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We need attachments to other people, places, and to God. Yet transitions have a way of shaking up those attachments-even healthy ones!
Today we're talking all about how to balance our need to hold on to others - and also the need to let go. It takes skill and self-compassion to navigate these seasons of wrestling for more health, more connection, or more freedom.
Here's what we cover:
1. Healthy & unhealthy attachments
2. The 2 competing relationship needs everyone has
3. The reality of attachment voids
4. Practices to anchor yourself
5. The role of liminal figures
Resources:
- Pre-order I Shouldn't Feel This Way on Amazon!
- More from Gabor Maté on the need to be attached and the need to be authentic
- Psalm 23
- The Bend in the Road by Paul Cezanne
- Ships in Distress Off a Rocky Coast by Ludolf Backhuysen
- Voyage of Life series by Thomas Cole:
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Music by Andy Luiten
Sound editing by Kelly Kramarik
© 2024 Alison Cook. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Please do not copy or share the contents of this webpage without permission from the author.
While Dr. Cook is a counselor, the content of this podcast and any of the products provided by Dr. Cook are not specific counseling advice nor are they a substitute for individual counseling. The content and products provided on this podcast are for informational purposes only.
Transcript:
Alison: Hey everyone, and welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You Podcast. I am so glad you're here for part two of my conversation with Rowena Day about transitions. I heard from so many of you that this first episode on transitions was so helpful to you as you think about what you're going through in your own life.
And so many of you were saying that naming those words like uncertainty and disorientation and even confusion was really freeing and normalizing as it relates to one of these transitions that you're going through.
So today we want to talk about some of these more challenging transitions and in particular, we want to focus on the role of attachment in transitions. Now, we talked in depth about attachments in episode 16 where I went through attachment theory and different attachment styles.
We're not going to do that in today's episode. Instead, we're focusing on attachments in a broader sense. These could be our psychological attachments to other people, but they could also be our attachments to places, to organizations to communities, even to habits or aspects of ourselves, old versions of our identities.
These attachments that we have make it really hard for us to lean into transitions, especially when those transitions involve a shift in one of our relationships. Transitions are challenging because they get at those attachments. As I think of these transitions, I think about that path that we so often talk about on this podcast.
It's as if you're heading up that path and suddenly you find yourself on a little bit of a cliff. You're at the edge of a steep slope and you're realizing that the path you've been on has to change dramatically in many ways. And maybe you can see off in the distance, the next peak that you need to get to, it's there.
You can see it, but there's a gulf between where you are now and where you've got to get. And it's scary when you're standing there at the edge of that cliff. All you can see is that gulf. And it can feel like one of these defining moments where something needs to change. You're aware that you need to go through something, but all you can see is what feels like an abyss in front of you.
And it can feel lonely and anxiety-inducing because the very nature of a transition is that it invites us to let go of some of our attachments, to let go of some of what's felt familiar to us, some of what's made us feel tethered in many ways.
And so we have to let go of something so often in order to move through one of these transitional seasons and allow something new to emerge. There's a reason that these transitional seasons stir up a lot of complicated feelings inside of us.
In today's episode, we want to join you there, because a big component of braving these transitional seasons is not doing them alone. It's finding safe people and safe places that understand the nuances of what you're going through, and can help give you wisdom and encouragement that you're not alone as you face this journey.
So without further ado, I want to welcome back Rowena Day, my dear friend. She's also a spiritual director so she brings a really beautiful lens to this conversation about the role of attachment in navigating these challenging transitions.
Thanks so much for joining me for part two of this conversation, Rowena.
Rowena: Thanks Alison. It's been really meaningful to journey with each other in some significant transitions of our lives. So it's also really meaningful to be able to talk about all the things that we've learned in that process together.
Alison: Yeah, exactly. This really flows out of our shared experiences these last couple of years as we've tried to find names for what we've been experiencing. And it was really a conversation this fall where you started talking about this phrase, transitions, and you even use this word that we're going to get into in this episode, attachment void, that really stood out to me.
And I was like, oh, we need to talk about this. This is really helpful stuff to identify what we're going through in these seasons. Part of what makes transitions so hard is that we're attached to people. We're attached to old ways of doing things. We get attached to places and none of that is all bad. So walk us through a little bit, some of these different types of attachments.
We are driven and wired to seek attachment and it's written in our neurobiological wiring the drive for closeness and contact emotionally, physically, and spiritually. And I think it's really about seeking out safety and connection in life. We're not wired to be alone.
Rowena: I think we're pretty familiar with this relating to people, but we can also think of attachments in terms of being attached to places and objects and definitely with God.
We are designed to have healthy attachments with other human beings and this looks like a beautiful interdependence where we are open to one another, where we are separate and differentiated, and where we are equal. And so that's really when the fruit of a beautiful attachment relationship can be born and thrives.
Both parties in the relationship are able to engage in this mutual way where they're open to each other, to the thoughts, feelings, and needs and preferences of the other person as well as their own. In healthy attachments, you consider each other as equals, not thinking of yourself as superior or inferior. You have some healthy separateness and differentiation also. And that is the paradox of beautiful attachment, is that there is separateness at the same time.
Each person is working in the relationship to understand and live from their own healthy boundaries, while also respecting the boundaries of the other. And together, it creates this beautiful dance of a mutual relationship.
We can also think of being attached to places and objects. We can get attached to particular cities that feel like home, and particular geographies. Some people might feel more comfortable in the mountains. Some people might feel more comfortable by the ocean.
We can get attached to working for particular organizations, jobs, and institutions. So there's a variety of other parts of our life that play huge roles in our sense of belonging and place in the world.
Finally, and most importantly, is our attachment to God. I think God allows us to receive the secure attachment that only he can provide so that we can have that changeless anchor for our souls that holds us fast through all the storms of life.
And this helps keep our other attachments in their proper place. It allows us to enjoy these attachments even more without reverting to either of the extremes.
Alison: I love this picture you're painting of the dance that we need. Attachments are not bad. They provide us with anchoring, especially when they're ordered.
I love how you're saying that when our primary attachment is to God, it allows us to hold these other beautiful attachments that keep us tethered to this world. They help us find our place in this world. These are really wonderful gifts.
Rowena: Blessing the need for healthy attachment is really vital because we are created to be in relationship for our survival and our flourishing and the immense richness and depth that it creates. At the end of our life, the quality of our relationships is of utmost importance and is what is eternal.
Navigating life, we are in an ongoing process of learning how to be healthily attached to other people, to love really deeply while also holding people loosely. Knowing when it's time to let go is incredibly hard and can invoke a lot of grief and that's not abnormal, that's normal.
Alison: Yeah, exactly. And that's where these transitions come in because so often they are invitations to do some of the letting go. I love how you're saying again, these attachments are a blessing. I think sometimes some of us have been taught through our faith traditions, or we get taught this through our culture, that we shouldn't have these attachments, that we shouldn't need other people, that we shouldn't be over-attached to a place.
That we should be able to move on. And therefore we shouldn't have these transitional seasons because we should be able to get from where I am now to the next place easily.
So I think there's some nuance here with this word attachment. What is an unhealthy attachment?
Rowena: Yeah, so we could be avoidant of attachment or excessively attached, and those are the two extremes. Neither is healthy.
Thinking about our society and culture that we live in, the West is highly individualistic, and so it errs more on the avoidant, counter-dependent side of the spectrum. We are not as woven into a larger community as we once were, and we've moved away from having healthy interdependent attachments.
We live in a much faster-paced world than we ever did, and with tremendous workaholism. With this addiction to work and not recognizing our need to be healthily attached to others, we see a big epidemic of loneliness in our society. That is a result of how our culture is now structured, with much weaker social ties and bonds.
Whereas in reality, our hearts, minds, and our nervous systems are wired and designed for attachment and deep connection.
On the other side of the spectrum, we could have attachments that become overly or inordinately attached to other people–more on the codependent side where you're enmeshed or there's not enough separation between the two parties.
This requires a process of detaching from other people a little bit, and reestablishing more separateness. It comes back to those three things I mentioned earlier, the open, separate, and equal, and keeping those all in balance and all in tension appropriately.
And navigating life, noticing when things start to get a bit off, and that's a huge part of the transitional process, is learning how to make those changes and tweaks in our attachments to help get them into their proper place of healthy attachment.
Alison: That makes so much sense. I love how you describe those three qualities of, have I gotten too attached? Do I need to create some more healthy distance? Are there situations where I need to get more attached to other people?
Maybe I've become too self-sufficient or isolated. So these transitions, especially these relational transitions, could also be when we're invited to reconsider an attachment to a place or an object. Opportunities to look at how tightly or how loosely we're holding things and make sure that we're in that proper balance.
So we need attachments and also there's always an invitation to be looking at our attachments and reordering them and these transitions are a part of that process. They're often disrupting the stability and familiarity of our existing attachments.
They're invitations to do the deep, important work of allowing ourselves to surrender to a season of adjustment. Sometimes these transitions get forced upon us. We don't have a choice. It's out of our control. Maybe we lose a job or we lose a person.
Maybe they move away. Maybe there's a breakup that wasn't our choice. This also can happen with death. We're going to touch on that a little bit more in next week's episode because there's a little bit of a different connotation with death when we talk about grief, although all of these involve some form of grief.
Sometimes we choose to enter into a season of transition where we start examining ourselves or our relationships, and we start to notice, like you're saying, maybe we're too close or too attached, or maybe we're not attached enough, and we need to either release a little bit or shift something to make a change.
Any one of these things launch us into one of these transitional seasons. And again, we're naming that because so often, as you said, in our fast paced culture, we're not invited into this season of discernment of noticing there needs to be a change.
It's going to take a minute to discern how to do this without either blowing up a relationship or pretending like everything's fine, but really noticing how we move through a relational transition. And sometimes this surprises us. Not always are we consciously aware, oh, I'm going to discern the nature of that relationship.
Sometimes we find ourselves in one of these seasons where suddenly we're aware that some sort of attachment figure is changing and we're in that abyss. We're in that place of discomfort and we're trying to scramble to figure out why.
Rowena: Yeah. I've been through several of those. I think one of the biggest sort of multi-transitional periods of my life was 10 years ago, being at one of those transitional cliff edges. My husband and I had been living in Boston for five years at that time and it was a really beautiful stable time in our life.
Where we were both flourishing. And it was a place that I had come to feel the most rooted as an adult. And we lived in this beautiful apartment, but my husband's schooling had come to an end and we had made the decision to move to D. C. for his new job. We were also expecting our first baby, and the creative work that I had been enjoying so much was also going to experience a significant shift as I became a mother.
And so it was time to move on from this apartment and this ending was really difficult for me and I was surprised how attached I had become to it. And it represented all these deep things, a place of stability, a place of home, a place of flourishing. And parts of me were scared to let go and walk away from that.
And other parts of me knew it was time. We were looking forward to starting a family and getting ready to say goodbye to our twenties. So it was a lot of transitions colliding at one time and it resulted in a tremendous upheaval. It didn't shake us to our core, but it was a lot of transitions happening at one time.
Alison: Yeah. New city, new job, new baby, new role. Everything all at once. Actually, one rule of thumb, people will say, if at all possible, try not to do a whole bunch of transitions at once. But sometimes it's not possible. I've had the same experiences, but it makes sense that the apartment became this sort of attachment figure of loss and grief and even this uncertainty, this sort of, oh my gosh, I've got to let this go. And it felt destabilizing to some degree.
Rowena: Oh yeah, the tension it creates between the different parts of us and the need to create room for this inward transitional process of adapting to a lot of external change and not expecting the letting go process to happen overnight.
Alison: Exactly. Giving yourself permission. Not to beat yourself up, but to give yourself permission. Okay. I need to honor that this is going to take me some time.
I want to talk a little bit about these relational transitions, especially when we have some choice. Especially when we're noticing a need for a change. I love how you're describing these parts, Rowena, because I think this is so common where we start to notice, like in your case, it's an example of a decision that has been made.
Your husband had taken a job. You were pregnant. You didn't have a lot of choices. This was going to happen. And so you had to enter into this season of wrestling with all of those changes.
That's hard enough. Those are hard enough when they're in the context of some good things, even. Then I think about these transitions where we have some choice, where we're noticing maybe something needs to change in our lives.
Maybe we need to change the dynamics of a relationship. Maybe we need to change a job situation or relationship to a church, but we're starting to notice the need for a change, and we've got some agency there and we're maybe standing at the edge of that cliff going, I don't want to go into that uncertainty and I've got some choice here and I don't want to descend down that path.
We've got a couple of options in that moment. We can choose to face the feelings of uncertainty and fear and even grief and disorientation, or we can shame ourselves that it's hard for us to do that, which is also not helpful.
But regardless, if we're really honest with ourselves, we're aware that we need to be paying attention and that we might need to make a change. And let's talk about this specifically for the sake of this episode in the context of a relationship change.
I want to focus on these situations where we need to make a shift in a relationship. Because again, those are often our most pronounced attachments. We get attached to people. That's not bad. That's there for a reason. Sometimes we can get attached in unhealthy relationships,
What are some of the cues when we're standing there and we're feeling some of that internal stuckness?
Maybe we're noticing there's a need for a change. I'm noticing that I'm longing for something else, but I'm terrified to go down into this valley of making a change. Let's name some of the internal dynamics that can help us in those moments where we're actually in the middle of a relationship transition that's really hard for us to face sometimes.
Rowena: The work of Gabor Maté has been really influential for me here because he boils down the needs of human beings in relationships to two things, and that is the need to be attached and the need to be authentic.
So in healthy relationships, both of those needs should be able to be met. We should be able to be attached to the other person in healthy ways and to show up authentically and for the other person to be attached to us while being able to show up authentically themselves.
When in a relationship dynamic where those two needs are coming into conflict with each other, that's where it can get really challenging and messy and be complicated and extremely activating for our nervous systems. When we feel like we have to consistently sacrifice authenticity for the attachment, there's an indication that something needs to be looked at more closely.
If there's an ongoing pattern of that, it's going to require support because those can be very challenging dynamics. So the need for attachment is so strong that it tends to win out over the need to be authentic.
Alison: I can think of examples, Rowena, of exactly what you're saying, where you're in a relationship, there's an attachment there, this person matters to you. And also simultaneously, you're noticing, man, there are these patterns.
Maybe I'm having to lie. Maybe I'm having to betray certain aspects of myself. Maybe I'm having to be a little bit fake in order to maintain this relationship. I'm noticing this tension internally. That's the authenticity side of things. But at the same time, I feel attached to this person, and that makes sense.
There's a reason we feel attached. And so the red flags that we might need to transition in this relationship, whether we leave the relationship or whether we create a shift in the relationship to try to show up more authentically can really create a lot of inner turmoil and I think this is where we get really hard on ourselves.
We start to beat ourselves up that we're not making the change. Sometimes well meaning friends will come in and say you need to get out of that relationship. You need to leave, or we can try to numb or shut it down or avoid those feelings, neither of which is healthy. But the reality is this is really where we're starting to do that work of wrestling.
And I think about what you said last week about these transitional seasons being marked by endings, neutral phases, and new beginnings, where we're really wrestling with the possibility of an ending. That ending might be the end of a relationship, or it might be the end of a way of being with a relationship, the end of a way of coping in a relationship.
It might be the end of one of those responses you described. The end of pleasing, which we don't know how that's going to change the relationship and what's going to happen, which evokes all of this disorientation and confusion and anxiety, and this is where we get really stuck. So I think that's a really helpful paradigm.
Rowena: This is where the parts work comes in because you need to notice how different parts of you are feeling about this relationship and the potential transition, and to honor the complexity of these parts. Different parts of us want to find a way to stay attached, and other parts, probably from our body, are picking up the fact that there's something that's not right there.
And so it creates that internal conflict that can create so much distress and discomfort on the inside. And that's where it's really important to get curious about what each part is thinking and feeling. You can't really move forward unless you look closely at each part and widen your window of tolerance to endure some of that distress and discomfort on the inside.
Paradoxically it's when we begin to honor all the different parts of ourselves that we can actually gain a little bit more of the calm that we need to eventually allow us to discern and take a step in a direction, one step at a time.
Alison: Yeah, I love that. I love that. And I love that we're saying that widening that window of tolerance, our ability to tolerate the distress, is what paradoxically allows us over time to make those changes that we need to make. Basically, if you think about that cliff metaphor, we don't want to stay on the edge of that cliff, but we also don't want to jump down or race into something before we're ready.
And so when we think about that metaphor, this is where, again, we need people to come around us and help us with naming. Yes, this is hard. Let's look at the different parts of you. We're not going to rush ourselves, but we are going to honor the fullness of what's really happening.
Rowena: Yeah, and the inner distress that can get us to freeze and then we feel like we can't access our agency anymore. It's really allowing ourselves to feel some of that discomfort and allowing ourselves to be in that place of pausing and noticing and saying yes, I would like to have some agency and figure out what my choices are.
I'm not there yet but with support and by noticing my internal world, I can slowly build to that place of regaining agency.
Alison: Yeah, this is where that term “attachment void” really stood out to me. This is the fear that we have in these moments of internal wrestling–this attachment void. Can you talk about that a little bit?
Rowena: Yeah, I think the term attachment void hits the nail on the head with what we can be feeling on the inside when we are wrestling with a relationship transition. The sense of void, deficiency, or the absence of what used to be an emotional or relational bond. We know that the goal of life is not to avoid having attachment voids–they're natural, they're part of life.
Relationships are meant to ebb and flow; some last for longer, some are for different seasons, and so we can't avoid them. I think that's a little bit difficult in our culture because there's a lot of pressure to be happy all of the time, which really prevents you from navigating these tough transitional seasons.
So the presence of an attachment void does not necessarily indicate that there is an unhealthy situation there, which might be the assumption that people make. So I think it's important to distinguish the difference that attachment voids can come in. When you lose somebody, when there's been a healthy attachment with a friend who has moved away, these attachment voids can stir up a lot of grief, and that's normal, and that is okay to experience feelings of grief.
When the attachment voids come from a relationship where there is unhealth, then it gets more complicated and those relationships can be the most activating for our nervous systems as we might enter into a hyper-aroused state with fight or flight or go into hypo-arousal freeze or fawn. It might be that our nervous system is confused and can go back and forth between some of those over the course of time.
But our nervous systems, our bodies are wise and they're detecting that something isn't right here and they always know before our mind. They signal that there's an unhealthy attachment potentially. We don't want to experience anxiety or distress in our nervous systems and we tend to discount the positive messages that they're trying to bring us.
I think widening our tolerance for some anxiety can be helpful in noticing the symptoms that our body is sending to us so that our mind and body can belong to each other. And we can go through the work of discernment with mind and body integrated and connected together.
Oftentimes if you're at the cliff, you might be feeling pressure to make some movement, to descend, or to jump, and oftentimes we might need people to join us at the cliff and sit with us in that place while we tend to our nervous systems and try to bring ourselves back into a more regulated state so that we can reclaim some agency and figure out how to navigate those more challenging dynamics in relationships.
Alison: I love that you're saying this, and I think it's so important for the listener to hear, because I talked to so many people who are wrestling with this very thing. They might be in a relationship that they've become aware isn't as healthy as it could be, or isn't healthy at all.
And then there's shame involved in not being able to make that change when in reality, it's a process. We have to equip ourselves. We have to get ourselves the nourishment and the care and the support and the resources that we need in order to make that change. And again, it can feel like you're descending into one of those attachment voids.
It's hard.
So I love that you're naming that, that part of this process, especially when our bodies are beginning to cue us that there's some unhealth, is to allow ourselves that process of noticing of paying attention of letting each of the different parts, the part of us that says, I've got to make a change and the part of it says, no way I am not doing it.
It brings to mind a story when I had to break up with someone. This was long ago, and I remember I had a couple of people–I call it sandwich support. I had some safe people who anchored me on one end, and I knew I had to do it because it was one of those things that I couldn't delay, but the whole car ride to that conversation, one part of me was saying, I need to do this.
And one part of me was saying, I'm not doing it. I'm not doing it. I'm not going to do it, and I let both parts coexist. But by the time it came for me to have the conversation, I had done enough work that I had enough tolerance, as you're saying, for that conflict inside of me that I could do it, but it took a lot of work. It took a lot of support and it took a lot of time.
This is a process. So as we think about Rowena, these seasons where we're wrestling, oftentimes initially inside of ourselves, I want us to talk a little bit about how we anchor ourselves. We need to create a space and name it. This is a discernment season. I'm not going to do this quickly, but I am going to put some things in place to help me get resourced so that I can make this transition.
There are a number of ways we can do this. Tell me some of the things that come to mind for you.
Rowena: So the first, I think, is to name it as a passage. This is something that is unique to a particular phase of life and so is going to need different things. It's going to need naming and acceptance, which is a process in itself. And then it's going to need your attention.
It's going to need stepping away from the busyness of life even more and creating a little bit of extra bandwidth and room in your life. So cutting out whatever commitments you can, allowing yourself the time and space to sit and think and journal or talk with friends, to get good sleep.
Like it really requires slowing your life down. So that's, I think, the first step. You can't really get anywhere if your life is at a high speed and you're trying to make important decisions and changes. The next, I think, is really, and slowing down helps with this, but really attuning to your body and to your nervous system, noticing what your body needs.
Does it need to be out in nature? Does it need some space? Does it need beauty? Does it need silence? Does it need music? Do you need to lay on the floor on your stomach and feel very grounded? Do you need to do deep breathing or walking, stretching, whatever urges your body has to help your mind and your body come back to each other and reach a more regulated state?
So as you can pay attention to your body and help your nervous system shift from the hyper-arousal or the hypo-arousal to a place of regulated calm, you can begin to get creative with the beauty of “even though” statements combined with “I wonder”.
Even though I'm in a place of uncertainty in this relationship, I wonder what possibilities are ahead. We can't really hold the complexity of our experience if we're in a state of dysregulation. So whatever we can do to bring us back to that place of calm is extremely important.
I find art to be incredibly powerful. Finding visual images that really represent something that I'm feeling on the inside. I'm really lucky to have the National Gallery of Art down the road. And I have been really impacted by a number of paintings there. Recently, I saw a painting called The Bend in the Road by Paul Cezanne. And seeing this beautiful painting of this road taking this bend, and you can't see what's on the other side of the road, brought such calm within and such an acceptance.
Almost seeing something physically in front of me that shows that there's an end of the path and you can't see what's ahead. Times of big upheaval and distress, there's another painting there that's called Ships in Distress Off a Rocky Coast. And it depicts sailboats caught in a tremendous storm.
And the painting of this tempestuous storm evokes such emotion and resonance during really difficult transitions in life for me. Another example that I find of art that is extremely powerful is the Voyage of Life series by Thomas Cole. And these consist of four paintings that depict the journey of what it's like for a baby to grow into a young adult, to reach adulthood, and then eventually old age. And it depicts this all using the river as the passage of time.
So the first painting is of a baby in a boat. And there's an angel in the boat with the baby, and everything is lush and green around in the setting on the banks of the river. The sky is bright and beautiful, and it is a picture of abundance and promise. The next painting depicts a young adult on the boat, leaving the bank of the shore, and the angel is now standing on the bank, waving the young adult off.
And in the distance where the young adult is looking, there is an ethereal castle in the sky to show the promise of a future. Or the hope of a good future ahead. And then the third painting, which is most relatable to being in the season of transition that we're talking about, is of a man now in a huge storm raging in the water and brewing in the sky.
And he's standing up in the boat and he's got his hands clasped together in prayer, desperate for help and for guidance to get through the storm. And there's a light behind him, and you can see an angel, the angel's back there, but the man can't see it. And then if you look closely at the darkness of the sky, you can see these really creepy figures to represent the immense darkness that he's feeling outwardly and inwardly.
And then the fourth painting is the man in old age, and the angel is returning to the boat and guiding the old man out of the dark place towards this beautiful sky in the distance and the light ahead. And seeing these paintings and sitting with them, seeing the totality of life before my eyes with these four paintings is so beautiful.
It's been so meaningful and can give me such courage. We only live our one life and we only know what it's like to be us, and so to have outer representations of what other people go through can be extremely profound and so I love the power of art for that.
Alison: Yeah, I love that. And we'll link to these images, but they show us the bigger picture, which is what we need when we're stuck on that cliff and we're wrestling with ourselves. These images help us recognize that what we're going to go through, while it’s going to be hard, there is an image of hope on the other side. Art really paints that picture for us when we can't see it for ourselves, which gives us the courage to maybe take that brave step we need to take.
Rowena: Yeah, and if we think about the pathways of fear that can get turned on in our bodies, that anticipation of bad, and then if we think of hope as the anticipation of good, it can be a challenge to slowly get our minds, our hearts, and our nervous systems to be on the pathway of hope, anticipating good.
Having that secure attachment with God is so helpful because that is what he's the master at, is helping us turn away from dwelling in a state of fear, and bringing us slowly, mysteriously, toward a pathway of hope as we walk through the wilderness, through the dark valley. He is with us.
Alison: Yeah. I love that. The other thing that those pieces of art show is this term I learned back in my doctoral program, and I loved it. These attachment figures show up when we're in transitional seasons. They're these kind-of angels but they're not really angels.
They're people that surprise us, that come in to support us when we're going through something hard. And oftentimes these are therapists or spiritual directors, they're these anchoring figures that we really lean into when we feel so disoriented and we're not sure.
And that's so healthy too. You don't want to do this alone. These figures show up and they don't do the work for us. We still have to go through it, but they're guiding us through it. And sometimes we bump into people who will surprise us.
We might notice ourselves thinking about a friend that maybe we've lost touch with, but we realize, man, that friend went through something like this. And I couldn't relate to it at the time, but now I'm going through it. Maybe they'll have some wisdom for me.
Or you might be surprised that you're connecting with someone new because they've got some wisdom that's really helpful to you during this season. So we can also be surprised by the figures that show up in that quote unquote attachment void, where we have descended into a valley.
It feels hard. It feels scary. We feel alone, but we're more attuned to the people that can actually help us walk through it. And again, oftentimes we're surprised by who those people are. It may not always be who we think it's gonna be.
