Sense of Soul - Get Comfortable with the Uncomfortable

Episode Date: December 24, 2024

Merry Christmas! Today on Sense of Soul we have Ann Kelley, PhD. She is a Licensed Psychologist, specializing in individual and couples therapy, providing training in interpersonal neurobiology, attachment and relationships. Ann lives in Texas with her wife and co-host Sue Marriott, LCSW, CGP, together they bring love and expertise of research and the relational sciences to their audience both nationally and internationally on their podcast, Therapist Uncensored.  Together they also co-authored the book Secure Relating Holding Your Own in an Insecure World. This book offers a refreshing and innovative approach to understanding and improving relationships in today's increasingly polarized world. Drawing on over thirty years of professional clinical experience, they integrate modern attachment theory, relational neuroscience, and depth psychology into practical tools for deepening self-awareness and navigating closeness with strength in even the most challenging relationships. https://therapistuncensored.com Check out her Podcast Therapist Uncensored www.senseofsoupodcast.com

Hello, my soul-seeking friends. It's Shanna. Thank you so much for listening to Sense of Soul Podcast. Enlightening conversations with like-minded souls from around the world, sharing their journey of finding their light within, turning pain into purpose, and awakening to their true sense of soul. If you like what you hear, show me some love and rate, like, and subscribe. And consider becoming a Sense of Soul Patreon member, where you will get ad-free episodes, monthly circles, and much more. Now go grab your coffee, open your mind, heart, and soul. It's time to awaken. Merry Christmas. Today on Sense of Soul, we have Dr. Ann Kelly. She is a licensed psychologist who specializes in individual and couples therapy, providing training in interpersonal

neurobiology, attachment, and relationships. Ann lives in Texas with her wife and co-host, Sue Marriott. Together, they bring their love and expertise of research and relational sciences to their audience on their podcast, Therapists Uncensored. Together, they also authored the book, Secure Relating, Holding Your Own in a Secure World. And she's with us today to share with us how we can get comfortable with sometimes the uncomfortable. So please welcome Dr. Ann Kelly. How are you? Good. I'm good. How are you? I'm good. So a big part of my journey is my ancestry, you know, just repatterning and re wiring, you know, because, you you know all of these things that have

been living within me unconsciously yeah yeah our lineage comes down is and affects us is really pretty powerful isn't it oh yeah yeah epigenetics is powerful please tell me about how you got to where you are today. I always like to hear the background about what did life look like before? What did life look like before? Boy, that's a big question, isn't it? The life... I think we all, most of us as therapists, and I'm a psychologist, and most of us have had a life of feeling like you got to keep things together and keep everyone around you together in order to feel stable and safe.

And I think my history is pretty consistent with that. I was raised by a single mom with five kids and several wayward brothers that left our history sort of really fraught with a lot of stress. We still have the privileges of being white and in a primarily white area. So I have that background that kind of was solid for me. And then added on to that sort of real low, you know, fairly low, I would say fairly low comparative to the world it was not but low SES and sort of struggling in those environments and seeing my mom was a pretty strong powerhouse kid cast woman but it was pretty hard to be single back then and carried a lot of weight but was really strong so I think I got a lot of her love of life, even through pain and struggling.

So my passion has been, so it was kind of like, you know, you become a psychologist because of what you're already doing naturally, I think. And then I worked with trauma in the juvenile justice system. advocate for trying to keep juveniles and young individuals out of prison by helping them tend to the trauma that has created a lot of their background and landed them there. Instead of seeing them as criminals, we saw them as really trauma sufferers coming from sorts of systemic oppression. And so that was a real passion for me. It continues to be. I got on a judge not too long ago.

That was mainly our main talk. And she was even saying like the amount that it would cost to rehabilitate them is far less, you know, than it would be, it would be to keep them in jail. Oh, it's so true. But the problem is, I mean, when we look at that as taxpayers, that would make a lot of sense. But a lot of the individuals making this decision, so we have the industrial complex of the prisons that are quite big moneymakers. So it's super difficult. You know, you create fear of people.

