Sharon: Welcome, JJ. I am so excited you’re here.

JJ: Thank you, Dr. Sharon. I’m excited to be here.

Sharon: And we were just chatting before we came on live and realized we are both dear friends of Dr. Nasha Winters, who has also been on the podcast. So, I feel like now I’m talking to another sister, talking to family. So, we’re really happy to have you here. And I always start by just, like, “Who are you? Why are you doing this? Do you have a story?”

JJ: Who doesn’t have a story? Of course. Let’s condense the story. So, I know that this is an audio podcast, not a video podcast, but behind me on my wall, I’ve got a lot of my podcast art and then, of course, my mind-body-soul sort of logo that I’ve created, which is sort of where I started. I started in the entertainment industry, actually, in a very right-brained capacity. And then, when I was in college, and after college, and I moved to New York City, and I wanted to go forth in my career in my right-brained capacity, I wanted to do, and I knew early on that, even though I couldn’t identify it or tell you, I got that I was more of sort of balanced brain. There were parts of me that wanted to be expressive and emotional and creative and dancing and singing and loud and happy, and then there were parts of me that wanted to figure shit out. I wanted to problem-solve. I am an excellent problem solver. And so, when I got to working, I thought, “Well, I want to do something that stimulates my brain.” I’m trying to work in an entertainment capacity, which is very about the emotions and, again, physicality, whether it be dancing or acting or whatnot, but I thought, “I’m going to go figure things out. I don’t want to wait tables.”

And I had started, back in college, learning about personal training. I worked at the gym, and I was like, “Oh, I want to do that.” And that took me down a path of learning science, and learning science in really interesting ways, meaning that I don’t know what the state of the personal training industry is right now because I’ve been out of it for a couple of years, and I definitely don’t hang out with trainers, but I see really bad things at the gym still all the time. The lack of science in the personal training world, it’s astounding. It’s astounding that people make things up because it’s some fad and they have no reason for it. And especially when it comes to exercise, I am super passionate and I am an expert in biomechanics. We will go biomechanics and the structure of the body and preserving what you have. Everyone knows you have meniscus in your knee and they act as your brake pads. Well, if you look at your knee like your car and you think, “Well, if I’m really hard on my brakes, I’m going to wear down the pads really fast.” But in a car, I can replace them. In your body, you won’t be replacing them. So, when you look at what choices you make, I’ve always had this sort of long vision of you see someone who’s in their 70s or 80s and how they’ve aged, and it’s a quick wake-up call to say to yourself, “Am I doing now what I want to be doing, so that way, later I’m better or not so bad?”

So, put that altogether, I went through a whole path of personal training, mind-body-soul. I started with the body, asking the science questions of the body. But then, when the sciences that I was using wasn’t helping somebody not have back pain or whatever pain they were having, I would dig a little deeper. And I’m the person who says, “I don’t know, but I’m going to go find out. I don’t know, but I’m going to go learn something new. I don’t know, but I’ll ask somebody else who does and I’m going to figure it out.” And what it just led me to was a much deeper…it connected my worlds differently. It connected our need for expression—creative expression, emotional expression—with the amount of repression that we live with and how that shows up in the body. So, I was a personal trainer for about 20 some years, maybe 25 years, and I’ve been in all kinds of magazines and on television. I’ve got books that I’ve written. But what has been the theme over the last 10 to 15 years, maybe even 18 years, has been the emotional component underneath it all, because I understand quantum physics, I understand energy, I see energy. To me, it is as real as the bones in your arm and in your body. So, you have to factor that in and then how that sort of affects you.

And the problem, Dr. Sharon, is that I’m really good at what I do when it comes to personal training, and I held onto that for so long that it limited my growth. And I thought, “I have to let this go,” because at the end of the day, anyone can give you the template, “Here’s the plan,” and yes, it can get more extensive, and you do your testing, and you look at your terrain, and it can be super scientifically personalized, but at the end of the day, whether you do it or not, how you got there in the first place and then how you feel is really what it’s all about. So, I just decided to take the leap, and I was like, “Okay, that’s it.” And I started my podcast eight years ago, and people started coming to me for the things I actually wanted to deal with and talk with them about, which was law of attraction, manifestation, emotion, quantum physics, and then emotional processing. So, that’s kind of how I got here, and I decided to hang up my shingle and say, “I’m no longer a personal trainer really.” I mean, I do fitness of your mind and of your heart, and I’m looking at how do we uncover what sabotages you?

And again, I’m going to use Nasha as an example. Just like in Nasha’s terrain 10, one of her doctors was on my show recently and she was talking about the specificity of how she sort of diagnoses and then treats her patients. And I thought, “Whoa. Ooh, stop.” Because she said, “I don’t really know what you do. I don’t understand what you do.” And of course, you wouldn’t until you do it with me. But let me explain it that way. That’s exactly what I do. Just like you have 10 terrain areas, I have possibly five, six, seven different psychological, core wound, astrological, first born, whatever, left-, right-brained, balanced. I’ve got those pieces that I collect the data and then we decide how we work from there. So, it’s extremely, to me, very scientific in one way, but it’s all about how you feel. It’s all about how you perceive. And I could talk about literally for fricking a month without taking a breath. So, I’m going to shut up because I know I can keep going. But I’m that passionate about talking about emotion.