Rowena: I think that is so helpful and so necessary to find those liminal figures in addition to having people be of support to us. I think one of the single most powerful practices that I've learned over the past decade is to do Lectio Divina. And that means ancient reading.
It's a really powerful way of slowing ourselves down with a short passage and reading it over and slowly digesting it and mulling the words over in our minds and noticing if a word or a phrase comes to our attention and that there's a reason for that. So the Psalms, I think, are really beautiful for this.
It helps these messages of hope really penetrate into our nervous systems, to help our minds and our bodies connect to this deeper reality that God is using all of these hard things for our good and it doesn't deny or bypass the reality of what's hard. The Psalms hold the reality of what's hard while also providing hope in the midst of the transitions and those dark valleys.
And so I think, because we've been talking about the valley so much, Psalm 23 comes to mind, of course. It's so famous, but it's so rich and so powerful in the way that it honors the difficulty of walking through a dark valley while also clinging and trusting the fact that God says He is there with you.
And that his goodness and mercy shall follow you all the days of your life, like repeating that over and over again. That surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life. It has become such a transformative phrase for me in helping me transition from those pathways of fear to more pathways of hope in an embodied way.
Alison: I love that. I agree with that. I found that in my own life. I know for me, having a little bit more of an avoidant disposition, when I'm giving myself permission to make a shift to let someone in, which is also a transitional season, I've gone through Psalm 23 over and over.
I can feel shame that I find myself needing someone in a new way. And so I will, very similar to what you're saying over and over, Lord, my God, I put my trust in you. Do not let me be put to shame. No one who hopes in you will be put to shame. And I'll say that over and over. And for some reason it quells whatever that fear is in me, that there's going to be shame involved, in this discomfort of, in my case, often allowing somebody in.
Which can feel like a valley. I don't want to disrupt the system. I don't want to try something new. And that Psalm, really anchoring on that, reminding myself of that truth, can be so helpful. I love that, Rowena. I love the way you put words to these things.
And I'm so grateful that you have been someone with whom I can sit on the edge of the cliff and you don't rush me–you sit with me and help me look at all the different pieces. That's such a gift that you have. And I also love that you are someone who sometimes walks with me down into the valley and you're also someone who will celebrate with me on the other side, when we reach those new beginnings
Rowena: Party on the other side.
Alison: Yeah, exactly right? We've got to do that too. We've got to celebrate the, “we did it!”. This was hard. We did it and it's such a rare gift. And I'm so grateful for you and grateful that you were willing to lend us your time and expertise to this conversation.
Rowena: It was a lot of fun. Thanks, Alison.
What do you do when life feels disorienting or uncertain? Maybe a relationship ends, you change jobs, or your children no longer need you in the same way.
Change is disorienting. We don't always recognize the value in slowing down to process these in between places-when we've left something (or someone) behind but aren't yet sure what the future is going to look like.
This next series is all about navigating transitions. I've invited spiritual director, Rowena Day, on to discuss. . .
1. Normalizing liminal spaces
2. Do we ever "arrive" at stability?
3. Fascinating research on the pain of uncertainty
4. The 3 stages of transitions
5. The value in endings
6. How our bodies can help us
Resources:
- Pre-order I Shouldn't Feel This Way on Amazon!
- Exodus 14-15, a major transition for the Israelites
- Transitions: Making Sense Of Life's Changes by William Bridges
- Research on the pain of uncertainty in University College London article
- Isaiah 43:19
- Ecclesiastes 3:1-8: A Time for Everything
Thanks to our sponsors:
- Go to www.organifi.com/bestofyou today and use code BESTOFYOU for 20% off your order today.
- This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/BESTOFYOU and get on your way to being your best self.
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Music by Andy Luiten
Sound editing by Kelly Kramarik
© 2024 Alison Cook. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Please do not copy or share the contents of this webpage without permission from the author.
While Dr. Cook is a counselor, the content of this podcast and any of the products provided by Dr. Cook are not specific counseling advice nor are they a substitute for individual counseling. The content and products provided on this podcast are for informational purposes only.
Transcript:
Hey everyone, and welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You Podcast. I am so glad you're here. We are starting a new series today. It's a series about what we call “Liminal Spaces”. These are seasons of transition where we've left something behind, but we're not yet sure exactly what's coming next.
We all go through these seasons and it's really important to understand what they are so that you can equip yourself to cope with them. Because if you don't recognize you're in a liminal space, you're in a season of transition, you might not understand why you're feeling a little bit more anxious or a little bit more emotional or a little bit more fearful than normal.
And when you begin to understand that you're going through something, you're in one of these in-between places, it helps to normalize what you're experiencing, adjust your expectations of yourself and give yourself the care that you need. These transitions, these liminal spaces are not talked about enough. And yet in my work as a therapist, as a friend, and just in my own life, I see how important it is to recognize and notice when you're in one of these spaces
These transitional seasons are marked by an external event, a change. It could be a friend moving away. It could be a child starting school for the first time. It could be a child leaving home for the first time. It could be the end of a relationship. It could also be starting a new relationship.
You're taking a risk, you're opening up to the possibility of getting to know someone, but you're not yet sure where that relationship is going to lead. It could be leaving a job where you've left something behind and you're not yet sure where you're going to end up next. It could also be starting a new job where there's been a change and you have a period of time where you're adjusting to this change.
You're trying to figure out the dynamics of the culture, which people you can trust, what your daily rhythms will be. It can happen when you leave a church or when you move. It's any transition where there's a change, something happens outside of you that ushers in a season of change where you have to sit with uncertainty.
You don't know yet exactly what the lay of the land is going to look like. You're not sure yet who your safe people are. You're not sure yet whether or not you can trust this person that you're slowly letting into your life. You're not sure yet what your day to day routines are going to look like in light of this change. These transitional places are hard.
We don't often give ourselves permission to have an adjustment season to feel a lot of conflicting emotions, and we have to care for ourselves in very specific and unique ways when we're going through these seasons,
It's normal to feel some heightened emotions during these transitional seasons, during these liminal spaces, a little bit more anxiety, a little bit more confusion, a little bit more inner turmoil.
Now in the field of psychology, oftentimes we use the word adjustment to describe these liminal places. There's even a category in the Diagnostic Manual for therapists that is called an Adjustment Disorder. I don't like that they call it a disorder, but the idea behind that diagnosis is that it is this experience of heightened anxiety, or even a little bit of sadness or depression.
Now I don't like that it's called a disorder because I think it's normal for humans to experience heightened anxiety or even some heightened depression when you're going through an adjustment. But what that diagnostic category means is that the heightened emotions that you're experiencing aren't due to an underlying mental health issue.
They're directly related to this change, there's an identifiable external stressor or change that has evoked these feelings of stress or these heightened emotions. And the way that we respond to change or to a stressor is very much impacted by our personality style. As we discussed back in episode 49, they're impacted by our family of origin and our experience learning how to tolerate change, how to tolerate uncertainty.
Do we have these skills built into us because we've had to learn them along the way? They're influenced by our trauma history, our attachment wounds, because we feel untethered, especially if you're dealing with a change in a primary relationship.
And it is my belief that in our modern American culture, we do not normalize these seasons of transition. It is normal to feel uncertain or a little bit anxious or a little bit disoriented when you're going through a season of change. And so in this series, we want to talk about these transitional seasons. We want to give you some examples.
We want to talk about some of what is normal to experience and equip you with ways of coping and equip you with a different perspective if you find yourself in one of these seasons. Most of all, I want to heighten your awareness to this reality so that if you're feeling some of these things, you will be gentle with yourself and understand that this season that you're in serves a purpose, and you can surrender to the process of this season instead of fighting against yourself or beating yourself up.
And so for this series, I've asked my friend Rowena Day, who is also a spiritual director, to join me in talking about these transitions. You've heard from Rowena before on the podcast. She joined us for episode 63, all about spiritual direction. And episodes 44 and 31 about peacekeeping and also about anger.
Rowena is a writer, an artist, and a spiritual director. She's also the mom of four young children. And I'm so excited to bring you our conversation today, all about transitions.
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Alison Cook: I'm so glad you're here, Rowena. I love these conversations that you and I have. I get so much feedback whenever I have you on the podcast. You're our most frequent guest. We so appreciate your wisdom. We've been talking a lot, you and I, about transitions, these different seasons of life, these different transitions we go through.
You and I are both in pretty intense seasons of transition in different ways in our own lives. We've talked about before, you have really young kids. I have adult kids. We're in different seasons of life, which makes it helpful as conversation partners sometimes.
We each can have a better perspective on the other, but tell me a little bit about why you've been thinking so much about transitions. What brought this topic top of mind for you?
Rowena: I think there was an unspoken expectation that, I don't know if it's just the culture we live in, or just my own development, but I assumed that in my late thirties, surely, that would be a period of stability after having the 20s be just a really significant decade of making lots of major life decisions.
And so there's sort of an expectation once you clear that hurdle, you're headed into several decades of stability, surely. And so to find that yet again you're thrown into another period of transition, it can be very disorienting and can add a lot of layers of inner distress. And I’ve also been diving into this subject and through my work in spiritual direction with my director, and then also with directees, just really getting to explore this topic a lot and being really fascinated with it.
There's just a lot of transitions we go through in our lifetime and they don't disappear just because you've reached adulthood. They become sort of new transitions as you get older and you’re accepting that reality has created a lot more ease in the transition process.
For me, a couple of big transitions are happening. Specifically, I think just coming to the end of a 10 year period of raising four young kids and seeing, oh, wow, this really doesn't last forever. Whereas when you're in the thick of it, it just feels like this is what I'm doing for the rest of my life.
These kids are always going to be young and you watch them grow and change and you grow and change and your spouse grows and changes and then your marriage needs to grow and change. It's ever evolving. And so that is just one element of change. Living in a very transitory city and having that be constantly evolving and changing around me and just the dynamic environment that it is and the joy and excitement, but also the loss of community from time to time as people uproot and move and the loss of really dear friends.
Also, there are vocational decisions that are needing to change and morph as I grow, and realizing the things that I used to do might not be the things that are on the horizon for me, but not quite knowing yet what those are. Seeing parents get older and just wrestling with their mortality, my own mortality, just lots of life to really grapple with.
And so removing the assumption that it's going to be a period of stability at least helps to recognize that this is normal. Just as when you're a kid, you have growing pains in your leg, those growing pains become internalized and you have spiritual, personal developmental growing pains.
And if we bypass that or ignore it or feel shame or self judgment or self contempt for going through it, we are just adding unnecessary pain to the necessary pain of growing as humans.
Alison Cook: Yeah. I love that you named that. My mom used to say when I was a kid growing up, I’d be processing something, and she'd say, oh, you're going through something. And I always, whenever she would name that, it would be calming to me because she was naming essentially what you're saying. You're going through a season, maybe I started high school, it's a transition. And I remember that vividly.
In my life, we're going through almost empty nests. We've had about four huge transitions all simultaneously as the result of the pandemic, moving, and empty nest all colliding at once. And again, just naming that as a big transition helps to calm the nervous system and recognize, okay, we're going to feel a little disoriented for a while, that's okay. That's normal.
It names this space, this season so that you adjust the expectations that you have of yourself, of your spouse, of your partner, maybe even your friends. Like you alluded to, you do have seasons of relative stability, and sometimes, I'll say in my own case, we didn't realize how stable those years from when our kids were in junior high all the way through high school, how relatively stable things were until they weren't anymore. Suddenly we're in a season of transition and we're like, oh, the ship was just cruising along.
Not that we weren't dealing with things and didn't have challenges, but for the most part, there was a season of stability, which we almost didn't realize until it wasn't there. Tell me a little bit for you, how do you recognize, especially when you're in the thick of raising little kids, how do you recognize, oh, I'm going through a transition? I'm going through something.
Rowena: I think often it's from that felt sense of discomfort in our bodies. Like, why do I feel a little bit off? What is this feeling and trying to name it. And just wrestling with that internal disorientation. I think that's the biggest cue, is that our bodies show are going through a passage and to move through it, it's going to require different sensations in your body and it requires a tuning to those sensations, and naming it with yourself, through journaling, with God, or through prayer, and with other people, and just getting it out in front of you, and being able to see it and hold it and look at it and say, oh this makes a lot of sense.
It facilitates such greater self understanding and compassion and just starts to unlock a whole journey of paradoxes and holding a lot of things in tension. There’s discomfort with growth and a stripping away of old identities or false selves or old patterns and ways of being that are not serving you well, that you need to grow and mature into something different.
And so it's just a really confusing and scary terrain a lot of times and I don't think it's very normalized in our society. There's an external change and then you should adapt pretty quickly. And if you don't adapt then what's wrong with you? And it really requires a whole lot of space and time to have that internal adjustment process to the external change.
Alison Cook: What are some examples of those very concrete external changes that can trigger these periods of transition?
Rowena: I think there's a lot of hardship and difficulties that externally can happen. And then there's also lots of positive change that can also create disorientation. And that can sometimes be even more distressing because you're thinking, I just got a new job. I just had a baby. I just moved to a new city and they are good things, and also it does require a significant shift to adapt to that new reality.
And so I think it's important to name that there can be good things that happen in life that cause a lot of disorientation. And then it's a little more obvious that hardship is going to cause disorientation and distress. So that could be the loss of a job or the loss of a family member, friends moving away, turning a new decade in life, having a health challenge or crisis, a financial hardship, getting divorced or loss of a friendship, children leaving to go to school or leaving the nest, retirement, there's a lot that we have to navigate.
The expectation that we should be okay can be a detriment because it is necessary that we have times of feeling like we're not quite okay and being able to accept that as normal. It's to reduce the fear around the distress.
Alison Cook: The wrestling that occurs during these transitions, I'm tempted to use this word, from psychology, these liminal places, these in between places. I write about this in my new book coming out, I Shouldn’t Feel This Way, these spaces. There's one illustration from the Bible of a major transition: when the Israelites leave Egypt, they come out of slavery, and they're headed to the promised land.
And a lot of us speak of that metaphorically, that place of stability, that place of promise we all want to be. But there's this prolonged season in between where they're roaming around the wilderness. And one of the ways some psychologists look at those liminal places is that they're adjusting to what it's like to be a people who are no longer in slavery and are preparing to be in this new place.
And so these passageways, these transitions, these liminal places are really normal. That's a big example. But I love how you describe positive examples. I think sometimes things like an engagement period, or even a pregnancy, are built in adjustment periods that are normalized in the sense of you're leaving a single life to get married.
So we've named this liminal space, this transitional season where you adjust or a gestation period, you found out you're pregnant and now you've got nine months that's named, where in those particular instances, they are more normalized. People tend to be a little bit more like, oh, wow, this is a big change.
We've got a name for it. We're honoring that you're going to feel some anxiety, you're going to be going through changes, But for so many of these other things, just as you said, they're not named. We're just expected to hit the ground running. I remember in my thirties, when I moved to Boston for the first time and I was so disoriented, I had no idea.
I was single, I didn't know how to engage community, how to find friends. And so I enlisted the support of a therapist, which is a really normal thing to do during these transitional seasons. And she told me, and it was so helpful to me, she just named it. She said, oh, it'll take you about three years. It'll take you about three years to adjust to being in a new city.
And it just anchored me. You might think that might be discouraging. It was not discouraging. It felt true. I was like, that feels about right. This is a big change. And that naming gave me that courage and that settling of, okay, I've got some work to do. It's going to take a while. It's normal. And I love that you're naming that this is not just in response to that hardship, although that's certainly a big part of it.
These are just seasons of life where it's really normal. And I want the listener to hear that it is so normal to experience some heightened anxiety, sadness, a lot of emotions, a feeling of isolation, and there's nothing wrong with you. If you're feeling those things, it's actually normal.
It's healthy to experience some of this internal conflict, some of this uncertainty because you're adjusting your whole body, your mind, your heart, your soul, your body has to adjust to new realities.
Rowena: Yeah. And I just want to add one more that I think is really an important one for lots of folks. If you're single and you're desiring to be with someone and you're finding yourself in a new decade and still single, that In itself is a transition. Because you're desiring and wanting for change, but continuing the phase that you're in that you don't want to be in and that brings its own transition and difficulty.
So I just wanted to name that also because it can feel like marriage and babies are significant transitions and single people go through significant transitions too.
Alison Cook: Same with wanting children or not having children. I love that you named that entering into new decades can be a really big transition, especially for women. The forties can be a big transition, hitting the fifties can be a transition, and beyond. We talk about the biological clock.
I know even for me hitting big decades, and I don't have biological children, can bring about some of this anxiety, this, oh, I've got to adjust to the reality that I'm a different age. And what does that mean for me at this particular period of time?
I've had some big ones with birthdays. So yeah, I appreciate that you're naming that. So Rowena, are we always in transition?
Rowena: Yes and no, I think. I think we are in alternating periods of change and stability and so when we're in the midst of stability, it's probably slow, like when leaves change color. You try to watch it, but you can't quite see it. Even with changes in times of stability, they’re slow. Things are slowly changing, but you feel stable.
There's growth happening deep down that is going to propel you into a period of transition later on. We really do face a lifetime of transition and it's not just from becoming a child to an adult. Adult life is full of transitions all the way until we die.
Coming to terms with that and accepting that reality is really the first step in understanding that, yes, I desire to be in stable periods and also the reality of life is that it has cycles. The earth rotates around the sun every year and things come and they go and then they come back in different forms and in different ways.
There's going to be periods in life where there's a lot of upheaval. And I found it really fascinating that the word develop means unfolding, much like a flower. Watching flowers unfold and seeing even on the same bush, different flowers at different states has been oddly captivating for me in times of transition, just going for a walk and those are times that I feel much more attuned with nature.
And looking at the moon and phases of the moon and watching the clouds slowly drift by, suddenly these things become very interesting outer representations of things that are happening internally. The alternating rhythms of expansion and contraction, change and stability, which William Bridges names in his book Transitions: Making Sense Of Life's Changes, which is a phenomenal read and really helpful in normalizing these periods of significant change after being in a period of stability.
Alison Cook: I love how you're bringing in nature. If you think about the seasons, we're in winter right now. And so there is a relative stability to that, and simultaneously, things are happening that are preparing the earth for spring.
We might experience that stability for a period of time, and we're always moving toward growth. And that's a good thing because the reality is we're either moving toward growth or we're moving toward decay. We are moving and we want to be moving toward growth.
And so transitions, those phases, those seasons are actually a part of growth. When we learn how to have that psychological agility, that flexibility that I hear you describing as we're honoring the seasons of stability, where there's some structure, and also simultaneously not getting rigid. We're prepared for when things are going to change.
Rowena Day: Once we can release the struggle and the fight against transition, we unlock a lot of growth. It doesn't take away the discomfort, but the struggle and the fighting against it is what creates a lot more distress. Once we can come to a place of acceptance that all of life is letting go until the final letting go–and realizing that is profound–we can try to learn to hold things very loosely. Having to release again and again ourselves and the people we love to the process of change. It's hard.
Alison Cook: I love that you just said that. Part of what helps ease the feelings of uncertainty and the feelings of confusion and inner turmoil that can come with a transition is honoring that it's normal to feel that way.
Because when we beat ourselves up that we're not transitioning better, that we're not just figuring it all out more quickly, it actually makes it worse. As opposed to, oh, I'm going through something. Of course I feel this way. Of course I'm disoriented–my friends just moved, or we just switched churches, or my kids aren't home as much. Suddenly I have more hours in the day and I'm not sure how to use those hours.
Or, my kids are home more and suddenly I feel very constricted and like I don't have any time to myself. Whatever the thing is, give yourself that space to go, oh, it's normal to feel disoriented. It's normal to feel a little tension and that's okay. The goal isn't to get yourself to not feel that way. The goal is to name, oh, this is a transition. It's going to take me a minute to find my way through it, but I will find my way through it. And part of the way I will find my way through it is by honoring that it's normal to feel the way I feel.
Rowena: Yeah, it's okay to not feel okay all of the time. And, there's this fascinating study that the University College London did about the pain of uncertainty. They found that humans would rather have a 100 percent chance of an electrical shock versus a small percent chance of having an electrical shock. If they could have certainty that there would be pain, that was preferable to a low percentage.
So the uncertainty of pain was worse than the certainty of pain, which I just find so hilarious, and this is just so true for all humans, and learning to be compassionate with ourselves, that uncertainty is hard, and it's okay for it to be hard, and it's normal.
Alison Cook: What are some of the different phases of a transition?
Rowena: I really found William Bridges book on transitions extremely helpful to name that there's always an ending, and then a neutral zone, or a liminal space, or a wilderness period, depending on which name you prefer. And then there's the new beginning. And those stages cannot really be ignored or bypassed.
They are a part of the process. And coming to terms with endings is the first part of the transition. Acknowledging what has been who you were at that phase of life and honoring that and really letting that go. And trusting that the ending is clearing a path for an unexpected beginning and new growth.
There are going to be lots of endings in life and developmentally, they're expected every 10 years as we reach a new decade, these are times of readjustment and renewed commitments. We've talked about this a bit already, but they can initiate a lot of inner distress and we can normalize it.
I found the word positive disintegration to be very helpful in naming, yes, I feel disintegrated, but this is net positive in the long run. It is leading to good things.
Alison Cook: Can you give me an example, Rowena, of an ending from your own life?
Rowena: I've had a couple of really significant transitions these past couple of years. The one that's on the horizon and happening for me now is being at the tail end of raising four young kids. That part of my life is over and sure, I have lots of parenting ahead of me, and lots of joy ahead and lots of new stages, but it does require a little bit of grieving of what was and the life that I've known, the person that I was back then.
I've been so changed, and just recognizing the both-and of being excited about the new possibilities on the horizon while not being quite sure exactly what they are, what that means in seeing our youngest on the cusp of eventually going to school and being like, wow, I'm not going to have young kids at home anymore.
This is really significant. And it just brings such a level of bittersweetness, in just relishing every day with this knowledge and this feeling in my body, like this is coming to an end. And that means they're growing into new phases, which I will enjoy, but I'm in this really remarkable passage after 10 years of being with babies and toddlers and I don't want to stay there forever.
I loved it and it was hard and it's a lot all at one time to hold all the different parts of me as they feel different things about this really major transition.
Alison Cook: I love that you're naming that. That's a great example of being aware of feeling a little bit disoriented. And having to look at your life and go, what is happening here? I love what you said. Naming that there's an ending allows me to cherish this season while I have it. There's an ending that's going to be really beautiful and also evokes a lot of emotions about the ending and that's, again, normal. The complexity of those emotions are really normal.
I love what you're saying. We have to be aware of these endings. In a way, the awareness of the ending forces us into the present moment to face the reality of where we are. So what are these other phases then?
Rowena: So the next phase is heading into the neutral zone or the liminal space where your old life isn't quite what you have, but you also don't really have your new life yet. You're in the passage period, in the middle. And these are the places in life that we most want to skip over.
The two traps that Bridges identifies in his book is the trap of fast forward or reverse. It's like we want to go back to where we were, like the Israelites– send us back to Egypt or send us to the promised land, but don't leave us in this middle zone. There's a lot of discomfort for human beings in this period of emptiness and somewhat nothingness where you feel like, I'm not as productive as I used to be, I should be more productive.
There can be a lot of “shoulds” around it. It can feel very lonely and isolating. We wonder, does anyone else feel this way? What happened to my old self that felt so much more stable? Why have I gotten older and become less sure? It can be profoundly disorienting. And it can feel frightening.
And it's agonizing because you don't know the length of time that you will be in this place, and we're often tempted to skip it, bypass it, avoid it, numb it, but it's a road that insists on being walked. When we don't, we just punt the difficulty to deal with in a later decade. It's important that we have courage and we have people alongside us to offer empathy and wisdom and listening and care in these places so that we don't feel rushed to get through them.
The more we try to fast forward, the more it can actually prolong it. So actually accepting it and easing into it is paradoxically the way to allow it to move at the pace that it needs to go. These are really profound times of renewal. Oftentimes the neutral zone is the only place capable of giving us new ways of seeing a deeper reality within and around us.
Bridges points out that it's the succession of these neutral zones over our lifetime that produces wisdom and that's really encouraging. These feel like they're periods of nothingness and what is happening? You feel like you don't have a lot of motivation to do anything, but you're just existing and being and observing a lot and asking, what am I doing in this place? But that’s really powerful.
Alison Cook: You are doing something even though it feels disorienting and much of what you're doing is allowing the spaciousness for the different parts of you to adjust and align and observe and begin to process and metabolize what's happened. It's so interesting and when you're out the other side of it, and I want to get to that third phase, you're aware of that.
I've been through that a lot myself this last year, where suddenly I'm starting to come out the other side and I'm like, oh, all that time that I felt disoriented or unproductive or pulling back–there's fruit that's starting to come from that.
I'm starting to see it. I'm starting to see what I need to do. I'm starting to see where I need to go. It’s starting to make sense.
Rowena: As a potter I find that imagery really helpful because it's like we have been a very useful pot, and then all of a sudden we find we're a lump of clay again. We can't see what we're going to be turned into next. And so we just are like, why am I regressing to a lump of clay when in reality, God is the potter and he's reforming and reshaping something new.
And I love that verse in Isaiah that says something like, behold, can you not perceive it? I'm doing a new thing. And if we can just hold on to that ability to trust God in the process of these significant periods of upheaval and transition, knowing that he is doing a new thing, he's going to make us into a new pot.
And it'll have perhaps different uses that we didn't have when we had our old pot. And that will produce lots of emotions and agony, but also lots of good. It's enduring and persevering through the necessary, uncomfortable middle zone.
Alison Cook: I love that. And so we finally get to, what's the third, what's the good news? Where do we finally arrive?
Rowena: We eventually find ourselves in a new beginning, a new phase of stability. I love the wisdom of Ecclesiastes, that there's a time for everything, a time to be uprooted, a season to sow, a time for everything.
Eventually we'll find that once we've endured the middle zone, we are slowly like buds growing on a tree, changing into a new phase of our life. That can start to feel like more of an ease in our bodies and our nervous system, more of an acceptance of, okay, this is who I am now at 40 or 50 or 60 or whatever it is.
