If I Speak - 15: Dissociation is my superpower

Episode Date: May 28, 2024

Does the body keep the score? Ash and Moya explore the border between grief and trauma and how to embrace being emotionally messy when disaster strikes. Plus: an “accidental incel” writes in. Got a problem? Tell us: [e-mail] *Gossip, elevated.* Music by Matt Huxley

Hola mi amigos, it is If I Speak, the podcast for the unhinged and underemployed. I'm Ash Sarkar and with me, as ever, is Moya Lothian-McLean. Moya, how you doing? It's really funny you saying underemployed because that is something that keeps getting levelled at our age group when we turn up to things like deportation protests. I was at the Peckham deportation protest uh that happened recently and anti-deportation i should say if people don't know what this is there was a van that was coming to take some people to the bibby stockholm barge which is where they

store asylum seekers on the floating prison barge and a load of people turned up in peckham to stop this van leaving and one of the accusations level is like, you're all underemployed. And everyone's like, well, we all have jobs. We just work in digital media. So, yes. It's like, I'm active on the company Slack. So, that's fine. I'm texting.

Yeah. What was the difference between being jobless and having, as David Graeber, you called it, bullshit jobs? Yeah, it's like you're texting on Slack rather than WhatsApp. That's the difference. Coming up, we've got some genuinely intrusive thoughts from me and a selection of audience dilemmas. As always, we'd love to hear from you, particularly if you've got a problem which couldn't possibly be made worse by us so just email at if i speak at navarra media.com that's if i speak at navarra media.com and we will we'll try to get to you and we we do try and give good advice and i think even if it's not good advice what you know is that it's come from the heart so it's bad advice that we genuinely mean

is that does that make it any better I don't know um but first it's time for our quick fire round lawyer what have you got for me this is 73 questions minus 70 so three questions and let's start off with ash do you write a diary i don't write a diary but i think i should write a diary and in fact for my birthday a friend of mine got me a very nice leather bound journal and i think it could be good for me but the reason why i don't write a diary is that i feel that writing is my job so have you ever tried to write a diary what happens when you try and write a diary i become very self-conscious about the idea of people reading it like for posterity and I've become very pretentious in my own diary. What about you? I'm exactly the same obviously.

I start doing the fucking... I lie to my diary. I don't even, I don't write a diary for that reason but I won't be honest with the diary about how i'm thinking and feeling which obviously completely uh what's the word what's the word when it defeats the purpose it defeats the purpose of the exercise if you're not being honest with your own diary and it's like wow i can't even be honest with myself lots of food thought there but instead of unpacking that let's go next question which is what is your holy grail skincare product my holy grail skincare product for the face is probably just the bog standard cera v moisturizer because i've tried loads of really fancy ones and it doesn't work for me so that and then the beauty pie feather light spf into it lots of spf chat at the moment

um i am obviously a late i'm a late adopter but now i am very spf 50 on the face spf 30 on the bodies but one thing i don't mean to be like cliche and talk about straight man again i know we talk about straight men way too much in this podcast but unfortunately we live in a patriarchal society so straight men are like the they they absorb all of those values and um it's very sad so we're trying to unpick it um but all the straight men i know fucking love tanning and are so resistant to spf it doesn't make sense to me they're so resistant i don't i don't know if your husband is like this but my ex and like my friends you try and get them to wear higher than sps 15 and 30 degree temperatures and they're like no like my burn will turn to tan i'm trying to communicate with them look you will tan for longer and better if you wear spf but it's not going in the straight men in my life are very pro SPF actually I would say more

pro SPF than me I can be very very cavalier with the SPF and I'm trying not to be but the straight men in my life very SPF conscious they're a good influence on me ash protect protect your gorgeous skin get SPF'd up okay third question inspired by me um Would you ever dye your hair and what color if so? Well, I was gonna say, I really, really love this color hair on you. It's giving a little bit Marilyn Monroe. I'm just, I'm into it. I used to dye my hair a lot when I was in my teens.

So I had every hair color you could think of under the sun apart from blonde. So I had silver, pink, blue, green, red, all of the things and now I don't want to dye my hair anymore. I'm happy as it is but I love it when other people dye their hair. It provides much needed excitement. What was your favourite colour when you were a teenager? What was your favourite period? your favorite period i had this hair which went from a kind of purpley black into a red and then an orange like a bird of paradise the emo's rainbow from kind of like the back of the crown to like the front and i liked it i am calling that the emo's rainbow officially it was the emo's rainbow it was the emo's rainbow but i also had like a spock haircut

for a bit which was hideous it's the spock one with like a blunt fringe it's it's sort of like rounded fringe that's quite blunt across the forehead okay so it's like the it's not it's not the daunt books fringe it's a different fringe yeah not not the daunt books fringe but like a kind of rounded fringe uh across front. So I look like Spock. Would you go Dawn Books fringe over? Like would, sometimes I'm like, what would it be like if I just complete, because I've definitely changed my aesthetic loads

over the years. And now I look, I went over the way I dress and like when you see me out and about, I look like I live in Peckham. You can tell I live in Peckham. So I'm just interested in what would you do if you changed your aesthetic to something else and what like subculture would you do? I don't want to change my hair to anything where I have to get it cut regularly.

