Rays of Light Podcast

Hi Karisha,

Hi Makiko,

Welcome to Rays of Light and the Village of Sunnyside.

Our podcast features fictional characters with real problems.

If you have a topic or personality type you'd like us to focus on, please let us know. We'll include contact information in the show notes.

Shellie waves excitedly at her friends, Keira and Lily, as they enter the cafe.

“I'm over here, hurry, I've got great news.”

“There's something really strange about this town,” Keira says as she sits next to Shellie at the small round table.

“Not to delay your news, which I'm sure is about a man and will have turned tragic by tomorrow.”

“Oh, shut up,” Shellie says. “And why are you hating on Sunnyside?”

“I'm still adjusting. It's so small and it's called Sunnyside. Yet the two main cafes are Minions of the Moon and Shadow Self. I mean, I'm glad they're not called Love's Adoration or Shine on Me or something nauseating like that. But what's the deal?”

Shellie turns to Lily, who's still standing.

“What's wrong?”

“I was waiting for Keira's rant to finish so I could go to the bathroom.” Keira laughs.

“I'll try to keep Shellie from speaking until you return. I really don't want to have to hear about this twice.”

After Lily is out of earshot, Shellie says, “You've known me for three months and you already think you can predict what I'll say next. Actually, you're totally wrong. My presentation was selected and I'll be exhibiting it at the National Convention in early November.”

“Oh, wow. That's amazing.” Keira says,

“Is this the one on infection prevention?”

“Yes, I can't believe you remember that. The CDC's ICAR tool for prevention assessment.” “Excellent work. And you kept saying it was a disaster. I'm so sorry. Well, really, I'm glad I guessed wrong.”

When Lily returns, they both share the news with her. She congratulates Shellie, but after they order, asks, “Is that really what you were yelling across the room about?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, I don't see this as ‘Shellie yells across the room news’.”

“Why not?” Keira asks. “She's doing important work.”

“I know she is. No one works harder than a public health nurse. And this was for long-term care facilities, right?”

“You both have such great memories.”

“You complained a lot.” Keira sighs. “So much complaining.”

“And I have no idea what either of you even do in your jobs.” Shellie says. “I feel so guilty.” “We don't know what you do either. Just that you really, really didn't want to create this presentation. And now you're famous.” Shellie rolls her eyes.

Bridger brings the rest of the food and suggests they try a new dessert when they're finished. As they eat and chat, Shellie starts to move around restlessly in her chair. Finally, she smiles broadly and announces.

“So my presentation being selected is true. But Lily's right. That's not what I was so excited about. And now for my real news. I've met the most perfect man.” Her friends groan.

“Well, I haven't actually met him yet.”

Keira throws up her hands and says a little too loudly.

“Please never call a man perfect or ideal in my earshot again.”

“Especially,” Lily adds, “when you haven't even met him. And you will never meet him because he doesn't exist.”

Shellie frowns. “I wish I didn't feel an intense desire to share things. I need supportive, enthusiastic friends. Dating is hard.”

"Do we feel guilty?” Keira asks Lily.

“Not guilty enough to ask about him until after at least one date.” Lily says. “Good or bad, you can tell us then.”

“But it might be weeks before we actually meet.”

“Speed it up. The time chatting is a waste.”

“As long as you're meeting safely.” Keira adds.

“You know it.” Lily says. “One of the many things Shellie does right is safety.”

The next day, Shellie texts Lily and Keira to ask if they're up for an evening walk. They meet at the park at 6 p.m. It's October, so almost dark and rather chilly. They move along briskly, as Shellie explains. Or rather, wails out her dilemma.

“Hating dogs is a deal breaker.”

“What?” Keira and Lily ask.

“Wesley, the man I met, well, you know, matched with. He loves dogs, and he won't go out with anyone who doesn't love them, too. It's a deal breaker.”

“Did he say that? Because deal breaker is kind of an odd phrase.”

“Keira, that's not important. I hate dogs. I can't stand them. They're disgusting, slobbering, stupid, dangerous monsters.”

There's a silence while the vehemence of her words sink in. And then Lily says.

