The One You Feed - The Quiet Pain of Self-Loathing and Finding the Courage to Face It with Sarah Gormley

Episode Date: June 24, 2025

In this episode, Sarah Gormley discusses the quiet pain of self-loathing and finding the courage to face it. Sarah had it all – a thriving corporate career, success, and admiration. But beneath was a quiet, relentless self-loathing she couldn’t shake. In her memoir, The Order of Things, Sarah shares the profound turning point at 40 when she finally asked, is this how it’s going to feel forever? She unpacks why therapy isn’t linear, how grief can deepen gratitude, and the freedom that comes when we stop performing and start genuinely living.Feeling stuck? It could be one of the six saboteurs of self-control—things like autopilot, self-doubt, or emotional escapism. But here’s the good news: you can outsmart them. Download the free Six Saboteurs of Self-Control ebook now at oneyoufeed.net/ebook and start taking back control today!Key Takeaways:Journey of self-discovery and self-acceptanceImportance of mental health and therapyStruggles with self-loathing and emotional challengesImpact of grief on personal growth and gratitudeRelationship dynamics and self-worthCaregiving experiences and their emotional complexitiesNavigating grief while supporting othersThe role of compassion in healingTools for managing negative self-talk and thought patternsThe interplay of environment, genetics, and personal agency in shaping identityIf you enjoyed this conversation with Sarah Gormley, check out these other episodes:How to Tame Your Inner Critic with Dr. Aziz GazipuraHow to Practice Self Compassion with Dr. Shauna ShapiroFor full show notes, click here!Connect with the show:Follow us on YouTube: @TheOneYouFeedPodSubscribe on Apple Podcasts or SpotifyFollow us on InstagramSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

The relationship with yourself is the relationship that's most important, and it informs everything else, romantically, professionally, my siblings. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen

our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction. How they feed their good wolf. On the surface, Sarah Gormley had it all. A thriving corporate career, success, admiration. But beneath was a quiet, relentless self-loathing she couldn't shake.

In her memoir, The Order of Things, Sarah shares the profound turning point at 40 when she finally asked, is this how it's going to feel forever? In our conversation, we discuss why therapy isn't linear, how grief can deepen gratitude, and the freedom that comes when we stop performing and start genuinely living. I'm Eric Zimmer, and this is The One You Feed. Hi, Sarah, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me. Nice to be here. Those of you that are watching, we'll see that we are sitting together in person in the studio in Columbus, Ohio that we use. You're also here in Columbus, Ohio. And they will also see this book, which is what we're going to be talking about. It's called The Order of Things, a memoir about chasing joy. But before we get into that, we'll start in the way that we always do with the parable. Okay. In the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild and they say, in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf,

which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and they think about it for a second and they look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the others I'm listening. I think it's all of our story. I'm hesitating because I'm already getting a little bit emotional. I think probably this most surprising lesson of my life, which I try to capture in the book, is how much we can be in charge of our emotional selves. It takes work, but you can choose to feed the part of you that's healthy. And I love the parable. And before I even knew

you existed, I saw the parable online somewhere and I sent it to my boyfriend and partner, Camillas, because I thought it was so beautiful and I hadn't, I'm sure I'd heard it before, but I saw one of those images online, the perfect quote, and I'd sent it to him. And that was, I don't know, six years ago. So it's incredibly poignant and relevant to all of us. I love that idea about thinking of having the power to work with our emotional selves more skillfully. Right?

I don't think we can control our emotional self, but we can certainly relate to it and work with it far more skillfully. Before we dive into all of that, why don't you just give us a brief overview of kind of the heart of the book, what it's about. Okay. It's a memoir, as you mentioned in the subhead, is a memoir about chasing joy. And so the narrative arc of the book is about my experience when I came home to Ohio after a career in New York and San Francisco. I came home to be with my dying mother. Her cancer came back. We knew what was likely going to happen.

And I took a year break to kind of, well, A, to be with her, but B, sort some things out for myself. I had been struggling in my corporate career. And that's sort of the narrative arc. The story beneath the story is an emotional journey. And I had been a person who my entire adult life starting in childhood was full of self-loathing. And it wasn't depression, it wasn't anxiety, it was just, I hated myself. And how that manifested was I was an overachiever. You know, it wasn't debilitating self-loathing, it was motivating self-loathing. So I became a gold star chaser.

You know, needed to be smart, smart skinny successful. And so I just kept Achieving. Yep, and what a shock the more I achieved the Less fulfilled I was and that's a pretty frustrating place to find yourself So at age 40 finally, I found a therapist who's still my therapist today. And my work with him and the work of myself pretty radically transformed my life. So that's the story beneath the story, and the book includes scenes with my therapist,

David, because I wanted to show people what actually happens in therapy sessions. It's funny that you say at 40 because I was having a conversation yesterday with a woman who's an executive coach and she was saying what she saw consistently in her work was that when people got into their 40s all of a sudden what had been working for them to get them to the point in their career that they were suddenly started to not work. It started to be a problem. And I think a lot of it is what we're talking about here, is that I think we can be motivated by striving because we don't think we're good enough. And that can be a really powerful fuel. And it's a fuel that I think over time really starts to gunk up the engine. And when you hit your 40s, you know, you may still career-wise be doing okay,

but inside it's like the, I think it's this critical point habits. It must be maybe some combination of years of that and, you know, the realities of getting older. And I've seen that in the coaching work that I've done with people. It's somewhere in that range that maybe you've had enough success at that point that you're like, oh, that didn't fix the problem. And instead of thinking, oh, it's just more success, more success, I think certain people wise up a little bit and go, oh, hang on, let me question the whole paradigm of what I'm doing here, the strategy I'm going after to deal with these internal emotions.