I hate going to get my hair cut. I hate sitting down for a long time. I hate the amount of time it takes. I can't stand it. So there'll be times where I won't get my hair cut for like two years or something. I last got my hair cut in November. And maybe I'll get it cut this summer maybe I won't um so the idea of a fringe which requires upkeep is just not for me I like long layers where they grow nicely but I just I can't be fucked I'm very very pleased this is not a judgment on like high maintenance hairdos I love it when other people have them i just hate it for myself do you know what's weird i'm a low maintenance person who suddenly started getting stupidly high maintenance hairdos so i got a fringe what do you think that's about

i don't know self-punishment the need for dopamine constantly an external injection of dopamine that i wasn't getting elsewhere it's not a coincidence that I dyed my hair blonde and got a new tattoo in like the space and I got another one booked in like the space of three weeks it's a a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis anyway we can talk about that another time but we've got big big big tings to talk about today you've got an intrusive thought for me and it is pretty hardcore this time i know i have a real intrusive thought and i actually went back and forth about the idea of saying it on the podcast because i find it difficult to talk about my feelings when they're fresh and when they're raw and it's weird for me bringing something which is so present for me onto the podcast so if I become inarticulate and start stumbling over my words do bear with me um so basically my intrusive

thought is this how do you get over or mitigate against a paralyzing fear of being emotionally messy. So something which I think you'll have picked up on by now is that I have always prided myself on being good at emotionally regulating. I haven't always done it, but I've prided myself on being good at it. It's a big part of my identity that I can jump into high stress situations and be competent and that I'm really good at decentering my own emotions and that even when things are really difficult I can keep working. That's a big one, the fact that I can keep working and doing this job where it feels like people want to cut my head off all the time. But at the moment I'm dealing with genuinely intrusive thoughts like

actual like flashbacks and auditory hallucinations which is new for me um and I think that all the things that I just shunted to the side over the years plus losing a parent two months ago in a way that was just incredibly distressing and very chaotic it's just pushed my repression and inshallah strategy to the limit um so as I mentioned that's having physical manifestations so I'm getting the classic anxiety ones like shallow breathing and my heart going crazy um I had my first like proper full on panic attack about a month or so ago, which was really fun. It also happened in Peckham, which really has bolstered my anti South London agenda. I'm like, look what happens when you go

south of the river, panic attacks. And I've been having this strange hypersensitivity to sound. So if someone like closes a door somewhere in the house, it sounds like it's happening right next to my ear. And when I'm sleeping, I'll suddenly wake up because I think there's been a really loud noise. And when I say a loud noise, I feel like someone has just like fired a gun next to my head, but my partner is still fast asleep. So there's, there's no noise at all. Or maybe the noise was like a car's gone down the street and normally I'd sleep through it, but it feels really, really present. Um, but I'm wide awake and my body is just completely saturated with adrenaline. Um, and I actually worked out why uh last week that's happening so I don't want to go into the details of how my stepdad died because that does just feel private but over

the two nights when he was in the ICU and I was trying to sleep either in the room with him in the ICU or going home to like try and sleep for a couple of hours it was a kind of sleep where you had to be ready to wake up at any moment because the phone would ring or the machines would start beeping so my body was primed for being woken up by loud noises and I just realized that last week I was like oh that's why I keep waking up in the night thinking there's been a loud noise like my body is still trained for the phone to ring again um so yeah as well as those things there's been this like constant feeling of dread um I feel totally overwhelmed by the feeling that something really really bad

is going to happen and it's going to somehow be my fault because I've taken my eye off the ball um and that feeling that feeling happens when I'm with people it happens when I'm alone um and the best way to block it out I've found so I can get to sleep is to watch these like woodworking videos on YouTube I'm really into watching people do woodworking now. And I think it's kind of rational to have that feeling of dread or that feeling that something really bad is going to happen because something really, really, really bad did happen. And I saw all of it and I was there for all of it and I wasn't shielded from it. But it does make it really hard to connect with the social world around you because you're just like ding ding ding catastrophe incoming um and I read this quote from C.S. Lewis uh the other day which

is no one ever told me that grief felt so much like fear and that's how I feel not so much like I'm grieving but like I'm just constantly afraid and I'm not a complete idiot I know that I can't just dissociate my way out of this one so I've started therapy and more than that I'm not a complete idiot I know that I can't just dissociate my way out of this one so I've started therapy and more than that I'm actively trying to do things differently by talking out loud not just doing repression and inshallah but I'm so scared of letting go of my sense of control and competence and I don't want to do anything that will make me worse at working or worse at regulating my emotions and basically I'm still completely freaked out by the idea of being emotionally messy, even though I know that that is just locking the anxiety and the trauma deeper into my body. So it's not completing the circuit. It's not allowing for a moment of catharsis it's just driving it deeper into my nervous system so to come back to the question is this how do you get over the fear of being

emotionally messy without completely abandoning the things you value in yourself and is it possible to embrace catharsis without losing competence and yeah these are real questions these are real questions that i don't know the answer to so over to you well um i made some notes because i first want to start by saying i guess thank you for being so open and not sound a woo-woo but i am sounding i'm very woo-woo at the moment sorry to say my friends have been like we love your woo-woo, but I'm all about like, we need to let go of our shame. We need to build up our self-esteem, you know? But what you're describing isn't being emotionally messy, Ash. You're describing PTSD. The symptoms that you have described are all that of post-traumatic stress disorder. And obviously there's questions about whether you know there's lots of things like wow does this work or this but the collection of symptoms that you have described to the letter

if you take them to a medical professional they will describe they will diagnose that as post-traumatic stress disorder and as i as you were talking and i don't want to be all pathological but i'm going to get a bit pathological for this one. As you were talking, I literally was like, let me just double check this just to make sure that I'm not going mad about this. So, you know, some of the symptoms are things like flashbacks, nightmares, repetitive distressing images or sensations. You try and distract yourself with work and hobbies uh to numb the pain you will have feelings of isolation irritability and guilt you may have problems sleeping you may be hyper aroused

hyper aware and when we say around i don't mean sexually i mean you're so aware of everything around you such as noises auditory you may have hallucinations where panic attacks you witnessed a really traumatic event you witnessed a really traumatic event and i think what you're dealing with is not just this idea of being emotionally you know messy or grief i think it is more than that i think you have suffered a great great shock and i think i can tell by your face you're not like you're not liking this but i think you have post-traumatic stress disorder i'm sorry to say um and the therapist the therapist is the first is like the first step to that but i think you need to look at this as more than just this is