And it's mysterious. I don't think this is something we can totally control. It's something that we surrender to. And through the surrendering, some mysterious shaping is happening that gets us to a place of a new beginning, but it does require a lot of honesty, a lot of feeling our feelings and naming them and not avoiding them.
Alison Cook: That's where I want to end this conversation. We're going to come back. We've got lots more to dive into in some of these specific transitions. I love what you just said. So what do we do when we're in one of these seasons where we're feeling so disoriented, like I don't know who I am anymore?
I love how you said, there's a part of me that wants to go back. I want what I had. I don't know what's ahead. And so in that space, what do we do? What are the ways we cope? If we think about that metaphor of the clay, some of it is that we just have to wait it out, but there are also things we can do that lend itself to that process of being shaped, where we're surrendering ourselves actively to that process with God.
So what are some of the things we do?
Rowena: I think it's really important to structure some alone time where you can notice your thoughts, notice the sensations in your body. Journaling, going for long walks, just observing nature, perhaps going on a retreat for any length of time. Somewhere that you can find some beauty and something that's a little out of your everyday reality to help your mind and your heart and your body process what you're going through.
To really take note of your experience and your feelings and accept your need for being in this place. And to notice when you're feeling those feelings of shame or self judgment or self contempt and name those. We can be gentle with ourselves with that. Like, I'm noticing a lot of “shoulds” and a lot of condemnation and naming that and allowing that to exist can slowly transform it.
I find myself watching my potted plants in my house grow new leaves and just being like, wow, look at those cute little leaves. It gives me such hope to see things growing and to see the parts of a tree that I have pruned back with shears then double into two new branches instead of the one that used to be there. Having these plants in my house gives me such hope and watching nature I think is really profound.
I find myself looking at the moon a lot, and the moon evokes so much change in the ocean with gravity. It's a force of stability and also of change. And so I find myself watching this moon–it has always been there and always will be there. This kind of forgotten-about object in the sky is just so anchoring to me, to observe it move around and to witness its stability at the same time. It helps anchor me on earth.
Alison Cook: I love that. There's a way in which this whole thing you're describing is when we recognize and we name, oh man, I'm going through something. I'm in something that is hard, that I don't quite understand. When we honor that, we give it a name. This is a transition. We begin to slow down enough to become more aware of the beauty around us, the little things around us, which is really a spiritual practice.
It's being more connected to God with us in that sense of what is it today? And I think about the manna in the wilderness, where this is my daily bread. It forces us right into that present moment. We can't get ahead of ourselves. We can't get behind ourselves. We have to be very focused on the one step in front of us, the one thing in front of us, the journey of today.
What do I need today? And there's something so powerful about slowing down and being so present to the feeling in this moment, the task of this moment, the feeding of myself in this moment, whatever it is. It's paradoxical. We want to escape the moment, but it's the slowing down and being fully present that actually moves us through it to a better place.
Rowena: Yes. And there's a real invitation in these seasons to come back home to ourselves in our bodies. Those feelings of discomfort and disorientation are are hard, and they're also a gift because it's something that your body is feeling and it helps reconnect your mind with your body and create integration. These periods are an opportunity to become more whole because there are so many forces at work in the world to fragment our minds from our bodies. God and his wisdom is: I am going to allow these seasonal periods in your life where you can come back home to yourself and back home to your body and find me there. Find yourself there.
And it's not always enjoyable, but I have really come to appreciate the gifts that they are, that I have found there, and feeling like I don't totally know where my home is in the world, but I'm realizing I am at home in my body and my body is my home as long as I'm on earth and that our bodies can't be anywhere but the present.
Our bodies help us come back to the present and that's where we also find God in the present moment. He's always here, but it's often our fragmented parts that are pulling us and wanting us to produce and perform and disintegrate and disconnect our bodies from our minds and our souls.
So these periods are tremendously valuable for reestablishing connection with ourselves and with God.
Alison Cook: I love that. The most important thing you might do today, if you're feeling a lot of what we've been talking about, if you're feeling disoriented, if you're feeling unsure of yourself, is that breath that you take, of honoring that feeling, taking a really good care of your body, being aware of what you need in this moment.
That is the most important thing you can do to honor yourself and honor God and honor this season that you're in. Thank you so much, Rowena. We have so much more to come. We will be back next week. Thank you guys for being here.
Do you feel like others are doing better than you? Do you struggle with an inner critic? Do you see the strengths in others, but struggle to see them in yourself?
This episode will empower you. I've personally seen the harm that negative comparison can do, and I'm passionate about helping you escape its trap. You'll uncover a surprising way to tackle comparison, along with simple steps to follow when it arises. Most importantly, you'll learn how to focus your attention on what matters most. Listen to this episode whenever you catch yourself in self-criticism.
Here's what we cover:
-The only time comparison is healthy
-Two types of negative comparison
-A powerful metaphor from the Bible
-The surprising antidote to comparison
-4 simple steps to transform you outlook
-1 powerful question to ask yourself each day
Resources
- Galatians 6:4-5
- The Best of You by Dr. Alison Cook
- Amos 7:8
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Music by Andy Luiten
Sound editing by Kelly Kramarik
While Dr. Cook is a counselor, the content of this podcast and any of the products provided by Dr. Cook are not specific counseling advice nor are they a substitute for individual counseling. The content and products provided on this podcast are for informational purposes only.
Transcript
Hey everyone, and welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You Podcast. I am so glad you're here this week as we are talking about happiness. What does it mean to get just a little bit happier? We're not talking about instant gratification. We're not talking about even a fleeting feeling.
As we talked about in episode 84, that dopamine hit of a momentary pleasure doesn't actually lead us to deep-seated contentment and even that feeling of lightness and ease that we associate with this word happiness.
We're talking about something deeper: how we put ourselves on the path toward increasing degrees of happiness in our life. One of the things I have found that distracts us from true, deep-down abiding joy, deep contentment, deep satisfaction in our own lives is comparison.
We constantly compare our lives to the lives of others. We look at the lives of other people and we tend to compare our lives to theirs, and inevitably we tend to see ourselves negatively in comparison to someone else.
When we get stuck in this rut of comparison, we descend into feelings of negativity, resentment, and self doubt. We start beating ourselves up in comparison to others instead of focusing on becoming more of our God-given selves.
So in today's episode, I want to talk through what comparison is, what I think the antidote to comparison is, and at the end, I want to walk you through an exercise that you can do when you feel that downward spiral of starting to compare yourself to another person.
So what is comparison? When we talk about comparison, we're actually talking about what psychologists call social comparison. It's when we compare ourselves socially to other people. The truth is, it's not all bad. There are positive forms of social comparison, and there are negative forms of social comparison.
It's important to understand the difference. As human beings, it's actually normal to gauge our own success, our own progress, or even our own skills against those of other people. This is really natural. We start doing it early on in life. Again, it's not all bad. This propensity to social comparison, to compare ourselves to other people can be both constructive and destructive.
There are two sides to this coin.
Comparing yourself to someone else can lead to growth when it's motivating or when you aspire to a quality that someone else has that you didn't realize might even be a possibility for you. So you might see a quality in someone you care about, a friend or a spouse or even a colleague that really inspires you.
You see this quality that someone else has and you're like, I want to have more of that. It doesn't make you feel worse about yourself. It inspires you to want to be better. So in that case, comparison can actually be healthy.
On the other hand, often when we compare ourselves to others, especially when we perceive ourselves to be less than, we perceive ourselves to be less successful or inferior or not as good, as if they're better than me, in those cases, comparison has a negative impact on our psyche.
It doesn't motivate us to want to be better. In fact, it keeps us stuck and in a downward spiral. So comparison, again, is simply looking to the lives of other people to gauge the progress or success of your own life, or even the skills or the gifts or the talents that you have.
I want you as you're listening to think of examples that are both positive and negative in your own life. Who is someone that you look to and you see a quality, or maybe you even see where they may be ahead of you on the road toward growth, and it actually inspires you?
It helps you want to improve a specific skill or it motivates you to want to keep going. I want you to name that example, whether mentally or write it down as you're listening, because that's really important to notice that there are positive instances of comparison where someone inspires you to want to be an even better version of yourself.
As you notice that, I believe that's an invitation from God. That's a cue that the Holy Spirit is at work because the Holy Spirit doesn't prompt us through shaming, negativity, and criticism. The Holy Spirit works through gentle tapping on your shoulder and showing you, hey, that might be possible for you. I want to invite you into more of that.
So when you notice that someone is inspiring you or motivating you or unlocking a desire within you, that's a cue that God is pointing you to something aspirational as an invitation. It's bearing positive fruit versus the negativity that comes with negative comparison.
Now, I want you to think about a situation where you compare yourself to someone else and it evokes negativity, a downward spiral, maybe of self-criticism, of shame, of feeling less than.
Notice that situation. Not to judge or blame but to just notice that situation where comparison triggers a downward spiral inside of you, where you just notice those feelings of less than, self-shame, and self-criticism that don't lead you to take brave steps to improve or to grow in your own life, but instead just lead you into a spiral.
Noticing that difference is a really important step in and of itself, allowing you to move toward those people who inspire growth and noticing those situations that lead you to a downward spiral.
I want to add a note here about social media, because one of the things social media has introduced into our lives is the ability to constantly compare ourselves to others. We have instant access to seeing what's going on in other people's lives that without social media, we might not even know.
We might not even have that image in front of us. Think about this in your day to day lives, but also think about this in social media. Research has shown that the addition of social media to our daily lives has primarily increased the negative effects of social comparison.
Social media, instead of promoting the positive benefits that motivate us or inspire us or lead us to growth, tends to exacerbate the negative aspects of social comparison. So think about that question in your own life, but also think about that as it relates to the people you follow on social media.
You want to be particularly mindful that you're muting those people that tend to promote the negative social comparison in your life. For this next section, I want to talk with you about this unhealthy comparison that so many of us are so acquainted with.
I can feel that downward spiral in my body. I know it so well now when I head down that trail of negative comparison with someone else where the self doubt and the shame and the self criticism just keep piling on and I know it's not going anywhere good. What do we do to keep ourselves from going down that downward spiral? How do we keep ourselves on the path?
I want to anchor this discussion in what I think is the antidote to comparison, which is healthy confidence. The best scripture to anchor ourselves on for this discussion is Galatians 6, 4 through 5. Each one should test their own actions, then they can take pride in themselves alone, without comparing themselves to someone else, for each one should carry their own load.
So in this scripture, Paul is talking about the idea that we should be able to take pride in ourselves. There is such a thing as satisfaction in our own work, in who we are, in who God made us to be. That's the goal. That's the antidote to comparison. It doesn't really work to just beat yourself up for comparing yourself to other people. What works is to shift your focus away from comparison toward a healthy sense of pride in your God given self.
It's not just that we're moving away from comparison. It's that we're moving toward healthy confidence, a healthy sense of deep-down satisfaction in the person God made me uniquely to be in this life, in this world, in my relationships. That's the goal. That's putting ourselves on the path toward happiness.
We're moving towards something. We're not just moving away from negative comparison. We're moving toward something beautiful, something God wants for us to have. So I want you to get a sense of that as I'm talking right now. I want you to feel that in your bones.
What would it be like to feel proud of who you are, to feel proud of the person God made you to be? Now, that doesn't mean you don't see the areas where you still need to grow, where you're still struggling. Of course, we see those things. But the goal is to move toward, man, I may not be where I want to be yet, but I'm on the path.
I can see a glimpse of that person that God sees in me. I want to move toward that person. I want to move toward that because God calls me and invites me and woos me from a place of deep love for all of who I am. God doesn't motivate me or inspire me from a place of shame. I want to keep that in front of me as I move away from unhealthy comparison.
With that picture in front of us, here's the problem with unhealthy comparison. We are keeping our view horizontal. If you imagine yourself on this path toward becoming the best version of yourself, the truest, most beautiful version of that person God wants you to become–where you're bringing goodness into the lives of other people, where you are well aware of the landmines and the pitfalls of toxicity and steering yourself around them, where you're confident and you're clear you're delighting in the ways you are using your good gifts, you are measuring yourself vertically to the God who made you.
Your eyes are primarily focused on the prize ahead of you, which is your true self in God. Your eyes are not focused primarily horizontally on other people who are on a different path. The problem with comparison when it gets negative is we're focusing too much on everybody else all around us. We lose focus and we start looking with longing or with envy or with self-criticism at other people who are on different paths that God never called us to be on.
Here are some signs, some messages in your mind when you're focused too much horizontally. You might have a voice in your head that is laced with inferiority, envy, or self-doubt.
Man, she never gets angry with her kids. I am such a lousy mom. Or, she has so many friends, everybody loves her. I'm not worthy of that kind of love. Or, that couple just has it all together. My relationship will never be like theirs. You can hear the self-defeat in that tone. You're not feeling inspired or motivated.
You're just on a trail down the path of self-sabotage and self-doubt and self-criticism. Your eyes are focused on other people instead of on the next step you need to take to move forward on the path of your one beautiful and precious life.
Comparison can also show up in another way. That's a little more insidious. You're still focusing too much horizontally, but you might be building yourself up in comparison to other people. Maybe you're noticing with a little bit of pride or a little bit of arrogance, or even a little bit of judgment or self-righteousness.
Man, I am doing so much better than they are. Their kids are a mess. At least I'm doing better than they are. Or, at least I don't get angry like he does. There's just a little bit of false pride in that kind of self-talk. You're still comparing yourself to someone else. Your ego is involved just a little bit, right?
Well, at least I'm better than they are, which isn't actually that healthy confidence that Paul is talking about. There's still a little bit of false self in that well. I don't feel great about myself, but at least I'm better than they are, right? There's still a little bit of ego in that. Again, there's no shame in this. It's important to notice you're still looking horizontally, you're still determining your own value, your own worth, your own success by primarily comparing yourself to someone else.
Both extremes are problematic. When you criticize yourself, you move down that path of self-shaming, which is never productive. But when you criticize other people to build yourself up, you move down the path of false pride, or even a little bit of judgment, which is also not productive.
Neither of those extremes reflects that healthy confidence, that God-given confidence without comparing yourself to anyone else. Keeping your gaze horizontal rarely reflects healthy confidence, what I define as a humble, honest awareness of your own strengths, of your own weaknesses, of your own growth curves, and even have some of your own limitations.
You're looking at the true pieces of your own path. Honestly, here's where I'm doing okay. Here's where it's hard. Here's where I'm struggling. You're naming those things without shame before God and with a few trusted advisors, you're aware of where you're still growing. You're aware of where you're doing okay. You're on your own path, moving toward living out your God-given purpose, one brave step at a time.
If you notice that you compare yourself to others frequently in the ways that I just described, I want you to start paying attention. This is a part of you that is looking to others, looking horizontally to set your standard, instead of who is the person God wants me to be? What is the calling God has set before me? Where does God want me to grow? Who are the people that invite me into that calling into that growth in a healthy, positive way?
Now, listen, I've talked about this before in other places, but I want to share this with you here because I think this is a trap that many of us fall in. I have struggled with comparison for a lot of years without realizing that's what it was. I write about this in The Best of You, but for me, there's a part of me that genuinely wants to see the good in others.
I really observe and want to name the good I see in others. I love to hold up that mirror to reflect the good qualities I see in other people. That's a really good quality. I'm proud of that quality. I think it's something that I'm good at, but there's a flip side to that quality that has also tripped me up at times where I can do that at the expense of myself. I can be so good at seeing the good in others that I can forget to allow God to simultaneously point out the good that he sees in me.
I can dish out the compliments, but it could be hard for me to see those same things in myself. I know that a lot of you listening find yourself in that same category. You are so willing to point out the good you see in those around you. It's really hard for you to allow that mirror to shine on you so that you can begin to see the beauty that God sees in you and that God wants to put his finger on and say, I love this about you. I want more of that. I want you to grow that quality.
It can be hard to cultivate that ability of allowing our good qualities to be reflected back to us by God and by other people. So what's the solution? How do we move toward that healthy confidence, that healthy ability to both see the good in others and also celebrate the good we see in ourselves?
If there's nothing else you take away from this episode today, I want you to hear me say it is a holy, sacred work to learn to celebrate the good you see in yourself. How do we get there?
Well, the solution is to shift your gaze from the horizontal to the vertical, to God, who is the one who truly sets your standard. There's a metaphor that I love to illustrate this shift from the horizontal to the vertical. It's the metaphor of a plumb line. Now a plumb line is a weighted vertical line that extends directly toward the center of gravity. It was used in construction to determine vertical alignment.
So if you think about it, it's like if you held up a string or a cord, something that wouldn't necessarily straighten out. But it has a weight on it at the bottom, that keeps that line moving always toward the center of gravity. So whenever it's suspended from a fixed point, that tool is going to use gravity to stay aligned perfectly in a vertical line.
One of the most notable places where this idea of a plumb line is used metaphorically is in the book of Amos. God's people in this book were so focused on gaining material success. In many ways they were focused on this frantic hustle to be better than their neighbors. They were trying to get richer and get bigger houses and a lot of material success. As a result of that, they were taking advantage of other people, in particular, the sick, the poor, and the vulnerable to try to get ahead.
Honestly, we see some of this in our culture today, right? Where we're so fixated on trying to be better than so and so that we're missing out on the more important calling that God has for our lives. In Amos, this is chapter seven verse eight, in a vivid gesture, God holds up a plumb line to show his people how far they have strayed from the center. They're so busy trying to be better than everybody around them, they're missing the true North, the actual goal, which is to follow God and to be made in God's likeness.
I find that metaphor so anchoring in my own life when I sense myself starting to veer toward looking to the right, and looking to the left, and taking inventory of what everybody else is doing, what everybody else has got going for them,
When I start to notice that, what I do is I feel deep down in the core of my stomach, that plumb line. I try to imagine that weighted line of gravity and I literally move my eyes upward to remind myself, God, I want to align with you. I want to do what you want. I want to know what you want. That image just sort of pulls me up.
I feel the weight of that plumb line pulling me up out of that horizontal gaze and shifting my attention vertically to God. I take a deep breath and reorient myself to God. The truth is when my gaze is horizontal and I'm comparing myself to everybody around me, it's about me. Even when I'm beating myself up, I wish I was better at this. I wish I had more of that. I wish I was more like them. It's ultimately about me.
I don't want to shame myself for that. I don't want you to shame yourself for that because shame never helps. But just that simple gesture of going, oh, wait a minute, God, what do you want? What are the next steps you want me to take? That shifts me up out of that mess and into the clarity and perspective of God's view.
Here's the paradox. When I focus my gaze vertically and look to God to set my standard and to give me my next steps, that's when I begin to understand how beloved I am. It's such a paradox when I'm staring at everybody else around me, it's both all about me and I feel terrible about myself.
But when I look to God to set my standard and to direct my next steps, I get clearer and braver in my calling and I feel a sense of my own belovedness and how cherished I am by God and how important my next steps actually are. Because that's the thing. Comparison keeps you from living out the life God designed you to live.
No matter what obstacles you are facing in that life right now, God will give you what you need to brave those obstacles that you face; he will lead you through the challenges and into a better place, but you have to keep your eyes on him. Keeping your gaze on everybody else and wanting what they have will not help you find your way through.
As we close today, I want to summarize three steps for you to take if you struggle with negative comparison with others. Number one, the first step is to notice and name it. When you notice that self-talk in your mind, oh, they've got it so much better than I do, or she's doing it so much better than I am. Name that. That's comparison.
Often at the root of comparison is an inner critic. It's just a part of you that tends to constantly point out how other people are doing it better than you are. These inner critics are trying to help. They think that by shaming us or criticizing us or beating us up, that they can get us to do better, but it doesn't help. So the trick to working with an inner critic is to notice it and name it.
I'm comparing myself to that other person. That's my inner critic. Don't shame yourself. Shame never helps. What does help is to set a healthy boundary with that inner critic, which requires you to notice it. Noticing and naming is a brave step in and of itself.
When you name that inner critic for what it is, you reconnect to your true self, to your Spirit-led self. You shift from beating yourself up to calming your nervous system, and to breathing in the love God has for you.
Number two, I want you to shift your gaze. You might even try doing this literally, shift your head upward, as a gesture of looking to God, and use that comma God technique that I taught you back in episode 81, where when you notice something hard, add a comma God to it. Turn it into a prayer. I'm comparing myself, God. Help me look to you. You shift your whole focus up to God just to get yourself out of that horizontal gaze.
Number three, I want you to be honest with God. This is really important. I don't want you to gaslight yourself. What I mean by that is, I don't want you to pretend like you don't feel what you really feel. Something triggered that comparison. Something might be hard in your own life, and there's a reason you're tempted to look at everybody else and think they have it better than they do.
Even as you're reorienting to God, I want you to still be honest about what you feel. So you might say, God, this is hard. I don't like my situation. I don't like the way I feel, or I'm struggling in my finances, or I'm struggling in this relationship, or I'm struggling in my parenting.
It's hard. There's a reason that I'm tempted to compare my situation to someone else's, right? So this third step is really important. You're being honest. You're not just bypassing or gaslighting yourself for the way that you feel. You're naming that you don't want to compare yourself to someone else. You're turning your attention to God instead of to that horizontal focus.
But you're also being honest with God. This is hard. I'm struggling here. That's what's really going on. This isn't about that other person at all. God, this is about the fact that I'm struggling with this thing and I don't know what to do.
Now, listen to what's happened as you take those three steps and you do the work. Suddenly you're in a position to actually do something, to face your own challenge instead of comparing yourself to someone else and going down a rabbit trail of self shame and self blame. Instead, you're facing what's hard.
Honestly, you're saying, God, this is hard. I don't know what to do. It's tempting for me right now to just beat myself up in comparison to other people, but that's not actually helpful. You move into the fourth thing I want you to do, which is to identify one brave step you can take to confront the actual challenge that lies in front of you.
Comparison is a dead end. It will not get you to where you want to go. But when you face what's hard, honestly, in partnership with God, you actually start to see the path ahead of you. Instead of trying to bypass that obstacle or beat yourself up or sit helplessly, you identify that yes, there's an obstacle on your path. Something is hard. Something is bothering you.
But you want to be on that path toward confidence, toward calling. It means you've got to face this thing that's hard in front of you. You've got to find your way through it. Here are some examples of brave steps you can take that'll move you through that obstacle instead of sabotaging yourself.
Number one, you might seek input from a trusted friend. You might go to someone and say, I am struggling with this thing. I'm really beating myself up. Especially when I look at other people in this area, can you come alongside me and help me face what's hard?
Ask others for help. Number two, you might identify one step that you can take to improve some aspect of your life. Instead of comparing yourself to someone else, you might say, what do I have control over? There's some things I don't have control over, but there are some things I do have control over. What is that one thing I can control?
This is such a powerful reframe to do when you're feeling stuck or lost in any way–what do I have control over? What's one step I can take? You might make a call or send an email or read a book or even take a class; do something proactively improving that area of your life.
Another brave step you might take is to ask someone in your life, what good qualities do you see in me? I'm struggling right now to see those good qualities in myself. You might even say, you know, it feels awkward for me to ask you this, but I could really use your help. Could you tell me the ways that you see me growing or changing or moving toward becoming just a little bit more toward this person I want to become? I really could use your encouragement.
I mean, what a brave step. Ask someone to give you that encouragement, that naming of the good they see in you, that we all need to hear from other people from time to time.
Finally, you might practice gratitude. When I say that, I want to be clear. I'm not encouraging you to bypass what's hard. This is where I want you to practice something I call “two things can be true”. While my finances are really hard, what's also true is I am so grateful for my family. Or while this relationship is really a mess right now, I am so grateful for the good work that I have. Or, while I'm floundering as a parent right now, I am so grateful for these friends that I have.
So again, number one, notice and name it when you start down that comparison path.
Number two, shift your gaze vertically. Visualize that plumb line and shift your gaze vertically to the one who made you.
Number three, name what's hard, honestly, that's underneath that comparison. This is hard. God, there's a reason I'm tempted to beat myself up in comparison to others.
Then number four, identify a brave step you can take that both honors the reality of what's hard, but helps you engage what you do have control over.
When it comes to comparison, as you simultaneously honor what's hard while taking brave steps to face the challenges that lie ahead of you, you give yourself the gift of agency. You take control of what you can and you release the rest to God and you begin to create a life that's purposeful, a life that's satisfying, a life that helps you become the best version of yourself in God.
Conflict is a part of every relationship. It's normal to disagree from time to time- even (especially!) with the people you love the most. Yet so many of us fear conflict and do all we can to avoid it. In today's episode, I show you how to transform conflict into an opportunity for growth.
Here's what we cover:
1. The causes of conflict (6:48)
2. 5 benefits of conflict (10:17)
3. The top 3 reasons we avoid conflict (21:18)
4. 4 steps to mastering conflict (30:40)
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Music by Andy Luiten
Sound editing by Kelly Kramarik
While Dr. Cook is a counselor, the content of this podcast and any of the products provided by Dr. Cook are not specific counseling advice nor are they a substitute for individual counseling. The content and products provided on this podcast are for informational purposes only.
Resources
- Pre-order I Shouldn't Feel This Way on Amazon!
- The Best of You by Dr. Alison Cook
Transcript
Hey, everyone, and welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You Podcast. I am so glad you're here. I loved all the feedback you've been giving me about these last two episodes, about what happiness really is. The whole point of this series is that happiness is more complex than what it seems at face value. It's all about putting yourself on the right path. So today we're going to lean right into that complexity and talk about walking into conflict, as a way of moving toward increasing degrees of happiness.
Now, if you subscribe to my weekly email, it goes out every week to over 60,000 people. You were the first to find out that I have a brand new book coming out May 7th. It's called I Shouldn't Feel This Way. This book is all about working through the inner conflict that so many of us face, those inner tensions that keep us stuck and defeated and far from the happiness we really crave.
On one hand, you feel like you should show up for your friend. But on the other hand, you are wrestling with feelings of hurt or betrayal. You feel like you should have positive feelings toward your spouse. But on the other hand, you wrestle with feeling lonely or disappointed. You feel like you should have unwavering faith on one hand. On the other hand, you wrestle with doubt or discouragement when it comes to your relationship with God.
