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what was super obvious, and that was that he wasn’t giving me permission to drink. He was giving himself permission to drink. He was manipulating the hell out of the situation like I was the beneficiary. And from my perspective, I was all do as I say, not as I do. I was a total bullshitter. My coaching session has forced me to re-evaluate my own relationship with alcohol and my role in Leland’s sobriety. I realized that I needed to reflect what I wanted from him in my own actions if I wanted him to be sober.

I needed to be sober, period, if for no other reason than spousal support. But also I get to lose all those booze pounds and I’m not spending nearly as much money having been sober for nine days. I think back over the last six months of, quote, drinking responsibly, which consisted of drinking two or three glasses of wine every night, waking up in the morning feeling like shit, thinking to myself, I have to quit doing this.

I don’t eat a lot of food at night to booze goes right to my head and my mornings are super foggy and the opposite of productive. Now we’re supporting each other and we haven’t had one argument and I haven’t been a bitchy man hater or had any sort of anxiety. We’ve replaced our wine routine with a cup of camomile tea and I can actually get up and be a mom in the morning. Wow. That is absolutely amazing. It actually is kind of inspiring, you know, to basically say one change in your pattern makes that big of a difference in anxiety and how you’re behaving and how productive you are.

You know what else I loved is she actually admits, quote, I couldn’t see in the moment what was super obvious, and that was that he wasn’t giving me permission to drink. He was giving himself permission to drink. You know what’s interesting is she’s validating something I keep telling you, which is when you’re stuck in the patterns, you can’t see him.

But the second you follow the fear and you identify the trigger and then you start to recognize, well, what do I do when I get afraid? Holy cow, I start Nick picking it becomes super obvious. And the other thing that I want to point out is, you know, how she said she used to have two or three glasses of wine.

What is she drinking now? Camomile tea. So she’s using the science of habits to take one pattern, which is come home, have two or three glasses of wine with a new pattern she’s in control of. She’s substituted wine and put in camomile tea. She’s still having a drink. It’s just a different one and a more powerful one that’s allowing her to take control of her life. And that brings me to the six takeaway, which is fear of abandonment with fear of abandonment.

You want to control how hurt you will be. Fear of abandonment is all about losing control.

And in her session, Cassandra kept talking about how she has this attitude that she can survive without them. And I want you to take a listen to how she thinks about a scenario where Leland might leave. And so I catch myself just finding stuff to be angry at him for. And it bothers me because he’s really great. And I know that, you know, if I keep it up, I’m going to push him away.

If I keep it up, he’s going to have enough and be like, I don’t need like, I love you, but I don’t need this. Yeah. And that’ll be fine. Good riddance.

You know, I didn’t want you around anyway or just some garbage. But, you know, that’s what I’ve always done. And so I’ve always survived and I’ve always done well for myself. And so I don’t know. To catch the end, so she’s terrified of driving him away. But then she sort of nonchalantly at the NGOs. I’ve always survived and I’ve always done well for myself. This is classic fear of abandonment, giving you a fake sense of control.

By telling yourself, I’ve survived. It’s okay. You’re preventing the pain of it actually happening by assuming it’s going to happen. Remember Heather and the self-criticism piece that we talked about, remember how she said you have no idea how it’s hard to be me. She was so hard on herself. Well, self-criticism is something that people do in a weird way to cope with environments where they’re getting criticized. Like, if you can criticize yourself enough, then it insulates you from how painful it’ll be if other people do.

You criticize yourself before other people can criticize you, and that way you get to control how hurt you can be. Fear of abandonment. Super similar concept.

If you’ve already played out the future in your mind as one without the person that you’re with right now, you can’t be hurt when they actually leave. When you see it coming, you start socializing yourself to the pain by accepting it now. You either then push away or you think about it all the time. And Cassandra is doing both. She’s pushing him away constantly. And then she’s thinking about how she’s gonna be OK if he leaves anyway. And what you’re doing is you’re basically bracing for impact so that when it inevitably happens, you’ve already worked through it in your head a million times.

It’s typically created because of a childhood loss or trauma. And it’s really important to attack this because research shows that people with abandonment issues, they have lower self-confidence. They feel jealous more often. They have a hard time trusting people and they have a hard time being alone. If a relationship ends so they tend to just grab on to the next one quickly, even if it’s a wrong relationship. In order for you to move past a fear of abandonment, you must recognize that you are worthy of being loved.