messy and actually really embrace that it might be a bit more than this idea of mess and i get that's hard because throughout your whole life your strategy has been if i just carry on i could deal with anything where there is a will there is a way to repress there is a will to carry on like you know there is a way so the idea that something might have happened to you that is so seismic and traumatic that it might be out of the realm of something that you yourself can just kind of like deal with and work through on your own is going to be really destabilizing as well but I think you have to do that in order to understand the magnitude of what's happened and understand the magnitude of how it's affected you and I don't think it would just be this like this one incident

but that can be a catalyst for all these other things going off um and yeah did you when you were younger did you have the space I think one of the questions is like did you have the space to ever feel like you could be vulnerable did you have the space? I think one of the questions is like, did you have the space to ever feel like you could be vulnerable? Did you have the space to feel like you could fall apart as you put it? Because you've talked a lot about being a parentified child. And I have a feeling that you may never have had the, or let yourself have the opportunity to grapple with what is like a normal level of emotional messy, which is why you're categorizing what I would call pretty severe post-traumatic stress symptoms as just like within the realm of what i would say is like normally messy um and i don't think they're on the same level i don't think you should treat them on the

same level i do think it's this idea of like you'll get catharsis etc but i i think it's deeper i don't want to scare you because i don't think this is a scary thing per se i think it's something you can learn to deal with but i think unless it's something diagnosed correctly you're going to apply the wrong methods to it and the wrong way of thinking about it I mean I you know I'm laughing because like I've not been unaware that these are symptoms of PTSD I mean not that long after my stepdad passed away I did what I call my comfort activity of reading all the academic papers about like you know the relatives of someone who died in ICU and the rates of acute distress disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder and I was like okay well the statistics

put you know all of us who are there in the cohort of people who are very likely to experience PTSD which then doesn't make it feel like it's some kind of like failure or failure of resilience on my part to be experiencing this I'm like no no no this is just incredibly statistically likely now of course I know that my way of interacting with it is to try and find a kind of like academic or intellectual distance to make it more manageable I'm not saying that like you know that's necessarily the healthiest way through in the world but I think that did create a sense of permission um and while I haven't gone to a GP yet and I probably should I just really fucking

hate going to the GP like you know the language my therapist is using is the language of trauma to describe this and so it feels like there is an awareness about this not just being like I feel sad or like I feel bereaved it's like no this is um trauma that's living in the body coming up in a very particular way I think when it comes to like what my attitudes are to vulnerability it's like you know me and my mum spoke about this a few weeks ago which is we both prided ourselves on being the good child which is such a loaded phrasing right and it's relational and it's about how you compare yourself to other people. It's very self-aggrandizing. And there's also a kind of need for like being patted on the head about it as well.

It's like, no, I'm the good child. I'm the one that doesn't need. And I'm the one that, you know, observes the needs of others and meets them and doesn't have needs of my own. And, you know, my mom is very much superwoman right you know she she plays this role in the family and also her job for decades was working in child protection it was literally meeting the needs of other people and intervening in other people's crises which by definition means you don't have any yourself. And I think that being modelled for me was really good in lots of ways.

And, you know, I joke sometimes like, dissociation is my superpower. Like, it is. And that has allowed for me to be resilient in ways that I'm not sure other people in my life could do. But the flip side of that is that it's so difficult to think about a way of being vulnerable which doesn't just immediately hit me with like a panic fear response um like that that is very much the downside and then something which

my which is something which my therapist told me um something which my therapist sort of made the connections with is that I grew up with that being modeled this idea that your own vulnerability is undesirable and will negatively impact your competence and then in terms of the things that you know i saw with my stepdad's passing um he was very vulnerable and it was really bad and it was really scary so it's like i got this message from the universe telling me that like vulnerability is really really frightening so that fed back into like all these other messages that i'd i'd grown up with um and i think i mean you might even be able to hear it now that i'm speaking less fluently and

it feels physically difficult to like get the words out between my chest and my throat like that's the bit where it feels just like there is a physical block and when I exert my sense of control in the world through language that that feels really frightening it feels so frightening to like be worse at articulating myself it feels frightening to kind of come into either you know the relational dynamics that exist in my life or like even a therapeutic space with like messy unprocessed raw material and I'm scared of opening it up and being overwhelmed by it to the extent that it will like completely undercut the rest of myself it's my sense of self you know like and maybe that makes me a big old fraidy cat right and all the like front and superficial like bravery or resilience of my job it's like actually very very brittle and

underneath it is just like pulsing throbbing fear well i think you know that's true i think you i think you know straight up that that's true i think i have so many thoughts that i want to kind of get onto that that you've touched on but i also don't want to make you cry sorry because we're just going to get the emotional geyser out uh this always first of all i want to go back to this concept of emotionally messy i do think you have ptsd symptoms i think that's part of it but i think it's also important to look at the way you phrase this segment which is how like how can i be emotionally messy and without abandoning myself um and the idea of being emotionally messy and without abandoning myself?

And the idea of being emotionally messy is interesting to me because I think you just view all emotion as mess. Any emotion that isn't somehow allowing you to like carry on, you know, do up your tie, stand up straight, sing the national anthem, is mess to you. Being, needing other people despite the fact that you want other people to need you and that you have preached to me in a very useful way about like, you know, the best thing you can do for other people despite the fact that you want other people to need you and that you have preached to me in a very useful way about like you know the best thing you can do for other people sometimes is be the one who needs their support you do not practice that you you do not you not do not allow other people to hold you up and i you talk about this idea of vulnerability

i i do wonder when you feel like you have actually been vulnerable to the people even to i don't want to get too like tell me the exact moment but when when you actually are vulnerable because i was talking to a friend the other day and they were saying something very interesting is about how um their like partner said to them you know you don't let me in and they were like what but i talk to you all the time like i talk to you constantly and it's like yeah you talk to them constantly but you're not actually being vulnerable you you're talking to control the perception they have of you you're not actually showing your soft belly at all and you're not showing the things that scare you most and this is this is part of the idea of like the constant need to control how other people see you and perceive you

