Change Your Brain’s GPS and Reroute Life’s Destination With Odille Remmert

 

How do our childhood experiences determine our results as adults? The answers may not be so obvious. In this 400th episode, Odille Remmert, the co-author of Change What Happened to You, highlights how we overcome generational suffering through memory editing. He breaks down how to look at the unconscious part of our brain as GPS coordinates to safely address our trauma and old beliefs. She discusses how to understand chemicals in our brains that impact emotions to overcome patterns that deepen depression and anxiety. Odille also discusses the impact of culture, religion, and historical trauma to our everyday perspectives, as well as how limiting beliefs can be changed by exploring the unconscious memories that “prove” them.

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Change Your Brain’s GPS and Reroute Life’s Destination With Odille Remmert

With my special guest, Odille, I am thrilled because this is the 400th episode. People often, when I share the numbers of the show, are a bit surprised or I don’t know if I want to say impressed, but it’s been so much time. The time flies by because of the amazing guests. It also happens to be at least the day of release. I like to preface this with the fact that we’re recording ahead of time in early November 2022 but also acknowledge that people read at different times.

If you are reading on the day of re-release, it happens to be Black Friday, a day in which people tend to look for deals. I’m excited to share that Odille, which is easy to remember her name because she said it was like Deal or No Deal, the television show. Odille has a deal, which is something we’re going to share at the end of the episode. I think if you read, you’re going to be more excited to find out what this free gift is for you.

While we were speaking before clicking record, Odille, you mentioned that you have a circus family. I would love to know some more details on this because I also have a feeling that ties into some of the topics we’re going to discuss here about family and childhood experiences. From what I know so far, you mentioned that this was during your teen years, so maybe not quite childhood. I would love to hear some background story about what being in a circus family means.

My brother, my sister and I were the first generation to grow up out of the circus. My grandparents, great grandparents and so on and my mum were all born into the circus and that was their life. They all started working from 4 and 5 years old. We were brought up outside of the circus. In going to school and that thing, but with that circus culture background, it was a show business family, so everything was around show business.

My mom had left the circus to become an actress. She married my dad, who was a singer. He didn’t have the circus background, but it was all about the show must go on and all of that thing. We were brought up fairly strictly according to where show business was like a religion. That intense dedication to this way of life, this standard of being professional.

My brother, sister and I all started working at 5 and 6 years old. You’re right, that is part of my story, how I end up doing what I’m doing now. The interesting thing, I grew up as a performer. I loved performing. I became a professional actress and singer, which I did for most of my life. I loved it, but I struggled my whole life with emotional issues. The last few years before I changed everything, Fibromyalgia, IBS and dramatic money issues, which I can share more about later.

The point I want to make is that as I changed the negative childhood memories, which is basically what we do now, I discovered that if I’d grown up in an ordinary family, so a non-showbiz family. I would never have become a performer. I would’ve become a neuroscientist, a psychologist, or something to do with the brain. I became a professional performer because that was my conditioning and it was part of my survival technique. It’s the thing. Performing and being a good performer was the thing that got the reaction. I felt safe basically, so my brain was conditioned for that until I changed it.

It’s so interesting to hear stories from people’s family lives that are vastly different from my own experience and from other experiences that I’ve heard. I don’t know if I’ve met someone who grew up in that circus environment. There are all these ideas that I have about what that’s like. I love that you’re touching upon survival and safety. I imagine that plays such a big role in the work that you do as you hinted that and the psychology of our emotions and the impact of these childhood experiences and who you become as adults. In fact, that is almost verbatim of something in your work, which is how our childhood experiences determine our results as adults. You had a quote that said, “Your childhood may be over, but your brain doesn’t know that.”

The brain is still referring to everything you learned in childhood that determined your self-image and your worldview. From birth, our experiences, the brain is recording but not like a camera records. The brain is recording experiences and try interpreting them to mean something. They form a structure of who we are and how the world works, our self-image and worldview.

Moving forward, every new experience is filtered through that structure and added to it. The brain is referring to implicit or unconscious childhood memory to tell to determine whether something, 1) Is dangerous or not. 2) How to respond automatically before we even consciously become aware of it, before the information gets through to the conscious part of the brain?