Sharon: Oh my god. Now I’m like, “All right. How are we going to do this in an hour?” because I’m like, “Can we talk about the five, six, seven core wounds?” Can you tell us what they are? Can we start there?

JJ: Well, let’s just talk about the process. So, it came to me years ago to do an episode called “The Roadmap to Emotional Healing.” And I wrote it down as an episode title. I do a lot of solo shows. And I put it sort of to the side. And every time I would think, “Oh, I should record that episode,” my intuition was like, “Nope. Not yet.” I swear, I held onto it for, like, two years. And then two years ago, or a year and a half ago, when Nasha introduced me to her doctors, who have studied the metabolic approach to cancer, and her cohorts, and I started talking about all of this stuff, I realized that looking at cancer patients, and I’ve said this to her recently, “I don’t know that I want to work with cancer patients.” And that hopefully doesn’t offend anybody. Not everybody is for everybody. Some of you may think, “Whoa, JJ, slow down. You talk too fast for me. You’ve got way too much energy.” And that’s cool. I’m not for you. We do not resonate. And I respect that, and I do not take offense to that.

Well, when we look at a certain group of people who all attracted or manifested or had gotten contacts to these messages of, like, “You need to change your life” as cancer, sometimes it’s almost like… I don’t want to say they’re too far gone physically. They’re too far gone emotionally. Some people have so much resistance. And I’ve had those people come because they’ve been referred by a doctor or Nasha, and then I realized there’s no way they’re going to hear what they want to hear. There’s no person, there’s no therapist, there is no coach. I mean, they’re just not ready to hear what they need to hear to make the change. And so, what ended up happening is I realized with my trainers, I needed to create a way to prequalify who was right to work with us. I’ve had my podcast for eight years. Most of the people that show up to work with me come from my podcast. It’s a very easy transaction. They email me, they get in touch, I’m ready. Or they buy something. I don’t even sell anybody anything. I mean, I sell them my show. But I thought, “I need to make this roadmap.” So, I actually made it a course, and I made the course so the doctors or anybody else could prequalify themselves. If you don’t like me and you aren’t willing to do the one-on-one work, you will get a roadmap, the start of your roadmap in this course.

Let me just tell you what it includes because you wanted to know what the six things were. And I don’t know that there are six things, but let’s just start with the diagnosis piece. Besides the other parts, the energetic parts, let’s just say that, your parents that you came in with, and sort of how they see the world, and the energy they held, and if they have a lot of anxiety, because then that would be normal to you. If your parents had super anxiety and you have anxiety, you don’t think you have anxiety because you’re like, “This is normal. This is what I’m used to.” But let’s take what happens when you’re young. We all have core wounds. Whether you think you had a perfect childhood or not, I promise, you had core wounds. So, why are we dealing with therapeutic things without testing what we’re dealing with? What’s the wound that needs to be healed? So, there’s an exercise that I take people through that literally identifies your core wounds. It identifies your top three. There’s more than three, but I like to make it simple. Your top three core wounds. Then you’re going to see the pattern of how you respond emotionally, so those three emotional responses, and then what your reaction is, and what actions you do or don’t do because of that.

When you have that map, now we can start to look at “Well, what do I need to heal these things? What things do I need to do differently?” And again, the tools are more of like the love languages, astrological, birth order. We’ve got all kinds of interpretations and ways to look at the world differently. I mean, socioeconomic. You’ve got religion. You’ve got all these different things that influence how we interpret. And until we become conscious of how we interpret, then we just think we’re defaulting. We’re defaulting to the programming that we were brought in with, and we stay victimized. And so, I try to empower people with pulling it forward, seeing the choice that you have and interpretation, and then deciding, “Okay, I don’t want to feel that way. Am I a victim in this situation? I’m not. So, I can change that.”

So, the core wound exercise, to me, is a place, if you’re in therapy and you haven’t done that… In fact, I would have people come to my webinar end of the course, who took the work back to their therapists, and then they come back and tell me, “Oh, wow. I had a really great session with my therapist. We got some really good work done because I took her to my core wound work that I did on your course.” I’m like, “Okay. All right. Keep paying your therapist. That’s fine. It’ll just take you 10 more years to get to the next step.” But anyway, so that’s kind of my perspective. And I know that there are good therapists out there, and there are people that love and get good results. I’m not here to judge what your results are. It’s just asking yourself, “Am I different?” To me, emotional healing is when you’re different in the same situation.

Sharon: Mm-hmm. Right? The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, right? So, yeah, exactly. I mean, I agree with you. I mean, I think there’s a time and place for talk therapy, but usually it needs to be coupled with other therapeutic activities. I see people who are in therapy for 10 years with this, and it’s like, “No, no, no.” It shouldn’t be a lifelong thing. You should be able to graduate and move on and heal. But I think that that’s a whole another problem in itself. So, this core wound exercise, is this something that you could take us through or explain a little more? I don’t know what it’s about.