as the good one the one who doesn't ask anything of others and will always give give give because it comes back to what we were talking about in the previous episode with Ashima Kenner, which is there's this fear at the core that there is either a badness or bad insides and that if that comes to the fore, something catastrophic will happen. And that catastrophe could be someone leaving you, that catastrophe could be you thinking that you're going to lose everything you hold dear simply by, because you'll fall apart to such you thinking that you're going to lose everything you hold dear simply by because you'll fall apart to such a degree you're not going to be able to hold it together anymore

because all you've ever known is the survival mode of just carrying on repressing and this front and if you take that front down somehow that will undermine the other things about yourself and it won't i promise you it will it will not do that um why am I getting emotional talking about this? Because I'm like, I want to fix you and that's my own problems. But it reminds, okay, I'll use an example from my past here. So for, I want to say from the ages of 16 to 25, and I've talked about this briefly, I had eczema all over my arms. I had it all over my face. I had it all over my arms i had it all over my face i had it all over my neck and i thought this eczema would never go away in parallel to this i would always talk about like i was always very like fronting fronting fronting about my father's death my father left when i was two um he was

maybe three he died when i was 10 didn't see him in the meantime barely have a memory of him and he was a joke in my life he was something that was like oh you know um it's fine like haha you've heard me joke about my dad like haha it's fine never ever people say i'm so sorry to hear he died and i'm just like i didn't know him i don't i don't have any uh jurisdiction over grief there i have nothing to like talk about there it's got no relation to me um and sometimes i and as i got older the thing is these emotions will come up at some point there's going to be a reckoning and you're having your reckoning now you might have had many reckonings before but whatever things have gone in your life that you suppressed the catalyst of your stepdad's death is giving you your reckoning and i would use

heavily like many things and as i got you know got older then things happen like i would see like a little kid in the street with their mixed race father with glasses and sometimes i'd find myself crying and i wouldn't know why but it's nothing to do with me it's nothing to do with me and then i went to a therapist and i was like oh i went to therapist for separate reasons and i went to them so i was like oh nothing's gonna come out of this whatever um i don't know whether you had this but on the first session she asked me at some point what about your dad and i just started wailing like deep in my soul wailing this geyser of emotion erupted and i i just couldn't stop and for the next 12 weeks i was with i think i was with her for like a year but

for 12 weeks just like tears tears all these repressed emotions came up and there were other things involved but there was this underlying grief that i just hadn't dealt with whatsoever and i said about my eczema because six months into that therapy i noticed all the eczema on my hands had disappeared and all the eczema my thing had just like this had disappeared because the body was really keeping the score and that therapy didn't break down all the things i prized about myself it didn't change you know my efficiency it didn't change my ability to do my job it didn't it made me better at those things it made me a better friend I'm still working on this stuff it made me a better partner it made me someone who could understand myself more it didn't ruin me it changed my life for the better um and I think

right now you you really have a choice which is you can either stick with your tried and tested survival methods of sort of like going back into your nothing can touch me. Disassociation is the way to go. Or you're going to have to do something very scary, which I think you're starting and I suspect you're doing, which is you're going to have to like open up that wound and really let yourself wail. Because it's not it's not going to it's not going to ruin your life. It's not going to undercut you. And it's not going to, as you say, make you lose value in yourself. In fact, it will give you more faith in yourself. And I can only say that from coming out the other side of that.

But I know how scary it is. I know how scary it is to look at the black box that you've kept locked up for so long and think, if I open that, I know that I'm going to be for a few weeks. So, so raw, like, like just this little lump of flesh that if you add, I don't know if you add like any sort of like water to it just stings, like everything stings, but you'll, you'll come out softer. It's, um, I always use this Narnia comparison where there's a bit like the fifth book, which no one got to, The Voyage of the Dordreda, where there's this one character called Eustace,

Eunice, I can't remember his name. And he gets changed into a dragon because of his greed. He gets changed to a dragon at one point. And Aslan comes along and let's forget all the fucking Jesus metaphors from him. But Aslan comes along and he peels his skin off and it's not enough.

And he says, you've got to peel you've got to peel the skin you start putting skin but the skin only comes off one layer and then aslan goes you're not peeling enough and he gets his claws in and he peels him till he's like raw and naked and only then can he change back into the boy and it's i always think about that was you you've got to go deeper you've got to go deeper to grow but he comes out and he's like a softer kinder more open empathetic person you understand so much more about yourself um i hope that's useful in some way but you have to be kind to yourself it is really useful and i think that one of the things that i

really recognized um in what you were saying when you were talking about your experience with your dad and the way you would articulate it um you know up until the age of like 25 was that you know so I've got my stepdad and then I've got a biological dad who has not been in my life since I was a newborn I can count on one hand the number of times I've met him I've not seen him since I was about 20 and we've not spoken for years right um and the conversations we've had are so crazy and weird um that my way of processing that and articulating it to other people is to tell it as a funny story and I really distinctly remember having had this crazy conversation with him where he was so avoidant and then aggressive and lashing out and then sort of trying to change the subject. It was really, really bizarre. And I remember at the time, because my husband could overhear a bit of it.