And it’s critical that you do this because what happens for a child that develops a fear of abandonment like Cassandra did, is as you’re standing there watching your mother drive away, your child brain starts to think, well, if they love me, they wouldn’t be leaving me. And you start to wonder, what is it about me that makes me unlovable? And you think that you caused that person to leave? So as an adult, it’s really important that you rewrite the story and you realize that you didn’t cause anybody to leave.

You’re worthy of love. Your mother wasn’t thinking about you when she walked out the door. She did it because she was dealing with her own safety. Your sister was protecting herself. She wasn’t leaving you. I mean, we make this all about us and we never stop and think about why your mom or why your sister might have left had nothing to do with you. And in the workbook, we’ve got a bunch of exercises on how to recognize that you are worthy of love and to begin to shift the narrative that you have.

If they loved me, they wouldn’t have left. What is it about me that makes me unlovable? Let’s get rid of that story and let’s write a new one that’s about self-love and self compassion. The seventh and final take away from Cassandra session has to do with how Juggy Cassandra was about her sister. And you’re gonna learn that judgment and judgmental people. It comes as a result of wanting to control whether or not you get hurt. You see, judgmental people at their core are deeply wounded.

I want to say that again, because if you have somebody in your life that is judgmental and I’m thinking about somebody in mine right now, this flip in perspective, it’s a game changer. Judge, mental people at their core are deeply wounded. Judgment. It creates a wall between you and other people. That’s why deeply wounded people build them because they’re wounded and they’re trying to protect themselves. If you’re a judge, mental person, there’s some unresolved hurt from your past that’s continuing to get triggered in your day to day life.

And so you get Juggy because that button of feeling wounded and feeling hurt.

It keeps getting pushed. And if you’re Juggy of people, then you don’t have to take a look in the mirror because you’re so busy criticizing everybody else. And Cassandra’s case, she was crazy, Juggy of her sister. Now, after our session with supercool and I’m going to give you a great update. She could see that the reason why she was judges, because she was wounded, she felt abandoned by her sister and that hurt her. Instead of saying that she did what all super wounded people do, she started judging her sister because of that hurt instead of stopping taking a deep breath and working on why she was hurt.

Where you cast judgments on other people. I want you to pay attention because often your judgments, they’re created by your own perception, not the truth.

And I want to share an incredible update from Cassandra about her relationship with her sister. The other thing I want to say is this, if you’ve got somebody that’s super Juggy in your life, instead of being triggered by them, try a little empathy. Stop and consider. It’s actually not about you at all. They don’t know anything about what’s going on in your life. They’re so busy being hurt that all they’re doing is judging everybody else so that they don’t have to slow down and deal with themselves.

So let me tell you about Cassandra’s update with her sister. Here’s what she wrote to me. Mal, I wanted to quickly update you on some enlightening new developments with my sister. I called her the same afternoon I her coaching session and left her a voice message. She called back and said that she actually had some things she wanted to talk to me about. She came over yesterday and told me that in July she’d flown to Texas to visit her father.

She didn’t have any good memories of him, didn’t know him very well, and was really just wanting to meet him and get to know him. The entire visit consisted of him talking about himself. He made vulgar, racist and sexist comments pretty regularly. He asked my sister two questions the whole time she was there and knows where. Does your husband know you’re here? And what does your husband do for a living?

If you recall, my sister is married to a woman, but she didn’t even feel safe telling them that on the last day she was getting ready to head back to the airport and she told him that he is the antithesis of everything she believes in, that he’s full of hatred and hostility and that she’s glad she got to meet him because at least now she knows that she never wants to have anything to do with him again. And then she said she’s married to a woman and deal with it.

She concluded the trip a success. I told her how incredible it was that we were even discussing this because it completely dovetails into our coaching session with my father being an abusive prick and driving a wedge between everyone. I told her that I was sorry for carrying all my garbage around for years. It was because I was jealous of her that she is living her truth. And I’m here trying to sugarcoat everything and make sure everyone is happy all the time.

She was like, Fuck you world. I’m gonna go do what I want and it’s gonna be my way. And I envy that kind of freedom. All my opinions ever. Like, she needs therapy because she’s internalized this shit, never dealt with it. And then she married a woman because my dad made her hate men. They were all just that. My opinions. I told her all of this. I’m the one who needs therapy. If she’s happy, then no other variable in that equation matters.

She, in turn, apologize to me forever, making me feel inferior or unimportant. We totally hugged it out.

