Chapter 1: What betrayal led to a breakdown in the guest's life?
This is the story about how a certain betrayal almost landed me in the loony bin. I don't even know how to start this. I don't know how to talk to you. Like, I've been gone for a month. Almost two months. Oh, my God. Literally. Here's the intro. I'm going to tell you about the betrayal that broke me. And the relationship between betrayal and your nervous system.
And being stuck in fight or flight mode. That's good. Yeah, that sounds nice. I've been through a fair share of betrayals in my life. I have trust no one tattooed on my hand for a reason. Everybody's always asking me, how do you handle betrayal? I just got a crash course on how not to because the betrayal I just experienced broke me fully.
Broke my nervous system, broke my emotional system, broke me mentally. So... I've learned a lot from it, and I want to start with that, okay? I want to start with the awareness that I've gained around it, and then I can walk you through my experience of what has happened, and... Yeah, we'll take it from there.
Chapter 2: How does betrayal affect the nervous system?
So with betrayal, you know how when, like, you're going through somebody's phone. We can start with this. Good. You know how you're going through somebody's phone and you find them messaging somebody else. You find that your partner's cheating on you or something. And your stomach drops. It's like that pit in your stomach where it's like you don't know if you want to throw up. You start shaking.
Part of you wants to bash their skull through the wall. And part of you is like, oh, my God. Like, devastated, want to boohoo, cry. That is an activation of fight or flight mode.
it's also a state of shock when you find something out like that so i've been stuck in a state of shock and my nervous system has been activated into fight or flight mode so that was just a stupid example of like how it's not an actual threat but your body will perceive a threat because when you find out someone's cheating on you your entire life is up in the air Nothing feels safe.
You don't know what to trust, who to trust, nothing. It's just like you go kind of like nuts. So I wanted to give the relationship example because I feel like we all got a little bit of experience with that, unfortunately.
Chapter 3: What experiences illustrate being stuck in fight or flight mode?
If you're watching me, you have experience with that. So the new awareness I have around being in fight-or-flight mode is everybody's body has it. You have a full-fledged nervous system and biological system that is prepared to keep you alive. So if you perceive a threat, like you're out in the wild, and all of a sudden there's a lion and it's looking at you like... I'm going to eat you, bitch.
Your body reacts to keep you safe. So you got fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. I've never related to nothing but fight, OK? That's my problem. And when there's not a physical threat, that's when I go nuts.
So like with the example of you catch your partner cheating, you catch something in the phone, or you catch somebody doing something or lying to you about something, catch somebody stealing money from you. Hi. Sometimes there is no actual physical threat. And that's what drives me insane. But sometimes you get the reaction of freeze, like pretend you invisible, right? And then you gotta flee.
Get the fuck up out of here. So your body's set up to protect you and keep you away from threats, right? So I look at it like a loop now. It's kind of how I see it. When the fight or flight response loop is started, you get knocked into it. You're prepared to handle the threat. And then what's supposed to happen is you have resolution. You fight, freeze, or flee.
Once you're away from that threat, the loop closes and your nervous system will down regulate itself. Everybody's experienced that where you get stressed out, something happens, you got to handle it and then you come back to a state of like rest and a sense of safety.
If you do not complete that loop, if you never feel safe after something has happened, you will be stuck in the fight or flight response. That is when you become illogical. That is when you overread things, you get stuck in hypervigilance mode, and you start seeing threats that are not real. You're not able to see reality no more. You will lose your grip on reality, and I lost mine.
When I said this is the betrayal that broke me, This is the one that fucking broke me because I got stuck in it until I literally, it's like a car spinning its wheels until it's burnt the tires off and you're just scrubbing rims. Then I scrubbed my rims flat until the car was just sitting there. I spun the fuck out. My nervous system fried because of this.
I got stuck in fight or flight mode for a year, really. But the past few months is when the burnout really just like hit. So the main thing is not being able to feel safe when you're stuck in fight or flight mode. One thing I want to say before we go into this is betrayal destroys people. Betrayal destroys your nervous system and it destroys your mind and your ability to trust people.
