The Emotional Loops Keeping You on Autopilot and Disconnected From Your Inner Voice, with Kristen Crabtree | #590

Agi Keramidas (0:02)
Today it is my real pleasure to speak with Kristen Crabtree. Kristen, you describe yourself as an archaeologist of the self, helping people remember who they are beneath the roles that they have played. Kristen, welcome, it's such a pleasure to speak with you today.

Kristen Crabtree (0:21)
Thank you, Agi, it is for me too.

Agi Keramidas (0:23)
I'm looking forward discussing with you, I already mentioned that the inner truth, hearing our inner truth, also making our decisions, our current decisions, from or based in that inner truth. And what I wanted to start with, without spending too much time on it, I would like to hear briefly your moment of realisation that the life you were living was no longer or was not aligned with the person that you were or you had become.

Kristen Crabtree (1:00)
Yeah, so I love to talk about this, but I love to talk about this briefly, and everybody wants to talk about it so long, so I'm going to give you the really short abbreviated version. I had some pretty bad trauma in my youth. I married somebody who used that trauma against me to control me and manipulate me for 22 years.
And the amazing thing about that type of manipulation and control is you don't see it happening until you're, you know, I believe that you're a true self, your inner self tries to, it can't text you, so it tries to tell you things in a whisper. And when you don't hear it, then it talks a little louder. And, you know, so it goes from this feeling of, oh, I don't feel right to, oh, my God, I'm always in a panic attack to, oh, my God, I'm vomiting on the floor with anxiety, migraines to the true self hitting you over the head with a two by four, right?
And so that's what happened to me. I was in this very dysfunctional is a gentle word for it. Marriage, didn't know it, didn't even know it when I left.
Like, it's not like I had this power and everything figured out when I left. I left feeling confused and foggy and broken and pathetic and little and scared. And that's where I started this work from.

Agi Keramidas (2:28)
Thank you. And I appreciate the brevity of the answer. And it's, yeah, I won't, I will not stay there and move on.
It's just good to have a little bit of context as a background. And what I'm going to ask straight away then, and I alluded to it in the introduction, was about using the idea or the notion of our future self to help us guide our decision making process in the present. So let's start about this.
Let's, first of all, a little bit unpack the necessity, shall we say, or the need or the benefits of doing it like that. And give us a little bit of more overview. And when you say future self, how far are we talking about?
Let's start with this.

Kristen Crabtree (3:34)
Okay, so the future self needs to be discovered and heard. And there's a process for doing that. Let me first say, I'm not an expert in you.
And I'm talking to the listener as well as you, Agi. I'm not the expert in you. I'm really good at presenting ways for people to hear their own truth, their own inner truth.
And it's through questions and exercises. And that's basically what I provide to people. That information, so I call that the archaeologist.
The artefact is what you dig up. Those pieces of you, those memories, those experiences that made you who you are. And the chapters that I call the archaeologist basically give you sort of the credentials or the understanding or the framework for knowing is this an artefact or is this a piece of rubble, right?
So you use those artefacts then to develop what I call a tree of becoming. And the tree of becoming starts with a timeline exercise that helps you recognise the strengths that you got from your traumas. So we have to talk about trauma because it's there, but we don't have to stay in that, which is why I'm so happy we're not talking about that with me.
You know, the idea is to reorient that trauma to where, like, is your trauma serving your story, right? It's not, right? And so how do you use that, not forgetting about it, not discounting it, not changing what happened per se, although we could get to a whole topic about memory and that type of thing.
But I heard once that a memory without the emotional charge is wisdom. And I know one of the things you like to talk about is wisdom. And so knowing that happened, but having a different framework for it and pulling out the strengths that the trauma shows in you is a way that you can then repackage what is happening to you today so that it's no longer you no longer playing the role of the victim in your own head or to others, right?
You are now learning in a way of wisdom from those experiences. So the timeline helps people realise their strengths and their superpowers, which usually come out of the high moments. And the artefacts have helped people understand their values and their morals and their passions and their dreams and their drives and all of that.
So the combination of those things help people with their tree of becoming. And unlike a dream board or something like that, what the tree of becoming is, is it's very flexible and adaptable. And the roots are your dreams, passions, morals, values, all of that.
Your trunk is the strengths and the superpowers. The leaves are potentials. They're places that you could go.
And then the branches are the different possible routes to get there. OK, and then there's something I call the jig. And this is all to answer your question about the future self.
So then there's something I call the jig, which is actually pulls from the roots of the tree. So a jig in carpentry is when people, a carpenter constructs a tool in advance of creating the chair, for example, or the table. And they take time out of their project to do this first.
Right. And some carpenters are like, I just want to get to building the chair. But if you build the jig first, then everything you build from that point is perfectly aligned and balanced.
And so the jig that I help people design then gives them this really quick and easy tool. So it takes time up front, but then it creates this really quick and easy tool. And when somebody gets presented with an opportunity, they can within seconds decide, is this opportunity in alignment with my future self, with that person?
I call it the true you 2.0 self. So true you, because it's based on your truth 2.0, because it's what you're embodying in this experience for like your magnificence. Everybody is magnificent.
Everybody is incredible. They just have to remember it. They have to remember the future is what I call it.
And once you remember the future, you know where you're going. But rather than having these linear goals where I want to build this business, instead of having this linear goal where you have to set these paths, if you embody that future self now, then you're your future self. You're already there.
You're living in alignment with it. All of your decisions are based on that. All of a sudden, you start to get synchronicities, which people can call them coincidences or whatever.
I don't care. But it's these things that you bring into your field, basically, that enable you to have your future now.

