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If you’re human, you’ve encountered some toxic behaviors. We all have. And it’s not wise to be naive about them. I’m passionate about helping you identify these toxic behaviors—not to label people, but to name behaviors accurately. When you understand the nature of toxic strategies, you can protect yourself and move toward health.
Here's what we cover:
1. A mistake vs. a pattern of toxic behaviors
2. The root of toxic behaviors
3. Examples of healthy communication vs. manipulation
4. Identifying guilt-driven love
5. The difference between constructive feedback & criticism
6. Examples of triangulation
7. The #1 antidote against toxic behaviors
8. Examples of word & action boundaries
Resources
- Pre-order I Shouldn’t Feel This Way on Amazon!
- Ishouldn'tfeelthisway.com
- The Best of You by Dr. Alison Cook
- Romans 2:4
- Luke 10:38-42
- Matthew 10:16
Related Episodes:
- Episode 94: Should I Stay or Should I Walk Away? How to Discern When It’s Time to Leave with Emily P. Freeman
- Episode 1: What Is Narcissism Really?
- Episode 24: Boundaries, the Spectrum of Toxicity, and a Note About Evil
- Boundaries and the Bible Youtube Playlist
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- 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 & subscribe to the Heart of Dating Podcast!
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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. This week I'm taking a deep dive into a topic that I'm passionate about, because so many of you listening, I know, get ensnared by toxic behaviors, just as I have struggled with getting ensnared by them.
When you are someone who is kind hearted, who wants to be helpful to others, who is highly empathetic, who is highly responsible, those wonderful strengths can also make us more susceptible to other people's toxic strategies.
One of the things that I'm passionate about is naming those toxic strategies so that you can be equipped to be wise, because unfortunately we live in a world where some folks will try to use toxic strategies to manipulate you, to control you, to harm you. And if you don't know what those strategies are, it can be really hard to know how to protect yourself.
So in last week's episode, episode 94, Emily P. Freeman talked about discerning yellow and red flags. Today I want to dive in a little bit more deeply into what some of those yellow and red flag behaviors to be on the lookout for are. Because it's really hard to protect yourself and be wise if you don't know what these toxic strategies are.
Before we get started, I want to remind you that next week, on Tuesday March 26th, I am hosting an hour-long masterclass: How to Stop Feeling Stuck in Your Head. It's at 5 PM Eastern. If you want to attend live with me, you'll have a chance to ask questions, but you will also get the recording so you can watch it at any time. This is bonus content for my new book, I Shouldn’t Feel This Way.
I took a poll online and this is the topic you most wanted to get started on early. So I'm giving you bonus content on how to stop feeling stuck in your head or tripped up by your own mental gymnastics. It's on the 25th at 5 pm. To get access to that class, simply pre-order a copy of I Shouldn’t Feel This Way anywhere books are sold–Amazon, Barnes and Noble, you can call your local independent bookstore and pre-order through them. That's a fantastic way to support local bookstores.
Go over to my website, Ishouldntfeelthisway.com, enter your email address and where you bought the book, and you will automatically get emailed the first three chapters of the book, a few other freebies, including a guided journal, as well as information on how to access this masterclass. So pre-order a copy of I Shouldn’t Feel This Way, go to Ishouldntfeelthisway.com, put in your email address, and you'll get all the information you need emailed directly to you.
So today I want to dive into four toxic behaviors I think everyone should know about and how to protect yourself. So first of all, what are toxic behaviors? What do I mean by that? The word toxic simply means dangerous, destructive, or harmful. It's any sort of behavior that is designed to hurt you.
Some behaviors are annoying. We don't like them, but they're not actually harmful. When we're talking about toxic behaviors, we're talking about behaviors that are damaging. They're doing harm on some level. The key point to remember about toxic behaviors is they're a consistent pattern of behaviors over time.
Any one of us can be toxic in a moment. Any one of us can lie, can guilt trip, can maybe even manipulate, can lash out angrily, can triangulate. Any of these things we're going to talk about today, every single one of us has probably done at some point in our lives.
If we're honest with ourselves, we struggle with certain toxic behaviors more than others. We can all be toxic in a moment, but here's the difference between a mistake and a pattern of toxic behaviors over time.
Number one, frequency. Making a mistake is part of being human. It's often an isolated incident. It occurs infrequently. A pattern of toxic behaviors occurs repeatedly over time. These harmful behaviors continue to recur despite the consequences of those actions. There's a clear pattern of these behaviors over time; it's not a one-off mistake.
Number two, intent. Mistakes that we make are usually unintentional. They might result from a lack of knowledge. They might result from a lack of understanding in the moment. They might result from our own stress. We get overwhelmed, maybe we melt down, we do something we wish we didn't do, we get stuck in a moment and we grasp for a strategy to get ourselves out of the moment.
We do something that later on we go, oh, I could have handled that situation better. That's a mistake. A pattern of toxic behaviors tends to be more intentional, and even if a toxic behavior was not initially intended to harm, if someone refuses to modify that behavior after its effects are made known, that might reflect a harmful intent.
This gets a little bit into the buzzword narcissism–you can go back to episode one to learn more. When someone is narcissistic, they are not capable of caring how their behaviors Impact you. Maybe they're completely sold over to self-preservation, but it's still harmful intent because that person is not willing to change or to grow or to heal.
That leads us right into the third differentiating factor between someone who makes a mistake and a toxic pattern of behaviors over time, and that's willingness to change after making a mistake. Someone who feels remorse takes responsibility and shows a genuine willingness to learn from the experience so that they can avoid repeating it.
That's what you do when you make a mistake. Now, listen, we're not perfect. A really bad habit that someone has developed over years can take a long time to change. We're not asking for perfection, but we are asking for ownership and responsibility. And we are asking for steps toward improvement with toxic behaviors. There's typically a lack of genuine remorse or taking responsibility. Instead of that, there's denial, there's justification, there's rationalization.
“If you wouldn't do this, I wouldn't have to resort to this toxic behavior”. There's blame shifting. I'm going to blame you for my toxic behaviors. Or there might be repeated empty promises to change without any real action. And we see this: “Oh, I'm so sorry. It'll never happen again”. And then it's Groundhog Day. And that person keeps doing it. They're not actually taking responsibility for those toxic actions.
Now listen, toxic patterns of behaviors lie on a spectrum. Some folks demonstrate mostly toxic behaviors–there's very little good. And in those cases, you have to ask yourself, why am I continuing to be in a relationship with this person when the impact of their presence on my life is mostly harmful?
That's one end of the spectrum. There are also a lot of people that are more in the middle of that spectrum. And what that means is maybe they have a toxic habit that is repeated that they don't change, that they're not showing signs toward growth, but there's also some good.
And those are some of the most challenging relationships. You might want to continue on in a relationship with that person because there's some good there. There are good reasons, there are positive benefits to the relationship.
And in those instances, you have to figure out how to quarantine and protect yourself from the toxic behavior while still enjoying the person's good qualities. So if you want more on that, on the nuances of those boundaries, check out my book, The Best of You. It's a lot about the nuances of healthy boundary setting in relationships.
When you think about that spectrum, for example, maybe there's a person in your life, a friend or a parent or a family member who tends to manipulate you to get their emotional needs met. They don't want to hurt you. And there are good things there. Maybe they're really loyal. Maybe they do show up for you when you need them. Maybe they help out with your kids but the pattern of manipulation in this one area really does hurt you.
That's an example of where there's some good. But there's also some harm and you need to be able to name that harmful behavior in order to protect yourself from it so that you can enjoy this person's good qualities. When you download your first three chapters of I Shouldn’t Feel This Way, you're going to see how important it is to name things. Naming things frees us.Not so that you can label another person, but so that you can name behaviors. You'll start to see these behaviors in yourself. You'll start to see them in your family members. You'll start to see them in your friends.
It doesn't mean all of those people demonstrating these behaviors are toxic people that you have to cut out of your life. That is not what this means. There are two important byproducts of learning to name toxic behaviors. Number one, you will learn how to protect yourself. Okay. This person tends to do this. I'm not in this to go call them out on their stuff.
I want to become a healthier version of myself. So the more I can see that behavior and name it, I can begin to extract myself from that toxicity, I'm extracting myself from a toxic dynamic so that I can stay healthy so that I can grow so that I can keep moving forward on the path God wants me to be on.
And now that I know what this is and that it's in fact toxic, I can start to untangle from it and keep moving forward toward growth. That's number one, but number two, as you disentangle from toxic behaviors, you will begin to have healthier boundaries. And guess what that does–that empowers the other person to make their own choice.
You'll find out really quickly if that other person begins to change with you and grow as well. That's amazing. You've been part of a healing process. You've unleashed more healing through healing yourself and extracting yourself from toxicity. That other person is now going to get freer too.
On the other hand, that other person may recognize that you're setting different boundaries. They may recognize that you're shifting the dynamics in a relationship and they might not like it and they might get more toxic. They might continue with their toxic behaviors. They might even ratchet up the intensity of the toxicity. That's also their choice. That's their choice.
And as they do that, you will need to continue to protect yourself and move toward health. So this process of learning to name and identify toxic behaviors is about getting healthier yourself, removing the toxins as best you can from your relationships.
It's also about empowering other people to make healthy choices. Not because you're trying to get them to change, but because by getting healthier and extracting yourself, it will automatically unleash a ripple effect of healing. That other person will have their own choice to make. You're not in control of the choice they make, but you are at least giving them that opportunity.
Here are the four toxic behaviors I want to talk about today. Number one is manipulation. Number two is gaslighting. It's a buzzword, but it's an important one to understand in our culture today. Number three is constant criticism. And number four is triangulation.
Now this is not an exhaustive list. There are a lot of toxic behaviors. But these are four that I see frequently in the people that I work with in my own life and the people that I serve. All of these behaviors have one thing in common. These are all forms of manipulation and control. We manipulate other people to avoid doing our own work. We try to control others instead of taking control of ourselves.
That's the root of all toxic behaviors. I don't like what's happening inside of me. I don't like what I feel. I don't like how I feel about myself. I don't like how I feel in this situation. Instead of taking ownership of myself with God's help, I try to manipulate you. I try to control you. I try to get other people to do the work that is mine. To do that is the root of toxic behaviors.
When you begin to recognize these toxic behaviors, you stop letting other people manipulate and control you. It was never your job to do this work for them. It's their job to do their own work. When you recognize these strategies and stop being hooked by them, you free yourself to be a healthier person and you remove that avenue that this other person has been using inappropriately, which gives them that choice.
They get to choose then what they're going to do with that. And their choice is not your responsibility.
So let's talk about manipulation. Manipulation is a form of control. It's a more insidious, often indirect form of control. When we say someone's controlling in an overt way, these tend to be domineering people that get really aggressive and create power moves telling you what to do, what to think, or what to feel, and that's a form of toxicity.
Manipulation is a more indirect or covert form of control. Now, this is really important, so listen closely. Someone who's manipulative is trying to influence or control your actions, your emotions, your decisions to serve their interests, and their interests are selfish. They're not trying to help you. The effort to manipulate is at the expense of your wellbeing. And it's certainly without your consent.
Often this is done really subtly where you might not even realize you're being manipulated, and it is not for your good. It is for the person who's manipulating to feel powerful, to feel better about themselves. Again, as I said before, they're not doing their own work. They're trying to manipulate you to behave or think or feel or act in a certain way that makes them feel better about themselves.
Here are some examples: someone who guilt-trips you tries to get you to feel bad, even when you haven't done anything wrong. Someone who's guilt-tripping you doesn't respect your personal boundaries. Maybe you tell your friend, I can't make it this week and I'm so sorry. I wish I could be there. I can't. I've got these five things going on in my own family.
And instead of honoring that, and saying, oh, I'm disappointed. I wish you could make it, but I completely understand. That's a healthy response. I'm disappointed. I'm taking responsibility for my own emotions. And I also completely understand and I honor that decision that you made. That decision makes sense to me. I get it.
Someone who guilt trips or manipulates you might say something like, I've done everything for you. I dropped everything to be there for you. And you can't do this one thing for me. They're manipulating you, they're making you feel bad. You've actually made a wise decision, but they're trying to make you feel bad because they can't tolerate the disappointment or for whatever reason, they can't tolerate the fact that you've said a healthy no.
Now, remember, we can all do this in a moment. This becomes toxic when it becomes a regular pattern over time. When someone is constantly disrespecting your boundaries and guilting you to make you feel bad for healthy decisions you are in fact making.
Another example of manipulation can be passive aggressive digs. I guess you're just too busy for me. That's a manipulative statement. You're trying to get the other person to feel bad. In contrast, taking responsibility for your own emotions would be to say, oh man, I'm bummed. I'd love to see you more. I love having you around, but I understand.
You're honoring that the other person has made choices. Now listen, this is nuanced because we are allowed to set healthy boundaries for ourselves in response to someone else's boundaries. If you're in a relationship with someone who you feel like is too busy for you, they're never available, they never call you back, they're never showing up for things, and that hurts you?
You get to protect yourself. It's not okay to try to manipulate the other person to get them to show up for you. That's not okay. But what you can do in that situation is move on to another friendship, or you can even communicate that and say, man, I would love to have more time with you. I think you're amazing. I wish we had more time together.
I see that you've got a lot on your plate and I really want to honor that. I've got to step back and I need to invest more in these other relationships.
That would be a healthy response to someone who you've realized, oh, they're too busy for me. They don't have time for me. You would be proactive to shift away from investing in that person, not to punish them, not to threaten them, but simply to align your decisions with the reality.
This person doesn't have time for you. That would be a healthy response, but to try to continually manipulate that other person to do something they clearly aren't doing or don't want to do, or haven't decided to do, or can't make time to do, is toxic. It's toxic.
You can't manipulate or control somebody into being in a relationship with you. It's not fair to yourself or to the other person. Again, we'd sometimes do these things because we don't know better. We're like, oh man, I'm hurt by this other person. I don't know what to do. We resort to some of these toxic behaviors. All of us do at times. But when you become aware, you are then responsible to change.
If someone is guilt-tripping you, they're trying to manipulate or control you to get more of your time, to get more of your money, to get more of your volunteer work, to get more of your caretaking in whatever way. You need to recognize when someone is manipulating you versus when there's a legitimate need.
And if someone is manipulating you, it can be really hard because you feel bad. They're masters at making you feel guilty. You have to recognize, I think I'm being manipulated here. This person never respects my boundaries. They always want more than I can give. They're always trying to get me to do things I'm not comfortable doing.
There's a consistent pattern of that. And I hate how I feel. That's a red flag. When you're repeatedly operating out of guilt, I call it guilt-driven love. That's a red flag. And your job is not to get the other person to change. Your job is to recognize that and figure out before God, what is my actual responsibility to this person?
What is the actual need if there is any? And what is my actual responsibility to this person, if there is any? Often your actual responsibility to this person is very different from what they're trying to manipulate out of you. Your job is to recognize, I'm being manipulated here. I've got to stop responding to every single one of these digs, every single one of these manipulative statements aimed at making me feel guilty.
I've got to pause and inside myself, name it. Ooh, I think I'm being guilt-tripped here. Use that comma God–I think I'm being guilt tripped here, God. The first thing I've gotta do is try not to respond to that guilt trip, separate out from it, get really logical about it. What is the actual need? What am I actually responsible for?
Find some safe people to bounce that off of, ask a couple of safe people. Hey, do you think this is actually my responsibility? Does this seem like a fair ask to you? Gain some objectivity, and then set those healthy boundaries going forward.
Next is gaslighting. Gaslighting is a really toxic form of manipulation. It ratchets up the toxicity. It's a form of psychological abuse. It's when someone uses lies and deception to manipulate you into questioning yourself or feeling crazy.
They're messing with you. They're trying to manipulate you into doubting yourself, doubting your memory, or doubting your perceptions of reality, your own instincts, doubting what you believe to be true. And they're doing this to try to get you to stay dependent on them, to exert power over you so that you won't leave them, so that you won't maybe out them.
Maybe they're doing something wrong and they're trying to keep you feeling crazy so that you won't unleash the power of truth. They're terrified of that. They don't want their own stuff to come to the surface. So they try to manipulate you so that you won't actually get to the truth of what's happening. Here's an example, a classic example of gaslighting.
Maybe your spouse has started drinking again and you confront him on it. You say, hey, it seems like you might be drinking again. I've noticed you seem more bleary eyed, you're staying out late. I'm curious what's going on. First of all, they deny it. They lie. “No, I'm not”. Then they accuse you. “You're crazy. You're paranoid. How dare you accuse me?”
So there's two components. They're lying to cover up their own tracks and then they're turning it on you to make you feel bad.
Maybe you have a parent or a family member, a friend who's talking behind your back or slandering you or doing some really harmful things behind your back and you confront them on it. You go to them and say, hey, what's going on? Are you doing this? Are you talking about me? Did you spread this gossip about me?
And they deny it. “No, I would never do that. How dare you accuse me? You are ungrateful”. Do you see what's happening there? They're making you feel crazy. You feel like a bad person because you confronted them. It's so toxic because you feel bad. And in fact, you were right about it. You question yourself. You doubt yourself. It leads to so much chaos and confusion in your own soul.
Number three, constant criticism. We all need to be able to receive constructive feedback. That's a part of growth. That's a part of becoming a truer version of ourselves. My husband and I use the metaphor of lettuce in the teeth. We need people who have our backs and say, hey, I hate to tell you this, but you got lettuce in your teeth.
And that could be like, I hate to tell you this, but the way you talk to that person, ooh, that wasn't good. You might need to go back and apologize. We need people in our lives who help us see our blind spots, who point out when we're showing up with lettuce in our teeth, even though we don't like to hear it.
That kind of constructive feedback that's rooted in trust, that's rooted in safety, that's rooted in relationships where there's mutual consent, you've agreed with a friend or with a loved one or with a family member–hey, would you let me know if I'm out of bounds? I need your set of eyeballs on this. Because I'm not sure. I'm trying to figure this out.
I need you to let me know if I'm out of bounds here, if the way I'm talking to our kids, or if the way I'm showing up at this small group, or if the way I'm showing up with these other friends of ours, if there's anything I'm doing that you think is out of line. We need those types of people in our life. Constant criticism is completely different.
It can actually be a form of verbal abuse. It's when someone is continually, consistently over time, undermining you, pointing out perceived flaws, criticizing your actions, your appearance, your abilities. It's toxic. When you're the target of constant criticism, it's as if you're receiving a million tiny paper cuts to your soul constantly. It can show up with shaming comments. It can show up with sarcasm. It can show up with insults. It can show up with broad sweeping statements of judgment.
For example, you're always so disorganized. Can't you do anything right? Are you really going to wear that? Do you really want your hair to look that way?
It can also come out as sarcasm. Not everybody can be as perfect as you are. That's a dig. These comments leave you feeling wounded. Now again, we need constructive feedback. Sometimes a partner or parent or a loved one or you as a parent might need to say, oh, I don't know if that's the shirt you want to wear.
There's a way to give constructive feedback. It's hard. You have to think about how to give the people that you love constructive feedback in their lives. Criticism, sarcasm, passive aggressive comments, constantly pointing out someone else's flaws is toxic.
And here's the thing. Someone who's constantly criticizing is not doing it for your good. They're not actually doing it to help you. That's that intent piece. They're not trying to help you improve or grow or change. They're trying to make themselves feel better than you. It's born out of deep seated insecurity and a fragility of self. It's not about trying to help you improve. It's about trying to make themselves feel better.
And it's really toxic. You are not created to thrive in a toxic environment that is cruel, shaming, or harsh. Even if a part of you knows rationally, I know this is about them, I know this isn't about me, I know they're insecure, it doesn't matter. It still wounds you. It still wounds you. None of us is created to thrive in those settings.
God designed our souls, hearts, and minds for warmth, for care, for connection, for compassion. I think of the scripture where it says God's kindness is what leads us to repentance. So even when God points out that lettuce in our teeth, even when God comes to us and says, oh, Alison, I don't think you should have done that.
I think you were deceptive there because you were scared to be brave. I think you were a little bit hard on that person, a little judgmental of that person. Do you hear the tone in my voice when God shows me those things? God isn't shaming me.
It hurts. I don't like it when God points out when I made a mistake. I don't like it when the people I love point out, oh, Alison, I don't think you showed up exactly as your best self in that situation. It hurts, but it doesn't shame me. That kindness leads to me going, oh man, you're right. I could have done better. I need to make it right.
The truth sets us free. It liberates us. It helps us become a better person. It doesn't shame us. It doesn't crush us. Constant criticism makes us feel desolate and helpless and like we'll never be good enough. It doesn't help us. It harms us. It's really toxic.
Lastly, I want to talk about triangulation. I think it's one of the toxic patterns of behavior that is talked about the least and very quietly does a lot of damage, especially in families and in close friend groups. Triangulation is when one person pulls you into the middle of their conflict with a third person.
Instead of working through their problem directly with the person involved, they might do any of the following: they might vent to you about the other person, but never address their own frustrations with the other person. They might ask you directly to fix their problem with the other person when it's not your place to enter in.
So for example, maybe your mom comes to you and vents to you about how your dad has been treating her. And the implication is you should go talk to your dad and get him to apologize to me. You should go talk to your dad and get him to give me more money. You should go talk to your dad and get him to change his behaviors.