I love knowing how the brain works. It’s so fascinating to me. I’m eager to hear your thoughts on whether or not it’s useful to focus so much on our childhood to understand ourselves as adults. In other words, I imagine doing some reflecting is helpful. That’s something common in therapy. That’s something that a lot of personal development centers around.

Is there a limit to that or a maximum amount? Should we be diving deep into our childhood experiences trying to uncover it? I find myself wanting to do more of that, but then I think, “Is this useful or am I just almost trying to like reach for something that’s not useful to me as an adult?” If that makes sense.

Yes, it makes perfect sense. I don’t like to do too much archeology. I don’t like to do too much digging. The reason for that is, very briefly, thoughts are connections between neurons in the neocortex of the brain. Those connections trigger matching chemicals. Negative thoughts trigger stress chemicals like adrenaline and cortisol. Positive thoughts trigger feel-good chemicals like endorphin, serotonin and oxytocin.

As we think about the negative stuff and as we go deeper into it, every connection between neurons, as we’re focusing on that negative stuff, is pumping stress chemicals into the system. We don’t want to do that more than necessary, but a certain amount is necessary in order to change it. If you think of the implicit memories in the unconscious part of the brain as GPS coordinates, if we want to drive from where we are now to a new destination, we need to change the GPS to match that end destination.

If our childhood memories are the GPS set for, I’m not good enough and we want to end up with things that we desire. Every time we start heading towards what we desire, the GPS can turn us around and ahead us back to keep an alignment with those childhood memories. You need to go to the GPS enough to change the coordinates to match the end destination. That’s what we do with the childhood memories. It’s like dipping your toe in a hot bath to check how hot it is then you end up changing it. There’s no need to sit and soak in it.

That is helpful. There’s no need to sit and soak in it. That’s clarifying for me because I have a tendency to sit and soak because I feel like maybe if I stay here long enough, there’ll be more information. I think I tend to have challenges with enoughness. I’ve noticed this a lot. There the common feelings of not being enough. Not having enough. You mentioned the financial side of it that you struggle with. That’s a very common thing and there’s the self-esteem side of things like not being enough of whatever quality and feeling like your worthiness is tied to that.

There’s also the side of, do I have enough information? That’s something probably on the more unique side to me of craving more. I struggle to make decisions or feel clarity until I feel satisfied with enough information. How that ties into the childhood side of things is wondering, do I remember enough about my childhood to heal from it and understand myself as an adult?

That’s an excellent point and you’re not alone in that. The answer is there’s a lot. The conscious mind can only recall a tiny fraction compared to what is held in the unconscious part of the brain. For example, if you look outside and it’s raining, how do you know it’s rain? How do you know it’s wet? How do you know it’s not dangerous? How do you know if you walk out into it, you’ll get wet?

All of that information is in the unconscious part of your brain. You don’t need to consciously remember everything separately, but somewhere in your childhood, you experienced rain and learned all those things about it. The unconscious part of your brain keeps that data for future reference. The fascinating thing is that whatever you can remember, even if it was something last week.

Let’s say the earliest memory I have of feeling anxious was last week. We would work with that first. Whatever the earliest one is, we change that. Now, as we work with that, as we change it, the brain is automatically updating everything else that’s connected to it and that’s what’s so exciting. We don’t have to consciously remember everything. Anything it can’t update, we will suddenly remember it. You’ll suddenly have a memory, “When I was fourteen years old,” this pops up this memory, then we change that. Again, the brain will update whatever it can connect to that.

You may get another memory from when you were ten. That’s the fantastic thing. The unconscious part of the brain does all the heavy lifting. We may consciously never know some of the stuff that’s updated. I’ve got a wonderful example, if I can share this with you, of this thing happening. A very recent example.

 

When I was writing our book in the first chapter, I talked about sitting in my car and my mobile phone rang and it was on the passenger seat next to me. I had a clear memory of the scene, visual memory. I can remember the cell phone on the passenger seat on my right-hand side ringing. I described the scene, wrote it, edited it, reread it, and all of that.

At some point, towards the end, when I was finally doing a proofread, I thought, “It couldn’t have been on my right,” because I was in England. The driver’s side is on the right and the passenger seat is on the left. It had to have been on the left, but my memory was so clear with it being on my right. What had happened there was I’d been living in America for five years now, so my brain had updated that one piece. That one piece of data. It updated it and that’s happening all the time. As we change certain memories, whether from now to childhood, the others will update automatically.

