69. Clean and Dirty Pain

0:00 Hey, What is up everyone? It’s Jennie Dildine, the LDS mission coach and you are listening to the LDS mission Podcast, episode number 69. Clean pain versus dirty pain. Hey, I’m Jennie, the LDS mission coach. And whether you’re preparing to serve a mission, currently serving a returned missionary or a missionary mama like me, I created this podcast just for you. Are you searching for epic confidence? Ready to love yourself and to learn the how of doing hard things? Then let’s go. I will help you step powerfully into your potential and never question your purpose. Again. It’s time to embrace yourself, embrace your mission, embrace your life, and embrace what’s next. Hey, everybody, thanks so much for joining me on the podcast today. I wanted to kind of clarify something for those of you who have been reaching out to me about my mental mission prep course. So I’ve had a few people reach out and say, Jennie, tell me the difference between your mental mission prep course, and your mental mission prep one on one. And this is the way I think about it, is that my mental mission prep course, is sort of designed for the person who just wants to kind of consume the information, who wants to watch some videos. And to get a little bit of mental mission prep before the mission. Sometimes what happens is I hear from moms or from preparing missionaries who say, I just found you. And it’s, you know, I, I can’t believe that I didn’t know about you until now. And my son or daughter leaves in, like 10 days. And I’m like, Oh, well, that’s going to be kind of tricky for us to do one on one. So here is my mental mission prep course. That is, you guys, I really do teach so many of the same tools in my one on one that I do in the course. And here’s the difference, though, not everybody is going to do well with the course. And not everybody needs the one on one. And here’s what I mean by that is the difference between the course. And my one on one program is the course picture. Like if you were to watch a cooking show, like if you were to watch a cooking show, like Iron Chef, or if you were to watch what is that one called the baker, the great British baking show or whatever that one is, you’re gonna get some ideas and tools to really understand like how to make strawberry shortcake, or how to make seared salmon or whatever it is, right. So you’re gonna get some of those tools, and they will go into your mind. And, by the way, if you purchase the course, I on there, I have a video where you can upload that course to your Google mission drive. So I teach you how to do that in the course. So that you can have reference to those videos throughout the rest of your mission. So picture that between actually going to a cooking class, or actually getting into the kitchen and learning how to make Strawberry Shortcake and or seared salmon is you are going to take the learning that you’ve learned and you’re going to start to apply it into your life or into your mission. And we talk about specific things that are going on for you. So that is the biggest difference between the course which I think is totally great for a lot of missionaries. And I highly recommend that you have those videos either way, but some of you are gonna want the one on one, which is where we can do a deeper dive. Maybe you’ve experienced some anxiety already. Maybe you’re worried about the fact that you might end up coming home. Maybe you are,

4:51 you know, super worried about something specific with homesickness. That would be when we would want to kind of dive into some one on In one stuff, so it just depends you guys on if you want to watch a cooking show, or if you actually want to get in the kitchen with me, and we start creating something, we start creating a transformation in your life, where we actually do kind of the mindset work and we see how it can change your mission or change your life. Okay, I don’t have a course for return missionaries, all of the stuff I do with return missionaries is one on one. But, um, the other really cool thing you guys is if you have a missionary that’s currently serving, and they didn’t get the course before they left, and you’re feeling like they’re struggling, if one on one isn’t a good fit, you could just send them the course and and upload it to their Google Drive. And they can start watching those videos, as if they were watching like a cooking class and they can, you know, I am of the mindset like watching a cooking class is better than not at all. Like, let’s, let’s get them some tools. So here is where you can go to get more information about my mental mission prep course, it’s the one with the videos, and there’s supplemental podcasts with all of it, okay. So you can go to Jennie dildine.com, forward slash preparing dash missionaries, that’s where you would go to find out more about that. And again, if you have a missionary that’s struggling right now that you think this would help, I don’t know, maybe you want to get it from for Christmas, or, or maybe you want it right now, you could totally get that course and get them a little bit of help for like a super inexpensive cost. Fun fact, when I was thinking about what I wanted to how much where I wanted to price the course, I decided to 49 because that is the hem number of called to serve. So what I’ve kind of figured out is that the cost of the mission is somewhere in between, I don’t know you’ll see different things. But the cost of the mission by the time you get close and your monthly payment and a bike and bedding and luggage and all of that, you know anywhere between 80 $212,600 Just depending on you know if you’re a sister or you’re an elder or what the course to get, like mental and emotional tools. In a like cooking class, cooking show type format is just $249. And that’s it to get your son or your daughter some mental and emotional tools. Or if you’re on the mission right now and you’re listening, like text your parents and be like, I need that I need that thing that Jenny teaches all of our one on one clients, but I’m just gonna get it in video form, because that’s the best way for me right now. So I just wanted to speak to that a little bit before I dove into what I wanted to teach today, which is clean pain versus dirty pain. Okay, what we need to know and I’ve talked about this, I think in recent podcasts is that to your brain, Pain is pain.

