The Dr. Hyman Show - How To Find The Gifts In Unpleasant Feelings with Dr. Joan Rosenberg

Episode Date: May 4, 2022

This episode is brought to you by BiOptimizers, InsideTracker, and Cozy Earth.   Many of us will try anything to get away from hard feelings. Food, shopping, alcohol, screens… There is an endless list of distractions and addictions we use to try to avoid our emotions. But the key word here is “try,” and as much as we might resist the tough feelings, it never really works. Today, I’m thrilled to talk about the power of sitting with unpleasant feelings with my guest Dr. Joan Rosenberg.  Bestselling author, consultant, master clinician, and media host, Dr. Joan Rosenberg is a cutting-edge psychologist who is known as an innovative thinker, acclaimed speaker, and trainer. As a three-time TEDx speaker and member of the Association of Transformational Leaders, she has been recognized for her thought leadership and influence on personal development. A California-licensed psychologist, Dr. Rosenberg speaks on how to build confidence, emotional strength, resilience; achieving emotional, conversational, and relationship mastery; integrating neuroscience and psychotherapy, and suicide prevention. She is the author of 90 Seconds to a Life You Love: How to Master Your Difficult Feelings to Cultivate Lasting Confidence, Resilience, and Authenticity.   This episode is brought to you by BiOptimizers, InsideTracker, and Cozy Earth.   BiOptimizers Magnesium Breakthrough formula contains seven different forms of magnesium, all of which have different functions in the body. There is truly nothing like it on the market. Go to magbreakthrough.com/hyman and use code hyman10 at checkout for 10% off your next order.   InsideTracker is a personalized health and wellness platform like no other. Right now they’re offering my community 20% off at insidetracker.com/drhyman. Cozy Earth makes the most comfortable, temperature-regulating, nontoxic sheets on the market. Right now, get 40% off your Cozy Earth sheets. Just head over to cozyearth.com and use code MARK40. Here are more details from our interview (audio version / Apple Subscriber version):  Why we avoid unpleasant feelings and the physiology of these feelings (5:28 / 1:48) How blocking feelings leads to soulful depression (11:25 / 7:28) The importance of naming our feeling experiences (15:01 / 11:10) Ninety seconds to a life you love (18:25 / 14:35) Dealing with lingering feelings and disappointment (26:11 / 20:44) Identifying disguised grief (36:11 / 30:54) Five categories of grieving (38:48 / 33:30)  Finding the good that may have resulted from difficult life experiences (45:31 / 39:38) Building emotional strength and speaking truth with love (47:36 / 42:15)  Why it’s vital to stop harsh self-criticism and accept compliments (1:09:52 / 1:04:20) Get a copy of Dr. Rosenberg’s book, 90 Seconds to a Life You Love: How to Master Your Difficult Feelings to Cultivate Lasting Confidence, Resilience, and Authenticity, here, and download her powerful, free tools to help you create a life of your design here.

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Welcome to The Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman. That's pharmacy with an F, a place for conversation as a matter. And if you've ever had any unpleasant feelings, which I know you all have because we're human, then this podcast you should pay attention to because it's with a woman who's been studying unpleasant feelings her whole life, Dr. Joan Rosenberg. She's a bestselling author. She's a psychologist, a corporate wellness consultant, a media expert who's known globally as an acclaimed speaker and trainer on communication, confidence, resilience, authenticity, and grief. She's a three-time TEDx speaker, member of the Association of Transformational Leaders, and has been recognized

for innovative emotional mastery and confidence-building approach, and for thought leadership and global influence in personal development. She's served as a mental health and media consultant for documentaries, print, radio, TV, and more. She's a professor of psychology at Pepperdine University. And to learn more about her work, you can go to drjohnrosenberg.com and follow on Instagram. And her latest book, 90 Seconds to a Life You Love. That sounds really too good to be true. We're going to get into that. How to Master Your Difficult Feelings and Cultivate Lasting Confidence, Resilience, and Authenticity, which sounds like a great promise. So I want to get to how we're going to get to the promise of 90 seconds to happiness. But first, we're going to kind of unpack something that I think is central to being human, which is unpleasant feelings and our incredible drive to not have them.

Absolutely. And our really poor ability to deal with them and their inhibition of our total free and authentic experience of life. So how do these sort of unpleasant feelings that you talk about, these eight unpleasant feelings, sadness, shame, helplessness, anger, embarrassment, disappointment, frustration,

and vulnerability. And we had a brief conversation about this before the podcast. We're going to get into why that's kind of a different flavor of unpleasant feelings. How do those block us from really being happy, from being successful? And why do we try to avoid those feelings at all cost? Great questions. Thank you. So to start with, the reason we avoid them is because they feel so uncomfortable. Try to avoid those feelings at all costs. Great questions. Thank you.

So to start with, the reason we avoid them is because they feel so uncomfortable. They're unpleasant. They're uncomfortable. Many people think that when an unpleasant feeling starts, something like sadness, then it's never going to stop. Or it's going to be too intense and it's going to overwhelm. Or if I start to experience it, I'm going to lose control. Right? So there's all sorts of reasons that people want to avoid them.

But the reality is that our unpleasant feelings actually exist to protect us. It's sort of a signal. It's like, hey, back away from this. This doesn't feel good. And so there's survival aspects to it. So it's our ego survival aspect that's operating unconsciously to protect us from harm, which we think is coming at us. Right. And I would say in some cases it goes beyond ego. It could be actual survival, literal survival kinds of things.

For sure. Somebody's at threat, domestic violence situation, whatever it might be, then there's literal threat. Sure. I mean, I always define stress as a real or an imagined threat to your body or your ego. So it could be a tiger chasing you, which is a real threat to your body. Or you could think your partner's cheating on you, but they're not. And that could be eliciting the same biological response as if a tiger chasing you, because you are putting meaning on that belief or that thought that creates the unpleasant feeling

and the actual physiology. And what was so amazing about your work is you talk about almost the physiology of unpleasant feelings, that it's a visceral phenomena that happens in your body. Right. And it's always preceded by thought, but the way we experience it is as a physical sensation first. Correct. Correct. But it actually, the thought happens so

quickly that triggers the feeling and i don't know if you agree with me on this but i think always thoughts precede feelings the meaning making machines that we are causes us to believe certain things about our experience but then causes us to have those feelings and can happen in a nanosecond but it still kind of operates from those unconscious patterns and what i would say is that there there's what the literature talks about is a bottom-up response and a top-down response. So the thought proceeding would be a top-down response. I have the thought, again, nanoseconds so quickly, and then I'm having the reaction.

In other situations, my understanding is that our bodily sensations, in essence, travel faster than our thoughts. So we might like to think of putting our hand on a hot stove and we're pulling it away immediately. Then part of that is that we're reacting kind of in an unconscious or non-conscious manner to something that feels unsafe. So that's traveling faster than us going, oh, that's hot. So there's what's known as kind of a bottom-up response

where the body is responding first or that sensing ability is responding first. And then we think about what's taking place. I think that's true in the face of acute physical danger. But in emotional danger, it's got to be the thought that precedes it because there's no external stimulus that's burning your hand. It's a thought, isn't it? Well, in this case, yes. In this case, it's thought. I mean, yes. But it's having an awareness that it can go both directions.

