Reclaiming Inner Peace: Steering Clear of Drama Addiction and Choosing Serenity

Have you ever found yourself inexplicably drawn to the chaotic whirlwind of a reality TV show, only to realize it's clouding your quest for serenity? I am no stranger to this paradox, and in today's episode, I'm sharing my own dance with drama and how it veered me off the path to inner peace. We're peeling back the layers of why our souls might crave the excitement of conflict, even when it's at odds with our deep longing for happiness. It's a candid look at how the media and activities we absorb can shape our emotional well-being and the reality we live in, and I'll be offering insights from my Soul Recovery journey about liberating ourselves from these addictions to embrace spiritual principles that lead to tranquility and self-love.

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This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not allied or representative of any organizations or religions, but is based on the opinions and experience of Rev. Rachel Harrison. The host claims no responsibility to any person or entity for any liability, loss, or damage caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly as a result of the use, application, or interpretation of the information presented herein. Take what you need and leave the rest.

Transcript

Rev Rachel Harrison: 0:47

If you ask most people what they want in life, they're going to tell you that they want peace, they want to be happy, and yet we are addicted to drama. It's interesting that we actually open up to and create scenarios where we're dragging in other people's drama into our life which is disrupting that peace and happiness within ourselves. In this episode I talk about how I got caught in watching a drama reality TV show and how it reminded me that this is just like watching the drama in other people's lives. We're powerless over everything outside of ourselves and what we choose to put into our life what we choose to watch, what we choose to listen to, what we choose to participate in will affect who we are and how we live our life. It is as we choose to see it and we get to choose what we're going to see, what is drama in our life and really what is reality. Anyway, enjoy the episode.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 1:49

Welcome to the Recovery your Soul podcast a spiritual path to a happy and healthy life. My name is Reverend Rachel Harrison. I started Recovery your Soul after having profound changes in my life. From my recovery of alcoholism, codependency and control addiction. I was guided to share the tools and principles of spirituality and soul recovery to help others transform their lives, as mine was transformed. For us to overcome external circumstances, we need to turn the attention to ourselves, focusing on how we're in change and healing. Positive results in our lives will follow.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 2:26

If you're new to the Soul Recovery community, welcome. If you have landed here through whatever door you came through, this is a community. This is a community that is here to support each other, to help each other to move past the place where we're worrying about other people more than we're worrying about ourselves, that we are learning to take care of ourselves. We're turning the attention to ourselves and our wholeness and breaking free from old patterns, old belief systems and learning to allow them to have their experience so that we can live for our wholeness, fullest self. I really do see this as a community. I see every single one of us as holding space for the other. If you're coming back as someone who's holding space for the rest of us, thank you. I can't tell you how much I appreciate it. I hope that you'll go on the Facebook page and join the Facebook community. I hope that you'll come to the support group once a month on Zoom, that we can all connect and that you just know that you're not alone in this, that we are in this together, that we're doing our Soul Recovery journey together, so thank you for being here For this episode.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 3:43

I wanted to talk about a couple things. One is our addiction to drama, and the other is how we perceive reality. What is reality? Those two things came to me because yesterday I fell back into a very interesting situation that I've been in before, where I get completely sucked into a TV reality show and get sucked into the drama and I just watched myself spiral into negative feelings, obsessive thinking, the inability to turn it off and all of the yuckiness that comes from getting sucked into someone else's drama and someone else's life. The question is what is reality? That's what I wanted to talk about today, because I think that one of the awarenesses that I have is how much more peace I feel today than I did six years ago when I started my Soul Recovery journey in earnest and getting clarity on what is the tools that I've used, what are the practices that I've used, how do I spend my day? What is it that I can share with you that has so transformed my life from where I was before that was so dramatic, so miserable, so uncomfortable, so unhappy to place today, where I am mostly at peace, where I love who I am, that I love my life, that I'm comfortable with being me, I'm comfortable in my skin. I've released addiction from alcohol. I've released addiction from control. I've released the addiction of people pleasing. Those things didn't just happen. They happened because I'm utilizing these tools and principles that I'm hoping to teach through soul recovery.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 5:52

If you're ready for soul recovery, as a spiritual coach, I can support your healing to help make real changes that will bring you a life of peace, happiness, connection and abundance. You can also work in smaller groups by taking a deep dive in a zoom workshop or with me in person at a retreat or an event. Join others on the soul recovery path, once a month for the free zoom support group or daily on the private Facebook page. This is the website recover your soul net to book coaching sessions with me or find all the information you need about soul recovery dates that are coming up and how to register for those groups and workshops. To support the podcast and the community, check the links in the show notes to make a small monthly donation or a one-time donation of your choice. That will make a huge impact to support this community and the soul recovery mission. Together we can do the work that will recover your soul, and so what happened yesterday was kind of a reminder and a marker of how this represents my whole life.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 6:58

