Cheating, Addiction and Intimate Tattoos - Magic Mailbag Q&A 💌
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Hi, I'm Jessica Porter and welcome back to Sleep Magic, a podcast where I help you find the magic of your own mind, helping you to sleep better and live better.

Welcome, everyone. This is our second mailbag episode, which is exciting. As I said last month, I get questions from you guys through Spotify and Supercast, but the truth is it's hard to address some of them in the actual hypnosis, the normal episode, so I'm glad we have this one. Before we get started, let's hear a quick word from our sponsors who make this free content possible.

Hey everyone, it's me, Jessica. I'm here to extend a warm welcome to any new listeners we might have here. This is where you can come after a long day, get a little selfish and relax. I'm also excited to let you know that we're offering a special one-month free trial of Sleep Magic Premium to celebrate our new listeners and thank those of you who've been with us for a while.

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I'll see you over there at Sleep Magic Premium. So you guys have been sending in some questions. If you have any questions that come up during this episode, you can send them to us. I'll give you instructions at the end of it. And your questions this month have been really interesting. So I look forward to diving in and seeing if I can give my thoughts and perspectives on some of your issues or just entertain. Who knows?

Uh, just so before we get started, I want to make clear that if you tend to fall asleep listening to my voice, then go for it. You know, you can listen to this later if you want. Also, this episode may not be entirely suitable for children. I will definitely keep my language clean, but some of these questions are about intimate relationships. So just a heads up.

Finally, these are just my thoughts and perspectives. I'm a hypnotherapist, so I look at things from a certain angle, but please get advice from all different sources if you need it. Okay, great. Here we go. Question number one from Janice. My new boyfriend of a month has a tattoo of his ex's name in a pretty intimate place. How do I bring it up?

It really, really bothers me. I know people have a past, but I don't want it to be so in my face. Wow, interesting question and written very interestingly. Okay, so there's a couple ways of handling this. First of all, you say you've only been together a month. So in a very real way, you may not actually know each other.

Now, maybe you met this person at work and you've known him for years or he's an old friend who's become a boyfriend. I don't know. But if you've just met and you only have a month's worth of information on this person, that's not a lot. And there's so much more to be revealed. So I just want to put that in perspective. Like our characters are revealed over time and only over time. It's only over time that you can see somebody's patterns.

You can see what they're made of under pressure or in certain circumstances. So, you know, you guys are already getting to know each other in this intimate way, but there's so much information coming so quickly. And this is just one piece of information in this big sort of unknown. So I just want to throw that out there at first. Second, you don't really make it clear here why it bothers you. I mean, I can assume that.

why it bothers you, but there's a couple ways it could bug you. And I want to address one of them specifically. So if saying this other person's name is eliciting feelings of jealousy or possessiveness or resentment, whether it's at him or at her, I remember being in a situation similar to this in my 20s where I was dating a guy who

And we were living in community at the time where someone whom he had been dating was still in the community. So I was confronted with her on a regular basis. Now, I quite liked her as a person. I had no problem with her. If anything, I felt inadequate compared to her, etc. But the point is, he was in this new phase with me and there was this old phase sort of lurking.

And I remember reading a book that addressed this issue specifically. And it was by Marianne Williamson, who recently will be known as someone who's run for president, but made her name in the world as a spiritual teacher, someone who used a text called The Course in Miracles and sort of brought it to the mainstream.

Anyway, she wrote a book that was really famous called A Return to Love. And I can't remember if it was in this one or another one called A Woman's Worth, but she speaks specifically to this subject. And she said, think of any woman who has loved the man you love as a sister. Like you've both loved the same person. That means you have a lot in common. And if you can embrace that commonality,

instead of feeling possessive or rejecting of yourself or her, that is letting love do what love does, which is connect and express. And love itself isn't jealous. Now,

When we are physically aroused by somebody, when we're intimate with somebody, it can kick up hormones that cause us to feel very possessive and jealous. But as love matures in a relationship,

It's only really healthy if it allows that person to be completely who they are, including their past and including everyone they've loved or who has ever loved them. Love is a big, big picture that includes everyone, ultimately. Unconditional love is a force that can move through all of us, connecting all of us. So

I know it's early days and it may feel difficult to make that leap, but I just want to throw out that idea to you that any woman who's loved a man you love or vice versa, mess with the genders in any way you want to, is your sister. And that really, really helped. That really helped me at the time. I hope it helps you now. And yeah, we're all in this modern world going to be with people who have been with people. It's very rare that that's not the case.

So we all need to learn how to move from love and less from ego. Understanding the ego gets involved in almost everything. Great. Thank you for that question, Janice. I hope I offered some perspective. Okay. Next question from Jen.

Hey Jessica, I'm having an existential crisis, lol. Can you give me some pearls of wisdom? I was brought up very religious. You know, the almost culty kind. I won't tell you which group, it's a relatively small community. I've grown up with shame, believing all my wants and desires will send me to hell. I've now left the church and trying to learn who I am outside of religion. How do I release all the shame that I'm struggling with? I feel like everything I do is evil and selfish.

I've started a new relationship and it's sending me in a spin. My boyfriend has a really good relationship with God and has no shame about his sexuality, about the way he dresses, or the thoughts he has. All things I struggle with. How do I deal with these feelings and navigate life and my relationship now that there's no one telling me what to do? It's like I don't know what's right and wrong anymore. Help. Well, this is very, very interesting, Jen.

And as much as your situation is quite particular, there's a universal aspect to it that everyone can understand. Let me tell you what I mean. So hypnosis is about the messages and belief systems that get into our subconscious mind. It's about the programming that we all received generally as children.

because we have no defenses against this programming for the first several years of our life. And all of us are programmed by our parents, our environments, our friends, when we're little. At a certain point, we develop sort of a protective mechanism around those belief systems. In hypnosis, we call it the critical faculty.