That is helpful. I love that metaphor. That’s something else I wanted to speak with you about is changing things like limiting beliefs by changing the unconscious memories that prove them. This is something that I know you specialize in. I am enjoying that perspective of our memories proving these limiting beliefs we have about ourselves and our lives. How can we update those thoughts to be more in alignment with how we want to be?

Not being good enough is a very common one. A lot of us have that and using that as an example. It’s when I changed in myself. I was doing all of the affirmations and the visualization and all of that and Louise Hay, mirror work, all of the things. I am worthy, I am wonderful and all of that. As I was doing that consciously, the unconscious part of my brain was referring to the childhood memories that proved I was not good enough.

I could keep going for the rest of my life with those affirmations, but the unconscious part of the brain is the one running the show. As I went about my life, a classic one for me was asking to be paid as I went to ask to be paid, for example, for something I’d done. My brain would refer to the fact that I don’t deserve it and that it’s dangerous to ask anything. It would put pump stress chemicals into my system and I would feel this cringiness at the thought of being asked to be paid for something I’d done.

I’m curious how you recognize that because that makes sense to me as you’re sharing it. Despite all of the work I’ve done and reflecting, as I’ve mentioned. There are still elements I don’t understand. I don’t know if it’s a lack of memory about feeling certain ways because, as an adult, I feel like, “This is obvious. I shouldn’t feel this way,” but I don’t have a direct memory of where those ideas got lodged inside me. How do we tap back into that or if it’s not necessary to remember it because it’s so unconscious, how do we do the work on something that we don’t even know where to locate in our past?

First of all, we have three main detective questions that we use. The first is, how do I know? How do I know this is a problem? You could also ask, what’s the worst thing about this? The first money thing that I worked on my question to myself, “How do I know I have a money problem?” The answer to that for me was I didn’t have enough money to pay my bills. That was a lifelong pattern.

The second question is, how does that feel? It’ll be different for different people. It felt like they wanted something of me and I didn’t have it to give them. If I had it, I wanted to give it to them. I just don’t have it. It was an intense gut-wrenching feeling. The third question is, where did you feel that feeling in your childhood? Very importantly, it may be a different topic, but it’ll be the same feeling. That’s the key. For me, it was about expectations. It had nothing to do with money.

They want me to be something and I can’t be it. That was the same feeling. It was my entire childhood. That’s why it can be difficult to find childhood memories. That’s one of the reasons. It’s a different topic. The second reason is that we mostly look for trauma or something obviously bad, but there are a range of references. It can be something like the loss of a pet or moving house, moving schools, bullying and school, that thing. It could be my parents were very stressed and I was picking up the anxiety. It can be the silent treatment. There are so many options for that. Parents divorcing and that thing and misunderstandings.

In addition to all of that, it could be good memories. For example, addiction is very often supported by good memories as well as the negative memories. An example is I worked with someone who wanted to stop smoking. We changed all the bad memories from her childhood then I asked her, “Do you have any good memories about smoking?” She didn’t have any earlier ones, but her and her husband were some of her favorite memories. I think she had a daughter. They would stand outside the back door smoking and drinking soda. That was a lovely time. There was a connection between them and all of that.

I then asked her what it reminded her of. Did she have any good memories that connected at all to the smell of cigarettes or seeing cigarettes or anything like that? She had memories of her grandfather, who she would sit on the steps of the house next to her grandfather when she was a child and he would smoke. He was a complete contrast to her father. She felt safe with him. She had a close relationship with him.

Her brain had made a connection between the smell of cigarettes and feeling safe and loved. We changed that memory to where now, instead of smoking, they’re sitting on the steps. I also asked her what some of her favorite smells and she mentioned a few, including the ocean. I said, “The house is now on the beachfront and she’s sitting on the steps with her grandfather.”

We kept all the love and connection and all the good stuff. We added in the smell of the sea, took the cigarettes out, and put glasses of ice water. There’s the tinkling of the ice and the feeling of the ice-cold water. Her brain connected those sensations with love and connection, and then she didn’t want to smoke anymore.

What a great example editing memories. One thing you like to touch upon is overcoming generational suffering through memory editing. I was curious to hear about that. Does this example you gave tie into generational suffering or is there another level to understanding what that means?