And when you lose your ability to trust, you're not able to complete that loop of exiting survival mode at all. Because once a betrayal happens, you see that you've believed lies and you lose your grip on your ability to trust your own judgment of things. You don't trust people, you don't trust God, you don't trust life, and you do not trust yourself.
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Chapter 4: How did the guest's relationship with trust change after betrayal?
scale of what you guys made the pop-up be because y'all came but the store was not set up to be efficient and it was not set up for sales to go as good as possible i ended up breaking even on the pop-up store and that put me in a situation of kind of like hyper vigilance because i did so much and put so much into it all of the things that i had said
these are my concerns with everything in writing to everybody all the i was worried about happening still happened even though i already pre-planned for it so i felt like it was useless for me to be hyper vigilant handing things off to people is just people are not trustworthy is what i saw it as fully so i was in a state of financial absolute stress and potential ruin but also with no hope of going forward so all the products by this point
I was hopeless they were going to be able to be made right. I was so beyond pissed off, hopeless, all the things you can imagine. Okay, one more thing to thicken the plot that happened before I left the company. I forgot to add this in, so I'm recording it now. There was one employee at this company who was actually great. And me and him worked really well together.
He was facing the same frustration that I was when we would send critiques and changes to be made to certain products and the manufacturers would send them back not listening to shit. So we were both irritated with it. And I asked him, Is there some other manufacturer we can use? I want to switch at this point. And he goes, yeah, there's actually this other manufacturer who I think is great.
But the owner of the company that I was working with, my friend at the time, he resisted like a bitch when I wanted to switch to the new manufacturer. He for like almost two weeks was like pulling like, no, no, we're not switching it. We're not switching it. Until I put my fucking foot down and I was like, I don't care. I'm paying you. Now switch my shit.
The new manufacturer nailed my tank top in two tries. So 14 samples we've gone through once a month. Every time I send a critique, a new sample comes back and it's wrong. This new guy, the new manufacturer nails it in two tries. Literally perfect. I've been trying to make tank tops for four years with different companies. Just this one was 14 samples. And I knew I was not the fucking problem.
I knew what I was asking for was not that goddamn fucking hard. It takes somebody that takes pride in what they do and can listen to basic instruction and detail.
to make it the manufacturer I made them switch me to nailed it on the second try there is not a single thing I would change about it and I got one of those samples in my hand I have it so after the pop-up store as soon as I got home is when I got the invoice for ordering these tank tops I'm like finally I'm gonna order them and I was starting to speculate all this shit going on and I was like okay
Something's off. And when I got the invoice for ordering my tank tops, finally, the price that I remember discussing was a little bit higher that they were trying to charge me. And that's when I started getting red flags of like, something's fishy. Why all of a sudden is it more?
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Chapter 5: What challenges did the guest face in their business partnership?
It's over a few hundred thousand dollars that...
went right in this fucking pocket that i didn't find out about i didn't know about and i didn't have a chance to know about it because i didn't fucking know until my hyper vigilant shit starts and i start nitpicking and just like sitting there thinking about every single thing that could be going on like as soon as you set me free like that i'm gonna find it and after our conversation i'm like yeah it's pretty much everything i'm speculating seems 99 accurate so i decided to fucking terminate the partnership and i was like yeah fuck this i'm done
i had to swallow the fact that all the money of all the mold fees of all the things that i've paid i'm never gonna get it back all the products i've been working on dead stopped and i'm not allowed to contact the manufacturers that they found and used so their fear is being cut out of transactions so it's like it's in the contract but you can't contact them and then when my sunglasses came
Over 800 of them were defective. And there's no coverage, there's no warranty, there's no shit for it if something's wrong. So you've connected me with manufacturers and got me making products with manufacturers that offer no warranty, no quality control, and no refund or anything if something's off. Like, oh, I just gotta fucking eat it. So I'm looking at it like, okay, I gotta walk away.
