The Blame Game

Anne: Good morning, afternoon, and evening. It is Coffee, Tea and Consciousness. I'm Anne.

Mel: I'm Mel. Thanks for joining us.

Anne: Yep. At whatever time of day. We're gonna talk about not blaming other people for things that upset us. It's basically a scapegoat when we blame others — it's not taking responsibility for your feelings.

Anne: One of the big ones I had was last week — I finally realized... when our kids were little, my husband would go to work and then go to the bar, not every night, but a couple times a week. And I was home with the kids and I would be pissed because I'm home with the kids and now you're going for happy hour. And I kind of created a story around that. But my son is kind of doing the same thing now — he doesn't have kids, but his girlfriend isn't happy about it. And it kind of brought all of that back up in me. So I'm talking to my husband about it and he's pissed. He's like, "You'd think the last twenty-six years have been complete shit, like that's all I did." And then it dawned on me — I'm not trying to blame him for the way I was feeling, but in reality it was me. I'm mad at me, I think, for allowing it, or...

Anne: I'm not entirely sure. I think I was telling myself a story around it. But now that I've seen it and taken responsibility for the way I felt, I don't feel triggered by it anymore. Does that make sense?

Mel: Yeah — well, sort of. I recently had an experience too, and I'm glad we're talking about this today, because I also — our son. We bought a house for our son and his wife. She was going to school, he was working, they couldn't have gotten a mortgage, and rent was getting too extraordinarily difficult to consider paying. So Jimmy and I bought a house and they sort of rent it from us. That's been five, six years now. They're currently not living together — they're separated, and our son is having a hard time making the full payment on his own, which we get.

Mel: So we came up with an idea for how to help him for a while, while he gets through this tough time. And he hasn't been paying for all of August, which I know is just a few weeks, but he didn't always pay in July either. And yesterday I was telling Anne — I haven't been talking to my husband about it, and I've been wondering: what is this? What is in here for me? I think that's a pretty common theme after an awakening — what's in this for me? What am I not seeing? How could I see this differently?

Mel: I'm not upset about the rent, or the money toward the mortgage payment. I'm not upset at all. I know he's going through a hard time, it's fine. I wish he would talk to me, but I also know what it feels like when something is happening and you don't want to say it because you don't want to feel embarrassed, you don't want to feel ashamed. And like you said, Anne, I wouldn't put that on him.

Mel: And maybe he feels it anyway, I don't know. But I don't want to add to that, because I'm not upset about it — I get it. I just wish we'd had a conversation. So I'm thinking this, but I'm also not talking to my husband about it, because he still lives in the real world of dollars and cents — "you're not doing what you should be doing, why aren't you doing what you should be doing?" To me, everything is energy. So what is the energy underlying this situation for us? I've been exploring that through journaling and talking to myself while I take the dog for a walk. What is in here for me that I'm resisting? If this is an experience I'm having, what am I resisting in it?

Mel: I'm resisting this conversation with Jimmy, because he's going to say we have to alter our lifestyle to make up for that money. Actually — that's true. I don't resist that being true. But I resist the conversation about it being true. I don't want to listen. I'm resisting a conversation about the tangible reality versus the energy reality. I look at the energy reality: hey, I can see there's something in here for us. Thank you. I'm not mad at Alex. If I could be completely honest, I'm actually kind of sad that this is the easiest way Spirit is bringing this experience to us. There's something for Alex in this experience, there's something for Jimmy in this experience — although he doesn't know it yet, because he doesn't know what's happening.

Mel: And there's something for me in this experience, which — when I look back at my own patterns — is that I hide experiences I think are going to be hard for another person, probably because I don't think they're capable of handling them, or I think it's easier if I just take care of it myself. It's not that it's not a big deal. In reality, that is a lot of money, and in reality we do need to alter our lifestyle so we're not running at a deficit every month by making that payment ourselves. So I can see the physical truth in it, but I also know there's an underlying energetic situation here, which is: Mel really tries to keep others from feeling something difficult because I don't like how they're going to respond. Sort of like you with Tony and the happy hour.