at the time um because my my husband could overhear a bit of it and I remember feeling like oh this is so good because someone else can hear and can be a reliable authority on how mad this is so that no one will think I'm just exaggerating for effect because I like have a witness and after that happened I immediately transformed it into a funny story where there were these beats of comedy of like set up and punchline and I went to a friend's house for dinner and there was quite a few people there some that I'd never met and I remember telling the story and everyone was like hanging on my every word and laughing exactly when I wanted them to laugh and I felt like a conductor um and then afterwards I was like I wonder if that was entirely healthy that my way of telling the story was to turn it into like a comedic product for other people to consume. And it took me out of it, or the part of me that was there was getting social validation through the fact that I could make people laugh and again it's like you don't want to throw the baby out with the bath water I'm glad that I can make people laugh and I'm glad

that I can express things in a way which can like straddle the twin horses of like tragedy and comedy like I think that's an important part of the human experience but I think the fact that I never want to express it as tragedy and I only want to express it as comedy is like very very telling um and so yeah how how you were talking about like you had a set way of talking about your dad that really made me think that my set way is like make him laugh make him laugh make him laugh um and I can't I can't do that with what happened with my stepdad like there's nothing funny about it there's no there's nothing about it where you can go this becomes a manageable product for other people and I think that's the scary part because I did have

this very narrow way of talking about you know something that's very painful and that's through a kind of like comic performance and i can't do that with this so that feels like being robbed of like the little channel of articulacy because it can't be funny it's also because i think it's like it's like i saw this on sorry twitter sad to say but someone was saying just because you tell your stories that doesn't equal a vulnerability in fact you get in such a rote way of telling your stories it's a protective mechanism and as you've highlighted throughout this you use language and stories to distance yourself from the emotions you're feeling and you use the impact your language and stories have on other people to distance yourself because

they're reacting for you they're changing the emotion you might have felt which is you know sadness rejection pain grief with your biological father or with your stepfather there's this you know you've gone into full practical mode when you talk about him um and both of those things elicit responses from someone else who can you can outsource the emotional response to so when you're at this dinner party and everyone's laughing great you don't have to feel the sadness that might be in there you don't have to feel any pain or the complex emotions around your relationship because you've got this laughter fine that's written off that's how the story is framed and it's like you say i saw this other thing the other day which is talking about you know when british people we

always just yap yap yap yap and i'm saying this a bit earlier with my friend, but like in general, we just yap all the time. We never have silences. And part of this is, I think, this TikTok, yes, it was a TikTok, was talking about pub culture and how we never have silences because this idea of being boring and interesting. But I've thought about it more

and I also think we don't have silences because we'd have to feel shit in silences. We can't just be constantly expressing something all the time and intellectualising our emotions, which is, I'm really drawn to people who just the time and intellectualizing our emotions which is i'm really drawn to people who just constantly analyze intellectualize but i've realized so often we don't let ourselves feel it we'll talk about something to the nth degree and we'll intellectualize it like we're doing now to the nth degree but we won't actually at the same time and this is why i

get emotional when i talk because when i actually like think about it i'm like oh now i'm feeling it while i'm talking about it rather than just what i'd normally do which is like analyze it till and be very pragmatic like well right we've analyzed it we're aware now you're aware but you're not letting yourself feel it and if you don't let yourself feel it you're not going to get the actually to the bottom of it you can't find out what the pain is sticking to you can just be like it's all fine and uh i've talked about i'm pragmatic and i'll carry on and that's that shelved away and i do want to also flip it here which is say our generation we are lucky in one sense because we have the space to feel those things if we let ourselves whereas i think we i know you know you can correct me if i'm wrong here but i think we have quite similar experiences in the mothers we

have who were just like we need to fucking carry on we're going to carry on at any cost and i talked to my mum about when i started like i need to feel this about you know i need to start understanding like my relationship my father but also my mother's relationship she has her own separate relationship my dad and i wanted her to have the space to talk about it when i first started asking questions about him um which was more recently than it should have been i i said you know what was it like when he left? And she said, I don't know. I just had to carry on. I had two kids.

Like I just carried on. I said, did you let yourself feel it? And she was like, I don't know. She's talked about this more when I went into it. She was sad, but she said, you just have to keep going. You couldn't look back. And she said some other stuff that made me realise like how much I've just taken from her

in the idea of like, you have to tamp it down and there isn't the space. But we have different situations, Ash, than we don't have children we have the space and the time to like actually feel these things and i think we should let ourselves do that and it's not a betrayal to like the ideologies or the lessons they taught us to let ourselves like let ourselves fall apart a little bit because we also have the skills to pick ourselves back up they taught us that too they did teach us that i i think that's the bit that i don't feel confident in because whenever anything bad has happened before um and like and like things you know which are genuinely traumatic that happened before like repression and inshallah worked so well like it worked incredibly well and

i can sometimes feel like i don't think this is true maybe it's something to discuss with my therapist i don't know if it's true or not but sometimes i feel like repression and inshallah is the foundation on which everything else was built so like my career my like confidence my social skills my relationships all of that is built on top of repression and inshallah and going okay well if I don't do that anymore or if I can't do that anymore if I'm making the choice not to do that anymore like does the rest of it come crashing down and I guess it's like I've not really had the experience of using a different set of emotional tools for dealing with something difficult this is the first time and the reason why I am trying to do it now is that one I can't like I just my body is not letting me do repression and inshallah the way my physical

body feels is so so different like you know being in yoga my balance is so fucked like I just can't stand on one foot anymore like my body is just not letting me do it or like when I was in yoga and it was quite a dynamic class so my heart racing. I then felt the panic response come in because my heart was beating. So I was excited and I was active. My body went, is that the heart going fast? Somebody must be dying somewhere. Let's go.

Like my nervous system is just primed to respond to different cues in, you know, in this very, very like panic and fear-based way or like very adrenalized way shall i say um so i just i can't do repression and inshallah and i think that you know not to not to like catastrophize this at all because i think i'm very lucky i'm very very lucky in that i've never been that prone to depressive episodes and I've not, you know, that that's not been a part of my experience. But like, I am aware that this shit kills people. Do you know what I mean?