These inner tensions, inner conflicts are normal. We all feel these ways at times and the path toward health, toward wholeness, and yes, toward increasing degrees of happiness isn't to guilt trip. It isn't to shove those inner tensions aside.
It's to work our way through them. That is what I Shouldn't Feel This Way is all about. I poured over these pages last year, laying down my own three step framework to work through those inner tensions so that you can move from stuck and defeated and trapped into courageous action. So it would mean so much to me if you go pre order I Shouldn't Feel This Way.
But in today's episode, I want to give you some background teaching. So you understand that the true path toward happiness inside yourself and in your relationships means you have to find a way through conflict. You can't avoid it. You can't bypass it. You can't pretend like it's not there. You have to learn how to deal with conflict in your relationships.
The truth is facing conflict in your relationships leads to greater degrees of happiness. The opposite is also true. If you're suppressing conflict, if you're avoiding it, if you're bypassing it, if you're on the path and you're seeing conflict there and you're doing everything you can to get around it so that you don't have to walk through it, you're actually weakening your relationships. That's the most important thing I want you to take from today's episode.
If you're avoiding conflict at all costs, you aren't helping your relationships, you're not improving your relationships. In fact, you are actually in jeopardy of weakening them. Research shows that when you learn to proactively engage in healthy conflict, you improve your relationships, improve your own well being, you earn the respect of your peers, and you will experience less depression, anxiety, and loneliness.
Listen, I want to be honest with you here. I hate conflict. I hate it. I am one of those people that when I see conflict there on the path, I will do anything to walk around it, anything, including hurting myself. I have also found it also hurts my relationships. It's not good for me and it's not good for other people.
So I need this episode today as much as you do listening. This is hard. I remember years ago someone challenged me on this very point. They said, wouldn't you rather be respected by other people than liked? I had to think hard about that because there is a strong, pleasing part of me that would settle for liked over respected, but I'm learning to change.
I'm learning to grow. I'm learning that short term instant gratification of making somebody happy is not worth the long term sacrifice of respect, of trust, of dignity that actually leads to greater relational health over time.
When we avoid conflict, we risk damaging relationships which leads to greater degrees of isolation. Conflict is necessary for growth. We have to learn how to face it. So without further ado, let's talk about how to achieve happiness through conflict and small, brave steps we can take to move through conflict instead of avoiding it.
So what do we mean when we talk about conflict? What is conflict?
In the context of our relationships, that term conflict refers to any disagreement, clash, or even a mild tension. It could be massive, it could be tiny—anything that occurs between you and another person, a friend, a family member, your own child, a spouse, a parent, any relationship where there are two different viewpoints.
There might be conflicting needs, where you have one need and your loved one has another need. There could be conflicting goals, where you want to go one way and they want to go another way. It could be conflicting values.
Here's the thing: we're going to have conflict in every single one of our relationships because human beings never completely align. You and your very best friend at times are going to have differing viewpoints. You're going to have competing needs. You're going to have different goals or even slightly different values. We don't ever line up 100 percent with another human being. This is a good thing. I worry when someone is so mapped on to another person that they don't have their own distinct viewpoint. That's not healthy. That's getting into codependency.
So in healthy relationships, on any given day there are going to be clashes between individuals. These can be tiny things. It might be who got to the grocery checkout line first, and you've got to navigate that conflict. It could be a conflict with one of your kids who doesn't like the curfew that you set. It could be a conflict with your spouse about how to unwind after dinner, what television show to watch. It could be a conflict with one of your friends who said something that kind of stung when it landed.
And these are the smaller ways that we clash with other people. There are also bigger ways. You might hold different political viewpoints from someone you love. You might hold different religious viewpoints from someone you love. You might even have the same faith, but differ about where you want to go to church or how you viewed a sermon. There might be bigger conflicts about how to raise kids or how to spend money.
These types of conflicts are part of being in relationship with other people. The only way to not have conflict is to live in isolation and that's not a good option.
We have to learn to deal with conflict.
Now, I Shouldn't Feel This Way starts with the inner conflict that we feel because usually that's where it starts. We feel something that we don't like, or we notice that we're not aligned with the other person, that we're feeling differently than they're feeling. What do we do with those feelings? Do we hide them?
Do we bury them? Do we suppress them or do we learn how to speak on behalf of what we feel in a healthy way so that we can experience the positive benefits of being in relationship with other people who at the end of the day are different from us.
This is a beautiful thing. God made us with a lot of differences, with a lot of diversity. We have different viewpoints. We have different beliefs. We see things differently. This is a good thing. We do not want to be clones of each other.
And part of our work in this world is to learn how to work our way through these differences to arrive at even better solutions.
That leads us to why is conflict so important? What are the benefits of conflict?
Well, learning to engage in conflict has been shown to be necessary for so many reasons. Number one, it improves a sense of self confidence. Learning to navigate conflict and resolve it effectively gives you an incredible boost to your self esteem. In short, it helps you grow. It helps you grow in how you show up with your kids and how you show up with your friends in how you show up with a partner, with a spouse and how you show up at work. It makes you a more effective leader in all of those categories.
Number two, engaging in conflicts improves relationships. It's not fun to name something hard or something that's not working in a relationship. It's not fun. It's hard to do. It takes some trial and error to figure it out.
But the alternative is to suffer tensions or misunderstandings or miscommunications that don't need to be suffered. Often when you are willing to address an awkward conversation where you name something, especially in healthy relationships where there's a baseline of trust, the other person is relieved.
They're like, man, that wasn't working for me either. Together you look at the problem. You're not blaming each other. You're saying, this isn't working. This thing outside of us isn't working. Can we find a better way? So for example, maybe at work, you're frustrated with a colleague who always pushes things right up to the edge of the deadline, but you're also aware that you've never actually asked them to get things to you a little bit sooner.
So it's hard. You're gonna take a risk, but when you name something and say, hey, listen, next time, could we try something new? Could we try to get this together a week out so that we have margin before the deadline to fix anything that doesn't work? Would you be willing to do that with me?
That other person might be like, yeah, that's a really good idea. I tend to work to the deadline. It's a bad habit. I'm so glad you spoke up. I'm happy to try that. Let's do that together. So you're bringing a gift that you have to the table that will actually free this other person to grow a little bit too.
Now listen, I know that it doesn't always work that way. Sometimes the other person is like, no, I'm not doing that. But at least you forced that problem to the surface and you've given yourself a fighting chance to approach it in a way that would be beneficial for both of you.
Number three, facing conflict helps you clarify your values when you face the conflict, especially inside of your own self, when you're really honest about these two different conflicting things you feel. If part of you is feeling like, oh, I don't want to be a squeaky wheel. I don't want to raise this issue in my friendship.
But another part of you is going, this actually really matters to me. I do care. I don't like it that we're always doing things that are more expensive than what I can afford, or I don't like it that my friend is always pushing me for more time than I have to give, or I don't like it that my friend doesn't reach out to me, that I'm always the one initiating. You boil it down to, I love this friend and this thing that's bothering me really matters to me.
It's a value that I have. So in order to honor that relationship, I need to honor that value. So when you face the conflict, especially the conflict inside of yourself, you force yourself to get really clear about your values. Is this something I really care about, in which case I need to bring it to the table?
Or is this a value I can set aside? I don't care that much. It's not worth fighting for. But when you face that conflict, you make a clear decision. You don't bypass what you feel. You don't avoid it. You actually look at it and clarify your values.
Facing conflict can expand your perspective. Sometimes you go to the other person and you raise an issue and you say, hey, this has been a little bit hard for me. Can we talk about it? you find out valuable information about the other person. Maybe you go to someone and say, hey, it's kind of hurt that I haven't heard from you in a couple of months. Can we talk?
The other person says to you, hey, man, I'm sorry. So sorry, I have been so stressed out because of X, Y, and Z going on in my life. I haven't had the bandwidth to reach out to anyone. Suddenly, you have information and you can pivot and you can say, oh my gosh, I don't want to pressure you.
I want to support you. How can I be praying for you? Take the time that you need.
So facing the conflict allows you to gain information that changes your perspective, that allows you to become an even better friend. Facing conflict helps you engage in problem solving. When you walk into conflict, you name something hard and it allows you to problem solve together with the other person.
It helps you build resilience within the context of your cherished relationships, not only resilience in yourself. You're learning to be brave to raise things that matter to you, but also resilience within the context of your relationship.
Sometimes it takes a couple laps around the track to get it right with someone. You might go to someone with something that you need to talk about. And they say, oh, that's hard. I don't know if I can do that, but let's see if we can tackle this together.
It puts you on the same team with somebody and together, you don't have to figure it out right away, but you can start to have conversations that show how much you care about each other and develop resilience and problem solving skills over time,
Lastly, facing conflict can create closure. Sometimes you go to someone with something you need to address. You've thought it through. It's a value. You need to raise it. You need to talk about it. Maybe they aren't able to join you in resolving that conflict. That's painful, but you get valuable information that allows you to move toward closure.
Sometimes closure is the very best next step. So facing conflict builds a muscle where you learn to name what's hard, raise it in healthy ways. It allows you to gain a deeper understanding about the other person and about the nature of your relationship.
Facing conflict isn't demanding a certain type of solution. It's not demanding something from the other person. It's saying, I care about you. I need to have this conversation with you. Will you join me in talking this through?
So, in light of all these great benefits of facing conflict, why do we avoid it? Well, there are a lot of reasons we avoid conflict, and I'm going to walk you through some of the most common, but the bottom line is most of us have a lot of fear about jeopardizing our relationships. We avoid the possibility of a rupture at all costs. There are a lot of reasons for this.
There's no shame in being someone who avoids conflict. Like I said, I'm an incredibly conflict avoidant person myself. I identify with a lot of the reasons I'm about to lay out, but it's really important to get curious and consider: why do I avoid conflict? What's at the root of that? What do I fear would happen if I were to walk through conflict instead of working overtime to walk around it or avoid it?
Here are some reasons that might resonate with your experience.
Number one, you might be someone who doesn't like to face the negative emotions that often precede a conflict. We covered the importance of working through negative emotions. You can go back to episodes 80 through 83 for a deep dive into how to start facing your own negative emotions.
But the bottom line is that we don't like those emotions. We avoid emotions like anger, frustration, sadness, or fear inside ourselves, which means we end up avoiding opportunities for growth and intimacy with other people. Facing those emotions inside of us helps us gain clarity, which in turn helps us gain conviction, which in turn helps empower us to enter into our relationships with more courage, with more clarity, with more confidence.
Number two, we have a strong bent toward harmony. For those of you who are high in empathy or who are peacekeepers, who have a genuine desire to see others thrive, you often don't want to be the source of tension or stress for another person, even when that tension or stress you're introducing is for the other person's good.
You may prioritize maintaining peace or harmony over resolving genuine issues in a relationship. This gets back to personality type or natural God-given strengths or those Enneagram types we discussed back in episodes 49, 52, and 53.
We talked about how some of these things are hardwired, sometimes you simply by nature, by your God-given design, tend to prioritize other values. So for you, it's working against the grain of your God-given design a little bit to learn the benefit of introducing some healthy conflict for the good of everyone.
Another reason we avoid conflict is a lack of skills. You don't know how. You'd love to figure out how to talk about something hard with your kids, with your spouse, with your friend, but you literally don't know how. Because you don't have the skills, because no one taught you, when you have tried to introduce conflict, maybe it didn't go well. Maybe the other person responded poorly. So you stopped trying.
Sometimes we avoid conflict because of wounds from our past. If you grew up in a high conflict family where there was a lot of negativity around conflict or where you have some trauma, where conflict was dealt with in an abusive way, or maybe where someone even used toxic strategies with you.
When you did try to talk about something that was hard for you, parts of you learned to survive, right? You've learned how to cope. I will never go down that road again. I want to honor that. If you're someone who has learned to survive by avoiding conflict at all costs, that makes sense.
That part of you learned how to survive through not saying anything. I want to honor that–that's a survival tactic you may well have needed in the past.
If you're currently in an abusive relationship or in a toxic relationship, you may be using that coping strategy of avoiding conflict. I get it. That makes sense. If this is the case for you, I want you to honor that. I can't engage in conflict because the cost is too high, either because of this current toxicity that I'm involved with, or because in the past I was so hurt that it creates too much anxiety or tension inside of me to consider dealing with conflict in a different way.
If that's the case for you, that's a great reason to reach out for support from a therapist to learn how to both heal from those past wounds and engage conflict in different ways in your present and future relationships.
Then finally, sometimes we avoid conflict because of cultural or social norms. It may be that you grew up in a family that really valued politeness, that things were shoved under the carpet and that wasn't all bad. It kind of worked in your family of origin and now you find yourself in a whole different world where maybe you married into a family with different cultural norms or different social norms, and you don't know how to fit in because that's not the way that you were raised or that's not how you did things in your own family.
You're working through that. Again, I want to honor that. There are a lot of different cultural norms around conflict and there's no one right way to do this. Navigating conflict within the context of your relationships can look really different from one relationship to another, from one family to another. I want to honor that.
I don't like one size fits all solutions. The way that one couple, for example, resolves conflict might look so different from the way another couple resolves conflict. Some families use a lot of humor as their way of dealing with conflict. Some are really direct.
Regardless of how you go about facing conflict, what matters is that there's a path through it. In fact, part of the joy in relationships is learning, within the context of your own unique relationship, how to face conflict.
For example, some couples hit it head on. They might have weekly meetings where every week they get together to have an issue-clearing. It's the place they set aside every week to put the issues on the table and talk them through.
Some couples have a weekly therapy session where they use that time to raise issues that need clearing. Some families have monthly family meetings with the kids and everybody in tow. This is the time where we're going to raise the issues that aren't working. We're going to go head on into conflict.
So that's a really structured approach to conflict within relationships. Others do it a little bit more organically where you bring things up directly as they occur in the moment. Some couples use written communication when it comes to navigating conflict, because they find that writing things out tends to take out the emotion and gives the other person time to respond.
Now for one couple, that might work. For another couple that doesn't work at all. So again, there are different ways to approach this. What matters is when I ask this question to you: “how are you navigating conflict in your most precious relationships?” is that you have an idea of how you walk through it.
You know, we tend to kind of tease each other. That's what works for us. When we're both having coffee, we tend to kind of teasingly raise the things that are hard, but we both feel pretty good about that.
Or, I'm someone who needs to name it when I see it. I've got to bring it up. I've got to address it. This is what I have to do. Or I'm someone who needs structure. I will not raise the conflict so I've got to have scheduled check-ins for that express purpose.
Whether you're someone who does that a little bit more organically, whether you're someone who does it in a very structured way, whether you're someone who uses humor, whether you're someone who needs to really rely on the clarity of the written word to communicate, what matters is that you feel empowered to face conflict in your most beloved relationships.
I want to leave you with four steps you can take to find happiness through conflict. These are for those of you who really hate conflict, to begin to shift your mind to help you begin to move through conflict instead of avoiding it.
As you consider these four steps, I want you to remember what we talked about back in episode 84–that the goal of happiness is not instant gratification. Happiness is about putting yourself on the right path, the path of more creativity, the path of a clearer calling or purpose, the path of courage, and the path of connection.
When you raise a hard topic with someone, you ignite each four of those qualities. You have to get creative. You have to be courageous. You have to think about your values. You know what? I think there's a higher purpose here than my own comfort level. I think there's a calling here to go deeper in this relationship.
You are taking a step toward connection. This leads us to the very first step I want you to take as you consider your own relationship with conflict. It's to reframe conflict as a courageous conversation. As an opportunity to be brave. It's an opportunity to walk into a courageous conversation.
So when you notice yourself avoiding that conflict, because you don't want to hurt someone, you don't want to disappoint someone, you don't want to be a bother. You don't want to cause someone else stress. You don't want to jeopardize a relationship. Remind yourself that this is an opportunity to be brave. It's an opportunity to hold a courageous conversation.
When you reframe conflict in this way, you remove the pressure, you remove the expectations. You don't have to do it perfectly, it will probably be messy, but what you're doing is giving yourself permission to be brave. You're giving yourself permission to say, I care enough about both myself and this other person and the relationship that I'm willing to be brave.
You reframe your benchmark for success. Your benchmark for success isn't to get the other person to do something, to get your way. Success won't be that the conversation goes perfectly because it might not. Success will be, did I take one tiny step toward being a little bit more brave?
So number one is to reframe how you think about conflict in your mind. Conflict is an opportunity to be brave. In fact, if you don't face the opportunity for conflict, you might actually harm the relationship. We tend to tell ourselves, well, if I hurt someone or if I disappoint someone, or if I am the squeaky wheel or create stress, then that's bad, but what if doing those things actually leads to a healthier relationship and what if not doing those things allows or enables an unhealthy pattern to continue?
Number two is that you got to deal with the guilt and the self-gaslighting. This is exactly where I came up with the title of this next book that's coming out called I Shouldn't Feel This Way. That's our inner guilt tripper talking. It's telling us, you shouldn't feel that way. Stop caring, stop being frustrated, stop caring so much. And that guilt-tripper is trying to help, trying to keep the peace, but you've got to face those negative feelings in order to find a better way.
When you face those negative feelings you are feeling inside, the frustration, the hurt, the annoyance, the anger, you gain clarity. You also calm your own nervous system. You shift from guilt tripping and gaslighting yourself to holy curiosity. I wonder what that's about. Why do I feel this way?
You invite God into that process. God, what is going on here? Why are these feelings here? They're not going away. What do I need to know about this situation? Can you help me understand? Maybe this isn't something I should try to make go away. Maybe there's an invitation here.
What if these negative emotions are an invitation to be brave? So when you shift from guilt tripping yourself to facing those negative emotions in partnership with God's Spirit, you're already taking a brave step.
Sometimes this can take weeks or even months to work through, especially when there's a history of a really toxic or abusive relationship where you've learned to avoid conflict for a very good reason. Learning to really honor and validate those painful emotions that you experience is in and of itself a brave step toward facing conflict.
You're learning to face that conflict inside yourself and inviting God in to help you work through it instead of trying to sideline legitimate emotions.
So number one is to reframe conflict as an opportunity to be brave. Number two is to stop guilt tripping and gaslighting yourself and really face that inner conflict, those negative emotions that are refusing to go away. Those two things happen inside yourself. You're reframing your own thoughts about conflict and you're working through your own inner tensions, your own conflicting feelings.
Then when it comes to actually taking a brave step toward conflict in your relationship, number three is to start with a safe person first.
Don't go right into your hardest relationship with your hardest conversation. Start by naming it with a safe person. You can ask for support from a safe person in a couple of ways.
You might ask them to support you on your journey of learning to face conflict rather than avoid it. You might say, I really need to work on facing conflict. I need to start naming some things that are hard. I need to work on this especially in these relationships, would you hold me accountable for that?
Would you support me on that? Could we check in about how I'm doing on that goal once a week or once a month? Could you be someone who journeys with me as I work to go through conflict instead of avoiding it? So naming it to a safe person can be helpful.
Secondly, you might start practicing with a safe person, which is what I call starting with the low hanging fruit. You might go to someone who feels pretty safe and where you don't see any really good reason not to, and practice being a little bit more honest,
Maybe you have a friend who always wants to go out to pizza for dinner and you actually don't really like pizza. So you practice the next time you're getting together saying, could we do something different? Could we try taking a walk instead of going out to eat? Now, listen, that's really low stakes. Arguably that might not even be raising conflict, but for some of you, just introducing a shift like that might be the next brave step you need to take..
Lastly, a fourth step is actually to have that courageous conversation now. There's a whole section on this called The Negotiation Conversation in The Best of You. So I'm going to go through these steps quickly.
When you start any courageous conversation, you affirm the good, with something like, I care enough about this relationship that it's important to talk about this. You state the deeper longing that you have for yourself or for the relationship. You propose an option that might work for both of you and in the words of Brene Brown–I love that she says this–you want to stay awkward, brave, and kind.
When you affirm the good, you name the deeper longing, you propose an option, and you embrace the awkward and you stay brave and kind, it's really hard to go wrong. It's really hard to go wrong. Remember, you don't have to get it perfectly. If you start off affirming the good, and you have clear options and you have clear conviction and even if you stay awkward, if you're brave and you're kind, it's really hard to go wrong.
Here's the thing. No matter how the other person responds, you will have taken a brave step to put yourself on that path toward deeper satisfaction and greater happiness. You're taking command of your own life. You're not avoiding conflict. You're walking through it and you're reframing your expectations of yourself.
Your goal is to show yourself that you are worth facing conflict one brave step at a time. This is part of growth. Jesus was the Prince of Peace and also Jesus named what was hard. He did not walk around conflict.
He walked through it. Part of growing to become the truest, best version of your God-given self is learning to move through conflict in partnership with God's Spirit.
It's hard to lead a family. It's even harder when you didn't experience health in your own family as a child. Today, I'm walking you through what a healthy family looks like and what happens when it gets out of balance. This is a practical, non-shaming guide to identifying what's working in your family and how to course-correct when it's not!
Here's what we cover:
1. The goal of a healthy family (5:19)
2. Signs of dysfunction vs. signs of health (8:07)
3. 6 extreme roles children get pushed into (19:44)
4. 4 simple, research-backed strategies to create harmony within your family (37:28)
Resource
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- Get 35% off your first order of Sundays. Go to SundaysForDogs.com/BESTOFYOU or use code BESTOFYOU at checkout.
- Go to thrivemarket.com/bestofyou for 30% off your first order, plus a FREE $60 gift!
- Go to AquaTru.com and enter code BESTOFYOU at checkout to get 20% OFF any AquaTru purifier!
- Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/BESTOFYOU and get on your way to being your best self.
Music by Andy Luiten
Sound editing by Kelly Kramarik
While Dr. Cook is a counselor, the content of this podcast and any of the products provided by Dr. Cook are not specific counseling advice nor are they a substitute for individual counseling. The content and products provided on this podcast are for informational purposes only.
Transcript
Hey everyone. And welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You Podcast. I'm so glad you're here. I'm so glad that we are here. In this new year, this new year of 2024, the new year is just an opportunity to be just a little bit more intentional about how we want to focus the direction of our lives.
And in today's episode, I wanted to address a topic that so many of you have asked me to address. And it's: what is a healthy family? What do healthy families look like?
We spend a lot of time talking about how to recover from childhood wounds, how to heal from painful events in the past. So what does a healthy family look like? Some of you are trying to understand that as you lead your own family. Some of you are just trying to understand it as you consider your past and try to locate your own experience on a spectrum.
Because as we all know, there's no such thing as a perfect family. There are some families that operate in a healthier way than others. And then there are some families that are extremely dysfunctional and most families fall somewhere in the middle of that spectrum.
So whether you're thinking about your past experiences in your family of origin or whether you're thinking about the family that you're trying to lead right now, in this episode we'll walk you through what a healthy family looks like. What are some of the most common pitfalls that show up that lead to varying degrees of dysfunction in families?
And finally, we're going to end with the most important skill to learn as you are trying to lead a healthy family of your own. Lots to cover today. Let's dive in.
So what is a healthy family? Well, there are lots of definitions for a healthy family, but there's one word that I always go to when I'm describing a healthy family system. And that word “system” is important here. All it means is that a system is a collection of different parts and each part of the system is important, but each part is also intricately connected to the other parts and all of the parts working together create the system.
And one of my favorite metaphors to use when you're thinking about a system is to think about a middle school band. Maybe you were a part of one. I was part of one. I played the alto saxophone. I wasn't very good at it, but I have some knowledge of how a middle school band functions. And if you think about that band, there are so many different parts to it.
There's the flutes, there's the clarinets, there's the saxophones, there's the drums in the back, there's the trombones and the trumpets, and each one of those parts plays an incredibly important role in creating the whole of the system.
If any one of those individual parts of that system gets too loud or starts playing off key or loses the beat of the song, the whole thing doesn't sound very good. It's really discordant. There's sort of a cacophony that erupts, but when every individual part plays its role well, you get this beautiful sound. We hear music that is enjoyable, that is pleasant to our ears. The whole system is working together to create a beautiful harmony.
And that's the key word, harmony.
So according to family systems theory and psychology, the goal of a healthy family is this word harmony. And what that means is we're looking for harmonious interactions among and between the different members. It doesn't mean that there's never conflict.
It means that as you look at the family system, and all of the individuals who have comprised the family, every family member has a role that is important in the family. Every family member is valued. Every family member has a chance to thrive.
Every family member has a voice and also every family member needs appropriate boundaries. If you think about that middle school band, every part has to play its role, which means you don't want one part taking over the whole system, but you also don't want one part of the system sidelined, not getting any attention at all.
You want every single individual member of that family to feel valued, heard, seen, known, Like they're contributing within appropriate boundaries. And so this is a lot of work. And if you lead a family of your own, you know what I mean.
And I'm sure you're going, yeah, right. There isn't harmony around my family dinner table. You know, we're not all just speaking pleasantly to each other all the time and making sure that every voice is heard. And I, I want to be clear. That is not what we mean by harmony. The way that we work out the day to day health of a family is incredibly messy.
It's not always that perfect picture. And again, if you think about that middle school band, there's a lot of rehearsal time, a lot of practice time. Every single day, that band is getting together to rehearse and sometimes it sounds terrible. And sometimes the conductor has to take more time with the violins because something's not working there.
And meanwhile, the saxophones are off by themselves, kind of entertaining themselves, right? The goal of all that rehearsal, of all that time in the messiness of trying to figure it out, it's just a moment, one evening of glorious harmony and that moment of glorious harmony makes all the work so worthwhile.
And so I want you to think about that when you think about leading your own family. The goal is not perfection every single day or every single meal. The goal is that you're working it out. You're working out the kinks of family harmony every single day, so that every so often you get these glimpses of wholeness. You get these glimpses of what it's like when you're just enjoying the heck out of each other.
Okay. So I want you to keep that goal in mind. Imagine being in a family. And if you think back to your own earliest memories of family, in most dysfunctional families, there is almost never a moment of joy. There's almost never a moment of, oh my gosh, this is just such a delight to be together. It feels so comforting, so safe, so secure to be with my people here in our home, as a family.
In those extreme cases of dysfunction, there's so much chaos. Where there's just no order, you never knew what you could expect or rely on from your family members. Or there's just constant, persistent, unresolved conflict where there's a state of tension and emotional distress constantly.