And it's the part of us that when someone says, hey, let's go do this, and that doesn't jive with your own belief system, you say no. The critical faculty defends or rejects. If a Republican says, hey, vote for a Republican to a Democrat, the Democrat automatically says no, because it doesn't jive with their own internal belief system and vice versa, meaning a Democrat couldn't convince a Republican to vote Democrat. So,

We all enter our adulthoods or really later childhood with a bunch of belief systems that other people put in there because we had no defense against them. And then we develop a critical faculty and whether those belief systems work for us or not, we defend them because they're just in there and they're happening on a subconscious level that we don't feel like we have any connection to. Now,

The definition of hypnosis is the bypass of the critical faculty and the establishment of selected thinking in the subconscious mind. Now, what that means is that we're getting past that defense system. Just by relaxing the body and relaxing the mind, you can allow new belief systems to get in. Now, you'll only let in belief systems that you want.

I can't actually hypnotize somebody into doing something or thinking something that they don't want to do or think. However, the belief systems that got in when we were young, young children, we weren't consenting to them necessarily. So the point is, you grew up in an environment with parents who had a set of belief systems, and without your consent or understanding, their belief systems sort of just oozed into you.

That's what happens. And it happens to all of us. Now, behind your parents was also a religious set of concepts and ideas. And that too moved through them into you. So this stuff is deep. It's deep, like body level. And I'm not surprised that

seeing your boyfriend behave in a different way around his spirituality and his sexuality, etc., kind of triggers you because it's so opposed to what's deep in your subconscious mind. But it's not a hopeless situation at all. I think it just requires active hypnosis in the new direction because, as we said, hypnosis is the bypass of the critical faculty, so you do have a tool to get in there and change things.

One of the great things about your situation, Jen, is that you chose a guy who has a healthy relationship to himself, his body, and his spirituality. That's a good sign. That means you're sort of aiming at that. So check that box off. Like your subconscious mind wants to feel better about all these things. Great sign. Second,

This will require, I believe, like some modeling from other people who have managed to help themselves get out of situations that were mentally and psychologically tricky. So I encourage you to read books about people who have gotten out of strict religious households or cult situations. But finally, there are a lot of belief systems in this world. There are a lot of religions in this world that

There's a lot of ways human beings understand and interpret and manage being alive. And they can't all be exactly right. So for me, I always look to nature. Nature's here. We are in it. We depend on it. And that's true of every person in every religion on earth. And when I study nature,

And I study the laws of nature. These aren't man's laws. These are natural. I can feel grounded in my body.

I can start to see metaphors occurring in nature, learn lessons from nature about growth and blooming and development. Nature doesn't seem to shame itself. It has a healthy relationship to its interconnectedness, to life and death. And I just think it's a really helpful template that we can all fall back on when in doubt.

about the ideas that other humans develop. Ideas are not bad, and I'm a firm believer that a little religion is a good thing. I mean, there's something to be said for a set of values and behaviors that keep us in our own integrity and keep us being of service to the whole. But

You know, humans tend to double down on their ideas, triple down on their ideas, like to feel control from their ideas. And that's when things get tricky. So I encourage you to get into relationship with your own subconscious mind.

Figure out what were the belief systems that you'd picked up, whether you liked it or not. And you have the opportunity now through looking at that, maybe some therapy, doing hypnosis, maybe some body work, talking to your boyfriend, learning from other people, to take back your own subconscious mind. And that's everybody's job, whether we come from a religious context or just a family that is dysfunctional.

We all are charged with knowing our deepest selves so we can bring that self, which is the most powerful part of who we are, to the table. That's when life gets really fun and interesting instead of just like all of us pinging around in reaction to one another's ideas. I hope that helps. Okay, next from Sarah. I've got a little dilemma going on.

My friend, let's call him Ben, and I have been friends since college. He's a guy, I'm a gay woman, we get on great and hang out often. Now, at the end of the year, Ben's getting married. I love the girl, let's call her Rachel. She's sweet, but I don't know her so well. She seems really caring and seems to help Ben be a better person. He can be a bit of a party boy. Not long ago, I went to Ben's bachelor party as one of the guys.

It was everything you'd expect, and we ended up at a strip club. But things got weird towards the end of the night. Ben started getting too friendly with the girl at the bar. Next I know, they disappeared, and all Ben's friends are laughing about how they were hooking up. When I see Ben half an hour later, he says nothing happened. But as I keep asking, I know he's lying, and he just told me to leave it. So here's my question. Do I let Rachel marry Ben knowing he cheated on her? Is it none of my business?

What do I do? Do I honor girl code? Or do I leave it and pretend nothing ever happened? Oh, Sarah, I feel for you. This is not an easy situation, and I've actually been in your position.

And that's where we'll leave it for today's free version of the mailbag episode. If you want to unlock the extended version of this episode, become a subscriber and join us over on Team Magic in just two taps on Apple Podcasts or visit sleepmagic.supercast.com.

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If you have questions you'd like me to respond to in the next mailbag, please send them to hello at sleepmagic.fm or use the Ask Me Anything feature on the Supercast link in the show notes. And remember, you can ask me anything, whether it's about a personal issue, something you're curious about, or just a life question. I'm here to share my thoughts, opinions, experiences, and I look forward to hearing from you.

Don't forget to leave a review or a comment wherever you listen to this show to let me know what you think of the episode. Your feedback is invaluable. Okay, I won't keep you any longer. Some of you might be ready to drift off. Sleep well and have a great night.