Agi Keramidas (9:25)
Thank you for this answer. I know the question I asked is quite multifaceted. You said, and actually I'll go there straight away.
It's one thing to recognise or describe the future self, or perhaps do some exercises, the timeline you said, or other practises that there are to help us discover or identify some elements of ourself. So that's one thing. And you can have a very accurate description that can also bring insights.
I also speak from personal experience. Sometimes I have read those results. I thought, wow, this is profound.
I get it. I understand it. However, the intellectual understanding of this future self or the description or anything else is one thing.
You use the word embodied. That's, in my experience, completely different than having a mental comprehension of what your future self is. So can you help us bridge that gap between knowing and embodying?
Yes.

Kristen Crabtree (10:43)
Yes, I can. So there are tools accessible to everybody. And I'm not saying that they're easy up front.
I mean, very few changes are easy up front. But once you get in the groove with them, they're super easy and they're so pleasurable that you wanna do them. So the first thing is creating awareness around how your behaviour and experiences and thoughts and emotions exist now.
So some of you may know this, but your thoughts influence your emotions. Your emotions release chemicals. Those chemicals, actually, we become addicted to them.
Those emotions influence our experiences because they influence our decisions and our behaviours. So we go thoughts, emotions, chemicals, behaviours, experiences back to the thought because the experience then validates or reinforces the thought. So one thing is becoming emotionally sober is what I call it.
So it's breaking that addiction to the chemicals. So because of my trauma, and it could be people's work stress or family demands or whatever, it doesn't matter. If there's some amount of stress or trauma or aggravation or anger that is a pervasive feeling and experience for you, then you're releasing things like cortisol and adrenaline.
And your body literally becomes addicted to it, just like heroin, just like alcohol, right? And in order to break that cycle, and that cycle has to be broken in order to get to your truth and embody. In order to break that cycle, you have to do, first, you have to have awareness.
And we'll talk about how to get that. And then you have to have tools for breaking that pattern, right? And again, it's not easy, but you can do it.
So the process, and I hate using this word because so many people are afraid of it. And so I actually created some of the word I'm about to say, but I call them mind-expanding experiences. So meditation, yes, you have to meditate.
But the great thing is, you don't have to sit cross-legged and say, although that's wonderful and that's beautiful. And a lot of people can do that. Most people feel like failures when they do that.
Because it's so hard. And I'm sorry, I'm talking fast because I know we have a limited amount of time. But so you can play me on slow speed if you're listening back.
So the meditations that you do can be as simple as starting to have five minutes of your meal be dedicated to the flavours and the textures of the experience of the meal. Or during your half hour walk at lunchtime, having the first five minutes be how many things can I see that I've never seen before? How many colours are out there that I ignore, right?
So it doesn't have to be this formal practise. It can be more, I mean, that's really called mindfulness. But again, mindfulness is very misunderstood.
But if you just break it down into these little tiny pieces, it starts to break monkey mind, right? Monkey mind is that internal chatter that's always going on. All of us have it.
Even once you learn these practises, you'll still have monkey mind to some extent, but less and less frequently and shorter. But these little brief moments can help break monkey mind. And the more you break that, the more the observer, which is that awareness, the more the observer plays a role in your life.
And you don't have to know what the observer is or believe in the observer. It will just happen. The observer will then start to help you see through the filter.