We thought, oh, we'll lock them and get them away from us. But it is really, I think, a very sad destruction of our system. Our system is so broken. It needs to be rebuilt, just like we are trying to do individually. And that's the truth. Right. It really needs to happen as well i just recently saw christ's spirit see have you heard of that movie no it's the same guy kip anderson i think it's his name who did house spirit see and see spirit

see on netflix so he did christ's spirit see and when he gave it to Netflix they wanted to take out all the kind all kinds of stuff and he he raised the money to buy his movie back and he put it in the movie theaters for two days and I was lucky enough to go and see it and it's really a hidden gem they don't want to be out there but one of the things that they talked about was in some of these slaughterhouses, it is the prisoners who work there. And this guy was speaking and it was very sad. He talked about how the cows actually cry and had tears. And he said, can you imagine a lot of these people are very violent in prison and then we have to come out here and slaughter this. He said, I could barely close my eyes without seeing, you know, just was heartbreaking to me. And I didn't know that. And I don't know how many people don't know that. But I think movies like that and conversations that are able to be heard now, thank God, because of Zoom and, you know, the internet, It's a double-edged sword, I guess. It is a double-edged sword because it gets us exposed to things that used to be able to be completely out of our awareness, right? And so we would go along thinking, oh, everything's kind of okay, and yet there's these horrible things happening and we get exposed to it. And yet then there's the other side where I think we're getting

intentionally activated and agitated. And I think that, you know, that's kind of where my passion went from there is as a psychologist and continuing with trauma is to work on helping people like really learn how to live in their most wise, warm, grounded selves. And that you just have to learn about your body. And like we were speaking about before we got started, our lineage and how our defense system activates and what happens to us as humans when that happens. You just have to. So I worked as a couples therapist i still do but that was for such a long

time helping people once they get so into the defense system of their body and feeling either mistreated or that they're the bad person and people deeply compassionately get what's going on between them that can add compassion to the self and the others is huge. And now my coauthor and partner in life and I have turned that, we went from turning it to like, how do we help individuals to how do we help couples to our book with secure relating is secure relating, holding your own in an insecure world. So it's a lot of what we're talking about is like, we have to all learn how to hold each other and ourselves in a more secure way,

or we're just going to continue on the plight of this severe mental health crisis and spiritual crisis and this division. It's just, it's a real alarm bell right now, isn't it? It is, but you know, exactly what you're saying needs to be done on an individual, you know, each individual journey. And then it helps the system because we're aware then, wow, this is broken. This is not working, but it really does start with you. Yeah, I would agree. We're kind of on this mission, you know, and that is like, if we can each individually concentrate on making a difference

in ourself of how do I more securely relate to you and how do I more securely relate to anyone whose political beliefs differ from me or whose ideology differs so that we can actually learn to stay together because we need each other. We haven't survived this long because we conquer each other. We survived this long because what made us different is that we work together. You know, we're actually, the more we come together, the more we thrive and the more we divide. And I feel like we can do it. Like, I feel hopeful. You know, I'm an optimist that has been quite challenged in the last 10 years with the reality of what's been happening. But I still feel hopeful.

Yeah, absolutely. Because more people are awakening. You know, it's interesting. I used to think that being vulnerable was such a negative thing. I mean, I grew up this way. And actually, my ancestry proves I understand why, you know, they were constantly hiding who they were. And so it was, you know, don't tell people your business, you know, you know, that kind of thing. And, and also just don't show

people your weaknesses. But I had learned through this podcast, for sure, that is one thing that brings us together is to know that I am human. I stress. I make mistakes. I fall and I get up. And I know that I'll have challenges. And to share this and connect with other people, that vulnerability is so important. Yeah. so important. Yeah, like I think I love how you said the concept of how society and your ancestry promoted the hiding of self. If we expose ourselves, people are going to take advantage

of us or they're going to hurt us. And that belief is really stored in a lot of our nervous systems. We were talking about your ancestry coming down and having to hide themselves. And really the powerful thing is that this is not just hearsay, right? We've really shown that epigenetics is a real thing, that you can live in trauma response without ever having a direct trauma in your lifetime. Though most of us have some trauma in our lifetime, but we also carry our ancestors' trauma in the way we've been taught to believe and our cultural awareness, but also in how our genes get expressed. So that hiding yourself and don't be vulnerable because that will be taken advantage of or you'll be hurt. It's really hard to overcome, but it's essential. Something that happened with me a few years ago, I was teaching a Reiki class. And in those classes,

I love because I get to work on myself and sitting down on the floor a lot, my lower back was hurting. So I was putting my hand on my back and focusing and sending it lots of love and light and just connecting with that space. And that night I went to bed. And I've never liked to be woken up at night to have sex. If I'm barely awake, yes, but out of a dead sleep, I always get very agitated and I'm like, get it over with. And my body tenses up and I don't enjoy it at all. And I feel bad for my partner too, because I'm sure he's not, he's like, great. But that night in particular, after it was over, I laid in bed and all of a sudden a memory came back of when I was 11 years old. And it was when I was staying at my aunt's house in Louisiana and

I was over there for the summer and one of my cousin's friends had come into the room while I was dead asleep. I mean, not had sex with me, but he violated me. And it was my first experience. But I remember being so stiff as a board, not breathing, pretending I was asleep. And all of a sudden, all that came back. What was crazy was that my body had been remembering all this, but yet I didn't. I had not connected it at all. So once I, my partner, he, I've known him since second grade, you know, he looks over, he's like, and he would never ask me, but he's like, is everything okay? And I'm like, actually, no, I just remembered something.