It is toxic, especially when parents do it to a child, but even in a friend group. Maybe a friend comes to you and says, man, I don't like how our other friend treats me, I think you should talk to her and get her to see the error of her ways. It's really toxic. It's a form of manipulation. That person's trying to get you to do her work for her.
Sometimes they do it indirectly. They tell you all the stuff that bothers them about this other person. And you're left holding the baggage. You're left holding a suitcase full of burdens that aren't your burdens. Maybe you don't have a problem with the other person, but now you've got the suitcase.
You've got the baggage and you don't know what to do with it. It leaves you feeling really anxious. It leaves you feeling really guilty because you feel bad that you're not fixing this problem for the other person, but you also feel bad because you don't want to go to this other person that you don't have a problem with and give them the suitcase of baggage.
You're left by yourself with a suitcase full of baggage that was never yours to carry. You absorb all the weight of the conflict without any clear path to resolve it. And when this occurs consistently over time, maybe within a family, maybe within a close friend group, you're also not getting the attention you need.
You're being viewed as a mediator or as a dumping ground for other people's problems instead of as your own distinct person who is worthy of a two-way reciprocal relationship. And I see this all the time with folks who are highly empathetic, who are caretakers, who are helpers, who are trying to help other people.
They get put into the middle of other people's problems. Now there are healthy ways to seek third party counsel. Sometimes we need to bounce off of another friend a problem that we're having. We need advice. We need wisdom in healthy ways.
I actually tend to think of the story of Mary and Martha in the Bible as an example of triangulation. The story is found in Luke 10:38-42, and in the passage, Martha's busy with extensive preparation. She's trying to get everything on the table. She's trying to make sure the event gets pulled off while her sister, Mary is sitting quietly at Jesus' feet, listening to him.
A lot of us can identify with Martha. That's annoying. Listen, I'm doing all the work. Come on, help me out. There are a lot of ways to interpret this passage, but one of the ways that I like to think about it is in terms of triangulation.
We don't know what Martha's intent was. We don't know if she did this regularly. We don't know her backstory. This might've been a one-off, but instead of going to Mary with her gripe, she goes to Jesus and complains about Mary. Don't you care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her she should be helping me.
She goes to Jesus with her gripe about Mary. And if you notice, Jesus sets a boundary. He says, listen, Mary's made a choice and I'm good with her choice. You've made a different choice. What's to say that your choice is better?
Jesus does not indulge her attempt to pull him into the middle. He doesn't say, oh, you're right. Mary, you really should help Martha here. He sets that healthy boundary in that situation. We see Jesus setting healthy boundaries with toxic behaviors. All throughout the New Testament, he was a master at setting boundaries with toxicity. What do we have to learn from Jesus? It's about protecting ourselves from these toxic behaviors.
Number one is start with yourself. Start noticing any of these patterns in yourself without shame, because the number one best way to protect yourself from toxicity at the hands of others is to become really aware of it in yourself. Oh man, sometimes I do that. Sometimes I triangulate because I don't know how to go to the person directly. Lord, help me change that.
Here's the thing. When you begin to name and notice your own unhealthy strategies, you become really aware of them and you gain a lot more confidence in seeing them in the world around you. Because when we're indulging in our own toxic behaviors, we don't want to call other people out because we don't want to call ourselves out. So number one is to notice without shame, oh, these are some things I do.
I presented at a workshop last weekend and at the end of the day I asked them what they got out of it. And one woman raised her hand and she said, you know what I got out of this workshop? She said, I'm not very good at accepting other people's boundaries. And I almost teared up. I was like, man, that is profound. The fact that what you got out of this was, I'm the one that's not so good at honoring other people's boundaries.
That awareness is so key, not only to becoming a healthier person yourself, but also to recognizing toxic behaviors in other people. The best antidote against toxicity and others is to be really honest with ourselves before God.
Number two, if you're dealing with someone who is regularly indulging in these toxic behaviors and without showing any remorse and without really responding to you, be aware. It is going to stir up a lot of guilt and a lot of painful emotions inside of you when you start to change, and you need to anticipate that because when you start to set boundaries with toxic behaviors, it can feel really uncomfortable and folks will try to use that against you.
They know they can make you feel guilty. They'll know they can exploit your good heart, your high responsibility. Be aware that guilt doesn't mean you've done something wrong. It might mean you've done something incredibly brave.
You've got to really work on that core strength, telling yourself, I'm trying to get healthier. This other person might not like it, but I know that disentangling from their toxicity and moving toward health is ultimately better for both of us, even if that other person doesn't see it that way. Even if that other person doesn't see it that way, you're taking God's invitation to get healthier. Even when they don't see it that way.
And then lastly, I want you to think about the difference between “word boundaries” and “action boundaries”. Boundaries do not require anything from the other person. You're not trying to get the other person to change their ways. You have no control over that. You cannot change another person.
Most of us want to get the other person to understand what they're doing. We want them to recognize, oh my gosh, I'm engaging in toxic behavior. I need to stop. That happens sometimes, but it often doesn't. Your goal is not to get the other person to understand the error of their ways. Your goal is to remove yourself from the toxic behavior.
You're not trying to get the other person to change their ways. You have no control over that. You cannot change another person. Your goal when dealing with toxic behaviors is to take effective action to remove yourself from the toxicity as much as possible. So many people get fixated on wanting to get the other person to change or at the very least to understand what they've done wrong.
It's really hard for us to believe that another person doesn't care. They're so absorbed in these toxic patterns of behaviors. They can't see how their behaviors are harming you and that hurts us. And we do need to grieve that. There's grief involved in setting healthy boundaries. We have to grieve what we can't get from the other person. And it's painful to watch someone choose to continue in their pattern of toxic behaviors.
But the bottom line is that obedience to God and a commitment to your own health and wholeness means that you can only take charge of your own responses and actions. You cannot change another person. If you try to get that other person to change, you are in jeopardy of trying to control or manipulate them.
You only have control over your own responses, your own reactions, and the steps you take to move away from toxic behaviors.
You might communicate with a word boundary, but if you choose that route, your goal is to state the action you are going to take in response to the toxic behavior. It's something that you should be able to do without their help, without their permission. Even if they don't like it, you're going to let them know what you are going to do to change the dynamic going forward.
So for example, you always start with the good. Start with something positive, especially if you're planning to stay in the relationship or it's the first time you've communicated. I appreciate you. I value our relationship. I've noticed that our conversations often veer into discussing your issues with dad or with mom or with my sister or with this other friend of ours.
This triangulation is uncomfortable for me. It stirs up anxiety inside of me and I'm not going to participate in it anymore. In the future, if you bring up your issues with this person, I'm going to excuse myself from the conversation. I'm going to get off the phone or I'm going to walk away.
This is a boundary that I need to set for my own health. Full stop. That's it. And do you see how you're naming a behavior? You're naming it. But you're saying, this is what I'm going to do to not participate in this anymore.
That's it. And then you have to make good on that with your actions. You don't have the conversation with that person anymore. If it happens again, you use an action boundary. You remove yourself. That's it. Now, again, depending on the nature of the relationship, depending on the level of toxicity, the other person might ratchet up the toxicity. They don't like it. If that's the case, you need to be wise. You might take someone with you, use the buddy system to go into that conversation.
Don't do it alone because you need someone there to help anchor you. You might have to do it over the phone. You might have to do it over text. You might have to do it in writing. That's okay. Depending on the level of toxicity, sometimes that's what you have to do to let the boundary be known.
The goal is to get yourself out of interacting with that toxic behavior. But again, notice you've taken responsibility for the actions. You're going to remove yourself. The other person doesn't have to do anything.
Now I want to give a note: with someone who uses gaslighting tactics, words almost never work because people who gaslight are a master of manipulating words. No matter what you say to them, they're going to say, you're paranoid. You're cruel. I can't believe you're going to do that. That's evil.
They're going to turn anything, no matter how healthy, no matter how well worded the script is, they're going to turn it and use it against you. That's what gaslighters do. So in the case where there's a lot of toxicity, words won't work. You're going to use action boundaries. Action boundaries are a very legitimate option in the case of toxic behaviors, especially when you're pretty sure this person isn't going to take it very well.
They're not going to like it. Action boundaries are really powerful. An action boundary means that you let your actions do the talking. They're communicated through changes in your behaviors. Instead of using words to communicate, you simply refuse to engage. And there are a lot of ways to do this. You might excuse yourself from a call. You might leave the room. You might use grounding exercises.
You might stop being alone with the other person because it's not safe. You have to only be with them in group gatherings or group situations. You use the buddy system to have someone with you when you have to be with that person, depending on the level of severity. You let your actions do the work of creating that boundary.
And in some cases, you have to leave the relationship altogether. Because like we said, there's no good that counterbalances the harm. And you have to leave that relationship altogether.
Now, listen, this is all a lot harder than it sounds. Depending on the level of toxicity, you might want to reach out to a professional therapist to help you. There's a lot on this in my book, The Best of You. So look at those resources, get support for yourself. But the most important thing I want you to understand today as we close is that naming a pattern of toxic behaviors is an act of love. It's a gift you give not only to yourself, but also to others. It's not loving to indulge or enable somebody else's toxic pattern of behaviors.
It's not loving to them and it's not loving to yourself. Whether or not the other person recognizes that gift that you are giving them is beside the point. You are creating an opportunity for both parties, yourself and the other person, to brave a different, healthier path.
You are freeing yourself to pursue the healing and goodness that lies ahead. And you are releasing the other person to making their own choices. You can love someone and leave a toxic pattern of behavior. You can forgive someone and maintain firm boundaries. You can value someone and refuse to engage in their toxicity.
Jesus said, be as wise serpents and innocent as doves. We long to embody the purity of doves soaring above life's challenges. But the problem is that while we are still inhabiting planet earth, we are at times going to have to inch our way through the murky and chaotic underbelly of this life created by toxic behaviors.
It's part of reality and pretending otherwise won't change it. I want you to be wise. I want you to be shrewd. And I also don't want you to lose your innocence. That's the goal here as you name and recognize toxicity for what it is. You will find your way through it. You will move out of its snare and into the healing, the honesty, the loving mutuality God wants for you, and you will appreciate the joy of what real love and genuine goodness looks like all the more for the pain you've endured.
You are worth the work that it takes to move away from toxic behaviors. Your brave actions honor God. It honors yourself. And I promise you, whether it feels this way or not, it honors the other person.
How do you decide when it's time to leave a place or a relationship behind? We have to make decisions all the time. Yet most of us struggle with it. It's hard to leave something (or someone) behind. It's also hard to give ourselves the time that we need to wrestle with a decision.
When you don't have a process, you might be tempted to avoid decision-making. Or you might rush too quickly into a decision that isn't quite right. That's why I'm thrilled to have this conversation with Emily P. Freeman this week. It's such a rich conversation about how to discern when it's time to walk away and what to do when it's time to enter into a new space.
Here's what we cover:
1. The truth about tiny red flags (11:29)
2. 4 crucial questions to ask yourself (13:40)
3. What to do with those 51/49 decisions (20:13)
4. Readiness vs. timeliness in decision making (21:30)
5. Emily's decision process for leaving a church (25:26)
6. How to walk into a new space (33:28)
7. A life-changing 2 word mantra for decision making (38:34)
Resources:
- Pre-order I Shouldn't Feel This Way on Amazon!
- Claim preorder bonus items at Ishouldn'tfeelthisway.com
- How to Walk into a Room: The Art of Knowing When to Stay and When to Walk Away by Emily P. Freeman
- The Next Right Thing: A Simple, Soulful Practice for Making Life Decisions by Emily P. Freeman
- The Next Right Thing Podcast
- Bossy Pants by Tina Fey
- emilypfreeman.com
- Emily's Instagram @emilypfreeman
- Emily's substack The Soul Minimalist
Thanks to our sponsors:
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- 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:
Alison Cook: 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, mid-March, as we inch our way toward spring and toward Easter. I want to thank you so much for how many of you went out and pre-ordered I Shouldn’t Feel This Way.
After we announced all of the pre order bonus items last week, it was really overwhelming to see your response and to see how many of you really want to read the book, and were even willing to purchase it early. I've so appreciated the notes you've been sending me, the DMs, the emails, the messages on my website. It really means a lot to me to know that so many of you actually have those first few chapters in your hand and are reading it.
Please know that I see your messages and I appreciate hearing from you. It means the world to me that these words are resonating with you, perhaps more than any other book I've written. This one feels pretty vulnerable to me. For some reason, it really is.
It’s a framework I try to live my life by and try to bring into everything that I do. And to know that it's resonating with you really means so much to me. Again, if you pre-order I Shouldn’t Feel This Way anywhere books are sold, be sure to go to my website, Ishouldn'tfeelthisway.com and fill out the quick form on that website.
You will automatically receive the first three chapters, a guided journal PDF, the looking tool PDF, so you can start reflecting on some of the challenges in your own life as well as access to a masterclass. It's coming up at the end of this month. We'll have more details about that to you very soon.
And that leads me to today's interview. There's a lot of synergy between Emily P. Freeman's work and the work that I do. And this book that she's written called How to Walk into a Room: The Art of Knowing When to Stay and When to Walk Away is a beautiful guide to making hard decisions and Emily doesn't oversimplify that complicated process of making decisions.
That's one thing I really appreciate about her. She gets that it's complicated, that it's a nuanced process, but toward that end, she's trying to give us tools to help make it a little bit simpler, a little bit more practical as we go.
And so I was so thrilled to have this conversation with Emily today. Emily P. Freeman is the Wall Street Journal bestselling author of five books, including The Next Right Thing: A Simple, Soulful Practice for Making Life Decisions. She's a spiritual director, workshop leader, and the host of The Next Right Thing podcast. Emily holds a master's degree in spiritual formation and leadership from Friends University, where she also serves as a residency lecturer for the graduate program in spiritual formation.
She lives in North Carolina with her family. I really appreciate the nuance and wisdom that Emily brings to everything that she does. Her brand new book, How to Walk into a Room: The Art of Knowing When to Stay and When to Walk Away, is out now so you can pick that up anywhere. Please enjoy my conversation with Emily P. Freeman.
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All right, Emily, I am so glad to have you here on The Best of You Podcast. I have admired your work from afar. I love what you're doing in terms of helping people with decision making. It's so practical, but also you bring such a spirituality to it, such an honoring of the process of decision making to what you do on your own podcast, the Next Right Thing podcast.
And so when I saw that you had this new book coming out, How to Walk in a Room, I thought, oh, I want to talk to you about this because I know you are going to honor the discernment, the messiness, the complexity of these decisions of leaving, staying, and even sitting with something in the middle.
So thank you so much for being here.
Emily: Oh, I am so thrilled to be here with you today. I can't wait for this conversation.
Alison Cook: You start off the book and I thought this was so astute–I think it's Malcolm Gladwell's observation that it takes about 10,000 hours to become an expert. And if that is true, most of us should be experts at making a change, at saying a goodbye, at making a big decision to leave something.
And yet none of us feel like experts at that. Tell me a little bit about your own experience with starting over, with leaving, with goodbyes. You had a ton of it in your life and you share that in the book. And yet my sense is you didn't arrive at adulthood feeling like you were an expert at that process.
Emily: Oh, but if I would have, wouldn't that have been great? It's right. I think that 10,000 hours, well, there's a lot of conversation around that–is that really true? There's been some follow-up conversation where Malcolm Gladwell got that question regarding the 10,000 hours.
I think it depends on how those hours were practiced and who the teacher was and what that practice actually looks like. And so I think about that in terms of decision making, especially when it comes to leaving beloved spaces or deciding to walk into new spaces–who will teach us how to say goodbye?
Who has taught us how to enter rooms as the people who we most fully are? We're stumbling forward into it. We're doing it all the time. But we've never really learned how to do it well, or how to do it without feeling like everything's falling apart. Or maybe we need someone to tell us that feeling like everything's falling apart is actually sometimes the path. Sometimes that is the only way to exit or enter and I'm longing for someone to normalize that.
So that's really why I wanted to write this book, and in many ways I think the book is hopefully a beginning of a conversation; it will maybe be the first sentence of a longer conversation we can have about, what does it look like to enter spaces as the person who we most fully are?
And what does it look like to say goodbye, when maybe there's no opportunity for closure? Or maybe it's a space that we actually didn't want to leave or thought we would be in forever. So these are the questions that I'm asking and hopefully beginning to answer.
Alison Cook: The fact that the feeling of awkwardness, all the disjointedness doesn't mean we're doing it wrong, it may well mean we're doing it right–that's one of the things you really show us in the book. That's part of the deal, is being willing to be a little bit uncomfortable with the process.
Tell me a little bit about this metaphor of the house that you use. I loved that. I thought that was a really powerful metaphor for what we're talking about here to anchor it.
Emily: I don't know how other writers do it without metaphor. Metaphor helps me so much when I imagine big concepts and things that are difficult or hard. It helps me to think about, in some ways, all of life is a house, and every room holds a story.
And we know that some rooms in life are exactly for us. And we love those rooms and they embrace us and we feel like ourselves in those rooms. And we know those rooms. Probably some have come to mind for you. There are other rooms that we enter into and one step in, you turn on the light, you're like, nope, not for me.
And we walk right out. These two extremes are not the rooms that give us trouble. The rooms where we have trouble are usually the ones where perhaps at one time, this room was a space where I felt like myself. But what do we do when a space where we belong begins to turn or change in such a way that we begin to question if we belong there anymore?
Or the people in the room are questioning us. And that's the place where I think is a real opportunity for some discernment, for some good questions. A lot of our spiritual formation happens when we're beginning to ask and answer those questions about those rooms where we once belonged, wondering maybe I don't belong here anymore. So what do I do now?
Alison Cook: So you said two really important things there I want to highlight: one is how do we know, what are the cues that we need to name? Oh, I'm in one of those rooms. Because if we don't name it, we're floundering and feeling like there's something wrong with us. I think most often we tend to blame ourselves. There's something wrong with me that this is happening.
We might also judge other people. There's something wrong with them. As opposed to, oh, there's something here that's happening so how do we get there? How do we get to that name? How do we know this is happening? And then number two, I love that you said this is an invitation to spiritual formation. This discomfort, this wrestling is where the growth is actually going to happen. And so when we get that name for it, we can settle ourselves a little bit into it. Okay, I'm going to go into a season of growth here.
So tell me a little bit about how we know, what's our cue that we're in one of those rooms?
Emily: I actually have 10 questions you can ask yourself, and we don't necessarily have to go through all 10 of them, but I can give you a few. For one thing, I think the first way we know is we start to sense some tiny, teeny red flags. When I was questioning something, I think it was about an event that I was asked to be a part of. and I was wondering, should I go, should I not, should I say yes or no?
There were a couple things about the organizer of the event that were starting to give me pause. And it was becoming a little more difficult. This event I thought was simple, it's becoming really complicated. So I talked to my friend Holly to get some advice and she said something I've never forgotten.
She said, “tiny red flags rarely shrink, they only grow”. And in considering that, first of all, I said no to that event but I have found that to be true in almost every area of life. And so I think that's the first thing to pay attention to–where do you sense tiny red flags? And that could be in relationships, in a community that you're a part of, vocationally there might be some tiny red flags.
The second thing is, refuse to assume that every hesitation is a tiny red flag, because I think some of us might say, oh, I sense discomfort. Tiny red flags never shrink, they only grow. So therefore this is only going to get worse. I'm going to get out now.
And we hightail it out of there too soon. And so my encouragement is, yes, I do believe it's true that tiny red flags rarely shrink. They only grow. However, first we have to determine, is this a tiny red flag? I would encourage anyone who has a hesitation to assume every flag is yellow.
Let's start with a yellow flag. Now, yellow flags might turn green, but if they turn red over time, then we can begin to know, okay, there might be another decision I need to make here.
Alison Cook: I love that. You talk about in the book the difference between avoidance and peacekeeping. And the first thought that came to my mind as you were saying that is in my own life, I'm super conflict avoidant. It's very easy for me to assume a flag is red because then I don't have to deal with it.
As opposed to a flag being yellow, which is, oh, I need to pay attention. Is this an invitation for me to leave, or is this an invitation for me to grow or move toward conflict? And so I think knowing our own predisposition to conflict, our own predisposition to challenging situations is really important in that yellow flag space.
Okay. Yes. Something is happening here. What's the invitation? Which gets us into that discernment that you talk about in the book. Let's be discerning. And I love very practical questions. Could you give us some of those, Emily, to help us as we're discerning whether this is a yellow or red flag?
Emily: I think the first question, backing up, is when you look at the rooms of your life to ask ourselves, did I choose this room or did it choose me? The process of choice can help us remember if this is a room that I was born into. For example, if this is a particular faith community, if you grew up in this church and you've been here all your life, that's a different type of choice than if you've been a part of a certain faith community for two years.
Let's say there's different questions to ask yourself and the stakes are different too. And so beginning to name and say, okay, did I choose this room or did it choose me? Looking back on that decision making process. A second question to ask yourself is, are there corners or sections, people or parts of this room that I'm actively avoiding. And sometimes we don't like to think about this because we all selectively do this.
It's like selective hearing. Sometimes my kids, I'm like, you heard me, but you're choosing not to hear me. I think the same can be true for us when it comes to the rooms of our lives. Do you find yourself making excuses or concessions for defending certain aspects of this room? How often are you doing that? And what are they particularly about?