“I had no idea you felt this way. Well, you can't go out with him. You're completely incompatible.”

“But he's the only one I want.”

Her friends both sigh.

“Shellie,” Keira says, “you'll meet someone whose deal breaker is not your truth. He surely has at least one dog, maybe more. You'll be miserable around him.”

“He does have a dog,” Shellie admits.

“And being American, he probably wants three more,” Lily says.

“Avoid, avoid, avoid. There are so many women in this country that love dogs. Maybe having dogs or even intending to get a dog should be one of your deal breakers.”

“Do you know what kind of dog he has?”

“Yes,” Shellie says sadly. “Like I said, he's obsessed. Also, he inherited this dog from his grandmother.”

“Aw,” Lily says. “That adds a whole other layer that most American women would adore. Leave him for them.”

“But maybe it's old and feeble,” Keira suggests.

“It looks very hyper in the videos,” Shellie says. “Terrifyingly hyper.”

Lily asks, “what type of dog is it? A German Shepherd? A Bloodhound?”

“I'll bet it's a Mastiff. They're huge,” Keira says. “Or one of those gorgeous sled dogs, Huskies?”

Shellie sighs. “It's a dash-shund.”

“A what?” Keira asks.

“Do you mean a dox-whond?” Lily asks.

“I don't know. It's spelled like dash-shun.” Shellie groans. “I can't even pronounce it.”

Her friends are laughing now.

“Well, I've only read it,” Shellie says defensively. “I'm not a stupid dog person.”

Keira's laughing too hard to speak.

Lily says. “It's not that, Shellie. It's the dox-whonds are tiny.”

When Keira calms down, she adds.

“I thought it was pronounced dots-sun. But the important thing is that you can deal with this dog.”

“You don't even have to say Dachshund. Just call it by its name, which is…”

“Duke,” Shellie says.

“Ah, a Dachshund named Duke,” Keira says. “That's pretty cute.”

“It is,” Lily says.

“The dog was adopted. That's just the part they know.”

“So he is large?” Lily asks.

“Well, no, it's really small. But I hate all dogs. You don't understand.”

“Why do you hate them? Did one bite you or something?”

“No, but when I was about six or maybe younger, I was playing outside and I saw a dog bite a boy really hard on the arm. Then the boy got spanked right on the street.”

“I'll bet he did something to antagonize the dog,” Keira says.

“Yeah, I'm sure that was the case. But I still feel scared whenever I see one. Scared and repulsed. They're just gross.”

“Stop it, Shellie,” Lily says. “Just forget this guy. If you don't, I'll feel sorry for him and his dog than you because you'll be misleading him.”

Shellie asks seriously. “Is there any possible way I can start liking dogs?”

“Have you researched it?”

“Yes, but I don't want to just get over my fear. I want to love them.”

“Shellie,” Keira exclaims in frustration. “You're irrational. I have a lot to do tonight, and here we are discussing another one of your absurd fantasies. You haven't even met this guy, and you believe you can love him and his dog? No, I don't want to hear about him again or about dogs.”

“I kind of want to go and adopt a dog now,” Lily says.

“Well, you can talk about your dog, but I don't want to hear Shellie's opinions.”

“I can't believe you'd get a dog.”

"Only to help you,” Lily says. “So I think I'm going to head home now that we made the loop twice. It's cold, and I'm in line with Keira's feelings about this.”

“Sorry,” Shellie says as Lily and Keira walk away.

“I'll let it go. I'm not going to be able to change my brain in time to help anyway.”

“Well,” Keira says, stopping and turning her head towards Shellie.

“If you want to change your brain, maybe you can try hypnosis. See you soon.” She waves and jogs off.

“Don't worry, you'll meet a wonderful cat person,” Lily yells supportively as she too hurries away. Shellie doesn't notice the cold anymore. She's filled with excitement at the idea of using hypnosis to change her brain.

“So like I told you on the phone,” Shellie says to Luke at the beginning of their first session, “I hate dogs, but need to love them as soon as possible. I can't even see a photo of a dog without cringing internally.” Luke nods.