There’s another level. That was her experience with her grandfather. I wanted to mention one more thing before we move on to the generational stuff, which is the other question you can ask yourself if you can’t think of any negative childhood memories. Some people say, “I had a good childhood. I can’t think of anything bad that happened to me, but I’m still not happy with my life now.” One of the questions I ask is, how were you punished when you did something wrong?

It’s important to understand the separation of the conscious and the unconscious. The conscious mind’s logic reason can make sense of things and has a sense of time and understanding, whereas the brain’s unconscious part is more like a dog. It is responding in the moment. Everything’s happening now. There’s no sense of time and no ability to use logic or reason. It’s experienced now.

The conscious mind can make sense of things, has a sense of time, and understands. The unconscious mind is more like a dog and responds in the moment. Click To Tweet

As your brain refers to the childhood stuff, it’s happening now. When we are punished, the conscious mind may well understand. I go, “I know I was punished because I was naughty and I did this. I was warned and I didn’t listen and all that.” The unconscious part of the brain cannot understand that. The unconscious part of the brain has interpreted it who knows how but in some way, it’s taken it to mean something about who I am and how the world works.

I always say, “Change it so that you are never punished. Instead of punishment, your parents sat you down and explained things kindly, compassionately, nicely, and clearly. On top of that, helped you make a strategic plan for what to do next time. Instead of doing that, I tell you what? How about next time, let’s put a plan in place so that you can make a different decision.” That thing, number one. That’s the stepping stone. The final memory is that you never did anything wrong. Having those references for your brain to refer to support an entirely different and much more empowering self-image and worldview that will have a knock-on effect on everything else.

That could be transformational to go through that exercise. Is it something that you can do on your own or do you recommend doing this type of work with a therapist? Do you consider yourself a coach? How do you refer to your profession?

I think of myself as a mindset coach specializing in using neuroscience to change negative childhood memories and gain control of brain chemistry. You can do it yourself. What we do suggest is not attempting to address trauma on your own because that can be overwhelming. Get help with any trauma memories. Trauma is different for different people. The gauge to use is that when you think of negative memory, the negative emotions are an eight on a scale of 0 to 10. Where zero can’t feel anything. Ten, it’s very strong. If it’s an eight or higher, reach out for help with that one. The process itself, you can use. It’s a DIY thing. You can do it yourself.

Do not attempt to address trauma alone because that can be overwhelming. Get help with it because trauma can be different for different people. Click To Tweet

Odille, I appreciate the steps you give because you articulate them in a way that invokes confidence in working through these things. It’s so wonderful to hear that you can do that in many cases on your own. I think that’s so empowering, but certainly, the power of working with a coach is something I can attest to and a therapist, of course. It’s an important reminder for us that we don’t have to do this work alone and sometimes we shouldn’t because it’s tricky.

Childhood trauma can be dangerous. Trauma in general. It’s called trauma for a reason. We react to it in so many different ways. I’m curious, going back to the generational suffering, because sometimes it’s not our own trauma that we’re dealing with. It’s our family’s trauma on top of it. When you talk about generational suffering, does this tie into epigenetics? How are things passed down through us that we never even experienced ourselves? Are these things that we’re witnessing? How do you define generational suffering?

It’s all of the above. Epigenetics has a role and there’s quite a lot of stuff. I have quite a lot of research on that but also the knock-on effect. If you imagine if our parents and grandparents had been raised differently. Let’s say my grandmother, my mother’s mother, was raised with kindness and compassion. She was born to two people who were in love, emotionally intelligent, and financially stable.

It was a safe environment to grow up. She grew up feeling loved and safe. That child would then grow into a teenager who feels loved, safe, confident, has people skills, and does well in school and everything. You can imagine the woman she would’ve grown into and the mother she would’ve been to my mother.

My mother grew up being treated the same thing and so on. That’s the generational hand-me-downs or heirlooms that we work with. We use a technique called generational childhood memory transformation. We all feel some or most of us feel some resistance at first to changing our parents. Especially where a parent has been particularly there’s a lot of damage or hurt. The end result you want to get to is that you can change whatever you want.

You make the parent as ideal as you can because that’s empowering and there are no people in your brain. There aren’t even any pictures or sounds in the brain or movies. It’s all neurons, nerve cells connecting and chemicals. That’s all that’s there. What originally happened is now not happening anymore, but the brain and the body is reliving it because those neurons are connecting and pumping stress chemicals into the system.