So those are some other questions to ask. And then I think it's also good to name in this process what is good and beautiful about this room? What brought you here in the first place? What's kept you here for the amount of time you've been here? Because later down the road, if we do end up walking out, I think it's so important to recognize that no room is all bad and no room is all good.
It's really important for our own healing and closure, no matter what the ending ends up looking like, to be able to name the gifts of the room and to bring with us what we need, and then maybe leave the rest behind.
Alison Cook: I love what you're saying, and it reminds me a little bit of the parts work that we talk a lot about on this podcast. What I hear in what you're saying, Emily, is often two things can be true and when we honor that, when we validate that, it actually facilitates a better decision.
Man, part of me is attached to this room. I like it. There are things that are comfortable. There are things that are truly beautiful. And part of me is increasingly bothered by this. I don't like this. And we don't have to force fit either one of those. Both parts can live inside of us. That's what creates the tension. That's what makes it feel uncomfortable.
That's also the invitation. And I think when we try to force fit one of those, we do ourselves a disservice. It can take longer to arrive at a conclusion, but when we do, we're actually going to have a more wholehearted, more true place. Tell me a little bit about your own experience with learning to navigate that tension in your own life.
Emily: One particular decision comes to mind when I was in college, and I actually don't remember the nuance of the decision, but I remember being very torn up about what to do. It might have been about transferring from one school to the next. Wondering if I should leave this course of study, and what I wanted to study, which was sign language interpreting, was not offered at the school where I was.
I was two years into college. This is what we do. We think we know what we want to be when we grow up. And then we start doing it and we realize, no, I might need to make a change. At that time as a 20 year old, it sure felt like a really tough decision because there were some really good things about what I was studying and where I was at.
There was a good community there. There was a good community there. But I had a conversation with my dad at the time, and I remember he said to me, this 51%-49% is still a decision and I really wanted it to be a hundred to zero. Like we always want 100%. Yes. And sometimes we get that.
And when we do, man, toast to it, throw a party and be glad that this is a clear decision. But so often our decisions are like two percentage points in one direction. And that's a really nuanced movement to pay attention to. And that's why, to be a person of reflection, to be someone who pays attention to our own life, that's what's required sometimes in order to be able to discern the difference between 49%-51%.
Alison Cook: That's right. It reminds me of that house metaphor. It's very rare that in those rooms, you open the door and go, oh no thank you. Slam it. It's that hundred percent. It's not those rooms where, oh, there's some things about this I like. It's not all bad.
And also, and I love what you're saying to slow that down. It takes some reflection. It takes some discernment. You describe in the book, particularly as it relates to a church community, was it years or months, Emily, of you and your husband having conversations about the flags that you were noticing, whether they were red or yellow. Noticing some flags, talking about them while you were still participating in the space.
It took a lot of time to do that, and by naming it and honoring the time, it doesn't take away the discomfort, but it allows you to engage it more authentically where you're aware.
Emily: Absolutely. And I think what you're describing is the tension that we all experience between readiness and timeliness. The hundred percent is when readiness and timeliness align. And that's when we have graduation parties, that's when we throw weddings, that's when we retire. When I'm ready and it's time and everybody agrees, there's no discernment process that has to happen because these two things are the same.
I think what we're always chasing, and this is where the tension exists, we're always wanting readiness and timeliness to align, and rarely do they when it comes to these decisions of our life. And so often we are asked, invited if you will, to practice courage. When it's time, but we don't feel ready, or we're invited to practice patience when we're ready, but it's not yet time.
That nuance takes a lot of attention, and I think we do ourselves a disservice when we force those two things, when we expect those two things to be aligned. We're missing out on some potential times of, no, it's actually time for me to stay, even though everything in me says leave, or the opposite. And that's some deep work right there.
Alison Cook: I want to pause there for a second. There are two different invitations. It could be that we're invited to practice courage when it's time to leave, or we could be invited to practice patience when everything in us wants to leave, but it's not quite time.
I can feel that in my bones. And again, as you said that, I can feel the tension inside of me settling because a part of us is like, come on, you got to do this thing. And then we beat ourselves up because we're not. And what if, in fact, the deeper wisdom is, yes, a change is going to be needed. And also it's not quite time for whatever reason.
Maybe I'm not quite ready emotionally to handle it. Maybe there's still something left for me to do in this room. I see this a lot in folks, where we beat ourselves up. And you hear that in memes right? It's like, why am I not doing the thing? Maybe let's reframe it as, we're not quite ready. It's not quite the time. I love that. And then conversely, I can feel in my bones, it is time.
And oh my golly, do I not want to do this thing? Walk me through that a little bit. I'm curious for you, I'm wondering, as I'm listening to you, if different personality types tend to have more of one of those invitations than others. For example, do you tend to be someone who has to really lean into patience or do you have to be someone who has to lean in more to the, oh, it's time to be brave?
Emily: Oh, the second one for me. Personally, I find myself needing to move even when I don't feel ready a lot more often than I find myself having to wait even though it's not yet time. One great picture of this, I think comes from, of all people, Tina Fey. She writes in her book, Bossy Pants, about Lorne Michaels, who very famously said, Saturday Night Live does not go on because it is ready. It goes on because it's 11:30 on a Saturday night.
And that's such a beautiful example. In our cultural ethos, we understand what that means. Oh, they could have spent another week, another month on that show. They didn't have it because time's up. That's a deadline. Like we got to get this out. Were we ready? No ma'am, we were not, but this is how the creative process works.
We don't ever finish books. We have to turn them in because we have contracts. Those are two great examples that we can all broadly relate to, of it being time, whether or not we're ready.
Alison Cook: That's so good. That's so good.
Emily: And I think that's where I'm challenged usually, is like Emily, you got to be done, whether it's a small thing or whether it's a really large thing. And you brought up when we made that difficult and painful, still painful, decision to leave our church where we were.
And I share that story in How to Walk into a Room. There was a long runway leading up to it. It wasn't a day and then you decide. And I think a lot of people can relate to that. I think a lot of us have been in this space in recent years. I still don't feel ready to have left my church, and it's been four years and that's how long ago we left.
But when the time came, my husband John and I, we both knew. Like it is time and we don't feel ready but we had to make that move and I have such compassion for people who are standing at the threshold of the time has come. Your body and your heart might be broken into a million pieces, because you are having to leave something that you thought was going to be yours for a really long time.
And you had to let go of something that you thought you would always be able to hold on to. So I have deep compassion for anyone standing at that threshold, who's needing to practice the courage that they might not even think they have, to step over it and say goodbye to something that they deeply loved.
Alison Cook: I feel that so viscerally. I was thinking as you were describing that, I've had moments where I'll have to make a phone call or I'll have to have a conversation. I will literally have to have a friend sitting in the room with me cause I wouldn't do it otherwise. I won't do it, and I think we talk a lot on this podcast about empathy being such a gift and also, when you have an empathetic heart, when you care about others, when you care deeply feeling heart that's what's coming to mind as I'm listening to you, man are these endings really hard.
And it's the flip side of a wonderful gift. It can be really hard to make those brave decisions. We don't want to hurt anybody. We don't want to disappoint anybody. We don't want to hurt parts of ourselves. And I love that you're giving us permission to honor the pain of that and the ongoing loss of that. You know you made the right decision, and it doesn't mean that it doesn't still bring up complicated feelings.
Emily: That's right. And I'm so glad that you mentioned the presence of other people, because I think that's such a key part of the discernment process–acknowledging the presence of those who know you and love you. Acknowledging the presence of God who always goes with us wherever we go, and also acknowledging our own presence, which for me is something that I sometimes forget.
That third one is that I forget that I'm going with myself. I can learn to be my own friend. And sometimes when you're leaving a space, what keeps a lot of people in spaces is the fear of loneliness on the other side of knowing that there's going to be some loss of community.
There's going to be a loss of being able to control the narrative. Potentially, there's going to be a loss of understanding that maybe you didn't get a chance to say goodbye or to have the closure you thought you might get if you ever had to leave. And so there's a lot of loneliness on the other side of that.
But I think recognizing the presence of those who are with me, including myself, has been a real gift to me in times of transition like that.
Alison Cook: We need those, in the psychology world, these attachment figures. And attachments can become problematic if we won't leave because we're too attached, but we sometimes need those transitional tethers. To your point, I'm doing this hard thing. I'm leaving this relationship. I'm leaving this space that I've loved. I'm leaving this. It could even be work.
You talk about that in the book, having to leave behind a business that you built and loved. Oh my gosh. My heart broke when I read that. I was like, oh, that is hard for the right reasons. But I think about this word attachment. We need some tethers during those seasons. These structures provide us with that sense of stability. We need those structures. And so when we're leaving them, we need those transitional figures.
And I love that you're saying God is one. Oh my word. God is that. We can be that for ourselves. And also sometimes we need a couple other people to remind us, you're going to come through this, you're going to come through to the other side. And you're not going to be alone. Because it feels like you are.
Emily: I think a lot of us want to forget the pandemic. Hello. But I think of it now because so many of those natural tethers, the ceremonies, the embedded goodbyes, the community that we had, we didn't have any of those things, but that doesn't mean that things didn't end. And so instead, things ended without even an opportunity for closure.
And I don't know about you, but I find myself now, several years later, beginning to recognize some of the things that ended that didn't have those natural tethers. And it's almost like it's a little bit of an open wound still, and I'm realizing like, oh, this still needs to be processed and named.
Alison Cook: 100 percent. My husband and I were talking about that. Our son essentially didn't have his last two years of college, and we did all sorts of creative things and it turned out really well. And we have a wedding coming this June and I can tell that's what it's like to celebrate a big event.
And with that comes that loss of, oh, we missed a couple of other opportunities and there's a fresh new understanding of why that's such a beautiful thing, but there's also a little bit of the grief of we didn't get that. Talk to me a little bit about, as we're winding down here, walking into the new space.
Because this is hard. You and I've gone on the emotional journey of letting go of all that we have to ask of ourselves. To make hard, wise decisions, to make those decisions well, and it's not like we tie a bow on it. There is a reason we are walking into something in a different way as a result of that. Talk to us a little bit about that piece. That's the third component of this.
Emily: I really think about this framed very loosely by the three centers of our intelligence, our thinking, feeling, and our action/instinct, our body, if you will. And I think we all have a natural tendency to lead with one. And when I walk into a room, I walk with my feelings first.
I can't understand not knowing how I feel. I always know how I feel. Now, I might not know why or where it's coming from, but I can always name it. Someone else might walk into a room, a physical room, I'm talking like a meeting or a church or a community, and, immediately, they're analyzing the room and they're thinking through it.
They walk in with their thinking mind. And then someone else might walk in and instinctively know who needs a helping hand in the room over in the corner, or they feel something in the room. And that's a more instinctual person. And I think it's true. We lead with one.
Alison Cook: Yeah. My mind is running the Enneagram wheel as I'm listening.
Emily: Yeah. And we all have all three. It's not like we only have one. And so I think when it comes to walking into a room as a person who I'm most fully am, it's bringing online my whole self, not my feeling or my thinking or my doing, and I think depending on your social location, your cultural space where you grew up, some of us have been taught to value certain types of seeing ways of seeing the world, certain ways of knowing over other ways of knowing, and they're all valid and we all have something to learn from one another.
Those are some ways that I'm beginning to learn to walk into a room as my own friend, as a listener, and as a leader, even when I'm not in charge.
Alison Cook: Emily, I'm wondering, I'm imagining, as you're walking into maybe a new church, you've left a church, you're walking in, it seems to me as if you're saying, now I can walk in both with my heart wide open, my feelings wide open, and also maybe I'm going to bring online, for lack of a better word, critical thinking, like observation, what's happening here.
Because of this old experience, and what I've gone through, because I made a brave choice to change, to leave, to move in a new direction, I now have more access to different parts of myself as I'm discerning this new space.
Emily: I think so. And that question of did I choose the space or did it choose me? Sometimes when we leave a space that we've been in for a really long time, we become more aware of things that we maybe didn't have, weren't required of us in the room where we had been for so long.
So now in this new space, whereas before I could get by because people knew me and I knew the language there and I knew the ins and outs of the space and I didn't have to access this other, this maybe more hidden part of myself because I could get by, I belonged. But when you walk into a new room, there is an invitation there to access parts of myself that maybe I took for granted before or didn't really have to access before and calling them to mind in a new space.
We've been visiting a new faith community for about two years now. And I'm not a different person there. But my experience of that space is different from my experience of the old space. And I think it's because of the loss of the old space. And I still can't fully put that into words, but I do think it has to do with recognizing that yes, I feel certain things here. But also, I can bring to the forefront these other aspects of myself that maybe I wasn't exercising before, and I'm finding that to be a real gift.
Alison Cook: Interesting. It makes sense to me. Geographically, I've moved a lot. I grew up in a little town in Wyoming, the same school, same house, same family for 20 years, went to school in New England on the East Coast, went to college. Different world.
How do I bring that person that I was into that new space? And almost going to a different country. You learn to speak a different language. You learn over time. It takes time. And then lived on the East Coast, then came back during the pandemic to this rural area of Wyoming. Suddenly I'm like, wow, I have this old person in me. And also now I speak about five different languages.
And how do I bring all of that so that I'm an integrated person in a new way, because I can't speak all the languages at once, but I'm aware now that all those languages are inside of me. That's the best way I can put it–almost as I think about people who have lived in a lot of different cultures and literally, I had to literally learn a new language, but sometimes that's what it feels like.
It's a whole different way of being. They're all now inside of me and it's fun. It's also disorienting, but there's an adventure to it. I can play with this a little bit. How can I bring this one to the forefront in this new space? And I love that you said, we've been trying out this new church for two years. Meaning that also takes time.
It takes time to figure out how I am gonna show up as a whole person with all these new facets of myself that have become more illuminated in this new space.
Emily: And what of myself in my previous experience am I bringing forward? And what was conditioned and I followed and fell in line, because that's what was expected in that room? And that's what I'm also discerning as we're disentangling what is me? What is God? What is from that space?
Alison Cook: It's a whole different season of discernment. I love that. I love that because again, it's to your point, what did I choose and what kind of chose me? Putting myself in this new situation gives me that gift of agency to choose. It also requires discernment, but I feel like the disorientation of that has a little bit more of a connotation of joy. I don't know. It feels a little bit more like an adventure than the disorientation of the middle place. But you tell me how you see that.
Emily: I think that's a good articulation of that because from my experience, when you have an unmade decision, when you're in the liminal space of a hallway, there's a lot of tension you have to hold all the time, because you're always waiting for the resolution of the final chord in the song.
It feels like you're always in this waiting space. And so once you enter an actual room, even though there are new things to explore, part of it's been resolved. The decision of my next right thing was this. I don't know for how long. And one of my favorite two word mantras is “for now”; here's where I am for now.
I'm doing this. It will not be forever, or if it is, I can't answer that right now. For now, here I am. Therefore, what's my next right thing here in this space, because I know this room is where we'll be for a minute. And so I think to that point, it does feel a bit more like an opportunity or an adventure, even while we're carrying a whole bag of losses with us still.
Alison Cook: You're in the room. So there's some release there, even as now you have to explore it and you have to figure out where the old stuff that you brought with you goes. You're in a new room. You've crossed the threshold. I love that. I love that.
You've led the way so well for so many of us around this topic of making decisions and the part that we play in that. It’s not a passive thing; we have a part to play in our spiritual formation to bring it back to that.
We have to make decisions for now. We have to discern. We have to be aware. There's a very active role that we play in that. You've done such a beautiful job of leading us through that, through this book, through your podcast, through so much of your work. I'm curious, as you think back over younger Emily, back even when you were thinking about making that decision in college, what would you want her to know that you know now?
Emily: I did this then and I still do this sometimes now, in that when I make the final decision, I think the destination is the point. And I think what I continue to learn and what I would hope to be able to impart to my younger self is that while the decision is very important, the more important thing is the person who you are becoming.
And for me, I have found the process of discernment and decision making is such a wonderful place to meet God, to meet myself, to find community, and what ends up happening on the other side, I don't want to say it doesn't matter because it deeply matters, but maybe the thing that matters more is who I am becoming in the process, which then gives me a lot of freedom. It maybe lets me off the hook from having to make the exact right decision in every case, because I'm becoming someone no matter how I end up choosing. That's what I want to be more deeply invested in.
Alison Cook: I love that. It's who you’re becoming. You can't go wrong then. You can't go wrong if you're becoming that truer version of yourself. I love that. Thank you. To close, I want to ask you the question we ask all of our guests: what's bringing out the best of you right now?
Emily: What a lovely question. We mentioned this a little bit already, but I probably would answer it this way and for a long time, which is, I think what brings out the best of me is a regular habit of reflection. Whether that's reflecting on gratitude, on what was life giving, even on what was life-draining, because paying attention to decisions I've made in the past helps me make more informed decisions in the present and for the future.
If I go too long without reflecting on my life, I start to not feel like a person. I start to lose my sense of self in a way. And so that practice and having that be a regular part of my rhythm of life brings out the best of me
Alison Cook: That's so interesting. I love that. I hear the word courage in that–a courage to come up out of things and really look at them. It allows you to tap into a better version of yourself. I love that. This is such a gift. Where can people find you?
Emily: You can find me and links to the book and all the things at my website, emilypfreeman.com, don't forget the P. Also on Instagram @emilypfreeman. I host a weekly podcast called The Next Right Thing where we talk about 12 to 15 minutes a week about usually one decision making practice.
And then we go a little deeper on my substack, the Soul Minimalist, where we host a little bit of a smaller conversation with people who are a part of that community, who want to go beyond the pro/con list and talk about decision making in faith, work, and life. And the book can be found at the website and wherever books are sold.
Alison Cook: I love that. How to Walk into a Room. The love language we speak on this podcast is deeply spiritual and also practical and it's both. It's both. I was like, oh my gosh, this is right up our alley. So for those of you listening, you're going to get spiritual wisdom with some really practical, helpful questions, practical tethers to help anchor you when you're walking through these seasons where you might need to make a change.
You might need to leave something, you might need to start something new. And it's a fantastic resource. Thank you for all that you do, all of who you are, most of all, because it reflects in the work that you do. And, grateful for your time being here with us today.
Emily: Thank you so much.
Emotions are complicated. They're also beautiful. When you don't honor the complicated mix of fears, frustrations, and also the good things that you feel, you doubt yourself and you doubt other people. You deprive yourself of the opportunity to get real wisdom and to brave healthier solutions. Today we're diving into these complicated feelings together.
Here's what we cover:
1. Why emotional complexity is a gift
2. Examples of how we guilt-trip & gaslight ourselves
3. How to locate emotions within a larger story
4. Real-life examples
5. The 3 most important guideposts to get started
Resources
- Pre-order I Shouldn't Feel This Way
- The Best of You by Dr. Alison Cook
- Boundaries For Your Soul by Dr. Alison Cook and Kimberly Miller
- The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis
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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'm so glad you're here. I am so excited about this episode today to dive into one of my favorite topics. It's a topic I have been immersed in this past year–really these past several years.
It's a topic I've struggled with personally. It's how to navigate these complicated, conflicting emotions that we all have inside. So often these emotions that we have are in tension with each other; they collide with one another. Those situations where you love someone, and you're also really angry with that same person.
Where you love God, but you're also really frustrated with how far away God feels or how distant God feels. Maybe you love your kids and you feel protective of your kids. And you also know that you need to show some restraint.
There's so much inner tension that happens inside of us as we go through life, and so this idea of how we begin to untangle the knots of the emotions that live inside of us became the topic of my brand new book. It's called I Shouldn't Feel This Way, and it's coming out May 7th. In this book, I took these last few years to put together a framework, a map, through the inner conflict that we all face, the emotional complexity inside of all of us.
I believe that our inability to tend to the noise in our hearts and the inner chaos that so many of us feel is one of the most under addressed, under diagnosed and under named threats to the health of ourselves and our relationships, including our relationship with God. and so this book is the third book I've written and it's the most forward facing.
If you've read Boundaries for Your Soul, my first book with Kimberly Miller, it's a deep dive into healing the parts of your soul. It's a therapeutic method that goes deep into unburdening past wounds and recovering and reclaiming every part of who you are. My second book, The Best of You, is really more focused on external relationships. It's about the work of setting boundaries in our relationships and how you have to heal the self in order to forge healthy relationships and healthy boundaries with other people.
This next book, I Shouldn't Feel This Way, is a set of three practices that we all need to be working through every single day. I've distilled these three foundational practices and given you numerous examples of how to apply these practices in our everyday lives. I'm so excited for you to get this book in your hands. It was a hard book for me to write.
Probably the hardest book I've ever written. I write about the process of why it was so hard within the book. It was very meta. The framework I was laying out in the book, I was having to apply to my own complicated feelings while I was writing the book. It stirred up so much of my own inner tensions.
And so in today's episode, I'm going to walk you through three of the mantras from the book that are your starting point for this journey. And by mantra, I mean a catch phrase that helps you engage in what I believe is a spiritual practice. This practice of tending to the inner conflict inside of us, the complexity of our emotions, I don't believe it's only in the realm of therapy.
I believe it's a spiritual practice. It's part of being human. It's a practice every single one of us needs to have, and the fact that we don't have it, I think, is a big part of why we're dealing with so many of the problems we're dealing with in our world today.