Mel: It isn't — when Jimmy finds out, he's going to be pretty mad that I haven't been totally telling him. That's true. So I'm going to have to deal with that anger, which is valid — he gets to be mad at me for hiding something from him. That's really wrong of me, and I'm down with that completely. I should be more open. But I'm not hiding it because I'm worried — I just don't really want to have the conversation. So what am I resisting? I'm resisting the experience of having this conversation with him. But I don't get to blame Alex for giving us this situation, because this situation is coming regardless. If you're not done working through something, it's coming. Like for you, maybe it came for you to write.

Anne: It's coming and you don't know who it's from. It doesn't matter who it came from — it's something you've got to work on. So obviously, having the conversation with my son's girlfriend triggered a thing in me that I hadn't dealt with. I want to say, "That was twenty-five years ago, get over it," but obviously there's a thing there.

Mel: There's an energy there.

Anne: Yeah, there's an energy there. And so you get to feel it with Alex — that's who it's coming from. But at the same time, there's more to the story than "Alex isn't paying the mortgage." He's just a little piece of it. He's supposed to work on his own stuff. If it wasn't him, it would be someone else.

Mel: Yeah — if it weren't going to come from him, it'd come from someone else. That's the thing. So when we talk about blame, this is why I can't blame anyone anymore for anything. Everything I see, I want to — no, sometimes, because sometimes it's so — like we've talked about before, it was easier when real life was just tangible life and we could just blame other people for our bad experience, right?

Anne: Yeah, that was so easy. So easy to blame other people.

Mel: So easy to live your life pissed as a victim.

Anne: Yep. I still catch myself though — I'm like, "you motherfucker" — you get caught up in the emotion of it.

Mel: No, for me, I can see the underlying thing, and I've got a lot of empathy and compassion for Alex, that he's going through this too, partially for himself, for sure — you're always the star in your own life. So this is for him, but it's also, in this way, for me. I'm sort of sad that it has to come from him to me. I wish it didn't, but either way it would have come.

Anne: Isn't his thing about responsibility?

Mel: Yes. His life purpose. When we did a reading — this was very early on, when Anne and I were still begging our family and friends to let us give them readings — for this kid, I saw past lives of spirit. All energy has to go through a human if you're going to say it out loud, so Spirit knows I don't mind swearing. For me, it was: he's lived a lot of lives of "fuck-offery." Couldn't quite pull his responsibility piece together. And in this lifetime, he came here to ease himself into it. He came here for me to be his mom, because — and Anne has said this too — I'm way more tender with that one than the rest. That one's always gotten my tender heart. "Let's give him a little more time, a little more rope." I've always wondered why, and now I can see it. He came to me, and that feeling is there for me — not to keep him from responsibility, but because he needed a little more ease, a little more space, a little more time, and he needed someone who could give it to him. I'm totally capable of that, and I can see it throughout our life together.

Anne: Yeah. And this is part of it.

Mel: So he's meant to be moving into a more responsible human. You wouldn't think that's true, but it makes perfect sense.

Anne: He's gotta get to the point where — I don't want him to figure it out by not paying the bill. Let's have a conversation beforehand. Hopefully he gets there.

Mel: Here's the difference I can see in him, and Jimmy and I have talked about this — five years ago, he would not have thought twice about us paying it. Not at all. He came to us for everything, all the time, for everything. I don't know that I would have had the nerve to keep going back to my mother and asking for more help, but for him there was no "I shouldn't do that." Over the last few years, we've seen him not want to ask for help. Even when I'd have the grandkids over and offer to send them home with dinner, he'd say, "No, it's fine, Mom, we'll go home and make it." It used to not be like that. I've watched this slow evolution of him moving away from relying on me and Jimmy and his dad, toward relying on himself. And even when he can't rely on himself, he's trying to. I think that's what this is. A few years ago he wouldn't have felt bad about saying "I can't make that mortgage payment forever." He's feeling feelings about it now, which are his to feel. I can't take them away, and I don't want to, because I know he's meant to be moving in this direction.