Yes, I think so. I mean, for me, it was 40 sort of a big number and you think maybe a midpoint of life. And I really just asked myself, like, what are we doing? And I was in a huge amount of pain. I mean, pain can be a pretty big motivator. Yeah, pain is an outstanding motivator. And it's clear that that pain is still, or the experience of it is still close at hand. You can laugh at me. I cry all the time. And I think, you know, the body remembers. And so I think my body physically recalls how I felt for so long and nobody knew. I didn't even know, I didn't know what to call it. I just, when I turned 40, I thought, I can't do this for 40 more years, something. And I was terrified to try therapy because I thought, what if a therapist says, no, Sarah, this

is just life. This is how you're gonna feel. Because I thought, well, then what do I do? You know, I was so nervous. And fortunately, I didn't have to feel that way about myself for the rest of my life. And part of writing the book was yes, to share the story, but boy, I can get myself, I can get in my head a little bit of I probably should have started at 30. What if? And it's not productive to say what if, but my life, I'm so fortunate. I have a blessed, full, lovely life. But if I had not been as terrified to start therapy and started at 25 or 30, who knows? Who knows? But it's okay. But I don't spend too much time there. But I think if someone reads the book and recognizes themselves in the story, several people have already

told me they've reached out and started therapy after they read the book, because I took out some of the scariness of it. Yeah, that's wonderful. Yeah, I think that ability to pivot from internal self-loathing to some form of internal kindness is about the biggest upgrade you can give your life, right? Because the person we spend the most time with by far, of course, is ourselves. And if that self-loathing voice is just constantly kind of going, it's really lousy in there. Now I think that becoming kind to ourselves actually allows us to get better at everything

that we do. But even if that were not the case, that upgrade inside is so, and it's so weird because I think, I mean, I did in many ways start this sort of journey at 25 as a recovering heroin addict. And I can say that one of the things that has happened is that that self-loathing is pretty much gone. Now, but here's what's weird, is my brain will still fire up this phrase, I hate myself. Like it just arises and I'm like, what on earth is that?

And I recognize what tends to cause it also. I can recognize the situations I'm in and it's usually a situation in which I don't know the answer. When I find myself in a like which I don't know the answer okay, when I find myself in a like I don't know what to do or I'm gonna make somebody unhappy or something like that that voice just rises up even though at this point It doesn't have any energy underneath it. It just shows that our patterns get so deeply wired Oh my god, the patterns are so strong. They're so powerful.

And I still have the voice. I named the voice Scott Kennedy after the bully in elementary school. And it's still there. Same, like, and I'm like, what? No, not today. But it creeps up, you know, whether it's about body or success or, you know, and then I just sort of,

I guess now I have the tools to, like I don't tolerate the voice much longer than like few seconds at a time, but it's not totally gone. You know, it's not all. Well, my experience is it won't totally go, but it's a completely different experience. Mostly when I say something like that,

or occasionally the other one that'll fire up will be like, I wanna die, or, and I'll be – I just kind of tend to laugh at it now because I'm like, that is extremely over dramatic. That is way too dramatic for the fact that you're not sure which shampoo to use today, right? Like we can just – we can relax a little here. Yes. My therapist, David, who I will reference multiple times, but he once said to me, you don't have to make a pageant out of it. Yeah, that's funny. You can just kind of have a conversation. It doesn't have to be this full blown up

thing. It's just this. I'm like, oh, right. It doesn't have to be a pageant. Yep. The book very early on paints a poignant picture of you sitting in your apartment. I think you're in New York at this time. And you're reading books like The Noonday Demon by Andrew Solomon, who's been on the show a couple times and I think is one of the best writers alive, and a book about depression, which I resonate with very deeply. But you were reading it going, not me. So you were reading these books about depression, anxiety, all of this, but none of it was resonating with what you had. And what you were able to finally put your finger on was it was this self-loathing. And I consider myself a fairly bright individual, and so I was trying to do the research, you know, because I thought if I could find a book or an article that resonated with me,

I would know what to do. And I couldn't find myself in any of those pages. And I still today think that when we talk about mental health, if you say certain words, people are like, yes, that's a mental health issue. Suicide, depression, sexual trauma, sexual assault. There are these big categories that are connected to something pretty extreme. And what I've found is that there are a lot of us, women in particular, who are carrying around this sort of quiet suffering, often disguised by success. And it's just not necessary. So, you know, that to me is one of the reasons, it's one of the

reasons I wrote the book, but it's one of the reasons I am talking to you today and writing essays for national media because so many people, women in particular, again, when they've read the book, approach me and say, me too, me too. So many, you know? And so, again, I think there is help and I used to think, oh, you just have to ask for help, that's the key. Now I think, no, the key is to admit that you're hurting. And I think a lot of people, their lives look great on paper, they've got a great job, healthy kids, a supportive family, a great friend group.