And he's like, well, you know, I would never hurt you. I'm like, I know, but my body didn't know. That is such a powerful story, Shanna, because it's like a lot of times people who really struggle and you try to ask them, you know, about their history and they just have very limited memories or some of us have really over positive memories. And yet our body really knows. And when we have trauma happen to us, it gets stored in our implicit memory. It gets stored in part of our nervous system that tucks it away from us until we can handle it. But yet all of those times where any associations that you didn't even know were happening to you along the way would tense your body up. And yet you had no memory of that until all of a sudden you're in a safer place

and you're able to let that memory come through. And we have to talk about those kind of things to be able to let healing happen. But that was a really vulnerable thing to share. But what a wonderful experience that you got to, what we would healing happen. But that was a really vulnerable thing to share. But what a wonderful experience that you got to, what we would say in therapy is that you got to relive that learned experience, but in a safe and loving way. And I had already done so much work. I'd already had so much therapy and had overcome so many challenges and obstacles in my life, had no clue that was there.

That's so powerful. That really is that you had no clue and then it comes back and is clear. That's why sometimes memories come up in therapy offices because you have a safe place. But it's true that sometimes talking and talking and talking because you didn't have a conscious knowledge of it, then it's not there so you didn't have a conscious knowledge of it, then it's not there, so you don't know. So coming back to just us knowing ourselves and what a difference it makes, if we don't know that and we don't look for it, it still affects the way you act, how you connect with people,

or how you don't connect with people. And so it gets played out whether we have a conscious awareness or not, right? And so that's exactly what we're talking about, about like the more we know about ourselves, then the more connected we could get and we could be. But what happens so often is that we have these defenses, but we don't know them because they're so familiar to us, right? You can go on and on and think, I just had this lower back pain and that's what's causing me to have a problem. But because you had that memory, your whole body releases. And that happens a lot like in couples, right? You come in and you have, oftentimes you have one in the couple that is a little bit more comfortable with

emotional expression and recognizing things. Sometimes a little too active in their emotional expression, right? Or, oh, I wouldn't say too, but more hyper-focused on emotional expressions and things going wrong based on their history. And then you often can have somebody who has learned through their own history that having emotions and being vulnerable is not safe at all. And so they have, we have these really well-worn strategies that we're not consciously aware of that play out in our relationships over and over and over again. But because we don't recognize it, we tend to blame it on the other person. You know, like it's very common for somebody to, for one person in the partnership to say, if she would just be happy,

we'd be fine. She always seems to be unhappy. She always seems to be frustrated with me. I can't do anything right. And while they're saying that, they're eye rolling, looking away, they're not showing any care or concern. And they don't really realize, and she's so activated she's so sensitive and it's so interesting when you start to help them realize she's the only one sensitive here but let me explore that right and that his intolerance or her intolerance if it's two women but his intolerance and this example is his sensitivity. So what happens when she starts to cry? Oh, it drives me crazy. I just can't stand it. It just makes me so mad. I'm like, have you ever thought about why when she cries, it makes you mad?

You're like, well, because it's ridiculous. It's totally ridiculous. She's crying about something small. It's just dumb. So how so how do we know, like who gets to be the marker of what's important or not, you know? And we could keep going in this and keep going this, but the, what ends up happening is this person has to learn that actually emotions completely freak them out. And so they have all these well-worn strategies to shut it down in themselves, just like you were talking about in their implicit memory. They don't have any knowledge of this. They'll say the family history was great. But the problem is also have all these ways of shutting down emotions in the other person through criticism, through being dismissing, through walking out the door. So

learning kind of what our patterns are and what gets activated is probably the best thing we could do for ourselves that anybody we're in a relationship with. Yeah, that investigating. So maybe had I been having some issues with that, say that was a huge issue in our relationship, which it's not because he's usually too tired to wake me up anyways. But if that was an issue, maybe we would have sought counseling and that maybe would have been something I would have investigated into and had eventually discovered. But this was completely spontaneous. And I believe it's like you said, I held some space for my body, really. And me talking about it is a huge thing. And the reason why I decided to share and talk about it was because if me sharing that can help somebody else, well, then it's no longer a trauma. It's actually something that can help somebody else. when we're young like that, we have a memory of it at that moment, but we blame ourselves or why