JJ: It’s like a seven-page exercise. It takes you back to memories and positive traits and negative traits of your parents, and then positive attributes. And it’s like a whole process. So, it’s not necessarily a simple thing, but I will give you a simple exercise that most people don’t use. And I use this in the course also. And because of Nasha and the doctors, and because of my work, and people asking, I’m like, “Okay, it’s time to sort of train people to replace me.” So, I create a certification, and it’s in the certification, and then now I’m doing it as just a group coaching program. But it’s based on the work of Dr. Marshall Rosenberg. He wrote a book called “Nonviolent Communication.” Terrible title, kept me from reading it for many years, because I’m like, “Nobody identifies themselves as a violent communicator.” Terrible, terrible title. But amazing book. And again, how my brain works is that if something doesn’t make sense to me, I rearrange it until it does, but then I assume everyone else did the same thing. So, I have taken the best of what I think is the most important part really of his work when it comes to owning and being responsible for being the creator of your own reality.

And I guess that’s something I should say off the top. How I work is giving you your power back. I believe that you’re the creator of your own reality because you’re the only one that can think your thoughts, feel your feelings, vibrate at a frequency. No one else can make you do that but you. And for people that think, “Oh, no, people can hurt my feelings,” think about a situation where someone maybe said something to you, or let’s say that I take the role of saying something to you. So, Sharon, if I said to you, “Sharon, you seem like you’re lifeless, like you don’t have any passion.” You just laugh, right? Why? Because you know it’s not true. It didn’t hurt your feelings because you know I’m not serious, but even if I was serious, you’d think, “What are you, nuts? Are you living under a rock? Of course I am.” If it doesn’t resonate, if you know it’s not true, you don’t take it personally. The reason we get our feelings hurt is because we actually agree with the people saying bad things. And that’s what hurts. It’s not because of them. It’s because of us. But what happens is we become victimized by our circumstances. We think we have to try to control circumstances, control environments, control people, in order for us to feel better. And if that is what you want to continue doing, more power to you. Good luck. And it may work. You can manipulate people to a certain degree for so long. It definitely works because it keeps happening. But it isn’t sustainable and it never feels good.

What feels good is to understand that you are the creator of your own reality. And I’m not shaming you. You didn’t do anything wrong. Nothing you’ve done has been a mistake. It’s about “Where am I now? What am I doing, and how do I course correct? Or what are the lessons in front of me that I need to learn to change the path, to manifest new things, to be in new circumstances?” So, it’s a call to a feelings and needs list, and it’s a three-step process. And I know I’m showing this to you, but nobody who’s listening can see this. I have a piece of paper that I’m holding, and it’s my feelings and needs list. And I do have a free download of it, and I’m happy to give you the link if people want to go through it, because I kind of walk through it a little bit more than I’m probably going to be able to do here. But it’s a three-step process, and it’s when you feel yourself getting triggered or you have a negative emotion, or you just feel icky, you start by asking the first question: “How do I feel?”

Now, for you, because you’re conscious and aware, that might be a very easy question. But for some people, they have no idea how they feel. They can’t find a word. They have five words: angry, mad, sad, happy. Right? And on this feelings list, there are 100 different feeling words. And so, you may be thinking, “Well, why do I need 100 different feeling words?” Well, let’s see. What is the difference? What’s the vibrational frequency intensity difference of the word “irritated” and the word “rage”? Pretty extreme. But they both fall under angry and mad. So, when we fine-tune what we’re really feeling, we have now an awareness of how that feels in my body. One of the things I know we were considering talking about (I have a lot of content) is how emotions affect healing and disease. And people think, “Oh, emotions…” And by the way, for any man listening, emotions can equal stress, so when you go, “Oh, I don’t want to think about emotions. I don’t have emotions,” do you have stress? “Oh my god. I have stress. Yes, I have stress.” We claim stress like it’s a badge of honor. Stress is an emotion, guys. When you’re stressed, it means that you are interpreting things in such a way that it’s creating this crunchy stress feeling that you have.

So, the three-step process is just easy. I’ll run through it. It’s just “How do I feel? What need is not being met that’s creating the feelings?” And it’s not a need of somebody else. It’s “What need do I have?” And then the third is “How do I strategize to get those needs met without asking anyone else to be different?” So, it’s a pretty deep exercise. It sounds super simple, but trust me, no one does it right for a very long time, because we’re so used to saying, “I’m mad because you did this. I’m upset because the world is like this.” And we never take responsibility, which is why we’re never getting our needs met, which is why we can’t solve the problem. We stay in a stress and anxiety state because we delegate our emotions to everybody else.

Sharon: And do you think all these needs that we’re not getting met all stem from childhood?

JJ: Oh, absolutely, but it’s not necessarily… I mean, someone could need safety. Someone could identify that they’re in a situation where they don’t feel safe. I talked with someone yesterday about a service that I was looking to participate in. And she must have said it a couple of times, and I thought, “Okay, I don’t think we’re resonating. And because of that, because I don’t feel like you get me, and that’s important for me, it doesn’t feel safe. It doesn’t feel safe to become extra vulnerable with you in a new way, with someone who really doesn’t know who I am, and I really don’t want to spend another couple of months having you getting to know me so that I feel safe.” I’ve had the experience in years where I’m with a healer who connects with me instantly and gets me energetically. I don’t need to explain anything. So, I think we can have needs…

I mean, so many women… I’m guessing we have a lot of women that listen to you. And maybe I’m wrong, but it could be men too. Men need to be acknowledged. Men need to know that what they’re doing is contributing. If you’re not acknowledging your husband, your boyfriend, your son, your whomever, your father, then maybe they don’t feel appreciated. Men play for points, so that’s a huge one for men. But they don’t know that. They just play for points. They just want to know it’s working. But they’re not going to say to you, “I need to be acknowledged.” They don’t know that. They’re not aware of that. Women also need to be acknowledged, but women also need to feel connected. And they don’t know how to say that, but if we start actually looking at these needs… And they’re not neediness. This is 86 basic human needs. We all need acceptance, belonging, closeness, compassion, empathy. But the bottom line is we have to get this for ourselves and know how to get this for ourselves first, because you can’t ask someone to give you compassion until you can give yourself compassion.