You never feel that sense of peace in a highly conflicted family. In a highly dysfunctional family, there might be an extreme lack of emotional support. You don't have any memories of feeling really loved or comforted or cared for. Maybe your parents were around, but they really didn't pay attention to you.
You were kind of on your own, and so there weren't those glimmers or those glimpses of, oh, this is what love feels like. This is what it really feels like to feel close to a family member.
In really dysfunctional families, we also see an absence of communication. And again, if you think about that middle school band, part of what makes it work is the different pieces of the band have to communicate with each other. Everybody has to wait their turn and come in at the right time.
And, each part has to listen for the other parts so the different parts aren't playing over each other. In an extremely dysfunctional family, there's no communication at all. Nobody's really asking hey, how was your day? Or, hey, could we connect? I'd love to share with you what's going on with me. I'd love to learn what's going on with you.
Instead, you're just kind of ships passing in the night and no one's really ever stopping to connect. In contrast, in a healthy family, in a family that's moving toward this idea of harmony–again, it's not achieved every single day for sure, but you're moving toward harmony–here are some of the features that you'll see.
And it's the opposite of what we just laid out. You'll see a lot of effort at communication. It doesn't always go perfectly, but a lot of frequent efforts to connect where the parents are frequently checking in with the children. How are you doing? I want to check in with you. What's going on with you? Can we connect?
And the children have a sense of that safety so they respond. Again, these bids for communication don't always go perfectly, but there are frequent attempts to connect through using words to ask questions and to listen to the responses of the other person.
Number two, there's a pathway through conflict. And this is really important. It doesn't mean there's no conflict. In families where there's no conflict, that can actually be a sign of emotional disconnection. It's almost impossible to be close to another human without some form of conflict.
Conflict in and of itself is not the problem. What healthy families have is a path through conflict. This means there's an avenue to name conflict when it happens and address it in a healthy way. And this skill of addressing conflict within a family or within any relationship is such an important skill that so many of us never learned.
I'm going to return to that at the end of this episode, because there's one skill that is critical to resolving conflict in a healthy way. But healthy families have a path through conflict. They don't avoid conflict, nor do they live in a state of high conflict where everybody's always yelling at each other and they're never really connecting.
In healthy families, we see conflict. Man, I think I just hurt your feelings. I'm really sorry about that. Could we talk about what happened? Or wow, that conversation just went sideways. I can see that you're upset. I didn't mean to upset you. Can we talk about it? In healthy families, those conflicts are named and there's a path through them so that you can repair and come out stronger on the other side.
Number three, healthy families also show a high degree of emotional support. So instead of leaving each member of the family to just sort of function on their own and find their own way through life, in a healthy family, there's a lot of emotional support where parents or caregivers are checking in on their kids. Again, it's part of this communication, but it's not just words.
And we talked about this all the way back in episode 16, when we talked about attachment. Emotional support really gets at this idea of presence. It's not always words. It's having a calm enough nervous system that you're really present to what's happening in the people around you.
You're picking up on nonverbal cues. Maybe you're noticing that your teenager has gotten quiet or withdrawn and you might not even be sure exactly what to do or say, but you're aware. You're processing that information, you're present. And as a result of that presence, you can attune to your child and figure out how best to check in with them.
That emotional presence is really important for young children. Again, it's not always verbal, but we have this sense that someone is present to us. They're available to us. And if you think about when you feel seen by somebody, you feel somebody's eyes scanning yours. You feel somebody's arms go around you.
It's almost an intangible thing to describe, but you know it when you feel it, that the other person is orienting their whole being toward you. And it creates this supportive container that is deeply settling to our nervous systems and deeply critical to achieving harmony within a family.
So again, if we zoom out to that metaphor of the middle school band, if I'm the conductor of that band, I only have so much energy to go around. I can't be present to every single part of that band simultaneously. So it's not being omnipresent as God is, right? We're not God as we parent our families and our parents weren't God either. It’s about seeking moments where you're really zooming into each member to give them that quality of your presence.
Healthy families also have clear boundaries. There's no rule confusion. In fact, it's one of the crucibles in which healthy boundaries are for. So if you struggle with boundaries in your current life, it may be because you didn't experience healthy boundaries in your family of origin.
Healthy boundaries mean that there's a clear distinction between the parent and the child, and if you look back on the way that you were raised, you may have experienced something that we call parentification, where there was a role reversal. Where you were expected to parent your parent.
In healthy families, those boundaries are clear, where the caregivers are the caregivers, the adults are the adults, and the children get to be the children. And this can be communicated in a lot of ways. It can be communicated through actions, but it can also be communicated very specifically where a parent says to you, listen, I see that you care. And I see that you want to solve this conflict between your dad and me.
It's not your problem. This is for your dad and I to figure out. You get to be a kid. And what matters is that we love you and that we're here for you. And yes. We're in a little bit of conflict right now. We'll figure it out. It's not yours to solve.
Because kids pick up on the conflict between adults and their families. It doesn't mean that as adults, you can never have conflict. It does mean that you're clear about your role and it is never a child's role to take on the job of being a conflict mediator between two adults.
Now, role confusion can also show up among siblings of a family. Oftentimes in unhealthy families, we see the children getting pigeonholed into rigid roles, and this isn't healthy either. Healthy families create a flexible enough family environment where every child feels valued, feels like they can play a different role, but they're also not pigeonholed into an unhealthy extreme.
And I want to spend a little time here because this is a big place where a lot of you listening will relate to one of these unhealthy roles that you might've gotten pigeonholed into.
There are six roles that sometimes get extreme in families. It can be convenient to let a child play a certain role that becomes unhealthy. It's unhealthy for the child, but it's also unhealthy for the entire family. Again, in healthy families, everybody's playing a role that leads to the individuals’ benefit and to the overall health of the family.
We've got to have families that are flexible enough to include the gifts and talents and different voices of all the family members, even as each individual family member is willing to set some things aside for the good of the whole family. This is how we learn this beautiful dance of autonomy and connectedness that we all need to bring into our adult relationships.
It's not all about me, but it's also not never about me. And some of you have had that experience where it was never about you in your family of origin. And so it's really hard for you to figure out how to take up space in your adult relationships.
Other folks have the opposite of that, where maybe it was all about them in their family of origin, and so they don't know how to share space in their adult relationships. I want to walk you through six of these most common roles that children get pigeonholed into in unhealthy families.
Now, again, if you're leading a family of your own right now, if you're parenting kids, you will notice trends. You will be like, I think one of my kids fits more into that role. And another kid fits more into that role.
The fact that you can name that with humility means you're already well on the path toward health, because if you can name it, you can then begin to ensure you're not shoving your kid into a role that's not healthy for them.
Think about your family of origin, the family you were raised in. And notice if you may have been pushed into any one of these six extreme roles.
The first one is the golden child. This is the child who can do no wrong, no matter what they do. The parents just think they're amazing. If you watched the sitcom Friends, with Monica and Ross Geller, brother and sister, it’s a comedic take on this, but Ross is the golden child. He can do no wrong, no matter what he does.
The parents think he's amazing. Even if he does something really stupid, he's just always thought of as amazing. Now, if you were the golden child, there are ways in which that can feel really good, but there are also problems with it.
If you grow up and you never really learned how to receive constructive feedback from a parent, or you never really learned how to tolerate the reality of disappointing someone else, it can have a negative impact on the way you relate to your peers or your adult relationships.
You might struggle with getting your value and your worth from people outside of you and not know what to do with it if someone just doesn't like you, or someone differs with you, or someone is disappointed by you.
That may feel incredibly uncomfortable because you never learned to tolerate that within your family of origin. And again, if you think back to healthy families and this idea of harmony, part of being part of a healthy system is giving and receiving feedback. It's learning to be able to hear from someone, hey, this disappointed me and learning to tolerate that.
You can work through that with a family member and come out the other side even stronger and even more connected for having had that hard conversation. So while being a golden child might feel good in the moment, it can lead to problems in adulthood.
Secondly, we have the comedians. And in fact, a lot of actual comedians in real life talk about how one of the ways they coped in families with high conflict was to become the funny one, was to alleviate tension, tell a joke, do something funny, make everybody laugh. It would calm everybody in the family down.
And made them feel good. And that became this role that they learned how to play. One of your own children may have this skill. It can be a gift. It's not a bad thing, but if that was the only role you were really validated for playing in your family of origin growing up, it can lead to issues in your adult relationships.
You may not know how to process your own painful feelings. It may be hard for you to be vulnerable. You're so busy trying to make everybody else feel better or laugh, that you don't know how to say, man, this is hard for me. I'm the one who's hurting. This is painful for me. You may not know how to express vulnerability.
In a healthy family, it's not that we don't have these tendencies, but that child tends to be the one to alleviate pressure by telling a joke or making people laugh. We want to honor that gift while also ensuring that that child doesn't feel like that is their job. We want to help create balance where that child can also come to the table and say, hey, this doesn't feel very good to me. I don't like it when everybody's fighting.
The third role is the scapegoat, and this is the person who becomes the outlier, the one who is different from everybody else. They're often the focus of the family's problems. They're sort of identified as the problem child.
It's the opposite of the golden child. So if you were a golden child, you might've had a sibling who was the “problem child”. The family norms work in such a way that this one person is sort of left outside of those norms.
Oftentimes those family members really are just creative. They're different. They might have unique needs. They might have unique challenges. Maybe they're acting out for a specific reason. And so it does take some work to figure it out. I'm not trying to say this is simple. Your present day family may have a child who sometimes it's easy to scapegoat and think, oh man, they're the problem.
But when you find yourself doing that, you wanna pull that back in and ask yourself, what does my child need? Because if you were scapegoated, it's really painful and if the family doubles down on the exclusive norms that the child doesn't fit into, that child is gonna polarize against the family even further.
I've worked with families over the years where this has happened. The family will come to me with a sort of identified scapegoat. Can you fix this kid? If we could fix this kid, our family would be okay. Now, again, I don't want to minimize the reality that sometimes there is one person or one child in a family that is really difficult. Maybe they're addicted to a substance. Maybe they're really acting out. Maybe they're really going their own way and you need to set healthy boundaries.
I do not want to minimize that. I'm talking about something a little bit different. It's where the family norms aren't flexible enough to allow for a child that just doesn't quite fit in. It might be a child who's really creative and thinks outside the box and doesn't really love the family rules or wants to do things a little bit their own way.
It's not that they want to go do bad or immoral things. They just want to do things a little bit differently. It might be a child who's really honest and speaks up and says it like they see it. They're not afraid to call a spade a spade, and it's kind of off putting to the rest of the family members.
If you were one of these children, maybe you were the kid who was just kind of saying, this is dumb. I don't know why we do this. I ended up getting in trouble for that, when you really were just being yourself, you were just trying to be honest, and then you end up feeling like an outsider to the rest of the family.
And it can be really painful when you get scapegoated, when you're simply trying to be honest. You're trying to be true to your God given self. If you were a child who was scapegoated, as you enter into your adult relationships, you might notice that you tend to feel misunderstood, that you tend to feel ostracized, that you tend to feel like an outlier in your adult relationships or in adult groups.
You may even seek out other scapegoats, right? Other folks who didn't feel like they fit in because you feel more at home with those folks. And so it's something to be mindful of as you think about your family of origin. In a healthy family where we're trying to move toward harmony, we'd slow the system down and take the time needed to get to know the unique needs of this child.
I get that this takes a lot of work and that we do not do it perfectly. I've worked with enough moms and enough families to know this is not easy. But it's reframing what's happening in your mind. Okay. I don't always get this child. I don't always understand what they need. Sometimes this child even triggers me and that's okay. Sometimes some children trigger you more than other children.
When you name that with humility, you can take brave steps to gain understanding, to gain the skills that you need to parent that unique child so that they feel like a part of the family system. And again, if you think about that middle school band metaphor, you might think of a really cool instrument that isn't necessarily that common that comes in and plays an amazing solo. That wouldn't be possible without that unique gift.
If you were scapegoated as a child, if that's how you were treated, please hear me say you have tremendous value to the group. You may not be the person just sort of seamlessly cruising along with the rest of the system, with the rest of the people, but you may be the one who comes in at key times and shows up and changes the whole thing for the better. Your role matters. It matters for you and it matters for the good of the group.
Next, we get to the invisible one. If you were an invisible one, you'll know it to your bones. You were the child who was just trying to survive. You stayed out of the way, out of the fray. Off the grid.
You didn't get the positive attention. Maybe your parents were preoccupied. Maybe they weren't present to you and you surely did not want the negative attention. So you flew under the radar. Unseen and unnoticed. And if you were the invisible child, it can be hard for you as an adult to feel worthy of being seen, to feel worthy of love, to feel worthy of making your presence known in your adult relationships.
If you were one of those invisible children, your job as you heal is to learn how to insert your voice. Now again, for those of you parenting and and thinking about your own kids who might be quieter or might be tempted to stay under the radar, your job is to stay connected to them, is to try to gently keep them active, keep them involved, keep them engaged in the system.
The last role I want to cover is the caretaker. And I'm guessing a lot of you will relate to this one. A lot of what we talk about on this podcast is learning how to not take responsibility for everybody else in our lives. And in many ways, a lot of that starts in childhood, where as a child, you were the one who took responsibility for supporting everyone in your family. You might've tried to cover up the unhealthy behavior of another family member.
And this is a role that I see so frequently in women, especially. These are the children who take responsibility for everybody else. If you were somebody who took on a caregiver role, you might've taken responsibility for a parent where you became the parent for your parent–maybe they had an addiction issue or a mental health issue. Or maybe they were just emotionally immature and you tried to care for them as a child.
That became a role that you took on. Maybe you were caring for siblings because your parents or caregivers weren't taking leadership, weren't taking on that responsibility and you saw a need. And so you stepped into that vacuum of leadership and started taking care of your siblings.
And these are beautiful qualities. If no one ever came alongside you as a child and reminded you that at the end of the day, you are not an adult, you are not the parent, you are a child, and those responsibilities were never meant to be yours, it can be really challenging to learn the boundaries of those caretaking skills.
As an adult, you can slip into codependency where instead of focusing on identifying and meeting your own needs, you over-focus on meeting the needs of everyone around you. It can be really hard for you as an adult to learn where the healthy boundary lines fall between being a good person, a kind person, an empathetic person, and also not taking on other people's problems in a way that isn't healthy.
That can be really challenging if you were in that caregiver role as a child. For those of you, again, who are parenting and you have a child that kind of fits that description, that can be very empathetic, and that can tend to sense the needs of his or her siblings, it's really tempting to rely on that child, right? This happens in the best of families, where we just sense these different areas of giftedness, and we might over-rely on them instead of helping our children have healthy boundaries.
If you notice that in one of your children, it's so important to name that and have those conversations and be saying to that child, listen, I love that quality in you. That is such a beautiful quality, that empathetic spirit, that kind heart. And also it is not your job to take care of all of us. It is just not your job. And I want you to excuse yourself from that responsibility today.
You start to teach your child. Number one, that you see it, that you name it, and that you are going to help them learn to identify when they're overextending that part of themselves.
These are some of these extreme roles. When a family system gets out of balance for any reason, when the adults, the caretakers who are tasked with the job of maintaining a harmonious system, when for whatever reason that job gets abdicated, children get pushed into these extreme roles and the family gets out of balance.
Again, it's not only detrimental for each child who is part of the family. It's also detrimental for the whole family because the whole family isn't functioning in its healthiest way, where each family member is showing up as a whole person who has feelings, who has thoughts, who has needs, who can express their needs, can express their thoughts, and also meet the needs of others who can express opinions, who can also be disagreed with.
I mean, this is a healthy family. It's noisy. There's a lot going on in a healthy family. There are a lot of skills there. The ability to assert your voice. And also the ability to take feedback, the ability to help other family members, and also the ability to tolerate when we disappoint other family members.
The family is a crucible for learning these critical skills that we need when we move into our adult relationships. I want to pause here for a moment for a few words from our incredible sponsors. These sponsors allow me to bring you this content for free. And so I'm grateful if you take a few moments to listen to these words from them, and then we'll come back and talk about practical steps you can take to create harmony in your family.
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Here are the four most important things you can do to begin to create harmony in your family. Now, if you have kids, this could apply to the family you are leading. If you don't have kids, this could apply to any relationship, really, where you're living life together, where you're working through the kinks of life. Any relationship you have is a crucible for healing past wounds and learning new skills.
You can take steps in any of these four categories in any relationship, and you will be taking a step toward health and wholeness through these actions.
Number one, it sounds cliche, but it's open communication. In harmonious systems, each member of that system is encouraged to both give and receive communication. There's a time to share what's on your heart, to state a need, to state a preference, to ask for help. There's also a time to receive communication, to listen to the people around you.
It sounds so simple, but we don't always do this very well. A great strategy to get started just with leveling the playing field where everybody is invited to come to the table. The two minute check in. You just set aside time. It could be at the beginning of dinner, around the dinner table, it could be in the car, if you all drive somewhere together, where you do these quick two minute check-ins where each family member in two minutes gets to share whatever they want to share.
They just have to share an update. What's going on, something they're proud of, something they're worried about, something they're thinking about, something that happened, something they're excited about, something they really want, and just let each family member have two minutes to share.
Everybody else just listens. Nobody gets to cut in. Nobody gets to judge. Nobody gets to criticize. Everybody just gets to share their two minutes, whatever they want. And everybody else listens and sees what you learn about each other.
It’s a way to level the playing field. You know, if you've got a kid who doesn't talk a lot, or if you've got a kid that tends to take over, it sets a norm where we've got a timer, you got two minutes, go. And the kid who doesn't want to talk a lot has to fill that time. And the kid who wants to talk too much has to stop after two minutes. You're normalizing that idea that everybody's got a voice. Everybody's got a role.
Number two, the other research-backed activity that I really like is called clock contingent attention. And all that means is that if you're a member of a family, you're leading a family, you give clock contingent attention to each family member. What do we mean by that? Clock contingent means it's based on the clock.
It could be once a week that you spend clock-contingent time with each of your children. It could be once a day, depending on your schedule, depending on how many kids you have, this clock contingent attention could happen every day. It could happen once a week, but what it means is you're setting aside time regularly to give to each one of your children.
And during that time, you're going to do something together that you both enjoy. It's not based on how you're feeling toward that particular child. It's not based on how they've been behaving. It's not based on whether they've earned it. It's not based on whether you're in a good mood. It's just what you do.
If your kids are younger, it might be that every single night you read them a story before bed. That's your clock-contingent attention. It doesn't matter how the day went. You're going to end the day at 9 p.m. with 20 minutes of quality time where you are present to each one of your children.
You might take a weekly date night with each of your kids, where during that time, they get your full attention, they know what it feels like in their body to have the fullness of your presence.
As your kids get older, it might be that once a week you check-in with each other. Every Thursday night, we're going to spend 30 minutes together. And you do something that your kids like to do during that time. It's their time and you're just present to them.
This idea of clock-contingent attention reinforces that you are there for each member of your family based on the fact that you just love them. It's not something that they have to earn.
Now that doesn't mean there aren't going to be other times where you need to have hard conversations with your kids or negotiate boundaries or set limits, but that clock contingent attention is always going to be there as a time for you to reconnect and just be present.
The third strategy I call the no shame zone. We want to foster an environment where there's no shame. We can talk about what's hard. We can talk about things that are vulnerable. We can talk about things that we did wrong without shame.
And there are a couple of ways that you can foster an environment like that. The strategy that I like best to foster a no shame zone is what I like to call “two things can be true”. Anytime you're approaching a difficult topic or a challenging conversation, maybe you need to talk about the fact that the house is a mess and you need it to get picked up.
Or maybe you need to talk about something you've noticed, maybe you need to talk about a poor attitude that you've noticed in one of your children. Or maybe you need to talk about some secrecy or some sneaking around and you need to raise a hard conversation.
The premise of two things can be true is that you can both honor something good that you see and name what's hard. Here are some examples. No one did anything wrong and we need to talk about the mess. When you say something like that, you're saying, listen, I don't know whose fault this is. I'm not laying blame. Something happened here and we need to fix it.
Right there, you're neutralizing the shame of what's wrong with you guys? Why would you do this? How could you make this huge mess? You're neutralizing all the defensiveness, and you're just saying, listen, nobody did anything wrong. I am not laying blame here. And we've got an issue that we all need to help solve.
Another example, you might say to a child who's kind of showing some attitude or not necessarily wanting to pull their weight. I see that something's going on with you. I don't understand exactly what's happening and this attitude isn't going to cut it. We've got to have a conversation.
When you set those two things down side by side, you neutralize defensiveness and you give yourself a fighting chance of actually connecting with your child. You're honoring that there's a reason that they're behaving the way they're behaving. Something's going on. I get it. I don't know what it is.
I do know that this thing that you're doing isn't okay. And so we need to together figure out how to come up with a better way. The idea of a no shame zone isn't that we all communicate perfectly all the time. We don't, but when you use those “two things can be true” statements, you're reflecting reality, which is, listen, we are all doing our best. This is hard. And also, this isn't going to cut it.
We've got to figure out how to navigate that middle ground. I'm going to go back to that middle school band–if you imagine yourself as the conductor going to the violins going, I get that you are doing your best. You are playing your heart out. And also it's a little out of tune. It doesn't sound quite right. Can we try something else?
I get that the drummers are just giving it your all. And also we've got an issue here. This isn't quite working. We need to bring it in a little bit. And when you take that two things can be true, you assume the best of the other person while simultaneously pointing out the thing that needs to be corrected, that needs to come into alignment.
You create this no shame zone and it allows the pieces to all come together. Every family member learns that they are important, that they are valued, that they're trying their best, and also sometimes they're going to mess up.
They're not going to be quite in alignment. They're going to miss some cues and it's your job to point that out so that we're working toward this end goal of harmony.
Finally, to close, I want to share with you what I think is one of the most important skills that you can have in any family, really in any relationship.Here's the thing, there is going to be conflict in your family. There's going to be conflict in your relationship. They're going to be ruptures. You're going to hurt other people. Other people are going to hurt you, especially in our families.
It just happens. We trip over each other's triggers. Sometimes it's intentional. Sometimes it's unintentional. We just do it. We are human. We're going to trip over each other's triggers from time to time. So therefore what we have to be able to do really, really well is repair.
Now there's a really good TED talk that Dr. Becky Kennedy gave on this very topic. She believes the number one most important strategy for any parent to understand is the art of repair. And she does a fantastic job of describing it in her TED talk. You can check that out. We'll have a link to it in the show notes.
Repair is modeling the art of empathy. It's modeling the art of going to a child and naming what happened. Here's what happened. I can imagine how hard this was for you. Here's what I want you to know. I was having a bad day. I didn't treat you right. I didn't say what I wished I would say.
It takes a lot of humility to go and say, I was not having a good moment there. You know, that thing that you saw me do, it wasn't right. And it wasn't your fault. You didn't cause me to do that. I was having a bad moment and this is such a healing act. And the reason I know it is so important is because I want each one of you listening to think about some of the heavy weights that you carry and imagine if your caregivers, if the people who cared for you came to you and said, you know what, I did that thing. It was not my best moment and it was never your fault.
I am so sorry that happened. I love you and I wish I could have done a better job, we all need to hear that from the people that we love, and we all need to extend that to others. When we are able to humble ourselves and say to our children, I own it. At that moment, I was out of line and you did nothing to cause that. That was on me and I take responsibility.
When we do that, nervous systems calm and we open up to the goodness and the kindness and the grace of God, who doesn't expect us to be perfect. In those moments of surrender where we say, oh my gosh, that one is on me. I am so sorry. That is not your weight to bear. God shows up in powerful ways. He releases those burdens and everybody feels just a little bit lighter.
In those moments of repair, the harmony of our family, of this symphony we are creating together, becomes something beautiful for the benefit of everyone.
Most of us want to be happier, but we don't even know what true happiness means! We walk around feeling unmotivated, stuck, and unsure of our next steps. The truth is that the path to happiness is just a few steps away. In today's episode, I'm walking you through exactly what happiness is and exactly how you can put yourself on the path toward finding it.
Here's what we cover:
1. What exactly is happiness?
2. 4 myths about happiness
3. 4 truths about happiness
4. Simple, practical steps anyone can take to feel happier
Thanks to our sponsors:
- Go to www.organifi.com/bestofyou today and use code BESTOFYOU for 20% off your order today.
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Music by Andy Luiten
Sound editing by Kelly Kramarik
While Dr. Cook is a counselor, the content of this podcast and any of the products provided by Dr. Cook are not specific counseling advice nor are they a substitute for individual counseling. The content and products provided on this podcast are for informational purposes only.
Resources
- More from Harvard professor and happiness researcher Arthur Brooks
- Adam Grant on languishing in 2021 New York Times article
- John 10:10
Transcript
Hey everyone. Welcome back to this week's episode on The Best of You Podcast. I'm so glad you're here. I'm so glad we made it through the holidays and into this brand new year. I have so many exciting things in store for us this new year and I cannot wait to share them with you. I loved getting all of your feedback on the survey–thank you so much for taking the time to fill that out and giving me such thoughtful ideas.
It feels like a true partnership where I was benefiting from the wisdom and your questions and your ideas and what you want to learn about and how you want to grow. It just meant so much to me. So thank you for taking the time to do that. I look forward to circling back and bringing those into upcoming episodes.
As we kick off this new year, I wanted to hit the ground running with a conversation about happiness. So many people come to see me, whether as a therapist or through my work creating this podcast, people ask me so many questions, and often what is underneath is:
I want to feel better. I don't want to feel this pain. I don't want to feel this chaos. I don't want to feel this confusion. I don't want to feel this frustrated. I want to feel better. I don't want to feel this way. I want to feel better.
Often when we're thinking about what that better is, we don't even really know what it is. I just know I don't want to feel this way, but I'm not exactly sure what it is that I'm supposed to feel. What should I aspire to? What is a healthy expectation of my family, of my friends, of my work?
All of those questions get at this idea of what is happiness? The truth is there are so many false ideas about what that is out in the world that we don't even know what it is that we want. We just know what we don't want. So today I'm going to walk you through what science has to say about happiness, what the Bible has to say about happiness, and spoiler alert, it's surprisingly similar.
