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Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this episode of The Horsemanship Journey podcast. My name is Shane Jacob, your host, and I thank you for taking your time to be here with me today.
So today, we'll talk about something, I don't know, maybe we'll call it a little bit sensitive or a little bit feely, I guess. That's kind of a word sometimes we use about horses that are sensitive. And that is why teens and why human beings really turn to drugs and alcohol and kind of a parallel lesson from horses that, you know, can be helpful in preventing substance abuse.
And I'll just say this about where I'm coming from, okay? Where I'm coming from and where I'm not. Where I'm not coming from is I'm not a medical professional. I'm not a licensed therapist.
What I am is someone who has experienced abuse, addiction, myself for a long period of time, and someone who's been up close with it with people who are close to me for a long period of time, a number of people. And of course, that may be you, part of that anyway.
I'm coming from a place of, I've studied human development in a serious way for 10 years. Part of that is my certification with the Life Coach School. Probably most importantly of where I'm coming to you from on this subject is just I know what it feels like. So that's my position of authority, is I know what it feels like to be in those places myself.
So with that to begin, let's just go back to human nature. I like to call it the natural man or our default brain. The brain that we've been given a lot of times that, in an effort to protect us, it guides us to places that are not good for us.
And so our natural way of being, our natural man, our brain guides us to seek pleasure, avoid pain, and conserve energy. Okay.
So we know that our brains are wired to want to feel good all the time. And what I'm going to suggest, and I've suggested before, that feeling good all the time — I'd like you to think about that, whether it's a good goal for you to have or not. Okay.
So because for teens, the instinct to turn to what feels good, it doesn't take very long, right? Like using drugs or all kinds of other harmful behaviors, right? There's so many things.
It's not just drugs and alcohol I'm talking about. It's turning to things or buffering with things that feel better in the moment because we don't like how we're feeling at the time, okay?
Usually it's really, it's the easiest way, is to use a substance or that, you know, bury yourself in media, pornography, gambling, or reading, or drinking, all types of drug abuse and so on, right? Movies and all the over-everythings, okay? Overdoing life.
Okay, and then you bury yourself in that. You mask it. You try to hide. You push aside the way that life feels. You try to feel better and it feels better in the moment.
And a lot of those things can turn into really damaging behaviors and harmful. And I'm living proof of that.
The thing of it is, avoiding — the truth is — that avoiding discomfort doesn't solve the problem. It just creates more.
And so, you know, when teenagers face normal situations, like fear, embarrassment, insecurity, we just naturally look for a way out.
Now, you can say that teens, or even peer pressure — teens turn to drugs, you can say because of peer pressure — but really if you go to the root of it, it's about how you feel.
Peer pressure is about how I feel about me. And how do I fit in? Am I good enough? Do I need to fit in? Or how does it feel if somebody's over there saying, making fun of me because I'm not doing something and so on and so forth.
When it really comes down to it, I believe that we just go there in an effort to feel better. When I say go there, it's to begin experimenting, which can lead to habits and down this road of addiction and abuse, substance abuse.
Because they do provide this temporary escape, but they cause long lasting consequences, serious consequences like, you know, of course, you can damage your health, broken relationships, your potential with school and work, and this cycle of avoidance just deepens the problem. Okay. It just makes it worse.
And then the problem isn't just the substance itself. It's the underlying habit that we can develop, that a lot of us do develop, of just trying to get away from feeling bad.
Because the thing of it is, is when we avoid the tough emotions and the hard times, and we push away the discomfort and we try to suppress it, we try to bury it, we try to mask it, we try to cover it up, we just go to feel better as quick as we can, it doesn't go away.
Okay. It stays buried inside of us somewhere and it's going to come out somehow. It's going to be causing stress, you know, problems with our health, emotional outbursts that harm relationships, all kinds of stuff.
And I'll tell you, for me, if I haven't said this before, if you haven't heard it listening now, you know, when I was a teenager and even into my twenties, you know, I really wanted to fit in and be like everybody else and be as good as.
And you know, I wanted to feel good about me, but I didn't. You know, I felt like for whatever reason, and I don't know why, I had these thoughts in my head that said, hey man, you're not as good as, you're not, you're not, you don't quite measure up. You're a little deficient somehow, right?
I don't know how, but these are just these messages that I had in my mind. And so I don't know why, right? I don't, I don't know why.