didn't I say anything? And you had stored experiences that once you know more about the body, you understand why you did that. And then, oh, this is too much. So it's going to go out of my memory. And I would say another thing that happened for you is that he made space for it too. He saw you and said, what's the matter? He saw those expressions. He didn't just, you know, and then you were able to tell him about it. Sometimes what can happen unknowingly is that the other person can take it about themselves. Well, that's not me. You're blaming me. Like you're like, why are you pulling away from me? I didn't do that. I'm not the one that harmed you. And so that would be part of what we'd work on in therapy is the making space for our responses and our vulnerability and our need to communicate about it.

Yeah. I mean, I knew that it had happened, but I just didn't ever think it affected me. Right. Right. That's really, yeah. You can think it's like, well, that's the past. Why do we need to talk about the past? A lot of people believe that, right? Why talk about the past? It's over. I know it happened, but it's fine. But that's the wonderful book called The Body Keeps the Score. It's one of the, I think, the best titled books ever. The Body Does Keep the Score, whether we think it is or not, because believe me, all your listeners out there have stuff stored in their implicit memory that affects how they think about themselves, how they think about their partners in the world, whether they feel like they have agency in the world, whether people care about them. It also affects whether you rely on other

people. You mentioned the whole part about being vulnerable and that our culture supports invulnerability. In our book, we call it toxic invulnerability rather than toxic masculinity because it isn't just about masculinity. It's that our culture supports that if you're being vulnerable, you're weak. It's why political candidates that are female have a lot harder time. We expect more, you know, females get emotional, they're weak, right? And I can't hold things. And we have been taught, you know, in our culture that expressing emotions is off and shouldn't happen. And yet, it is the way we connect in the world.

And so we have so much promotion of left brain activity right now. And I think, you know, we started talking about the computers and that they can be for good or bad, but the more that our computer serves to activate us and to make us mistrust the world. The one thing that when you learn about your body and science is you learn that, that when we have a protection system and we have a connection system, right? We have a whole nervous system that is out there to protect us, and it's going to do that first. And if we feel safe enough, then our connection system can

come in. And that's more of the ventral vagal. And we talk a lot about this in kind of everyday terms. But like you're saying, when he said, you know, you're safe with me, he didn't defend himself. If he would have said, hey, I didn't do anything, you know, if he would have defended himself, I don't think he'd have had that experience. Instead, he'd say, you're safe with me, and you're like, I know that. You're not the one causing my thing, and he stayed there. And so when we have a safe enough environment, we can think, we can have our mind and our body go together, and we can talk about things, and we can be reasonable, and we can take in other people's ideas. We can question our ideas

of always being right. But the problem is when we're activated as humans, inherently all that shuts down. And we can't think clearly, you know, we can't care what other people feel. That caring system shuts down. So I think part of what I'm personally very motivated about is teaching this far and wide, because if we're not really aware of it, then we will all learn more and more and more to live in our protection system. And that's going to lead to disconnection. And I think since COVID and since some of the political strife that we've been having, I think a lot of us are living there. And that's why depression is so high, anxiety is so high. The other effect of that is people numbing and disconnecting and saying they don't care, polarizing and fighting at the drop of the hat.

Families not speaking to one another. And I'm worried that it only takes a few very powerful people. Unchecked to control a lot of people. Because the more fearful we feel, the more our worst parts of our nervous system come alive, and then we're much easier to control, if you will, lack of a better word. The more we can look at the vulnerability, like what you're doing and what your podcast spreads, and that is, let's really look at ourselves, really understand a lot so that we can activate the more warm part, the wiser part, because we can't even use the frontal lobe of our body when we're activated. So honestly, what we're doing is we're tuning down

the way that we can wisely think, and then we're tuning out the warm part of our thinking, the warm part of connection. And inevitably, that leads us into almost a collective hijack of our amygdalas, and that will create fighting, and it's not going to stop. There's not going to be somebody out there that has the answer. There's not going to be a political side that can solve our problems. We know that. We have to do it together and we have to learn how to connect to each other. And it starts by your very courageous example about,

oh wait, I didn't know that was there. And that's really impacting my body. And, well, you know, I think that I, you know, cause I've, I've been a body worker for over a decade and, you know, I was learning, you know, to use my discernment, but after that happened, I really started to trust my body. Oh, I love that. And to trust my discernment and to use my body when something came up. Instead of trying to make the pain go away, I wanted to sit with it more. I wanted to investigate because I thought, you know, my God, my body is so smart. This is amazing.