That like, this level of like, unexpressed or unmetabolized or suppressed trauma, it kills people. It kills them with heart attacks, it kills them with heart attacks it kills them with strokes it kills them with drugs it kills them with suicide it kills them right and i'm just like i don't i don't i don't want that i want to live till i'm 90 i want to be like you know an old lady perving at waiters on the amalfi coast and you know I want to die in the fiery car crash of a Ferrari driven by my you know Italian bit on the side that's what I want I don't want to die young of unexpressed trauma again I was making notes all the way through you talking because there is so much there and firstly yes you should absolutely

talk to your therapist about this idea that inshallah and repression is what is what you've built your life on the foundation because that is what we call a core belief and i'm sure they've talked to you about your core beliefs or maybe you haven't got there yet but like you know i have core beliefs like all men are below me you know like there's there's core beliefs so we have and usually the core beliefs or like my friends have called but like I don't know my friends have core beliefs like I am bad and someone will find out I am going to fundamentally hurt people all these things are core beliefs that when you unpick everything else and strip back the skin that's what's under there this little kind of golem and you have to brush him out with a broom um what I

kind of get from that is you don't trust yourself really or the scaffolding that you've built to actually hold you up you talk you talk a big game about all these things that you've got but when it comes down to it you're not trusting that the world you've built around you will actually hold you up you're like if i don't do the you know the inshallah repression then all these other factors such as my my partner my loving friends who i know you know the inshallah and repression then all these other factors such as my my partner my loving friends who i know you know in theory are so loving and caring and will hold you up but you don't trust them to actually catch you you don't trust yourself to like be able to pick yourself back up or build yourself back up with the tools you have you're just like no i have to do the repression and i want to just challenge the idea that inshallah and repression works because it has isn't work it's not things that worked it's deferred you deferred the problems for a future ash

and you push them further and we all do that like that is that's very natural and normal to i don't all some people do let themselves feel it lots of us do that and it's very natural and normal to let ourselves do that but eventually you will get to this crunch point like i said the crunch point can come you know in your early 20s it can come in your teens but there will be a crisis point at which point your body is going to rebel to a degree where it will not let you do that anymore and you have to trust i think you don't trust you don't trust other people to be able to like look after you you don't trust yourself to look after you um and i think that also and you don't trust other people to be able to handle your mess the same way you don't trust yourself to handle your mess

like you've always just been I've got to be the good one I've got to be the good one why do you have to be the good one why what is it about that that like you really believe deep down

why do you have to be good why do you think other people won't allow you to be quote unquote bad and still love you what is that about I mean I know what that's about but i'm never going to stay on the podcast we're getting to the deep shit now um yeah yeah i mean i look i know i

know why that is but that is not podcast material that's that's the cbt stuff that's the stuff you have to keep telling yourself again like you have to counteract these beliefs and this you know this idea of like catastrophizing i don't get depressed all of that i'm i'm very like you and to counteract these beliefs and this you know this idea of like catastrophizing i don't get depressed all of that i'm very like you and i don't have depressive episodes in the way that say members of my family have depressive episodes which means i do think sometimes we are quite unequipped as well to deal with when things are getting shit because we're so used to just motoring along and as you say repress um and inshallah it was going to be fine but you gave me this advice and i'm just going to say it back to you letting someone else take care of you is honestly

one of the greatest gifts you can give and it's so hard and i'm chipping away at it but doing this podcast is very therapeutic for me and i want it to be like that for you because even my friend the other day commented he was like it's been it's almost like we've gone from windows 2000 operating system to windows 11 with none of the intermediary commented, he was like, it's been, it's almost like we've gone from Windows 2000 operating system to Windows 11 with none of the intermediary peer. And I was like, why is that? I was like, it's the podcast. It's because the lessons I'm taking

from you on the podcast and the people that we write in and we learn through, I'm actually trying to put them to practice. And there comes a point where you have to stop intellectualizing about what's going on. That's fine.

Theory is great. And you have to actively force yourself to do the hard thing which is put it into action which is being vulnerable in some way whether that looks like you know lying down and crying and really letting yourself feel things or just saying i can't do this right now and i think in small ways you are doing that but you need to be really honest with yourself about where this is coming from and trust that people are not going to think of you as like failing in your duties in some way it's merely that you you're actually you're actually again setting up the scaffolding once more to be able to do those duties to to your fullest degree in future rather than like pushing down a problem that will eventually blow

them all up um but you've got to do it bit by bit it's always my advice always my advice but i stick to it bit by bit like saying to someone i'm you know i'm feeling really bad right now and just seeing what their response is and it may not be as amazing a response as you would be able to give them but it's still going to be something they're still going to be and they're going to because they won't even know how to support you yet probably i suspect some of your like friends won't know support you because you haven't let them before and so they've got to learn that too and that's that's you know a bit by bit process but i think the first thing comes down to trust you have a complete lack of trust in yourself and other people to be able to hold you up and they will be able to that's what i mean i kind of think

sometimes the tagline of this podcast this let me start the thought again i sometimes think that the tagline of this podcast should be that line from alice in wonderland i give myself very good advice but i very seldom follow it no because you give me very good advice and then don't follow it yeah i don't i i don't follow my own advice i'm like yes you should definitely reach out to people that you love are you doing that ash i said you should reach out to the people who love you and surround you it's like yeah but are you doing that this is an exercise though i think i think by talking about it first of all here you might be inching closer you're sort of using this as your methadone as you're like you're sort of like weaning into weaning into it but you you have to take i can't

no one else i say this as well all the time no one else can do it for you and no one else can take that leap and i'm not saying that to be like this is another task for you but it's like you love other people so much imagine if you turn that beam on yourself and gave yourself like the same love and care and grace that you give yourself but also with added trust I think trust is the major theme I'm getting from this I mean I think I think the thing that like you know and and I I do know this about myself which is I think of myself as being someone who is like quite um regulated and moderate but that's only because i've got two horses sprinting in different directions and one is a kamikaze level of self-confidence and the other is the pit of

self-loathing that i carry everywhere so as long as these two horses are running like at the same speed and the same force i'm like that's called equilibrium baby i'm balanced no what i have is like you know these two things which are like very big and overwhelming in particular the pit of self-loathing and uh it's a voice which can sound deceptively rational you know it's like a voice that's always like tricking you um but I know I know I have to deal with this in a different way I think speaking about it on this podcast is the beginning of it being different I am saying to my friends like I'm not feeling so good man or like I don't know dog I think I got the pretty ting stress disorder which is what I think PTSD stands for um and that is beginning to change and I will say that like you know i've not done

i've probably not done enough wailing but the person who i've done that with is my husband and while i do still find it challenging to like drop the responsibility and i get this knee-jerk thing where i express my emotions and i constantly say sorry and i say sorry for like taking up the space and i say sorry for crying and i say sorry for like not being fun um but the person with whom am i gonna cry on the podcast no why just let yourself let yourself also you won't cry as much as you think you will. No. You never do. You just breathe a little. Like, I just had a little cry and then I was like, great, I'm back. It's fine.