Kristen Crabtree (15:08)
Okay, so now let's talk about the filter. And that's where my mind expanding experiences AKA meditations come in. And they're only 10 to 20 minutes long, and there's four of them.
But the idea behind them is to see the filter that you're seeing through. So we're only, and this is science, this is not metaphysics or woo-woo. We're only seeing 0.01%, and actually it's less than that. But again, it's kind of a mind blowing small number.
We're only seeing 0.01% of reality. And that is because we wouldn't be able to function in this world, in this body, if we didn't have the filter. And our brain is there for efficiency and for providing you with what you expect.
And I'm pausing there on purpose. Your filter is there to help you see what you expect. And it's not because your brain is working against you.
It's because your brain is working for you. The problem with that is, if you don't realise that your brain is sculpting reality for you, then you're victim to your current reality, right? Because your brain is filtering for what you expect.
So learning to see the filter then enables you to choose, to reconstruct your filter, to choose different experiences in your life. And that's when synchronicities come. So again, that's a sort of brain exercise, a brain spirit, spirituality, science, all of that exercise.
If you don't want to use my mind expanding experiences, which by the way are free on my website. So you don't have to pay for them. They're free.
But if you don't want to use them, the basic premise is, there's one for vision, one for auditory, one for sensory, and then one that combines all of those. And the idea with those is to see, hear, and feel differently. So you hear things that you don't normally hear, the rustling of the trees, the sound of your dog's footsteps on the dirt, right?
With the visual, you see things that, you see the energy, you see the field of light and texture without defining it as a chair and a thing on my desk and whatever. You experience your body not as a form, but as sensations. Okay, so that's the idea if people don't want to use my mind expanding experiences.
Okay, so once you quiet monkey mind, once you become aware of that loop, once you start implementing practises, and I can talk about that real quick too, but practises that break that loop, then you start to be able to, so emotional sobriety again, then you start to be able to be more in control of how, let's back up control. You start to have more intention about the way you're responding to the world. So to other people, to your experiences.
That intention is the embodiment of your future self, really. It's having that conscious awareness and then the decision to be intentional in your actions.

Kristen Crabtree (19:02)
So to break the loop, since I don't want people to be left going, well, how do I do that? That's great. To break the loop, once you become aware of the reaction that isn't working for you, then you have to find a way, and there's a lot of different tools people do, but you have to find a way to shift your internal experience.
So you're feeling angry. You realise you're feeling angry and maybe you're even angry the first couple of times, right? So then you feel angry.
You become aware that you're feeling angry. You might even start being angry and then you go, wait a minute. Nope, this isn't right for me.
So you step away from the situation. You take three deep breaths. You centre yourself.
You think, how would my future self respond to this situation? Because there's a million different ways to respond to every situation. So what intention do I want to have that is in alignment with my future self?
Okay, so it's to understand this person's perspective. So I'm going to ask them questions because there might be assumptions I'm having here, right? So let me ask them questions.
Let me get, you know, blah, blah, blah. So you've got the idea. And again, that three breaths, you can play around with different breaks, but it's somehow disrupting that unintentional reaction.

Agi Keramidas (20:36)
This is great. You unpacked quite a lot there. I will give my own, let's say, summary of this in a practical way.
And the first step is becoming aware of that automatic, you call it the monkey mind, this internal dialogue that happens all the time, mostly without us being aware of it. So the first step is to become aware of it, that this is the thought that is happening, which is then creating the emotional state that I'm in, which then will create our behaviour, our reaction usually to that. So cultivating that awareness with, you know, meditation, mindfulness, you mentioned the experience in the meal and the flavours and all this is great ways to, for one to cultivate that ability to become aware.
The second step is once you become aware of it, how do you actually stop it, break it? I think you said break the loop or the cycle, because it is one thing to reach that awareness at some point saying, oh, I'm angry now. But emotions have the tendency of, you know, carrying us somewhere.
And then even if you become momentarily aware of what is happening in your internal world, breaking that is not necessarily easy. You said the technique of three breaths. What I wanted to ask just to get a little bit more into that, because I think that is practical.
And very important. When one realises that I'm caught now in a whirlwind of negative thoughts that cause these emotions and so on. And I just realised this for a moment.
What is a way or perhaps another way or an effective way to stop it or to remain aware? Because that awareness can disappear again if you follow the stream of the emotion that is taking you. I hope my question makes sense.