“I didn't have a chance to ask what you mean when you say you hate dogs,” Shellie says.

“I'm sorry I had to end the call so abruptly. I was at work. Well, I'm afraid of them, and I don't see what the point is.”

“The point of dogs?” Luke asks. “Exactly. What's with people being so desperate for something to worship them that they're willing to go out in all weathers and pick up poop?” “Do you remember when you first felt afraid of dogs?”

“I do.” Shellie tells him the story she told her friends.

“It makes sense you're afraid of dogs,” Luke says. “The bite would be enough, but then the boy was spanked publicly. He got into trouble.”

“Right,” Shellie says. “It was so confusing. He must have done something to upset the dog, and it probably wasn't the first time, but I didn't see that. And even thinking it now doesn't help me.”

“It's become a known in your subconscious,” Luke says.

“When you try to rationalize it away, you end up stuck, going around in circles in your conscious mind. So what we're going to do is open up a pathway between what you know consciously and logically is best for you and begin to retrain these old associations that have been trained to work against you. Does that make sense to you?” Shellie nods.

“So on the phone, you mentioned that you found a man on a dating app that's only interested in meeting someone who loves dogs, and that's what led you to contacting me. The way you talk about dogs does make me wonder if you really want to stop fearing them. Doing it for someone else might not be enough.”

Shellie nods repeatedly while she thinks about this.

"You're right. I'm afraid to no longer fear them, but they're all around. I'm tired of jumping in fright and cowering away from them. It's true I wouldn't have bothered to book a session if I hadn't come across Wesley. He's the man I matched with. But I think there are enough other reasons for me to want this. Plus, so many men have dogs.”

“Okay,” Luke says. “I'm going to draw a little diagram of what we were discussing a moment ago so it's clear.”

Shellie has a hard time focusing as Luke continues. She fantasizes that Wesley's dog chooses a new person, leaving him all alone, completely dogless. If only wonderful things like that happened in real life.

M: Here, Luke checked on Shellie's motivation rather than just taking the request at face value because when it comes to rewiring old fears or any pattern in the subconscious when it comes to that, motivation is like everything. Not the motivation to please someone else or to make a relationship work or something external, but a real internal, personal desire for the change itself.

M: If the drive is mostly borrowed from wanting someone else's approval or something external, the suggestions given in hypnosis most likely wouldn't land well. That's why Luke asking her to pause and clarifying the level of her motivation is really important in terms of how hypnotherapy works.

K: Right. There are hypnotherapists that won't work with someone if they're not coming in for their own personal reasons. Like if they're just coming in because the doctor said, but they don't actually want to do what the doctor said or because a spouse is common and they don't want to do what the spouse said. If they don't have any kind of internal motivation, then they're not going to do their part. They’re not going to listen to their recordings and they're not even going to take in the suggestions because they're going to be blocking them.

Shellie feels much more relaxed after the hypnosis part of the session. Luke gives her the assignments of listening to her session recording and also looking at a website he'll send her full of photos of small, cute, cuddly dogs. When she opens the website, it's without trepidation. She even finds herself silently thinking, “aww,” about a few of the photos. She doesn't cringe once. Seeing dogs in real life still scares her, but she's pleased at the progress she's made.

Shellie is going to meet Wesley for the first time and her second session with Luke is focused on this because it's all she wants to talk about. The meeting will be at a restaurant and she's made sure there's no outside seating and no dogs are allowed.

“I have a fear of ruining the first meeting with the man I plan to spend the rest of my life with,” she jokes to Luke.

When Wesley cancels a few days in advance due to a bad cold, Shellie asks Luke if she can have an extra session that week to get back to working on dogs. They focus on helping her feel comfortable enough to not look away when she sees one. Her task for the week is to walk around areas where there tend to be a lot of leashed dogs.

The success of this exercise is galvanizing and after a few days, Shellie sees a woman on a park bench with a small dog sleeping on her lap and she moves closer to them.

“So cute,” Shellie says. The woman smiles.