I'm also going to share, toward the end of the episode, some pretty vulnerable examples from my own life that I've had to work through using this framework this past year.
Before we get started, I want to announce to you the pre-order bonus items that you'll get when you pre-order I Shouldn’t Feel This Way. When you pre-order a book, it's so helpful to authors. It sends signals to publishers and to all of the digital algorithms, to Google, to Amazon, to Instagram, to all the social media algorithms, to all the powers that be out there that are putting things in front of you all the time.
When people start pre-ordering a book, it tells those algorithms that there's interest in this topic, that they want to see more of this topic. And so then those algorithms do their job and they put this book in front of more people. It helps get the word out about the book into the hands of people who need these materials. I invest all the profits off of the books I write, off of the podcast ads for this podcast, back into creating more healing resources because my purpose and my driving mission is to bring affordable faith based healing resources to all God's people, everywhere.
I know they're hard to come by, and it is my mission to get these resources out into the hands of all the people who need them. So that's what drives me.
When you preorder, you'll get the first three chapters of the book and you'll get a guided journal. You’ll also get a tool I like to call “the looking tool”. I mentioned it in last week's podcast, episode 92. It's a way of framing the challenges that you're facing in the context of the larger picture of your life. And you're also going to get information on how to join me for a free live masterclass, where I'm going to help you begin the process of applying these three practices in real time.
You can attend it live. You'll also be able to get the recording. So to get those bonus items, all you have to do is pre-order a copy of I Shouldn't Feel This Way. You can get the hardcover version. You can get the audio version. You can get the Kindle version. It doesn't matter.
Purchase your copy anywhere books are sold; you can go to Barnes and Noble, Amazon, Christian Book Distributors, you can go to your local bookstore and ask them to order it for you. That's also another way to really help authors–to request the book from local bookstores.
So purchase the book, then you go to my website. The website is IShouldntFeelThisWay.com, and enter in the information that it asks, and you'll automatically get emailed those first three chapters, the guided journal, the looking tool, and the information about how to join the live masterclass.
So what is emotional complexity?
It refers to the depth and nuances of an individual's emotional experiences. It means that we often encounter conflicting emotions simultaneously. It's a beautiful concept that underscores the richness of our emotional life and the complexity of how God made us.
The reality is that emotions are complex. You experience multiple, often conflicting emotions, simultaneously. We all do. And in order to become a mature adult with a healthy emotional life, you have to be able to navigate through your own emotions. Now, here is the thing I want you to understand.
Complicated emotions are evoked by complicated situations. Something happens outside of you that's hard. Your child comes home from school upset. They've been bullied. It detonates a whole lot of emotions inside of you. Your spouse does something you don't like. It detonates a whole bunch of emotions inside of you. Maybe it's a friend who does something, maybe your family member does something, maybe it's a boss, maybe it's something on the news.
There's so much going on in our world. You read a news article, you see a post by someone on social media, and it activates a bunch of emotions inside of you. The problem is, most of us don't have the tools needed to work our way through those complicated emotions. We don't even have that language for it. “Oh, wow, what I'm feeling is complicated.”
There are very few situations that have a one size fits all solution. And so when we're not taught how to honor and navigate the different, competing, sometimes conflicting emotions that come up inside our own heart, soul, and mind, we're left doubting ourselves, feeling ill equipped, feeling helpless, instead of being empowered to take action into our challenges, one brave step at a time.
Navigating emotional complexity is crucial for our own mental health. And it's crucial for the health of our relationships and for the world around us. Research tells us when we understand how to navigate our own complicated emotions, we cope better with stress.
It enhances emotional regulation and we gain psychological maturity and resilience. We have healthier, richer interpersonal relationships. People with a greater understanding of the complexity of their emotions are better equipped to navigate the complexities of this life. They can process and respond to challenging situations more effectively.
One of the biggest problems contributing to so many of the relational problems, the public betrayals, the anxiety pandemic, the broken relationships, the low self esteem, all of these things that we're seeing in our culture today, is because we don't know how to navigate our own minds, our own hearts, our own souls, our own inner tensions.
The more you learn to let the light of God's truth and God's love shine on the inside of your soul, the more equipped you are to let that same light shine into and light up the circumstances around you. When we're not able to navigate our own inner turmoil, our own inner complexity, how in the world can we navigate the complicated challenges in the world around us or help our loved ones navigate their complicated challenges?
Research shows that on any given day, we process about 11 million bits of information per second, anywhere from 6,000 to 70,000 thoughts per second. And we experience emotions during at least 90 percent of our day, often several simultaneously. This is that emotional complexity that we're talking about. The amount of information we're processing is increasing exponentially in this digital age with the advent of social media and the internet, and so much coming at us all the time.
We live in a culture that does not teach us how to navigate complexity. It oversimplifies it. It sends us memes about just thinking positively, or validating every feeling that you have. And these simplistic formulas aren't helpful. Sometimes our faith communities also give us simplistic formulas, or they don't really talk to us much about emotions at all.
But even our experience of faith is complex. We have complicated feelings about God. This is normal, but we don't often identify that this is normal, let alone talk about how to navigate the complicated feelings that we have. And so what most of us do is we go on autopilot. We process all of this information outside of our conscious awareness. We react to things subconsciously.
And what that means is our responses to what's happening around us are driven by thoughts and feelings and beliefs that we hold that we're not consciously aware of these feelings and these beliefs might be rooted in pain from the past. They might be rooted in unhelpful messages from the past. They might be rooted in patterns of behavior that aren't actually helpful to us anymore, and we're not aware of it because we're on autopilot.
And sometimes I use the metaphor, it's as if your mind is like a self-driving car. That car has been programmed and you're sitting back and letting the car drive and you're trusting that the car is going the right way, that it knows what to do when it hits a chaotic intersection. You're just trusting that the system has been programmed directly, but the problem is, what if it's not?
What if that autopilot that our brain is on has been programmed by past traumas? What if it's been programmed by unhelpful advice that someone gave us years ago? What if it's been programmed to respond to situations in extremely simplistic ways that don't actually count for the nuances of the situation?
You assume that you're heading in the right direction. And it doesn't work. You might even be noticing some inner tension–I don't know if I should be trusting this car to be driving me through this crazy intersection, but I don't know what else to do.
And because we don't know what else to do, we don't know how to come out of autopilot, we work harder to shut that inner turmoil, that cue inside of us, that something might actually need our attention. We work harder to shut that noise down.
So many of us are on autopilot. We're reacting so quickly to everything that's coming at us. We're moving so fast, we're driving through intersections without stopping to get out of the car to enter into some of that chaos that we're feeling inside. That's important. That needs our attention before we do something foolish or head down a road we have no business being on. The stakes are really high .
What often happens when we do notice some of that inner tension or some of those emotions that we don't want to feel is that we've learned to shut them down. We end up sabotaging ourselves. We don't know what to do. So we default to the programming and then we keep doing what we've always done.
We try to numb those emotions. We try to shut them down by eating or scrolling or binge watching or jumping into other people's problems. Or we guilt trip ourselves. We try to guilt message ourselves out of feeling the way we really feel. We gaslight ourselves. We try to tell ourselves we shouldn't really feel the way that we feel.
We have all these strategies for keeping those emotions down, outside of our conscious awareness. And that's where the title of this book came from; I realized, this is my story. I have a pretty good intuitive radar for picking up on things that are going on around me that aren't really aligned with the truth or that don't sit right with me.
It's also uncomfortable for me. And so for a long time, I would tell myself, you shouldn't feel that way. Shut it down. That's not your business. Let it go. And it's taken me years to notice that sometimes the very first emotion that I have to identify and name is that feeling of, I shouldn't feel this way.
That “I shouldn't feel this way” is often a cue that I do feel this way. And I need to slow down, I need to pay attention. I don't know exactly why I'm feeling what I'm feeling, but I do feel this way and trying to guilt trip or gaslight myself out of it doesn't help.
When we don't honor the complicated mix of doubts, fears, and real questions that we have inside, we doubt ourselves and we doubt other people. We silently battle ourselves and we silently battle against other people. We deprive ourselves of the opportunity to get real wisdom and real clarity in partnership with God's Spirit.
And so instead of working our way through the inner turmoil, through the inner confusion, that I don't know what I think about this, we tend to move down the path of least resistance. We do things the way we've always done them. We risk jeopardizing our own health and the health of our relationships. We don't address the real needs all around us. And we don't bring the full power of our God-given design, our thinking brain, our nervous system, and all the resources God has given us to sift through the challenges in our lives.
When I was a kid, we had a map on the wall in our basement. It was a map of Narnia based on the Narnia Chronicles by C. S. Lewis, which many of you have read. I loved those books as a kid. And I would stare at the map and imagine myself at different points on the map.
Sometimes I would imagine what it might feel like to have come through that wardrobe and be in that scary forest. I don't know where I am. I don't even know where I'm supposed to go. This is weird. This is confusing. This is disorienting. And then I imagine myself over in the witch's castle to the north, where it was sinister and maybe even a feeling of evil and the icy cold of what that must've felt like. And how do I get out of here? How do I get away from that? I have a feeling about that. This doesn't feel good to me. I don't think I should be here, but how do I get out of here, and can I trust how I'm feeling?
And then there are places on the map where it shows Aslan's land. And I would imagine that feeling of sunshine on my face and Aslan's land, the green grass, the feeling of freedom, the feeling of clarity, the feeling of, oh, this is where I want to be. This feels good. This doesn't feel complicated. This feels beautiful.
And how do I get here? How do I get from the forest or out of the evil or out of the toxicity and into Aslan's land? I would imagine myself at all those different places and that's what I wanted to do for you in I Shouldn’t Feel This Way, is begin to map out some of the different places, the different landmines, some of the things that are hard that you're facing.
We can get to a better place, but it's a journey. We've got to go through some of these hard seasons in order to get to where we want to be. We first have to name what's hard about where we are now. This is not a formula. This is not a, you do these three things and you'll be all set. That is not what this is. This is a map that gives you guideposts so that you can navigate your way through the forest.
It doesn't take you out of the forest of the challenges that you face. You're going to have to do the work of finding your way through the forest. I can't come and rescue you out of it. No one can. And if someone is promising you that they can pluck you out of the challenges that you face, I would be skeptical about that.
You've got to walk through those challenges, but this book gives you a guide, a framework so that you don't get lost, so that you're not alone, and so that you have some touchstones, some mile markers to keep you on track.
There are three guideposts I want to introduce to you today, because these are three guideposts we're going to come back to time and time again over the coming weeks and months. The first one is, “I shouldn't feel this way”.
I've been using this mantra over and over this last year. My husband and I now use it–”this is my “I shouldn't feel this way” moment. That moment of recognition, of, oh my gosh, I'm beating myself up for feeling something I actually do feel.
It's something I need to face. I don't want to feel this way. I don't want to feel activated after spending time with this person, I don't like feeling that way. I don't want to feel angry at this person that I love. I don't want to feel this way about God. I don't want to feel this way about my body, but I do feel this way.
So your “I shouldn't feel this way” moment is a recognition of the feeling you wish you didn't feel. I don't like feeling angry about my loved one. It's scary. I don't like it. I don't like that I feel activated by this person, that they don't seem trustworthy. I don't want to feel that way. I don't like that I feel like numbing with food all the time. I don't like that I feel conflicted about God, that I'm checking out at church or checking out during my prayer times.
I don't like that I'm feeling stuck in my head and confused and unable to get out of it. I don't like that I feel this way about other people, but I do. I do feel this way. This is your moment of making what's subconscious, conscious, bringing it into your conscious awareness. I do feel this way. I wish I didn't, but I do. And you're stopping the guilt-tripping, the gaslighting part of you, all the ways that you try to shove that aside.
You bring that uncomfortable feeling into your conscious awareness. I've got to stop. I've got to take a look at it. I've got to do some work around it, because this is the way I actually feel. I don't want to do something foolish, and this feeling is here for a reason.
I've got to figure it out. Something doesn't feel right. I'm confused. I'm having a reaction to a situation. I wish I didn't, but I am, and I need to do something about it. Now listen, so often, part of the reason we don't want to stop when we're feeling things we wish we didn't feel is because it's confusing. We don't want to face the very thing that's confusing us.
And that leads to mantra number two: “I'm at a crossroads”.
Crossroads are inherently confusing. There's a bunch of different directions, a bunch of different paths you can take at a crossroads. It's disorienting when you don't know which way to go. It's confusing and it's hard to stop when you already feel activated.
It's so tempting to put your foot on the gas pedal, close your eyes, and hope that you choose the right path. It's hoping to get lucky. Maybe I'll get lucky. Go for it. It's hard to stop when you're already confused. But that crossroads, oh my gosh, that crossroads is not a bad place to be.
It's a place to stop. It's a place to put your car and park and get out and look around and invite God into the disorientation. And that's where this whole “I shouldn't feel this way” process starts. It starts when you stop and acknowledge, I do feel this way. I don't know what to do about it yet. I don't know which path to take, but I can stop here at the crossroads.
I've got to stop. I can set up camp for a minute at the crossroads, and I can learn to pay attention to what's going on inside of me so I'll have a fighting chance of getting back in my car when it's time to drive forward and take the right path.
You start to learn how to build yourself what I call a place in between. I love these places in between where you learn to stop and set up a little house for yourself, a little place in between where you do the work of looking inside, of reflecting, of tending to your own emotions so that when it's time, you're ready to find the right path. And step three, the very first thing you're going to do when you stop, when you set up camp at the crossroads, is you start to name what's hard.
What's hard? What do I feel? What am I seeing that I wish I didn't but I do? I'm frustrated. I'm scared. I feel alone. I'm not entirely ungrateful. Some things are okay. A lot of me is confused. I'm not sure what to do. I don't like feeling this way, but I do feel this way. I do feel scared. I do feel uncomfortable. I do feel unsure.
And the first thing that I can do at this crossroads is to stop. It's to stop and name what's hard about what I feel. As we close, I want to give you some examples of these moments from my own life and how I've applied them to situations in my own life.
The first one that I noticed was almost exactly a year ago. I turned 50 last February and I had a huge I shouldn't feel this way moment. I hated turning 50. I hated it. I've never had that experience at a milestone birthday. I didn't have it at 30. I didn't have it at 40. 50 was so hard for me and it came out of nowhere.
An avalanche of uncomfortable, unpleasant, hard emotions. And I didn't like feeling that way. I thought I should feel empowered. I thought I should feel free. I saw other people posting about how 50 is their best life and how they're feeling all empowered and all great about this next chapter of their life. I didn't feel any of that.
It came out of nowhere. I didn't feel at the top of my game. I felt a complicated mixture of feelings. And I didn't want to feel that way about aging. I didn't want to feel shame. I didn't want to feel the way I felt about the lines that seemed to pop out of nowhere on my face. I didn't want to feel the way I felt about my body, but I did. I did. And I had to stop and face those feelings in order to understand myself in a more compassionate way. I couldn't beat myself up for feeling those feelings.
Now, in hindsight, I understand it a lot better in some ways. There was some catching up to myself that I hadn't done because I'd been so absorbed in the work of helping other people through hard things. I'm at a much better place now; I turned 51 in February and I was aware.
I was like, okay, I've done the work. I entered into the crossroads. I faced what was hard and I'm finding myself in a better place, but I didn't get there through exiling those emotions, through beating myself up, through pretending like I didn't feel the complicated set of things I actually did feel.
Another thing I'm feeling right now: I'm feeling a lot of complicated feelings about showing up more on social media. I've been offline for the most part this last year. I show up every once in a while. I post weekly about the podcast, but most of that I do through a third-party server. I'm not on social media very much.
I've noticed about myself this last year–I tend to be a pretty private person. I'm a pretty private person with a public platform. And so it's hard for me to navigate the public part of this work that I do, and yet I care about this work and I want to share about it. And that means I have to show up on social media and yet I have complicated feelings about social media. So many of us have complicated feelings about social media.
There's another one that comes up for me about my work. I have complicated feelings about traveling to speak. I turn down so many requests for speaking, and I feel bad about that. Part of it is my own values of being a pretty private person and living a simple life. I don't travel a lot for the purpose of my work.
I also donate a lot of the work I do to organizations that are serving the underserved, those who don't have access to a lot of tools. That's one of my core values; whatever work I do, speaking or putting on workshops, is to do most of it for organizations that are serving people who don't have access to resources, who are coming out of homelessness, who are dealing with addictions, who don't have the ability to get these resources.
And because I have that value, it means I can't do as much traveling to speak in other types of venues. And so again, that's complicated for me. I've had to make hard decisions, but I feel like I've made wiser decisions when I honored the reality of the complicated feelings I have inside. I would love to join large gatherings of women. I would love to come to some of your churches.
I would love to be able to travel more and meet so many more of you in person. And I also value being really attentive to and close to my family, the people in my day to day life, and I also really value the work that I do for some of these nonprofit organizations. And so it means I have to make hard decisions, but when I name what's hard about those decisions and I sift through the noise of the complicated feelings I have, I'm able to arrive at better decisions.
And that brings me to you. What are some things you have complicated feelings about? What are some of your “I shouldn't feel this way” moments? You might have complicated feelings about a job that you need but also hate. Maybe there are people at your job that you like, that have given you a chance, that have invested in you, but there are also things about your job that are really hard, that are really sometimes even harmful to you.
And it's complicated. It's not so simple as “I should leave”.
You might have complicated feelings about a spouse, about a romantic partner. Maybe you love your spouse and sometimes your relationship is hard for you. And it's tricky to talk about that because people want to force you into a quick fix solution. Maybe they think you should leave when you're not ready to leave. It's not that simple.
Maybe they think you should stay and not complain about it. And it's also not that simple. It's nuanced. You need a way to honor the complexity of all that you feel so that you can find a way through the complicated situation.
Health is another one. So many people I know, including myself, are dealing with complicated feelings about their health. Sometimes for me, what I will say to my doctor after really thinking hard about a lot of the challenges I face is I'm one of the healthiest, unhealthy people you'll ever meet.
And that simple statement has come after years of recognizing I am so healthy in so many ways. And yet I also battle some really complicated health conditions and I know so many of you are in that same boat where it's not a simple thing. You're healthy on one hand; you can do a lot of things. And on the other hand, you're dealing with some really complicated health challenges.
You might have complicated feelings about God. You love God on one hand, you have faith on one end, and sometimes you don't trust God. You are disappointed in God. Maybe you're confused about where to go to church, or about how to pray, or about how to talk to God, or about what it should look like to follow God. And you're conflicted, and that's normal, and that makes sense, but you can't find other people to help you.
Honor the reality of that complexity. People around you are telling you, you shouldn't feel that way. You should trust God. You should go to church, pray, worship, and all those feelings will go away, but they don't. You feel confused and you feel lonely. And then on the other side, people are saying to you, yeah, that's why you should leave church altogether. You should ditch your faith. That's what people are saying on the other side.
And that's not it either. That's not what you want. You want to fight for your faith. You love God, and neither of those extremes is helpful to you. It's complicated, and that's your cue to stop and pay attention and honor that it's okay to feel the different things that you feel. It's normal. And together we can find a better way through it.
Here's the thing about “I shouldn't feel this way”. It's saying, yes, this is complicated. These simplistic formulas do not cut it. They will not help you through it. But there is a way to untangle the knots, to honor the complexity and to find a better way through. That's why I wrote this book. I wrote this book to give you a guide, and together we're going to find our way through inner conflict and into braver, healthier, wiser solutions.
We experience big and little losses all the time.
A friend moves away.
An opportunity passes you by.
A relationship ends.
Learning how to recognize and honor the losses we all experience can become a beautiful part of life, leading to more kindness, self-compassion, and connection with others. But we don't often talk about our losses, let alone how to honor them. That's why I loved this conversation with Rachel Marie Kang about creating space to honor loss. She is the author of the brand new book, "The Matter of Little Losses," a beautiful journey through how to honor the big and little losses in your life.
Here's what we cover:
1. The difference between loss and grief (2:09)
2. Different types of loss (7:22)
3. How we process loss as children (14:23)
4. Examples of "little" losses (22:46)
5. The most important way to parent kids through losses (31:04)
6. Rachel's 3 steps for tending losses each day (35:25)
7. The thing we want most through loss (39:59)
8. Why honoring loss brings hope (47:25)
Resources
- The Matter of Little Losses: Finding Grace to Grieve the Big (and Small) Things by Rachel Marie Kang
- Let There Be Art: The Pleasure and Purpose of Unleashing the Creativity within You by Rachel Marie Kang
- Follow Rachel Marie Kang on Instagram!
- RachelMarieKang.com
- The Fallow HouseDopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence by Dr. Anna Lembke
- Boundaries For Your Soul by Dr. Alison Cook and Kimberly Miller
- On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life through Great Books by Karen Swallow Prior
- Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
- The Myth Pilgrim podcast
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
© 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'm so glad you're here today for this conversation about creating space for the losses in our life. Whether you're someone who's had a major loss, maybe recently, or even long ago—or whether you're just like every single one of us and honoring the little losses almost every single week, even every single day sometimes.
We're going to get into grief in upcoming episodes. Today, we're really focusing on loss. So I want to touch on right here at the start about what is the difference.