That’s all that’s happening now. You want to be the boss of your brain and you decide what your parents were like. You can give that little you, that child in you. You can grant all their wishes and give them the most perfect childhood. Understanding all that consciously is important and it is the first step, but there can still be resistance. A person says, “I can’t imagine my father differently. He was like that. He was horrible and I can’t imagine him differently or I can’t imagine him being affectionate.”

The answer to that is, can you imagine if he had grown up differently? If he’d had the perfect childhood and felt safe and loved all his life and had the support of his parents and enthusiasm and grown up with abundance and all of that? Can you imagine the kind of person he would’ve been and the father he would’ve been? Sometimes that works. Sometimes people still say, “No, I can’t imagine that because his parents were so horrible.” You go, “Now, can you imagine if they’d grown up differently?”

Until you reach a point where you go, “I can imagine that,” then you work forward. I do a generational childhood memory transformation meditation, where I take you through each, so the maternal grandmother, paternal grandfather and the mother, then the paternal grandmother, grandfather and father. Can you imagine what your life would’ve been? We do that. That’s before you get to culture and religion, the country you grew up in, and the heritage that comes from many generations.

If you’re talking about slavery and other persecution and the Holocaust, there’s a lot of civil war. There’s a lot of historical trauma that continues to contribute to who we are now to our self-image, worldview, and epigenetics. Also, we are hearing it from those who raise us. We’re seeing it demonstrated. We are reading about it. This is a very important piece as well. As we are told, the brain forms a memory, especially if there’s a lot of emotion.

Even if we weren’t there, the unconscious part of the brain still experiences it as if we were there if there’s a lot of emotion. As we’re told about the terrible suffering of an ancestor or a grandparent or a parent, especially as children, the brain forms those memories. While we consciously know we weren’t there, the unconscious part of the brain is behaving as if we were and putting the same chemicals into the system. Those kinds of things we can change.

 

It’s interesting to hear you share that because I have a few experiences of hearing things secondhand but feeling as if I was there. These were traumatic things that thinking about them. I can feel my body tense up. I feel like my brain remembers it. I know consciously that I wasn’t there, but I can sense it in a way as if I was. Hearing you share that is affirming but also. I feel a bit curious. What else have I been told?

I’m so glad you brought up the impact of culture and religion and the historical suffering because there’s so much of that, depending on how I suppose we are in touch and where we are with ourselves. On that same note, do you think people can feel things about the same? It’s that we have different levels of self-awareness. We might be taking things in but not noticing that because we’ve built up such like a buffer, an ability to ignore the tough emotions I suppose.

What makes the difference is what references we have. Not everyone experiences things in the same way. You could have several people experience the same event, but each one will experience it according to their own childhood references. One person may suffer PTSD from it. Another person may be upset by it but get over it over time and be able to heal. Another person may not impact them much at all. That’s all going to depend on each individual’s existing self-image and worldview created by their implicit childhood memories.

That’s why not everyone who experiences the same traumatic event will develop PTSD. Some will and some won’t. It’s the childhood that makes the difference. In addition to that, when you hear something, so let’s say you watch the news. One person will be very affected by it and perhaps have nightmares. Another person may be upset by it and get over it. Another person may not even see it as a bad thing necessary.

Not everyone who experiences a traumatic event will develop PTSD. It's childhood that makes the difference. Click To Tweet

They may go, “It’s nothing to do with me.” That’s about the references. As we are watching something or reading something or hearing something, for example, what you were saying, the things that affected you. Your brain was referring to something that told you what it meant. Before you even become consciously aware of it, it has already pumped stress chemicals into your system, then your conscious mind catches up and goes, “This is upsetting because.” Does that make sense?

That makes so much sense and yet, at the same time, I sit here wondering, how do we navigate life with everybody having completely different views of the same thing? I feel as human beings, there’s a tendency to assume that other people think the same way that we do. The last few years of my life, I feel like I’ve had a shocking realization of how differently I look at things and think about them and process them.

If we’re all walking around thinking about things, maybe not completely differently. Perhaps like there are different frames of reference or categories. We can say, “One person’s probably going to have this type of thought. Another person’s going to have this type of thought.” We can group ourselves into different ways of how we might perceive things.