So we have these feelings. Why does it interrupt our ability to be happy and successful? And why are they so problematic for us? Because we all experience these things all the time, but you're saying they really block us from having a life that we want that well yes well it's not the feelings that block us it's our blocking of the feelings okay so it's so if we can experience and move through them we're probably gonna do pretty well in life but if we if we make any attempt to distract to ignore to disconnect or to to block, then the blocking of those feelings is actually what's going to create problems. Interesting.

So basically in our culture where nobody blocks their feelings through drugs or caffeine or alcohol or sex or food or- Porn. Porn or social media. Nobody does any of that stuff. Exactly. So we're all totally fine. But given the world where people are, I mean, it's so crazy, Joan, that we are so unwilling to feel what we have to feel. And I spent a month in

Vermont by myself. I peeled away everything, computer, phone, technology, even books. I had a few more spiritual books that I brought with me, but just me and my journal and being, being like with no distractions and input. And you get to feel a lot of feelings that come up. You got to see a lot of things. And it's, it's a, it's such a rare thing for us to do in our culture. It's so in a way frowned upon. It's like, you know, but it, but it actually is such a therapeutic thing to actually be able to meet yourself, meet your feelings in a way that you can start to unpack it and learn who you are and your responses. And your work really helps to call out why it's important that we actually allow ourselves to feel those uncomfortable feelings.

Why, you know, what happens if we don't allow ourselves to feel those feelings? And what is actually the gift in those unpleasant feelings? So can you talk about that? Absolutely. Let me take it both directions. When we get engaged in the blocking, then what ends up happening is that in my mind, we start ourselves down a path of what I call soulful depression. Not real depression.

It looks and smells and sounds like real depression, but it's not real depression. So soulful depression is a disconnection from the self. I've disconnected me from me. So your month to be with you brings you on the other side. But what does that path look like? The first things that happen are you start to experience bodily symptoms. Or the idea here is that what doesn't get emotionalized often gets physicalized. It ends up in our body as a problem, a dis-ease or a disease, as opposed to something that is worked through on an emotional level. So we have bodily symptoms. We might have increased

anxiety. We might feel more vulnerable, the downside of the vulnerability. We might feel more vulnerable. The downside of the vulnerability, we might feel like we are losing control. And if that process continues over time, then what we start to experience is kind of a cutoff from ourselves. And when that starts to happen, we start to feel numb. We feel less alive. We feel more depressed. We feel disconnected. Some people might feel kind of dead inside. And that's when we start to see in the mental health system, that's when we start to see people cutting or engaging in self-injurious kind of behaviors. Now, the addictions are already occurring higher up on that chain around the anxiety piece. And that's all addiction is often is a response to some trauma and not feeling the feelings that we're actually having.

Exactly. Exactly. In fact, I think of addictions as diseases of isolation. But we're also cut off from ourselves. Well, that's it. I mean, isolation, either actual isolation or isolation from our soul. Right. Right.

We take it further down in terms of the downside of disconnecting from our feelings. Then now we're hitting isolation. We're hitting despair, we're hitting suicidality, we're hitting that kind of stuff. So, and soulful depression. Yeah, interesting. The flip side is when if we choose, it's what I call, the difference is what I call trying not to know what we know as opposed to knowing what we know. So, the upside is knowing what we know as opposed to knowing what we know. So the upside is knowing what we know. So we stay aware of and in touch with our experience. We're connected, well-connected. So your month away is a well-connected,

potentially well-connected experience. And then the upside is increased confidence, a sense that I can pursue what I want. Because I'm more well-connected I, because I'm more well connected to me, I'm more well connected to other people. I'm more resilient. I mean, it's the whole upside is there in terms of how we then move through life. And the, the, again, it's not that we're not going to face difficult circumstances. We still will, but we, we have the sense that we can actually handle it and move through it. That's powerful.

So really what you're talking about is learning to actually sit with, be with, feel the feelings. Yes. And not run from them, hide from them, suppress them, block them, ignore them, medicate them, feed them. Criticize them, doubt them, have feelings about feelings about them. Yeah. And we judge ourself for our feelings.

We do. Yes, we do. Yes. I know. I shouldn't feel this. I shouldn't feel sad. I shouldn't feel helpless. I shouldn't.

And as soon as you do that, you're disconnecting. And you're disconnecting. But you also say something, the converse, which is that research shows that naming our feelings, labeling our feelings feelings talking about our feelings verbally actually changes our brain it it does it actually helps us regulate our experience much better so talk about that because you know i i know so many people like um you know relations i've been for example when i was with she she would i could tell she was going through so much, but she wouldn't verbalize. She's like, I can deal with it.

I can deal with it. And it would come out sideways. And I was like, wow, that's fascinating. We often are unable to verbalize. But then when we do, when we actually are able to say the truth and talk about what we feel, not in a blame way or a judgy way, but just authentically what we're feeling, it's like a magic trick. It kind of evaporates. It does. Actually, my point of view on that is that when we're able to express, whether we're

journaling or doing something like that, and through talking, that that's how feelings get metabolized. Yeah. We experience them, we express them. And those are the ways they get metabolized. I'm a doctor, so I'm going to bring this back to the body. So kind of like not expressing your feelings is being like constipated. Yes.

I'll go with that. And, you know, how we just block that is just we fill up with all this stuff and it makes us sick. Yes. And letting it out actually makes us feel better. Yeah. So we're always looking for flow in life. But what is interesting, what you say is that the science is saying this isn't just a psychological phenomenon. This is like a neural pathway phenomenon. Yeah. So when we express ourselves, what ends up happening is it actually,

our capacity to think through what we're experiencing. Actually, Dan Siegel talks about this. And he talks about, you know, if we think generally speaking, and I know this is a gross generalization, that the emotions and experience are in the right hemisphere of the brain and our words are in the, our language is in the left, then when we put language to our experience, that we integrate the brain and that an integrated brain is a healthier brain. So the idea here is that when we have an opportunity to put thought and words to the feeling that we're experiencing, we actually end up feeling calmer.

We are more centered. We are less impulsive. We're more in control. I literally see this happen all the time. I'm very committed to my friends and people I'm in a relationship with telling the truth and myself telling the truth, even if it's hard or you think it's hard. I went to the grocery store and bought a banana.

That's easy truth. But if you're having an unpleasant feeling, you're scared or you're angry or you're disappointed disappointed or and you express it it's uncomfortable because you don't know how it's going to be received you don't know how you're going to be held by the person sharing it but you know if you can be with someone who has the ability to be in their own feelings and to sit in their own feelings and not freak out. And actually that person gets to share what they're feeling. It's transmuted so quickly.

And from the weight of the experience that they're having, it becomes light and different. Yeah, absolutely true. Yes. It's kind of a magic trick. So coming back to your work, which is, you know, this is a very provocative title of your book, right? 90 Seconds to a Life You Love. I mean, I'm like 10 days, three weeks, you know, a month. Like, okay, I got that. I've written like 10 days, seven. I've written The Ultra Simple. That was seven days, but 90 seconds. How does 90 seconds work? And how do you handle unpleasant feelings in a way that actually leads to the promise of your book, which is how to master your difficult feelings to cultivate confidence, resilience, and authenticity in 90 seconds? I'm going to push you on that.