Loss is the event of losing something or someone. It's an external event or situation that leads to a change in your experience, or it might lead to an emotional response.
It can be really vivid and noticeable, such as the death of a loved one, the end of a relationship, the loss of a job. It can also be a little bit more abstract or intangible, such as the loss of a dream, the loss of a sense of security, or maybe the loss of energy, or a certain way of feeling vital in your body.
So these are losses. They can range all the way from big losses down to little losses. Just yesterday I was going through the day and I got an email that was a disappointment. I would categorize it as a loss. It was a little one, but it had a big emotional punch and I had to name that loss so that it didn't take me out for the rest of my day.
And this is where we link from loss to grief. When we name our losses, when we're aware of our losses, when we notice our losses, we can then engage in a healthy process of grief.
Grief is the emotional response to loss, and it encompasses a wide range of feelings that arise after experiencing a loss. It can include sadness. It can include anger. It can include confusion. It might include a longing or a poignancy, a bittersweet feeling. It's really personal and it's really case specific.
So for example, for me yesterday, I didn't really feel a big grief. I felt a pinch of sadness and regret and even a little anger, but I did need to notice the loss in order to be able to tend to the emotional response to the loss. And it includes a process again, no matter how big or how little.
It involves coming to terms with the loss, adjusting your view of reality based on that loss, tending to the emotions that come up no matter how big or how little, and finding ways to cope and care for yourself.
And you're often doing all of this as you're trying to stay present to the tasks of your day, to the work that you have, to the parenting that you have, to all the things that you're involved with. So as our guest today talks about—this idea of tending to our losses is a really important practice that we all need to learn.
We have to have these skills to notice these losses and tend to ourselves through them because if we don't tend to our losses, we're not honoring the emotions that they stir up. And those emotions get sidelined. And as we know from everything we talk about this, and as we know from everything we talk about on this podcast, those emotions don't go away. They get exiled to a corner of your soul where they fester and get bigger, and then they come out in even bigger ways over time.
And so remember the loss is the event. It's the thing that happens no matter how big or how small and grief is your emotional response to that loss. Grieving is a skill. It's a skill we're not taught. But in order to grieve well, in order to honor the emotion of sadness, that is an important part of all of our human lives, we have to begin to notice our losses.
And if you struggle to notice or validate or honor, even the little losses in your life, you will bypass the grief process. On the other hand, if you begin to recognize losses, you can then frame them and brave your way through a healthy relationship with loss.
Now I want to introduce you to a tool that is from my upcoming book called I Shouldn't Feel This Way. It's The Looking Tool. And in the book, I walk you through this three step process I just laid out. It's naming, framing, and braving, where you begin to name different things that are occurring so that you can brave a healthy way through them. Now this tool can apply to anything you're experiencing, but I want to apply it today to this idea of noticing and tending to your losses. It’s pretty simple. It helps you understand how loss fits into the larger story of your life.
The tool consists of three parts:
Looking back.
Looking at today.
Looking ahead.
And it helps you understand your current relationship to loss because you're positioning that in the larger context of how you've experienced loss throughout your life. So for example, if you have big reactions to little losses in your current life, it may well be that you've got some big losses from your past that you haven't really looked at. And so you have a big reaction in your present because there's a backlog of untended grief due to losses you haven't really honored from the past.
And so as you begin to think about loss in your own life through this episode, you might notice: Where are there some losses that it might be good for me to honor and name and validate and show some compassion for myself as I look ahead? So looking back, here are some examples of losses from childhood that so many of us face and don't even realize that they still affect us:
Number one is just a loss of innocence. If you experienced some trauma or abuse or witnessed some trauma, there's a loss of innocence. Number two, there can be a loss of physical places.
Rachel talks about this in our episode today. I write about this in Boundaries for Your Soul. The loss of a home can be a big deal for a child through a move or through a relocation.
You can experience the loss of trust if there was a betrayal, a disappointment, or realization that the adults in your life were not actually trustworthy. And that can be a loss that it takes a while to understand how to name and recover. You might experience the loss of potential if certain choices were cut off for you. And then there's the loss of friendships or the loss of a feeling of acceptance or the loss of a feeling of acceptance in a peer group or the loss of security if there's a loss in your family structure.
And so these losses, if, again, not named, they still live inside our souls and we don't want to let the grief over these losses take us over. But the way to do that is to begin to do the work of gently honoring the losses in little ways.
When we look at today, some of the big and little losses that many of us deal with in our current lives. We deal with the loss of time. Time feels like it's moving really fast. We deal with the loss of different stages of our children's lives. I talked about this with Rowena in the series on transitions, how sometimes every milestone that you go through with your kids also presents a loss.
We deal with the loss of friendships. We deal with the loss of communities. Sometimes we deal with financial losses. We deal with the loss of a job or the loss of a potential career path. We might deal with the loss of a feeling of our youthfulness or a loss of energy or a loss of the health that we thought we once had. These are all losses that flicker through our lives on an almost daily basis.
And these losses again, do not have to take us out. They're part of being human. Jesus experienced loss all the time. The question is how do we tend to these losses in a healthy way?
And then lastly, when we look ahead, many of us are anticipating certain losses. We might be anticipating the loss of a loved one. We might be anticipating the loss of our own physical abilities, the loss of a career identity. The loss of a certain way we've been doing our family. Even good things can bring up these losses. When our kids leave the nest, we're happy for them, but it can bring up loss for us.
Tending to these losses in a healthy way is crucial for maintaining emotional and psychological wellbeing. These losses, even the little ones, can accumulate over time and impact our mental health if we don't learn how to address them properly. It's a little bit like a garden—you have to tend the garden. We have to tend these losses.
Stanford psychiatrist, Anna Lembke, wrote in her insightful book, Dopamine Nation, “with intermittent exposure to pain, we become less vulnerable to pain and more able to feel pleasure over time.” In other words, to keep pain from becoming too big, you need to tend to the right amount of pain in healthy ways.
We have to learn to tend our pain. And we do that by naming it, by honoring it, by noticing it when it shows up.
It starts by naming what's hard. Recognizing, “Ouch, that feels like a loss.” That hurts—that rejection, that disappointment, that lost opportunity—that hurts! Recognizing that it's okay to feel upset, disappointed or frustrated by a loss. When you validate those feelings—the truth of your experience in that moment—you can then take steps toward that healthy experience, again, of grief, whether it's a small process, a little process, or a big process of adjusting your view of reality based on what happened, caring for yourself, and then taking brave steps forward in light of that new reality.
And one of the most important things you can do as you learn to tend to your losses is to practice self compassion, is to be kind to yourself when you have that emotional response, no matter how big or how small. Self compassion means treating yourself with kindness, with concern and with support in the same way you would offer a good friend that support if they were going through something.
“Yes. That was hard. That's a loss.” Let's honor that. Let's validate that. Let's adjust to this new reality, and then we'll figure out how to find our way forward.
Today's conversation about tending to our losses is with Rachel Marie Kang. She's the author of a beautiful new book. It's called The Matter of Little Losses: Finding Grace to Grieve the Big (and Small) Things.
Rachel's book walks us through so many of these types of losses—losses from childhood that still impact us all the way to bigger losses in the present day.
Here's what she says: “Life is full of love, but it is also full of loss. Every big and seemingly insignificant loss—the loss of friendships, faith, dreams, health, community, and everything in between grieves us more than we think it will and often more than we let on. Why? Because losses matter.”
And as we learn to be kind to ourselves through loss, we are able to bring so much more kindness to everyone around us. And I think we could all agree that our world could use a little bit more of that kindness and that compassion as we all navigate losses every single day.
And so I'm so thrilled to bring you this conversation with Rachel. Rachel Marie Kang is the founder of the Fallow House and her writing has been featured in Christianity Today, Proverbs 31, She Reads Truth in and (in)courage, Rachel is the author of Let There Be Art and her brand new book, The Matter of Little Losses.
Please enjoy my conversation with Rachel Marie Kang.
***
Alison: I am thrilled to have you here today, Rachel. This is just such a beautiful book, and I'm so grateful that you're taking the time to come on and talk with us about it. So welcome.
Rachel: Thanks for having me, Alison.
Alison: I would love it if you would tell us a little bit about how you would have thought about loss or grief early on as a young person or even a young adult. How would you have coped with it back then?
Rachel: absolutely. I love this question. And I have to say, when I think back to my younger self or past days, I think, oh my gosh, I carried so much. I carried so much. And I now know that a lot of what I was carrying, I carried it because I cared. There was a great deal in my life that was taking place as I share in my book that mattered to me, that I cared about, even when I thought I didn't.
And I just want to read really quick from my first book, actually, because I literally say this almost word for word. I love how I say it. But I say there I am in that 1997 Kodak memory. So I'm talking about a photo, the girl who carries a lot, the girl who questions a lot, the girl who can't help but see that her lot in life is always asking, but never answering.
And then later on, I talk about beholding broken things and I say I was no longer just beholding brokenness, but it was beholding me. And I think I had this perspective of, I'm just a broken person because of carrying these sad and terrible and hard things, and so maybe this is just a personality defect, maybe I'm just a pessimistic person.
I now know that there was grief. It was real grief. And I'm so thankful for the gift of words and the gift of writing that was, I would say, how I made sense of my world and made sense of my grief as a young girl, just writing poems, writing in my journal, even before I knew really what I was doing.
Alison: Yeah. It's so interesting. You were processing through it, but simultaneously at that young age, you were also seeing yourself as broken. What's wrong with me? Even though what you were doing was beautiful coping, beautiful work of making sense of pain, but you didn't have the language of, oh, this is how one processes grief.
Rachel: Right.
Alison: You mentioned in the first part of The Matter of Little Losses, it takes bravery to be here. When did you begin to notice or realize that you needed to face grief, that you needed to be brave to really face some of that grief?
Rachel: Yeah, I think there were different nudges I'd felt throughout childhood, teenage years, adult, young adult years. I think when I think back though, the first nudge was as a teenager. It was at some event, I couldn't tell you the person who was speaking, I couldn't tell you where we were. I don't even remember any of that.
But what I do know was this woman on the stage was talking about anger and bitterness and sorrow. She didn't know my story, but she was naming how I felt and I will never forget, I had chills on my arms, goosebumps, just to be seen, and again, she didn't know my story. She was speaking to a whole crowd of us, but she called out how I felt.
And it was at that moment when I realized, oh my gosh, this shouldn't be here. This pain, this sorrow, this sadness, what do I do to get it out, to face it, to fix it? And so I'd say that began probably my first step towards a healing journey. And there were other places in my life too, where I'd felt those nudges, probably my college years in different positions of leadership when you're challenging others to make good decisions and to make healthy decisions.
And then you, yourself, you are automatically challenging yourself and saying, wait a minute, how am I doing in this area? My undergraduate years were really another season in my life of just lots of healing.
And then of course, motherhood, which I have just entered into. It's six beautiful, wonderful, fantastic, crazy years of tending to these sweet two boys that I have, but you are daily invited to check yourself and to see when and where you are operating out of pain or unhealth, however we want to call it, whatever it is for that day.
So yeah, I'd say it started many years ago, but that journey of learning to see, to bravely face those places. I'm still on that journey.
Alison: When you began to notice those nudges, so you were in high school when that woman was on stage, then you're in college in leadership and you began to realize, oh I'm dealing with some of this, did you reach out to anybody for support with that? And if so, was it helpful or sometimes it's not helpful.
People encourage you to shove it back under the carpet or stuff it back inside or even be shaming. And so I like to ask the question without the pressure of you feeling like you have to answer in the positive. It's helpful either way, because I think when we get those nudges, we tend, especially when we're younger, to take little fledgling steps to maybe move towards someone who we think can help us. And depending on the help that we get, to use your flower metaphor we can wilt back in.
Rachel: Yeah. Yeah, that is so good. I have to say that I had some really great leaders in my life while growing up. Even as a teen, I remember that moment I was at a church event. I was at some church gathering girls event. That swirl, I almost envision it as a swirl because you don't know what is all of this mess, this tornado of emotions and feelings.
I do remember taking that to certain youth leaders and, and being mentored through that and being tended to and heard through that and validated and prayed for and and I think I remember too probably the greatest thing that they gave was time. There wasn't a pressure of “we need to fix this now”, but you're in a relationship with people and so they know when to ask a question or maybe not.
And for some of us, it's not always a good experience, but thankfully, I did have good leaders in my life that knew when to ask a question and maybe to let me sit in it.
Alison: I love that reminder of what you're trying to show us through the book, which is time, spaciousness, gentle questioning, exploration versus you need to fix that. You need to pray that away. You need to not feel that, which can make us feel more ashamed for those emotions that are just really part of actually a normal response to hard things.
So I love that. I'm grateful that you had that experience. We talk so much, Rachel, about grief and we sometimes think of it in terms of these big losses and it's important, these sudden losses or big moments of losing someone or, a big loss of a relationship or even the loss of a dream of a certain type of family, we see that and these are really important things to name and honor.
I think it's so interesting that you talk about these little losses that maybe are even harder for us to give ourselves permission to grieve in a healthy way. Talk to us about what you mean by that idea of little losses and some of the ones that you encountered that led you to have to process all of these emotions.
Rachel: Sure. Oh my gosh. Yeah. I had so much fun writing this book, by the way. I know I tackle some heavy and hard topics, but there's so much nostalgia leaning into some of these stories and memories. And honestly when writing about moving home and friendships, those chapters, I thought about those losses when you move from a home and you start a new school and you make all these new friends, but you lose these friends.
That was something that I'd done a few times and I look back now and I'm like, where were the rituals? I think that I would have floundered less if I had someone that when we moved from our first house, what if we had gathered rocks and kept those rocks and made some sort of collection or, I don't know I'm just, I'm grasping.
Or even with friendships, I actually wrote in the book, I tried to make a ritual for myself. I share the story of, I'm with my friends, we're celebrating my party, they all surprise me and come to my house, we take a walk, we go to the gas station and we order these Coca Cola's that are in vintage bottles and my friends all go home the next day and I save those bottles and I wash them out and I keep them in my closet for years.
And when I look back on that moment, I don't think I was crazy, I think I was trying to create a ritual. I was trying to keep those friends as close to me as I could because I knew they were going back home and now I'm here in this new town and I'm going to miss them. How do I keep them close?
And so yeah, I had a lot of fun naming little losses and imagining that others would feel validated through that. But those were two that kind of surprised me and I had fun writing about it. But as I looked back, I thought, I wonder how things could have been different if there were words for this or rituals for this.
Alison: That chapter got me so much. I think it's so resonant. It reminded me of when we were writing Boundaries for Your Soul years ago, we needed a personal story for the chapter on sadness, on grief. And I just wrote this story about revisiting my childhood home. Years later, when my parents sold the house, like you said, there was not really a ritual and I was maybe disconnected from that.
And then years later, it was almost a flood of delayed grief. And I remember even as an adult, writing that and thinking, oh, this is such a little. thing. And that little story became so resonant for so many people, same with yours.
When I read yours, I was just like, oh, this formative age where the safety and security of these places and these people mean so much to these young parts of us and how you ritualized it. You found a meaningful way to ritualize that for yourself. Yeah, that was beautiful.
Rachel: So cool that happened since writing that book. It was in-between the time after you send it to your editor and you're working through it, so it hasn't come out yet, and one of my best friends’ parents left her childhood home and she was devastated.
I had gone to this home, and I was like, oh my gosh, like what do you do? And so I had to think, what would I have wanted? If I could go back to any of my childhood homes, what would I want? And I thought, I would love a leaf from a tree or a sprig from a plant or a flower, something to keep and to hold.
And within a few days I'd ordered like this clear glass frame that you can basically pluck a leaf off or find some flowers and you just dry press them and then you can preserve it forever. And so I sent those to her and I was like, can't save your home, but go get a snipping of the peppermint in your mom's garden or something and keep a piece of it forever.
Alison: You're really getting at with this whole idea of big and little losses, but parts of us long for that permanence, that sense of ultimacy with home, whether it's the home of a place or the home of a relationship. And that's what I love about what you're doing in this book, even the way you bring in really familiar art and literature that are so familiar to so many of us.
I think you talk about the Harry Potter series. You talk about Madeleine L'Engle, you're quoting a lot of these very resonant things that put us back in places of our memory. It's so human. And there are parts of us that know we can't hang on to things forever, but we long for that sense of consistency, of permanency, of goodness.
And so the fact that you were able to turn some of that pain into this gift for us to help us reconnect is just such a powerful gift that you've given us.
Rachel: Thank you for seeing that.
Alison: Tell me a little bit, Rachel, how has your faith helped you navigate grief, but also how have your losses changed your experience of faith?
Rachel: Okay, I love this question. And I actually want to allude to something that you had mentioned earlier. You were piggybacking off of a thought that I said, this idea of having these leaders that kind of gave space and gave time for the grief that I would unpack with them. As I think about this question, I think that's what my faith has given me.
It's given me space. It's given me space to think and to feel and to question and even to rage, which I really loved getting into later in The Matter of Little Losses, like the space to question and to be angry. And then even just literally space in journaling, to be able to journal to God and say, this has broken my heart, or why is this the way that it is?
Being out in creation, nature, God's creation, and finding an expansiveness in that–being held by nature and allowing that to be a huge part of my faith and what holds me. And as I thought about this, I thought, wow, I feel like I have found such an expansiveness even beyond the walls of a building, which is when you think about faith. Most often, we get this image of a church, which is true, that is part of it, but there are other parts, and I found that it's so expansive.
And then the other way around, how has grief shaped my faith? I think it's given me permission to see this as just as sacred as these qualities and virtues such as love and faith and hope, which are always lifted up so high and cast in such a generous light. What I am finding is that grief is sacred too. It's not to be feared or avoided–it is beautiful, actually, and it opens our eyes to love not only ourselves and God, but others more, to care more, to hold and carry more compassion.
I love this question because it does feel like faith shapes grief and then grief shapes faith and I don't think I'd want to have it any other way.
Alison: Listening to you, I sense that word–expansiveness. You almost light up, and I don't want to put words in your mouth, but what I'm hearing you say, and I think it's really beautiful, so I want to just circle around it for a minute, is that in naming the different emotions, even the rage, the grief, the heartache, inviting God into those things, you've experienced more expansiveness of faith, more fruit of the Spirit, these qualities of love.
You don’t shove those away so that you can feel more loving. It's oh, as I honor the complexity of those feelings, I actually receive more from God, which gives me paradoxically more to pour out.
Rachel: Yeah. Absolutely, for sure.
Alison: I'm curious how connecting so genuinely and authentically with your own losses shapes how you're parenting your own kids through their losses,
Rachel: Oh my gosh, all the time, every day. I cannot write this book and then be doing the work of tending to my little losses and then simultaneously my kid will tell me about something that happened in school and, to dismiss that for whatever reason. If I'm busy, I can't handle it, my mind is overloaded and maybe I'm not perfect in the moment, but my mind will just circle on whatever it is.
And I will have to be like, hey, sweetie, hey, Milo, you know what? You were telling me earlier. I am so sorry. Tell me more about that. Let me listen. Or even in the moment, like turning off the impulses, turning off the over-productive mind and listening because all those little things, when little Rachel moved and little Rachel lost her friends and all the little feelings that came along with that, she needed someone in those moments to say hey, how is this for you?
I have found, and maybe this is why it comes back to bite me in the butt because my child loves to ask questions, but I love to ask questions. And actually my parents kind of joke around and they're like, yeah, that's kind of what you deserve because you asked us tons of questions as a kid and you were always talking.
But I ask him a lot of questions and I think it's for him, but it's also for me, if that makes sense. Like I understand that it feels good when someone is asking you a question, asking you, what do you think? How does this make you feel? Tell me your thoughts because they matter to me.
That's what matters to me. And so if I can give that to my son, any chance that I can get asking him a question, that's how I try to show up.
Alison: I love that. There's a question that they use in couples therapy: Is there more? Is there more? Is there more? Is there more? And you're just showing through that question a willingness, I'll be here with you as long as it takes. Is there more? Is there more?
And I imagine that's how God is with us. Is there more? He's never getting tired of listening to us. Because we're human, sometimes we're like, okay, I don't want to hear more, but I love the way your eyes light up knowing I'm giving them this out of the overflow of having recognized this is what the younger me needed.
Rachel: Yeah. I love how you put that.
Alison: So pinging off of that, tell me a little bit about spiritual practices. You're a mom, you're a writer, you've got a lot going on, and yet I can tell just by being with you, you're someone who is trying to actively engage the work, spiritually, of tending to your little losses. How do you do that? What are some of the practices and rhythms that help you continue to tend the little losses inside your own soul?
Rachel: Yeah. This is so good. And okay, when I think about this question, I'm like, okay, I want to give answers that are really helpful, but also practical, but also true to where I'm at. And as I thought about this, I'm like, okay. I've got this in my book, at the end of every single chapter, I have these little sections: remember, reflect, respire. Those are things that I come back to.
I write things down so that I can remember what's true. If you saw my wall right now, the wall that's in front of my computer, my camera, you would see pages ripped out from magazines, notes from friends like my old chorus teacher. I have to have words in front of me so that I can remember what is true.
And then another thing is to reflect. Light a candle. That's one of my favorite spiritual practices. Lighting candles in and of itself. It just feels like there's evidence of a presence with you and that holds me. That makes me feel held. And so I like to light candles and ponder your pain, entering into good questions and whether that's a conversation with someone that's asking you or they're saying tell me more. Is there more? I love that.