Miracle body trying to tell me something. But, you know, I thought when you said, if you can do that, then you can almost trust the world a little better too. And recently I was just thinking about this as I'm a mother, I have five kids, four of my own, three of them are adults. So three different generations in my house. I have some Democrats, some Republicans, independent. I have some who are Christians. I'm a recovering Catholic. We have so many different stuff going on in here, but yet we all respect and we all love each other still. That's wonderful. And so I see my house as what I wish to see in the world.

Oh, me too, me too. Because it didn't used to be. One of the things that happens that you are defying, which is beautiful, is that when I'm talking about that, when we get so activated, one of the primary signs that we're living in our more primitive system is the team building, is joining a tribe

and believing that my side's right and the other side's wrong. That's a sign, actually. It's a very human sign that we're doing that. We used to vote Republican in the United States or vote Democrat. Now we are Republican. It's a whole identity, right? And so it's become our identity in our tribe. Interesting thing about it is if you take a group of a hundred individuals and you literally divide them by coin flips, only coin flips. Research has shown this. And now there's two teams by nothing but that. And you have them do some activities in that day. They will already have more negative attributions to the opposing group and start to think them less intelligent, less caring, all these things. And it's by coin toss. And my point

in that is it's just so human when we're threatened to divide. Because once we put on different teams, we're sunk. As humans, those are basic human nature. And so I think another thing you said that is the most important is really like the crux of our terminology of secure relating. To learn to secure relate, securely relate by holding your own is not about we're going to all hold hands and get along and agree. This is not. It's that the most important step is that we have to tolerate discomfort. And in our world, we have a deep belief that we shouldn't, if we've had enough privilege, we believe that we shouldn't have discomfort. So if somebody's making me feel uncomfortable, they must be wrong, or I stop it, or triggered. Triggered. And so if I don't stop

you from talking, then I have to tolerate a lot of discomfort. And your policies are really different than mine. We have to learn to tolerate the discomfort. And one of the ways we have to do it, not see good and bad. And when we're activated, we see good, bad. You're bad. Your team is bad. I'm good. And so then we can justify being really cruddy to the bad team and not feel bad about ourselves, right? And so we have to pull together to see that we're not on teams, that we need each other to stop global warming, to slow it down. We can't do it with one team. And then once you understand what makes you feel threatened, like going back to your example, you didn't know that was in your body. You didn't know that was history and pain causing

the stress in your body. And so you could have easily, without that knowledge, start to see your husband in this really negative way about waking you up and then thinking that he was the intruder. Yeah, you're right. You know, I had asked myself years ago, like really at the beginning of my journey, how much of what I believe in have I been told to believe in? And of that, how much have I experienced to be my truth? And also in doing that, you start to allow other people to have their own experiences. Yeah, that's so well stated. right and is familiar and about the discomfort of the differences. So you going back and go, wait, what of this have I been taught and what is it that I actually feel and value? That question's powerful. But we're often taught to question and to wonder, to be a bad in faith or taught so much about race and about economics, different parts of the country. For me,

I realized in having some of the things that I have to question about, even the things I was taught about different races when I was growing up, before you were aware enough not to say things. Right. And then you hear these things, and even if your brain doesn't believe it, your body does. Yeah, I have a story about that, too. So in my ancestry journey and during 2020, I had a very powerful African-American woman came on from our university here. And she suggested I take a or anybody take the Harvard bias test oh yeah I love you know I moved out of Louisiana when I was in second grade moved to Colorado but I went back every year to Louisiana we always did every year you know I can see a huge difference you know between our culture and their culture and so I thought well I don't have these issues. We don't see color.

This is what I was saying. Yes, quote unquote. So I take this bias test and I was shocked. I got strongly biased. My children were actually getting nil or opposite. So at least I was comfortable with that. I was like, okay, well, it stops with me. But why? My conscious mind does not agree with what's happening. But yet I tried it over and over. I must have done it a hundred times, Anne. And I would cry.

I was devastated. So at the time, I was also kind of finishing up on my ancestry. I studied it for years, but I was really in it. And I was really connecting with that side of me. I had 21% African-American in me. I never knew. I connected with, I had a slave in my tree. She didn't have a name. She was just slave of the master, my grandfather. I went on a journey. I found her name. I mean, I just really

went deep in connecting with this. And one day I tried to do the bias test again because I had done so much work. I do not get strong anymore. I don't get way less, but I get moderate, which is okay with me. Get moved. That's awesome. I am proof that that can change. I created a brighter pathway within myself. And even at the times I think I'm going to fail, I don't. I can't fail. I can't get that high result anymore. Epigenetics is real. This is true. You can rewire your brain. And I believe that the healing I did not only was for me, was for my ancestors and also was for my future lineages. Wow. Wow, that is a really powerful story.