That's fine. Wait a minute. Okay, can I defer to the editor on this one? I don't. No, it's the – let's talk about both sides of that. So the truth is that the subtitle, the second part, the promise is really the key to the book. So as much as the 90 seconds is important, to me, that's the method. But the most important part of that promise is really on your ability to handle the eight feelings. To master the difficult feelings.

Yeah. So the eight feelings to me is where the real magic of the whole process is. So what's the deal with the 90 seconds? I talk about it kind of as a formula so that it's easy for people to remember. And so the formula is one choice, eight feelings, 90 seconds. One choice, eight feelings, 90 seconds. Right. So the one choice is that what I'm asking people to do is to lean into awareness as opposed to avoidance. So what does awareness look like? It looks like being as in touch with and aware of and in touch with as much of your moment

to moment experience as possible at any given time. That we just stay present to it. Again, if we use your example of being in Vermont, that you chose into an experience of being present. And the best doorway to that is because feelings get represented in physiology, in our body. And so you can actually check in with your body and say, do I feel tight in my chest? Is my stomach in knots? Am I sweaty? Do I have chaotic thoughts? What is actually happening in my body? Yes, all of that is true. But let me do the flip side to walk us through if I can.

So then the other part that I don't want people to do is to avoid. And you talked about all these different ways we can avoid. And I think in the book, I talk about like 35 different ways to avoid. I was just on a roll. Yeah, you are. So we've already covered that so so the awareness is is a choice to lean into and you want to be as aware of and in touch with as much of that moment-to-moment experience the eight feelings we've named but there's sadness shame helplessness

anger vulnerability embarrassment disappointment and frustration so why those eight well it's because they're the most common, everyday spontaneous reactions to things not turning out the way we want or the way we believe we need them to be. Uh-huh. So it's the everydayness of them. So our attachment to the outcomes of our experience is what causes the suffering.

Yes. Also, I think there was a guy who said that before. His name was Buddha. Right. It sounded familiar. Yeah. And then to the 90 seconds part, when I started out in my professional career, my big question was what made it so difficult for people to experience and move through these unpleasant feelings? It's like as bad as our thoughts can be, I found that when people couldn't handle unpleasant feelings, they didn't feel capable of moving through life. So for me, it was really

understanding that. So again, the neuroscience research starts to come out more so in the late 90s and the early 2000s. And there's like three or four things to this. So the first is that we're one interconnected whole. We know that. The brain's always feeding the body. The body's always feeding the brain information back and forth, back and forth. So we've got to keep in mind that we're that interconnected whole. There's a book I wrote about it, The Ultra Mind Solution over there. There you go. The second is-

It's called The Body Mind Effect. Okay. To kind of flip it upside down from the mind body effect. And it's sort of what you're talking about. Right, exactly. So the second part then is that most of us come to know what we're feeling through bodily sensation. So my easiest example is thinking of embarrassment. You might see the redness in my face. I'm going to feel the heat of the flush, right? So the heat is the bodily sensation. But we feel that in all sorts of

different ways. Each one of us feels it differently and to a different intensity, that whole idea. And then the third part then is, okay, then how do I get people to kind of lean into this? Yeah. To move to it as opposed to away the feelings. Right. Right. So part of what I would always be saying to people is ride the wave, ride the wave. What I didn't understand is I was telling them to ride the bodily sensation waves.

And so the key then to leaning into a feeling is, again, understanding that most of us are going to experience in the body first. And in this case, it's a rush of biochemicals into the bloodstream that activate the bodily sensations and then flush out of the bloodstream in roughly 90 seconds. So there's the 90 seconds. So then what I was able to tell people is that the key is to lean into riding those short-lived bodily sensation waves over and over every day or whenever you experience the feeling, the unpleasantness in particular, but throughout the rest of your life. And what I realized, Mark, is that it's not that we don't want to feel the whole range of our feelings. We do. I think we want the whole expanse because that's when we feel the most alive. But what we don't want is to tolerate or have to experience the discomfort of knowing the feeling through the bodily sensation. So everybody's trying to back

away from the bodily sensations. That's true. Hey, everybody. It's Dr. Mark. Now, I don't think there's anything better than waking up feeling super rested, relaxed, and energized. And when we get high quality sleep, this is the norm. But without it, our simple day-to-day tasks can feel impossible and our health suffers. And that's why I'm always looking for ways to upgrade my sleep routine and the bamboo sheet set from Cozier is my new favorite way to get an amazing night's rest. Now you might be surprised to learn that many types of bedding out there contain toxins that can off-gas into the air and absorb into your skin. I mean, do you want to sleep on formaldehyde?

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obviously reflecting on my own experience because that's all we have and you know sadness you know can be a 90 seconds or it can be longer like you know a couple years ago i split up with my wife we were so loved each other so much and you know there were more external reasons why we split. And it was sad for a long time, a long time, like months and months and months. So that wasn't 90 seconds. No, it's not 90 seconds. And I felt it in my body. Absolutely. So what's the deal with the lingering part? Yeah.

Yeah. So I think there's three or four different things to that. One is you have established neural tracks of being with her, right? those those established tracks of getting up in the morning sharing coffee you know whatever it is that you would do on a regular basis you still have those those established neural tracks so so when you're recognizing you're in a new or a novel experience you have the contrast of of still dealing with the that established neural pathway if you will so that that memory hasn't gone away it's not until you establish enough new other memories or new other ways of being and that's repeated enough that that part of it seems to then diminish it's like you stop reflecting in the same way. Well, what about disappointment? I have a fairly large dose of disappointment about my father.

Okay. And I've come to accept who he was and I understand why he was the way he was from his trauma and his family and my grandmother who was mentally not great because she accidentally killed her sister when she was like three or four years old and pushed her on a swing and was the black sheep of the family. I get all that and have compassion for him,

but the disappointment of not having a father who actually showed up for me, I think I'm okay, but I definitely, it's like, hmm. Still, it's not, hmm. Still. I was on a trip and there was this father and son there. And I was like, oh, wow, that's different. God, I wish I had that.

I have disappointment around that. It didn't bother me to feel that, but it was more than 90 seconds. It's more of an ongoing experience of life for me. I just come to terms with that fact, and I've come to accept it, and accept his behaviors were out of integrity that I would have wanted to have in a father. Right. But I still love him, and I was there at his deathbed, and I don't have any residual stuff around it. I just feel like, yeah. The grief is still there. Yeah.

The grief comes and goes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So then a couple other things around, and that gets us to kind of decide my idea. I mean, I don't want to do therapy with you right here. No, no, no. It's okay.

But it's like, fine. I'm happy to share as a way to reflect on what you're saying, because I think people who are listening are going to have the same thoughts. Well, so there are a couple of things with that as well. One, that takes us to what I would call disguised grief. But before I get there, let's talk about lingering feelings. So grief and disappointment are not the same. No, actually, I think of disappointment as part of grief.