Or if you're journaling and you're exploring a question, one of my favorite things right now with my therapist is, she asks a question and I have to wait a whole week to answer that with her. But I love it because she gives me a question and I have to ponder it and I have to self-examine and I journal about it or think about it or pray about it or ask God, hey, can you speak into this? Can you show me?
And then I get to share it with someone, which is really great because that helps, but I just love that I get to ponder this question that someone else is posing to me. I really loved including this in my book. And this is probably something that catches me in my moments when I'm probably feeling unhinged, I would say, if I'm just overwhelmed.
Usually under my overwhelm, there's always more–it's like, why are you stressed? Why are you anxious? Because you're afraid, because you're worried, like what's really there? Respire breath prayers and these prayers are so short; there's just something to that brevity.
I remember, you know, a few years back during the height of COVID when I would pray with my older son and put him to bed, I just remember we would pray, God help me help everybody.
And that was it because there were just no other words for what was going on in the world and it's just so hard and so heavy. And there were only just so many words that we could muster up, that I could muster up as a mother, and when I look back on that season, I'm like, that was such faith, even just to pray those few words.
And sometimes we need that reminder in our own faith journeys. We don't have to come out of the gate with these long winded prayers that have these big words and there's no one to impress. God isn't looking to be impressed by us. He just wants our honest hearts and if all you can muster out is a brief confession or a brief whatever it is, I need you, that's enough.
And so those are a few things that have held me recently, are holding me now. But they're also in my book. And so I think that can be really practical and helpful for anyone out there that is wanting some spiritual practices to hold onto as you’re grieving,
Alison: I love the simplicity of “I'm hurting” as a prayer. That's a full, like you're saying, help me. I need you. I'm hurting. And the word that comes to mind as I'm listening to you, Rachel, is with-ness. And it's throughout the pages of your book, this idea, even as you're telling your own stories of just longing for that with-ness, someone to be with you, how you're learning to be with yourself in these little losses with your kids, with a friend and how we're learning to let God be with us.
When you talk about the candle, I've never thought about it that way before, the lighted candle as a symbol of with-ness, I'm not actually alone. There are lots of ways we can try to cultivate that sense of with-ness.
Rachel: I love that word as summing up all that this is centering around–with-ness. I absolutely love that. Yeah, that's so true. It resonates.
Alison: Which is what we want. We want to not be alone in the grief, in the feelings, in the loss. We see it more easily in some ways for our kiddos than we do for the parts of us that need presence. One of the things I think you do so well in The Matter of Little Losses is naming and sharing with us some of your own experiences.
Naming so we can find ourselves in them. But you also use some beautiful imagery. You explore loss through the language of flowers. You, as I've already said, bring in a lot of literature and art, which are these tangible manifestations and symbols. How did that language of flowers come to be and how has it been helpful for you in processing losses?
Rachel: I love this question so much because there's definitely a passion behind that. I studied stories in college; I was a creative writing major. It has been a journey of unpacking why I chose that and why this matters.
And I really do think stories are medicine. I really think that they are; they provide a simulation for life. And so even as I started writing this book, I thought to myself, I want to approach it similar to how I did Let There Be Art, but I think I want to really go into some literary criticism and analysis and delve deep into stories.
But I don't want to do that if it's just me wanting to do something–like what is the reason behind this? I'll just read really quickly from my intro “Why I discovered it matters”. As you read this book, you will encounter quotes from fiction and plays and references to art and film, all of which intend to give face and form to the ubiquitous and ambiguous nature of grief.
We need levity. We need beauty. We need hope. Books can be that, and art can offer that. It is just as Karen Swallow Prior, author of On Reading Well writes: Literature embodies virtue, first, by offering images of virtue in action, and second, by offering the reader vicarious practice in exercising virtue.
Irrevocably, story is embedded with the virtues we pine to embody. In reading, telling, hearing, and witnessing stories, we are afforded the safety and space to practice these virtues. So when you watch a movie or you read a fiction book and you fall in love with a character because they are courageous through conflict, you are not only just falling in love for that character and cheering them on, but you yourself, you want to embody that same perseverance, compassion, kind, and strength that they are living out and there's something to that.
I don't know, maybe I might be onto something. I might study this further, but there really is something to us gaining confidence, strength, and hope through these characters that we are watching through these stories.
And yeah, I had a really fun time unpacking different references to art. And I think what you said earlier too, there's a bit of nostalgia that we carry when it comes to certain characters and stories, right? And it's almost a universal language in itself.
When I start talking about Little Women and I start talking about Jo and the March sisters, we're all speaking the same language now. And so I have an easy way to talk about grief. I have images and symbols already there for my taking to to give examples and to reflect on what is hard about grief, but then also what is good and what could be good and beautiful and helpful.
Alison: I love that. As I'm listening, the image that comes to mind immediately is Frodo in Lord of the Rings when I'm going through something where it's just impossible. And if I have that image, there's something in there that helps me feel braver. It's transporting me into this idea that this is one chapter in the larger story, because we know that he comes out the other side. And so I can tap into a little bit of that hope vicariously.
It's so powerful. Art is so powerful to give us that sort of big picture perspective. I'm in it, but there's a larger story at work here. This is not the end of the story.
Rachel: Absolutely. Absolutely. And I was listening to a podcast earlier today, Myth Pilgrim, if anyone's interested, but he unpacks different works of literature and movies too. But he says this is why stories are important. They are symbols, and our whole faith is hinged on a symbol.
We have not seen God. He has these invisible qualities that we need symbols to show us who He is until we get Jesus. We have Jesus, this incarnate God who is with us. But other than that, we need something to show us, to grope for, to give us a picture, give us a sign, give us something to tell us what this looks like.
And stories are one way of doing that.
Alison: And that's what I want the listener to hear. Your book is a really unique combination where you're not shying away from the hard emotions, the hard stories, the losses, and it's also very uplifting. It's the both-and, and that's a hard balance to strike.
We don't want to minimize the pain. We don't want to minimize the loss. And when we can connect ourselves to a larger story, there can be hope paradoxically within that. And you've really struck that balance.
I'm curious, what would you want your younger self to know about grief, about loss, based on all that you've learned now?
Rachel: My gosh. I have never been asked this specific question, and I love it so much. I would tell her that I see her and I would say, I believe you. And then I would tell her that to keep tending and that even though her garden seems like it's only filled with grief, that someday you'll see those flowers flourishing.
That's what I would tell her. And then I would be her friend. I get these flashes of little me, and I'm like, she's so cute and fun and spunky, and I want to be her friend and I would be her friend.
Alison: She wouldn't be alone in that garden. I love that. That's so beautiful. She's lucky to have you and we're lucky to have the fruit of the tending that you've done as you've gone back to some of those little losses to honor them and bring us all just so much closer to those parts of ourselves that carry those things.
I had a loss this week. It was a friend of mine who passed away, somebody who was so dear to me years ago who I haven't been in touch with for a very long time. And so there's a part of me that can minimize that, right?
I saw that we had this conversation and I thought, no, it's a loss. That person mattered to me deeply from that very formative period of time. It was college and giving yourself permission to say, no, that matters. And then as you give yourself permission, suddenly I'm connecting with all these people from that period of time.
Suddenly something beautiful is forming by allowing ourselves to let that loss matter. That when we honor those losses, we actually come together. So I saw that we had this on the schedule and I thought, this could not be more perfectly timed. I am so grateful that you are giving us permission to honor the losses.
They matter, and finding our way through them is what brings us closer together, closer to each other, closer to ourselves, closer to God.
Rachel: Yeah. I believe that. Oh, thank you for sharing that.
Alison: Thank you for giving me a space to remind myself, every loss matters. We don't do ourselves any favors to minimize. So just before we go, I ask all my guests, what is bringing out the best of you right now?
Rachel: Ah, yes. To echo our earlier conversation, I think my children are bringing out the best in me. They're also bringing out the worst in me. But ultimately they really are bringing out the best in me. And I do think motherhood is such a crucible, but on the other side, you are just completely made new and you've got all these different elements that are interacting and it can be a bit much and sometimes it seems like the worst is coming out, but I feel like they make me a better person, my two boys.
Alison: You're the first person who's ever answered that question with the thing that's bringing out the best of you is also what's bringing out the worst of you. And I think there's a lot of truth in that. That's a very powerful paradox. So I love that. Where can our listeners go to connect with you?
Rachel: I love hanging out on Instagram. You can find my writings and sharings from my life there @RachelMarieKang. And then to learn more, to order my book or for anything else, visit me at RachelMarieKang.com.
Alison: Thank you so much for sharing your heart, sharing the fruit of your labor, and just sharing your time with us today.
Rachel: Thanks for making space.
Do you doubt yourself?
Struggle to respect your own worth?
Self-worth is foundational to both our psychological and our spiritual health, and today's episode is all about how to develop it. My guest, Jamie Kern Lima, is an entrepreneur, philanthropist, New York Times bestselling author, and founder of IT Cosmetics, a company she started in her living room and grew to the largest luxury makeup brand in the country. If you've ever struggled with self-doubt, this episode is for you.
Here's what we cover:
1. The 4 benefits of self-worth
2. The difference between self-worth and self-confidence
3. The moment Jamie realized she was believing a lie
4. Who are you really doubting?
5. The prayer Jamie prayed to combat God-doubt
6. Research on negative self-talk
7. How to reframe rejection
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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- 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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Resources
- Worthy: How to Believe You Are Enough and Transform Your Life by Jamie Kern Lima
- Believe IT: How to Go from Underestimated to Unstoppable by Jamie Kern Lima
- Genesis 1:27
- Psalm 139:14
- Matthew 10:29-31
- Ephesians 2:10
- Mark 9:24
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'm so glad you're here. I'm so excited to bring you this conversation today. It's all about self-worth. Now, self-worth can sound like one of those self help-y buzzwords, but the truth is that a sense of self-worth is foundational to becoming a whole person psychologically and spiritually.
It's a key concept in the field of psychology. And it's a key concept in the story of creation and redemption all throughout the Bible. Self-worth gets at some of the most important fundamental questions we ask of ourselves. Does my life have inherent worth? Do I have value? Do I have a unique purpose? Does it matter that I'm here?
Our sense of self-worth gets at our inherent dignity, our value, and our purpose. And it's foundational to living a beautiful life, a whole life, the kind of life God designed us to enjoy. The truth is that most of us really struggle to see ourselves as having that inherent worth that we see in other people.
We see it and honor it in our friends. We see it and honor it in the people we serve, we see it in our own kids and we try to instill it in our own kids, but it's really hard sometimes to see it in ourselves.
On one hand we struggle to really experience and inhabit and live from a place of recognizing our own worth and our own. But, on the other extreme, we see a false version of this idea of self-worth presented to us often in the media and in the culture around us, where this idea of self-worth gets conflated with ego and arrogance and entitlement and even narcissism, which is in fact the opposite of a healthy sense of self-worth
And that's not what we're after either.
Healthy self-worth is a nuanced concept that is so crucial, again, to living this life that God has for us. It involves a really balanced and honest assessment of our own strengths, our own talents, our own interests, the things we excel at, the areas where we feel useful and purposeful and the things we want to bring into this world as a child of God.
Healthy self-worth also includes a recognition of where we fall short or where we may have limitations or blind spots or even imperfections. When we have a healthy sense of self-worth, we see both really honestly. We celebrate the gifts we've been given. We delight in leaning into our potential. And we also are aware of where we fall short and our limitations and we're aware of that without shame.
When we find and discover a healthy sense of self-worth, it helps us in four key areas.
Number one, it helps us tap into our God-given potential. We find the confidence to pursue our natural talents, the talents and gifts and abilities God has given us. We use our time and we make decisions in a way that aligns with how God made us. And we experience a deep satisfaction in finding purpose in our lives.
Number two, it helps us establish healthy boundaries. When I have a strong sense of my worth and my value, I am less inclined to let other people take advantage of me or treat me poorly. I'm able to say no when I need to say no or separate myself from other people's harmful ways.
Number three, a healthy sense of self-worth empowers me to care well for myself. I think of Jesus's commandment when he says to love others as yourself. When we value ourselves, we work to take care of our bodies and our physical health. We work to take care of our emotions, and to take care of our mind and to treat ourselves with compassion instead of from that guilt-tripping inner critic that so often wants to rear up.
And lastly, a healthy sense of self-worth empowers us to create healthy relationships with others, because when we have a sense of our own worth and what we have to contribute, we will seek out healthy two way relationships with other people that are built on mutual respect, where we are valuing other people in the same way that we expect them to value us.
A healthy sense of self-worth is deeply biblical. We see the roots of it in Genesis 1:27, when we read that God created us in his image; we are made to bear the image of God. We have inherent dignity as a result of being made in the image of God. Every human being on this planet has inherent dignity and worth. We see it in Psalm 139:14, when the psalmist praises God in awe that he is fearfully and wonderfully made.
We are fearfully and wonderfully made and a sense of self-worth honors that. I am fearfully and wonderfully made byGod. Thank you for that gift. Help me steward it well.
And then again, in Matthew 10, when Jesus talks about the worth of even a sparrow and how not even a sparrow will fall to the ground outside the Father's care and that you and I are each worth more than many sparrows. Our God places value on us.
And then finally, Ephesians 2:10, for we are God's handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. Our lives of purpose. We have inherent dignity, we have inherent value, and we were created for a purpose.
Our lives matter. We impact the world around us. We impact other people. And the more we understand the depth of our worth, I'm convinced the more we will unlock more of God's goodness in the world around us.
And so for today's episode to talk all about this idea of self-worth, of worthiness, I thought of no one better to speak on the topic than Jamie Kern Lima, whose new book, Worthy: How to Believe You Are Enough and Transform Your Life is all about recovering a sense of your worth.
Jamie Kern Lima is a New York Times bestselling author of Believe It, and she's the founder of It Cosmetics, which is a company she started in her living room that has grown to become the largest luxury makeup brand in the country.
Jamie's story is a stunning example of the fact that self-worth is never forgotten nor found in external accomplishments or achievements. It's not found in earning other people's approval or worldly accolades. She talks about how she achieved so many things in her external life only to discover that she did not have a healthy sense of self-worth.
Jamie was given away at birth and adopted and has been on a lifelong journey of learning to believe she's worthy, lovable, and enough. She's been a Denny's waitress, a struggling entrepreneur, she's lived a lifelong journey of rejections and has battled her way through years of self-doubt, body-doubt, and God-doubt. Her brand new book, Worthy, walks us through step by step how to recover a healthy sense of self-worth.
Jamie is the mother of two and an active philanthropist, who is donating 100 percent of her author proceeds for both Worthy and Believe It. Please enjoy this conversation about self-worth with Jamie Kern Lima.
****
I am thrilled to have you here with me today, Jamie. I read your first book, I listened to it actually on Audible. I loved it. And I'm so thrilled about this new book all about being worthy. We talk so much on this podcast about self-worth. I am curious when you first struggled with self-worth; how did you see yourself back in those early days when you were a younger version of yourself and what did that look like for you?
Jamie Kern Lima: Yeah. I have struggled with self-worth my entire life, and the thing, Alison, I want to say by the way–thank you for having me. I'm so honored to be having this talk with you and sharing it with everyone in the audience and it's amazing. For me, self-worth is the one thing that changes everything in our entire lives, our relationships, our goals and dreams, how fulfilled we are.
And I learned it the hard way. And then I relearned it after achieving all these things that the world tells me is what success looks like. And I got to this point in my life where I realized there's such a big difference between self-confidence and self-worth. I realized I had achieved all these things.
Sold my business for a billion dollars and all these things and had lunch with Oprah and just all these different things that I felt so confident about at the time, but I was still stuck in certain areas of my life and I was still sabotaging things and I still didn't feel enough. Because what I didn't realize is I had achieved a lot and done all these things that build self-confidence, which is largely based on external things.
But underneath it all, I hadn't yet learned to feel truly worthy and truly enough. And, as we speak right now, 80 percent of women don't believe they're enough. 75 percent of female executives deal with imposter syndrome. 91 percent of girls and women don't love their bodies and the numbers are staggering.
Growing up I often didn't feel enough. I was adopted and my parents worked a lot and I always had labeled myself words like abandoned or rejected. I always felt like, I know beyond a shadow of a doubt, it's God whispering to me: you are here to do great things. You are here for a purpose.
And I always felt that even as a little girl. So I had this kind of drive in me to decide, okay, where I come from doesn't have to determine where I'm going and all of those things. And I had these big goals, but for anyone listening to us who's a people pleaser or a perfectionist, you might relate to this.
I for so long believed the lie that if I can just achieve enough, then I'll be enough, then I'll feel enough. And a big part of why I wrote the book Worthy is because when people see my story and they think, oh, it's a fairy tale. She went from a Denny's waitress to a billion dollar company.
My real story is a girl who did not believe in herself or believe she was enough and had to learn how. In my journey, there were so many moments I almost doubted myself out of my own destiny. And I always had that kind of deep knowing, which, when I pray or get still, I feel like I can hear it in my soul and I feel like that's how God talks to me.
And I always knew I could do great things. I was worthy of being the first person in my family to work really hard and go to college and all of those things. And then what I feel like happens in life or at least happened to me for sure is I believed a lot of the lies that lead to self-doubt and that are in our head and our thoughts.
And I thought, okay, I feel like I'm not enough because I haven't done enough yet or achieved enough. And so I worked really hard, eventually paying my way through school doing lots of different jobs. And then was in what I thought was my dream job in television news, interviewing other people.
And I got a really serious skin condition called rosacea. For some people it's pretty mild and it's hereditary and there's no cure for it. But for me, I get these big red bumps and patches all over my face. And it was at one point close to ending my news career because every time I'd be live on the air, I would hear my producer say, there's something on your face, you've got to wipe it off.
And I went through this big season of setback and self-doubt. But what I know is so often in life, our setbacks are actually God's setups for what we're called to do. And long story short, I ended up taking a big chance and launching a business in my living room called IT Cosmetics and went through years and years of hundreds of rejections.
It was teetering on bankruptcy for many years. A lot of people know it now as the success that it is but it was a hard journey. And along that way, I got to the outcome that I'd always dreamed of. I sold the business. I was in Forbes magazine, like all these things were happening.
I eventually met Oprah, went to her house for lunch. And here's what I learned the hard way, Alison, is that I had a lot of self-confidence then. I had achieved all the things, but underneath it all, I still didn't believe I was enough. Self-confidence is an internal trait based so much on the external.
A lot of people think self-confidence and self-worth are the same thing. But self-confidence can fluctuate so easily based on if we're winning or losing or how much of the world's definition of success we have or how we feel we stack up compared to others or our willingness to try and go for it.
And it can fluctuate and it's fragile. But our self-worth is the deep internal knowing that we are worthy of love exactly as we are. These are two different things. And what I learned the hard way through having lunch with Oprah at the very end of it, Alison, this was my lifelong dream.
And I walked into this lunch so confident. I had all this career success and had sold my business for so much I couldn't even imagine the day I was a Denny's waitress selling a company for a billion dollars. Like what, how does that even–I know how it happened. I work really hard, but I had built a lot of confidence.
When Oprah at the end of this lunch gave me her cell phone number and said, you can call me anytime. I did not call her for four years.
And in that four year window, I thought, oh, I'm just going to wait ‘till I have the perfect thing to say to her, then I'll call or, oh, I bet if everyone wants something from her, I'm going to prove I don't need anything for all these stories.
One day I realized the real reason I didn't call her was because deep down inside, I did not believe I was worthy of being her friend. And for anyone listening to us right now, if you've ever had this big goal and you thought oh when I finally get that thing, then I'll feel enough. Then I'll be happy, then I'll feel fulfilled–maybe it's marriage and kids or it's a certain job title or it's a six pack abs, whatever it is, and then you work so hard, you get the thing and then what happens?
Maybe you're excited and happy for a month or a week or a few hours, but eventually if underneath it all you don't have strong self-worth, you'll still feel like something's missing.
And then we work harder and achieve more and most people can go their whole lives and never feel like they're enough. In that moment when I realized the reason I didn't call Oprah even though I had what the world tells me should make me feel enough, I didn't feel like I was enough. So I had a lot of self-confidence but not self-worth.
When we don't have self-worth, we will sabotage things like I did with Oprah, we will stay stuck and not go for things. We won't put our art or ideas out in the world. Or if we have medium self-worth we will go for the things and eventually maybe even get them. But we won't feel fulfilled or enough when we arrive there.
So that was the moment that I became obsessed with self-worth and it is why I wrote Worthy because it's packed with 20 tools to really build true self-worth.
Alison: I love that you're talking about this, Jamie, that, you'd achieved it. And even that example, I think we can all relate to that where you have a phone number. And you make up all sorts of excuses for not doing it because deep inside something inside of you, this voice is whispering, you're not good enough. You're not worth that. She doesn't really mean that. We can all relate to that on some level.
So tell us, how did you overcome that? You had to become aware of it. We always talk about this. Awareness is the first step to healing. You became aware. Oh my gosh. Yes. I'm my problem in a way. And then how did you change? I think sometimes we know we need to feel a certain way, but we don't. So how did you get from where you were to where you knew you needed to be?