Ah, well, turns out not wanting to means that it won't happen. No, you're repressing again. If you don't cry, we're not ending the stream. Yes, I am repressing again. You can't make me uncork. You can't make me. But the person who I can do that with is my husband not enough but like i want to also expand that beyond just him and expand that beyond the very very narrow and curtailed spaces in which i can let that happen but anyway it's time to move on to the next portion

of our podcast we will be called i'm in big trouble we will we will return to our our private overseas at some point you can't make me we are in big trouble though and so are listeners. So let's do a little dilemma. Shall I read it out or shall you? Me? I think you should read it out. Yes, I've realised I should read it out. And I will, okay?

I will read it out. Ready. I feel a bit awkward putting my dilemma to you. Essentially, I'm an incel. I'm in my mid-30s and have never had vaginal sex. My sexual experience is limited to receiving oral sex in the past. I don't think I'll ever have a relationship. I don't consider myself socially incompetent. I have lots of friends and I think I'm perceived to be quite a social person. However,

for some reason, I seem incapable of developing the types of relationships that other people have. I've spoken to a therapist about and I don't feel confident that I will be able to change the situation. I don't actually feel lonely at all. I just worry I'm not having the full slash normal human experience. And our producer said that it was a man's name on this, which doesn't mean much, but I'm guessing this is a man, a het man from the vaginal worry and incel use. worry and incel use so the first thing that i want to say is that there is an interview with me and a guy called william castello who is a psychologist whose main area of focus is about incels so we will tailor this advice to you as best as we can but I would also recommend watching that interview on the Navarro Media YouTube because he will probably have a lot of insights which could prove helpful

to you so that's the first thing I want to say I think the second thing that I want to say is that there's a lot you should be proud of um you should be proud of yourself for not letting this curdle into resentment or entitlement or hatred there's a lot of gentleness that's in your dilemma and the way that you phrased it and i think for a lot of men in particular who experience involuntary celibacy, it can curdle into something which is a lot more aggressive, resentful, and even violent. So the fact that there is this gentleness and kindness suffused through what you've written, I think that's something to value in yourself. There isn't enough in here for us to establish a why, like why isn't this happening? Why isn't sex happening for you? I don't know enough about you,

I don't know enough about how you interact with people who you consider potential sexual or romantic partners. And as you say say you don't consider yourself socially incompetent you have lots of friends and you're perceived to be social so it's hard for me to say well why is this happening I guess what I have are questions and they might be questions which are useful to like think through and also you can respond to those questions in an email to us if i speak at navaramedia.com and maybe we can have a more extensive conversation because the first thing i'd say is like what's the gender balance of your friendship group like um are you drawn towards having more male friends than female friends are you drawn to having more female friends than male friends are there differences between how you feel when you're interacting with your male friends versus your female friends

because I actually think that there is a much less rigid boundary between friends and potential lovers and I often feel that when I'm meeting people who I know I'm only going to be friends with because you know I'm married there is this feeling of being drawn to them and a sense of attraction which isn't so different from you know desire or eroticism so I wonder if you know do you do you have a really rigid boundary between this idea of friends and lovers and is that something that's coming into play? Or is it that your friendship group skews very heavily male because you're only seeing women as potential lovers? And that means that kind of psychological blockage is coming into play when you're trying to connect with any woman. You know, you say you've spoken

to a therapist about it, and I think that's good. And I think you should continue exploring this with a therapist. And I think that it's really interesting that you say you don't feel confident that you will be able to change this situation. Because I actually think there is a lot within your power. And one of the things that is really notable about incel subculture, and I'm not saying you're a part of this subculture at all i'm saying it's just a really prominent part of like the reddit forums and the youtube channels is this idea that your ability to have sex as a heterosexual man is entirely contingent on um arbitrary status signifiers like height and money and being perceived to be successful. Whereas the research done about what women are actually looking for in a romantic and sexual partner is really different. So what the research shows is that incels, even if they're not a part

of the very, very online subcculture tend to overestimate the importance of things like wealth and you know height and physical appearances and really underestimate the importance of sense of humor kindness willingness to share in domestic tasks so what incels think are important and what women actually think are important are total opposites so i wonder if when you're saying you don't feel confident you'll be able to change the situation is that what's going on the things that you think of as deal breakers and the things that actually are deal breakers are really really different and yeah the last thing i'd say is that it's good that you say you don't actually feel lonely at all um and maybe there's something to explore here which is is this a case of being an incel and

involuntarily you're celibate or is this maybe a case of being on the asexuality spectrum somewhere you know is it that you want to have sex because you want to have sex or is it that you want to have sex because you feel you should be having is it that you want to have sex because you feel you should be having sex and that's what it means to be a normal human being I mean obviously having an active sex life is typical but that doesn't mean it's like abnormal or weird or wrong if you don't want to do that so yeah the final thing I'd land on is really hone in to what it is you want do you want to have sex because you want to have sex or do you want to have sex because you want to have sex or do you want to have sex because you feel it brings you in line with what you perceive to be

the normal human experience but yeah what do you reckon moya i think all that is everything you said is very it's on the it's on the money you're always on the money ash uh and very useful the only things i'd add is i don't think you're an incel because you have had sexual experiences you have had sex the idea that penetrative sex is the only form of sex and that you know it's you're not getting the full shebang unless you have penetrative sex well i think there's a lot of people out there who'd be like what what are you talking about not like let's start with the lesbian community and work from there you know know? So it's not that you're an incel. You have had sexual experiences.