And I do agree with you. You're doing work for the ancestors. And you're doing work for those that come after you. You really are. And you know what is really powerful about your story too is you're doing such great examples about understanding what we mean when we say implicit learning versus explicit, the conscious. Because your conscious belief is you're independent,

you don't have these biases, your conscious thoughts. And even after you knew it, you're like, ah, I'm going to do this again and again, but you were authentic in answering it. And it wasn't, you had to help your body move. You know, it's so interesting. And I fall into this as like, you know, you'd go to these conferences that would say racial diversity, right? Or they would use some kind of racial. And I would think, oh, I need to attend that.

But I never thought about, I always thought about that about BIPOC. I forget that I have a race. Do you know what I mean? So the implicit biases that I have that I am so under-recognized in, and so often people think, oh, I don't need to attend that. I know everything that they're going to say, but we actually have to be able to tolerate and really have really hard conversations. Just like you had that conversation with your husband and yourself while you were activated and that helped you heal, our country needs to have really serious, hard conversations about the way we have harmed and marginalized our BIPOC and immigrants and refugees and colonization of the native people of america like we have to be able to talk about it and that is hard we want to say that was then we're fine that wasn't us but

in our ancestry it's in us the heart of your grand your your grandmother or is that good i guess that would be your great-grandmother is that right oh she was like my great-great-great. Yeah, she was. Well, yeah, great-grandmother. Yeah, like it. Way, way down. Early 1700s, yeah, she was. Way far down. But your history is, you have that in you, and that was things that happened to her.

And for us to come together as a country, we have to really push past our fear of talking about it. And when we live in our defense that makes us uncomfortable and we want to say, well, that wasn't me and it's different now. And when are people going to get over it? Let's move on. And we can't make up the past. That's all of our defense saying it's not in our body anymore. Move on. Or it's not in people who have been oppressed body or yeah it is and

healing means we talk about it and we could be part of healing our ancestors and what they did and we could be healing and making it different like you are for your children and hopefully i am for mine and that they don't carry our biases forward, you know? And so it just feels like the more we are able to tolerate and really deal with hard stuff and learn about ourselves, like when you start to learn about your own defenses and why they're there, you have so much more agency about how not to just be in a reactive state with each other and to be deeper and

connected. And now those repetitive fights that we have become, oh, now that makes sense. So much made sense. I could see so many patterns through the generation as I just learned their stories. But one thing, being a woman in this day you know I mean it's so funny because I asked my partner the other day name like the biggest historical female that really stands out to you said Susan B. Anthony you know I mean which is so typical but there's so many more right and you know even authors you know I, I love to read old texts. So, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, you know, I really, really liked her work. And this is only because I was working on the Gnostic Gospels, which the whole Gnostic Gospels holds this divine

feminine energy. I'm like, no wonder why you didn't pick these books to go into the Bible. However, one of my listeners actually told me to watch this movie on Amazon Prime. It's called The Power. It's a series and it's an over-dramatized version of like the divine feminine rising and her finding her power. But like they don't know how to control their power quite yet. And you see this thing that happened where women were competing against each other or jealous of it, not having that brotherhood or sisterhood. This maybe is very interesting. As a psychologist, I would love to get your opinion on that. So their power is represented by they have like these sparks or this electricity in their hands. They can use it for good and they're learning to heal with it and stuff.

But you can also zap somebody if you're triggered. And they're not all in any way able to control it. It's almost like when you're triggered and like you throw up on somebody, even though you didn't mean to, you're like, shoot, what did I say? I didn't mean to say that. They had no control over it. You would probably love this series. Yeah. So are you saying that they portray women as not having control over this? Only the women have the power. The men don't have it. And they're trying to fight to put into law that they're not allowed to use it and all this because the men are freaking out about it. It's a crazy move. That's a crazy, I have to see it. That's a, that's a crazy thing. It sounds powerful. But

your point about what women are taught throughout the generation. Sometimes I don't know about you. I have older kids too. And I remember like, oh, I want to show you some of the little programs that I watched when I was a kid, right? As you get older and you start watching and you're like, oh my gosh, I love that show. But like Lucy Ricardo being like some of the things that you, we watch and you watch it through another lens, and we had no idea the messaging.