This is how I felt. What in the hell am I bitching about? Who am I to complain? You have this gratitude happening. Poor little spoiled white girl from Ohio, what's she bitching about? Yeah, yeah. And that's why I couldn't reconcile

that there was quote unquote something wrong or something I needed to fix. And when I reframed it and said, I can't live this way for the next 40 years, I'm in too much pain, then it became more acceptable to me in my head to ask for help. Yeah, I think I was, you know, I was fortunate enough at an early age to see a lot of people who are in real pain, particularly in 12 steps, like, you know. But as time went on, and the main thing I got really interested in and have gone really deep in is Buddhism. And Buddhism starts from the place of saying, everybody's got some of this suffering going on. It's the human condition. And I find that a helpful view of the world. Because A, I think it allows me to approach everybody, well I try, I try to approach everybody from a place of more compassion.

And I think it also allows me when something is going wrong, I'm struggling to say, like that's totally normal. And so of course you're hurting and the next thing to do is seek some help. So I think that you're right, a lot of people it's I think there are so many they call it like a journey of healing and I think that on one hand I hate that phrase. Journey. I know. I cringe when I say emotional journey but it's what it is. But yeah it's apt because there's I was talking with a friend yesterday who's a therapist and he's been a social worker for years and we talked about how for many people they think like if you just ask for help it just all gets better. You know I thought the first time like if I just you know it was my like I am dying from addiction but someday I'll pull a

pin I'll go to rehab and it'll be solved and of course it didn't work that way. It eventually worked that way eventually but I think so there's that first part of like the journey to get to the place where you can ask for help. Mm-hmm. Yes. Yes. Then there's everything that kind of happens after.

And you make a great metaphor in the book that I'd like to turn to for a second here. And you say therapy is not like hiking the Appalachian Trail. It's like being a duck paddling around the same pond in random circles. So, say more. Well, there's an anecdote in the book about going to the therapist when I was in my 20s, right? And it didn't go well, but because I went, I also went in with a list of things I wanted to work on. And even with David, who I'm still with 12 years after starting at age 40, I had some, you know, categories of things I wanted to work on. I'm a very goal-oriented, problem-solving type of person. And it doesn't work that way in therapy. And I wanted readers

to know that you don't get to go in and say, well, I would like to fix my self-loathing. How long is that going to take? Yes, I know. And so the right therapist for you will lead you into conversations, revisit topics, ideas, and it's slow and messy. And oftentimes you leave an hour long session thinking, what in the hell did we just talk about? You know, I don't know. But over time, you realize this is what happened for me.

I realized I was seeing myself differently. I was treating myself more kindly. And I'm not, I don't sit and reference specific things about Jungian therapy and archetypes. I mean, we've talked about all of those things and he teaches me, but it's more of the awareness and subtle shifts throughout the day of how I'm talking to myself and how I relate to other people. And that's when I say it's like swimming around in the pond. Like you don't know where the little nuggets of nutrients are coming from. It's just it's happening because you asked for help because you're committed to the emotional work. So 12 years you've been in therapy, what makes you think you should still go?

Like what sustains your commitment to continuing to do it? Intense pain, intense motivation. What I see over and over and over with people and I see it in my own life. When I'm in a lot of pain, I'm very motivated to change it. Things get better and it's like, all right, good. Now let me go play, you know, wiffle ball. I don't actually play wiffle ball.

I would like to play wiffle ball. If you want to play wiffle ball after Joe, we could get a game going. You get my point. Yes, yes. Well, two things. And this isn't in the book, but I did stop therapy for a spell when I moved from New York to San Francisco because I still had this idea of like checklist, fix that.

And so I move out to San Francisco, my father passes away, and I'm kind of in one of the lowest points of my life emotionally and I email David and we get on the phone. He said, I thought I might hear from you again. But the reason I continue with David now is that I still struggle, you know? I still struggle with I still struggle, you know? I still struggle with how kind I am to myself. I'm interested in relationships and how I behave in relationships and frankly, I want to be a better version of myself. And I have found that therapy has helped me.

The relationship with yourself is the relationship that's most important and it informs everything else, romantically, professionally, my siblings. And yeah, that's why because I think I've come this far in 12 years and I'd like to see what else there is. And it really does, I still have my, I still make some pageants out of things that don't need to be pageants. And it really does, when I speak with him about it, I'm not beating up my boyfriend or, I'm not dumping it on somebody else. So I kind of save certain topics, if you will, for David. We also have something called trickle-down therapy. So my friends know about David, Camilla's knows about David. And so if I have an idea, I pass on my little nuggets sometimes.

So let's change directions for a second. The book is, I think primarily about, at least from my perspective, two core things. One is this idea of self-loathing and how we work with it. And the second is about the death of and the relationship with your mother. Yes. So tell us a little bit about what brought you back to Ohio and where in Ohio. You weren't in Columbus, you were in a small town, right? Yeah, Chandler'sville, outside of Zanesville, Ohio, which is where I grew up. Okay. In a small town, right? Yeah, Chandler'sville, outside of Zanesville, Ohio, which is where I grew up. Grew up in a family farm.