Kristen Crabtree (23:19)
Yes. And I want to parlay off of a couple of things. So you mentioned breaking the loop in terms of seeing the thought.
So actually, you can break the loop at any point. So you can break it at the thought. You can realise, oh, my God, I'm feeling angry.
You can realise, oh, my behaviour is not in alignment with my future self. And you can break it at the experience as well. So you can actually break it in any spot.
So that was one thing I wanted to mention. In terms of catching it and having some tools for breaking it, I'll give you some examples. I mean, to be totally honest, I am so excited to say, I live pretty darn peacefully now.
And this was definitely not my life, right? But I described it to my therapist as a calm happiness. And he said, oh, that sounds like peace.
And I'm like, huh, yes, you're right. But nonetheless, I still get into these monkey mind traps as well. So today, I had one.
We got dumped on with a couple of feet of snow. And my back sliding door was buried about two feet up, like I couldn't open it. My front door was so buried, I had to push the front door closed.
So the whole property was so buried. My dog is very ill with cancer and has a lot of trouble walking, even though she loves snow. And it was very sad and all of that.
So I shovelled my front walkway down to the street and the driveway, which were sort of priorities. I didn't shovel the back porch. She actually loves to go out on the back porch, but I didn't shovel it.
And I had a friend come over, thank God, who was like, we're going to shovel your back porch. And so we did, which is great. And I'm so grateful for my friend.
However, what that left me with, monkey mind, was you are so lazy. And that's one of my things, like you don't be lazy. I grew up in a military family.
Laziness is a four letter word. So, oh, you're so lazy. Oh, you're so stupid.
You didn't realise that over the next couple of days, it's going to be so darn cold that that snow is going to turn into rocks, right? So my brain starts doing this, but I see it right away. I'm like, OK, this is not true.
First of all, I'm smart and I'm not lazy. So what's happening here? Why am I dwelling on these emotions?
Oh, OK, well, I haven't had my dose of cortisol and adrenaline in a while. So maybe that's it. Or maybe I'm just drawn back to my old trauma that told me those things about myself.
OK, so whatever. It's happening for whatever reason. So now, how do I want to change it?
So I got very quiet and I thought about how deeply grateful, deeply grateful I am for Mark, who came over and motivated me to dig myself out. And then I became very grateful for the fact that I have six amazing friends in my life right now. Like during my trauma, I was isolated.
I had it was bad. I was totally isolated. But through this process, I have met these amazing people.
And I am so grateful for that because not that many people have that. So I started focussing on the gratitude and gratitude is such a huge. What's it called remedy for or, you know, interceptive interception of like anything bad.
So I became grateful for that. I became grateful that my dog is still alive. Like I started practising gratitude and that shifted everything for me.
Now, I'm going to mention one other thing. And this is not a marketing plug, but this is because this is my passion and this is what I do and this is why. So we read something amazing.
For example, I read The Four Agreements, which is an incredible book, highly recommend. I thought to myself, oh, my God, I'm going to live, you know, in alignment with these practises. And the very next day I got triggered and I was like, OK, how would the, you know, how would I act and I couldn't remember what the heck the agreements were.
Like I just, I forgot, right? So I know that happens for me. So I created tools for myself and I expanded those tools for others to use.
And some of them are free and some of them, sorry, you have to pay for them. The ones that are free are I have on my website and you can just go to shop and then go to free things. The meditations are on there, but also the screen saver.
So that is my logo. But what that's supposed to be is a portal into your future self.