Then I'm going to walk you through a very practical set of questions to help you increase your understanding of what the true nature of happiness actually is. Because if you don't know what you're aiming for, how can you achieve it? Even worse, if you're aiming for something that's actually faulty, you have a misunderstanding of happiness, you're going to be heading down the wrong path.
If you understand what happiness is and how it really works, you can then take the steps that you need to move toward increasing degrees of happiness. So let's dive into learning what happiness actually is.
What is happiness? Social psychologists have studied happiness for years and the answer is that it's a complicated psychological state. It's not a simple feeling. So if you're pursuing a feeling of, oh, I just want to feel happy, you’re pursuing something really fleeting, sort of like a feather floating in the wind that you can't really ever grasp.
That's not a worthwhile pursuit. So right here at the top, I want to say, if you're pursuing this idea of, I just want to feel happy, you're pursuing the wrong thing. You're pursuing something that you can't really get. Harvard psychologist and happiness researcher, Arthur Brooks, says that happiness is a complex state that includes three distinct elements: enjoyment, purpose, and satisfaction.
Each of those three ingredients is fairly complex in and of itself. He also says that happiness is not a destination, and that's what I mean by that feather floating around in the wind. It's not something you're actually going to find and go, I have it. I have achieved happiness.
It's a pursuit. It's a direction more than it's a destination. It's impossible to arrive at the location of happiness. It's a way of being in the world where you orient to those things that tend to bring you more happiness.
So if you make your goal happiness, as in, I just want to be happy, you're setting yourself up for failure. Instead, Brooks suggests making your goal to become a little bit happier. That's something you can pursue through orienting yourself to the substance of what brings happiness. Sometimes I like to think about this as the metaphor of the steak and the sizzle.
So much in our culture promotes the sizzle, not the steak, the deep, substantive ingredients that create a really healthy, nutritious meal.
So happiness is not just a fleeting sense of a dopamine hit. You can chase dopamine hits all day long, and you're never really going to experience happiness on a deep core level. Happiness comprises all that life has to offer, including what's hard in a way that orients your whole being to contentment and satisfaction.
This is what the Bible calls joy, a deep abiding, stable sense of no matter what life brings my way, I'm okay. I'm content. As Paul says, it's a deep nuanced state of being that has to be broken down and pursued in its component parts. It's an overall orientation of your life toward good, noble, beautiful things.
It takes a whole body shift, an orientation of your mind, your heart, your will, even your nervous system to the things that actually move you toward increasing degrees of happiness. Sometimes it's helpful to understand happiness to think about its opposite, which isn't necessarily depression. It's more along the lines of what psychologists call languishing.
This is a term that Adam Grant popularized in a 2021 New York Times article, where he described this pervasive sense of languishing that we're seeing in our culture. He defines it in this way: languishing is a sense of stagnation and emptiness. It feels as if you're muddling through your days, looking at your life through a foggy windshield.
Grant says languishing is the absence of wellbeing. It doesn't necessarily mean you're in a state of deep depression, it just means you're not fully thriving or flourishing in your life. You're not thriving. You're not experiencing that abundant life that Jesus talked about in John 10:10. This is really common. So many of us often feel this way.
I really liked that definition of languishing that Grant supplied because I think it's a really interesting category for so many of us where, again, you're not in a deep state of depression, maybe you're functioning in your life, but you also don't feel this elusive feeling that we often call happiness.
You might be noticing inside yourself, things like, I don't know if I feel happy. I'm not sure my life is happy. You might not even really be taking the time to unpack that, but you're just aware of that inside.
To understand happiness a little more, I took out some of those terms from Grant's definition of languishing and looked at them against their opposite. What is the opposite that would essentially help us move the needle toward happiness.
So first, if you look at that term of stagnation, which is sort of a lack of progress, a feeling of being stuck, not really moving anywhere, not really growing or seeing results in your life, the opposite of stagnation is a sense of generativity, a sense of creativity, a sense of movement, a sense of forward motion of progress of, of moving toward health. We need that to feel a little bit happier.
Number two, he talks about emptiness, and if you think about the opposite of that, it's a sense of purpose, a sense of meaning, a sense of what I do matters. That's an essential ingredient to feeling that happiness that we all long for.
Number three, he described a sense of foggy focus. if you think about just a lack of direction and foggy focus the opposite of that, you might think of words like clarity, perspective, even conviction. I know where I'm going. I know what I'm doing. Even if I don't always like it, I have a sense of clarity. I know what I'm doing, which leads to a greater sense of happiness.
Number four, he talks about languishing as being unmotivated. What's the opposite of being unmotivated? Feeling inspired, imaginative, or brave. It's that oomph to get up and do the thing that you don't really want to do, but that actually leads you to feeling a little bit happier.
Then lastly, he talks about a sense of feeling checked out or disconnected, the opposite of which is connection. It's moving toward others instead of away from them. There's a gap in between each of these, from stagnation to generativity, from emptiness to purpose, from a foggy focus to clarity, from unmotivated to inspired, from checked out to connected.
There's a gap in between each of those states that requires you to take an action step. These things don't magically happen. We have control over that gap. We have to do something to get ourselves from stagnation to creativity, from emptiness to meaning, from lack of focus to clarity, from unmotivated to inspired or brave, from checked out to connected. We have to do something to bridge that gap.
We have agency, we have the power to put ourselves from that pool of languishing where we're just drowning in muck to the path that moves us toward happier lives. Here's the paradox of moving toward happier–it requires you to confront the hard things. It doesn't mean that you pretend like what's hard isn't there, like what's holding you back isn't there, like what's keeping you feeling stuck or empty or unfocused or unmotivated or checked out isn't there.
It's facing those things honestly, and making a choice to move the needle toward what's ultimately going to bring you more happiness. We're going to get into how you can take steps practically each day to move that needle.
There are four words that I want to boil this down to, to give you a directional aim, if you're feeling any of those qualities of unhappiness or languishing. I want you to think about four words to orient the next decision or next step that you make.
How can I move toward creativity?
How can I move toward a sense of calling?
How can I move toward courage?
How can I move toward connection?
Again, it's just one tiny step and that language of moving toward makes it manageable. It's not, how can I become creative? How can I become courageous? How can I become connected? But if you think about it as moving toward, how can I take a step toward creativity? How can I take a step toward a greater sense of calling? How can I take a step toward courage? How can I take a step toward connection? Happiness becomes manageable.
It becomes right in front of you. It's in that next brave step that you take. These words give you a directional aim. In that very orientation you're making a choice to move toward happiness, and this works. This is a foolproof way to create more happiness, more abundance, more of what the Bible calls joy in your life.
So at the end of this episode, I'm going to get into some steps you can take literally today to put yourself on the path toward happiness, which is the goal. The goal is to be on the right path. Remember, it's not the destination. It's to be on the right path. You're not going to avoid suffering. You're not going to avoid things that are hard, but you're on the path that gives you what you need to experience increasing degrees of happiness, regardless of what you travel through in your life.
This is possible. It's a possible goal to be on a path that no matter what comes your way, you have a stable abiding sense of wellbeing. But before we get to those practical steps you can take, I want to talk about what doesn't lead to happiness, because we need to be able to identify when we're on the wrong path, when we are completely going down the wrong road and we are not putting ourselves in the position to experience greater degrees of happiness.
The first step to getting a little bit happier is to recognize where your ideas about happiness are misplaced, where you're seeking happiness in all the wrong places. This can be really subtle. It can be really insidious. Oftentimes, we have the right principles or the right ideas.
We know that happiness isn't found in this or that. But little messages inside of our minds creep in and we start subtly deceiving ourselves about where happiness lies. These subtle messages are even harder to detect and weed out because we are bombarded with false messages about happiness all the time, constantly from the media, from advertising, from shows that you watch, from social media.
So it takes some work to detect what is coming into our minds that is leading us down the wrong path so that we can orient ourselves to where true happiness lies. Now again, what I'm sharing with you today comes from decades of social science research, which very much validates what we know to be true about happiness as it's found in the Bible.
It is fascinating to me that what social scientists are finding empirically validated over and over again underscores what we know to be true about happiness from the Bible. So here are four myths about happiness.
The number one myth is that happiness is found in fame or fortune. Now, many of you listening are like, I know that. I know money doesn't make you happy. I know being famous wouldn't make me happy. But I want you to really take a minute and think about subtle messages you may tell yourself. Even if part of you believes that, okay, money and fame are not going to actually make me happy, there may be subtle messages inside your mind.
Oh man, if I just had a house that I loved, or if I just had a little more of this or a little more of that, or oftentimes this comes in with comparison. If I just had what she has, then I would feel happier. You may not consciously tell yourself that, but I guarantee if you take a look for just a moment inside the thoughts that swirl through your mind, you will find some of those thoughts.
If I just had a little more of that, I'd be a little bit happier.
Now the truth is, when it comes to financial stability, it is essential to have your basic needs met. More happiness comes when you are able to put a roof over your head and provide for your basic needs, your basic food, your basic shelter for your children, and you're able to provide for yourself.
It is true that as you are able to provide for yourself with basic financial stability, you do experience more happiness. The problem is once your basic needs are satisfied, we tend to get on a treadmill of wanting more and more and more and more.
Once your basic needs are met, additional wealth, additional accumulation of more, more, more actually begins to have a diminished impact on happiness. So the pursuit of wealth in and of itself to a certain point after your basic needs are met, leads to more stress, more comparison, and more strained relationships.
This is empirically validated through scientific study. You want to have enough. If you're struggling to meet your basic needs, that can lead to greater stress and diminished happiness. But once those basic needs are met, the pursuit of more wealth actually leads to diminishing returns.
Our culture tends to tell us we want more. We want more. You need more of this. You need more of that, you need more. It tends to set you up to compare yourself to unrealistic expectations that you see on tv. You see in movies, you see in advertisements, when in reality, if you have enough and you have a roof over your head and you can feed your kids good food, to be able to show gratitude genuinely in your heart for what you have puts you on the path toward happiness.
But if you subtly start to want more and start to tell yourself, if I had more of this or more of that or more of what she has or more of what her kids have, you're going down the wrong path that will not lead you to more happiness.
The same is true for this idea of fame, or what we might call external validation, being known, having people love us. It doesn't necessarily have to be fame, as in I'm a famous person. It's having the love of many people–another word you might use is popularity.
The myth is that getting a lot of approval and validation from others is often perceived as a path to happiness, but it is a false path. You might feel a dopamine hit when someone likes your post or someone compliments you, it might boost your self esteem for a moment, but pursuing those likes is a dead end road. It does not lead you to happiness.
The truth is that if you pursue other people's approval and being liked by others, whether it's on social media or whether it's in your real everyday life, it does not lead to happiness. It's the wrong path. We do need connection with others. We do need to feel known and understood by a few people in our lives.
But true happiness, that abiding sense of joy and satisfaction and contentment does not come from pursuing external validation. That's a dead end road. It's just like money. The more you get, the more you want, the more you get, the more you want.
It's a dead end road. It will not lead you to happiness. It leads to more comparison, more feelings of inferiority and more stress as you want more. Instead, the path to happiness is identifying the people who love you for who you really are, who know you and come alongside you and experiencing gratitude for those people–that moves you on the path toward happiness, moving toward true connection versus external validation.
Number three, I know many of you will relate to this. Happiness is not found in the pursuit of perfection. Again, another hamster wheel, another dead end road. The myth is that striving for perfection, whether it's in your appearance, whether it's in your achievements, whether it's in your relationships is often seen as a way of attaining happiness. Again, this is magnified by social media.
If I could just be a little more perfect, then I would be happy. That's a myth. It's a lie. That's the wrong path. The truth is that the pursuit of perfection is a never ending journey that leads to unhappiness. The pursuit of perfection fosters self-criticism, anxiety, and unrealistic expectations.
Here's the paradox, as you embrace imperfection, as you embrace the beauty of flaws in your life, you grow in self compassion, which helps you set realistic goals, which puts you on the path toward true happiness. The more you embrace the imperfections, the flaws, and you learn to release them and you learn to even enjoy them and appreciate them, you move down the path toward true happiness.
Lastly, there's a myth that if you could avoid all negative emotions, you could find happiness, and it's a complete myth. You see this in toxic positivity or in faith communities, you see it in spiritual bypassing. If I just pretend like I never experienced a negative emotion or never experienced any doubt, then I'll be happy.
Again, this might not be a conscious thought, but you might notice that you try to suppress or ignore any feelings of sadness, of anger, of grief, or you try to avoid thinking about those emotions, then that's how you become happy. But the truth is, and we just went through this in the whole series in December, negative emotions are a natural part of what it means to be a human.
They provide insights that help you grow. If you suppress or deny those negative emotions, you're suppressing cues that your body is sending you to help you move toward greater degrees of happiness. When you notice feelings of sadness or grief or anger, and you pay attention to those cues, then use them as information to help you grow or heal, or remove yourself from unhealthy situations, you move down the path toward happiness.
So on your road to happiness, you've got to watch out for that subtle insidious chatter in your mind. You may not literally be pursuing fame or fortune or popularity or perfection or the avoidance of all negativity. Maybe you agree with me. You're like, Alison, I know that I know those things, but here's the thing.
You've got to watch out for those thinking traps that we talked about back in episode 51 that subtly encourage you down this road toward unhappiness. So here are some examples. Comparison. If I had what she had, then I'd feel better. I'd be okay. My life would be working. If I just had what she had, that's a slippery slope. You've got to catch those thoughts.
Blaming. It's his fault. If he would change, then I would feel happier. That doesn't work. You have to take charge of your own happiness.
Avoidance is a trap. I'll just ignore it. I'll just pretend like it's not there. That doesn't get you to that next step. That doesn't move you toward those four words. Creativity. Calling. Connection. Courage. Avoidance doesn't move the needle.
Numbing. Oh, just shut it all down. Now, so often we don't consciously think that. We just reach for the food or we reach for a glass of wine. I just can't deal with this and we just numb it down. That does not move the needle. That does not move you on the path toward happiness.
Finally, shame is a big one. I'm just not worthy. I'm just not worthy of happiness. I'll never be someone who feels this way. That doesn't move the needle.
Remember you have agency. No matter what's hard in your life, you have agency to move the needle toward creativity, connection, calling, and courage. You have choices you can make to put yourself on the path.
Use the hardships in your life as an opportunity to move toward happiness. Don't bypass the reality of hardship or suffering. Instead, name it, invite God into the struggle, and then take a small step toward creativity, connection, calling, or courage.
To close, I want to walk through those four categories and talk about practical steps you can take today to put yourself on the path toward happiness. Now remember, this is not the instant gratification path. That is not the path that leads to happiness.
The instant gratification path actually leads to unhappiness; the path toward happiness is a series of intentional steps that you take. These are empirically validated steps. They're validated by science and they're validated by the Bible.
If you take these steps, you will put yourself on the path toward happiness. Number one, taking steps toward connection. Remember, it's connection that moves the needle toward happiness. It's not popularity. It's not the dopamine hit of a like on social media. It's not scrolling.
You might get some instant gratification by turning to your phone in a moment of unhappiness. But true happiness requires you to take a step toward actual human connection. It means picking up the phone and calling a friend, calling someone who loves you and saying, I'd like to connect. Could we take a walk this weekend?
It's showing up at your church or at your local community center and joining a group, knowing that it might take a few tries to find a group you actually like. If you're at work, instead of eating lunch by yourself, you know what? I'm going to see if this colleague that seems kind of interesting to me wants to eat together.
It's taking a step. Maybe they don't. Maybe you do eat together and it actually turns out to be kind of a bust. But you took a step to put yourself on the path toward happiness.
Now remember, I didn't say you will experience happiness in that moment. You might not. Maybe you don't connect right in that moment, but you're putting yourself on the right path.
If you keep taking those steps, you will find connection, which will lead you to greater degrees of happiness. Science tells us this, and the Bible tells us this. What is a step you can take to move toward connection with other people?
Number two is courage. What is a step you can take to be brave? This gets right into what we were just talking about. The path to happiness requires courage. It is not the path of least resistance. It requires the courage to do something new.
What is a step you can take toward courage? It might be getting up and turning off the show you've been streaming on Netflix and having the courage to walk outside and enjoy the sunshine. That might be your brave step that puts you on the path toward happiness.
It might be having the courage to move away from that second glass of wine, set it aside and move toward something life giving. That takes courage. It takes courage to change a numbing behavior.
It takes courage to face a thinking trap in your mind. For example, if you've been listening and you heard me talk about comparison and you realize oh my gosh, I do that I tell myself. That if I only had more of this I would be happier. A courageous act would be to say to yourself, what if just today I practiced gratitude.
I am grateful for the home that I have. I am grateful for the job that I have. I am grateful for the friends that I have. I am grateful to be talking about how to practice gratitude. Shifting the way that you think that will put you on the path toward happiness.
Number three, let's talk about taking steps toward calling. Instead of languishing, instead of stagnating, instead of feeling unmotivated, instead of feeling unfocused, what's a step you could take toward a sense of calling?
You might go take a test online to determine your strengths. We talked about Strengthfinders back in episode 53. You might take a step toward prayer to say, God, what are my gifts? What are the talents you have given me? You might make a note in your notes app on your phone of the three gifts you feel like you have to offer other people. That's putting yourself on the path toward happiness.
You might think about someone you could serve. No matter what your job is, no matter whether you work at home or in an office, no matter whether you wait tables or whether you're an engineer, it doesn't matter. You might take a step toward how can I be useful? How can I be helpful in this situation?
That's moving toward calling, which moves you toward a sense of purpose, which leads to a sense of satisfaction and that puts you on the path toward happiness.
Lastly, what's a step you might take today toward creativity? What's a hobby that you've let go by the wayside that brings you joy, that you'd like to pick back up? What's an activity, whether it's taking a jog, or walking under the stars at night before bed, or playing with your dogs, or laughing with a friend? What's an activity that you enjoy? Move toward that.
What sparks your imagination? Is it reading a good book? Is it writing? Is it journaling? Is it drawing? Do it. Move toward that. That puts you on the path toward happiness. Now again, it's a step. It's going to take several steps. Maybe you pick back up the paint brushes and you're like, I don't even remember how to do this.
I haven't done it in so long. it's a little bit frustrating the first time. This is not about instant gratification. This is about taking steps to move toward creativity, toward imagination, toward a sense of refreshment that will put you on the path toward happiness. These things are empirically validated.
It is also what the Bible tells us to be true. As we move toward a sense of connection with other people, as we move toward brave acts of showing up in this world, of taking control of our own lives, as we move toward our calling and a sense of purpose as we move toward creativity and imagination, we put ourselves on the right path, and happiness becomes a byproduct of being on the right path.
Happiness flows from the inside out, as we are known, as we are connected with others, as we understand our calling and purpose, as we are courageous in how we show up in our lives, and as we participate in creativity. Happiness flows out as a result of those brave acts.
Today as you're listening, what is a brave step you can take to move toward connecting with someone who loves you? What is a courageous act you can do to show up more authentically and more honestly In your life? What is a step you can take toward the calling or gifts God has put inside of you to use for good in this world? How can you move toward creativity, imagination, the good things that bring you life? Every brave step you take will unlock the happiness, the joy, the abundance that God created you to enjoy.
Most people feel anger, sadness, or fear at some point during the day. It's normal to feel these emotions. The question is, what will you do when they show up: Will you let them sabotage you? Or will you turn them into your allies?In today's episode, I teach you the skills you need to turn these feelings into your allies so that you can experience more joy and healthier boundaries.
Here's what we cover:
1. The #1 question to ask yourself (6:38)
2. How anger is trying to help (6:53)
3. What to do when you feel sadness (11:03)
4. An illustration from one of my favorite movies (15:11)
5. Why we need fear (19:41)
6. A powerful exercise to use at any time (29:00)
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Music by Andy Luiten
Sound editing by Kelly Kramarik
While Dr. Cook is a counselor, the content of this podcast and any of the products provided by Dr. Cook are not specific counseling advice nor are they a substitute for individual counseling. The content and products provided on this podcast are for informational purposes only.
Resources
- Fill out the The Best of You Podcast Survey
- The Best of You by Dr. Alison Cook
- Boundaries For Your Soul by Dr. Alison Cook and Kimberly Miller
- The scene in Good Will Hunting
Transcript
Alison Cook: Hey everyone. Welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You Podcast. This is our last episode of 2023. We hit the ground running again the first week of January.
So we want to hear from you before we move into 2024. We want to know what content you've appreciated, what content you want more of, what you're dying for me to talk about that we haven't talked about yet, what guests to interview, so we've created a survey. I'd be so grateful if you would just take two to three minutes to click on the survey link–it's in the episode show notes, or you can go to the episode page on my website, DrAlisonCook.com/podcast, you'll find the link there.
When you fill that out, we are going to give five randomly selected participants a free copy of The Best of You as well as Boundaries for Your Soul. So five of you will get a copy of each book, The Best of You and Boundaries for Your Soul, as our way of saying thank you for taking just a couple of minutes to fill out the survey.
Again, you can find that survey in the episode notes of this episode, wherever you listen to it, whether it's on Apple or Spotify, or you can go to my website, DrAlisonCook.com/podcast, and you'll find the link under the episode show notes there.
We would be so grateful to hear from you as we seek to serve you through this podcast with the best resources available, bringing together spiritual wisdom with practical tools from psychology.
Today's episode is the last episode in our series on Five Steps to Navigating Overwhelming Emotions. You've learned how to focus on an unpleasant emotion. You've learned how to befriend those emotions. You've learned how to invite God to be with you in the experience of an emotion. You've learned how to unburden painful emotions in last week's episode.
Today I want to talk about how we bring it all together. How do we integrate those emotions into the rest of our lives? Because here's the thing–those emotions are trying to help. Each emotion that you experience is a clue; it has information for you about how to make a change or make a decision or something.
You need these emotions, once you focus on them, befriend them, invite God to be with them, and unburden them, so they can become your allies on your journey toward wholeness. They help you become a more effective decision maker. They help you set healthier boundaries. They help you care for yourself. They help you to forge healthier connections with other people.
So today we're going to walk through THREE of the most common emotions, and how each one might be a cue that you need to make a subtle shift in your life, especially here at the holidays. I want you to pay attention. If you've been experiencing any of these emotions, you can make just a subtle change that will help you find just a little more peace, a little more joy, a little more groundedness this holiday season.
So I want to start today with the emotion of anger. The reason I want to start with anger is that it's often one of the first emotions that we notice. Anger has a lot of cousins. It doesn't always show up as just red hot rage, although sometimes it does. There's a lot of different permutations to how anger shows up.
For example, anger can show up as just irritability, maybe a sense of annoyance with others, where you just feel negative toward yourself or others. It can show up as judgmental or overly critical feelings toward yourself or others, where there's just a little bit of an edge.
Another way it might show up is as resentment; you start to resent the very people that you're actually trying to serve this holiday season, you start to resent the very people you're trying to please.
So anger as a broad emotion has a lot of ways that it shows up. From one extreme of lashing out, yelling, being verbally abusive to other people, all the way to more internalized anger that can show up as frustration, irritability, or hypercriticism.
If you are noticing any of those manifestations of anger, that's your cue to work the five steps to focus on it. Isn't it interesting that I feel so critical of that other person? I'm going to focus on that for a second. I'm going to pay attention to that. Or I'm just so bitter about my work. I just noticed a lot of bitterness. I need to look at that bitterness to focus on it and see what's going on there.
Then you have to befriend it. Right away. It's there for a reason. I don't have to beat myself up for feeling this way. What's going on? What's that about? Invite God into that experience. Ask God to be with you. As you begin to unpack that emotion, unburden any messages that might be there all the way back from the past.
Things like, everyone always lets me down. No one ever gives me a break. Notice those messages, pay attention to those messages. As you do this work of engaging with that emotion of anger, of journaling on behalf of it, maybe talking to a friend on behalf of it, I want you to ask yourself this clarifying question.
How is my anger trying to help? Just begin to think about that. How is this emotion trying to help? And notice what comes to mind.
Here are some examples of the ways that anger might actually be trying to get your attention to help you. It might be trying to protect you from danger. It may be that you're feeling all of that negative energy because you're in a situation that's not safe, and you actually need to do something to protect yourself.
It may be that you're letting people walk all over you. The fact that you're feeling angry inside is actually a cue that you need to set some healthier boundaries. You might need to speak up for yourself. You might need to get more assertive with a friend, with your family, with work.
You might need to say, guys, I'm overwhelmed. I need to get some things off my plate. Could you help me? You might need to have a hard conversation. Maybe somebody has hurt you, so you're just noticing that cynicism or that bitterness fester. Instead of beating yourself up for that, you might need to let that be a cue that you're going to have to brave that hard conversation. Maybe it's an opportunity to say to your family, let's set some boundaries around gift giving this year, or I'm going to focus on giving the gift of quality time this year. So you take command of something that you can actually do to bring a little bit of change into the situation.
Anger, when we focus, befriend, invite, unburden, then integrate, is mobilizing. It helps us take action and create change that is good for us. If it's good for you, I promise you, it is also going to be good for the people around you. When you say yes to God, yes to your own health–even when that means saying no to some of the things around you, you are honoring God. You are also honoring the people around you.
Even when they're disappointed.
Okay. So look at anger as an opportunity to set some healthy boundaries, to assert yourself, to use your voice, to speak up for something that will help you take command of your own health this holiday season. It could be around food. It could be around gifts. It could be around conversation topics.
There's so many ways you can speak up on behalf of yourself to give yourself the gift of agency at the holidays where you have some choice. You are not only at the mercy of the people around you, of all the expectations around you. So anger, when befriended, can become an emotion that helps you establish healthier boundaries.
Next, I want to look at sadness or hurt. This is often the other side of anger. Often our anger surfaces when another more vulnerable part of us is really hurt. Maybe you're hurt that no one is actually noticing your needs this holiday season. No one's coming alongside you saying, hey, how can I help you?
Maybe you're hurt that a friend seems to be ignoring you or disregarding you this holiday. Maybe you've been hurt by a family member. You're angry on one hand, but on the other hand, you're really hurt, and you don't know what to do with that feeling.