Like a Lifetime movie. And I felt like the last 25 years of distance vanished in a moment. You’re right, Mel. Decades of distance can be erased with one phone call. And the fucked up thing is I always knew that, but I was too stubborn to take any action on it. We even talked about taking a vacation, just the two of us, and getting to know one another again. I still have goose bumps about how this all aligned.

We were reaching out to each other at the same time to get closure on the same issues. It’s awesome. It is so awesome and I’m so glad that she is confirming that you can erase decades of distance with one phone call, you just never know what’s going on in someone’s heart and mind until you have the courage to pick up the phone and have the conversation. And here’s one thing that I know for sure. You’re never gonna have that conversation if you’re so busy sitting around judging them.

And now let me wrap up this coaching session by summarizing Cassandra’s seven takeaways for you. First drumroll, please, because you’ve never heard this one before. Well, that’s a joke. I hope that you never forget this in order to get control of your life. You’ve got to first understand what you do when you feel afraid or vulnerable. Cassandra fears being abandoned, so she pushes people away before they can leave. She also is terrified of being physically abused.

And so the second that it gets triggered, like when she hears a beer can opener, a bottle of wine coming at her pattern is the nit pick and nit pick and try to control what’s going on so that things don’t spiral out of control. Now that she sees the patterns, she has the power to change them. Second, abuse, it is not love. Please stop justifying the behavior of your abuser and calling it love. They may have been doing the best that they could given their own issues and trauma, but it is not love.

Your new mantra is they were so broken they were incapable of loving me. I do not want you to turn the abuse that you survived into an example of what love looks like.

Please let this be a wakeup call and use it to empower you to come up with a new definition of love. Third, PTSD is not just for veterans. If you have survived childhood drama, you may suffer from it as well. And if you suspect that you do, please go see a therapist and you might want to check out MDR. Fourth, you’re not a people pleaser. If your safety depended on it, there’s a major difference between being a people pleaser and a chameleon and trying to fit in and the things that you do in order to survive.

If you’re a survivor of abuse, stop calling your behavior people pleasing and see it for what it is. Patterns that were triggered as the result of abuse. Fifth, please, please, please remove all emotional landmines in your relationship for Cassandra, that alcohol. Alcohol was an emotional landmine, something that always triggers her. So she had a powerful and important conversation with her fiancee about it. And you heard straight from her. Their entire relationship has transformed.

Six, fear of abandonment, fear of abandonment will trigger you to control how hurt you will be, and what you’re doing is basically bracing for impact so that when it inevitably happens, you’re already worked through it in your head a million times and you’re not going to be as hurt in order to move past fear of abandonment issues. You’ve got to do the work to recognize that you are worthy of love. Finally, number seven, Judge Leanness judgment comes as a result of hurt.

That’s it. You’re a judge, a person I guarantee your deeply wounded. There’s some unresolved hurt from your past. That’s continuing to get triggered. And so you spend all day long casting judgment. So you never have to slow down long enough to deal with the hurt. And when you start to judge someone, please think of Cassandra’s update from her sister. You just never know what someone else is feeling, thinking or going through. What’s the fastest way to find out?

Pick up the phone and have the conversation and find the truth. And as Cassandra said, decades of distance can be erased with one phone call. So you might consider making it. All right, now I have a surprise. There’s actually a seventh coaching session in this audio book, and it’s for you. Now I want to coach you. You’ve learned that in order to get control of your life, you’ve got to first understand what you do when you feel afraid, you run to silence yourself.

What do you do? There is a pattern there. There’s no denying it. And before you listen to this audiobook, you probably didn’t even realize it. But every time you’re afraid, you react in the same way. And it’s become so automatic that it is now a habit and that habit, it is keeping you stuck. But as your coach, I’m telling you, once you see this pattern, you’ve got the power to change it. And if you change a response to situations that make you feel nervous or afraid, you’re going to take control of your life.

That’s how you do it. Now, for each of the six people that you heard me, coach, you learned what they were afraid of. And then you learned the pattern of behavior that they were stuck in. And you learned that by identifying the pattern, that they were able to move forward with a different response to things that make them nervous or afraid.

But in order to do that, you have to first become aware of how fear and nerves are felt in your body. You see, you have body wisdom. I have it. You have it. We all have it. But you might not be paying attention to it. Well, that’s got to change. So I want to ask you a question. Is your coach and it’s the same question that I asked you at the very beginning of this book.