“This is Gary. Look at him perking up with a compliment.” Gary's lifted his head and is staring at Shellie. She holds her hand out toward him with her palm up as she's seen others do, but she's standing five feet away. So the woman gestures her to move closer. Shellie does, feeling only a little nervous. Gary sniffs her palm, licks it, then settles back down and closes his eyes. “Thank you,” Shellie tells him quietly. She says goodbye to the woman and walks away, feeling like a conquering hero.

M: So I do want to pause here for a moment. Shellie's progress by this point, already feeling calm around a real dog after just three sessions. Actually, it's two on dogs, right?

K: Yeah, it's two on dogs.

M: Yeah, it's genuinely fast. It's not impossible, but it's not typical either. Just so that you don't have over-expectation because hypnotherapy is not a hypno-miracle. Especially for a fear that's been reinforced since childhood. I mean, she's had this fear for a very long time.

K: Yeah, most of her life. I mean, it's almost like the person writing the story was just really impatient to get going.

M: So motivation can definitely speed things up. But the tendency is, the more deeply rooted the fear is, or the pattern, any pattern is, the more time and repetition it takes to create lasting change. And of course, it also depends on how well the suggestions are reinforced in daily life. So it largely depends on the person and their circumstances.

K: Right, so if a person listens to the recording a lot, that reinforces things and that really does speed up the progress. So if someone has the time and inclination to listen to it daily or even every other day, that makes a big difference. And Shellie, she was given some other tasks like looking at the website, walking around a place with dogs. She actually did these things right away, which is, it's hard for a lot of people to do because everyone's really busy.

K: And, you know, sometimes we just forget these kind of things. But that's part of the reason that she is making such quick progress. And, you know, maybe she's very motivated by this Wesley guy.

M: Yeah, taking those small steps are very important. In fact, that's probably more important than listening to the recordings.

K: So true, you're right.

M: Yeah, and what's really important is to chunk it down small enough that you feel comfortable doing it. Maybe just like feeling a bit nervous, but not too nervous. So really chunking it down to small steps to make it easier to implement on a daily basis.

K: Yeah, and sometimes it would be much smaller steps than these too, like Makiko was referring to earlier. But looking at the website, that was quite reasonable. I mean, the website he sent in particular, that was quite a nice small step. Walking around where there were a lot of dogs, you know, on purpose, is kind of a bigger step.

By the time of Shellie's next session, she's purposefully visited two acquaintances with dogs. One, a large hairy creature kept trying to fit on her lap.

“I wasn't scared at all,” Shellie tells Luke. He congratulates her on her success and Shellie repeats the part about the dog on her lap and how she was covered in his fur and she wasn't the slightest bit fearful.

“So you went above and beyond what we worked on,” Luke says. He asks if she feels like she's in a good place with dogs. Shellie sighs.

“Well, I'm not afraid of them. I don't hate them, but I wouldn't say I like them. Some people go gaga over every dog they see. I don't think I need to go that far, but I'd like to feel, I don't know, maybe some warmth toward them. Like when I see a fawn or a kitten or a rabbit or a groundhog, I just kind of melt a bit.”

“Have you seen any of those recently?”

“I saw a fawn last spring, all curled up in the cutest little ball against my neighbor's house every day when Mama Doe was grazing. So sweet.”

“Great. When you bring that memory up, do you feel anything like the warmth you mentioned in your body anywhere?”

“Well, cornily, I feel warmth in my heart area.”

“Not corny at all. People really do feel emotions in their chest. How we assign meaning comes from our brain, but mind and body are always working together. When you remember the cutest dog you've seen lately, does that bring anything up?” Shellie thinks for a moment.

“Not that I can tell. I feel kind of neutral, which is wonderful, actually.”

“You mentioned mostly baby animals, but you probably don't see puppies much. Is there anything else that brings up that warm feeling in the heart area?”

“Hmm. Oh, my niece. She's 18. And my sweet cat from childhood who lived till I was 18. And my best friend from college adopted the most adorably mischievous child. I haven't met him yet, but her photos and funny descriptions give me that same feeling.”

“Okay, great. We'll focus on connecting dogs to this feeling of warmth in your heart. Let's talk about some of the dogs you can picture in your mind right now. You don't have to know the names. Just give me an identifier.”