Jamie Kern Lima: Yeah, and I love that you also talk about awareness a lot because I think for a lot of people even probably listening to us right now, they don't fully know why they're stuck. They know they have a book inside of them but they haven't written it, or they know they want to show up as who they truly are on social media but they're not quite ready, or they want to tell the person that they want to be more than just friends, or they want to get back on the dating app, whatever it might be, and they think, oh, I got to get more confidence, or more skills, or another degree, or any of those things, but none of those build self-worth, and they're just so different.
We're in a world that tells us, you look at every commercial on television or ad, they tell us if we get that thing, then we'll be happy, then we'll be enough. And yes, when we work hard to get those things, it's important. Building self-confidence is important, and growth and contribution are like the house we build, but our self-worth is the foundation underneath it all.
And we're only ever as fulfilled and happy as that rock solid foundation. And after this had happened, the first thing, Alison, is I had that huge epiphany. Oh my gosh, I'm not calling her not because I don't have the right thing to say, but because I don't feel I'm worthy of it.
And here's what I know to be true, is in our life we don't become what we want or get what we want–we become what we believe we're worthy of. And with our goals and our dreams, and they could be in personal friendships, relationships, it doesn't matter.
We don't rise to what we believe is possible. We follow what we believe are worthy of. We don't soar to our goals and dreams. We stay stuck at our level of self-worth.
And I had that huge awareness to describe it in the words you use. And I was like, whoa, that was the moment. And for me, in the book Worthy, I talk about all of these different tools on how to build self-worth right now.
And one of them, there's an entire chapter on how if you are a person of faith and if you actually are going to believe what you say, you're going to believe God's Word. Like it is the greatest self-worth hack because for me personally, I believe in God. And yet I had to ask myself in that moment, is this story that I'm not worthy?
Is that true? And my mind is telling me, my thoughts are telling me it is, but I remember literally imagining myself turning down the volume on my thoughts, like a dial on a radio, like turning it down and tuning into what is that knowing, which for me, when I pray and I get still, that still small voice.
That's how I hear God. I've never heard God talk to me out loud, but I get that sense, which I call my own knowing or intuition. And in that moment I was like, okay, first of all, I know I am a great friend, like I am so worthy of being her friend. She and anyone else would be lucky to be my friend because I'm such a good friend.
That's what I know for sure. But then our self-doubt, like there's a whole section of Worthy where I go into all the lies that lead to self-doubt and then how to ignite those truths that wake up worthiness. And that moment when I knew, oh, my mind is telling me I'm not worthy, but my soul, my knowing what God is telling me is I'm more than worthy.
That was the moment I picked up the phone and called her. We ended up teaching a class called The Life You Want this year together. All these things have happened that almost didn't happen. And ever since I've become obsessed with building self-worth and to share the tip about faith.
But I want to say that had I not picked up the phone and called, all the things that have happened since wouldn't have happened. And I like to share that ‘cause I'm donating a hundred percent of the proceeds of my book. Like none of this is about me. What I'm so passionate about is every person listening to us right now.
How are you doubting yourself out of your own destiny the way I almost did? What things aren't happening now because you haven't picked up the phone or you haven't tuned in and trusted yourself instead of your thoughts that lead to self-doubt? Really building self-worth is the biggest thing and so when it comes to faith, there is a whole chapter called “who are you really doubting”?
And I realized in my life that I know in my soul, and it's been a long journey, many of my years as in my early twenties, I went through a season of does God really exist? And a whole season of God-doubt in my life. And I was the first person–I have five families because I was adopted. It's a whole thing.
I'm the first person I'm aware of to ever go to counseling and seek therapy. And it was actually that therapist that said to me, and I don't even know if she has faith, I have no idea. But she said to me, because I was telling her I'm feeling like, does God really exist? And this is me in my twenties.
And she says what makes you think he can't handle your doubt? If he created the entire universe, what makes you think he can't handle your doubt? And I'm like, what do you mean? She goes, why don't you try praying and telling him you're doubting him and asking him to show up and prove you wrong? And I was like, okay.
And this is embarrassing to even share, but I'm just going to share it in case it's for someone listening to us today, that every time I started praying and this went on for years, whether I was praying about a friend's health or whatever it might be, at the very end of the prayer, I would say, and God, I'm doubting you exist.
So if you could please show up and prove me wrong, without a shadow of a doubt, I would be so grateful. In Jesus name, Amen. That was how I ended all my prayers. And he started showing up. It didn't happen immediately. Undeniably, it happened. I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that God exists. And so to answer your question about what did you do? How did you start building self-worth?
One of the tools in the book is a whole chapter called “who are you really doubting” and what I realized in my life was oh, I have a strong relationship with Jesus. I believe in my faith so much. I believe all of these things.
And yet do I really, because if I'm made in God's image, if I can do all things through Christ, he strengthens me. But then I decide I'm not enough. I don't belong in the room. I'm unqualified. Who am I to do this? All those things. What I'm actually doing is believing my own thoughts. And doubting God's Word.
Alison: It's so true. I even think about how we're in a relationship that we're not getting treated the way that we should be treated. And to your quote, this is such a good quote–I want to double click on it because you said we stay stuck at the level of our self-worth.
We believe God loves us. We believe we are his beloved children, and that should ripple out into how we show up in our relationships, how we show up in work, how we show up to steward our potential. I love that. And I also want to say, I love your prayer because it reminds me of Peter.
When Peter says to Jesus, I believe–help my disbelief. I trust you; help my disbelief. The third thing you said, I had to pick up the phone and call up. I didn't feel it yet, but there's something there, even in your prayer. Like I couldn't necessarily always conjure up the belief in God, or I couldn't necessarily conjure up the belief in myself, but I took the step of action.
I want to highlight that. I finally just picked up the phone and called or I said the prayer. I don't know if I believe in this God, but I'm going to pray. There's so much wisdom in that. Faith isn't always feeling. It doesn't always mean we feel that great belief in God. It doesn't always mean we feel that belief in ourselves, but it does mean acting on what we know to be true. I love that.
Jamie Kern Lima: Yes. Exactly. Thank you for all of that. And yeah, right now, every day, building our self-worth, trusting God's word over our own self-doubt. For me, it's a lifelong journey. It's when I still, every single day, when I talk in Worthy about every time self-doubt enters my mind and I have thoughts like, I don't belong in this room, am I going to have anything smart to say, am I going to add any value?
Am I qualified to be here? Whatever those thoughts are. Do I belong in this friend group? Am I enough? I will intercept my own self-doubt, literally intercept it and ask myself, who am I going to believe–my own doubt or God's word, which one? I go deep into this in the book, but for me, this has been a life-changing tool.
I believe that the things we call self-doubt can take root at an identity level. Because for a lot of us, we've made so many past mistakes, or past failures or past rejections, and somehow we've let that turn into a story of I am a rejection or I'm a failure, or, and they take root at an identity level.
And we know that's not true when we believe God's word, we know that's not true. And so what I always ask myself is oh, this self-doubt, if I'm going to trust this self-doubt that I'm not enough and I don't belong here, I intercept it right away and realize self-doubt is actually God-doubt.
God-doubt. It's believing my own thoughts and doubting God's word; self-doubt could be God-doubt. And for me, I like when I'm about to walk into a room or make a presentation or walk into a new friendship and meet someone for coffee, we all have different moments we doubt we’re enough. I literally intercept it in that moment and remind myself of how God made me.
I remind myself of his Word, remind myself that I'm not walking in alone. I know who I'm walking in with and I know whose I am, not just who I am. I'll just decide to believe that and I feel like for those of us that do have faith, we have an edge.
We have a secret recipe, a secret ingredient that a lot of people don't have when it comes to really hacking the system and building self-worth. Because we have something we know to be true that we can then turn to and decide to trust when it comes to our own self-worth. And to share one thing also that you had said is for so many of us, we have situations where, you use the example of, we somehow keep relationships that don't treat us well.
And for some of us, those are friendships. For others, it could be romantic relationships. It could be professional relationships. And we keep people in our lives that treat us less well than we deserve. We stay stuck at the level of our self-worth, and that applies to our friendships and our relationships in every area.
And when we build our self-worth it impacts all of it because we attract what we believe we are worthy of also. Where I want to go with this, I think the most important area where we allow people to treat us less than we deserve is our own relationship with ourselves. And for so many of us, I know you share so many of these amazing topics on your show, but for so many of us the things that we say to ourselves when we're not even aware of our things, we would never say to another person,
Alison: 100%.
Jamie Kern Lima: Right? And when you look at all the data on negativity bias and one study says that when you're interacting with other people, we're reading negative comments or positive comments on social whatever it is, that you need at least four positive ones for every one negative one just to be neutral.
For everyone listening to us right now, think about the thoughts you have about yourself all day long. Are you at least having four positive things that you are appreciating about yourself for every one that you might think is negative or you might critique?
There's a whole chapter in my book called, “do you see you”? And it's how to build that self-love and self-appreciation that we can so easily see in other people, but don't see in ourselves. And how do you build that? Because at an identity level, if you're not at least having four positive thoughts about yourself–by the way, there's going to be people listening to us that are like, I haven't had a positive thought about myself in a month.
Or a year. Because we're trained to be so harsh on ourselves. But every time you do that, it chips away at your identity, at your self-worth. And so there are simple things we can do in our lives right now. And there's a famous saying that we don't see things as they are. We see things as we are.
Which is why a lot of people bring their own experiences to how they show up. And one of the tools in the book is just flipping that. It's saying, instead of we don't see things as they are, we see them as we are, it's flipping it and saying, okay, we can also see ourselves as things are.
Meaning if we are so used to thinking negative about ourselves and have carved deep neural pathways, it's become a habit. When we intentionally start seeing the positive in everything, it becomes so much easier to see it in ourselves. I'm talking about simple things like waking up and going, wow, these sheets are so soft. This pillow is amazing.
Or even doing the dishes and instead of being like, ugh, be like, wow, the soap lathers. I get running water. When we start to write and then all of a sudden it retrains us to start loving the things about ourselves as well.
Alison: It's so good. It's so interesting when we have those negative thoughts, we also can project that's how God sees us. I was thinking about that as you're talking, it also applies to, God. He is not sitting there beating us up all day long like we are sitting there beating ourselves up.
So it's training yourself to see yourself as God sees you too. And I love this Jamie, thank you for bringing this to us. I have one question for you that I ask all my guests which is this: what is bringing out the very best of you right now?
Jamie Kern Lima: I lean deep on my faith every single day. Even though I've been obsessed with studying self-worth and there are 20 tools that have been so helpful in the book Worthy for me, what brings out the best in me is when I know I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. I know who I am, I know whose I am.
I know who's going before me, making crooked places straight. I know how to pray very quickly, God, fill me with your Holy Spirit. Put your full arm around me, your crown of favor. There's a whole chapter in the book on reframing rejection and I've learned I'm fearless about rejection. Now, I have a lot of other stuff I'm working on, but I am fearless about rejection and failure.
And one of my favorite ways to reframe it, and I believe this to be true, is either to get rejected and go, okay, I know rejection is God's protection. I know that, and I believe that, and over time that always proves right. My other favorite one that I'll share in case someone needs to hear this today, and I go deep into Worthy on, when someone maybe betrayed you in your life, or it could be a past failure or rejection or pain or a friend who pulled the rug out from underneath you or didn't see your value, or it could be a job you applied to, and you didn't get it and you wanted it so bad.
For situations like that, I literally will apply this definition to them, apply this meaning to them. I imagine God saying to me, oh, you weren't rejected. I hid your value from them because they're not assigned to your destiny. And I believe that. And tools like that have helped me build my self-worth day by day because I don't think those rejections mean I'm a reject.
I don't think those failures mean I'm a failure. I believe oh yeah no, God just hid my value from that friend who didn't invite me to the party, because they're not assigned to my destiny. I believe these things and it helps me over time build my identity. And then when I go after all the things I want and all my big goals, I'm able to actually feel fulfilled when I have them because I don't feel like I'm still not enough and I still have to achieve more.
And so it's one of many tools in the book. It's such an honor to share this with you, Alison, and just thank you so much.
Alison: I wish we had all the time in the world, but I want to honor your time and I am just so grateful. I look forward to everyone taking a look at Worthy. It's going to be a life-changing read for everybody.
Jamie Kern Lima: Thank you. I'm excited, it’s out in the world now and I'm so excited. It has been my life's greatest work. I'm donating all the proceeds. I'm just so excited because I have this vision of every girl, every woman, every person believing they're worthy. Literally no person left behind.
If we actually lived our lives who God fully made us to be, oh my goodness, I imagine the businesses that would be started, the ideas that would be shared, the art that would be put out in the world, the healthy relationships that would form, the unhealthy relationships that would end.
I'm so excited and there's lots of free gifts on worthybook.com. And you can get it anywhere books are sold. It's at Target, which I'm so excited about and independent bookstores. And yeah, it's just an honor to share it with you. And thank you so much again.
Navigating transitions with your children is a deep dive into raw emotions, facing conflict, and your own unhealed wounds.
These transitions aren't easy. The stakes feel so high! But when you face them with courage, compassion and curiosity, you'll find your way through the wilderness and onto a beautiful path. As you do your own work, you'll be an even stronger anchor for your kids!
Rowena Day is back to discuss:
1. How parenting changes neural pathways
2. Learning to set limits
3. Parenting differently than how you were parented
4. Growth vs. fixed mindset
5. A better way to praise your kids
6. The problem with peer attachments
7. The ultimate goal of all this parenting work
Resources
- The Best of You by Dr. Alison Cook
- More on Erikson's stages of development
- Dan Siegel's image of the flowing river
- Motherhood: Facing and Finding Yourself by Lisa Marciano
- Romans 7:15-20
- Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck
- Hold On To Your Kids by Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Maté
- The Emotional Lives of Teenagers: Raising Connected, Capable, and Compassionate Adolescents by Dr. Lisa Damour
Thanks to our sponsors:
- Go to www.organifi.com/bestofyou today and use code BESTOFYOU for 20% off your order today.
- Head over to WildHealth.com/BESTOFYOU and use code BESTOFYOU at checkout for 20% off!Head to airdoctorpro.com and use promo code BESTOFYOU to receive UP TO 39%!Go to goodranchers.com, pick your box, use my code BESTOFYOU, and enjoy $189 of free chicken in 2024 PLUS $20 off your first order.
- 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.
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. Welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You Podcast, where we are here for our third and final installment of this series on transitions.
For today's episode, I wanted to devote an entire episode to parenting through transitions. Because the reality is that one of the ways that life presents us with so many opportunities to walk through transitional seasons is through the act of parenting.
Our kids go through so many transitions from birth all the way until they leave the nest and even into young adulthood. If we're not aware and naming these different milestones, these different developmental seasons and what they require of us, we can find ourselves really disoriented because our kids are walking through a transition, and we need to figure out how to adto be that anchoring presence for them.
Because the truth is, as your children go through these different developmental transitions, you simultaneously have to go through your own. There's an invitation for us to do our own work, whether it be to grow in skills we never even thought we needed or thought we could have, or whether it be to do some of the work of reparenting ourselves, where some of what our kids are going through surfaces, areas of wounding in our own lives that we need to pay attention to so that we can parent from a healthier version of ourselves.
To anchor ourselves in this conversation, we're going to rely on the work of Erik Erikson. He's a psychologist who set forth this idea that we really are developing. We're going through transitional seasons throughout the course of our lives from being a tiny baby all the way to the end of our life. He identified eight stages of development that we all go through.
If you want to get all eight of those, you can go back to Episode 69: Your Future Self—8 Challenges to Resolve As You Become the Person You Were Meant to Be, where I walk through all of those.
But in today's episode, we're really going to focus on those first five that our kiddos go through, all the way into young adulthood.So if you're parenting, our hope is that this episode will help name and validate and normalize some of these transitional seasons that you've either already been through or you're currently in, or maybe you're headed toward, and if you're someone who's not a parent or maybe somebody who parented a long time ago, this episode still has a ton of value for you because we all go through these developmental stages.
So as you're listening, think about your own childhood because looking back is often so helpful in understanding where we are now and where we wanna go. I'm thrilled to once again invite my friend Rowena Day, who is a spiritual director and mother of four, back on the podcast to join me for this conversation on parenting through transitions.
Thank you so much Rowena for joining me in these conversations about transitions these last couple of weeks.
Rowena: Oh, thanks, Alison. This is a fascinating topic, to think about human development from all the different perspectives, emotional, neurobiological, social, spiritual, and how they're all connected and interwoven together in these complex and beautiful ways.
It's fun to try to tease it apart a little bit together and notice and name the invisible realities that are so much a part of our everyday, but that we take for granted.
Alison: I love how you call them invisible realities. They're always operating in the background. One of the things that really can bring them into the forefront when we're seeing our kids go through these seasons, or, in my work, so often when I'll hear parents start to describe a certain set of frustrations and I realize, oh, they're in a new developmental season and they haven't given themselves permission to recognize, oh, we're dealing with a whole new set of reality here.
We've got to adjust. We've got to change. We've got to be flexible to this new reality. That forces me to grow. We're going to start with the very first stage of development that Erikson talks about, from when a child is born to around 18 months, in this stage Erikson calls trust versus mistrust.
And in this stage, infants are learning in their bodies. This idea that we call attachment, this idea of safety. Can I trust a caregiver? Is there a benevolent adult around who can provide consistent, reliable care where I'm loved and safe and soothed and seen?
This is that basic need for a very secure attachment, a loving environment that fosters trust. And the opposite occurs where there's neglect or inconsistent care or abuse that leads to mistrust or what we call these insecure attachments.
So during this stage as a parent, we're really learning how to create this safe, nurturing environment as imperfect humans who are not going to do it exactly right. There's a steep learning curve for us, and sometimes I fear that all this talk of secure attachment can put undue pressure on parents to try to make such a perfect environment for an infant that is also not reasonable and not a fair expectation of parents.
So Rowena, what is it like as a parent to go through this transition yourself, even as you're aware of what your young infant is going through?
Rowena: One of the things that I think is most wild about parenting is that you find that you're navigating your own transitions simultaneously as you're navigating how your children are transitioning through their developmental stages. Whereas previously, before you were a parent, you were only going through your own transitions.
Then you have a baby and it feels like there's a transition happening at the beginning, every day, every week, every month, and it's a lot of rapid fire transitions. Trying to meet the needs of each stage and then a new one starts and you're trying to figure things out again.
I think also most importantly, the fleeting nature of time and feeling, for me at least, the ache of time passing. The letting go journey begins right away. It's a strange paradox of watching your child develop while also letting go of who they have been.
You have to be so nimble and so kind to yourself as you are thrown into the deep end of parenting. There's no way that we can assume a one size fits all approach to how everyone experiences these transitions, but I think there are some very common ones that we walk and wrestle our way through.
It can be a beautiful thing and so life-giving and also really challenging. It can be a lot of both-ands that are very intense at the same time, such delight going through the transition of letting go of the life you had before you had a child.
I knew that cognitively before I became a parent, but walking through it myself was a whole different ball game.
Alison: It reminds me of last week's episode about the competing needs for authenticity and attachment. We were talking about it in the context of adult relationships, but in a parenting relationship, you also face some of those competing needs.
It can really touch on areas of our own lives where we maybe didn't get that kind of parenting, where nobody ever really did that work of holding space for us. So we're struggling to figure out how to ground ourselves and to be kind to ourselves while we're also trying to learn those skills with our kids.
Rowena: Yeah, there can be a lot of tension that can arise within us. The transitions for an infant are obvious, but I think what is perhaps less talked about is the way that it changes the adult's brain and so the parents themselves go through significant shifts in their neural pathways.
Several decades ago, there was one book on parenting and now there's an overwhelming amount of information and opinions and advice about how to take care of this baby well. It can be a stressful thing trying to sift through and take some of the wisdom, while also learning and accepting that parenting is a learned skill.
I think sometimes we can have the expectation that we will have the intuition immediately to know what to do and I think there is a lot of that built-in, and also it requires slowly learning to grow and trust your own intuition.
Alison: I love that you say it's a learned skill. We're not expected to hit the ground running, knowing exactly how to do it. God designed it that way. We're not expected to show up perfectly. As much as it's a huge transition, obviously for the child who's being brought into the world, it is a huge transition for the parent and to honor that, as we've been saying over and over in this series, to give yourself space and permission to be in process with it.
These stages come fast and quick in these early years. Because pretty quickly we're into this second stage we're children, say around 18 months to around three years, they're still not in school. But they're developing more autonomy. This is where Erikson talks about autonomy versus shame, where children need this safe place.
They need safety to explore a little bit more to begin to differentiate a little bit. They're going out on their own. They're exploring their environment. They're asserting their independence which is really necessary. Also they need a lot of support. They need to do that within, again, that secure attachment, and this is where we have to shift and develop another skill set seemingly overnight to parent our kids through this next stage.
Talk to us a little bit about that, Rowena, about the parent's experience as our children get a little bit more active.
Rowena: With that comes a lot of joy about witnessing these milestones and the immense growth that they go through. Just delight in seeing their ability to play and be present. The way that they express their emotions so freely and in such an embodied way, that can also be challenging, but is also, I think, very inspiring for adults to embrace their emotions more fully, their ability to name what they want, and watching their personality unfold.