Mel: I can actually see how him not wanting to have this conversation is him showing me — in this backhanded way — that he's noticing where he's not being responsible. He's noticing. And for all of us, we have to notice before we can take on a huge task. So it is one of those things — but again, if it wasn't him, I would have gotten this somewhere else, because I'm not done yet trying to ease other people's discomfort.

Anne: Well, and it's not just you — Jimmy's got a role in this too, because the easy thing for him is: it's Alex's fault. Blame Alex. Where I think there's more to it, because he likes to go into the depression of "now we're broke, we've got no money."

Mel: Blame, blame, blame, blame, blame.

Anne: He goes down the really ugly rabbit hole of "now we can't buy groceries." He'll go from one extreme to the other in a heartbeat.

Mel: He thinks we really can't buy groceries now. I'll say something like, "Hey, looks like you need some new underwear," and he'll say, "I'm fine, we can't afford underwear." Oh my god, okay, alright.

Anne: "We're really fucked now. Give me the safety pins."

Mel: And I've learned that's just his way. Okay, fine — if you think we can't afford new underwear and you don't want to get some, I used to go buy them for him. Now I don't. You're gonna buy new underwear when you feel like we can afford it. But I'm gonna have underwear when I need underwear. I'm not not buying myself underwear because you think there's never, ever anything we can afford, which isn't true.

Anne: It's funny, because I think Tony was kind of like that too — "I don't need socks." Dude, your socks are so stretched out the heel is coming up your calf. Shut up, you need new socks. Or the underwear. So it became a thing — when I'd do laundry and see something that should just go in the garbage, I'd think, "Fine, he wants to keep all this crap, let him." Eventually he'd want to throw it out. It's funny, because I think what taught him we weren't in such shambles was when he actually quit the job and knew we were okay.

Mel: That's so true.

Anne: He needed to go through that to finally be okay with stuff. We were spending money, it was just a totally different — but he was the same way. "I can only have one pair of shoes and I'm gonna wear them every single day until the bottom starts flapping. And then I might even try to glue them. I'm gonna become a shoe repairman."

Mel: I threw a pair of Jimmy's shoes out this summer thinking he wouldn't notice — donated them at the garage sale. And he's like, "I don't know what happened to those shoes." I said, "I think the front was coming off." He said, "No, no, I only wear them to mow the grass — now what am I gonna do to mow the grass? I only have one other pair of shoes." Okay. Maybe that's the problem. Maybe that could be the issue.

Anne: Well, see, Tony would do that too — "I'm gonna save this pair just for outside yard work." He's too lazy to take the time to change his shoes — he's not like Mr. Rogers, sitting down and switching shoes for inside versus outside. No, he just wears them all the time. So even that became "forget it, you can't have outdoor shoes because then they become your everyday shoes." It's comical. It really is.

Mel: You can't have outdoor shoes because you don't know how to be responsible with them — you're wearing them as everyday go-to-work shoes. For Jimmy now, he actually does change his shoes. He has indoor shoes, outdoor yard shoes, indoor Birkenstocks — he has pairs of shoes very specifically designed for the tasks he does, which is fantastic for him. He's not without footwear, but you'd have thought in that moment he was without footwear. I've had to sit down with him — because he's an engineer and likes things in a spreadsheet — and we'll do a budget, write it all down, and look at it together. I see the numbers with a positive lens. He sees everything that's going out, all negative. And I've shown him: "Hey, isn't it funny how, looking at this spreadsheet, we've still been able to buy groceries — which you think we can't do? Could you see it this way?" And then we're able to pay some things off, and then we even have more disposable income. And he still says — the other day we had my mom in the car, taking her for a hearing test, and she asked, "Did you get the house figured out? Does it feel a little better with more money in your pocket?" And Jimmy scoffs behind me. I hear you — I hear that for you it doesn't matter what it looks like on paper. You feel the lack.