That I've been working on Drama is something that is interesting because Our souls both want peace and they want Contrast. So the word contrast is used in spirituality as a definition of how we need to have darkness to see light. You need to have hardship to see ease. You need to have heartache to understand love. You need to have lack to have abundance. So this concept around contrast on our souls level, on our development from our souls journey in this curriculum of life, it's an important aspect of how we need to be able to see both sides. We would love to have a life that's it, completely at ease, right, like some of us would say, oh, I want to never have another problem again. I never want to have a single situation that feels uncomfortable or hard or difficult and, as wonderful as that may seem, the truth is that your soul would be bored with that, that we need some level of Back and forth to be able to really appreciate the good, the positive. You have to have some level of the yin and the yang right. That's why there's yin and yang.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 8:32

But drama is this interesting hook that we can get into, around control and the belief that we can make things be a certain way or things should be a certain way. Drama has a lot around judgment. Drama has a lot around grievance, around guilt, around somebody doing something wrong or someone being better or worse than somebody else. And Drama is a product of our eco state that really likes and wants to stay in this body Part of ourselves, instead of the soul part of ourselves, the body part of ourselves that has tangible wants and desires, need and want to be met. Drama is the part that has some. It's almost like the juiciness around thinking that we can manipulate or that somebody is wrong or somebody is good or bad. And clearly it's true, because there are millions of examples of TV shows and movies and books and you know so much of what we consume. Is this drama piece? Now, again, what I think is so interesting in soul recovery is we're not saying that you don't Participate in any of these things. It's around choosing very carefully what you put into your mind and into your life, because we only have X amount of Bandwidth to be able to process. So what are you going to be putting into that space that is going to be taking up Room? If your life is what you think and feel and believe it is, what are you putting into that Bandwidth space that's helping create what that is?

Rev Rachel Harrison: 10:35

Drama for me in the past was a way that I could keep myself from being really in connection with what was happening with me on the inside. It's interesting that when my life was at its most dramatic point which included Alex having legal issues and school issues and my husband and I fighting all the time and Bodhi having his issues that we he was going through with friends and drugs and you know all the stuff that was happening I was consumed at the same time with watching and consuming media that was equally dramatic. It's like I needed that drama to feed the drama that was my life to. I needed it to show me that maybe other people had it worse than I did, or that maybe I related so much to what was going on with them. Long before I got sober, I used to watch almost incessantly. I used to watch for a period of time, intervention, which is really interesting because I was actively using. I was actively an addict, but I watched intervention to kind of prove that my family's addiction wasn't as bad as other people's addiction. I needed it as a marker to justify what was happening in my house and to see that there was hope. There was some part of me that liked the shows where you saw that people had success afterwards and it gave me some little level of hope that maybe in our life I would be better or the kids would be better or rich would be better.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 12:24

But when I got sober and I started living a healthier life, I tried to watch one of those shows one time and I couldn't. I couldn't stomach it. It was too much, it was too heavy, it was too dark. It was completely going against everything that was within me that was around being healthy, and it also was the part that I recognized that I needed to work on me and I needed to let the people in my life work on them, and that I had chosen sobriety so I needed to make sure that I wasn't continuing to fuel this part that was around dysfunction. I wanted to connect to and hold on to the truth that I'm whole. I wanted to recognize my wholeness.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 13:13

So the same is true in terms of the drama that I felt in my life in the past that I consumed shows that not only intervention but shows like Married at First Sight, or there was a whole bunch of shows on Bravo or Lifetime or you know. I can't even remember what they were, but they were these shows that were kind of around how people's lives were always dissatisfied that there was something wrong and that the person in their life was wrong, and they were trying to convince the person in their life that they were wrong and that that helped me feel better in my life, where I felt like everybody in my life was wrong. It's so funny to think about now, but it's essential to not judge ourselves right. So in soul recovery, what we're looking at is we're saying, if this is the curriculum of my life, if this is around me, recognizing my wholeness, I have to recognize that there were periods of time where I needed that information for some reason and I consumed that information because it fed a pain body in me that needed feeding, because I was living from that pain. I was so immersed in that pain and as I've come into this space of real deep healing and a change in how I choose to see it, a change in how I work.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 14:44