So, it goes into a deep dive journey, but it’s really taking the moment-by-moment, day-by-day situations, and looking at them a little differently with the intent to understand them, what the root is, and then how do I solve it? And when you feel the power of being able to solve your own problems emotionally, and you feel so much better, you didn’t have to ask anyone to be different, I mean, the rush, the confidence, the joy that comes out of people, it’s transformative.

Sharon: Absolutely. So, I want to go back to cancer for a second. Because we know our thoughts create our reality, and then a lot of times, patients feel shame and “Why did I create this?” And so, how do you explain that to someone who has a disease process that emotionally, thought-wise, they have a role, they co-created?

JJ: Well, I want to explain this through an example of a client who I currently have right now. She found Nasha and I. She found me first, she found Nasha second, but not attached to me. And then later, when there was an attachment, she’s like, “They’re finally together.” And she’s had triple negative breast cancer three times. And the first time, she did traditional allopathic standard of care. I think second time, she might have done standard of care too. And then, in between the second and third time, she learned about Nasha and the metabolic approach to cancer and, again, looked at alternative medicine and did not do standard of care the third time. Well, she’s part of one of my groups, and there’s a very good chance that she has it again for the fourth time. Now, we’ve done more business stuff versus emotional stuff, but she was here physically a couple of months ago and this lump that she has that she had looked at, she says, “I know what this is. I’ve had this four times. I know what this is.” The doctor didn’t confirm, but they had her measurement, they have all the information. And we were in the pool, because she was either here for the VIP day or we were here for the mastermind, and she said to me, “Yeah, I’m just going to get a cutout.” And I said, “Do you think that there is a possibility that if you have it for the fourth time, we’re still not learning the lesson?”

So, this person is all about the emotions right now. She’s come 100% on my team about understanding how this affects your body. But she still was reacting as if whatever was in her was something not her. It wasn’t a part of her. It was something outside of her, and it was a bad guy, and she had to fight it, and she just wanted to get it out of her. And I said, “Can we stop for a second? You have had this. If this is the fourth time, what is the lesson you have not learned yet?” There’s more than one, but I said, “What’s the lesson you haven’t learned yet?” And I said, “It’s the fact that this thing is a part of you. This is your body. In Chinese medicine, you know that there’s no such thing as a tumor. It’s stagnant energy, period. It’s not something that’s not you. So, what’s the message right now for you? And it possibly could be to embrace you more instead of cutting off or shutting down or repressing some of the things that you don’t want to look at.” And from that moment, it’s probably less than a month, that mass has softened and decreased in size.

So, when it comes to the emotional piece, that’s why I wanted to say with the feelings and the needs, you are where you are because… And I say this on a podcast I did. I said, “I hope this doesn’t offend anybody, but cancer doesn’t scare me, because if I manifest and attract cancer, it’s a wake-up call.” This is an opportunity to change your whole life. It is a message from your body, saying, “You have to stop what you’re doing and literally flip 180 degrees.” Because the messages are clear, and if you keep down the path of what you’re doing, it’s not going to get any better. I mean, “Radical Remission,” I’m sure if you haven’t talked about that book, everyone, read “Radical Remission.” And that’s just skimming the surface of what is possible when you understand that this emotional piece and the stress piece and the spirituality piece is to lighten that emotional load and to bring you into a place where you can go into parasympathetic so your body can heal itself. What is your message if you’re dealing with a chronic illness or disease? It isn’t to fight it. It isn’t to shut down. It isn’t to kill it. It’s to listen to it. Your body is telling you something. So, what is it telling you?

Sharon: I couldn’t agree more. I say that all the time. People hear me say, I always say when I’m working with a patient who’s dealing with cancer, “I know that we…” And I’m doing it all. I’m doing the terrain medicine. I’m doing the emotional. But I always know we’ve gotten there when the patient is like, “Oh my god, Dr. Stills, I’m so glad I got this cancer because I learned x, y, and z.” And so, echoing what you just said. And people always ask me, “If you get sick, what do you do?” And the first thing I ever do if I get sick or injured or anything, I always go inside and ask myself, “Where am I not honoring myself? Where am I out of balance? What’s going on in my life? Am I not marching to the beat I’m supposed to be marching to right now?” And so, I think it’s so often overlooked, the emotional piece, so I’m so glad we’re talking about this. And I think it’s weird because as we’re talking about it, I’m thinking people will come in and they’ll say, “I have this disease,” and I’ll be like, “Okay, we’ve got to tear apart your diet.” Because we’re still a physical vessel. We still got to pay attention to the physical vessel. And people don’t really feel like you’re shaming them or anything. They’re like, “Okay, I know. I got to stop going to the drive-through. I got to start buying organic.” Whatever. But when you talk about the emotions, it’s like there’s so much resistance. And I’m curious what you think that is about.