Maybe you're sad because of a loss. We talked about this in Episode 80. You've experienced loss and the holidays are pushing on that bruise where you're feeling that loss very keenly this holiday season. Sadness and the hurt that you feel is not a sign of weakness. It's a sign of your deep capacity to love and to connect with other people. It's an emotion we want to honor.
Oftentimes we want to bring in that emotion a little bit closer so that we can get curious about what we really need. So if you're noticing sadness or hurt, work on those steps of focusing on it, befriending it, inviting God into your experience of that sadness of that hurt, and then unburdening any pain that feels like it's from the past, that feels like it's interwoven with messages that aren't helpful to you.
And then let's find a way to integrate that sadness into your experience of the holiday season. I want to give you some examples of this because it's really powerful.
Sadness reminds you of your need for others and for God. It helps you become aware of needs that you have, of places where you're tender, that you need to receive care. It helps you develop empathy. It helps you come alongside others in beautiful ways, and it also helps you speak the truth about your story and about some of the hardships you're facing. Which helps you create more authenticity in your relationships.
Here's the thing though, if you don't honor sadness, if you try to exile it, it can get really big and it can lead to feelings of being invisible or worthless, or it can lead to feelings of fatigue or insecurity.
So you want to notice that sadness and let it inform you. Again, I want you to ask yourself a question. If you're noticing any of the manifestations of sadness this holiday season, I want you to ask yourself, how is sadness trying to help? What does it need you to know? Look at sadness as a wise advisor. How is it trying to inform you this holiday season?
Maybe it needs a safe place for you to grieve a loss. It needs you to carve out time with a trusted friend or with a counselor, with a small group where you can let them know what you're dealing with. Maybe it needs validation that it's okay for you to feel sad that what you're dealing with is hard and that it's okay that you don't have a quick fix.
Maybe it needs a gentle boundary to be reminded that yes, while some things are hard, there are also some things that are good and you can hold both side by side.
***Music Break***
To give you an example, we just watched the movie Good Will Hunting again. I hadn't watched it in years. and there's a couple of powerful scenes in that movie, but one in particular where the main character, Matt Damon's character, unburdens a hurt from the past with Robin Williams' character, who plays the role of his therapist in the movie.
If you've seen that movie, there's a powerful moment where Matt Damon is talking about the abuse from his past and the pain of it.He's very rational and Robin Williams keeps saying to him, it wasn't your fault. and Matt Damon's character keeps replying, I know it wasn't my fault.
Robin Williams keeps pushing in because what he senses is that a part of him is still carrying the weight of that pain. And sure enough, as he pushes in and pushes in, pretty soon, Matt Damon's character is just sobbing and letting Robin Williams love him and honor the pain with him in that moment.
He has a release and unburdening where he's no longer carrying the weight of all that pain alone in that moment. He's brought the force of all that emotion to the surface with someone who loves him and who cares about him, and he's unburdening the excess baggage, the excess weight of that pain.
There's a moment of release. And that moment of release frees him to then make changes in his life. So pretty soon we get to the end of the movie, spoiler alert, and he's finally able to make a decision where he leaves his old neighborhood. He leaves his past behind and he takes a brave step to claim a different future.
The ending of that movie is so profound because it embodies the both-and of sadness and joy. He unburdens that hurt, he unburdens that pain. There's a departure at the ending of the movie where he says, “I got to go find a fuller, more whole expression of my life and my talents and of the gifts God has given me”.
That means I have to leave my childhood neighborhood. And that's both sad and also incredibly joyful. What I love about that ending is, it is a happy ending in a way, but it's a true ending because so often when you're dealing with hurt or you're dealing with pain, joy is right around the corner. There's something there for you.
Maybe there's a hurt that you experienced long ago that makes the holidays hard for you. Maybe it's hard for you to gather with your family this holiday season. But as you unburden that hurt and you share what's hard with someone who loves you, something amazing happens. That thing that was hard becomes an avenue for deeper connection and that deeper connection with someone who loves you and cares for you in your present life leads to an experience of joy.
Sadness and joy are intimately linked in that way when you look at sadness and you face it and you honor it and you unburden it with someone who loves you and you share that heartache with them, it's amazing what happens. You find connection. Sometimes you end up laughing together.
Sometimes creativity sparks and you decide to do something to honor that loss together. Maybe you decide to do something completely different on Christmas day, because you can't figure out how to do the thing that everybody wants you to do. Maybe you end up getting creative to find new ways to celebrate the holidays as you honor what's also sad.
For example, maybe you spend some time volunteering or spending time with folks who are hurting. There's sometimes solidarity in reaching out to be with others who are hurting at the holidays where you don't feel alone, or maybe you get creative and create a game or a scavenger hunt or eat different foods or make plans to see different people that you don't usually see on the holiday, just to shake things up a little bit and open up new pathways.
Once you honor sadness and share it with someone who loves you, you'll be surprised at the way that creativity starts to pop and you start to see ways to create moments of joy, even as you honor the sadness.
Finally, let's talk about fear. Fear is a pervasive emotion. It's arguably the most primal, most pervasive of all emotions. It's that racing heart when you're about to give a big presentation. It's that pit in your stomach when you have to have a hard conversation. It can turn into anxiety if it gets really big.
Here's the thing about fear. It's also trying to help. Fear can alert you to real threats that you need to get strategic about facing. Sometimes fear is telling you something that you need to know. Hey, you need to have a plan because when you spend time with this family member, things don't always go well. They're inevitably going to hurt you. How are you going to respond? What are you going to do? So fear can be really helpful in alerting you to slow down and create a plan for an unsafe situation.
Fear can also just be a reminder of your vulnerability. You might fear someone's rejection. You might fear that if you disappoint someone, they'll reject you. You might fear that if you don't get things perfectly, people are going to laugh at you or shame you. Fear is so pervasive. It drives so much of what we do. and so it's so important.
Again, if you notice fear, if you notice that pit in your stomach, or you notice that feeling of holding back or wanting to play small or wanting to play it safe, or maybe you just notice the ways that fear manifests as incessant people pleasing, or perfectionism, or constant internal chatter, overthinking, not being able to get things done.
Because you're just analyzing and analyzing, trying to figure out the perfect way so that no one will ever be mad at you. That's another way fear shows up. It is so important if you're noticing that to focus on that feeling, name it. Oh my gosh, that's fear. I'm afraid. I'm terrified of making that person mad. I'm afraid of getting it wrong and making a fool of myself. I'm afraid to make a change because what if I don't have what it takes?
Befriend that feeling. It's okay that it's there. It's there for a reason. We don't have to fix it. We don't have to make it go away. Just notice it and befriend it. Invite God into your experience of fear. God, I'm frightened. I want to be wise. I'm also scared. Help me in that fear.
Unburden the fear. Remind yourself that you are beloved and that no one can take that away from you. Even if you do disappoint someone, even if someone does get mad at you, even if you don't get it perfectly, you are going to be okay because you're a beloved child of God and no one can take that away, even if the worst thing happens, you are going to be okay,
So you unburden that fear, and then you allow that fear to inform your decision-making, but you don't let it drive, you don't let it lead you. Again, you ask yourself this powerful question, how is fear trying to help? It's not maybe using the best strategies, but it's there for a reason. It's trying to help.
So often, what fear needs from you is your validation, number one, just your non-shaming presence. It's hard. Yes, that, I get it. Yes, that is scary. You're right. It is hard. And it also needs you to lovingly remind it of the truth of God's power. Oftentimes, we have to negotiate with our fear a little bit.
Maybe you want to set a really extreme boundary. You wish you could just go to a different place for Christmas and avoid everybody. Your fears, they're going, you can't do that. Everyone will be mad at you.
Fear in that case is actually helping you be reasonable. Let's negotiate internally. Let's think about a way that we can honor other people and simultaneously honor ourselves. So maybe you end up coming up with a hybrid solution where you spend half of Christmas day with your family, but you carve out an hour or two hours to just do something that you want to do for yourself.
Or maybe you're worried about all the people you might disappoint this holiday and you're fearful of just losing love. That is such a big fear for so many of us. We are hardwired for connection. So many of us have those attachment wounds, where we just can't bear the thought of hurting someone and losing that feeling of connection, even when we're doing harm to ourselves by not establishing a healthier boundary.
So if you notice that you're pleasing others or working overtime to make sure no one else is disappointed, maybe you're avoiding conflict out of worry or fear. You've got to extend compassion to your fear. Of course, I don't want to hurt anybody. Of course, I don't want to let anybody down. Of course, I wish I could make everybody happy.
And also, I'm not God. I am not omniscient. I am not all powerful. I have human limitations and I have to operate from within those human limitations and that's normal and it's okay to operate within my own limitations.
If other people don't like that, it's not my responsibility. I have to release that. I have to release them over to God, even as I claim the limits of my God given capacity and you gently work with your fear to soothe your fear. It's okay. Yes, it is scary.
I don't want anyone to be disappointed. And also, it's okay. I am beloved by God. I am going to be okay. And you walk yourself through that experience of fear. Fear, when integrated into your internal family, becomes such a beautiful channel of humility. Or better yet, what I like to call brave humility, where you humbly acknowledge your own human limitations and you do the best that you can and you release what is not your responsibility.
Anger, sadness, and fear become your allies on this journey toward wholeness. Anger helps you speak up for yourself and establish those healthy boundaries. Sadness reminds you to care for yourself and connect with others authentically so that you can be surprised. It's the joy that comes through the power of authentic connection and fear can help you stay kind and humble even as you release expectations of yourself that you were never meant to meet.
These emotions, when befriended and invited into your internal family, help you create a wise tapestry of your life that involves caring for others, even as you honor yourself; that involves setting healthy boundaries, even as you sometimes make sacrifices; hat involve honoring the good things in your life, even as you also honor what's hard.
***Exercise***
I want to close this episode today as well as this entire series by giving you some powerful questions you can ask yourself under each of these five steps. When you encounter a big emotion, you can engage these questions in real time right now as you're listening by hitting pause. on the podcast and journaling about the questions or just quietly noticing inside your soul how you would respond to the different questions.
You can also go to my website www.dralisoncook.com/podcast and find the full transcription for this episode in the episode show notes. And you can use the written version of these questions to help guide you in your journaling. This is a tool for you to use whenever you're noticing a big emotion. So here are the questions.
The first step, Focus.
\Where do you sense the emotion physically?
Is there a thought or image that comes to mind when you focus on it?
What situation evoked the emotion? What's an early memory of when you've experienced this emotion in the past?
Step number two, Befriend.
How do you feel toward this emotion?
If you notice any other emotion like criticism, shame, or frustration, ask that other emotion to step back and see if you can engage this original emotion from a place of compassion or curiosity.
Can you befriend this emotion and welcome it?
Number three, the step of Invite.
What happens when you invite God into your experience of this emotion?
What fears do you have about inviting God to come closer?
Is there anything you sense God has for you in your experience of this emotion?
Number four, the step of Unburden.
What burden does this emotion carry?
Are there any messages that go hand in hand with your experience of this emotion? There might be messages from the past about your worth. About not being good enough, about being rejectable, unlovable, invisible. Notice those heavy weights and see if this part of you would be open to reframing or releasing those messages.
What is a new message you want to tell yourself as it relates to this emotion?
Finally, Step five, Integrate.
How is this emotion trying to help?
What needs is this emotion trying to alert you to in your real life?
How can you work with this emotion to identify a change that you can make? A way to assert yourself, care for yourself, or set a healthy boundary.
And as we close, thank God for your experience of these emotions. They're trying to help you become a fuller, more beautiful version of your God made self.
***
Thank you for joining me for this week's episode of The Best of You. It would mean so much if you'd take a moment to subscribe. You can go to Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you listen to podcasts and click the plus or follow button. That will ensure you don't miss an episode and it helps get the word out to others.
While you're there, I'd love it if you leave your five star review. I look forward to seeing you back here next Thursday. And remember, as you become the best. of who you are. You honor God, you heal others and you stay true to your God given self.
We all over-react at times. I know I do! Maybe someone is late, and you get really angry instead of a little annoyed. Or your colleague gives you constructive feedback, and you feel decimated inside. You don't know why you had such a big reaction. What if your "overreactions" are actually clues to unpack?
In today's episode I walk you through an incredibly practical way to use the power of big emotional reactions in the present to help you heal from events in the past. When you decode the information in your overreactions, you can finally unburden yourself.
Here's what we cover:
1. The main reasons we overreact (8:27)
2. Why we pick up burdens from the past (16:36)
3. The effects of parentification (18:55)
4. How to become a cycle-breaker (23:27)
5. A real-time exercise in unburdening (29:20)
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Music by Andy Luiten
Sound editing by Kelly Kramarik
While Dr. Cook is a counselor, the content of this podcast and any of the products provided by Dr. Cook are not specific counseling advice nor are they a substitute for individual counseling. The content and products provided on this podcast are for informational purposes only.
Resources
- Boundaries For Your Soul by Dr. Alison Cook and Kimberly Miller
- 2 Corinthians 10:5
Transcript
Hey everyone, and welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You Podcast. I'm so glad you're here. I'm so glad you're joining me for this whole series, Five Steps to Navigating Overwhelming Emotions.
We have two steps left and today's is so important. We're going to touch on so many things that so many of you ask me about regularly. I love today's topic. We're going to get into this question of how do I break cycles and what does that have to do with my current day emotion?
Now, listen, if you are not already subscribed to The Best of You Podcast, please take a moment and subscribe to it right now. You can click the plus sign or the follow sign wherever you listen to the podcast. When you subscribe to it, you'll get reminders every time there's a new episode so that you don't miss one. Now, if you're on my email list, I also send out email reminders, but the best way to never miss one of these episodes is to click that subscribe button.
So what we've talked about so far is the very first step is to focus on an emotion, especially an emotion you don't like, we want to make them go away. But the first step is to actually stop yourself long enough to focus on it, which is immediately then followed by the second step of befriending. You focus on the emotion and you befriend it. You welcome it. It's there for a reason.
We're not saying that you welcome it to let it take you over, but you welcome it so that you can figure out why it's there and what you need to do on behalf of that emotion.
The third step, you invite God into your experience of that emotion. So now you're aware of the emotion, you're extending compassion toward the emotion, and you've invited God into your experience of that emotion. If you think about it, all of this is leading toward a wiser way through it.
These emotions are there for a reason. They’re cues that, when harnessed, can help guide you into healthier decision making, healthier actions in your day to day life.
Today's step is the step of unburden. Sometimes these emotions get complicated. Sometimes they're deep. They're rooted in pain. All the way from the past. In this case, the emotions are bigger than the immediate set of circumstances.
You might notice that you're more angry or more sad or more anxious than the actual situation in front of you warrants. If that's the case, that's just a cue that you need to do some work of unburdening. You've picked up a burden or two, and I'm going to get into what I mean by that.
We need to take a little more time to go deeper and unburden that part of you that's picked up this pain from the past so that you can free that part of you from the unnecessary weight of the emotion. There's a quote from my book with Kimberly Miller called Boundaries For Your Soul. There's a quote where we say, suffer what you have to suffer, but don't suffer what you don't have to suffer.
What that means is you might feel a little sad. Or a little anxious, or a little frustrated. That might make sense. That's suffering a little bit, but sometimes when these emotions get bigger than the situation warrants, it's because we're suffering something that's unhealed from the past. We're bringing past pain into present pain, which makes it twice the pain, and we don't need to experience that extra weight of pain, so we can unburden that emotion.
We're just experiencing a normal range of emotions without that excess baggage from the past. So with that being said, let's dive into this fourth step of unburdening a painful emotion.
The first question that I usually get asked when we're talking about unburdening an emotion is how do I know that I need to do this work? How do I know that one of my emotional responses has gotten extreme? The answer is, it's when you have an overreaction emotionally.
I want to be clear, there's no shame in this. We all overreact. When someone is overreacting, it's just the reality that you're getting more emotionally charged than the situation warrants. Let me give you some examples of what I mean by that.
A classic example is you lose your temper or yell over a minor mistake. Maybe one of your kids spills their milk, or maybe a spouse forgets about an appointment and you just lose it and you yell or you get really angry at them. That's a classic example of an overreaction. The situation warrants frustration. It might even warrant anger, but it doesn't warrant that extreme anger response.
Here’s another example that has to do with anxiety. Maybe a work meeting that you've been really nervous about gets changed. The schedule gets changed on you. While that change might evoke anxiety, an overreaction might be if it evokes extreme anxiety or even panic. Same thing if someone's late, maybe a friend is late to meet you for coffee.
While you feel a little bit stressed, you're a little bit worried. Where are they? An overreaction would be that you start to catastrophize and you start to imagine that they've been in a car accident and they're at the hospital when really they're just 10 minutes late. So that would be an example of an extreme emotion where you're having an emotional response that doesn't exactly match the situation in front of you.
A third example is that you get extremely sad over a minor disappointment. So for example, maybe you don't get invited to a neighbor's get together and it's disappointing and you're bummed out. But an overreaction might mean that you get really depressed and you start feeling like you're just never gonna be included anywhere.
It really was just one gathering. Or maybe someone at work or someone in your family gives you some constructive feedback and you just break down crying. You just get so sad. You have an extreme emotional response to a situation that really warranted a mild feeling of disappointment or a little bit of hurt, but not a major reaction.
That's what we mean by an overreaction. It just means that we have an emotional reaction that's not proportionate to the situation at hand. Again, there's no shame in this. This is a cue that we might need to unburden some part of us that's experiencing the big emotion.
The first thing we have to do is look at the underlying reasons for why the emotion might be so big. So, here are some of the reasons you might be having these big reactions:
It might just be stress or emotional strain. This is really common during the holidays, and we use that phrase, sometimes it's the straw that breaks the camel's back. The thing that happened hit you at a moment where you just didn't have anything left and you exploded in a big emotional reaction. Now, if that's the case, you will know, because pretty quickly you'll realize, oh my gosh, I completely overreacted.
I'm so sorry. I'm just stressed out. ‘Cause there's a lot going on. Here's why. You'll move on. That in and of itself is an unburdening. You recognize, oh, I'm carrying a lot of weight and this one, and this one thing was just too much.
So you unburden the weight of that shame. You name it, you honor it, and you let your loved one know, hey, this is what happened, and you're good. You repair. So that could be one of the reasons you have a big reaction, but today, what I want to get into is the reality that sometimes there's a deeper reason that you had a big reaction.
Something happened in the past that is just similar enough to this situation in the present, that those emotions from the past are sneaking in and ambushing you in the present situation. So I'm going to unpack this a little bit for you, but this is really common. You have an overreaction in the present because there's something in the past that still hasn't been unburdened, that you still haven't fully healed from, and that part of you wants to get healed, so it sneaks into the present, hijacks you in the moment.
You have this big reaction. You can't figure out why. Well, in this case, it's what we call a trail head. It's a cue that you need to look back and follow the trail to what is the actual event that happened in the past that is actually related to the big emotion that you didn't get to have back then, and you needed to have back then so that you could heal and repair.
Okay, so here's an example of what I mean by this. Let's go to the situation where your anxiety gets really big when someone changes the schedule. Let's say in this case you and a few friends were planning a get together, you've been looking forward to it, you've been so excited about it, and suddenly your friend backs out. They have to change the schedule, and it's for a very understandable reason, and you're disappointed by it, but you have a huge reaction to it.
You're angry, you're upset, you feel abandoned, you feel betrayed, you feel almost inconsolable. In that situation, the real thing that happened is that you've had a history of people canceling on you, of people ghosting you.
In fact, the history with this particular emotion of feeling abandoned might go all the way back to childhood where around Christmas time, there was a family gathering and you were so excited about it.
Maybe your parents had a history of being erratic or inconsistent in their behavior and they just canceled the event, didn't explain it to you, and you were just left in the dark.
Suddenly it's just gone and you're alone and nobody ever explained to you what happened. Nobody ever talked you through it and you were just left alone with all that disappointment and all those feelings of sadness. No one ever talked you through it and helped you heal that wound.
In fact, maybe that was a pattern. Maybe that happened time and time again, where there was just this inconsistency, where your parents were coming and going and no one stuck to this schedule, and you never knew what was happening, and you look forward to something, and then it'd be canceled, or one parent wouldn't show up, and for whatever reason you just constantly felt alone and abandoned and disappointed.
You've never really dealt with that. You never really had a chance to process that trauma and the memory of that feeling of abandonment still lives in your body. So when something happens in your present life that is just similar enough to that past experience, it triggers that backlog of emotions from deep inside of you.
Instead of just getting a little bit of disappointment, you get that whole geyser of emotions that's been buried inside of you for decades in some cases. You have this huge reaction to what really in the present tense was just a minor disappointment. So that's just an example of how painful events from the past can create these burdened emotions that are just buried deep inside.
When something happens in your present life that even loosely resembles one of those painful events from the past, those burdened emotions take the opportunity to just show up in a big way.
The good news is that when that happens, it's an opportunity to give yourself the care that you actually need. To unburden those painful emotions from the past so you can separate what happened in the past out from these very normal, very real, more manageable disappointments in the present.
This is the heart of the work that is so often done in therapy. It's noticing these big reactions and helping you identify what is rooted in your present circumstances and what is residual, unhealed pain from the past so that you can disconnect the two and have a normal reaction in your present. Oh, that's disappointing. Or, oh, I'm kind of bummed or, oh, that worries me a little bit, but those emotions match the situation in front of you.
You're not carrying all the weight of those burdens from those past memories. This is an example of a cue that you might need to do some unburdening: it's when your emotions in the present tense are bigger than the situation in front of you warrants.
If you're noticing that, if you're like, man, that is me, I do that. I have these big reactions that I can't figure out why they're so big. I can't figure out why I can't just be a little bit disappointed or a little bit angry or a little bit anxious. You know, because that feels like the normal way to respond to these events.
Please do not beat yourself up or shame yourself. This is just your body, the way that God designed you to give you a cue. Oh, I need to do some unburdening work. I need to do some healing. There's something in my past that maybe needs my attention.
So what do we mean by burdens? Well, the burdens that we pick up are these extreme beliefs or feelings. Sometimes they're physical sensations. Where we'll feel a disproportionate amount of tension or tightness in our stomach. Parts of you have taken on as a result of painful experiences from the past.
You can develop these burdens at any time, but often they develop in childhood. When you're a child, your mind can't process complex emotions or complex situations. So when something hard happens, even in the best of parenting situations, you make sense of those events, you often interpret those events in ways that aren't helpful.
That's when you pick up a burden, a belief burden, or an emotional burden that you were never meant to carry, but it never gets healed at the actual place where the injury occurred. Parts of your soul are still hanging on to these burdens from the past. So I want to give you some examples of these burdens. if you want more examples, there's two pages devoted to these examples and how to resolve these examples in Boundaries for Your Soul in the chapter on unburdening.
So here are some examples. My parents are fighting. It must be my fault. As a kid, your parents are fighting all the time. You hate it. No one's really naming it. No one's really helping you understand what's happening.
So you tell yourself, and this is so common, it must be my fault. If I could behave better, if I could be more perfect, my parents wouldn't behave in this way. So you take in that burden and it helps you explain a really hard situation, even though it's not true.
There is no correlation between your behavior and your parents fighting. But you tell yourself that because it helps you make sense of a painful situation, you carry that burden with you all the way into adulthood. So whenever anybody's fighting around you, you feel like it's your fault. It must be my fault that there's conflict. Even though it has nothing to do with you.
Anytime you're with people who are fighting or there's conflict, even normal conflict or healthy conflict, you start getting so anxious inside because in your mind, this is catastrophic. I can't let this happen. Because you're still back as that young child where it really was catastrophic to be a child witnessing two adults argue and fight and be angry with each other without anybody caring for you through that.
Another common burden that you pick up as a child and bring into adulthood is, I am responsible for everyone around me. Now, I bet a lot of you have that one. I am responsible for everyone around me. Now, listen, in a small dose, we are responsible to some degree to be good to the people around us in a normal way.
But let me walk you through how that oftentimes is rooted in a belief burden. You're a young child. The caregivers in your life aren't taking care of themselves.
Maybe one of your parents has an undiagnosed mental illness and you watch them not really be able to get out of bed or not really be able to care for themselves or be really erratic emotionally and you take on the responsibility for that. You start parenting your parent as a young child.
There's a term for this in psychology. It's called parentification. You become the parent for your parent, and it's never a child's responsibility to parent their parent. A child has a basic need of being cared for and loved and nurtured by an adult caregiver.
When that role gets inverted and the child is asked to care for their caregiver, that burden gets formed. It's my responsibility to be responsible for everybody else. That burden can sometimes get translated as, I'm not worthy to receive care from others because as a child, nobody ever cared for you.
You never had a lived experience inside your body of what it feels like to be cared for by an adult, by a parent, and so you tell yourself, oh, I'm not worthy of care. So not only am I responsible for everybody else, I'm also simultaneously not worthy of receiving care.
That's a double whammy of a belief burden. Either one of those is hard enough. But they're both rooted in a situation where as a child, you didn't get the care you needed from a caregiver and you picked up a burden. Listen, this is not conscious. You don't know that you're doing this when you're a young child.
You don't consciously say, wow, it's my job as a five year old to be the most responsible person in the room, to be the most mature person in the room. It's not conscious. It's just what happens. You start to notice that no one else in your household is taking any responsibility for their health or well being and so you do.
You just step up and do it and you tell yourself at some deep level, you internalize the message of, this is what I'm supposed to do. I'm supposed to be responsible for everyone. You take that with you into adulthood, and you don't know how to let go. You don't know how to let other people take responsibility for what is actually their responsibility.
So these are belief burdens we pick up as young children. We internalize them and they're operating silently under the surface, but they're influencing the ways we show up with others.
Again, let's say you're an adult and you're just overworking to the point of almost harming yourself to do things for other people that are not your responsibility to do for them. Maybe someone comes to you and gives you some constructive feedback and says, hey, I don't want you to do this. I don't want you to micromanage me in this or stop asking me about this or stop trying to do what's mine to do.
You feel incredibly hurt by that when in reality they're actually trying to be helpful. They're trying to say, listen, you don't have to do this for me, but you carry that burden of, that's the only thing I know. I only know how to take responsibility for everybody around me.