What makes you feel afraid or nervous? What are you afraid of? And to help you answer this, I’m going to remind you of what you learned about the six men and women that you just listened to. Dan is afraid that he’s not going to figure out what he should do with his life. Heather is terrified of failing. Rosa is afraid of facing the mess that her life has become. Casey, he’s afraid of being put on the spot or called out.

Amy, she’s afraid of conflict and being yelled at. And Cassandra, she’s afraid of being abandoned. And as a domestic violence survivor, she’s terrified of being beat up again.

Now, me, I’m afraid of disappointing people. Maybe you’re afraid of one of the things that I just said, or maybe it’s something else. Maybe you’re afraid of not living up to your potential or screwing up your kids, or maybe you’re afraid that you’re really not that great under the surface. You’re afraid that people are judging you or you’re afraid of being criticized or you’re afraid of being alone. Are you afraid of disappointing people or maybe you’re afraid you’re not enough.

Whatever it is that you’re afraid of, it’s personal to you. Being afraid, being nervous. Totally normal. But you can control what you do in response to it. And remember, there is an amazingly tight connection between fear and control.

Then what I want you to do is I want you to start paying attention to when those nerves or that feeling of fear is present in your body.

Tune into it. What does it feel like for you? What does your body do? Because becoming aware of the way your body physically manifests your nerves and fears, it’s going to help you recognize when you’re getting triggered before that fear rises up and turns into thoughts that start to spiral and make Iran or be silent, because once you know what you’re afraid of. And once you’ve identified and have the awareness about the way your body feels and expresses fear in nerves.

Now, I want you to think about this. What do you do when you feel nervous or afraid? What do you do when you feel nervous or afraid? For Dan, he’s afraid he’s not going to figure out what to do with his life. So that triggers him to try to figure it out by thinking and thinking and thinking and all this thinking. It keeps him stuck spinning ideas for Heather because she’s afraid of failing. She doesn’t even try.

So fear triggers her to not do anything for Rosa because she’s afraid of facing the mess that she believes her life has become. She clings to her stuff because it gives her a sense of momentary control, because it’s at least something that she can hold on to.

The other stuff feels too big. So fear triggers her to focus and obsess about her things.

For Casey, because he’s afraid of being judged and called out, he tries to manage what people think about him and he avoids situations in which she feels put on the spot. So he avoids the office like the plague and he’s questioning what his family does. So fear is triggering him to isolate himself. For Amy, because she’s afraid of conflict and being yelled at, she stays silent and keeps her mouth closed, particularly at work. So fear triggers her to be quiet.

For Cassandra, because she’s afraid of being abandoned, she’s always preparing for the people in her life to be gone. So fear is triggering her to push people away, to prepare. And she’s also afraid of getting into a situation as a domestic violence survivor where she’s being physically abused. And so she monitors and she nit picks the people in her life in order to try to control their behavior, particularly drinking. And she does it so things don’t spin out of control.

So fear is triggering her to micromanage and to nit pick. For me. Well, sometimes I run in panic, and whenever I’m afraid of disappointing people, I lie and I act like a chameleon in order to fit in. At least I used to. You see, I discovered the pattern and I changed it. And so can you. And now it’s your turn to answer the question, because you have a pattern whenever you feel nervous or afraid. There is a pattern there.

What do you do? You’ve got to see the pattern because then you have the power to change it. And that’s how you take control of your life. That’s how I stopped panicking. That’s how I stopped being concerned about what other people think. That’s how I stopped being insecure. I discovered the pattern that nerves and that fear was triggering. Now, you’ve heard me say this over and over again, and that’s because I want you to figure out this pattern after identifying the pattern for yourself.

You now need to create a new response to fear. That’s exactly what you heard. All six people do for Dan. He is triggered to think and think and think when he feels nervous and afraid. So he’s going to replace thinking with moving brick by brick. One action at a time forever. Fear triggered her to be so hard on herself. And that was paralyzing. So she’s going to replace putting herself down and not trying. With a growth mindset and focusing on her effort for Rosa.

Her fears triggered her to start hoarding things. And so she’s replacing hoarding with getting rid of things so she can make room for more empowered change. For Casey, his fears triggered him to hide. So he’s going to replace avoiding situations in which she feels put on the spot by showing up at his office and owning his story with his family and friends. For Amy. Well, she’s already replacing shutting up with speaking up. And for Cassandra, she’s stopped nit picking and started sharing how she really feels.

And that’s given her immediate control. And she’s also swapped out her habit of grabbing alcohol and swapped in a cup of camomile tea. So what pattern are you going to change? I want you to decide on a new empowering pattern. And I want you to start using that in place of the thing that you do when you normally feel nervous or afraid. If you’re silent. Speak up. If you overthink. Take action. If you run Stand Your Ground.