Even if we think relatively similar to somebody else, all those nuances are still based on our childhood experiences. It explains why we struggle so much in romantically, professionally, friendship and family relationships. We’re all looking at things through a different lenses. How do we get along and manage as a society does? Does that explain why society sometimes feels so chaotic?

Yes. When you think of all the people, everybody anyway, but certainly pulling out a little bit of our perception or perspective rather. People running businesses, running countries, running cities, and so on, each individual sees things through their own structure of who they are and how the world works. Each one is determined or completely knows that’s how it is and everybody sees the same thing. They’re just not doing what they should be doing. Nobody knows. There’s that and in addition to that, you’ve got all of the interactions. Somebody says something, it goes through this filter to my childhood and this is what it means.

For example, if people say, “If somebody if I smile at someone and they don’t smile back, that’s rude.” People think that. I used to think that very much so, but in some cultures, smiling is weird, especially at people you don’t know. You don’t do it. They think there’s something wrong with you. Saying certain things, I know people have said, “They said this to me and that was mean or that was rude.”

If they’d said it in another language that you didn’t understand, there wouldn’t be any reaction. You wouldn’t have any reaction because it wouldn’t mean anything. It’s the meaning we have for things, but it’s the automatic, unconscious meaning. That is having an impact. It’s not the conscious mind. The conscious mind is like the dog owner. The unconscious part of the brain is like this massive dog that’s strong and it can’t understand when you explain things to it.

It takes training and conditioning. You can only do that when you understand that it’s a dog and it doesn’t understand the logical reason. You can’t explain things to it because otherwise, you’re trying to communicate on a level that you can’t. I don’t know if you’ve seen that video that went viral. I can’t remember the dog’s name. He chased the Fenton. That’s the unconscious part of the brain. The thing is to catch Fenton before he spots the deer before he starts showing it. As he starts looking at the deer, “Fenton, come,” but to wait until he is running, it’s too late. That’s what happens with our brains.

This is the other key piece here. Stress chemicals like adrenaline and cortisol are stronger than feel-good chemicals. That’s why it’s easier to feel bad than to feel good. Once Fenton’s already running, that is the equivalent of we are already triggered. I’m already feeling frustrated, angry, frightened, anxious or whatever that is, betrayed. By then, you got to wait until Fenton comes back on his own. You got to do whatever you can to feel better now because you can’t un-ring that bell.

The key is to catch it early, which means this is what we call zero tolerance. As soon as I start to notice I’m not feeling good, as soon as I start to feel slightly triggered, that’s when to catch yourself and answer it. It’s not that you’re pushing it away or ignoring it. You answer the issue. Let’s say, for example, think, “I don’t know what I’m going to do about this. I’m so worried about this.” Let me answer that. What are my options or don’t worry, it’ll be okay. We don’t know yet. As if you are answering someone else. As if you’ve got a child in the room with you and that child is expressing whatever that is. You answer it reassuringly and change your focus to something.

In other words, connecting a different pattern of neurons that’s going to trigger feel-good chemicals. Thinking of your favorite color, imagining being surrounded by it and thinking of something you’re looking forward to. Imagine hugging someone you love, that thing, to change your chemical state before the level of stress chemicals gets too high, where if Fenton’s gone.

First, I love the Fenton reference. For anyone who doesn’t know what we’re talking about, I’ll link to that. I can’t wait to re-watch that video. I think I saw a reference and it’s at least ten years old and yet, look at the impact it has. It’s such a great example because, for anyone that resonates with that video, you can reference that in your head when you’re going through an example like you gave us. That’s helpful.

Those visual cues, even auditory cues, for us to say, “What do I need now?” I think a lot of us have a tendency to panic in those moments. They’re scary and overwhelming. Many of us have not had these resources at our fingertips. Even when we do, it’s still challenging. It’s not like it automatically gets easy because we know what to do. We still have to practice it. Having something to go to feels supportive.

One of the things to bear in mind as well is this is all physiological. This is not airy-fairy. There are physical things happening, which I equated to if you wanted to run a marathon and never run before. You wouldn’t be able to get off the couch and run. You would probably run for 30 seconds to a minute and feel it.