Kristen Crabtree (28:31)
So for me, and you can make your own darn, you know, lock screen of whatever, but for me, this reminds me every time I pick up my phone of who I'm trying to embody, what that looks like, what the whole purpose of my life is. For people who want to spend money, I have a deck of cards that also has the same graphic on it, and the cards have messages. So it's like, that's backwards, so at least on my end.
Okay, so what is the future you doing now is one of them. I know who I am, I just haven't told the version I'm pretending to be that they're not real. So the idea is you can use these a whole lot of different ways.
You can pull a card in the morning and think about it during the day, like whatever, but it's tools to help you remember. I've created an app that's about to be released. And one of the fun things about the app is, and there's a free version, and there's a paid version.
But one of the fun things about the app is, while it gets loaded up with, you know, daily quotes or whatever, you can also load it up with your own. So you can take the four agreements and you can say, I like this quote, and then it will be saved on your app. So book, journal, app, I have t-shirts that have the same messages.
And they're really intended for the person behind you to read, to remind other people that there's a truth down there. There's a community of people to share their development. So again, honestly, not a plug.
It's just stuff I'm excited about because of that issue that I had that people have with staying on course, staying on track, remembering what they're doing.

Agi Keramidas (30:25)
That's great. And I will put that, this will be in the show notes for the listener to explore all these things you mentioned. One thing I will just reiterate, because it was, I asked you for a tool and you did give me a tool and you simply said gratitude.
I mean, going into gratitude immediately, you can't be grateful and angry at the same time. You can't be grateful and depressed at the same time. So it's a very, I wrote that down as a tool along with the breath that you said, because I think in combination, it can help someone break that pattern once they become aware of it.
So thank you very much. This is quite practical.

Kristen Crabtree (31:21)
So let me talk about the gratitude again, because sometimes people will be angry at their coworker in the moment and be like, what am I grateful for? So you could be grateful you have a job. You could be grateful that you have money to pay for your family.
You could be grateful for the fact that you have this opportunity to learn something new about a person. You can be, there's things that you can be grateful for. And sometimes in that moment, it's hard to identify what they are.
And you could totally be grateful of your family and your whatever, like it doesn't have to be related to the situation and the anger at all, but it can be, it can be something present in the moment. So I just wanted to mention that too, because it's sometimes hard to remember what to be grateful for. It could be grateful that you have two hands, if you do, and two legs, if you do.
I mean, like it can be anything, anything, but it'll shift your mindset from where you were to where a healthier, happier, more peaceful places.

Agi Keramidas (32:24)
Definitely. Definitely. Thank you for that.
And Kristen, as we're going to start wrapping up, I wanted actually to ask you, because we talked about the awareness, the future self, what I would like to ask you, and actually that would be my last question to you. So you can answer that and give your closing words, if you want after, is something for the listener, practical to define. We talked about the future self, but I would like something practical to help them, not embodied, because we discussed about embodiment, but to see it or recognise it or understand their future self better.
And with that, I will also thank you for this fascinating, really fascinating conversation.

Kristen Crabtree (33:30)
Fantastic. So I think, you know, one of the very first steps is really being able to separate your ego, right, or whatever you want to call it, your persona, from that more vast and amazing and infinite self. And there's some really basic, easy tools that you can do anytime.
For example, during washing dishes, I'll just pick that. During washing dishes, talk out loud in the third person about yourself. So Kristen is grabbing the dish, Kristen notices that it's very crusty.
Kristen takes a sponge and tries to scrub off the gunk. Kristen can't scrub it off, so she takes her fingernail and she tries to pry it off. Kristen then rinses the dish.
It feels to see, yes, okay, it's smooth. Kristen puts the dish in the dishing. Okay.
So that kind of process helps you start to feel that separation on an experiential level rather than a cognitive level. Another exercise that, well, I mean, my foreplay in my book, it's free on my website, is an exercise called Who Am I? And there's four different ways to do the exercise.
One is with another person, one is journaling, one is in the mirror, and one is just out loud, a quickie is what I call it. And that exercise, again, free, that exercise is designed to help you realise, first of all, all the masks that you have, all the layers that you have, all the colours that you've hidden yourself to blend in with, all of the adaptations you've done. Okay.
And then, and you can do this exercise over and over, and I recommend you do, because the more you do it, the more you start to peel away what you've put on there and get to the good stuff, the meaty stuff about, oh, okay, so I've taken off all these layers, now what's left? You know?
There's another one I call the detective, where you take a notebook and you walk around your house pretending that you are a missing person. Okay. So what does this person have in their house and where might they be missing? Oh, they have this vast library of books. Maybe they're at the library, you know, whatever. So it's, you know, playful things and just practical things that you can kind of throw into your life to begin to get that experiential sensation of the separation.