You heard how Cassandra’s life is being transformed. And I’m promise you, when you start to attack these patterns, you will take control and your life will be transformed, too. But there’s one more important thing that I need to say to you. You can identify your fear. You can figure out the pattern that you turn to and you can pick out a new empowering pattern. You can stop running from the things that scare you. You can stop being silent when you feel nervous.

You have the self-awareness to do all of this. But to actually pivot and break the pattern that’s not serving you and to act in a new way that gives you control away, that’s truly aligned with the things that you want versus letting fear win and being triggered all the time. You got to take action. I’m sorry. There is no way around this. Just think about Amy. She walked right into her boss’s office despite the fact that her neck was on fire and her stomach was flipping out.

She took control.

It’s so easy to go on autopilot and default to all those patterns of being silent and running away because you have used them over and over and over again. But now you have the tools to interrupt this pattern. But it’s going to be a choice. You have to use them. You have to use them every single day. Because I think one of the other things that you learned by being with me and listening to this is it’s all taking place in the little moments.

It’s the stuff that’s happening every day, the small ways that you silence yourself, the small ways that you think instead of take action, the small ways that you run away from the things that scare you. I don’t want you to finish this book and figure out I was great. All right. What am I gonna listen to next? I want you to prove it. Prove to yourself that you can change. Because I know you can. Brick by brick, one small action at a time.

The patterns from your past do not define you unless you let them. Every day, every moment, you have a chance to silence fear, because every single day there are going to be moments and there are going to be people that make you feel nervous. They’re going to be situations that make you feel a little afraid. They’re going to be things that make you start to feel like things are about to go out of control. Do not run. Do not hide.

Do not be silent. Yes, you may get triggered. Yes. You may feel yourself reach for the pattern. But now you get to decide what’s true for you. Who are you now? A lot of this stuff happened in the past. A lot of these patterns you created in order to deal with other people in your life. A lot of the things that you do when you run and you silence yourself, you did it to survive when you were little.

But when you let fear control your life, now you’re giving permission to those people from your past to decide what’s true for you now. Stop it. You decide what’s true. And you do it by owning your story and you do it by interrupting these patterns. I want to remind you of what Casey told you in his session. I told you that this was the most important thing that you needed to learn from this audio book. And I want you to hear it again right now.

Today, I learned that who I was does not dictate who I am and who I’m becoming and that I grew through this process and I changed and it was an everyone else’s opinions and how they perceived who I am, but that all the change came from me and I need to own that. What I’m flipping is owning who I was when I was young and people’s perceptions of me and flipping that to a different story. It’s the same story, but telling it different.

Who I was does not dictate who I am and who I am becoming. All the change came from me and I need to own that and all the change comes from you. And you need to own that. Casey is telling his story differently. It is now time for you to do the same. And you start brick by brick. And as you start changing the patterns that don’t serve you. Please keep me updated. I love nothing more than hearing how these tools are changing your life.

You do not need to thank me. You do not need to acknowledge me. I will take the acknowledgement. I appreciate it. But I want you to get the credit. You own the change because it came from you and you can find me on social media.

And I am always watching for your comments. I am always watching for your posts. If you Tagus, we will likely feature you in our story. So if you’re not part of our community online, get your rear end over to the Internet and find us and join us.

And if you’ve got questions posted on social media, tag me and use the hashtag hashtag. Ask Mel because I’m watching and I’m also cheering. I’m cheering for you every step of the way. Now go take control of your life.

This has been an audible original’s production of Take Control of Your Life, How to Silence, Fear and Win the Mental Game, created and narrated by Mel Robbins, executive producers Dave Bloom, Keith O’Connell and Mike Shaza, editorial producer Rose Hilliard, producers Kat Lambrix, Mel Robbins, Mandy Bergen, Tracy Mertz, Donna Morrin, Rob Whitaker, edited by Sara Khoza. Peg Losa mixed and mastered by Darren Vermont’s. Copyright 2018. Mel Robbins Sound Recording. Copyright 2018 by Audible Originals LLC.

This audio book is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It is not intended as a substitute for the advice of a physician, professional coach, psychotherapist or other qualified professional.

The conversations in this project contain references to persons whose viewpoints are not represented. Their memories of events referenced in this project may differ dramatically, since there are always two sides to every story. Audible hopes you have enjoyed this program.