Anne: I was gonna say that too, because it totally is. His mother was notorious for that.

Mel: This is a hand-me-down. This is stuff he doesn't need to have on him. I sort of wonder if he actually believes it's true, or if he just says it to me.

Anne: He's acknowledged it.

Mel: I would think so — this is where we can go into manifesting. I have some curiosity around this. We are able to live — isn't it lovely, we can buy groceries, we have some disposable income. So I don't know, because I do believe in energy, and you get back what you put out there. So part of me wonders — does he just say it so that...

Anne: Like we used to — "everything is rainbows and kittens," even though internally it didn't feel like that.

Mel: Right. I'm feeling bad, so I wonder if he's the opposite — he's saying "oh my god, we can't do groceries," but we can. So maybe he's feeling like we have more than he's willing to say. Does that make sense?

Anne: Yes, because I have always been negative — Tony would call me Negative Nelly. My whole thing was, then I'm never disappointed when the shoe drops, or when it doesn't go the way I'd really like it to go. But I'm not disappointed, because I've already assumed it's not going to work out. Whereas I've seen you go completely "everything is great" — like the cruise — and then it falls apart and you tank, you get pissed.

Mel: The shoe actually does drop.

Anne: Because I've already assumed it's not going to.

Mel: And I also wonder — because of how much he talks about our inability to buy groceries this week — I keep thinking, are all these podcasts from my side going to be about money? What is happening? Anyway, I'm not sure, but whatever.

Anne: Well, that just happens to be the one thing where blaming somebody else isn't really about them.

Mel: Yeah. So for him, it's like — he talks about it like it is, but I don't know that he actually feels it is. I look at his mom, and how she was able to live — she'd say, "We can't do Christmas," all these things that weren't actually true. There was a year she gave me a maxi pad as my Christmas gift, because it came in the mail and that was something she could give. So I do think part of this comes down to how energy works and how it comes in. How is that different? I know I've had to do a lot of work on disappointment — I don't feel it as strongly anymore. It isn't that I don't have desires, or big expectations. I really don't have huge expectations.

Anne: Well, you've also stopped with the pushing and you're more about right timing.

Mel: I do really feel like right timing is awesome.

Anne: So if you look at it like, "well, maybe the timing isn't right for it" — that lessens the blow, doesn't it? But I do think — even when we had money issues, I always knew we were gonna be fine. I always went to worst-case scenario, and then when things worked out it was like, "oh my god, that's so great."

Mel: Right.

Anne: But yeah, it was a lot of shielding myself — because I put a shield around myself so I wouldn't be vulnerable. That was part of it too.

Mel: So I wonder, with that for you — I went through years of pretending disappointment wasn't there. And then I went through years of feeling any disappointment that came so horribly that I'd start sobbing. I used to get angry, and then anger is just covering up something else, so then I'd be sad. And I'd think, well, my life is pretty good — if that thing doesn't ever happen, I'm still okay. Now I just feel like, this is pretty alright, I've got a good life. I don't know that I need grand gestures or grand experiences like I used to think I needed — not that I wouldn't love them, I'd still like my yacht someday — it's just different now.

Mel: And I have a few friends who are always boohooing about money — "oh my god, we don't have this, we don't have that" — and I think, what is happening? That's not true, are you even looking around? So I wonder if people just say it — maybe Jimmy just says it but doesn't feel it. I think if he actually felt it was true, we'd have more struggle around it.

Anne: Well, and like you said not that long ago — I think he says it because he's worried you're gonna go ahead and spend whatever extra we have.