There's two different things that you're saying here, which is one, I don't have like penetrative vaginal sex. But the second is, I don't think I'll ever have a relationship. And those are not the same things. They're not synonymous. Like, yes, you might have a sex relationship, but those are separate things you opened with, I think I'm an incel. And then you go on to, I don't think i'll ever have a relationship and i don't know how

to develop the types of relationship other people have so that that's kind of what interests me which is are you talking about just sex here or are you talking about that you want a partner because those and you say you don't feel lonely but those are both things that you've mentioned so they they're obviously playing on you in some way. And whether it is, as Ash says, it's because of social norms and pressures that you think you need to have a partner at some point. You want to have a relationship when you want to have also full sexual intercourse, vaginal intercourse. Or is it that actually these are things that you don't feel that drawn to really and don't feel much impetus to go after? And that's why you haven't had them because i do i do think it's like

if you if you have we talked about standards before i don't mean it in a horrible way but if you have like quite low standards and you're just out in a pub on a friday night you could you could probably have a shag if you want to have a shag but i don't feel like you really want to i don't feel like that's there there's obviously things that would need to be in place for you to want that. And those haven't fallen into place. And I don't think it's something that's intrinsically wrong with you. It's something that you might be seeking

or looking for that hasn't fallen into place. It's worth examining that. If we want to talk about just sex, obviously again, like Ash said, there's loads of details missing that I think would be useful. Like what's your sexual relationship with yourself? Do you masturbate?

Do you get like pleasure out of that? Do you have, you know, do you feel like you have a sexual relationship with yourself do you do you masturbate do you get like pleasure out of that do you have you know do you feel like you have a healthy relationship with yourself because if you do um whether that's that you're masturbating you're not masturbating you're happy with it then that suggests that you're like quite well adjusted when it comes to a sexual relationship and maybe as ash says that is that you are on the spectrum of asexuality and you're actually not really interested in this physical act of sex um but asexuals also do have like loving fulfilling romantic relationships so do you want a romantic relationship do you not there's there's i do think that more details would be helpful um but the main thing is you're not an incel there's a lot of there's a lot of

people out there and not just because you're not having like vaginal sex but you're not an incel because i don't know there's lots of people out there who aren't having like shagging all the time or you know what's the word for an incel who's not who's like not dating you're not an incel or a nun um as i call myself you're neither of those things and but i think you need to examine more about whether you really want these sort of like socially normative relationships and sexual experiences or whether again this is something that you're just internalizing from people around you because if your life feels full and you feel happy um and it's not something you're seeking out those would be the reasons why as opposed to something about you that means that you're abnormal and you're

never going to develop these things it's maybe that you don't want it i always complain that you know oh there's not enough men and that's true but also if i wanted to get a boyfriend in a second i'd get a boyfriend just probably wouldn't fit a lot of the things that i'm looking for or asking for and my life is so good i'm not willing to compromise on that stuff because of it so it's really about me it's not really about them i think you made such an important observation about this distinction between sex and relationship um because it reminded me of an ezra klein podcast that i was listening to about the emergence of like a variety of different family forms and the idea of chosen family and one of the things that they discuss is that there was a friendship between a heterosexual man and a gay but celibate man and this idea that they did just want to be platonic life partners with each other and they formed a household which eventually included the wife of the heterosexual man.

It was a really, really sort of sensitive and nuanced look at that dynamic between the three of them. And the reason why I bring it up is that romantic relationships, sexual relationships, and relations of companionship, these can obviously all overlap, right? Like a Venn diagram, which is just a circle. But there's also the Venn diagram where different parts of them connect or none of them connect. And it's maybe worth thinking about what kinds of companionship you might really want, because maybe when you're talking about a romantic relationship what you're talking about is living with somebody um having a life which is very very integrated living as a household feeling is shared of like you know a sense of shared domestic purpose um you don't necessarily need sex or romantic love to do that um obviously if you want those

things that could be a part of it as well i mean in a very different way you know me and my partner live with his best friend who has now become my best friend and part of the reason why that happened is because we worked out that we are a better couple when we live with friends we just really really enjoy it and we really love this household as a three that we formed um and it doesn't feel like a heterosexual couple with like someone else tacked on it's very much a household of three people where there are all the dynamics going on between those three people um and i do feel like a level of companionship and belonging with my housemate, which is different, you know, the word housemate isn't enough to describe it. So yeah, I would say that really having a think about what kind of relationships you want, you know, what are

the ones which feel fulfilling to you? And what are the elements which maybe social norms are almost coercing you into or tricking you into thinking that like you know sex is a necessary precondition of romance or sex and romance are necessary preconditions of companionship i don't think that's the case great thoughts the grass is not always greener on the other side of the double bed don't even know if that metaphor was that metaphor that breached the geneva conventions the way you tortured that poor metaphor you will be appearing before the icc oh god they can't get anyone to appear in front of them it's kind of useless we need to we need to re-ratify those treaties asap because they do not seem the first podcast to

breach the geneva conventions oh sorry joe rogan's been there already there's been multiple podcast that breached the geneva conventions um on that note though uh i have to get back to my friends at the convent so you've got to get back to your friends at the hague i've got to get back to my friends at the hague gosh um this has been if i speak with me moynodi mclean and me ash sarkar possessor of the most healthy psychology on the planet you you ash i have full faith that you will be fine and healthy in whatever capacity that means to you in the long run because one thing about survival instinct is it does also push you to grow and when that instinct kicks in you will do that growth that's all i have to say on that and listeners that applies to you

inshallah great way to end ash how are we ending inshallah exactly see you next week bye