But with lingering feelings, I think there are three major ways that it happens. One or three in addition to what I was just talking about in terms of I still have those old neural pathways. I haven't built new experiences to replace that. But the other thing is thought suppression. I'm just not going to think about it. It's actually paradoxical. You can't not think about something. Don't think about pink elephant.

Exactly. You have to think about it in an effort to not think about something. Don't think about pink elephant. Exactly. You have to think about it in an effort to not think about it. It doesn't work. Right? So the effort to suppress thoughts is one thing that makes feelings feel like they linger. The second thing that makes it feel like it lingers is that we repeat the memory over and over. Or we repeat the thought over and over. So a breakup is classic.

Yeah. Where is he? What's he doing? Or will we repeat the thought over and over? So a breakup is classic. Yeah, you- Where is he? What's he doing? How come we do usually be doing this at this time, right? I remember we broke up and I walked to go in grocery shopping and she loved artichokes. I only walked in, it was like maybe a month after we broke up. I walked in the grocery store, I saw artichokes and I started crying. Exactly, right.

So when the memories get activated or we keep cycling over that same memory, we're going to bring up everything that's associated with the memory. So the feelings are going to be there. But then it feels like the feeling is lingering longer than 90 seconds. It feels like it's lingering, depending on how much you recycle those thoughts. People stay in that for 50 years. Exactly. Like my mother. Okay.

So then it feels like 50 years when it's actually not. And then the third is harsh self-criticism. I really think harsh self-criticism actually activates those unpleasant feelings underneath. And the harsher we are to ourselves, the more we recycle mean stuff, trash talk, then the more we're going to stay feeling like we're lingering in those unpleasant feelings. It's your inner a**hole you're talking about. If I would say that to myself, yes. Which I do my best not to. But yeah, we all have that inner a**hole.

How do you clear that out? So that brings me to a different sort of tact on what your work is. Because as I was studying it and reflecting on it, I was like, okay, I get that we don't like to feel our feelings and I get we do everything to suppress them. And I get that feeling our feelings and talking about them and actually metabolizing them in the right way can lead to more freedom and authenticity and confidence. But then there's the question, as as a functional medicine doctor i'm always thinking what's the root cause like what's the root cause what's upstream and you know in my own experience

and you're a psychologist i'm a doctor i'm not a psychiatrist psychologist but i'm going to hear your perspective in my own experience if if um if i have some kind of triggered emotion then it usually is a result of me telling a story about something, making meaning out of something. And that meaning I'm making is usually because of some earlier conditioned experience I had as a child. Agreed. And so whether it's a trauma, like if it's incest or if it's abuse or whatever it was, And I've experienced a lot of that. I know that those are conditioned responses based on those old meanings that I made out of those experiences. Right.

Sort of the one I always say, and it's taken me a long time to heal this, is when I was seven, my mother got remarried and we went to Canada and moved in with him. And he was a very traumatized man by his mother. You know, and I had compassion. Now as an adult, I have compassion for what he went through and I understand it. But he didn't know how to feel things. He did not express emotion. And he was a rageaholic.

And he was a clean freak. And my mother said, Mark, go take this soup and flush it down the toilet because we didn't have garbage, you know know incinerator like garbage disposal like we do now in the sink and i did that i came out of the bathroom he's like did you wash your hands and i'm like no i just flushed the toilet with the you know the soup and he's like went into a rage threw me across the room beat me and i learned it wasn't safe to tell the truth so i made meaning that if i told the truth, I would get annihilated, which was actually true in that moment with him, but it wasn't universally true.

So Joan, I told you something that was true, my truth, you wouldn't beat me and throw me across the room. You'd probably really listen and empathize and it would be a very different experience. But my whole life I was dealing with struggling with actually being afraid of of being hurt by telling the truth and and so that was very deep and i had to really do a lot of work to clear out that trauma right um and so all the feel all these feelings that you're talking about these age feelings are often the result in my thinking of something happened to us when we're younger some maybe past lives knows, like just the lineage of our family. Sure, generational trauma.

Generational trauma. Now from a scientific perspective, we really understand this through the doorway of science, through epigenetics and how literally thoughts, feelings, emotions, traumas get imprinted on our genes through the epigenome, which is like the piano player over the keys of our piano, which is our DNA. And so we can literally see these change in informational traumas show up. If you're a grandchild of a concentration camp survivor, their trauma is imprinted in your DNA. Correct. Right.

So, well, how do we deal with that? Because it's not 90 seconds to deal with that. No, it's not. But your capacity to handle the 90 seconds, your capacity to handle any given unpleasant feeling on a day-to-day basis is going to make it easier for you to deal with the kind of trauma you're talking about. Because now I can lean into it. So it's your learning to withstand the heat of the emotion. Exactly. It allows you to kind of stay in the game.

Right. And actually do the work. Right. Is that what you're saying? Yes, absolutely. Because now you can step into that kind of trauma and start to make sense of it. And in my mind, there really is a way to make sense of it. If I make this relevant to COVID for a moment,

what I watched happen is that over, especially the first full year, and also the protracted nature of it made it more difficult but when everybody was kind of quieted at home what ended up happening is because we didn't have all the same distractions all the stuff that people didn't deal with mmm they were quiet stuck and they were still and now all that stuff was starting to come up imagine how great have been if there was no Netflix. We would all have been like, really have to sit with our feelings.

And many people recognized it and chose in and started to deal with stuff that they had never dealt with before. Yeah, I see that. Right? So when we get quiet, that stuff gets to surface. But in this case, if you know how to handle the feelings, then you can lean into and then make sense of the experience. And again, that takes me to what in the book, what I describe as disguised grief. Yeah. So talk about the disguised grief, because it sounds like that's a real big part of your work.

It's helping to sort of understand how to get deeper than just the 90 seconds to really the root cause of why we feel these things. Right. So I think of disguised grief as the gap between what we kind of what we wanted, what we desired, what we dreamed of, and if you will, what really happened. What we wanted, you know, there's this big gap. Between our expectations and reality. Right. Right. Exactly. And when I think about grief, I actually think of grief as being comprised of at least four feelings. So of the eight, there's sadness, helplessness, anger, and disappointment.

So if we're, and we can experience them individually, or we can experience them collectively. So I might feel helpless and disappointed. So I might feel helpless and disappointed or I might feel angry and disappointed. All of it's grief. So and I think of there's kind of two major ways to identify disguised grief. And all of us have it. So if and one way to understand it is if you're using what I call grief signal words. So grief signal words sound like cynicism, pessimism, sarcasm, resentment, bitterness, holding grudges, longstanding anger, longstanding hurt. Wow.

Right? What's your list? Yeah. And when it's long, it gets much longer, but just so you have an idea. So if there's bitterness, resentment, and grudges, you've got disguised grief. Right? Wow. That's a big statement. So a lot of people have that. A lot of people project their their unpleasant emotions as being sourced outside of themselves correct as you did this to me it's victim right resentment all that passive those are all victim revenge is also revenge is also a to me a grief signal word i want to get revenge yeah and what's

underneath that those four feelings grief yeah Grief. Yeah. Jealousy. Disguised grief. Yeah. How is jealousy disguised grief? Or envy. It's I want something that's over there. I don't get to have it. Yeah.