JJ: I think that is about that we are not taught to know how to deal with emotions. Again, it’s about the emotional processing. And we don’t share healthy anger. We don’t know what that looks like. We have shame. People will cry and say, “I’m sorry I’m crying.” I’m like, “Never apologize for crying.” And this particular client of mine, actually, she would say, “I was always the strong one.” I said, “I’m going to call bullshit on your strong one.” You’re not being strong. You’re repressing. That’s not strong. Denying that you have emotions is repressing it. Now, I can say that to her because she loves me and she feels my heart. I would not say that… And this video doesn’t help because it makes me more animated. I recognize that you’re all listening, and I’ve got a lot of fire, and you may not be interpreting what I’m saying the way that I mean it. The people that I talk to and work with feel my heart. They know my passion. They know my desire to have compassion for you. And if there’s nothing else that I do, all these tools are to create compassion for you.

I mean, in the Roadmap to Emotional Healing, when I did the live, I did somebody who did the core wound work, and I go through this whole thing of, like, your parents had core wounds too. And they did the core wound work, and then they had a different response to their parents, because they thought, “Oh my god. What must they have gone through to be like that for me?” And it created this compassion that went back generations. And that’s my goal: to ease your relationship to emotions and to accept. If you can say that you came into this body to learn some lessons, and here you are presented with some of them, nobody is shaming you. One of my trainers just the other day said, “I’ve been doing something wrong for so long.” And I was like, “Wait. No. No one is saying it’s wrong. It’s perfect. It got you where you are, and there’s so many wonderful things about where you are.” So, I hope that everyone can hear that I’m never wanting to shame anybody. It’s about having perspective. It’s about learning something. And when it comes to the emotional journey, the reason why most people don’t like it is because it’s hard. You’re going to have to feel it to heal it.

And I think with therapy, a lot of people don’t like therapy because they go in, you do your structured talking for however long, you get to something at 45 minutes in, you’re done by 55 minutes, you feel like crap, and you have to leave. That is not how I work or anybody else works, because we’re about solutions and getting in there before we have to say, “How does that make you feel?” and “How did that make you feel?” It’s like, “We’re going to get to the root of this very quickly. You’re not going to have to go through 10 years of talking about your childhood.” Literally, it takes an hour. You do this exercise, boom, it’s right there. And then, from there, we can move forward. But it’s about our relationship to allowing ourselves to be human and to not judge. Crying doesn’t make you weak. In fact, stuffing it makes you weak. You know why? Because it means you can’t handle it. You’re not being fully expressed or human. You’re not being human if you don’t feel your emotions. And I’m sure, as you know, in Chinese medicine, all of our emotions are connected to organs, with the idea that we run in cycle through them all day every day. It’s only when we stop and pull in one area do we have stagnation and disease and imbalance, when we’re not allowing our anger out in a healthy way, with responsibility about why you’re really angry, not wanting to blame it on somebody else.

So, it gets layered, but ultimately, I think our society is all about repressing. I mean, anxiety right now is (I don’t mean this in a disrespectful way) funny because people think it’s a disease. Here’s what anxiety is. Anxiety is repressed emotion you haven’t let out. End of story. Do you have to go through therapeutic things to get to the other side of it? No, not necessarily. There’s other ways to create new neural pathways in your brain, to rebalance your brain. Yeah. But at the same time, you’re not learning any skills. So, what happens when you get triggered? What do you do with that? Most people eat or drink or work. They don’t have any tools. So, I have always been about… In my podcast, people write to me all the time, “Oh my god. I’ve changed my life from your podcast alone.” I’ve never talked to them. They’ve never worked with me. They’ve never been to a live event. Literally, I give tools. “Here’s the tool. Go use it. Good luck. It will change your life. It’s free. Just go do it.” But know that this emotional journey is uncomfortable. That’s the point. But then you learn how to be comfortable in discomfort, and then it goes away, and it doesn’t linger. But your avoiding of it makes it worse. It gets bigger.

Sharon: Yeah, I was just thinking, reflecting about some of the things that you were saying about Chinese medicine. And I know a majority of my patients who wake up in the middle of the night, wake up between 1:00 and 3:00, which is the time of the liver, which is related to anger. And so, we always are looking at that. And yes, we have a saying in naturopathic medicine. It’s like, “On the first visit, you know you did your job if the patient cries, that you’ve gotten somewhere.” And it makes me so sad because nine and a half out of 10 patients will apologize for crying, and then it’s like, “Oh, well, here’s where we have to do some work if you feel like you can’t express or that it’s not okay to cry.” And I think there’s like this toxic positivity where you can only be happy, and you can’t feel anger, and it’s not okay to be annoyed or anything. And I always teach people through mindfulness. It’s one of the tools and methods I love, and it’s about feeling what we’re feeling when we don’t feel it. It’s just what you said. We stagnate the energy and then we get disease processes. So, do you ever find that there’s not an emotion with someone who has an issue, like a chronic illness?