It's absolutely beautiful. And so, my father passed away in 16. I was in San Francisco at that point and his death was sad and terrible, but not a huge surprise. He had had, you know, litany of health challenges for the last 15 years of his life. And so then he died in 16, so November of 17, I was at an event in New York speaking and my sister calls from the emergency room and said, mom has tumors up and down her spine. It's like, first of all, I was like, are they allowed to tell you that?

The ER? Like that seemed a little... So yeah, and we didn't know how bad it was. I think mom knew. And what happened is after my dad died, I think we were confusing some of her symptoms with grief, which I've heard has happened a lot before. And so she just didn't feel well and had no energy. But we thought, well, you know, her husband of 38, 45, I don't know how many years, a long, healthy marriage. So there I was in San Francisco.

My job was not going well because I shouldn't have been in the role. I left a big job in New York to take a big job in San Francisco, really because I didn't know what else to do. So, I flew, rather than flying back to San Francisco from New York, I flew home to Ohio and, you know, had a conversation with mom and said, you know, I'll come home. I think I volunteered. I'll come home to be here with you. And she said, oh, I'd like that, which was shocking because she knew about my big career, maybe it was some vicarious enjoyment of my big career. And she knew the job was a little bit in trouble. And so I thought for sure she would say, no, no, no, you go back and take care of what you need to take care of in San Francisco. And when she said, I'd like it if you would come home,

I knew I had to do it. It was the right thing to do. So I packed up and just came home. And in that transition, I committed to myself that regardless of what happened with her, I was taking a full year off of work to reset, regroup, figure out another way to be with myself professionally.

And so I came home in November, she passed in February, and I did not work at all for a full year, which it takes a long time to get some of that corporate persona off of you. At least it did for me. I had confused my identity with my profession. And yeah, it took a little time. Which is not surprising if you see getting things right and gold stars is the way you feel good about yourself, right? Of course you're

married, you know, you're taking your career as your identity. How long was it after you sort of arrived back home and your mother passed on? Was it four months? December? Oh, I got home at the end of November and she died at the end of February. So you had four months of being sort of in the scrum of caretaking. And then that ended. I'm curious about that latter transition. Because I think when you go from like a job like that to another role that keeps you relatively busy, focused, and occupied, that's one transition. But there's a deeper transition, at least, and maybe it wasn't for

you, but I've seen with a lot of people where when that ends, the caregiving ends, now you're truly, what now? Yeah, I'm not working. I'm not like, what am I doing with my life? Well, two things. I think I anticipated that. So I'm a control freak even when I'm trying not to be, but I anticipated that that could happen. That's why I set the year timeline. And I said, Sarah, you can't go back. You are doing nothing but be at this farm, falling in love, visiting friends, traveling.

This is what you're doing. You are not working until January of 19. So I was prepared for it. Because there is another version of the story. I get asked this a lot at book clubs. Is there another version? Like what would have happened if? And I think the answer is it's very possible

had I not done what I needed to do in therapy and fallen in love with a man in Columbus, to be fair. That's a pretty big weight on that side. That is a big one. But I could have gone back to New York and gotten another big job. That was in my makeup and the desire to do that because it's what I knew and felt comfortable doing. So part of the year timeline was also to prevent that, prevent myself from jumping back into

what you knew. From falling back into the pattern, right? The patterns are super strong. Yes, they are for sure. You mentioned you're a control freak. Well, not as bad as some people maybe, but I have my moments. Or let's say that you are a control freak who's getting better. Yes, a recovering.

A recovering control freak. We may get to this at some point, but I think a salient detail in here is that you had anorexia at one point. The little I know about it is that's very much a disease of control. It is. And so let's just say you're well established in control. And now you come up against the uncontrollable, which is your mother's illness, which she at a certain point says, I don't want to treat. She stopped treatment.

Yes. She stopped treatment. So talk to me about the emotional process of coming in with a control mindset and being faced with the uncontrollable. I'm hesitating because... It's a poorly formed question. No, no. No, because I think there's a nice, probably pithy way to answer, but the real answer is about mom.

I mean, she choreographed her death for us. I mean, for her too. My father died in a hospice facility, which is so fucking awful. And she died at her favorite place on earth, at the family farm, surrounded by people who loved her, she was pretty lucid until the day she died. And that's how I could handle it. She gave us this gift of dying so gracefully. Doesn't mean it wasn't excruciatingly painful, but it wasn't about control. It was about grace. Yeah. And so you learned that through the process. You sort of learned that you can't control. You can't control it. And that is for anybody, any of your listeners who have gone through

it, and most of us will go through it. The relationship between grief and gratitude is something that fascinates me. And it starts happening when you're a caregiver before the end. And I think it's one of the things that makes you able to survive it with the person who's dying. And that was so beautiful and also in a way that was not at all like what we experienced with my father. So it really was a gift, and mom made it easier for us. Yeah. It's amazing how different death experiences can be. I mean, we were a primary caregiver

for Ginny's mom, who had dementia. That is a bad way to go. I mean, it's just. And then my dad died the same thing in a memory care facility for Alzheimer's. And so there's just these different ways. But I'm glad that you got to have that sort of thing with your mother where she got to sort of do it her way in that sense, which is really beautiful. It really was. And I think I got some of my

control tendencies from her. BD Yeah, so she was trying to, she was orchestrating. LSW She was. Yeah, no doubt. BD So that is the other part of the book that I think is really interesting is this is this inheritance of emotional pain, of starting to see in your mother some of what you saw in yourself. Yes. Talk us through when you started to notice that

and what it was like. First of all, I think to know my mom, to have a little picture of her, I mean, to say she was iconic is almost an understatement. People come up to me who met her 35 years ago for 10 minutes and tell me about my mom. She just was a force. She was bright and funny and beautiful.