Right? You're grieving for not having it, right? Yeah. Wow. So that's one way of beginning to understand that there's sadness, helplessness, anger, and disappointment underneath that. The second way for me is I talk about five categories of grieving. And the first is grieving over what we got and didn't deserve. So the rageaholic annihilation that you just described earlier. So think of grieving over what you got and didn't

deserve as the bad stuff. It's the abuse, it's the chaos, all those kinds of things, the cruelty, hostility, all that kind of stuff that we went through, these difficult life experiences. So that's one part. The second category is grieving over what we deserved and didn't get. That's the good stuff. The praise, the support, the nurturance, the consistent showing up at baseball games or track meets or that's great progress on what you did. I know you didn't hit the goal, but it's great progress. Yeah. Right?

So it's grieving over that. And then it's grieving over what never was so think of that as opportunities that think of that as the facts and circumstances of your early life and the and the opportunities that basically didn't get to get realized grieving over what is not now depending on where you are now and then the last one is grieving over what may never be that's what i call it's what i call grief over lost potentials yeah it's beautiful and that's those are all very human experiences i think we've all had those um and i certainly have and you know as i've gotten older i've just sort of reframed life in a very different way which is life is not there to to meet my

expectations like this is not what this whole game is about. And the more I focus on my expectations and my needs and my wants, my desires, my preferences, the more suffering I have. And the more dissatisfied I am and the more disappointed I am and the more all those unpleasant feelings happen that you're talking about. And I'm like, well, I have a choice, right? I have a choice to meet what is or to fight with what is. Correct.

You know, we've had Byron Katie on the podcast and she talks about loving what is. And it's such a beautiful practice because then, you know, yes, you still have to deal with all the generational trauma, your trauma, all the things that actually cause us to make meaning of the world in a way that doesn't serve us or make us feel like we have an authentic, confident, beautiful life. Right. But is there another state that's beyond all that where we come to actually not hold on to those things that we are grieving about? Absolutely. I always dreamed of having a happy family and lots of kids and a family compound,

and it didn't work out that way. You know, like I'm 62, you know, not married, and my kids are all over the place, and, you know, alcoholic first wife, which was all based on my choices, based on my trauma. And it didn't end up like that. And I can kind of grieve that. I can be unhappy with it.

Or I can embrace what I have now, which is a freedom I wouldn't have if I had all that. So I'm trying to just reframe my life story in a way that is taking away some of those beliefs and expectations that caused me so much suffering. Right. So for me, there is a process to go through that. So I'm not going to leave somebody in that kind of disguised grief state and go, oh, I've got this. Oh, great. Okay. I'm left with it permanently. I don't believe that at all. In fact, when I think about psychotherapy, if somebody stays in it and it really does the work, to me, psychotherapy is a grieving process. It's actually making our way through the disguised grief. Interesting. So that's how I look. So there really is an, and to me, there's an arc to it. So now somebody's at that point, they're going to what you're describing, they're starting to deal with these difficult life experiences so so the the thing is you you you start there you start it's like the and the when you deal

with feelings my experience as a psychologist and doing years and years of psychotherapy is that the the memories just surface they've just come right to the surface and now they're available for making sense of so the the thought here is that you want to make sense of any difficult life experience you've had. You want to make sense of the impact and meaning it had for you across time. So in essence, who did you become? As a result of that experience. Yeah, exactly. Or if they happened multiple, then it's like, okay, then let's make sense of that.

Who did you become because of that? And I think about it of looking at the time it happened, as you aged, and who you are now. And the reality is, is when you start to make sense of that and understand the impact and the meaning it had for you, then some of the pain starts to fall away. Can you give an example of what that would be like with a client of yours or a patient or somebody who just is suffering? I'm trying to... The first person that comes to mind is somebody who also grew up in an alcoholic household. She would...

She experienced... Both witnessed and experienced abuse. And what she began to recognize as we started to work through the or situations that were not good for her because she wasn't assessing danger and safety well, and that she stayed longer than she needed to be and also wouldn't speak up. So the process of making her way through that and understanding the impact that that had on her, she could begin to have a sense of choice. It's like, oh, wait a minute. I'm better now at reading Safety and Danger. That's not good for me.

I'm not going there. Right? And then the rest of it starts to kind of unfold in a similar manner. So what you're saying, just to summarize a little bit, is that we all have these unpleasant feelings. We all try to avoid them. But by actually sitting with them and actually metabolizing them and breathing through them and letting them kind of move through you,

it brings you to a different set of choice points around how to be with your experience. Absolutely. And then it's actually the beginning of the process of healing. It's not the healing in and of itself. It's just, oh, I'm good with these feelings. It's actually both.

I would actually say both. Both. Because when somebody is cut off from themselves, they don't feel comfortable in their own skin. oh, I'm good with these feelings. It's actually both. I would actually say both because when somebody is cut off from themselves, they don't feel comfortable in their own skin. So the process of actually first being able to be present to your own feeling state, my observation over time, Mark, is that there's a natural organic lift in the sense of well-being just by reconnecting to your feelings. So true. I mean, I felt so high when I got out of that month in Vermont, and it was really quite

amazing. So I would say layers of healing. And then that will eventually be able to take you to the deeper work. Then what you want to do is eventually extract the good from it. And so it's like, is there any good that came? I know this is painful. It was horrible. It affected me in these ways.

But now that I've made sense of it or I understand the impact and meaning it had on me, kind of what choices do I want to make? Was there any good that came from it? Somebody who grows up in an alcoholic household or an abusive household often becomes really good at school or extracurricular activities, keeps them out of the house. So the trajectory of their lives moves into achievement and a bunch of other things that are actually really good for them. But that came out of a bad experience, right? So there is some good sometimes that you can extract from difficult life experiences and then then you're that's your choice point because now

you can forgive and now you can forge kind of new stories of who you want to be so so so let's move from like the sort of the conversation around like the metabolizing unpleasant feelings to the promise really of your book which is the second right part of the title right which is actually becoming more authentic and more confident right more resilient and how how does that happen like what what took us through that process and and and why you wrote the book because you know you really were trying to answer like why is it so hard for people to handle their unpleasant feelings and how do we develop like confidence in life to actually meet it fully and be empowered and be authentically who we are right because that's really the the end game at the end of the day

absolutely so how how do how do you book help with building all the emotional strength and helping anxiety and confidence and all the things that allows us to create the life that we want the emotional strength part is for for me, two things. And it's going to keep on coming back to the eight feelings. The foundational piece for me of confidence is your ability to handle the eight unpleasant feelings. It's the foundation of it. And my definition of confidence is it's the deep sense that you can handle the emotional outcome of whatever you face or whatever you pursue. So the eight feelings are critical here.

So it's emotional resilience and agility, right? Yes. Yeah. But that's only a piece of it. And for me, there's two aspects to emotional strength, two key aspects. One is I can handle the eight unpleasant feelings. The second is I can acknowledge my needs and limitations and ask for help.