and everything i've been working on is done my future of seeing how i can make money is done that's a whole financial crisis i was under of there is no hope of potentially making anything anytime soon i'm gonna have to go back to months of sampling and trying and new manufacturers and all this so like financially everything's stuck and stopped for me what i have is all the inventory that i have my sunglasses that took a year to make
i'm not going to be able to make more i'm not going to trust that manufacturer to make more so all that's done if i want to make more of my sunglasses when they sell out i gotta restart with a whole new manufacturer just a lot of hopelessness a lot of fear and on top of all of that social media has like come down to like a slower pace for me now and there's been new ownership of tick tock
You don't get paid fuck off TikTok no more. YouTube has some kind of switch. You don't really get paid that much off YouTube. So pretty much every means of me making money got wiped out. I'm just giving you this background so you know where I was at and where I'm at.
mentally okay so let me back up a little bit because after the pop-up store like i said it wasn't set up for sales and there was a lot of people who were trying to buy a lot of stuff and employees there were just saying oh no it's out of stock like it's sold out because I didn't want to go look through boxes to find it. So a lot of my sales were prevented.
So after the pop up, I saw I barely broke even and I was like, OK, people are asking online for me to release the products I was selling at the pop up online. So I'm like, OK, let me do that. So as soon as I get them with the pop up, I go home. I don't get to rest. I don't get to chill. I got my family here. I got my friends here. So me and my friends do a quick photo shoot.
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Chapter 6: How did the guest cope with feelings of hopelessness?
They know what they're trying to say, but it can't make the words. Some people can't make words at all, and some people it just won't come out. It's like being trapped inside a body you can't control. I have that understanding and that knowledge, and then my mom telling me that story of when I was little, me already being in fight or flight mode, exhausted, tired, I started to panic about that.
And when I woke up the next morning, I was stuck in fear. I was so terrified to try and move because I was like, God is clearly fucking me up right now. This would be his last laugh. You've dangled in front of me so many things in my life. With my social media, I've been given an opportunity of a lifetime. I haven't been able to capitalize on it. I haven't been able to like, Have it go right.
I feel like I've been nerfed by things outside of my control. Anything in my control, I will do it and it will get done. Anything I ask people for help for with, anything I have to rely on outside forces for, will fuck up no matter what I do. And I've just lived so much experience of it. I have so much past experience way in the past of it. But it's just like the current stuff.
And I'm like, if God really wanted to get his last laugh on me, he would trap me in a body that I couldn't move in. And I was so convinced God was against me. And I was like, if that happens, what do I do?
I can't kill myself that like sent me over a lot like in a lot of ways mentally of like that being my fear and that made it harder to sleep every night because every night I would go to sleep I couldn't because I was terrified to fucking wake up I didn't know how I was gonna wake up so being in hyper vigilance mode made me lose grip on reality and this became a very real thing I was living every morning I would wake up I would just lay there before I would try and move because I was scared shitless
I do still kind of have that a little bit like I'm trying to work on that one But the other thing is like when you're in hyper vigilance mode, you can't be grateful. There's no positive.
There's no happy so I felt like this intense pressure on me to be grateful for The fact that my body does work and I felt scared like God's watching me Stress out and deal with so much shit and I'm not being grateful for my body He could take it and I was starting to look at God like that. I'm like It freaked me out. It really freaked me out.
And then I started getting frantic that I couldn't find positive thoughts. I couldn't feel good. I couldn't feel happy. I couldn't feel appreciative for fuck. It was just like a mental hell, literally. I really do appreciate my mom for pushing me to go to that. Even though telling me the story about me when I was little scared the shit out of me.
She's been there for me through so much of this and I couldn't have done this without her, truly. Like I couldn't have stayed sane as long as I did. And then she came and helped me with the warehouse. It's nuts. And then I reconnected with my sister.
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