Hello, well, welcome to the show.

This is Emotional Badass, where Moxie meets Mindful.

I'm your host, Nikki Eisenhower, life coach and psychotherapist.

And on today's episode, we're considering the secrets of inner strength. Our ideas of strength are interesting to consider.

Where do our ideas of emotional strength come from?

I'm going to share where I think some of mine come from,

and I want to encourage

you to look back on your life and extrapolate the messages that helped you form ideas about

where strength comes from, what it looks like, what it is and what it isn't. I was taught that stuffing and hiding emotion was strength.

The visual I often get when I think about this is a wife at the funeral of her beloved husband

or child. I can see her in my mind's eye, somber, stoic, greeting guests.

I was taught that strength was never acknowledging that you were affected,

never letting them see you cry.

We hear that one a lot when it comes to somebody bullying you.

We tend to see non-emotion, flat affect, the control of stuffing down

our response, covering it up, as strong, and the expression of emotion as weak, messy, dramatic,

even crazy in our culture.

We're not born thinking these things.

Interesting to think about that we're born and guess what we all do first.

We typically cry, show emotion.

It's interesting that as we grow, collectively we're sort of taught to move away from that emotion, isn't it?

When I look back at my childhood, I can see how often I felt just wrong.

...