8:25 So to your brain, emotional pain is the same as physical pain, and it’s going to do everything it can your brain to avoid feeling feelings, just like it would do everything that it could do to avoid getting eaten by a bear. Okay, so I think I’ve talked about this pretty extensively over the last couple podcast episodes. So I’m not going to go into it in detail here. But what I want to talk to you about today is how do we know if the pain that we’re experiencing, meaning the emotion that we’re experiencing, is clean? Or if it’s dirty pain, and why does that even matter? So let me kind of give you a definition of the way I think about the two types of pain. So some kind of pain or emotional pain, as we would say, keeps us moving forward, keeps us moving towards something. And other types of pain, emotional pain keeps us stuck and keeps us spinning. So the analogy I think of with dirty pain, is that we’re stuck in a pile of mud, super thick mud, that it’s hard to pull ourselves out of. In fact, it feels like every time we try to move out of it. It’s success in a little bit deeper and a little bit stronger. So, dirty pain, sound something like this, it would come from thoughts that sound like this, there’s something wrong with me. There is something wrong with the way I’m showing up. There is something wrong with the way I’m feeling. There’s something wrong with what happened. Or this is my fault. Dirty pain comes from a resistance of what is just true. So it might all like generally speaking, it would sound like I shouldn’t be having the experience that I’m having, or I shouldn’t be who I am. Here’s the problem, though, guys is when we’re in resistance to what’s just true. We’re in resistance to ourselves. That is why dirty pain feels so terrible, because we’re in resistance to us. We’re in resistance to our experience, to our feelings to our thoughts. And, and that just feels terrible. It’s actually where a lot of suffering comes from is just resistance to what’s just true. Resistance to ourselves, feels hopeless. It’s kind of it’s the kind of pain that sucks us in, over and over and over again. Here, let’s talk about some of the feelings or emotions that some of these thoughts would create. So it’s shame, self loathing, guilt, hopelessness. And again, these feelings when we talk about those feelings, creating a set of actions, those feelings are going to cause us to judge ourselves more, not less, it’s going to cause us to question everything, it’s going to cause our brains like I talked about a couple episodes ago, it’s going to cause our brains to look for all of the problems and look for more problems. And then we just get in the cycle over and over again, because then we feel shame. And then we think we shouldn’t feel shame, right? And then we feel self loathing about our shame. And it just sucks us in to that mud pit deeper and deeper. It’s a cycle. So one of the examples I have of this is a client who I was talking to a return missionary client who missed an assignment and ended up missing class. And her thought was, I made a mistake. And I said, Okay, well, how do you feel when you think that thought? And she said, I feel ashamed. And I said, Well, okay, well, what do you do when you feel ashamed? How are you showing up and she said, I actually miss more class. And it causes me to make more mistakes. And then what we discovered that it starts to feel like, we’re a mistake, we’re wrong, something’s wrong with me. And then we just repeat that cycle over and over and over again. Let me give you some examples of what clean pain might sound like, what are some of the sentences? So it would sound like this, huh? That didn’t turn out the way I thought it was going to.