Mel: Yes, I do think part of him says it, and I've told him: just so you know, I don't believe you anymore when you talk about money, because you've shown me that no matter how much or how little we have, it's never "we can't buy groceries this week."

Anne: Yeah. I wonder why it's always about food.

Mel: I don't know.

Anne: Probably because that's the one thing you can influence the most — the other bills are set, you have to pay that amount. That's probably why. Interesting.

Mel: And I wonder too — he grew up, for a while when his mom got divorced and was going to school, they were on what used to be called welfare. I don't know what it's called anymore. They drank powdered milk.

Anne: Just disgusting.

Mel: So I sort of wonder if part of the food thing came from his own upbringing — that's where he noticed it most, during the time they didn't have much or were struggling to get through the month. Maybe that's why he brings it up. But yeah, it is funny. I think the point of this whole thing today was to not blame.

Anne: To look at situations and see what your part is in them. Because there is a piece of it — if you're in the situation, there's a reason for it. We've been conditioned to blame everyone but ourselves.

Mel: Right. What's the energy underneath it? And I'll say, it's hard to understand what an experience is for, or why you should take responsibility for it. I would've thought this was an experience about money. It's not. It's an experience about —

Anne: It's never about the thing. It's about your emotions. It's always emotions.

Mel: Me struggling to have a hard conversation and allow someone else to feel something I know they're not going to like feeling. So I'll just do it myself, take it on myself. All the emotional struggles.

Anne: I would do that too, but for me it was to prove my worth — I'll take it on so there's a reason for my existence.

Mel: And so those look the same, right — you're taking it on, I'm taking it on — but for different reasons. You're taking it on for that reason. I'm taking it on because I have a hard time watching someone process through something hard.

Anne: Right. But then you gotta remember — they need it, so they can grow.

Mel: And I have to remember this is for me too. So in my journaling the other day: what are you resisting? This conversation. Why? If it's here for you, it's good for you, even if you don't like it. Remembering it's here for me on purpose, so I can move. I don't want this to be the case forever — I don't want to be afraid to let someone else feel a hard thing. I'll say, it just hit me — part of my resistance is old-school "the secret" thinking. I don't want to let more of it in. There's that piece. God, but if I accept it, does that mean it gives me more? I know that's not necessarily true.

Anne: But you know what I've found working through my own stuff — I used to be afraid to talk about how I really felt, and I've noticed that once I started talking about it, it doesn't bring more in. It actually feels like such a release and a relief to admit the thing you thought you shouldn't talk about or feel. The secret was great — it was the catalyst that started everything for us. But there's a lot about it that's just not true. I had a hard time with it — this last year is when I finally figured out it's okay to talk about this stuff, so you can get some relief and unwind that ball of mess that's been created over a lifetime, or possibly a past life — who knows.

Mel: Right. But somewhere it's in there, and I know it — but when I said that, I was like, there's still a little piece of it in there. I can feel it in my chest. Still a little resistance.

Anne: Well, and I get on TikTok, and there's still a ton of people saying the same thing — "you gotta do it this way, you need to manifest, you need to say it in this way..." and for me, that's just not true. Maybe for somebody else it is. But for me, it's better to talk about the thing so there can be some relief — I'm finally acknowledging a thing I haven't wanted to acknowledge.

Mel: Right. And I will say — I trust my way. I don't recommend anyone do anything I do my way necessarily, but I trust it for me. I think however I've been going through it, whatever it is, it's right for me. And this feels like the next thing.

Anne: Right, and I think everyone needs to figure out their own way. Everyone is different, there's no one-size-fits-all. Everyone's come in here with different things to learn, different things to experience. Who knows what your higher self set up for you — what you came up with as a plan for this life. You just don't know. It's not that you don't know at all — I get little pieces, and then I'm supposed to play blind and just move along. Other people seem to have more of a set course.