You’d need to do a bit each day and build up. As you run over a period of time, your muscles change. Your body changes physically. You build the stamina, your muscles and so on. This is the same. Every time you practice whatever it is that works for you, so you can use mindfulness and use music. Listening to your favorite music. Walk around the block listening to an uplifting audiobook or whatever.

Now we teach a little exercise called the beginner’s exercise. It’s imagine being surrounded by your favorite color and hugging something or someone you love or imagine hugging yourself as a child or you can look for five things to be grateful for. Whatever will make those kinds of neuro connections to produce feel-good chemicals. As you do that when you don’t need it, that’s the key. As you would run when you don’t need to run a marathon to build up the stamina or if you were going to play a musical instrument, you wouldn’t wait until the night of the concert before picking.

You’d have to practice leading when you don’t have to perform it. When you need it, you are already conditioned. You’ve already developed that skill. Practicing those feel-good exercises, whatever they look like for you, whatever works for you when you’re not triggered, when you’re feeling good. That’s when you build your skill and the habit and you condition your brain and body to produce lower levels of stress, chemicals, higher levels, feel-good chemicals and all that. When you’re in a situation that is triggering, you’ve already got that skill. You’ve already developed it.

When you're not triggered or feeling good, you condition your brain and body to produce lower levels of stress chemicals and higher levels of feel-good chemicals. Click To Tweet

I appreciate the way that you articulate these things and put them into perspective. It’s very soothing listening to you. I’m so grateful for the work that you’re doing and for the time you’ve spent with me and the readers. You’ve referenced a few times, we. As we, your husband?

Yes, indeed. My husband, Steve Remmert, who also co-authored the book. We met in February 2017 and got married in August. We developed this method together. We’d each separately made a lot of changes using some of these techniques then the rest we developed together. He does one-to-one sessions. I do group work and talks and interviews and so on.

If you go to your website, there are different options for how to work with each of you. I would love to hear more about the book because I believe that ties into the free gift we teased at the beginning.

Yes, indeed. The book is called Change What Happened to You: How to Use Neuroscience to Get the Life You Want by Changing Your Negative Childhood Memories. It’s available on Amazon and Audible and everywhere books are sold. I’d love to offer your audience a free eBook copy of the book. It’s the full book, just a PDF version and everything you need in order to make these changes is in the book. Including changing your own brain chemistry. The little brain chemistry exercises. There are references to all the science for those who are interested in the neuroscience behind those things.

It’s got examples and the step by step of how to do it and troubleshooting. What to do when you can’t find any memories, you can’t remember anything, or you’ve got too many memories and you’re feeling overwhelmed or something’s not changing. There are all of those troubleshooting things there and frequently asked questions at the back.

That is so incredibly generous of you to offer that up. What an amazing tool to have after reading a conversation like this, to know that you could go do something to take advantage of the free offer. This is such great timing. This happens to be coming out on Black Friday, where people are in that mentality.

This is a time of year around when this episode releases that a lot of people are struggling. The holidays bring up so many emotions. The day before this release is Thanksgiving and many people associate that with family or even trauma. There’s a lot of historical trauma tied into that holiday and that triggers some people. They’re feeling emotional and frustrated.

All these emotions get brought to the surface in November, December and even January and February. It’s like there’s this chunk of 3 to 4 months where a lot of people struggle. Thank you for offering this to someone as a tool that they can turn to, to start to figure out their path forward towards that change that they want to make.

You are so very welcome. Thank you for the opportunity to share all of this. My passion is making sure that people have the information because if they have the information, then they have the choice of whether they use it or not or whatever. I am passionate that people need to at least know about it and they’re empowered to make a choice.

Knowing about it and also having the next step forward, which could be picking up a free copy of a book and sitting down to read it. Knowing that it’s there when you’re struggling and you’re trying to figure out what to do because, as you mentioned, the financial side of things can feel tough, especially if you’re not sure if something’s going to work.

It’s hard to spend money on it. I think it’s such a wonderful thing because maybe somebody reads the book then decides they want to do group coaching with you, they want to do one-on-one or tune into other resources that you have. I’ll link to your website as well so that somebody can explore more of what you’re doing beyond the book. Listening to this, I feel so comforted having this conversation with you, hearing how you frame things. You do it in a way that feels simple so that I can address the complex things. That is a beautiful talent that you have.