“Well, Duke, of course. That's Wesley's dachshund, or however you say it.” Shellie thinks for a few moments and comes up with four other dogs she can picture easily.

M: So what Luke is doing here has a name in hypnotherapy. It's called using a resource state. Rather than trying to create a brand new feeling out of nowhere to link to or to associate to the image of dogs, in her case, he's finding feelings in the sensation Shellie already has easy access to, like the warmth, the melting feel, you know, she gets towards her niece or her fawn. And using hypnosis to link that existing feeling to dogs.

Shellie listens to her recording from this session every morning leading up to her newly scheduled first meeting with Wesley. After a few days, she finds she can think of the dogs she knows and bring up the warm feeling on her own. Then she tries it out on strange dogs, and she's successful with them, too.

There's a small setback when an enthusiastic dog charges toward her. And for a panic moment, she doesn't register that the dog is safely leashed and being held back by a flustered man. But a few minutes later, she feels calm again. She suggests to Wesley in a text message that they go to a cafe with outdoor seating since the weather's predicted to be surprisingly warm the Thursday evening of their meeting.

“And then you can bring Duke if you want,” she adds, feeling genuinely relieved about the distraction the dog will provide to dispel awkwardness. Wesley seems pleased by this idea, and Shellie thinks it might be the smoothest first date setup she's ever had.

The temperatures on the day of the meeting are nearly as pleasant as expected. Shellie's eager to find out what interacting with Duke will be like. Will he like her? Will she feel comfortable with him? Will they have a genuine connection? Shellie tells the host that she's meeting someone with a dog, and they'll be sitting outside. The host glances at his computer screen. “Shellie Monez?” He asks. At her nod, he says, “He's already arrived. Please follow me.”

The first few seconds are a blur as Wesley introduces himself and Duke, and Shellie kneels down and focuses, flustered, on the dog until she feels calmer. She looks up to see Wesley beaming at her, which makes her nervous again. Their server brings Duke some water and asks Wesley about the dog's dietary requirements as they decide on the perfect snack.

That's when Shellie finds out the dog is vegan, which she didn't even know was possible.

"Are you vegan too?” She asks Wesley after the server has left.

“I am,” he says. “It's on my profile.”

“Oh, I was too distracted by Duke to notice, I guess,” Shellie says, and this is true. She wonders what else she overlooked.

After Duke has settled, they order their food and begin to discuss books, movies, shows, and music. They can't find any interest in Coleman, and Shellie starts to feel a little nervous. Then, with a chuckle, Wesley says,

“We must like at least one thing that's the same,” and Shellie looks at his smiling face and can't help smiling back.

By the time their food arrives, they're both laughing so contagiously that their server joins in. Shellie tries to explain, as does Wesley, but they're giggling too much.

“Wait, so this is a first date, the server says, and do you dislike what each other loves or you're just unfamiliar with it?”

"Mostly unfamiliar,” Wesley says. “We've heard of a lot of it, but we haven't really given it a try.”

"How exciting,” their server exclaims. “You'll have so much fun introducing each other to new things. Come back in a month and ask for Tad’s section so I can get an update. Enjoy your food before it gets cold.”

After they eat for a few minutes, Wesley says,

“I've heard there's no longer a monoculture, and I guess this proves it. Of course, until I was 17, I lived in Norway, and then I started college early because that's how my parents wanted it.”

“Ooh, that explains some of it,” Shelley says. “Many of my high school preferences are really stuck, even 20 years later.”

“Mine too, but they're very Norwegian.” Wesley pauses, makes eye contact, then looks down at his food. So do you want to take Tad's challenge?”

“It sounds fun,” Shelley says. Duke barks.

We are delighted you joined us in Sunnyside today.

Yes, we are.

If you enjoy the content we create, the best way to support us is to click that follow button in your favorite podcast app and leave a five-star review.

Or you can go old school and tell a friend to listen. Yeah.

Thank you, Karisha, for writing our stories.

Thank you, Makiko, for editing our episodes and doing all of our other post-production work. And thank you to High Street Jack for our theme song.