I think that as human beings, we have to come and choose to, to first of all, to know, to develop who we are, right? To know that we can develop who we are.
Some of us never figure it out and we just kind of — life just happens to us and then we die. But we can come to know, and it's a learning process, that we get to choose what we get to believe about ourselves.
And without that, what happened to me was I was thinking that I was less than, right? I was super shy, was afraid to go to groups.
And you know, I was trying, I was trying to do good in sports and fit in and I did and do decent in school. I got by school and tried to go to college and I just, I, I, I constantly had these messages and like I said, I didn't know why.
For example, what I mean by that is, a lot of times if people have trauma, if something's happened to you, like in the case of like abuse or something like that, a lot of times we can make meaning out of that ourselves — if we are the abused in this example — that something's wrong with us. This is why we got to be, had this abuse happen to us.
And so that makes us feel like something's wrong with us. I didn't have that. I didn't have any of that.
I had what I called a good family, a solid, intact mom and dad. I think they did the best that they could. And so I didn't have anything I could pin it on.
Sometimes I wondered, where did all this come from? But it doesn't matter where it comes from, because where it comes from is being a human being on this earth.
All right, is what I finally figured out. Thoughts are just going through our mind, right? 60,000 a day?
What are you supposed to do with all this stuff? You're a teenager. Who tells you what to do with all this chatter in your head?
Of course, a lot of times it's easy just to go to feel better. And that's what I did.
I experienced alcohol and wow, problem solved, man. I felt better. I felt pretty good. Inhibitions gone.
I'm at a school dance and man, I didn't have to worry about how I was coming out. I felt pretty confident with some alcohol in me.
In part, and mostly, that led to a cycle that I created of addiction over a 20 year period of destruction that caused permanent — I caused so much damage to other people that it's hard to talk about to this day.
In addition to all that, and that was the worst of it, but in addition to that, I limited myself, my ability to earn, my ability to learn, my ability to maintain relationships, and it was a wreck, I'm here to tell you, and it was no good, and it was, it's just a bad cycle, and you don't want to be there, and I know what that feels like to make those choices that can lead to stuff like this, okay?
So, you know, as teenagers, we got all this emotions swirling around inside of it or doing this major life change into an adulthood and avoidance, avoiding how we feel can be especially dangerous at that time of our life. You know, we're learning, trying to learn how to manage your emotions. We don't even know it, but we need to, right? Or hopefully we have some instruction on how to go about do it, but a lot of us don't, right? There's not really a manual for that.
So without guidance, lot of times teens just turn to substance with a way to cope with how they feel because they don't really know.
Okay, so what about this? Okay, just try it on as a thought, see what you think. What if teens learned that discomfort isn't something to fear? Okay, what if you understood, what if we could get teens and young people and ourselves right now? You right now listening.
What if we could all understand that facing, facing tough emotion is a skill that we might want to embrace, okay? A skill that can lead to resilience, growth, and help our success and accomplish the things that we want to in this lifetime.
We talked a lot about discipline on this podcast. Discipline is the willingness to be uncomfortable for a short period of time in exchange for long lasting rewards. So there's that part of feeling discomfort. And so when teens practice this, they gain the ability to handle challenges without turning to all these harmful escapes that are so easily available.
So let's just talk a little bit about horses. I mean, horses can be such a magnificent example and they are in this case. Horses are masters of living in the moment. They take it all in.
Here's what they don't do. They're not thinking about yesterday. They're not thinking about the past. They're not thinking about the future. They're in the moment and they're processing everything that's happening in real time. They don't hold on to it and bury it and suppress it and try to go do different things to feel better. They're reacting to what's happening and they have thoughts and they have feelings, but they process it in real time.
So they feel their emotions fully as they experience them as they're happening. So whether it's fear or excitement or calm or you know whatever it is and then they just move through it and move on to the next, you know, piece of life, the next moment, moment by moment.
So when you watch a horse face a challenge, okay, it can be inspiring if you look at it this way because they're not suppressing how they feel. Okay, now they may have experienced this thing before and they're going to react based on what happened in their past, they're going to react to that.
But what I'm saying, that they don't have thoughts and they don't remember anything. What I'm saying is, they don't avoid discomfort. Well, they do. They try to feel comfortable too. But what I'm saying is, is they don't hold on to it or they don't try to cover it up to with, you know, do something else to try to feel better that's going to be harmful for them.