Mel: I don't know — I used to think, when I'd read books put out by people who've had awakenings, trying to discover my own way by trying to do it their way and it not working — I always thought, if I'm as spiritually awake as I am, it should work like this. Or I'd look at other people and think, how are their lives so much different than mine? I've been doing this for just as long.

Anne: So then there's the "what's wrong with me?"

Mel: And that's all comparing my spiritual journey to their spiritual journey, which isn't the same journey. For a long time I'd say to Jimmy, "my way is the right way too" — because I couldn't do things his way, I thought my way was wrong. I didn't see things the same way he did, and I thought, "obviously yours is the right way." For me, it's this way. Jimmy's purpose is stability — so it makes perfect sense that he's concerned about making sure we can have groceries. There's a line to his purpose that makes it feel right for him to be concerned about that, to hold it close to the chest, to say we don't have enough — because his purpose is to keep our family stable. Which he does a great job at. That is definitely not my purpose.

Anne: Right, that's his jam. And I find it interesting, because you read tons of books — that was never really my thing. I read one, but I didn't really get into it.

Mel: I read constantly. If I wasn't reading it, I was listening to it. I wanted our daughter — we only have one daughter — when I did my hypnosis, which was definitely a turning point for me — when I asked about each of the kids, when they showed me our daughter's energy, I got a recording of it: "Glory, glory, glory." I still don't fully know what glory means, but her frequency felt so much higher than when I commune with my own higher self or my own guides.

Mel: And when we first started doing readings and got to hers, it took a long time for her to let us do her reading and touch her energy. It was probably two years after my own hypnosis, and I'd sort of forgotten until I touched her energy and thought, "oh my god, it's glory." This is her last lifetime, and she sprinkled it with one calamity after another — they showed it to me like fireworks. When I look at her life growing up, I think, Lord, give me grace — one calamity after another. She's doing it for fun. Not fun as a human, but as a soul, she came through to experience all of these emotions like fireworks, one after another after another.

Mel: If you talk to Molly — who I love, I don't know if she'll ever listen to this — I'll say to her, when something rotten happens, "look at you, sprinkling in another firework." "Oh my god, Mom, my house burned down." "Look at you, you're so precious." And obviously I don't say it in the moment — in the moment I'm a mom, and I'm feeling horrible, wanting everyone to be okay. But after that goes away, it's like, well, Molly, you just threw in another one of your fireworks. The car got stolen — another firework. The broken leg — another firework. One thing after another, it never seems to end for her. They did say things will slow down for her somewhere in her forties. But I'm like, well, you've got some time left, my friend. She's like, "God, can't I just be forty tomorrow?" I'm like, I don't know what else you've got in store, but I'm down for it — I trust you, I have faith in you, I know you're gonna be fine. She's pretty open when we talk about blame too. But it is a human experience to want to blame someone else — and it's harder to do when you know everything is energy first, and there's something in here for me. Sometimes it's hard to know what part of it is for you.

Anne: Well, if you're in it, it's for you. In the moment you can get caught up in the emotion and not handle it the best way, but when you look back, you can see it — and then you're prepared for next time. It might become less, or you get tested again, even if you think you've dropped it.

Mel: And it will come again.

Anne: There'll be something that comes about.

Mel: Well — with you talking to your son's girlfriend about the bar, the happy hour — you'd have thought that was old news, from twenty years ago.

Anne: Yeah, that really pissed me off.

Mel: So can you see what the energy was underneath that?

Anne: I told myself a story. I think it was the story that I need to do it all, I need to be the responsible one, and he gets to go do whatever he wants. There was obviously some resentment there, but it was a deeper story than just "he goes to the bar and gets to have fun and I'm stuck with the kids." I think it was about worth.

Mel: And you're not allowed to have fun — you didn't earn your right to have fun, but he earned it because he went to a job.

Anne: Yeah — and that's such bullshit, what a stupid story to tell myself, because it's — no offense to the workers out there — but staying home with your kids is a different kind of hard.

Mel: It's a hard that never gets turned off.

