Episode 080: Stop Surviving & Start Living with Dr. Mcayla

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In this episode, James and Phoebe are joined by Dr. Mcayla, a licensed psychotherapist, Brain Training and MindSet Expert and an EMDR specialist. Her online programs and guided courses help people to change their brains, to remove negative core beliefs and to draw abundance into their lives. Today she shares all about self-states, what to do when you get triggered and ultimately, how to gain a deeper sense of awareness. Like most clinicians and therapists, Dr. Mcayla shares that she grew up with dysfunction but didn’t really know what her story was until she was asked to speak about it at an event.

She realized that she grew up with certain lies in her head about herself. Not wanting to ignore it, she was curious to understand herself, while helping others. This led to the study of the brain and neuroscience.

Dr. Mcayla didn’t just want to train people to manage their lives, but rather to start real change with them. She wanted to find a specific modality to specialize in, which led to EMDR, or “eye movement desensitization and reprocessing.” This modality focuses specifically on core beliefs, and how we can actually change them.

Although the brain is often talked about, she notes that the mind isn’t and there is still a lot to learn about the psyche.

She shares that as we grow up, we’re constantly defining ourselves, especially during deep sleeps or when in REM mode. This is done so that our brain comes up with some sort of solution of what it says about ourselves. However, as a child, the brain doesn’t have much logic and we end up filling in the gaps. We often do this with distorted truths that become our core beliefs. This is an issue because as we get older, we don’t go back and re-assess these beliefs to determine if they are in fact true.

95% of our actions, feelings and behaviors come from the subconscious mind, but not many of us know what we actually have there. Dr. Mcayla stresses that there’s a difference between what we know to be true, and what we feel to be true, and she says that a core belief is anything that feels true to us.

Our core beliefs create a guideline to what’s possible, but our egos will resist anything that challenges us to grow as it’s programmed to help us survive. This is why most people have learned how to survive, but few have learned how to really live.

James survived by being invisible when he was younger, which is a big contradiction of the personal brand that he is today. He admits that it’s taken a lot of mindset work for him to get to the point where he is today.

Dr. Mcayla’s work also focuses on self-states, or the bundles of information that are living in our subconscious minds and make up a memory. When we are resistant or fearful, usually it’s because of these self-states.

The role of the subconscious mind is to look and appear normal in society, at all times. For that reason, it will push back memories that don’t make us look good. However, these thoughts are still very much active in our minds.

She explains that we can’t lose our self-worth, but when things happen in life we feel like we have, and we’ve suddenly become “not good enough.” We then spend the rest of our lives trying to become worthy again, which becomes a cycle.

Society doesn’t define our truths; what defines us is the kind of person we are. We can’t trust our perceptions as they are often not based in logic and can be distorted. Dr. Mcayla notes adds that if we don’t gain self-awareness, then we’ll simply accept our present circumstances because we are looking at them through a distorted lens of the past.

EMDR allows us to reprocess a memory associated with a belief by using bi-lateral movements. The ultimate goal of EMDR is to open up communication between the conscious and subconscious minds and James found that it gave him a deeper appreciation of how much importance he was giving the opinions of others.

Dr. Mcayla reminds others not to take their perceptions to be real. Never stop wondering and asking questions; stay on your journey as we can be either in survival mode, or be truly living!