Most people see asking for help as weakness or a burden. I see it as a critical piece of emotional strength. Because when I can turn to you and say, hey, I can't sort through this. And you can say, well, wait, I got, let me give you a resource. Now all of a sudden I'm going to have more confidence because I can do that. And so that's one. And probably if the foundation of the book were not the eight unpleasant

feelings mark, then the foundation of the book would be one's ability to speak with ease. So speaking up is really the critical piece okay so so this is a whole nother rabbit hole because in our culture we do not learn at all how to talk about our feelings or emotions or thoughts in ways that are safe yes and uh we usually resort to blame victimhood anger you know judgment in the expression of our feelings you made me do this and you do that like this is a whole like negative subtext that we have around how we tend to express our feelings um but you're talking about a very different way can you kind of unpack that yeah well yes again, and my whole thing was kind of, I started out as a really shy, introverted kid.

And, you know, you have the idea of wallflowers. I was Velcroed to the wall. Ah, you were a Velcro flower. So, and I'd look over at my peers and go, like, they're so confident. It's like, how does one develop confidence? So for me, the big lifelong question was, how does someone develop confidence? Which is really good in the subtext of the book.

But what I realized is the speaking up piece. So we've got the foundation of the eight feelings. The speaking up piece is absolutely next. But there's a caveat here, because it needs to be positive, kind, and well-intended. Just because you can speak doesn't mean you... Doesn't mean you vomit on somebody else. But there's a caveat here, because it needs to be positive, kind, and well-intended. Okay. Just because you can speak doesn't mean you- Doesn't mean you vomit on somebody else. Yeah, exactly.

No can do. Right. Say that again. So it's kind- Positive, kind- Positive. And well-intended. Well-intended.

Yep. So it's basically speaking truth with love. Bingo. Yes. Stevie Wonder has a great song about this. It says, change your words into truth, and then change that truth into love. Bingo. Yes. Stevie Wonder has a great song about this. It says, change your words into truth, and then change that truth into love. And maybe our great children's grandchildren and their great grandchildren will tell. I mean, you can heal all the lineages by speaking truth with love.

Yes. And actually, I often equate truth and love. That truth is love. It is, but... But it needs to be delivered in a well-intended way. Yeah. So kindness and good intention is really critical. What if people are so stuck in their stories?

Because I think this is where we get so identified with our trauma, our past, all the things that have happened to us um that we we often are unable to actually see through that and we get stuck how many people you mean stuck in terms of being mean or stuck in victim and blame and judgment and fear and panic and like so many people are traumatized i mean they i mean sexual trauma affects one in four women probably more i mean i was a victim of sexual trauma twice as a child like you know it's it's not uncommon it's very common and then there's the emotional abuse and the physical abuse and you add all that up it's like who isn't touched by that correct right i actually have a friend who's like she's so awesome she. She's like 30 years old. She just seems so great.

And she's always just good. And I'm like, well, what's the story with you? Like, how are you like this? And she's like, my parents, they were just so loving and awesome and great. I'm like, wow, you're one in 7 billion. You've got to take, someone has to be willing to take responsibility.

And, you know, you've got to be willing to take blame out of the picture. You don't get to blame. So you've got to go inward to look for the answers. So you can't be righteous. No. Like it's your fault. No. No.

It doesn't go outside. It's like this happened to me. Let's make sense of it. Gabor Mate says trauma isn't the thing that happened to us. It's the meaning we make from the things that happened to us. Right. Right. And it explains how two people can have the same objective trauma, let's say sexual abuse,

and have two profoundly different responses. Right. One can become a 600-pound person. Another can be CEO of the world. And it's like, wow, how does that work? So if somebody really wants to do the work, I would say take blame out of the picture. Then you take the victim point away. So if blame's gone, then you're no longer the victim.

Then it's an experience you went through. You make sense of the experience. And you make different choices based on the meaning. But if you think you've been wronged. You've been wronged, then you're left with sadness, helplessness, anger, and disappointment. And what if somebody actually has wronged you? And many people have been wronged. It doesn't take that away. It's still part of your life experience. It's not about going back and writing the wrong necessarily it's make what did this mean to you what was the impact who did you become because of it and now how do you want to be based on what you're now aware of yeah so you don't have to become a victim of the

of the experience yes right right it affected you i'm not i. In no way am I diminishing the painful impact or the profoundly painful impact. When I was young, I traveled a lot and I went to Nepal as part of a medical expedition there up in the mountains, a public health project. And we came back down after the expedition and we went to this part of Nepal outside of Kathmandu called Bodhanath, which is where all the Tibetan refugees had come from China. And it was a beautiful place. And I met someone who met someone, long story short, I ended up sitting with this Tibetan doctor because I was very interested in Eastern medicine and Tibetan medicine. And I got to spend the day with him while he saw patients with the translator. It was fascinating. And I was in medical school at the time. And I said, well, talk to him about his life. And he said he'd been in a Chinese gulag for 22 years, tortured, beaten, deprived of anything that was familiar to him from his being a Tibetan monk.

Right. He was a Tibetan monk. Because all doctors in Tibet are monks, unless they're modern doctors, but all historically. And he says, you know, I said, what was the hardest bit for you of that 23 years? He goes, well, it was those times I thought I would lose compassion for my Chinese jailers. Powerful.

And I'm like, whoa, okay then. I've got to rethink everything. Because if that was your hardest moment in 22 years of being in a Chinese gulag, which you can imagine is in a very nice place, where you're stripped of everything that you care about and love and mean something to you, and you come out kind and compassionate and loving, wow. So that really, that's what Viktor Frankl said that, right? Between stimulus and response, there's a choice. And in that choice lies our freedom.

Correct. Yes. And he was in a concentration camp. You could be a victim in a concentration camp. 100%. They took everything of mine. They took my career. They took my house. They killed my family. They blah, blah, blah. And you could certainly become a victim justifiably. And I don't think anybody would argue with you about that. Nope. But he chose a very different response to the same stimulus as everybody else. And it's in his book, Man's Search for Meaning.

And it's a really powerful and very confronting perspective about how to think about your life. Because all of a sudden, you can't be a victim. Because the only way you can become a victim is if you give your power to somebody else to affect how you feel. Right. And that you're lost thinking that that is the effect of how you feel or that that causes the way you feel. Yeah, that the external stimulus is the cause of your experience. No. It's the meaning we make of the experience.

Right. Right? When we're fully responsible for our own experience, then we have that greatest make of the experience. Right. When we're fully responsible for our own experience, then we have that greatest choice, that sense of freedom. So Joan, how do people get to believe that they're the author of their own experience? How do they get to that place? Because it's a hard place to get to where you step out of being at the effect of the world and being empowered in your world. Again, I do think that there is a pathway.

First place, I'd say start with the unpleasant feelings. Start to lean in as opposed to leaning away. So that you can know what you know as opposed to try not to know what you know. Yeah. That's the first. The second for me is learning to speak up. We started to go down that hole for a moment, but speaking with ease. How do you get to that?

How do you do that? It's a skill, right? Well, it is a skill. Communication is a skill, both sides of it. Listening is a skill as well as speaking and communicating is a skill. But the thing that I really want people to understand is that most people think of their difficulty speaking up that it's a speaking problem. So difficulty speaking up is not a speaking problem. Your difficulty speaking up is a difficulty with unpleasant feeling problem.