Anne: You don't get to say "it's five o'clock, I'm gone." It's a twenty-four-hour, seven-day-a-week gig — no vacations, even when you take a vacation.

Mel: Yes. No time — you don't even get a smoke break without the kids. I think about when I used to work, I'd take my smoke breaks, get my lunch. It's a different kind of hard. I can't imagine getting up in the morning, getting everyone ready, taking them to daycare or school, going to work, coming home at six, making dinner, giving baths — I don't know when your sheets would even get washed. I really don't know how you do it. I never had the capacity for that — I did it for a short time, but it wasn't sustainable for me. I couldn't do it. That would be so hard. And then you come home and never get time off from your kids unless you're at work, and then you might get a call that they're sick, and now what are you gonna do — you've got the guilt of calling in, all of it. It is different.

Anne: Yeah, that's part of the reason I never went back to work — because I listened to everyone else trying to figure out how they'd manage it, and I never had to. I'm super thankful for that.

Mel: And I know people who waited until their kids went to school, but they still get sick — and now you've got the guilt of not being able to do that, or sending your kid to school sick — "are you really sick enough? Maybe I'll just give you some Tylenol." It's hard either way. But there is something underneath it, and I think — living consciously is learning to recognize what's underneath the physical experience of it.

Anne: Yeah. And even if you can't do it in the moment, you can look back.

Mel: Yeah, but it does come. I've been having this experience, wondering what it is — knowing it's something, but what. And then recognizing this is for me, and then recognizing I know it's for me but I still don't want to do it — there's still some resistance there. I said to Spirit two days ago, I get the issue underneath here. I get what's under here for me.

Anne: There are days, though, when it's almost easier to just be asleep and go with it, instead of "what is that, what does that mean" all day long. It's good, but at the same time, it was so much easier to just roll with it.

Mel: No, for sure. For me too. But it is nice once you can see what's under there, because I do believe it's true that things don't just go away — they stay there until you notice them. That's a belief that would take a lot for me to unravel. I do believe things don't go away unless you notice them — at the very least, recognize what it is.

Anne: And it doesn't mean that if you recognize it, it's coming back tenfold. If you give it the recognition and call it out for what it is — as we've always been told, "not yes," which is annoying.

Mel: Never, always, never — annoying.

Anne: It's super annoying, because you kind of wish it was one-size-fits-all. And it's interesting — you can have a completely different experience than mine, but if the emotion is the same, you're still kind of getting the same thing underneath. Like jealousy could show up differently for you than it would for me, but underneath it all, it's the same emotion. I remember figuring out that jealousy gets thrown around a lot, but if you dig deeper, at least for me, there was something deeper masquerading as jealousy.

Mel: Well, I'll go back to the cruise experience for me — it was jealousy on the surface. What I experienced was jealousy, but underneath there was grief. I was sad. I was so sad I couldn't do this thing I really wanted to do. I felt like I was going to disappoint my sister. I was watching other people have an experience I wanted and had been planning for almost a year. So underneath the jealousy, it was me — the jealousy was just the top layer. Once I got through the jealousy, I found disappointment. Once I got through disappointment, I had to get through sadness and grief. And then I had to acknowledge what's true: this is an experience for you to see something from. It's for you. You don't know what's coming later in your life. It could be true that you might never have that experience — it could be true that it's just not right timing. I don't know what it is, but I agree with you — underneath the jealousy was not wanting to feel disappointed, not wanting to feel lack, not wanting to feel the sadness that was going to come from all of it.

Anne: Right, and a lot of the time it's sadness — it's covering up sadness.