I think one of the most significant transitions for parents as the baby grows from infancy to toddlerhood is the challenge of establishing freedom within limits and discerning and figuring out how to give choice to your toddler without it being too overwhelming or too restrictive so that they can develop their autonomy.
You're going to be hit with those decisions moment after moment. I love Dan Siegel's image of the flowing river in the middle and on one bank you have the bank of rigidity and on the other bank it's the bank of chaos. Somehow as a parent learning over time, that is a dynamic and challenging dance to figure out.
Giving freedom within limits and doing that uniquely to each child so that they have that sweet spot of developing their autonomy, knowing that the boundaries are firm and secure while not being too restrictive and also knowing that they have some choice.
Alison: So how do you navigate that transition inside of yourself as you're having to learn this really important new skill set on the fly? What goes on inside of you and how do you help yourself through that transition?
Rowena: Yeah, there's a lot of making mistakes. I think it's a process of learning, oh, that worked, that didn't work, okay, and fine tuning along the way. Okay, that gave them way too much freedom, and that did not go well for me or them, or wow, they were really upset, and they felt like I took away their choice, and I wonder if there are creative ways that I could have addressed that situation so that it worked for me, but it also gave them a little bit more autonomy and choice.
That is going to be a constant conflict between parent and child, but it can be a beautiful thing of learning to listen to yourself and listen to your child and slowly, as the authority figure, navigate getting in that sweet spot. It's not something that I think you can jump in that river and swim there all the time–you're going to hit the bank kind of bounce around on the banks until you eventually get more into a groove as you get more experience with parenting.
It can be disorienting to feel like you're finding your way as a parent when you've got a toddler in front of you that you've got to make decisions with quickly.
Alison: Just thinking about all these conversations we've been having, it requires that ability to anchor yourself in the uncertainty. I don't know. I'm going to make some mistakes. There's a lot of trial and error, which requires us to have some of that psychological flexibility with ourselves.
This stage for our kiddos is about autonomy versus shame, but it's also inviting us to not shame ourselves, not beat ourselves up, to show compassion for ourselves while we're in that process of learning this very nuanced dance.
Rowena: Yeah. If it's multiple children, it is different for each child. So it's a new experience and adventure every single time. To give ourselves a wide open canvas to experiment and to know that we are going to mess up and it's not about being perfect, that's not what the child needs.
They need someone who is mostly present and that is the work that toddlers offer us is where are we scattered, where are we distracted, toddlers like to pull you into the present. It can be a huge gift and it can also be a huge challenge because you may not want to be in the present moment, battling for 10 minutes to try to get shoes on or whatever it may be.
I think toddlers offer an enormous possibility for us to experience discomfort within ourselves, and to notice and name how we're feeling at any given moment, and to allow the full experience of life with all of the emotions.
Something that caught me by surprise was the sheer sensory overload that can happen at this stage. There's a lot of sights and sounds and you're being touched a lot and there's smells and there can be legitimate sensory overload for our nervous systems and we can surpass our neurological threshold for certain senses and, by 9 a. m. you might be completely overloaded.
You've been up for three hours already but you still have the rest of the day ahead of you.
Alison: Yeah. Naming there that it's okay. Again, we could shame ourselves for that. It's okay. You're going to feel some sensory overload. It's a lot of new bodies in your space. It's a lot of new stimuli every single day. Give yourself that process of adjusting, maybe shifting how you go through your day.
You may have less capacity for other people. You may have less capacity in other ways. If you work full time, that's another variable where you're suddenly having to balance a whole new set of stimuli on top of existing ones. Be really gentle with yourself as you transition yourself through this season.
Rowena: I think that's the key to it all, is being very kind and gentle with yourself. That then enables you to be a little bit more kind and gentle with your toddler.
Alison: The way that we are with ourselves as we transition even at that young age models for our children that it's okay to be in process. It's okay. If I'm trying to be perfect and beating myself up, there's an unspoken message to my child that they need to be perfect and not be in transition.
If I'm able to show my children, this is what it's like for me to be kind to myself through this, they're going to catch that. More is caught than taught. They're going to catch that as they're learning how to be in that process with themselves.
Rowena, as we, again, are moving rapidly, time is on warp speed here, into stage three, Erikson talks about the preschool, early school years of initiative versus guilt, where children start to show interest in specific activities. They might start to show interest in particular types of play and other children.
They're getting more autonomy and they're learning more. So again, speaking of these transitions, big transition for them. They're experiencing more of the world, which brings up complicated emotions in them that they don't have the capacity to name or process. So we're also helping normalize for them some of these different experiences of feeling hurt or feeling scared or feeling angry when they don't really have a way to process those things.
What's going on for us as we're helping our children navigate this transitional season?
Rowena: Yeah, here in this stage, boy, attuning to emotions is hard work, both to our preschool-aged child’s and to our own. So their passionate curiosity and delight about life is such a joy and also they can have a lot of passionate tears and emotions about, to us, small things. The way their toast is buttered, this can be a big thing.
You're navigating many of these moments and that requires a lot of attuning to your own emotions. It is hard work and here again, I think the tension of holding love and limits together is one of the biggest challenges. Trying to find ways that may be different than the way that we were raised ourselves or what we have seen modeled. Going through all the internal dynamics of, how am I going to teach responsibility to my children?
Alison: Which is another transition for us. That transition from how I want to do this may be different than how my parents did it. That in and of itself can stir up a lot of inner conflict inside of us as we give ourselves permission to try things a different way in a way that may go against what we were taught.
This is where gaps in our own experience can show up even the best of parents–there are different generational models of parenting.
For example, there's much more of a focus and an emphasis on the importance of naming emotions now than there was 20 years ago, 30 years ago. So we are parenting in a different way, and also in ways that we maybe didn't get parented.
Like you said, we're in this dual process of figuring out how to honor our own internal landscape, the different parts of us, the different emotions in us, even as simultaneously, we're trying to learn how to do that with our kids. I remember one time you and I had a conversation and you were describing this experience to me.
I remember helping come alongside you and you have four young children to parent in addition to your own inner 12 year old who enters into the mix from time to time and who also needs you to honor and validate her emotions that she's having about all of this.
Rowena: I think children at this age make possible a huge potential for inner growth for us as parents especially coming into contact with this term that I like from this book called Motherhood: Facing and Finding Yourself by Lisa Marciano.
She calls it the shadow side and how inevitably children will trigger or draw out our shadow side to the surface and we become more faced with how we can be swept away by an overwhelming tsunami of emotion that we didn't know was capable of rising up within us. We can see ourselves at our very worst, and all humans have this shadow side.
In Romans 7, it says, I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do, I do not do. But what I hate, I do. I think this becomes so much more evident and pronounced when you're a parent and forced to reckon with this shadow side of yourself that you maybe thought, nah, I don't really have that. I'm so calm. I'm super patient.
Her book is hilarious. I feel like any mother could read it and find such a deep relaxation in it as they realize we all have a capacity to be filled with rage at certain moments. I think it's really important to name that in in this stage of life of being with our kids because it's not talked a lot about and I think it's really important that people don't feel alone when they're met with that inner volcano that's rising.
This can cause such distress it can be easy for parents to get really discouraged or stuck in shame or guilt about that. There's such a beautiful way that can be brought to the surface and be like, wow, I really flipped my lid there. That's certainly not how I want to be and so you make the repair. But the inner growth that we go through is not this beautiful, calm, serene walk in the garden.
It is a bit of a battle at times to name different parts of ourselves that are really coming to the surface that we haven't interacted with a lot in the past.
Alison: Yeah, it's so true. Every relationship gives us these opportunities to grow. These opportunities to grow are not always, as you're saying, pleasant. They often show up as these overwhelming emotions that we don't want to feel. I'm keenly aware, as I'm listening to you, that these opportunities for growth can come through other means.
Just being a human being in relationships with other people, it is really normal to have these opportunities to investigate our own big emotions. Parenting can be one of those crucibles for that is the most off-putting because we're like, “we're not supposed to feel this way about our own children”. But in fact, it's another crucible in which we're learning to face the reality of our human nature with curiosity, with compassion, and also with an eye toward growth.
So that brings us into the next stage, which according to Erikson is the early school years–industry versus inferiority.
This is where our kids are headed out to school. They're with their peers more than they're with their parents. They're getting grades. They're starting to measure themselves against their peers. They're interacting with teachers, and we're trying to help our kids develop a sense of confidence, a sense of competence, as opposed to a sense of inferiority.
Again, this one touches on so many of us personally, because this is where we start to have more memories and we remember that struggle. It's very visceral inside of us, our own struggle with this feeling confident and competent versus inferior.
So what's going on for us as parents in this stage, Rowena?
Rowena: I think some of the common transitions for parents in this stage is navigating a healthy attachment with a kid who is slowly needing you less. So some of the challenges that come along with that is navigating this really big tension with allowing your kids to struggle and fail in an age appropriate way, and not rescuing or preventing failure or learning of consequences.
This can be hard for us as parents to resist the urge to step in and solve all their problems for them while also being a support figure for them.
Another challenge I think at this stage can be the immense self-awareness that we develop over time as a parent in respecting the authenticity of our kids and their interests and being really aware of times when we might be trying to heal things from our past self at that age, or ways that we're trying to continue our desires through them.
So a small example for me was that I had to mourn a little bit when my daughter tried soccer and didn't want to continue anymore. I loved playing myself and a part of me wanted to keep living out my love of soccer by watching her play and I remember when she was like, I think I'm I think I'm good–I don't think I want to do this anymore.
I remember feeling, oh, that aches a little bit and needing to feel that and release that not shame myself for that. I want to let her be who she is. But that requires that transition of letting go of things that you hoped you would enjoy with your child.
Alison: That's a great example. Another thing I've come across is we can see things about ourselves that maybe we still don't like in our kids and come on too strong, trying to get our kids to fix things at a certain age that really are more about our own inner wrestling.
Rowena: Yeah. So if a kid is shy or something and you're wanting to help, push them to be a little bit more extroverted
Alison: –because it was painful for you when in fact because you parented them differently, they're actually at peace with their level of extroversion or introversion.
Rowena: They might be very comfortable being introverted.
Alison: We can project onto them our own wounds. It's so important, especially as they get a little bit older, to do our own work of, wait, what's me? What's my own growth curve here? That takes a lot of this agility to be very aware of our own stuff, even as we're trying to shepherd them through their growth.
Rowena: Carol Dweck captured this really well in her book, Mindset, about the concepts of growth versus fixed mindset. Fixed mindset being this cognitive idea that our abilities are unchangeable. So either I'm good at math or I'm not good at math. Whereas growth mindset is the idea that with some effort and practice you can improve and get better.
This might be what we are trying to teach ourselves is to have more of a growth mindset, and this can be in any capacity of life. And, it might not be across the board that we have growth or fixed mindset, but it's really interesting to notice when we might be parenting from a place of fixed mindset, and trying to gently move ourselves out of that.
I am not fixed in this state and that I think is the gift that transitions bring us, is that they help us move through some of these fixed mindset ways of being, and get a little bit more adaptable, or a little bit more self aware, or whatever it might be.
I find it so fascinating that the way we praise has a profound influence on how we cultivate a fixed or a growth mindset in our kids. Kids who are always called smart actually are less likely to approach challenging tasks in the future out of fear that they might not be considered smart anymore and lose that kind of validating praise.
She found that cultivating a growth mindset was done through a different type of praise, where you praise the effort and the ability and the process rather than these labels of being smart or not smart.
I find that so interesting. Growth mindset cultivates more of that intrinsic motivation and fixed mindset is more tied to extrinsic rewards and motivation. For example, if your kid is learning fractions, you could say, wow, you are so smart. You did all those fractions.
Or you could say, wow, I saw how hard you worked on learning your fractions. You've come a long way with all that effort. So praising them for their effort and for trying rather than the result is so crucial in cultivating that growth mindset and not setting themselves up to fear failure and making mistakes.
Having that same mindset within ourselves of being comfortable making mistakes and being gentle with ourselves when we fail and parenting from a growth mindset of ourselves while doing this with our kids–it becomes a very meta process.
Alison: Yeah, I love that. Again, that modeling. I'm having a growth mindset toward my parenting. I'm not a bad parent or a good parent. I'm working really hard to figure things out and you're modeling that as you're doing that for yourself as your kids are trying to figure out how to have that same approach.
So let's talk a little bit about this fifth stage. This is where we get into adolescence, where Erikson talked about a sense of identity. I talk about this a lot in The Best of You, this sense of selfhood versus role confusion. There's a sense of who we are in the world, what our values are, our place that we have a place in the world now.
More recent research suggests that this stage expands into the 20s, now that kids aren't really arriving at their full sense of identity into the 20s. We actually need to be parenting our young adult children. It's not like when they graduate and go to college that suddenly the parenting stops.
It doesn't. There's still a lot of parenting years all the way through our kids' lives. But this is a really pivotal season where we're trying to help our kids essentially differentiate from us, find their own identities and feel a sense of internal stability.
There's a ton of transitions for kids in this adolescent season. It's also a huge season for us as their parents because again, so many of us got stuck in one of these stages. We're still wrestling to find our sense of identity. We're still wrestling to feel our place in the world. Yet we're trying to help our kids navigate their way through it. So again, it brings up these opportunities for us to confront some of these challenges in our lives.
Rowena: There's a real ongoing need for kids to remain dependent and attached to their parents, while also getting a little bit more freedom as they get older. I love Gordon Neufeld's and Gabor Maté's book Hold On To Your Kids in discussing a lot of these dynamics in navigating attachment during these years, knowing when to give space and freedom and offer emotional support and attunement.
The real importance at this stage is kids not becoming peer-attached. Of course, peers are important and having peer relationships is vital. But I really love that this book highlights the importance of keeping the primary attachment and secure base as the parents so that they can have healthier relationships with their peers.
Having peer attachment is inherently unstable because these parties are both in such crucial developmental stages that these relationships are not made to be stable attachment figures.
Alison: Yeah, this is so interesting because this relates back to the theme of this whole series, where adolescence really is that wilderness. It really is that incredible liminal place for our kids. So we become that liminal attachment figure, while their peers, like you're saying, are so important, we also want to equip them with the very skills we're trying to talk about in this series, which is the ability to tolerate some distress, the ability to tolerate a lot of competing emotions and to think for themselves and to not default to over-attaching to others so that they don't have to face the uncertainty and the confusion and the internal commotion that is inherent to this season.
Adolescence really is the epitome of a transitional season from childhood to adulthood. I love what you're saying. This is where it's so important for us to be equipping them to push off of us at times as they're learning how to find their own voice and not find another bigger, more compelling attachment figure to lock onto.
Rowena: As you say the words “push off of us”, that immediately brings to mind one of the most helpful images of what adolescence is like that Dr. Lisa Damour talks about. She's written a lot about adolescent development as a psychologist and the analogy of the swimming pool and that teenagers want some freedom to swim around in the swimming pool, but then they might get overwhelmed.
Occasionally you want to come back to the side of the pool, which is us, the parents, before they kick off or push off the wall again. The biggest transition that I'm anticipating is the unpredictability of knowing oh, is this a moment that you really need me? Or is this a moment that you're pulling away?
The dance of it going back and forth and trying to ready myself for that. In order to walk with my kids as they transition from being a child to being a young adult, it is an ongoing kind of negotiation and dance, and it might be a very awkward dance at times. It might feel really beautiful and seamless at other times.
Alison: This is where that idea of us being that guide in the wilderness requires so much internal stability from us. It requires us not to take things personally. We talk about that when we're parenting adolescents, it requires us to be that voice of wisdom.
We go into those transitional seasons with our kids. That's true of all parenting, but I know in my own experience, I write about this a little bit in The Best of You. When I met my husband, he was a widower with two young kids. With the two young kids, they had lost their mom, so they had already gone through a major disruption to a primary attachment. There was a lot of grief there.
There was also a lot of stability. My husband did an amazing job of being a stable figure. That transition for them doesn't take away the grief. It never takes away the grief. Also there were a lot of really beautiful, stabilizing attachments that allowed them to go through that. Introducing myself as a new attachment figure for them required me almost immediately to provide this anchoring presence.
I love that swimming pool metaphor. There's a parallel to parenting that we're talking about here that applies to the role of being a stepparent or even an adoptive parent, no matter the age of your kids, where you very quickly are stepping into an intense season of transition for a child who has lost a biological parent, or has gone through a transition of parents divorcing.
In my case, I've gone through the loss of a parent, where my role is to stand in the gap, to stand in that place of transition as that anchoring figure while your kids are sorting out their own identities and their own identities in relationship to you.
It can be so tempting, whether as a biological parent, whether as a step-parent, whether as an adoptive parent, to want to bring our own needs into the relationship at that time. Our own needs to be liked, our own needs to be affirmed, our own needs to be valued.
It can be very tempting to bring those into that relationship when really what our kids need as they're finding their own way, as they're finding their own identities, is for us to be very human. I always say to parents at this stage: you get to be a person, you get to have feelings, you get to sometimes get your feelings hurt.
Also it's your job to be strong enough, to be that figure that they're going to push off of; it's a both-and of, I'm going to be here, I'm going to stand firm here, I'm not going to move, and I'm not going to try to, in my case, replace something that's been lost.
That's not my job. My job is to honor that loss and honor that I'm not that replacement attachment figure, but as I stand firm in my own identity, in my own work that I've done, I can be this stabilizing force for you. I can stand here with you in every valley you're going through, again, whether it's through your own loss or whether it's through the ups and downs and trials and tribulations of adolescence.
I have enough strength to stand here and to let you come and sometimes push off of me and sometimes cling on to me and I'm not going to cave either way. I'm going to be here for you. It's really a profound time of showing our kids what it's like to be that stabilizing presence. Again, I want to underscore here–we're not God. We will get our feelings hurt.
We will want our kids to appreciate us. Of course we will. At times it's appropriate to say, man, you can push off of me, but you can't hurt me. We can set those limits in this season and we can honor our humanity–and also–I'm never going to leave. I'm not going to leave. I am here. I'm never going to leave you.
We're really modeling that lived embodied presence of how God is with us as the ultimate parent. The ultimate parent who's always there with us. He also is real. He honors when we've stepped over boundary lines, when we've done something to hurt him.
He isn't without passions, he isn't without emotions and also he's always there. So for me, that experience of parenting has required so much deep soul work of this thing, Rowena, that you and I've been talking about this whole series of honoring my own humanity, my own emotions, even as I deeply embody the privilege of being this liminal figure, this attachment figure in the wilderness.
That really is the work of all parenting. We are an incredibly crucial figure in our kids' lives through all of these seasons. Our job is simultaneously helping to launch our children so that they can live their own lives apart from us. We're always doing that dance internally of wanting to feel that closeness with them and also wanting to release them to fly, to live their own lives.
That really comes to a head in these adolescent years. It continues into the young adult years where we watch them. My husband always uses this expression: we launch them like little birds. They leave the nest and they fly and they make it to the next tree. It's amazing. Our role shifts.
Again, we're so thrilled that they make it to the next tree. We're also there if they fall and they hit the ground and we need to be there to help them get back up. That work never changes. We continue that work for the rest of our days. We continue that work, stabilizing ourselves while we also release them. That paradox of both-and gets heightened as our kids age, the older that they get.
Rowena: That is so true and underscores the ongoing process as a parent to be letting go continually while navigating having Healthy attachment and then having a healthy attachment towards adulthood. Those bigger releases of okay, now you're going to college, now you're living on your own,
Alison: –married,
Rowena: –and you're building a family of your own and setting the foundation for that secure attachment along the way allows for that letting go to happen in that gradual way. And then the fruit of enjoying a beautiful relationship with your adult children is what I hope for.
Alison: Exactly. The thing that's so cool as we're rounding out this series is that it's a parallel process as we're helping our kids through these different seasonal transitions. We're setting them up to launch and to develop healthy relationships and to have kids of their own.
We're simultaneously doing the work of essentially becoming even more whole so that as they leave us, we're also okay. We also still have purpose in life. We also still have a beautiful life to live both apart from our kids and with our kids. It really demonstrates that dance we've been talking about throughout that whole series as we're equipping them, we are also simultaneously equipping ourselves.
These transitions are not easy as we've discussed this whole series. They also yield this ongoing fruitfulness and bringing more goodness into the world.
Rowena: Yeah, recognizing that our development is not complete because we've reached adulthood. That there is ongoing development in all of us until the day we die, and that is a beautiful thing. Change is both hard and disorienting and we wouldn't want to stay the same our whole life long.
Learning to hold ourselves loosely and who we have been and who we are and who we're becoming through the endings and the neutral zones and the new beginnings, having moments in life where we can reflect and look back and honor and name and notice and feel and grieve and allow ourselves to move into a new season.
That cycle repeats and having that broad lens of the totality of our life I think is so helpful to know that this is a process that comes and goes and comes and goes again in ever evolving ways. Life is not linear. It's about these cycles repeating so that we can grow to be more and more whole people and the people that God has made us.
Alison: This has been such a rich conversation. We've talked about this so much and yet moments of this have surprised me. I'm so grateful again that we could do this.
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:
Thanks to our sponsors:
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- Ritual's Essential for Women 18+ is a multivitamin you can actually trust. Get 40% off your first month for a limited time at ritual.com/BESTOFYOU.
- 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.
- 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
© 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
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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.
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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.
