’re a really good doer.

Allison: Type A people, look out. Sagittarius type A.

JJ: Then there’s the be, right? Doing and being. We have to balance the doing and the being. And so, if you’re not comfortable being, because being has you actually feel things that you can’t control, this is where we go to step two. So, we identify the feeling, and you go within, and you kind of look at where do you feel things in your body, and what does that feel like for you? People experience different feelings in different parts of their body, but connecting to the part of you… You have blood and bones and nerve endings. There’s this whole massive thing walking around to tell you when you’re out of alignment, when you’re having an issue, when you’re not being who you’re supposed to be when you’re holding something back. So, we have to identify the feeling and become aware of that. Step two would be to understand the need that’s not being met. So, here’s the newsflash. Listen up. This is important. You’re going to remember this.

Allison: I’m listening.

JJ: Anytime you have a negative emotion, it’s because you have a need that is not being met.

Allison: And one time, you came over to my house and I was complaining about an interaction I had, and you go, “What need of yours was not being met?” And I was like, “I want to punch you in the face right now.”

JJ: Right.

Allison: Because I wasn’t at the place yet, because this interaction had just happened. So, I wasn’t at the place yet where I was willing to look at it from a place of “What am I responsible for in this situation?” But when I got to that place, I’m able to look at it differently and heal it. But sometimes that takes time. So, tell us about what’s the process once you discover the need. So, you might need a little time away from the situation and get mad for a minute. That’s understandable, whatever it is. Get upset. Then let it go, and go, “What’s my need? So that I can figure out how I can heal this.”

JJ: And it would be really good for you to know and understand also your moon sign because that’s how you deal with emotion. So, I forget what yours is, but mine is Sag, so how I deal with emotion is to find the truth in it, which is why I quickly, most of the time, go to this exercise. So, thank you for saying that because for all of you, it’s not the right thing to start analyzing it yet. You have to express it. And especially if you’re a water sign, you definitely need to express it. Like a water moon. Cry it out. Yell it out. Punch something. Break something, hopefully not important. Get a plastic bat and beat the crap out of your pillow. Whatever. But yes, definitely expressing and feeling the feeling is important. And you’re not even going to do this until you feel the feeling anyway. But here’s what happens most of the time, Ally, is most people don’t even allow themselves to feel the feeling. They’re going straight to numbing it, which is why, again, if you have the wherewithal in the moment to at least start this process, you can take the time to realize, “Oh, I should probably express this.” Because if you aren’t trying to at least rein not the control of the emotion, but of the downward spiral that you might go on, expressing the pure feeling and then being able to analyze in a practical way. So, the need. So, wherever you are in the process, you do need to experience the actual physical feelings of the feeling. You need to let it out.

But then we have to look at “Why am I having this feeling? What is the need that’s not being met?” And again, that word “need” triggers a lot of people because they think need means needy. It doesn’t. I’m not talking about being a victim. I’m not talking about being pathetic. I’m not talking about being whiny. There are 86 basic human needs on this list. You have human needs. We all have a need to contribute. We all have a need to be seen, to be heard, and to have appreciation, to have collaboration. There’s a whole bunch of words on this list, okay? And every time I’ve used it, when I’m in a situation where I can’t quickly do this on my own, I learn something new. I didn’t realize my need for contribution in the way that I had it until something came up to show it to me. So, very educational about your needs. And the more you can take responsibility for your needs, the happier and better your life is going to be on every level. And you won’t struggle, you won’t have anxiety, and you’ll be able to problem-solve quickly. So, we discover the need that’s not being met that creates the feeling. Now, step three. Listen up. This is also very important. There’s only three steps.

Allison: Okay.

JJ: Okay? Everyone, step three is to list or come up with a couple different strategies to get your need met. But here’s the caveat: to get your need met without anyone else being different. So, you are not saying, “I’m unhappy because you said this to me” or “you did this.” It cannot be about anybody else. Now, that doesn’t mean the other person or people didn’t create a situation in which you then realized you had a need for safety that you’re not getting in this situation. But at no point in time do you turn around to the other people and say, “You know what? I’m unhappy and it’s your fault.” That’s not true, first of all. But it isn’t going to help you solve your problems. You have a need that they didn’t create, that’s already in you, and it’s your job to figure out how to get it met. Now, you can ask people to contribute and to help you, but it’s not about one person changing so that you feel better. This is where your wounds, your triggers, your traumas are going to show their ugly head, thank God, so you can weed your garden. You can figure out what that is and then finally heal it, so it stops happening.

But I just want to make sure people don’t use this language to someone else and say, “You know what? I have a need to be heard, and you’re not hearing me.” That is not… Right? So, the process is a little deeper. You have to get to the place where they’re all “I” statements. “I have a need. I feel this because I have a need for this.” And it’s really always going to come back to “How do I give it to myself first? How do I create safety? How do I feel seen and heard? How do I…?” Okay? But this three-step process is a life-changer. It’s a relationship changer. And I promise, if you work this, all the things and all the interpretations you have about things in life that aren’t working out for you will start to diminish. You’ll get your needs met. You’ll no longer get triggered. The emotions will feel better, and you won’t have anxiety anymore.

Allison: It reminds me of the theory that I truly 100% believe in. When you make a judgment about someone or something, it’s truly just about an unresolved issue within yourself. And if I judge someone and I go, “Ugh, she is so cheap,” then what I’m really saying is either I think that I’m too cheap, or I think I spend too much and I’m feeling guilty about it. So, it’s always a reflection of something going on inside me, and actually has nothing to do with that person, right? And so, it’s like recognizing it. Go ahead.