Mel: I think that's true whenever I see someone angry too — it's masquerading as something else. I think of that emotional scale a lot — how you let it go down further and further. I used to think you couldn't let it go down too far, like in the manifesting world — you can't let it go down to sadness, and you definitely can't go down to shame. I remember when I felt shame, it knocked me on my knees. I was at the pizza shop, down on the floor crying. I told Spirit I wasn't going to stop scrubbing that floor until I got through it, and I scrubbed that floor for a really long time. I felt so much shame — I can't even remember what had happened — but in the early days of our awakening, I wouldn't have allowed myself to go there, because I thought that's the lowest, that's going to bring in more shame. Instead, I let myself feel it completely.

Anne: Well, that's gonna really mess up manifesting.

Mel: I felt it. It was emotionally challenging to let myself feel it — you have to let yourself feel it. Some of those emotions, I'd rather just be mad — it's easier to be mad.

Anne: Being mad is super easy. And you think about all the people — road rage incidents — I think a lot of them just need a hug, because there's something underneath it and they're hiding it by being angry. Or maybe they're supposed to be angry, I don't know. But I think a lot of it is that we've never been taught. There should be classes about dealing with your emotions. We've been taught to "suck it up, buttercup," move on, "you're building character, look at you, you're so amazing." No — you're just burying a lot of stuff that eventually comes up. And yeah, being angry is super, super easy. That's an easy — fuck yes, it really is.

Mel: And it's hard on other people around you — when people are angry around you and you're the reason for their anger, it's hard to be that. So it's easier. And I do believe in mental health, and I do believe in medication — I'm also on medication for mental health.

Anne: Mm-hmm, I am too.

Mel: So this isn't about that, but I do believe there are times I'd just rather give you a pill.

Anne: Yeah, because it's a lot easier than dealing with the emotions of some of that stuff. I went through a pretty deep bout of depression — I've always had depression and anxiety. But then figuring out that depression is when you're looking backward, and anxiety is when you're looking forward — staying present in between. I'm starting to catch myself doing that more now, when I'm looking back or looking forward, and bringing myself back to this moment. But I have to catch myself — sometimes it's easy to get sucked in. Some of the stuff I've been working through has been in the past.

Mel: It is easy to get sucked in. It's sort of easy to be... I don't know if it's easy to be "normal," but it sometimes seems like it would be easier.

Anne: And I don't even know what normal is.

Mel: Not now — but old Mel Normal just blamed everyone and said "fuck off." It wasn't that things were easy, but it was easy to handle them, because I didn't have to — it was always somebody else.

Anne: Yeah, you didn't really have to look at it. It was just "that situation, and they can go fuck themselves."

Mel: Yeah. "Get the fuck out of my life," or whatever it was. Now I find it's hard to talk to other people when they have a hard experience — and no one wants to talk to me anymore when they have a hard experience. Even my daughter said — one of our sons, his longtime girlfriend broke up with him recently, and I said something to our daughter about it, and she said, "Really? You can't see why they wouldn't come to you?"

Anne: Tony was like, "Jesus Christ, who do you think you are, Gandhi over here." I'm like, I can't help it.

Mel: I know — I'd be like, "well, what do you think is in there for you?" And I'm like, alright, alright, I hear you, I hear you. I guess people don't want to come to me when they're having a hard experience because I'm too good for them.

Anne: It's so funny, because the boys always call me first when they want to talk out an idea or a plan.

Mel: No one calls me when they're having a hard experience at all.

Anne: They call you after the fact and ask, "now what do you think was in there for you?"

Mel: Yeah. "When you're ready to talk about the reality — oh my god, Mom." No one wants to talk to me about reality at all. They're like, "Christ, I think I'm gonna go get drunk." "Well, you do know why. What are you running from? There's an emotion in there." "Oh my god, we hate her so much."

Anne: I don't know where this went, but it was a good talk.

Mel: Well, that was a nice note to end on. I don't know if we covered anything fully, but there's a lot in there. If you stuck with us, that was awfully great of you.

Anne: Congratulations, I'm impressed. Color me impressed.

Mel: I'd be impressed too. Color me impressed. Alright, we'll see you next time. Bye now.

Anne: Yeah, bye.