With every single thing in my life, I've noticed that what I watch and what I listen to and what I consume has changed too, that I still have contrast, but the contrast is very different because I'm different. So now I still love reality shows because part of me loves human beings. That's why I love being a coach, that's why I love leading this community. I am passionate about what it means to be on this human experience, what it means to understand how to live from our best selves, this incredible experience of being a human being that is far greater than any of us get a chance to really truly experience, because most of us are so afraid to live from our greatness. We have been taught, and part of watching these shows or consuming these unhealthy shows is they are modeling for us how to be small and how to be in conflict and how to be self-righteous.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 15:50

What I am expanding into is can we expand into our greatness? So now I love documentaries about people who are really pushing themselves to be their fullest self. I love watching shows around creativity and even art, competition, shows that bring out the best in everybody. I love shows like Queer Eye for the Straight Guide, where they show up and they help people see themselves for who they are, as they're expressing fully as who they are To see humans be their best selves and to have heartache and to experience great joy and love and passion and to be vulnerable and open. I love that and that aligns with who I am today and how I want to show up in my life, because essentially the way that I see it is that we are all like our own little programs. I've talked about this before but I'm going to say it again we are all like our own little programs your own show, somebody else's their own show, somebody else's their own show and they do intersect. But ultimately we are responsible for our own characters. We're responsible for how we show up in every situation.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 17:18

None of us would enjoy life if it was just completely boring. You would think that you would. You would think that you don't want anything to happen in your life. But if you had two television shows that you could watch and one was somebody having a nice day, just wandering around having a nice day and everything just worked out smoothly and beautifully for them, or you could watch a show where there's more contrast and they're having a nice day but they have things to overcome. You're going to choose the one that has a little more contrast because there's learning in the contrast. But that's different than consuming and being wrapped up in drama. Being wrapped up in drama so when we watch shows on television or scroll social media or watch shorts or whatever the things are, each one of those things is going into your psyche and it's connecting to a part of you that is reflecting what's going on in your world and in your life. We want to be conscientious of the fact that everybody's life is like a show that you can watch, and how we interact with it gives us strength, or we give it the strength to determine how we feel.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 18:38

The reason why I wanted to do this episode is because yesterday I got caught in the swirl of watching bad drama TV and it affected me in a negative way. I went in for lunch and sat down and turned on the TV and got caught up in thinking oh my god, there's a new Love Is Blind 6 season. I wasn't going to watch it, but my friend said it was really good, so I'll just check it out. I knew better. I knew better the instant that I turned it on. But immediately you get drawn into the fairy tale, you get drawn into the potential. You want people to be happy and you want them to find love, and you get caught up in the situations that they're talking about and the drama sucks you in.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 19:26

And there I was, four episodes later, not doing the work that I'm supposed to be doing out here in the studio, not in a good mood, completely consumed with something that I have no control over at all, which is these people on this television show's life that, by the way, is being curated for the dramatic effect of making it, so that I won't turn off the show. And there I was, in the middle of it, and I felt this yuckiness, I felt this sadness. They had moved into the part where they had picked their people and now they were on vacation and they were starting to have real life drama. And I thought, oh my God, I've been pulled into the drama of somebody else's life that I'm powerless over and I really have nothing to do with, but it is affecting me, affected my body, affected my mood. I felt different. I didn't feel energetic, I didn't feel clean, I didn't feel connected to this higher power. I felt obsessed with something that I'm powerless over, and I had to consciously stop watching it.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 20:40

And I could watch my brain after I turned it off, wanting to know who worked out and what was happening, and I thought, oh my gosh, it's just like in life how we get obsessed with and consumed over the people in our lives that, even though my kids are my children and I have interactions with them and our characters connect in the shows, I have almost no true control. I have no control over anything outside of myself in step one of soul recovery, but literally I can show up as a character in their show and and say and do all the things that I want to to help them have success, but they're responsible for their own happiness, just like how I watch these people in a show that I have no no contact or ever will have contact with that I wish that I could give them the advice or have them see themselves in the right way so that they could not have these experiences. It is almost the same, except that I'm allowing myself to be consumed with people that I will never have experience with, and I felt yucky by the time I got to bed. I didn't feel good, I was sad and when I woke up this morning I said oh my gosh, rachel, you, you fell for drama. You're spending so much energy in your life to let go of the obsession that drama creates. That isn't about your own awakening. It isn't about your own health, your own well-being, your own peace, your own happiness, your own ease, your own contentment. This contrast reminded me that I don't like that. I don't want that. I don't need to put that into my life. It was a complete waste of my afternoon, is what it was.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 22:40

But the contrast also reminded me that I get to choose how I want to see it. I get to choose what I interact with. I get to choose what I watch. I get to choose how I respond to the world around me, as if everything is a show that I'm choosing. Am I going to watch this? Am I going to be part of this? So I spent about 15 minutes reading an article about how it all turns out for them, whether they stayed together, who did, who didn't, so that I could close that chapter and not have part of my mind curious, and then I'm going to wipe it. I'm going to truly let it go.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 23:20