JJ: Oh. No. I mean, I can identify. Again, my perspective, my sort of broader perspective of looking at all the dots and connecting all the dots, there’s always some emotional root. Does it mean that there isn’t a physical component? Of course, there is. But again, the container of healing the emotional piece of it. And when I say healing emotions, it’s about changing the interpretation. When you change the way that you look at something, so Wayne Dyer’s quote, “When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.” It’s that simple that when you can turn around and see that this thing that your mother did that meant to you she didn’t love you, when you can see that her love language was different than yours, and all the times that she did that, it was love, you switch the whole relationship immediately. Your past changes, your future changes, from one perspective change, from one tool. And that’s what I’m saying. I have all these tools that we use to create compassion to change the story, because most of the stuff we tell ourselves is BS anyway.

And the reason why most people don’t know how to have healthy anger is because they don’t take responsibility for their emotions. Anger comes when you think someone has betrayed you or done something to you, most of the time. So, maybe there’s an intuition that says, “Well, I shouldn’t yell at that person,” even though I really, really want to, because it really might not be about that person. It’s usually never about the other person, by the way. It’s always about you. You just don’t see it because it’s not what you’re taught. Nobody teaches this. Your parents don’t teach you this. Nobody teaches this in school. This should be taught along with math and science, before math and science, because when you’re a young kid, interpretation is exactly what… Emotions are what drive everything you do. I want to put this as like the ground level. Whether you want to deal with your emotions or not, whether you want to face them, they are the reason you make every single choice you make, period. Find me one thing that you think you do that isn’t attached to you wanting to feel better. That’s it. Everything is attached to wanting to feel better.

Sharon: Can’t argue with that. So, you had mentioned before we went live, talking about talk therapy and the three things wrong with it. And I would love to have that conversation because I think if someone does… like in mainstream, we work on an issue, they will go to talk therapy. And I feel like, as I said before, there can be some benefit, but I think it can lead to wasted years and time. She’s rolling her eyes, everyone. So, I’d love to hear your thoughts on that.

JJ: I’m rolling my eyes because I’ve been to many therapists, and most of my clients have had two sessions with me after five years of therapy and said they didn’t have any change until they saw me. This is a theme. That’s why I had to take a step back and say, “What’s the problem with traditional talk therapy?” And again, different therapists have different tools. Some people don’t just do traditional talk therapy. But let’s just talk about what the problem is. And I do a whole talk on this. It’s 90 minutes, so I’ll just give them the surface of sort of like a few little things. But you can get the full workshop. If you want to see it, it’s free. Or listen to it. But the first thing is that, again, sort of like I explained to you, when someone comes in, I want to do a quick diagnosis. I want to get to the bottom line. I have the tools to do that. The tools are out there. Other people have tools that can do that. It’s very simple. You just figure out what your core wounds are. Again, it’s a multi-step process, but like seven or eight pages, it will take you about an hour that you do on your own.

My partner, I sent him to a therapist here. Well, I encouraged him. He has [38:55], and I said, “Will you go…?” I didn’t want to be his therapist, even though I helped him get out of anxiety and back pain, and [39:01] and his life is great. But I don’t want to be the therapist, so I’m like, “Can you go see this person, this guy?” And he liked him very much, but he came back from the first session and I said, “So, what happened?” The first session was pretty good. He kind of opened up, and he kind of got some momentum going, went back for two more sessions, and then stopped going. And I knew both of them. I worked with the other one in a different capacity, and obviously, my partner. I said, “Just out of curiosity, why did you stop?” I knew why. I didn’t even have to ask. “Why did you stop going?” He said, “Because I didn’t know where we were going.” You go in and you talk.

Even with me, I went in to a certain therapist very specifically wanting to do EMDR, back when I thought EMDR was the best tool. I do tapping, and if anyone has seen the movie “Heal,” sorry, that woman does not do a good tapping session. She’s pretty bad. But I do tapping a little differently. I take a couple of these different exercises and get really deep really fast. We go in and we kind of cut that cord, and boom, then now you’re not triggered anymore by that thing. But tapping is self-administered. Well, unless you’re doing it with somebody, self-administered EMDR. So, I was searching, but I didn’t know that. My work with tapping was sort of much less than it is now, and it was only used for weight loss, so I didn’t realize the power of it. So, I went to find someone who did EMDR, and I went in, and I told her before I got there. She was very right-brained. And I told her, “I want to do EMDR. How fast can we do it?” And she’s like, “Well, I have to get to know you.” And I’m like, “Okay.” So, first session, we talked. Second session, we talk again. At the end of it, I said, “Do you think we can do EMDR next session?” And she’s like, “Okay, sure.”

We go to the next session. This is the third time. And I go in. Now, mind you, I’m a trainer at the time. Yes, I’m dealing with emotions, but I’m not getting paid to do it, I don’t have all the tools I have right now, and it’s not my room. I’m hiring you. I’m coming into your room. So, I sit down and I want her to lead me. Of course, I didn’t recognize she’s not a leader and she’s not balanced brain. So, now I know. But I go in and I’m waiting to be led. She’s like, “So, how are you?” I’m like, “I’m good.” “How are things going at home?” And so, I answered the question. That question leads to other questions, and in the third session, we have not done EMDR yet. I say at the end, “Can we please do EMDR next time?” I think it took five or six sessions to do one session of EMDR. And every time, she said, “When you come in, you tell me about something else.” I said, “Because you asked. You asked me, so I tell you.” I said, “It’s your room.”