They feel the feelings, they figure out a way to move through it, and then they move through it.
They let those feelings pass kind of naturally and that's what makes them powerful teachers for us.
You know, in talking to teens or other people or contemplating this for ourselves, you know, embracing discomfort starts with letting, knowing ourselves and then letting our kids know, hey, it's okay to feel. I didn't even know it. You know that? I didn't really know that.
If I did, I don't think I did. I don't know it was quite ago since I was a teenager, but here's the deal. I didn't know that it was okay to feel fear, to feel uncomfortable, right? To experience sadness.
I just thought that that's a bad way to be. I got to feel better. You know, I've come to realize there's a lot of things that I want to be angry about sometimes, okay? And there's things that I want to be sad about because, you know, life's not fair and I don't want to be happy about it.
And things that happen in this world. I mean, I want to feel what's happening in this world, okay?
And feeling insecurity as a young adult or a teenager, even as a mature adult, is a normal part of being alive. It's just the way it is. And so the more that we can accept that life is not all going to feel good and maybe the goal shouldn't be to constantly feel good, that's the first piece of it.
Processing, so people talk about processing emotion and I've said it I think already a couple of times here today. So what the hell does that mean? What do you mean process it? You know, what does that mean?
Okay, so what I mean by processing emotion means to first of all know that it's okay, know that it's at some point, okay? And then when it happens, not immediately running off to do something to feel better or suppress it, but to just sit with it, to just let it be there, to just feel it, to just experience what that feels like.
You know, we've talked about courage being, you know, we all want to be courageous because we know to go through courage is how we get to, you know, accomplish things and develop confidence in things, but it doesn't feel good. It feels pretty, it's frightening, okay? It's, it's fear is what it is and it doesn't feel good, but in sadness doesn't feel good, okay? It doesn't feel good, but just to, to be able just to, to feel it.
Okay, just to sit there, that's part one. And then to let it pass. And if it doesn't pass easily, and if it feels like it's lingering, and you can do this or not, whether it's lingering or not, but the next step is to share what's going on with you, how you're feeling, what the experience is with someone that you really trust. Okay?
And for our kids, we need to be the ones that they really trust. So we need to be dependable, man. We have to be the ones that they can count on emotionally, right?
That we're not going to blow up when we hear what their thing is, that we can give them space to hear, right? And a lot of times, if you're an adult, this is not an easy thing to do sometimes, okay? Because you're going to have to be vulnerable. You're going to have to have enough inner strength and enough — you're going to have to value yourself enough and know that you're okay enough with your own worthiness that you can open up to someone that you trust, okay?
And, and, uh, you know, share it with them, relate your experience of what's going on, you know, and those are good beginning points of letting, of feeling emotion, feeling life, and letting it pass.
I'll tell you what, in my experience, okay, the more that I'm willing to feel life, I think that the quality of my life has improved immensely. Okay. So that's what I'm talking about by that.
Really, when teens and young adults — and all of us, really— when we learn to face discomfort head on, it builds confidence, and it builds discipline, and it builds emotional strength, okay? It helps us be those calm leaders that we want to be as parents.
We don't need to escape through harmful behaviors, okay? And it's quite freeing, okay? There's a lot of freedom that can come from living fully in the moment just like a horse.
So the path to helping teens avoid substance abuse isn't about shielding them from discomfort. It's not about that.
Those moments that I'm talking about, those critical moments when things don't feel good — they can downright feel painful. It's about teaching them to embrace it and giving them the tools to be there with them, and, and being the one that they can trust to hear about it, or making sure they're doing the best that you can to see that they have a mentor that's worthy of them that they can trust.
When they gain the tools to be able to do that, it, it's a game changer.
Horses, they show us that the key to — one of the keys to — living well is just to face each moment as it comes, you know, and to feel life.
I like that. I like saying it, you know, just to be able to be willing to feel life.
If we can help our teens do the same, we can avoid the cycle of avoidance, and we lessen the odds of all kinds of substance abuse and buffering that has negative effects. That's what a healthier, happier, truly happier, more joy-filled future is going to be all about.
Hey, let me just say this. Being a parent is not an easy, simple thing to do. The fact that you're here listening to this today, if you're a parent, means that you're trying, and you're trying to do the best you can. That's something to be proud of.
I appreciate you taking your time to join me here today. Remember, you cannot fail as long as you Don't Ever Stop Chasin It.