Right, because if you tell the truth, you don't have control over what happens next. And that person could scream at you, yell at you, leave you, hit you, laugh at you, hug you, cry with you, kiss you. You don't know what's going to happen, right? Exactly. So it's your willingness then to be present, not only to your eight unpleasant feelings, your own eight difficult feelings. So it's what I call it's being comfortable or being willing to be in the discomfort of your own emotional discomfort. Think the eight difficult feelings

and the discomfort of someone else's emotional discomfort. Think their eight difficult feelings simultaneously. Right. Often the unwillingness to speak up is not

because you don't want to feel what you're feeling you don't want to feel what the other person's feeling right you have to contain it you have to listen to it and contain it and respond you have to respond to it which is what i learned it's like if i said the truth i would get beaten and hit and thrown across the room and so i wasn't right by one by that one person right and i and i turned that into everybody universal of course thing which wasn't which is what we do when we're young we we go oh wait a minute i'll just decide this because i'll make that decision and then i'll operate off that decision for the rest of my life so and but the trouble is it's often a sample of one right so how do you how do you get to a place where you can speak up how do you teach people to speak up again the the first part of it is understanding that it's

actually not a speaking problem it's an you've got to be you've got to be willing to to lean into the unpleasant feelings period end of story and and it's also understanding mark most people think that confident you have to be confident then you speak it doesn't work that way or if i branch off for a moment you have to be confident and then you speak. It doesn't work that way. Or if I branch off for a moment, you have to be confident and then take the action or go take a risk. It doesn't work that way. My experience,

especially with speaking, is that it's as you speak and through speaking, that's when you develop the confidence. It's a skill. Right, but it comes after you speak. It doesn't come before you speak. So you don't have to feel confident to speak.

You get confident by speaking. Bingo. Yes, absolutely true. And the same is true for taking actions. You don't get confident and then you go take the action. You take the action and because of wherever it went and you dealt with it, you get confident. Yeah, it's interesting. Sometimes people feel like they have to feel into the acting, but you can act into the

feeling. Correct. Right. Yes. Yes. So, and the other part of it here for me is what I also realized is that when you speak, again, many people go into, well, I know myself pretty well, and then I speak. The truth is, you actually come to know yourself better as you speak or through speaking. Because some things will start to pop out of your mouth that you didn't realize you even believed or you

knew or- Here's a challenge. If you are willing to speak, do you have to have a person in front of you who's willing to listen? And is that a necessary requirement in order to be able to speak and tell the truth? Because I think there's a, like I've experienced being with people who, you know, I can tell the truth. But it's, you know, it creates a lot of drama or a lot of chaos. Right. And maybe the truth is I just don't want to sit with the unpleasant feelings of what that is. But part of the healing of speaking the truth is being heard and seen in it. Correct. Right. Not just being re-traumatized by it.

No. So in the ideal, I would say start with somebody who cares about you. There's also something I call a preemptive bid in situations like you're describing. Which is? Which is that you actually talk about the obstacle to talking before you talk about the topic. Yes, I've done that. I always start like, this is a hard thing for me to talk about. This is a hard conversation. Can you listen and show up for me and hear me and not react?

Right. Or I can say, I wanted to bring this to you, but my concern is you're going to ridicule it or laugh at it or diminish what my experience is. And I've been reluctant to talk about it because of that. And the moment you preemptively call out that obstacle, the response from the other person usually is, oh, no, okay, no, I won't do that. Yeah, right. And if they do, you've already kind of identified that, well, this is exactly why I was concerned about talking to you about it. Yeah.

Right? So the preemptive bid can make a difference in terms of people starting to speak up. So speaking the truth is important. It's critical. I actually think it's the super glue to confidence. And it's also the key to authenticity. Yeah, for sure. And speaking is our first line of defense. So it contributes to confidence

because now I can say no, or that's too much work, or gee, boss, I want to raise, or you know what, I love you. It's the thing that opens the world up to us. Mark, I actually thought about handling the book differently in terms of the title much later. What I realized is that when we can handle our unpleasant feelings or difficult feelings, it's emotionally liberating. Totally. When we can speak, it's limitless opportunity. Yeah. It's powerful.

Very powerful. So if you want to speak the truth, it's a very powerful so so if if you want to speak the truth um i mean you know it's a challenging conversation uh what's your advice for helping people face those difficult conversations and do them in a way that creates an outcome that is healing rather than re-traumatizing well again the you have to pay attention to your point, who's doing the listening. And you also have to recognize that some, I would try maybe a couple times, but if people really won't listen, then you may have to work out the issue for yourself and not get it resolved with the other person. So it's being aware that some people are capable

of leaning into that and some people are not. And you're gonna have to be the judge of it. But if somebody will listen, then for me, you approach with love. I care about you, I love you, I want this to work out. Whatever it is, because now it's a compliment, right? And it's because now I want more connection or better connection or more closeness. And so that allows me to lean into it better. So you start with love. If you need to, you be preemptive about talking about the obstacle.

And then you go into the topic. But full responsibility. You're not doing you did you whatever. I was affected by this behavior. I was affected. Whatever it might be at that point in terms of following through. I mean, it's true, but you're also speaking about speaking the truth, but also on how to cultivate that skill. But also I think it's important for us to be able to learn how to listen.

Yes. Right? Not have your narrative going and your arguments in your head and your inner debate constantly challenging everything you're saying and actually really listen. So how do you get that? That even seems really hard for people. So there's six behaviors I talk about. The easiest thing to remember is feelings first.

Feelings first. Feelings first. Feelings first. So that when you're in conversation with somebody else, if you can respond to what you hear the feelings are or the feeling tone, that would be the first thing I'd have you respond to. Wow, I heard how hard that was for you. So as a listener,

to respond to the feeling tone in the other person's words. Right. First. It's the first thing you do. And then that's, that's to me the key for somebody to feel like they're being understood and heard. That's psychology 101.

You know what? I've spent more than three decades teaching graduate students how to do therapy. Oh boy. This is the essential skill yeah hands down you'll identify accurately another person's feeling state right yeah and just say it um so you know one of the things seems like in order to do all these things to sit with unpleasant feelings to deal with your unprocessed grief to actually um to speak the truth that you need to really believe

in yourself how do we how do we develop that capacity to believe in ourselves again what i what i will say is that just going through that process creates some of that belief that that when when you are more true to your own genuine feeling experience and you're connected to it and you begin to speak it, you're being more congruent. Again, that experience of congruence is going to start to lift you up. And that's when all the strength comes in. So when our actions match our words and our words and actions match our thoughts and feelings, there's a state of congruence. That congruence is emotional strength.

That congruence is confidence. That congruence is what contributes to our belief in ourselves. And then now we're living much more authentically in the world. And that really is sort of the backdoor to happiness. Yes. belief in ourselves and then now we're living much more authentically in the world and that really is sort of the sort of the backdoor to happiness yes and for me happiness the way i think about happiness is it's an inner peace and when we're when we're settled into our own skin we feel that inner peace yeah man it's a hard one people get to so many weight obstacles there's our culture doesn't support it our entire environment

that we live in doesn't support it you're bucking upstream but it's it's really the key essence of actually being a fully embodied human right and if we don't do that work we'll never get there true you know i i'm you know i don't think age matters i've seen people who are 30 there and i've seen people who are 90 who are not there. Right. And it's just fascinating to see that it's available to us all the time if we- It is. Sort of walk through that door that you've opened for people.