And she had this ability to connect with other people And she had this ability to connect with other people and just love them and make them feel seen and special. And sometimes she was better at giving it away to other people than her own children. So I'll say that. And I did not know that she was suffering until I graduated from college and she admitted to me that she had been depressed and was taking Prozac. But before then, I never would have thought that she was someone who was depressed. And there's a scene in the book where I go have a glass of wine with the psychiatrist who prescribed her Prozac. And I shared with him my experience with talk therapy.

And he sort of said to me, Sarah, you shouldn't ever have to suffer like that. In fact, if you let me know, I can get you some medicine. And I was a little bit offended, not offended, but I wanted him to understand that I had started healing through the process of therapy. And so when I think about mom and me, mom was hurting and suffering and medicine helped her suffer less. I was hurting and suffering and working with a therapist to help me suffer less. So there is absolutely no judgment about what helps and what works. But I think mom, I think she was really hard on herself. She doused herself as a mother, which she admitted to me.

And I hate that for her. There's a line in the book, is it weird to wish something for your dead mother? Right? But I kind of, I wish she had been kinder to herself. And we didn't talk about it a lot. She knew I had started therapy, and she hated that I was hurting. But that's kind of as far as we went. Before we dive back into the conversation, let me ask you something. What's one thing that has been holding you back lately? You know that it's there. You've tried to push

past it, but somehow it keeps getting in the way. You're not alone in this, and I've identified six major saboteurs of self-control, things like autopilot behavior, self-doubt, emotional escapism, that quietly derail our best intentions. But here's the good news, you can outsmart them. And I've put together a free guide to help you spot these hidden obstacles and give you simple actionable strategies that you can use to regain control. Download the free guide now at whenufeed.net slash ebook and take the first step towards getting back on track. You mentioned that your mom doubted her abilities as a mother in some ways and that maybe connecting

with people on the outside was easier for her. And I think that's a not tremendously uncommon thing for people who struggle emotionally. In that, it's just much easier to just have relatively surface level, now I'm not saying your mom didn't care about these people and see them. But you play a role for a very short period of time and then you go off versus the day in and day out emotional labor. And emotional intimacy.

And emotional intimacy. Like non-romantically, but we were of her. Yeah. Right? We are a part of her. I mean, I continue to notice how much easier it is for me to be emotionally intimate with other people versus compared to my siblings. It bothers me on some level.

I don't fault myself. I totally get why. It makes complete sense to me. And I've remained sort of even after having noticed it, even after having shared it with my siblings, we talk about these patterns that run deep. There's this thing, there is a code of the way you are with your family. Yes, the code. Yeah, that's a great word for it. And some of the relationship with my mom was speculating with my therapist. And so I was cautious, especially in the book, not to draw conclusions

that I didn't ever have the chance to talk with her about. But I will say that once I started looking at her just as a human being and not as my mother strictly. It's like once you start to understand why somebody may be the way they are, you don't have this need for blame. And she was a complex, incredible woman and she had some flaws and she had amazing gifts, you know. And so I used up all of my blame on myself my whole life, you know.

And so I don't have much blame for anyone anymore. It's like, no, I feel like everyone should write a memoir. And with the power of AI, when we meet someone, your memoir should sink into my brain. How much nicer would we all be to each other if we really knew each other's stories, right? That's a great use of AI. Like we would be overflowing with empathy. Yes, yes.

And it's like, I don't know, I'm just trying to be nicer. I... To myself and other people. I agree, and I think those were sort of your mother's Yes, deathbed advice. Yes. Yeah, be nice. Yeah, just be fucking nice Now my mother would say there's a difference between kindness and niceness and blah blah blah, but yes the point being Kindness goes a long way towards ourselves and others and I think once you learn Learn it with yourself when you learn some self-compassion,

I think it just helps you be more compassionate to other people. Really does. I think it's a bi-directional sort of thing, has been my experience, because I can think back to early in my recovery and I would see people who had basically done the sort of things that I had done that I felt really bad about myself and I shamed myself for and I could have compassion towards them, which then allowed me to see. Okay. But then that also as it developed in me, you know, so for me it's been this sort of bi-directional thing is that, you know, knowing my own self and being kind to myself, but also, is that, you know, knowing my own self and being kind to myself, but also, and it's one of the things when you study the research on self-compassion, at least the key thing