Songs, yeah. Oh, from, about women, and that women can't control their, you know. And then this whole, our whole culture really idolizes stoicism, not having emotions, shutting down. And it is not a coincidence that men die younger than women. And it is not a coincidence that men experience a lot more loneliness and disconnection, even if they're surrounded by people. And so this whole, I got your back stuff, it doesn't have to do with vulnerability. It has to do with blind loyalty being promoted rather than let me challenge you.

What the hell are you doing? Like women are conditioned to challenge each other in good ways. Men are conditioned to not see. And if they see to go, Oh, don't worry about it. Right. And like,

so men aren't conditioned enough to tolerate emotional complexity in fact it scares them so they have all these ways to shut it down and part of it is to is to um kind of give it an association of being out of control and seeing it all these ways but it's so sad i'm just so i love working with men in therapy, especially in couples therapy, to see when they get access to their vulnerability and to see when they quit living in that cutoff place and the depth of what happens. And of course, I'm talking in generality. So there's many women that are cut off from their emotions and many women that are very in tune.

But I think we would all agree, and research would support it, it's very disproportionate. And so, like we're changing the message about race to our kids, I really hope we keep changing it. We're not changing as much, though, when you do research on the 20-year-olds. This is interesting. You ask 20-year-old couples, heterosexual couples, what they believe about rights between men and women. What they report is very egalitarian beliefs. But when you ask them about behaviors, they're still doing a disproportionate amount of the homework, the household chores without children. When you look at the behaviors, the implicit coming out of the unconscious still reflects a lot of the bias. There's a funny story that is in our family, and that is my,

since I was raised by a single mom, we all did household chores, right? In fact, my brother's the better cook, right? I traded my cook night for his bathroom cleaning night. I'm a hell of a bathroom cleaner, not such a great cook. So we were very egalitarian in a lot of, we all did the yard work. It wasn't divided by gender at all, but we would go to my grandmother's house. It was my step-grand, not related to my mom. And we would be there for Thanksgiving. And then after the Thanksgiving dinner, all the women went to the kitchen to clean. Yeah.

And my brother would sit there and watch TV. Oh my God. I would walk in there and go, what are you doing? She goes, I'm doing exactly what everybody else is doing. I'm like, you get it. No, my grandmother's wonderful, but her name was Meat Mama. She's the nicest woman. Meat Mama does not want men in the kitchen. Right. Not in my mom's house either.

Oh, nope. I would just do it because she doesn't expect you in there. And you can sit, like, I'm not going to sit there and let her do all that. But he just took that privilege and I just, it irked me to my very soul is what I like to say. Well, and vice versa. For some reason, I had it in my mind that I could not take out trash. I mean, until I was 40 something. I mean, just probably in the last decade, I was like, okay, I can do it. Doesn't mean, you know, just because I'm a woman doesn't mean I can't. But, you know, I had said before, you know, son, take out the trash, right? You know, that's not my job.

It's not your sister's job. But sometimes, you know, when I'm like, go get something for your brother. He doesn't feel good. You know, these are things that are in my DNA. It would take really questioning. But there are also things that I've been challenged on that push on me that I make a conscious decision to say, no, this stops with me. I'm going to take out the sneaky ass trash. I'm capable of doing so. And my partner's

a great cook. I don't think my sons have ever done dishes, but if they ever wanted to, I'd be open for that. Well, our kids call us out. I don't know about you, but my kids call me out on things that I don't even recognize that I'm doing. Like I had, we had something in the car. I can't remember. I guess it was luggage. and I came in and I remember asking one of my sons I'm like hey can you go get the the whatever and my daughter's what you're not going to ask me but somehow he's like oh it was really funny it hadn't crossed my mind but I you know just to shift that bias you really does go or me learning to fix things, you know, that took me a while. And the funny thing is I didn't even have any man in my house fixing things as a child, you know, but my brother did.

So I was like, you know, like, go away. I really can do all that. Right. It goes both ways. And challenging the scripts, challenging this, you know, if we were to kind of summarize, challenging the scripts of what we know about gender, right? Yeah. Like, I love to ask in that thing when, you know,

the question about, like, oh, somebody's being too sensitive. Like, where's your sensitivity? How come you don't let it come through? Why is it that she holds a sensitivity? Where's yours and how can we help you hold yours? You know, like challenging scripts, challenging racial beliefs, right? Yeah. Asking questions, asking people of different races, what is this like for you?

Yes. You know, moving hard conversations. And honestly, I really want to be a big advocate for asking our leaders. Yeah. Let's airing the crap out of us and start helping us lead together. You know, like instead of having them act in a more secure relating way.