So, the frustration of not having a container of a goal or a structure. To me, the biggest failure of talk therapy (well, the two biggest) is it keeps you in your story that you’re the victim. And I have a bunch of different doctors who have given me testimonials, and Nasha’s testimonial was that traditional talk therapy keeps you in your story, and I help you change your story right there. I’m not going to come in and validate you. What if you were the one who was…? Because maybe it was you who’s feeling insecure or is feeling needy. Why is that? I’m not going to validate somebody and keep up a story that doesn’t serve you and that isn’t true. So, I think that’s one thing. Talk therapy, most of the time, keeps you in your story, because they want to give the power to you. It’s all about how you feel. And maybe there’s some tools to read this, or do this, or meditate, or breathe, or take a couple of seconds before you respond. And that’s all fine, but that doesn’t get to the point. It doesn’t get to what the root is. Like a weed in the ground, you’re just cutting off the top every time.

So, keeping you in your story, and then the other one is not having a structure. So, with my partner, I knew he would be onboard if someone was to lead him. And men need this more than women do, but women like it too, especially left-brained women, businesswomen. What’s my goal? Where am I going? What are the steps? How long is it going to take? Is this indefinite? Am I going to come in every day and talk to you about what happened yesterday? Who cares? It’s all attached to… I mean, they care, but the reality of it is everything that’s happening to you now literally has a connection to your core wound. It’s all a reenactment. It’s all trying to get your needs met. So, why not just bypass all that? Just know what the wound is, and start working on getting that need met. And how do we heal that? What do we need to do? How do we need to be? What do we need to change? So, those are the top two things. Because that’s why I think men hate therapy. It’s because they go, “So, am I supposed to come in and talk to her? And what do I talk to her about?” And the questions are literally “How do you feel?” “Well, how does that make you feel?” And they’re like, “Okay, I know it makes me angry. What do I do about it?” And I don’t feel like it’s driven. But how many times are you going to talk about getting angry without understanding that it came from this core wound of not feeling seen or heard? Until you know what the root cause is, you’re like throwing stuff at the wall, hoping it sticks. It’s unclear.

So, that’s after enough of it. And when I finally did find somebody, I was like, “Okay, I need someone more balanced brain.” And I literally wrote out. I’m the perfect patient for anybody who works in any kind of…when it comes to thinking, because I’ll come prepared with a list of things that I know: my beliefs that don’t serve me, the ones I want to change. “Here’s my traumas. Here’s my triggers.” So, do for me what I can’t do for me. And that next therapist, who was my last, we tapped on that first day. We did EMDR. We did hypnotherapy. It was awesome. She was great, but she’s not a traditional person. And there’s still sort of an endpoint of stuff.

Sharon: Well, you kind of covered it. The core wounds, are there certain ones you see over and over again?

JJ: Yes. Most people don’t feel good enough, and not being enough. Or in my case, I’m too much. So, one of my core wounds is (I’m sure no one is shocked by that when I say that, but is) feeling like I’m too much for people. Not that I’m not good enough. That I’m too much, and therefore, that makes me less desirable to connect with or to have deep, meaningful relationship with. And not feeling seen or heard, feeling ignored, feeling guilted or controlled, dominated, devalued. Those are some other core wounds. There are more, but…

Sharon: And do these all kind of settle into our psyche by the time we’re seven, or you think it’s earlier than that?

JJ: No. Yeah. Well, subconscious programming kind of has the majority of that in by, like, 8 to 10, in your basement. You’ve had enough life experience that you’ve decided things, mean things, even though they’re not true, but they’re coping mechanisms. Like if you felt ignored by your parents, then maybe you were someone who acted out. What I want people to really understand about knowing your core wounds, once you understand what those are, you can trace back every relationship, every career path. Every major choice you have made has been to get that need met. And when you see it that way in the patterns… So, I’m divorced and I have this. I learned because I was trying to save my marriage. I started my podcast to save my marriage eight years ago. And every guest I had on was to contribute to my knowledge and awareness and my journey to do whatever it took, change whatever I could change, learn whatever I could learn to give us a fighting chance, even though I was doing the majority of the work. But that’s okay because I chose that, and that’s a wound for me. So, I had to learn that. And I don’t regret a single moment of it because it made me who I am, and it got me where I am and with who I am now, and prepared for this relationship.

But when I went back to do some of this work on myself and we did this core wound exercise, I did this core wound exercise, my way of coping when someone doesn’t agree with me, or to feel a value, I educate. Hello? I have a podcast. This is part of me proving my worth, wanting to feel worthy, wanting to feel valuable, is to have information to help other people. So, I would do that and I would educate. And there’s a list of the frustrations, like your childhood frustrations. You think about a frustration that kind of got repeated a lot, and then you go to “Well, how did I act? What did I feel when that happened? And then what did I do?” And when I saw on that sheet the first time I did it, the column of “What did you do?” for all of them was yell and then educate, yell and then try to convince them, yell and then try to convince them. And I was like, “Oh my god. I’ve been doing this my whole life.” And I instantly stopped doing it. My ex-husband would tell me, “It doesn’t work.” I’m like, “I know.” And intellectually, I did know. It doesn’t work. But I still did it anyway. Until I saw it on a piece of paper, my entire life and how I’ve coped, that it really has been going on forever, and I’m like, “Oh my god.” And I stopped doing it because I recognized, in that moment, it doesn’t work. And I had a new relationship to it. It wasn’t just situational. It was me.