I have taken away from it, if I were to take one line from a whole lot of thousands of studies it would be, treat yourself like you would a friend. Exactly. Because we intuitively sort of, or a small child, because we intuitively sort of or a chop or a small child because we intuitively have compassion Yes for the people we care about and we intuitively can see what they're not seeing Yes, and we can't do it for we can't do it for ourselves So that imaginative exercise actually is a way it's a training and for a lot of people I think it's a backdoor in when the self-loathing is so strong

it's a backdoor in. When the self-loathing is so strong, it's a, imagine what I would do if it was someone else allows me to at least envision a world in which kindness could be a response to myself. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, I like the bi-directional. As we talk about your mother and we talked about meeting the uncontrollable with control type tendencies and how that changes, there's another theme that I see in the book and I just sort of noted it down as sort of the myth of the need ending. And I think of a scene where people in your town would come up to you consolingly and

say she's going to a better place or... Oh, she's going to be with the judge, my dad. Yeah. And how frustrated that made you. And I'm always drawn to the places where we're sort of called to hold two things. And what you're being held to there and you make it is, how do we navigate the tension there of saying what I want to say, being myself, and also letting other people have the thing that comforts them? Yes, because they were grieving too.

And they could be right. They were grieving too, but they weren't right. All right. No, it's one of my oldest and dearest friends, the scene in the book, and she calls the night mom decides to stop treatment. And Di calls and says, you know, she's ready. She's ready to be with your dad again. And I was so pissed.

And I'm like, her body is riddled with cancer. Right. And she's dying. So this is why she's ready to die because she's dying. And so then I felt this need to be right. And to your point, whatever people needed to tell themselves to make themselves feel better in the moment because she adored mom. So, you know, it wasn't me at my best, but I forgave myself because my mom was dying. So you get a lot of latitude in those circumstances. You can use it for like six months after too.

Well, my mom just died. Yeah. Fuck off. It's a good one. I don't think I took enough advantage of that after my father passed. I could, but now I'm, you know. One of the things that people do is they love to tell neat, tidy stories. And I recognize that I have a very strong bias against that.

Yes. That's not me. And yet I don't want to disabuse anybody of their neat, tidy story because again, on one level they could be right and I could be wrong. No, of course not. Well, this is particularly interesting to me because it's a journey I've gone through and I've watched a lot of people in our community go through, which is one where you have a belief in a neat, tidy, everything happens for a reason universe, and then you lose it. And how hard that can be.

Because if I could believe certain things, I think I would. Because I'm a big believer in usefulness, and I think there are certain beliefs that are actually very useful. And I would actually sign up for a couple of them. But I can't, because you can't believe something you don't believe. Correct. And so how to make sense of a world in which things don't happen for a reason, that your mother's death is just what it is.

It's a painful, sad thing. Yeah. And painful, sad things happen in life. And we, fortunately, are creatures who have tools to deal with hard, painful things. And we should be better in this country about talking about death and grief. And I think about death and grief and I think we're getting there I think we're getting closer, but you know, I have a group of friends There are now four of us in the club adult orphans we've all lost both parents and I was the first to lose both parents and it is

It's so disorienting But there are these moments until you experience it, it sounds absurd but there are moments of the beauty and gratitude. And you also have an opportunity to look at yourself and be proud of yourself, you know, for being a caregiver and being resilient. So I had my experience with it and everybody else will have theirs. One of the things that also happens in the book and you alluded to it is you fell in love when you came back.

Yes. How does that happen? In what universe does that happen except Hallmark? I was going to say, is this the bridges of Madison County? I don't actually know that story. I just know it's some love story that takes place in a small town. Yes. Indiana.

What happened with you is a takes place in a small town. Yes, Indiana. And that's what happened with you is in a love story in a small town. I'm less interested in all the specifics of that, but I am interested in how you learn to relate to another human being in relationship as you began to think about working on your self-loathing and particularly working on, because right along with self-loathing, we've sort of talked about it, is this, I'm as good as what I do. And that can be very problematic in a relationship. So how did the work in therapy, trying to untangle some of this self-loathing, how did that help you in this relationship?

I'll say a couple of things. So I had done five years of the emotional work before I came home. There was still more work to do, but I had come pretty far in untangling myself from my job is my identity. The pattern was there but I recognized it. Enough that you saw taken the year off was really important, right? Yes, absolutely. You have to have some degree of clarity to understand that for you, you couldn't heal

that while being in it. The way that happened was that I started to be kinder to myself. I mean, I'd still struggle to say that I love myself, but I certainly was being kinder to myself and recognizing that I was a person with qualities. And so, I'm back at the farm, I have no job, no home, no car. I had lost one parent, about to lose another. I mean, there was, for a person who was goal-oriented and identified by achievement, I was sort of at the lowest low. It was just me. This is what you get. And so, unlike every other relationship that I had attempted and failed in which I naively, ignorantly believed that the right person would make me feel better about myself, I

did not have that expectation. I already felt better about myself, which meant that I was probably at least 80% closer to being ready for a relationship than I had been before in my life. And then the timing of it was just crazy. So does that answer your question? It does. And I assume, you know, as we begin to disentangle our worth from what we do, we also, I think, are better able to actually be ourselves.