13:26 Or even I think this is really hard, can create clean pain? Or like, okay, I guess I didn’t really show up the way I wanted to there. Or maybe it’s a sentence that sounds like maybe I want to do that different next time. Or interesting that this is showing up in my life that this situation is happening. Okay. What do I want to do from here? Is this idea that my life is okay, right now the way it is. When we think about our lives this way, and the way that we’re showing up, we create different feelings. It’s feelings of compassion, its feelings of love. Its feelings of maybe kind of some sorrow. Maybe if something didn’t go the way that we thought it was gonna go, or we didn’t show up the way we wanted to show up. Maybe it’s feelings of sadness, if maybe grandpa passes away or something like that. All of those types of feelings are clean pain, because they move us to something. They move us towards healing, they move us towards growth. They move us towards transformation and change. It comes from a general thought like it makes sense that I’m thinking feeling and having the experience that I’m having. It sounds like this is the part where I feel kind of sad, or I feel kind of annoyed, or I feel kind of frustrated. That that didn’t go the way I thought it should go. Okay. But notice how when we don’t see it, like something’s wrong, something’s wrong with my life, something’s wrong with me, it allows that emotion to move through us. And we just walked by the mud pit. Remember, like this thought this is my fault keeps us stuck in the mud pit? And then we can have a thought like, I don’t know, it could have been my fault. Probably not. But even if it was, it’s okay. Okay, and we can just keep moving on. So one of the ways I like to think about clean pain and how to know if we’re in clean pain, or dirty pain is, first of all, you’ll know, you’ll know because of what kind of action you’re taking from that place. So I was actually coaching a client last night, where we were talking about stress. Okay, so stress, I think, can kind of walk the line between clean pain and dirty pain. So it depends on the thought creating the stress. And you’ll know because of the action that you’re taking from stress. So if we have this thought, like my job, I shouldn’t be messing this up, something’s wrong with me, like, I’ll never create, you know, the result I want to create in this job. This is my fault that this is not working out that stress is going to be dirty pain, because it causes us to shut down and just judge ourselves more. On the other hand, there’s actually this book called The upside of stress. And it’s written by Kelly McGonigal. And it’s possible that stress could be cleansing. If that stress is caused by thoughts, like, I’m, I’m going to do this, I’m going to do a good job, I’m committed to making this happen. Like, of course, the outcome is inevitable, of course, I’m gonna get the result I want, I’m just gonna have to figure it out all along the way. Now, we’ll know if that’s clean or dirty, remember by the thought creating it, and then the action that we take. So with dirty pain, stress, is going to cause us to shut down with my client that I talked to last night, he was totally frazzled by the end of the day. But if it’s a stress that moves us forward, we’re gonna feel actually energized. We’re gonna feel like it’s a cleansing sort of stress that can move through us. Same with sadness. So how do we know if sadness is a clean sadness? Or a dirty sadness? You’ll know because of the thoughts, first of all that are creating it. And then the action that you take from there? Is it a clean pain that helps you feel cleansed and moved on? And

18:22 work through kind of like a healing process? Or is it dirty, where you stay stuck in the mud, unable to move forward, and you continue judging yourself? So let me give you two examples. First of all, if we talked about an example, on the mission, let’s decide that we’re teaching someone and things are going really well. And then all of a sudden, that person decides like, I just I’m not sure this is a right fit for me, I don’t know if this is a good idea. And then they maybe ghost us or decide they don’t want to hear what we have to say anymore. We might feel sad about that. We might even feel disappointed about that. But even that negative emotion can have a clean site of pain, or a dirty site of pain. Clean pain would sound like oh gosh, that’s not what I was expecting. That kind of stinks. I really wanted what was best for them. I feel bad that they didn’t see it. But it’s okay. That they don’t. I’m not in charge of their salvation. That that’s kind of hard that that happened. And we can feel that disappointment. Dirty pain would sound like I must have done something wrong. I am in charge of their salvation and I failed and this is my fault. That’s dirty pain. So the other example would be like, let’s say you’re dating someone. And the person that you’re dating says, Hey, I just kind of feel like, this isn’t maybe what I want anymore. So clean pain when sound like, ah, gosh, that’s not what I was expecting. It’s kind of not what I saw for our future, I feel a little bit disappointed, I feel a little bit sad. We can sort of grieve the loss of a relationship. That kind of pain of grieving and feeling sad and disappointed is going to be cleansing, it’s going to help you move on. Dirty pain would sound like, Oh, I know, the reason that we broke up is because there’s something wrong with me, like, and you kind of even go to the past, it’s like, if I would have showed up differently, it would be different. And if like, I would have been more this way, then he would feel differently about me, it sort of becomes like, this is my fault. That’s all dirty pain. It’s the guilt is the self loathing, it’s the shame. And that is going to keep you stuck for a really long time if you don’t clean it up. So maybe take into consideration to clean up your pain. Make sure if you can to get your head in the right place. And choose thoughts that create clean pain, emotions that are cleansing and move you forward. Now remember, your lower brain is going to want you to go to the mud pit and stay there. It’s a way for your brain to conserve energy. And it’s a way for your brain to avoid future pain. Because usually when we’re in that state, we’re not going to want to move forward, we’re not going to open ourselves up to more pain. So just be on to your brain. Pay attention to clean pain versus dirty pain. Sometimes we’re gonna go to dirty paint, it’s not a problem, but just maybe be on to your brain when it does. All right. Everyone have the most amazing weekend and sending love to the missionaries all over the world. I think about you every single day, take care. Serving a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints can present a unique set of challenges. And many of those challenges you might not even see coming. So you’re gonna want a unique set of solutions. It’s easier than you think to overcome worry and anxiety serve the successful mission you’ve always dreamed up and navigate your post mission experience with confidence. That is why I created some amazing free goodies that I’m sharing in my show notes. Maybe you’ll want to grab the free training for preparing missionaries, my video course for RMS or maybe you and I should hop on a free strategy call. If you’re ready to take your preparedness to serve or your preparedness to come home to the next level. Then go grab one of those freebies. And in the meantime, no matter which part of the mission experience you are involved in just know that Jennie the LDS mission coach is thinking about you every single day.