So if you try to pry that responsibility away from me, I feel decimated. I don't know what to do with that. I don't know how to let people come alongside and share the weight with me, so you have a big reaction that's rooted in a burden from the past.
Now, here's the thing. Rationally, you may well understand that you shouldn't be thinking or feeling in the way that you do. You may be able to tell me, I get that that thing that happened in the past wasn't my fault. You have some cognitive awareness about it, but the reality is some part of you deep inside may still carry a residual experience of that burden.
When a similar situation happens, that part of you tends to come to the surface. So that's where these steps are iterative. When that happens, you focus on it. Oh, I just had a big reaction. You befriend it. This is a cue. My body's trying to tell me something. Something happened that needs my attention. You invite God into that experience. God, help me understand. Then you can go through this process of unburdening.
So I want to end this episode with a little exercise in unburdening because the best way to do it is to experience it. But before we do that, I want to touch on this idea of cycle-breaking. You may have heard this. It kind of floats around social media from time to time, this idea of being a cycle breaker.
A cycle breaker is someone who works to disrupt and change a negative familial pattern. If you think about it, these patterns get handed down generationally. So, for example, the burdens you picked up as a result of the way you were parented, your parents probably picked up the way they parented from their parents.
So when you break cycles, you work to identify an unhealthy pattern in your family of origin, something that happened that caused you harm. So you work to identify it, heal it in yourself, and then as a result of that, you then no longer pass that same unhealthy pattern down to your own offspring.
So you become a cycle breaker. You stop the pattern. This work of unburdening is really important. As you unburden your own painful emotions and your own painful memories, you're breaking the cycle of a pattern of behaviors.
You're consciously choosing a different path. You're choosing to heal and in doing so you create ripple effects of healing into the people around you, including your own family and the next generations ahead of you.
Here are some examples of what I mean by that. Oftentimes, addiction or misuse, what causes some of these injuries, is in your childhood. When you break a cycle of addiction and you heal and you obtain your sobriety and you no longer use, you're breaking a cycle and you're no longer handing down the damage that comes from substance abuse.
You're healing what happened to you and you're stopping that pattern of injury that occurs in families where their substance misuse from being passed down to the next generation. If there's a pattern of untreated mental illness, such as untreated anxiety or depression in your family, maybe that's the reason that your parent, when you were young, wasn't available to you, or why you don't have a secure attachment.
What you've decided to do is prioritize your own mental health so that you are healing those wounds and as a result, no longer passing down the damages of untreated mental health issues in your family.
It can happen. You can break the cycle of unhealthy conflict where maybe you were really harmed by the way the adults in your life handled conflict. so you, as a result of that, have decided I'm going to become someone who's really good at navigating conflict.
I'm going to unburden and heal the damage that that did to me. Then I'm going to work to create places of healthy conflict in my family going forward. There's so many ways we can become cycle breakers and cycle breaking comes out of this work of unburdening.
It's a byproduct. It's a fruit of this work. As you unburden and heal from the pain of your past, you create a ripple effect of change. You start to show up as a healthier version of yourself and your own family and your healing creates a ripple effect.
When the Bible talks about generational sin, I often think of it as generational trauma. We're passing down the generational trauma of our ancestors. You have an opportunity as you engage in your own healing work to unburden these painful emotions from the past, stopping that generational pattern and ushering in a generation of healing. This is amazing work.
We are part of that together. That's really what this whole podcast is about. It's unleashing a movement of healing because as you heal, you heal everybody around you.
Sometimes parts of us are fearful of unburdening. It's scary. Change is hard. Sometimes we like to keep the status quo. Again, the chapter on unburdening and Boundaries For Your Soul is an invaluable resource, walking you through some of the different fears that you may have about doing this work.
I mentioned this here because I want to say, if you have a deep reservoir of pain from your past, you don't want to do this work alone. This is work you want to do with a therapist or with safe people where you begin to unpack some of the pain from your past.
But it's so important for all of us to do the work of noticing where is there a big reaction, or a big pattern of emotional reactions in my life that I'm just not able to get on top of, and maybe that's a cue that there's some unburdening work I need to do. There's some painful experiences from my past that need to be healed and where I need to do some of the work of unburdening.
So I want to end with an exercise where you can begin to get a glimpse of this work of unburdening. As we walk through this exercise, if you want to pause the podcast, wherever you're listening, to give yourself more time to reflect, just feel free to do that.
Take this at your own pace. I'm going to walk you through some questions so you can just listen and learn, or you can actually try to engage the questions in real time by hitting pause and maybe doing some journaling work as I ask you each of the questions.
Think of a recent situation that evoked a strong reaction in you. Maybe it was at work, maybe it was at home, maybe it was with a friend, but you had maybe an overreaction. Just think about that situation and see if you can work through those first three steps as it relates to the emotion.
What was the emotion? Just focus on the emotion for a moment apart from the situation. Were you angry, were you anxious, were you sad? Were you scared? And then see if you can befriend that emotion. See if you can get curious about it or become compassionate toward it and just kind of notice what that emotion is.
If it feels overwhelming or too extreme, that's a cue that you might need to process this with another person, that you don't want to do this alone, because sometimes that can happen if you're new to this work. But if it feels comfortable to you, just notice the emotion and from a place of compassion and notice what it feels like in your body. You might even notice what it feels like as an image in your mind.
Then as you're connecting to the experience of that emotion, whatever it is, just letting yourself be present to it, you might invite God to be with you in that experience as well, to gain deeper understanding through the power of God's presence. What was that about? That sadness, that anger, that big reaction.
I'm aware of it. I'm connected to it. I'm not shaming myself for it. What was that about God? You're kind of becoming a detective or a student of your own soul. You're becoming aware of the emotion from a healthy distance.
Just notice what that feels like. Let the situation fade away as you tap into the emotion you experienced in that moment. As you're present to that experience of the emotion, whatever it is, begin to ask yourself some unburdening questions.
What is an extreme belief or a message? That goes hand in hand with this feeling. So here's some examples of what I mean by that.
As you're present to the emotion, you might become aware of some messages you tell yourself about the experience that evoked that emotion. For example:
No one ever helps me. I'm always on my own.
It's my fault. I should have tried harder.
No one will ever understand me.
If people are angry, I'm not safe.
If someone is mad at me, it must be my fault.
If someone is disappointed with me, it must be my fault.
If someone ignores me, it's because I'm not worthy.
If things don't go perfectly, I am a complete failure and no one will ever love me.
These are all examples of belief burdens, and notice if any of those types of messages resonate with your experience of that emotion. If so, I want you to make a note of that burden. What is it and what might that part of you that's been carrying the weight of that burden need from you or from God to create what I call a holy reframe? What's a holy, healed, healthy message that that part of you needs to hear?
When you create a holy reframe, I want you to imagine that part of you feeling the emotion as a child. What would a child need to hear in that moment of feeling the weight of that burden? Here are some examples:
Sometimes you feel alone, but there are people willing to help. Let's stay persistent.
It may take time, but someone will understand and love and appreciate you for who you are.
It's uncomfortable when someone is upset with you, but it doesn't mean everything will fall apart. You're safe.
Disappointment is a part of life. It doesn't mean that you did something wrong.
There might be many reasons someone ignored you, but you are always worthy of honor and care.
Criticism can be hard to hear, but it doesn't have to define you.
Take what's helpful to grow and release the rest.
It doesn't have to be perfect to be a success. Let's celebrate the good that we were able to accomplish.
As you reframe those painful burdens, it's really important that you're connecting with the part of you that experienced the big emotion. In that moment, you're reparenting yourself in a way.
You're helping a young part of you release an old burden and recognize that there might be a different way to see this situation. This hurting part of your soul can learn to release some of the weight of that pain that it's been carrying from long ago. You begin to care for yourself in that moment, in the way that maybe no one ever cared for you back then.
This work of unburdening is a process of releasing old messages you may have carried around for decades and replacing them with truer, more beautiful messages infused by God's Spirit. Messages rooted in the truth, that you are enough, you are worthy, you are beloved.
No matter how hard this situation is, you have what it takes in partnership with God's Spirit to face it. It's a process of tenderly attuning to every part of your soul in need of your care from this place of compassionate presence.
Remember, suffer what you have to suffer. There are hard situations that you have to work your way through with your family, with your friends, with the holiday season. But don't suffer what you don't need to suffer.
Take captive every thought, Paul said. It applies to these messages. You tell yourselves in these moments of big emotions, notice what messages you're telling yourself, release those messages and replace them with the truth of your belovedness as a soul created to bear the image of God.
If you're struggling to feel connected spiritually or stuck in negative emotions, you're in good company. Research shows that 9 out of 10 people struggle with stress during the holidays. In today's episode, I walk you through my simple but life-changing strategy for unlocking spiritual connection and experiencing more of God's loving presence.
Here's what we cover:
1. 3 reasons painful emotions get heightened at the holidays (2:32)
2. A simple hack for experiencing more spiritual vitality (8:22)
3. The neurobiology of what happens when you connect with God (9:43)
4. How to transform mundane moments into spiritual encounters (12:18)
5. How to harness your external environment to change your mental habits (23:03)
Thanks to our sponsors:
- This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/BESTOFYOU and get on your way to being your best self.
- Listen to Girls Night with Stephanie May Wilson wherever you get your podcasts!
- Go to www.organifi.com/bestofyou today and use code BESTOFYOU for 20% off your order today.
- Get 35% off your first order of Sundays. Go to SundaysForDogs.com/BESTOFYOU or use code BESTOFYOU at checkout.
Music by Andy Luiten
Sound editing by Kelly Kramarik
While Dr. Cook is a counselor, the content of this podcast and any of the products provided by Dr. Cook are not specific counseling advice nor are they a substitute for individual counseling. The content and products provided on this podcast are for informational purposes only.
Resources
- Boundaries For Your Soul by Dr. Alison Cook and Kimberly Miller
- The Practice of the Presence of God by Brother Lawrence
- Galatians 5:25
- The Garden Within by Dr. Anita Phillips
Transcript
Alison Cook: Hey everyone. And welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You Podcast. I'm so glad you're here. I'm so glad you keep coming back each week.
The response to this new series on five steps to navigating overwhelming emotions has been amazing. So many of you have written to me, letting me know that yes, this holiday season, you are dealing with so many tough emotions.
The holidays amplify our emotional states, this is a well researched fact in psychology. The holidays put a magnifying glass on family gatherings, on times that are supposed to be joyful and celebratory.
And so they evoke memories from the past. It's normal and natural that you feel heightened emotions as you anticipate these gatherings. If you've had a loss in your family, or if you've got acrimony or discord in a family, or if you have painful memories from past holidays, it makes sense that the coming of December will trigger some of those emotions.
Our emotions often have roots in memories from the past. Which means they're often influenced by previous experiences. So when you encounter a situation that's similar to a situation you've encountered before, maybe numerous times, if you go back through the course of your whole life, your brain can trigger emotions based on those past experiences.
So what I mean by that is as we move toward Christmas, there could be a young part of you, a part of you that is still stuck in a five year old memory of a traumatic Christmas. This is really common, these holidays have a lot of buildup around them.
And so if you've got some unresolved pain from your past, it makes sense that the coming of the Christmas holiday will start to tap on areas where you might have some lingering wounds from things that occurred a long time ago.
So that's one reason why emotions get intensified at the holidays–this idea of stored memory where a holiday triggers these memories from the past. A second reason is that there's a lot of pressure on the holidays.
There's a lot of stress on trying to make everything just right, make everything perfect, make everybody happy. Keep your kids happy. Keep your extended family happy, navigate different expectations that other people around you have for the holidays, navigate invitations or the lack of invitations. There's a lot of pressure to please, perform, produce, compare, all of those P words we went through last year at this time.
These over-working parts of us tend to come out this time of year under all the pressure of the holiday season. It can amplify those feelings of being less than, or shame for not having things perfect. Or those feelings that surface when you feel like you can't please everybody.
Or the feeling of self defeat when you feel like you can't produce at the level that everybody expects you to produce. Or the feelings of inferiority if you feel like you're not measuring up to what you see everyone around you doing. There's so many ways that some of these go-to parts of us can surface.
So if you're noticing yourself feeling more of those feelings than you normally do, don't be surprised. The holidays tend to activate some of these feelings. And then finally, the third reason that our emotional overwhelm can get amplified during the holidays is that the holidays can serve as a milestone or a marker for grief and loss.
The holidays tend to evoke those memories of the people we love who are no longer with us, or the people we love who are far away or who we can't be with during this season. And so you may feel the tension of the holiday season, wanting to experience the joy of the holiday season while simultaneously being even more aware of the grief or the loss.
This is normal, and throughout this series, I really want you to honor these different emotions that surface during the holidays. If there's one thing you take from this entire series, it's this: all of those emotions are welcome.
All of those emotions have a seat at your table, this holiday season. I can feel both joy and sadness this holiday.
I'm actually going to focus on that feeling and befriend it and incorporate that emotion into my experience of the holidays this year. Those are the first two steps to dealing with overwhelming emotions. We're going to get to the third step in today's episode, which is to invite God into your experience of that emotion.
***
The third step of the five steps to navigating your overwhelming emotions is based on my book with Kimberly Miller, Boundaries For Your Soul. This third step of “invite” is so important. This is the step where deep healing and transformation occurs.
You've got to first focus on that emotion. You've got to stop trying to banish it or make it go away. You've got to befriend that emotion, make peace with it. Then, where the real transformation occurs is when you're present to that emotion, whatever it is, you invite God to be with you in your experience of that emotion.
This is holy ground. This is where transformation occurs, where you not only become present to your own experience of an emotion, but you invite the one who made you and who loves you to be present with you in your experience of that emotion.
And I want to simplify this process because it's a really deep transformational process, but there's a really simple way into it. It's what I like to call “comma, God”. It's a really simple hack that I've found to be transformational in my own life.
What you do is no matter where you are, it could be right now, wherever you are listening to this podcast, it could be while you're journaling, it could be while you're grocery shopping, it could be while you're in the car pickup lane, waiting to pick up your child from school.
You become aware of the emotion. You focus on it. Oh. There it is. There's that emotion. There's that feeling I wish I didn't have. I do have it. I'm going to befriend it. And as you're naming that experience of that emotion, I want you to simply add a comma, God to your experience of naming that emotion.
Here are some examples of what I mean. I'm worried about all of these things. I'm worried about my kids. I'm worried about money. I'm worried about my health. Start to add a comma, God. I'm worried, God. I'm sad, God. I don't have time to pray, God. I'm angry, God.
And suddenly you just start to name these different experiences, and you're inviting God into the experience with you. I'm so mad right now, God. I don't have enough help. I'm all on my own. No one is helping me with anything.
“I feel so alone” becomes “I feel so alone, God, help me find support”. And you see the difference when you're in the emotion and you're ruminating in the emotion–I'm worried, I'm angry, I'm this, I'm that–you're blended with the emotion.
As you begin to bring that emotion out in front of you, you focus on it. You befriend it. I'm worried. And then you invite God into it. I'm worried, God. Help me untangle the knots. And suddenly you're engaged in a lived embodied form of prayer. Instead of walking through the grocery store lines, mindlessly ruminating, you're mindfully aware of the things on your mind in partnership with God's spirit.
It's a simple way into an ancient practice that Brother Lawrence talked about in his beautiful book, Practicing the Presence of God. Every single moment you become aware of an emotion, wherever you are, you name it, you befriend it, and you invite God into your experience with it.
You just add a comma, God. Comma, God is a simple way into a deeply transformational practice, literally wherever you are, whatever you're thinking about, add a comma, God.
What's happening in that moment is a deeply profound act of becoming consciously aware of the contents of your own soul, getting them out of your mind, getting out of your amygdala, out of your left brain where you're ruminating.
You're becoming consciously aware of whatever it is that's on your mind, whatever emotions, whatever thoughts–you're bringing them out in front of you, with those first two steps and then adding that comma, God. Suddenly you're not alone. You're aware of your feelings in partnership with God.
This is a transformational way to go through your day.
As you invite God into whatever it is that you're experiencing at any given moment of the day, you transform your spiritual practices. No longer is prayer this sort of 20 minute quiet time that you guilt trip yourself for not having every single morning–all of a sudden prayer becomes an embodied way of being in the world.
And you begin to bring every part of who you are into relationship with both yourself and with God. And here's the thing: even if you notice that you don't want to invite God into that moment, I'm mad at you, God, I don't really want to talk to you about it. Right there, you're still engaging a form of prayer.
Your comma God is: I'm mad and I don't want to talk with you about it, God. I'm hurting and I don't want to pray, God. Suddenly you're telling God about how you feel about talking to God, which is a form of prayer in and of itself.
It's amazing when you start to add a comma God to the end of every single feeling and every single sentence that you notice in your heart, mind, and soul. So I want to end today's episode with some other ways that you can practice this embodied version of prayer.
Many of us measure the success of our prayer life by maybe the intensity of connection that we feel with God or the minutes on the clock or how much we're able to focus with our eyes closed on God or meditating on scripture. Now, listen, those are all really fantastic practices, and we need to do those things, but I'm pretty sure that practicing the presence of God and inviting God into everything you're experiencing is equally as important, if not more.
It's what we see in the life of Jesus. It's walking in step with God's Spirit, which is what Paul talked about in Galatians 5. Let us keep in step with God's spirit all the time, everywhere we go. This is not shaming nor judging, this is a reorienting of your mind, heart, and soul to the presence of God.
In order to do that, you first have to be aware of the contents of your own soul, of what you're really thinking and feeling. And you have to believe that the God you're inviting into the contents of your soul loves you and is not judging or fearful of anything that God will find there. A lot of times we're having to get rid of old messages that we've inherited somehow.
It's a practice. Here are some really practical ways to train yourself toward this practice of paying attention to your feelings, even as you're inviting God into them. So the first step is to think about a time of day when your mind drifts, whether you're gardening or walking or driving to work or cooking or in traffic. These sort of dead periods where you're doing something, but your mind is free to wander.
These are the best moments to begin to capture this step of invite, in this step of using the comma, God hack where you become consciously aware of whatever it is that you're thinking and feeling and adding that comma God to the experience.
So the very first thing to do once you've identified those places where your mind tends to drift or where the emotions could potentially stir up, because you've got some dead time where you don't have to be focused on work or on somebody else. And just begin to notice, what are you actually thinking about?
What are you actually feeling? And then add that comma God, invite God into that experience. Isn't that interesting? I'm worried about my bills. I'm worried about my health. And then just take that next step. God, here's what's happening. I'm worried about my bills.
I'm worried about my health, God. Help me think clearly about what's really going on. Be with me as I work to get to the root of these fears or, I can't shake this idea that someone is mad at me, that I'm letting someone down, that I'm disappointing someone, God. Isn't that interesting?
Could you be with the part of me that's ruminating on this? They can't stop thinking about this. Could you help me consider the facts of the situation, God? Could you help me discern, God? If I actually hurt another person, if I actually did let someone down or if I didn't, God, could you help me think through this situation?
Suddenly you've got a partner as you become mindful of this fear. Or I'm wrestling with grief. God, I don't want to feel grief. I want to numb out. I want to make it go away, but I can't. It's here, God. Could you be with me in the grief? Could you help me honor the grief without letting the grief take me over?
Could you help me, God?
Carve out times to grieve, and to simultaneously still honor the good gifts that are available to me right now. God, could you help me honor both? I'm worried, God, about the conflict that I know is going to ensue on Christmas Day between my parents who are divorced or between my siblings who don't talk to each other anymore, between my kids who don't really get along.
I'm worried, God, could you join me in that worry? Could you help that part of me to calm down a little bit, because when I calm that worry a little bit, that's when creativity starts to show up. Could you help me, God, to calm that worried part of my soul? I'm tired, God. I don't have the energy to do all this.
Could you come be with that part of me, Lord? That's exhausting. Could we just tend to that weary part of my soul and could we stop forcing her to get it together for just this one moment? Suddenly you're tending to these different parts of you in partnership with God. You're taking otherwise ordinary moments of the day and turning them into healing moments where you become aware of what your soul actually needs.
Creativity shows up in those moments of holy, God-driven, compassionate self-awareness.
So the first way to invite God into this process is to identify those times throughout your day where you have that dead time, where you're doing something, some sort of task, but your mind tends to drift. Your mind tends to wander. Capture those moments to do this work to focus on the emotion that you're feeling, whatever it is in that moment.
Befriend it and to invite God into it through using this comma God exercise. So that's the first thing you want to do. I want you to harness the power of those moments that we all have throughout the day. There's no excuse not to do this work. We all have moments of time where we're participating in a somewhat mindless activity. Turn those mindless activities into mindful moments with God, where you do this work again of focusing on an emotion that you're feeling, befriending it and inviting God into it.
The second thing that you can do in order to invite God into more of what you're experiencing each and every day is to harness the power of your external environment. Notice the things around you, particularly in nature. Nature is filled with reminders about the power of God. And that's why Jesus used so many metaphors related to the mountains, the hills, the trees.
He was always looking to nature as a reminder to point us toward God. Nature serves as this very practical, concrete, reminder. Whether you're in a house looking out the window, whether you live in an apartment in a city or whether you live out in the country, you can always look out your window and see what is going on outside and use that as a cue to remind you about God.
So you start to add a comma God to whatever it is that you notice when you're looking at what's around you in your external environment. So here are some examples of how you can use those external cues, especially from nature to practice inviting in the presence of God. So the first thing is just to look at your window and notice, do you see trees?
Do you see mountains? Do you see grass? Is the sun out or is the sun setting? Is it night or is it day? Each one of those things that are always going to be around you becomes a cue. Let's say you're taking a walk and you start to notice the trees around you. I see those trees, God, those trees remind me that all seasons pass.
Maybe you notice that it's winter, that there's snow on the ground. I see the snow on the ground. The trees don't have leaves, God, this is a reminder that everything has its season. It's okay for me not to feel the glory of all the fruitfulness right now. This season matters. And this season will also pass.
Maybe you put a plant in front of you that you tend each day. And every day you see that plant becomes a cue to invite God into whatever it is that you're experiencing. Every time I water this plant, God, I'm reminded that I need to water my own body, literally, that I need to tend to the garden of my own soul. Every time I notice that this plant needs me to remove some weeds or some dead leaves, it reminds me, God, to check in on the soil of my own soul. What does my own soul need?
A powerful resource that I want to, that I can't recommend and a powerful resource that I can't recommend enough is Dr. Anita Phillips’ new book called The Garden Within. It's a beautiful book that uses this metaphor of the soil of your soul and how you need to tend to it. And so maybe you read that book and you buy a plant, and every day that you have to care for that plant becomes a reminder to you to add that comma God.
Here's this plant that needs my care, God. How can I apply that same wisdom to my own soul? Maybe every morning or every evening, as you watch the sun set, you notice that sunset and add that, comma, God. The sun is setting, God, you do that.
I have no control over that. I can't make that happen. And yet, every evening, the sun sets, God, and every morning, that same sun rises. Those two things happen and they remind me that you are ultimately in control, God, and I am not. What are the things in my own life that I need to send off with the sun as the sun sets and let it go for the rest of this evening?
Because guess what? Those things will come back tomorrow when I wake up with the sun and the sun rises. Those things I'm worried about will still be here tomorrow, God. But I can let those things go with the sun as it sets right now.
Okay, so that’s the second practical thing you can do. The first one is just to identify those places during the day where you've got some mindless time, where your mind tends to wander. Turn those mindless times into mindful times where you invite God into whatever it is that your mind goes to during those times, because there's really no such thing as a mindless time. Your mind is dwelling on something during those moments. So use those dead times to focus, befriend, and invite God into whatever it is that you're experiencing.
Number two, use those external reminders, especially from nature. And again, the reason I love using those cues from nature, whether it's plants, trees, hills, the seasons, the sun rising or setting, whatever it is that's around you is that they are just beautiful reminders of how God shows up in every detail of every day.
Every time you notice one of those objects in nature, remind yourself to add that comma, God. What does that tree have to teach me, God? What does the fact that the sun is setting right now have to remind me of you? Use those external cues. And then number three, the last practical thing you can do to invite more of the presence of God into your day to day life, is your breath.
Your breath is such a powerful tool. It's literally what keeps you alive. You do it all the time. And so often we are not mindful or conscious of the fact that we're breathing. But when you notice those moments, again, going back to those typically mindless moments, when you're in traffic or you're picking up your kids or you're running errands.
Start to notice your breath. Notice what it feels like to take a deep breath in and take a deep breath out, and then add a comma God. I'm worried, God. Inhale. I trust you, God. Exhale. This is called breath prayer.
And it's really powerful. And you can do it wherever you are at any moment of the day. Begin to notice your breath. “God, I'm struggling”, as you breathe in. “I need you”, as you breathe out,
“God, I'm scared”, as you breathe in. “Be with me”, as you breathe out. “God, I'm overwhelmed”, as you breathe in. “Be with me”, as you breathe out.
And as you do that you're practicing an embodied version of prayer. You're incorporating your whole nervous system because taking those breaths calms your nervous system. You're also opening up those connection pathways in your brain. You're connecting with the God who loves you, which brings endorphins in.
It brings good chemicals into your body. Suddenly, you're not alone. You're working in partnership with God. It's not that your problems magically go away, but you're incorporating the power of your God-given design as you invite God into whatever it is that you're experiencing. As you do that, your nervous system calms, good chemicals come in, you feel more grounded.
And from that place, we know from all the psychology research and all the neurobiology that when you're a little bit more grounded, when you're a little bit calmer, when you're experiencing that sense of connectedness, creativity starts to spark, and it's from this place, this calmer place inside this connected place inside where you're present to what you really feel.
In partnership with God's Spirit, you will begin to discern your next brave steps. You'll start to find a way forward. I want you to practice noticing, “What am feeling right now?”, befriending it, and inviting God into whatever it is that you're experiencing right now.
This is the path to transforming overwhelming emotions into your greatest allies in partnership with God's Spirit.
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The Best of You Every Day offers short, daily reflections on Scripture through the lens of emotional health—helping you stay steady, connected, and rooted in love.