JJ: No, yeah. I agree with you. I believe that people are mirrors for you. But I will split this into two things. There are times where you can observe someone doing something you may not agree with, you may not like. If it happens enough, it means you’re in that frequency. So, in terms of law of attraction, you can’t notice it if you’re not in the same frequency. You can’t observe it if you’re not in the same frequency. But there are times where it’s information. As long as you’re not triggered and you’re in observer mode, it’s just information to go, “Oh, okay, well, I don’t want to do that.” But if something someone else is doing triggers you, you have a very strong emotional response to it, the likelihood is that they’re just a mirror for you.

JJ: You just defined relationships right there. I mean, that’s everybody. And I recognized it many years ago, finally, in an experience with my relationship at the time, where we were in the same situation, observing the same thing, not talking, not really even participating, just being observers, and then it was amazing what came out of that. He said to me, “Can you believe those women were trying to bait you?” And I was like, “What? What are you talking about?” And he’s like, “They were trying to, like, coerce you.” And I was like, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Now, I didn’t disagree with him. I didn’t say, “You’re wrong.” I actually thought, “You know, he’s probably right.” But here’s where I was like, “Wow. I’m on a different frequency, so much so that I didn’t even get any whiff of that.” But he was so convinced it was happening that I’m like, “Okay, it probably was happening.” But I was in a different frequency, so it wasn’t happening to me. And it was the moment that I’m like, “Oh my god. Yes. This is a physical experience of vibrational dissonance, people in two different frequencies having to look at the same thing.” And it was great. But people don’t remember that. They think, “Oh, I’m observing this. I’m interpreting it in this way. Why isn’t everybody else seeing it the same way I am?” Well, they’re not, most likely.

Allison: It’s super fascinating. I love this stuff. All right. Well, let’s give our listeners your last tips for overcoming anxiety before we get off today. What else have you got?

JJ: So, when thinking about anxiety and thinking about it being energy that needs to be expressed, you can do anything from… I had a listener of my show listen, and he had, I guess, been in therapy for a little while. And I had done a show with my partner Doug on a panic attack he had had in 2015, and on anxiety. And I talked about this in the same exact way, and the guy pulled his car over listening to the show, and he decided to let it out. So, he started to scream at something and yell and make promises. And I think he started to cry. And then he started to laugh. And then he wrote to me to tell me that he had a great release. And it sounded like he didn’t get the same release in therapy because he said, “I’ve been in therapy for a while, and I actually had a real release today, so thank you.”

So, if you have anxiety, don’t ignore it, and don’t try to numb it. Actually, invite it in. You have an intuition. You have a higher consciousness. You have a subconscious. And my guess is you know what it’s about. You just don’t want to deal with it. You don’t want to feel it. But you’ve got to feel it to heal it, people. At least you have to go through it. It doesn’t mean you carry it with you. But let me tell you, if you use these three steps, if you look at life a little differently, from a different vantage point, whether it be astrology, love language, you will start to not heal the wound, so to speak, of what happened to you. You’ll have that memory, but you can absolutely transmute the relationship with that memory when you can see it from a different point of view. Now, one of the most famous quotes from Dr. Wayne Dyer is “When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.”

Allison: I love that.

JJ: So, you can only control you, so decide it’s worth changing the way you look at it.

Allison: And I love the simplicity of “You’ve got to feel it to heal it.” And I always say that change happens when the pain happens. So, it’s like when we are allowing ourselves to feel pain, physical and emotional, we are then allowing ourselves to experience the peace and joy that comes after. So, your listener who pulled over and was angry and crying and upset, and then, all of a sudden, was laughing. Joy can come out of letting go and releasing. And it can happen quickly. It doesn’t mean you have to be crying for days. It can happen in a few minutes. And that’s what I’ve really experienced in my life. I went to grad school at USM, and I was learning how to love myself. And the one thing that they always drilled into it was basically like “Give it a voice. Do not suppress it.” So, whether it’s anxiety, depression, give it a voice. And like JJ said, you may know what it’s about, but if you don’t, giving it a voice, whether it’s audibly or writing it down, you will discover what it’s about. You will shed some tears, you may refrain the memory right there, you might have to do more work on it, and then you’re going to experience peace around it. And the more you do that, the higher up the peace ladder is, how I see it, you get.

JJ: I love that, and I agree 100%.

Allison: We’re always on the same page, aren’t we?

JJ: Or damn close.

Allison: Pretty damn close. Well, JJ, I always enjoy talking to you. Tell everyone about your upcoming events and where they can listen to your podcast and find you online.

JJ: So, you can find all my podcasts at jjflizanes.com. And yes, my most popular show is called Spirit, Purpose, and Energy. We talk about law of attraction, astrology, numerology. And of course, I’ve got health things in there: mental health and physical health. And it’s really relationships. It’s the whole gamut. But it’s coming from the place of being connected to yourself, to source, being in alignment, and being motivated by your intuition and a higher calling, as well as the relationship with understanding that we are eternal beings and that we’re just here to have a good time, and then how to handle life in the process as we do that. So, Spirit, Purpose, and Energy is my most popular show, but there are other shows, and some of them do have similar content at times. My next local event in Los Angeles is on October. It’s October 11th through the 13th. It is a manifestation boot camp.

Allison: Oh, that’s cool.

JJ: And if you’re interested in that, you can go to jjflizanes.com/bootcamp. There’s a limit to the number of people I can have in the room, but it’s really using… So, Ally, how we were talking about we can understand things, but then we actually have to do them. So, it’s the same thing of embodying the practices of law of attraction from all different levels, from the creative to the emotional to the practical, and actually taking it through this boot camp, and not just understanding it, but actually doing it. So, the manifestation boot camp is October 11th through the 13th in Los Angeles. Yeah, I’d love to see you all there.

Allison: Awesome. That sounds great. Thank you so much, JJ. Today has been amazing.

JJ: Thanks, Ally.