Thank you very much. It’s something I love doing with passion and I love answering questions. There’s no question that I won’t answer. There may be some I don’t know the answer to and I’ll just say, “I’m sorry, I don’t know the answer to that,” but there’s nothing that would offend or anything like that. We’ve had some people say or comment rather on posts, “This is lying to yourself. This is gaslighting yourself.”

I so understand that comment. The answer is, it’s the difference between the conscious and the unconscious. When we watch a movie, the brain and body go into the same state as if we’re in physical danger. The only thing stopping us from running screaming into the street is that the conscious mind knows it’s just a movie, but the unconscious part of the brain is putting the body into that, putting stress and chemicals in, increasing heart rate and behaving as if when physical danger.

 

When we watch a movie, we’re allowing the unconscious part of the brain and the body to believe what we are watching for the experience of it while we still consciously know what is happening. We do the same with memories. We’re changing the unconscious reference. We still consciously know what happened, so we’re changing implicit memory to explicit memory.

Changing the negative memories from something that proves who I am and how the world works to something that happened, then we are replacing that implicit memory with something with empowering evidence that proves the self-image and worldview and beliefs that I want to have now moving forward. The same thing with the analogy of the GPS.

When you are in Chicago and you want to drive to LA and you change the GPS. You’re not lying to yourself. You’re not in LA now. That’s true, but you’re changing the GPS because that’s where you are going. The GPS will accept those new coordinates and guide you to LA. While you, as the driver, will still remember, “I know I’m in Chicago. I know I was somewhere else before, but now I’m heading toward LA.”

That’s so beneficial and, again, empowering to say, “This is what’s going on and I’m on my way to that change,” and like driving, which is something I talk a lot about on this show because I do it a lot. It can take a while, but I love the driving metaphor because, from my firsthand experience, sometimes, when I get in the car to do one of my long road trips, I have this overwhelming sense of, “I’m about to drive a long distance. This is going to take a while.” Once I get there, I have a feeling of, “That felt like it went by fast.”

It’s amazing how much your perspective on time shifts as you do something and that state you go from at the beginning to when you’ve finished something. I think that’s true of a lot of challenging and overwhelming things is getting into the car is the first step but one of the most important steps because that’s often the hardest part, is just saying that you’re going to go do something and starting.

Once you have that momentum, it goes by faster to the point where you look back and say, “That wasn’t that hard and it didn’t take that long. Now I’ve achieved this.” Thank you for sharing that. That resonates with me. Your passion came through in our conversation. The ease in which you address this. You answered my questions that somehow, in my brain, I’m wondering, “Do these make sense?” You listen and understand and you have approached everything with me with so much grace. I’m deeply grateful for the work that you do and the time that you’ve shared with me and the readers.

Thank you so much, Whitney. I’m so grateful for you and the platform you’re providing for. Not just this interview but all the others that you’ve done and continue to do to help empower people. There are so many pieces that contribute to each person’s well-being and progress and reaching those destinations they want to get to. I admire the work you are doing as well.

Thank you so much. I am going to go watch right now to have a nice little hit of dopamine from that. I hope it’s as funny as I remember. Even if it isn’t, it’s a delightful reference to what we discussed. Thank you again to both you, Odille and the readers. I’ll be back with another episode next time.

 

 Important Links

• Odille Remmert
• Change What Happened to You: How to Use Neuroscience to Get the Life You Want by Changing Your Negative Childhood Memories
• Amazon – Change What Happened to You: How to Use Neuroscience to Get The Life You Want by Changing Your Negative Childhood Memories
• Audible – Change What Happened to You: How to Use Neuroscience to Get The Life You Want by Changing Your Negative Childhood Memories
• eBook – Free gift
• Facebook: https://www.Facebook.com/groups/theremmertmethod
• Twitter: https://Twitter.com/RemmertMethod
• Instagram: https://www.Instagram.com/odilleremmert

 

About Odille Remmert

Odille is an empowerment coach, author, and inspirational speaker, specializing in subconscious reprogramming, specifically around emotions and limiting subconscious beliefs. Having dramatically turned her own life around – personally, professionally, and financially, Odille has worked with clients, worldwide, helping them to do the same.

The work Odille has done with her husband, Steve Remmert, has culminated in a powerful new modality: The Remmert Method, that creates deep and permanent change in the lives of all who use it.