And that happens to be a really key thing in any good relationship is that you enter it as yourself, which took me a long time to figure that one out. I thought I had to enter as a certain type of person with these certain posturing and then then it's really problematic So, oh, yeah, you know entering is yourself is a pretty big prerequisite for things going. Well, it's been my experience, right? I entered fully and truly as myself even what I would have considered one of my lowest points of my life and To this day seven and a half years later. I still feel the most comfortable I've ever felt in my life with him. Yeah, and he knows that and so it's not

It just works, you know, the love is funny so what I'd like to do now is go deeper into the process of do now is go deeper into the process of healing self-loathing. What sort of things happened in therapy? What things did you learn or what were you taught or what were moments along the way? How did this actually happen to the extent you're able to put any of it into words? Okay, well, I'm going to tell you two different things that happen, both of which are scenes in the book. Because again, I included the therapy scene so that people could actually see and feel what it's like. So when I started with David, I told him about the voice,

the running voice. I referenced a cassette tape, they don't exist anymore, but imagine the loop of tape that just never stops running. And the voice, no matter what I did, told me that I was a piece of shit, not good enough, not worthy, not smart, not funny, not cute, not pretty all day long. No matter what I was doing, I could be in a boardroom presenting to a CEO and the voice was still there. You suck. You fucked that up. You screwed that up, which is exhausting. Yes.

Okay. So, one of the things that David recommended is that we give this voice a name so that I could approach it. And he asked me to give it a name and I was frustrated. I was like, I'm not going to give this voice a name. And then I remembered a kid who had bullied me on the playground and I said, Scott Kennedy, who probably had a crush on me in elementary school, but I beat him up. I held him down and started punching him because he wouldn't leave me alone even though I'd asked him. So Scott

Kennedy became the name of the voice of the self-loathing. That was one tool. And I still think about it when we have those moments where the voice pops up, I'm like, not today, Scott Kennedy, you know? And it works. And so, that was an example of David getting me to recognize that it's not my whole who, that it's this voice and that you can resist and you can challenge the voice. So, you pay attention, what does it want? What's it trying to get from you? And then put him in his place. So, that was really useful. The other thing which we hinted at this when we were talking about how you treat other people versus how you treat yourself.

And so David was trying to push me to understand that I am not in fact a lonesome piece of shit. And he said, well, how would your friends describe you? And just like I am now, I started crying and he was like, why are you crying? And I have this amazing friend group from college and I thought about each of them walking into my apartment and how they would describe me and how they felt about me. And it was a very effective way, clearly, to get me to see myself in a different light. And I had to view myself through their eyes. And so, again, that was an exercise in one of

our sessions, and it freed up space in my mind and frankly my heart for myself to perceive myself differently. So manage the voice and view yourself more kindly. Again, none of that sounds like really radical, but those are the types of conversations that I had in the first year of working with him that started a shift. Yeah. Well, it sounds, you know, on the surface, simple and it's anything but, right? I mean, it's extremely hard because I can think of all the hurdles that could come up with that. Like one of them for me used to be, so and so thinks you're great, so and so thinks you're great, so and so thinks you're great.

And it was like, the simple one was, well, they just don't know me. But even when I went beyond that and I were like, they do know me, then I all of a sudden start questioning whether they're really good people, whether they're interesting people. No, I'm gonna trust the guy that thinks I suck.

That's who I'm gonna trust. Yeah, it's this crazy cascading. And that's why I'm going to trust the guy that thinks I suck. That's who I'm going to trust. Yeah. It's this crazy cascading. And that's why I'm really interested in how this sort of shifts over time because some of it is working to catch the thought patterns, restructure them. And there's just an awful lot of that. And endlessly, I always say the good news is you can retrain the way you think. The bad news is it does take a while of a lot of that. And endlessly, I always say the good news is you can retrain the way you think. The bad news is it does take a while of a lot of repetition. The book that I've got coming out,

How a Little Becomes a Lot, that's how it happens. But there's another element in there in which you can't out-argue your inner critic. Once a certain debate mode gets engaged, it seems like it's capable of countering every, well, I'm good enough because I'm presenting to CEOs, look how far I've come. And then the voice just has a perfectly good defense to why that doesn't matter. And so there's another element that happens. And I don't know exactly how to put my finger on what it is. But I'm curious as I say that if anything comes up in you. Well, my immediate thought is it's something about, it's a will, a will to experience a day differently. Or, you know, you have to have, those things can happen. The voices can be there

doing what they might do, but there has to be a bigger element of this is how I want to experience my life right now. And so, this is how much room I give you to the noise. I don't know if that makes sense, but David would probably have a better term for it. You know, and I still have moments. I always say like, look, it's not like I'm skipping through every day of my life. It's all rainbows and birds chirping. You know, just last week I got hit with something and I was down, a little bit down on myself for about two days. But that's all I can take anymore. I'm like,

you can get your two days. You got your two days. And now let's get back to the truth, which is you're capable and you're bright and you'll figure it out. Let's go with that. We're not going to go under the paralysis and anxiety and fear. You can feel poorly for a couple days and that's about it. And so that is when I say there's the will and the want to experience life differently. And that's been important to me. I don't know if that's been important to me.