But what it also reminded me of is I don't feel good in drama anymore. Drama doesn't appeal to me, but I needed to feel that, to be reminded that choosing reading spiritual things, listening to uplifting music, reading books that fill me up, aligns more with who I am today, and that we get to each choose. There's no judgment in soul recovery, so there isn't actually a thing that says what those shows are or who those people are is wrong. It's really around. Who are you aligned with? What feels good to you? What people in your life feel good to you? What drama is happening in your life that you get caught up in? It's easy to get caught up in it.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 24:12

Just this weekend my boys were going to get together. I had talked to one of them as he was driving up to see the other one. And then I call the other one the next day and he's still asleep and I watched myself get caught up in the drama of I thought they were going to get together and what's going to happen next and how are they going to. I stopped and I said, whoa, not your show, not your show. If they're going to get together, they're going to get together. If they're not, they're not. What are you going to do with your moment right now? Rachel and I just let it go. And then I found out later that they had gotten together, had a great time, enjoyed their time together. I don't even know what that looks like. I don't want to be involved to that level to where I'm caught up in what feels like drama. I want to let them have their own experience. I want them to create and cultivate their own experience.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 25:08

When we are looking at what is reality, it is whatever it is to each of us. There is no one absolute truth because in any moment, each person is seeing it, filtering it, experiencing it through their own lens and their own eyes and their own heart, their own perception. And in soul recovery, we're learning that our perception can move and it is as I choose to see it. When we are having somebody else tell us how to see it, we're losing the strength. That is who we are to make that choice, which is why which you watch and what you listen to and who you participate with is so important. We get to be in our own world and some people may say, rachel, you're totally living in non-reality.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 26:05

Okay, I will take this one. I will take this one all day, every single day. The one where I choose peace, the one where I let everybody be exactly who they are, with all of their faultedness, and I don't lay into wanting it to be different, that I see the wholeness in everyone, that I recognize that we're all just here, just trying to figure it out and learn as much as we can in this particular lifetime. I will choose the peace that's within my heart and that I can turn off that show that doesn't fill me up, in the same way that I can really turn off the relationships that don't work for me, the images that don't work for me. As you know, I don't watch the news anymore and as we lead up to the election, I'm gonna watch it less and less.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 27:01

I want to participate in love. I choose love. I choose to see us all as whole. I choose to see a country that is going to grow through whatever this is that we're in right now, and I choose to see every person that is here on the planet as part of a consciousness that is around us learning, and if that isn't reality to somebody else, that's okay, because that's their experience, and I also know and trust that we are each exactly where we're supposed to be, and spirituality isn't for everyone, because we are all here to learn in our own way. So just because I feel it and see it this way, maybe you resonate and see it and feel it this way too, and that's why you're here learning and connecting with me. But somebody else who's in their own experience, that's theirs. That's theirs to learn and to grow.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 28:03

And I get to choose. Am I gonna watch that particular show? Am I gonna have that interact and be part of me? Am I gonna get caught up in that drama? And that drama is keeping me from taking care of myself. So I'll pick my reality all day long and I love my reality. Now I can't even imagine myself back to where I was before, when it was so dramatic and so uncomfortable and so unhappy. I will choose this way of being because I've worked hard to get here. So I'm glad I ended up wasting a couple hours yesterday watching something that reminded me and gave me the contrast that that is not anything that I want in my life. I choose peace, I choose love.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 28:57

If you need help with this or wanna work through the steps of soul recovery with me, book a coaching session with me. I'd love to support you on your soul recovery journey. Until next time. Namaste, thank you for listening to the Recovery Soul podcast and if you loved what you heard here, every Friday we have a bonus episode and you can access this by becoming a subscriber through Apple Podcast for only $3.99 a month, or become a Patreon member, and on this platform you can choose $5.15 or $25 a month. To show what you wanna support the show with On both of these subscriber platforms is an entire catalog of back episodes intended to inspire and support you on your soul recovery journey.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 29:46

I really wanna invite everybody to attend the free once a month, every first Monday of the month support group. This is on Zoom. Everyone is welcome to attend and by giving a like or a review and sharing this with your friends and family really helps us to share the soul recovery message with even more people. We are on social media. We are on all the platforms. I am on TikTok. You can listen to guided meditations by Rev Rachel Harrison on Insight Timer. Thank you for supporting the show. Thank you for being part of the community. To find out more about soul recovery and everything that's being offered, visit the website wwwrecoveryoursoulnet. Together, we can do the work that will recover your soul.