Sharon: So, what about for people who don’t remember their childhoods? Just like they don’t remember.

JJ: Well, we start with what you do remember, and we start as far back as you can go, because that’s all we can work with. Except that, I do have a Strengthening Intuition course, and I have a lot of people who take that intuition course. It helps them to remember, and it helps them to get into their intuition and start to have memories, where they come up as dreams. But we can also look at manifestation, if your manifestation is a direct relationship to your belief system. So, if you are someone who… And I still do this, but I catch it, and faster. I have an episode on my show called “Your Inner Prostitute.” If you’re someone who feels like you have to convince people, or you have to go the extra mile, or you have to give stuff for free, it’s literally like begging for approval, which is your inner prostitute. It’s like negotiating your worth, which means that you don’t feel it, if you have to try to get someone else to validate you in order for you to feel it. And that, for me, when you look at someone’s manifestations…

We talked about today on our hike the fad of or the likelihood of people that when they win the lottery, they lose it within a couple of years, right? So, my partner today said, “If I win the lottery, I know I’d keep it.” I said, “I know you would too, because your father was super successful, your mother programmed you quite well to be able to do anything.” And honestly, he’s a money magnet. He believes and he knows he’s worthy. He’s going to make it anyway. But for some people who get it, who are starving, who are on food stamps, or they’re in a vibrational alignment just for enough time to get it, they aren’t at a personal development place, a self-respect, self-love, self-confidence place to keep it, which is why they feel guilty about it, and they end up losing it or getting rid of it, because they don’t love themselves or can handle that much abundance. It went too fast, and they did not do the work to be able to receive that. So, we can see it in people’s manifestations that you must not believe in yourself, you must not respect yourself. So, we can trace back a little bit.

Sharon: I always say that if you want to know what you believe, just look at your life and see how it’s going.

JJ: And listen to what you say, and listen to what you complain about, and listen to what you don’t have that you think you want. Yes, definitely, I agree with you, totally. Your manifestations. You’re living what you believe.

Sharon: And there’s hope, so…

JJ: And the good news is you can change your beliefs.

Sharon: Yes, at any moment. Well, this has been fun. You’re not too much for me.

JJ: Thank you.

Sharon: The New Yorker in me is like, “Oh, I love this girl.”

JJ: Yay!

Sharon: So, you mentioned your podcast. Where do people find you, learn more? Like this core wound thing, how do we do this?

JJ: Okay. Well, jjflizanes.com, everything is going to be there. There’s going to be a tab for podcasts, and you’ll see all the podcasts and the links to them on different podcast players. And on the homepage, there’s an option to sign in to get the workshop, the “3 Reasons Why Talk Therapy Is Ineffective.” If you want to do the core wound work, that is on an exercise that’s like a freebie or anything. You’d want to do that. So, whether it be buying a few sessions or buying the “Roadmap to Emotional Healing” course and doing it on your own, you can do that too, and that’s under Programs and Online Courses. That’s in there. But you can learn more about all of that. Again, all my podcasts. You can watch any of the free workshops that I have on the homepage. There’s another one of how emotions affect healing and disease, where I go a little bit more into that sort of physiological response, Chinese medicine, chakras, things like that, energy healing, and how we think about emotions, and how we don’t realize the impact that energetically makes on our bodies to heal or to be a grounds for disease.

Sharon: All about the terrain.

JJ: Yes, ma’am.

Sharon: So, head on over, check out her website. I’ll meet you there. And thank you for coming on and sharing your sassy self with us, and just really giving us some things to think about and to digest and to ponder. It’s really important work. Socrates says, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Also, it sounds kind of harsh, but kind of part of why we’re here is to really examine ourselves and our journey and our feelings and our thoughts and our beliefs and our manifestations. And it’s part of the fun of being a human being.

JJ: Just one more thing to say on that. Yes, it’s hard, but would you give your child back because labor was hard? What happens on the other side of it, you do it because of the freedom, the joy, and the happiness that you live more than you’re living now. That’s why you do it.

Sharon: Yes. I love that. Yes. There is benefit. It’s not just hard work for nothing. Good analogy. So, thank you. I’m so glad to connect with you. And thanks for being here and having this talk with us. And thanks, everyone, for being here for another week. We’ll be back in not one, but two weeks. And until then, as always, I invite you to practice radical self-responsibility. And I’m going to give it to JJ. What should they practice for radical self-responsibility this week?

JJ: Download the feelings and needs list, and start asking yourself. Don’t default to your stories. Re-examine your stories. See what your real need is underneath that, and see if you can get that need met without anybody else. I trust you’re going to be able to. And when you do, you’re going to be like, “Hallelujah! Oh my god. This is amazing.”

Sharon: Love it. Okay. Be well.