It's really amazing. Yeah. I mean, that's the thing for me because I know, and I've had the chance for decades now, to see the effect of the work. And the arc is the same for everybody. It just, what people's worlds open up yeah if they're if they're willing to lean in with the first one then the rest of it starts to open that's only true for me so i've had to sit with a lot of uncomfortable feelings and

you know feel them and uh and then tell the truth and the more i do that it's like the more free i am the more happy i am the more magic happens in my life, the more possibility opens up, the less I'm attached to anything in particular happening this way or that way. It's great. It's really pretty awesome. But it took me a long time to get here. It's a journey. Yeah, it's like the crucible and all the gauntlets and the suffering and the pain and the tears. But it's worth it. I mean, for those who are listening out there, it's really worth it to take heed of what we're saying,

because, you know, Joan's work is, is really unusual in that it sort of cracks open the key to us dealing with all the stuff that we like to avoid in a way that allows us to get free. Yes. And at the end of the day, I think that's what our souls came here to do is to get free. And if we want, it's available to us. So I just thank you so much for your work, Joan, and what you're doing. Are there any final thoughts about how we kind of cultivate confidence, resilience, and authenticity?

I'd like to add two. I'd like to add two because if I leave these two out, then it really, there's a lot to say about both, but if I leave them out, then I'm leaving out to me what are really essential keys. One of them is to stop harsh self-criticism.

Yeah. As much as we think it's not a big deal, to me there is no, there's nothing equal about a feeling like, that's unpleasant, like sadness. How do you stop that? It's nice to say, but. Well, here's nothing equal about a feeling that's unpleasant, like sadness. How do you stop that? It's nice to say, but... Well, here's the interesting thing. I look at harsh self-criticism as a thought hijack of unpleasant feelings.

We don't control that we feel or what we feel. We can manage it once it's in our awareness. We do, however, control what we think and how we think and so what what i watch is people people hijack an emotional experience by starting to trash talk themselves so again simple example i was doing an interview with somebody was via the internet he he i could hear him he could not hear me and then i'm watching so he's i'm watching him play on the keyboard right and then i'm watching him crawl under the desk because playing with the chords seeing trying to get to work right trying to get to work i'm minutes are passing i'm fine yeah yeah and and all of a sudden

i hear him say i I'm so embarrassed. But without missing a beat, he goes, I'm so stupid, I'm such an idiot. Wow. So the I'm so stupid, I'm such an idiot is the thought hijack of the embarrassment. Yeah. The embarrassment is just what it is. It is what it is. Right.

And I will tell you, the harsh self-criticism doesn't go away. That's what lingers. Yeah. But I want people to understand that that's a thought hijack. So how do you work with that? Once you catch yourself into all this negative self-talk,

you go, alright, what happened before this? What was unpleasant that was harder for me to bear, feel, or know? And then you go right back to that. It's probably going to be an unpleasant feeling. Could be sadness. Could be disappointment going to be an unpleasant feeling. It could be sadness. It could be disappointment. It could be embarrassment.

Whatever it is. How many people go from I failed at something? They're disappointed. I'm a failure. They're not equal. Yeah, no, they're not. So the hard self-criticism piece is one of them. The other one that's super important is taking in compliments.

Yeah, it's hard for people. It is for people and tell me about that why is it hard i well we're we're told we're trained we're socialized not to take them in you'll get a big head right don't you won't be able to even walk in the door right or people won't like you or i mean there's endless whatever the religion or faith tells us that we should or shouldn't do. Right? And the interesting thing for me is I think humility is actually telling the truth about ourselves. Wow. Humility is telling the truth about ourselves. Yeah.

Whatever it is. Whatever it is. Even if it's grand. Good stuff. Yeah. Absolutely. That's a flip. Yeah.

Wow. It's arrogant to think stuff. Yeah, absolutely. That's a flip. Yeah. Wow. It's arrogant to think that we should diminish ourselves. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So the compliment piece for me is that when people don't take them in, or I should say in the positive, when people do take them in, they have a chance to up level their sense of self and update their self-image so so if i didn't see myself a certain way and i'm now i'm telling people you're you know whatever the skillers or however i'm coming across wow that's so great and

and and i get that consistently yeah then it's like i have new information for myself because those compliments are not coming out of some vacuum or out of the blue right they're coming out of an experience of you or with you right so it's actually a mirror reflection back to you so compliments are a reflection of you back to you super important to take in and our criticisms no not harsh self-criticism constructive criticism is yeah constructive criticism is ill-intended criticism is not yeah yeah that's fair that's fair yeah so so navigating your way out of harsh self-criticism and learning to take compliments are key elements to actually building confidence and belief in yourself believing yourself. Believing in yourself. Yeah.

Yeah, I see people, you know, I tend to be very forward with my compliments of people because I just see who they are and I'll just share. And some people just love it and other people like squirm. You know, they're just like, I can't stop. Like, I just can't. Don't do that. You know, like, I'm like, wow, that's interesting. So what's the origin of the resistance to being complimented? I think what it does is it also activates an experience of vulnerability. Aha.

Okay. So I'm being seen in that. And I think people actually do more than not. I think that they actually know more of the truth about themselves so when they get complimented it's like they know that it's the truth but they think it's going to be like bad form to show that they know it's the truth

so and I think there's a vulnerability there also you know it's like the you know being seen is hard for people so they don't want to be seen. They want to hide in their little holes. And I think I, I've had the experience with people and it's like, wow, you know, what, what, what, what's going on in there under the hood that makes it hard for you to be seen because maybe you don't like yourself or maybe you have self-criticism or maybe whatever,

all the things we're talking about. So amazing. Wow. We could talk for hours. This is fantastic. Joan, you're great. Your work is fantastic. For everybody listening, I encourage you to get Joan's book, 90 Seconds to a Life You Love, How to Master Your Difficult Feelings to Cultivate Lasting Confidence, Resilience, and Authenticity. Check it out at 90secondsbook.com. There's a bonus gift if you're listening, drjohnrosenberg.com, four-size gift. Thank you for what you do in the world. Thank you for helping illuminate the darkness and helping us get free. I'm honored.

Thank you, Mark. And if you love this podcast and you know anybody or maybe you have had unpleasant feelings, why don't you share with them? I bet they get some out of it. How have you dealt with your unpleasant feelings? We'd love to know and healed. And if you're struggling, we'd also like to know that. And subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

And we'll see you next week on The Doctor's Pharmacy. Hey, everybody. It's Dr. Hyman. Thanks for tuning into The Doctor's Pharmacy. I hope you're loving this podcast. It's one of my favorite things to do and introducing you all the experts that I know and I love and that I've learned so much from. And I want to tell you about something else I'm doing, which is called Mark's Picks. It's my weekly newsletter.

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with you my favorite stuff that I use to enhance my health and get healthier and better and live younger longer. Hi, everyone. I hope you enjoyed this week's episode. Just a reminder that this podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical

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