I don't know if that's a clinical expression. I know it's not, but it is. It's what you're trying to answer. Do you write about that in your book? A little bit, but I honestly don't understand it. To be completely honest, like one of the things that I've said before, if I got to meet God, assuming there was one, which we've sort of covered, but assuming,

let's say I did, the creator of the universe, and I got a lot of basic questions out of the way, like what the hell's going on? And one of the questions I would really, that has been a personal question is, why is it that some people get sober and others don't? Because I watched people show up in the same treatment centers that I did. I

watched them go to the same meetings and I saw them put the effort in. It wasn't they were just going through the motions. They were trying. Now, I have some answers. I mean, I could give you some answers. Oh, it's about how much support they had. There's a lot of different factors. But underneath it, there's this intangible that I don't understand, which is that, and I think addiction just paints a starker picture of a, I think it's a nice analogy for a lot of things in life. It's just because it's so intensely focused. And in it, there is a certain amount of loss of choice. It's how it's defined to a certain degree. And yet the path out is defined by a certain amount of loss of choice. It's how it's defined to a certain degree. And yet the path out is defined by a certain amount of agency.

And how those things combine, and I think any of us in our healing journeys can, there's that word again, but can look at that and see like, oh. So in the book, there's something that David and I talk about quite a bit. And we think of a Venn diagram. And we talk about that people are made up for three components. There is heredity, environment. So the circles cross over.

And the third circle is something that's just uniquely you. And all three of those things contribute to who you are and how you show up in the world. So I'm wondering if the third circle, the uniquely you part is the will I was talking about and for you, it's what makes the difference between some people recovering and some people not. And that's just, unfortunately, maybe luck of the draw in terms of what we can do. Yeah. Yes.

David and I talk about the Venn diagram when I'm still being really hard on myself. He's like, why aren't you giving yourself the credit for who you are, that third circle? And so I can't answer that, but it might be a little bit closer to what you're asking. Yeah. I don't want to go down the rabbit hole of whether what the third circle is and how does it exist. But I had a conversation last week with a guy who wrote a book about the victim mindset. And he's talking about something very similar. He's saying like there is your environment, there is your DNA, your genetics, is the hand that you were dealt,

there is your DNA, your genetics, is the hand that you were dealt, which is a big part of what life is. But there's another element, which is your agency. And the more that we believe in that agency, I believe, the stronger it gets. So it's useful to recognize the ways that the things that have happened in our lives have shaped us into who we are, up to the point that I think that that begins to feel like I have to be that way. Because then agency disappears. Agency has to have some belief. And you're giving too much power. Too much. Yeah, you're not honoring that other part. And so it's the recognition of like, okay, I'm the way I am based on a lot, you know, like I think I come from a family of

very emotionally repressed depressive. Like I can look back a couple of generations and I think, yep, it's there. Genetically, environmentally, all the above, and I have an agency in how much that dictates my overall experience. It dictates some of it for sure. But it doesn't all. That's part of the reason I also love this idea of little by little is because we may only have a little bit of that agency at a time, right? We just have enough

to keep sort of inching along as, you know, bigger shifts start to reveal themselves. And the other thing as you were talking that I think about, it's like bringing stuff up and looking it over, right? You know what you inherited. You know, if you take it out and look at it and examine it, you're like, yeah, got some of that. Got some of that too. Okay. I'm aware of it. And I think just, there's so much to me that awareness and understanding frees up acceptance and move it along, right? Like check. But then I do the thing where it's like, yeah, not today. We're not doing that Scott Kennedy today. Yes. Good old Scott Kennedy.

Poor Scott Kennedy. I can't change his name either. Scott, if you're listening to this and you lived in Chandler'sville a long time ago and used to beat up a blonde girl, we'd like to hear from you. Oh, I got sent home from school, it was bad. Before we wrap up, I want you to think about this. Oh, I got sent home from school. It was bad.

Before we wrap up, I want you to think about this. Have you ever ended the day feeling like your choices didn't quite match the person you wanted to be? Maybe it was autopilot mode or self-doubt that made it harder to stick to your goals. And that's exactly why I created the Six Saboteurs of Self-Control. It's a free guide to help you recognize the hidden patterns that hold you back and give you simple, effective strategies to break through them. If you're ready to take back control and start making lasting changes,

download your copy now at oneufeed.net slash ebook. Let's make those shifts happen starting today. When you feed.net slash ebook. So if you could speak directly to that woman sitting on the couch in New York all those years ago reading The Noonday Demon, what would you say to her? I would hand her the book. Okay, good. Now, I would say, look, you need to learn to be kinder to yourself.

So maybe find a group, group therapy or find a therapist. Now I would say look you need to learn to be kinder to yourself so Maybe find find a group group therapy or find a therapist don't wait until you think your pain is enough That's a beautiful way to wrap up you and I are going to continue for a few minutes in a post-show conversation Which is available to people who support the show so listeners if you'd like access to those post-show conversations We also have ad free episodes and all kinds of other goodies. And the really important thing is you get to support a show that needs your help. Go to whenufeed.net slash join. You and I are going to be talking about a thing in the book that I really love, which is you talking about how hard it was to be who you were to your parents because you didn't want them to hurt.

And I think that's a really, there's a lot there. So you and I are going to discuss that. But thank you so much for coming on. Thank you for having me. It was a real treat to be here in person. Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought-provoking, I'd love for you to share it with a friend. Sharing from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do.

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