Yeah, if you have a leader that's being belittling, that's doing all these things, it says that they're not in their higher mind then we need to go wait this person's leading us and they're not in their higher mind do we really want to be following somebody who is showing all the psychological signs, forget around politics. Or ego. Yeah, when we get ego-driven, it's all about shame. And so then we cannot connect. It's like they've shown that power is actually very consistent

with frontal lobe brain damage. Well, that's what I was about to say. You scared me when you said, when you get triggered, I mean, you're not, you can't even become conscious. No, you cannot. So how are they making good decisions on behalf of humanity if they're just triggering each other? Trigger, trigger, trigger, love and anger, trigger you and you trigger me. Yeah. And if you're being taught, this is the only one way to think you are being taught by somebody who is in their triggered state. So do we want to follow people in their triggered states? Because if we are following them, then we're following the one

with the like, let's just go get them. I don't care why we're not going to let them win and get your rifle and let's go. Well, we're all running into that battle. You know, have you ever wondered when you watch those big movie battles where like all these people are just running into a certain death, right? Like what? But they're following somebody's belief all the way into certain death. It's like we have a risk of doing that ourselves. So if people are leading us and they are showing signs, that's the one thing we talk about in our book, the signs that we are not in our higher mind. All of us leave our higher mind. There's not one of us that stomp up our stairs in anger for our partner or child. But if we are being ruled by that in our daily, right, or in this world by people who want to create fear, question authority, divide people, say, I'm the only one that has you, like all of these things that would make a really horrible team leader bringing us all together in one camp and rather dividing the two, then we need to realize we're following somebody that

does not have access to their higher mind and is making decisions out of ego and their most primitive selves. And science is really behind that. And so if we listen to that and we go, no, I want to expect my leaders to securely relate with me, which is not making me afraid, it's giving me really good, solid information, not creating false information so that then we don't trust anybody. We need rest and hope, but we have to also question our own. Like you were saying earlier, I loved it. It's like, we don't have all the answers. We need people who have different strengths and we need to work together. And gosh, we need more than the population. So we can't only work with one side because we need the whole population for the answers.

And the only way to do that. Thank God we're so different. Yeah. You know, I mean, if I, if I, in my, in my team of my family, I mean, if I was the only one, you know, who knew how to do everything and who thought this way and who brought this energy, I mean, that's crazy. I mean, everybody brings something that's so important, even the challenge. That's really true. The challenge is if we can't be challenged, and that's the one thing about if you get too high up in power and you're not allowing people to challenge you, then you're not getting any conflicting information, right? Like we all need to be challenged because it helps us grow. I know my kids challenge me. Sometimes it drives me crazy, but thank God

it makes me a better human. I've learned so much, you know, and hopefully I challenge them and you challenge your spouse. And, you know, like challenge is good. It is not, if we're stuck in our ego, here's the thing to maybe leave with. If we're stuck in our ego, if we're stuck in, what are people going to think about me? If we're stuck, if I need people to think only good thoughts about me, then literally we're kind of stuck in a place we need to feel compassion for, but it's our insecure self because our secure self can know we're good and be wrong,

can know that we're amazing and bright and we don't have all the answers. And we know that we need both sides of the team to challenge us because when we're challenged we grow instead of being challenged is somehow letting me down or you know that that's what you brought up the bro code you know we got your back well that is not challenging a true friendship is somebody that's going to look you in the face and say, can we go through this again? What do you think your part of that argument was? Thank you so much. You have so much wisdom.

I think this is such an important conversation. I really do. It was really fun, and I really enjoyed your perspectives. It was so nice speaking with you. Oh, thank you so much. I'm so glad we were able to connect. Tell everybody where they can get your book, where they can find you and learn more. So the book is Secure Relating, Holding Your Own in an Insecure World.

And you can get it wherever you get your books, on Amazon, et cetera. We love to suggest the local independent bookstore. We also have a website that's called securerelating.com. And to reach us, I also have a podcast called Therapist Uncensored. And you can get that on any podcast player. We've been out there for probably nine years now. It's kind of strange to think it's that long. And we talk a lot about these concepts of modern attachment and neuroscience and how do you apply these things in your everyday life. So you can find me at annatherapistuncensored.com.

And all that information is on the website, therapistuncensored.com. Thanks again so much. I appreciate it. I really enjoyed the talk. Thank you so much. All right, you take care. Thanks for listening to Sense of Soul Podcast.

And thanks to our special guests for joining me. If you want more of Sense of Soul Podcast. And thanks to our special guests for joining me. If you want more of Sense of Soul, check out my website at www.mysenseofsoul.com where you can work with me one-on-one or help support Sense of Soul Podcast by donating to my coffee fund. Thanks for listening.